Le Ferté-Macé, Normandy, France, 24 May 1985
It took one second to snatch the child. One silent, unseen moment to pluck her from the world. In a click of a finger, a blink of an eye she was gone. As if, like a bird, she had just flown away.
Georges Preton had seen no strangers in the square that morning, no unfamiliar vehicles in the street outside his shop. He had opened up at eight as usual, smoked a cigarette as he always did. He’d unloaded the first bread from the ovens, arranged his display of pastries, had wiped down the counter then flicked through his paper. At around eight-forty he had seen Thérèse approach from the furthest corner of the square, pushing an old-fashioned pram, and smiling down at her daughter as she walked.
In the white-tiled warmth of his boulangerie Georges had looked out at the morning. A beautiful day: clouds like scattered bread crumbs, the sun round and yellow as a custard tart. Through his window he’d watched Thérèse leave the child sleeping in her pram in the shadow of his canapé. They’d chatted, as they always did, she’d asked for some croissants and then she’d paid and left. An ordinary start to an ordinary day. The bell above his door had jangled as it closed behind her. A minute, that was all. A minute’s worth of seconds and a second was all it took.
When Georges Preton, in the days and months and years to come, was to think back to the sound of Thérèse’s scream, he would recall, simply, that it had been the sound of every nightmare, every hell. And when he remembered the eyes of Thérèse, as she hurtled back through his door, yanking the empty pram behind her, bashing it against the door frame, holding in her hand the pink, woollen, baby-less blanket limp and useless as a flap of blistered skin, he would remember the moment in which their eyes had met: the awful, mutual understanding; a shared, desolate premonition that no matter how many searches there would be in the days and weeks to come, no matter how many appeals made to the public or the number of policemen assigned to the case, the truth was the child was gone; she was gone and she would never be seen again.
Preton would always know that in that same brief moment, he had witnessed the end to the young woman’s life – that in the second it had taken to snatch her child, Thérèse and all she was and might yet still have been had been taken, too.
The Mermaid, Dalston, north London, 21 September 2003
A rat’s nest of a place. Men lining the walls clasping cigarettes and gulping down pints, their shouted conversations like the barking of dogs. Eyeing the door, eyeing the talent, fingering their mobiles and wraps of cocaine. Into that she walked; Frank saw her above the record he’d just raised, glimpsed her between his two friends’ shoulders as they huddled there with him in the DJ booth. A girl walks into a bar.
‘Frank? Frankie old son?’
But a girl had walked into the bar and Frank could see or hear or think of nothing else.
‘Look lively. Track’s about to end.’
Another record on the turntable. Craning his neck so he could watch her between the dancers. There she was, getting a drink from the bar. Thin shoulders, a flash of short yellow hair, turning back into the crowd then vanishing again into the clouds of pale-blue smoke, between the leather jackets, the fake tanned skin, the pints of piss-weak beer, swallowed up by yet another Friday night in London as if she had never been there at all.
He became aware of a swarm of eyes staring reproachfully from the dance floor. He elbowed his friend who looked round at him with a bleary, five-pints smile. ‘Take over for a minute,’ he said and began fighting his way to the bar, to where she’d stood, this moment in his life soundtracked, after an initial screech of needle on vinyl, by a Gary Glitter track set at the wrong speed. And there she was. There she was, thank fuck.
Small. She’d barely reach his shoulder. Short tufts of bleached hair. Dark eyes, blue and quick. A delicate chin. So slim that he knew that if he were to trace a finger along her spine he would feel every tendon and bone and muscle of her. Knew the touch, already, of her skin.
‘Love? What do you want, Love?’ The barmaid stuck her bearded chin in Frank’s direction and he asked her for three pints. By the cigarette machine she stood amongst the barking crowds as if in an empty room and somewhere, somehow, a glam-rock paedo screamed on too fast. Frank sipped his pint and watched as she was approached by a tall, spiky looking redhead and a chubby brunette. She smiled, then, the girl. A smile that seemed to flood her face with light.
The hiss and thump of the needle in the grooves.
Time to go back. Put another record on. Sort it out, Frank. Not till she looks at me. Not till she turns round and looks at me. Tony the Turk with his sick, dwarfy legs steaming towards him, oily hair glistening red, blue, green in the disco lights. This is not what he paid Frank for, no way. Come on Frankie, gotta get going, move it. (But just … look at me. Look at me first.) In mid conversation she half turned her shoulders, this stranger, lifted her chin, scanned the bar, searching for something. Searching for someone. Found him. Found his eyes, lifted her chin. Held him. Held him there, right there, in her gaze. When does love start?
Back at the decks Jim and Eugene, pissed and stoned and deep in inane conversation and fucking useless as they always were had not noticed, were the only people who had not noticed that the evening’s musical entertainment was, and had been for some minutes, absent. Frank fought his way through the crowd again, past two kids swapping cash for drugs and a middle-aged woman passed out upon a table, and dropped a Beyoncé track on the turntable. The dance floor refilled instantly. Easily pleased, was the Mermaid’s clientele. The night sped on, the place filled out, Frank’s records keeping the dance floor rammed and the atmosphere about as good as the atmosphere ever got there. The three girls stayed by the bar meanwhile, a hundred eyes landing on them like rain, the brunette and the redhead porous, thirsty.
As he watched her, the hectic squalor of the Mermaid seemed