Naomi's Room Read Online Free Page A

helplessness that, for a moment, I was the lost child weeping on a cold London street.
    The manager accompanied me to Savile Row. His name, I think, was Mr Moneypenny, a good name for the manager of a shop. I do not remember saying a word to him all the way from Hamleys. Perhaps I did, but my mind was a blank, I could not have made sense. He was a man in his mid-forties or thereabouts, a well-dressed man with gently curling hair and a carnation in his buttonhole. I think he was genuinely upset by what had happened, not merely that it had occurred in his shop, that a child had been taken from her father there, but for the thing itself, for me myself.
    I showed him a photograph I carried of Naomi, one that had been taken the summer before, when she was a little younger. How much a few months matter at that age. I do not have that photograph now, the police took it from me, it was never returned. Perhaps they thought I would not need it. Perhaps no one really cared.
    But they were at least considerate. Enough time had passed by now for them to accept that something untoward had happened. They let me ring Laura. In all my life, I have never had . . . Of all things, I find these the most difficult to write about, that telephone call, that explanation, that sense of guilt. It has never left me, that feeling of personal blame, that conviction that I was responsible for our daughter’s disappearance, for what happened afterwards. Laura said she would leave for London right away, she would come by car. I asked her to drive carefully.
    It is easy to see what must have happened. Naomi got separated from me in the crush. Her abductor found her almost straight away, promised to help her find me, spirited her away in a different direction. If he had already been watching, he will have known who I was. By the time she suspected anything was amiss, Naomi was out of sight and out of earshot. Even if she started crying, even if she kicked up a fuss, who would have noticed a weeping or screaming child in a large toyshop on Christmas Eve?
    No, I do not mean ‘noticed’. Later, witnesses did come forward, saying that they remembered a little girl in a yellow coat crying as she was taken out of the store. Dozens of people must have noticed her. But they took no notice, that is the point. Why should they have? She would have been the sixth or seventh fractious infant seen by them that day. Some of them will have had bad-tempered or upset children of their own in tow. Too much excitement, too great a stimulus, too large a crowd: what more natural than that a child should weep or a parent drag her, in spite of her tears, out to the open street.
    Laura arrived in a little over an hour. She had not paused to change her clothes or pack a bag, she had simply rushed to the car and put her foot to the floor all the way down the A10. By the time she reached Savile Row, a full-scale search was under way. It was too late, of course it was too late, but how could we have known that then? I do not mean that Naomi was dead, that it was too late in that sense. Quite the opposite. Dear God, quite the opposite.
    There is a noise upstairs. I can hear it quite clearly, I know it is not an auditory hallucination, I know that what I hear is really there, that anyone could hear it. Bumpity-bump, an old sound, a familiar sound, a rubber ball bouncing on a wall. There will be a ball in the corridor tonight, a red and white ball the size of a large grapefruit. I have seen it before. If I pick it up she will laugh at me. Or scream at me in anger. She is unpredictable.
    This house stands on its own at the end of a street in the Newtown area of Cambridge, between Lensfield Road and Brooklands Avenue. Newtown was originally common land that was divided up in 1807 among several owners, including the university and Trinity Hall. Building started there about 1819, when Thomas Musgrave built thirteen little houses and named them Downing Terrace, after the newly-founded college