The Vanishing Read Online Free Page A

baby.
    They managed to leave the house just after eight. It was a sunny, warm day, hints of spring in the air. The sunlight had picked Rachel’s spirits up, made her feel lighter as they left. That was why she didn’t want to see it now. She had stopped to show Lauren a clump of daffodils growing by the gate. Lauren had reached her hand out, touched the petals and smiled, kicking her legs in excitement as she had when she was only a few months old. So Rachel had picked one and given it to her. The moment, so simple and beautiful in itself – her holding out the flower and Lauren’s hand taking it – was burned into her brain like an image of horror. Over the years it had come to stand for everything. She couldn’t look at a daffodil now without the distress rising in her throat like a physical lump, suffocating her.
    After that they got into the car and drove to Belgravia. At the time they were renting an apartment in Clapham and she had driven with Lauren in the baby chair, on the back seat of their Golf, passenger side, so she could turn round and see her, or even reach a hand across if she cried. But Lauren rarely cried. At precisely thirteen months and six days old she was a model baby. Everybody had said it about her. She had thick curly black hair and beautiful blue eyes, a face that wasn’t flabby, unlike many babies of that age that Rachel saw. She looked like her mum, people said. Roger had very light brown hair, brown eyes, but Rachel’s eyes were light blue, and back then her hair had been as dark as Lauren’s. Lauren had only just started walking, hesitantly, but with great enthusiasm. She was intensely interested in exploring her world, and had sussed already that walking would allow her to move more quickly, if she could only get the balance right. She would stumble towards an object – anything was interesting, but animals, especially the neighbour’s pet cat, would make her literally squeal with curiosity – and when she reached it, usually reverting to all fours still, she would look back at Rachel with a massive, proud grin, showing her four perfect, tiny front teeth.
    They got into work at just after five past nine and Rachel had carried Lauren straight to the crèche, in a hurry. In January she had started as a junior doctor at the Wellbeck Clinic, in Belgravia, a small but very well-appointed private clinic that specialised in oncology, and particularly in inheritable forms of cancer. It was private medicine – exclusive medicine, actually – which wasn’t what she had ever intended to do, but the years of study had left them with considerable debts, so while Roger was doing the right thing at Barts, Rachel had agreed, for a short time, to take what Elizabeth Wellbeck’s foundation had to offer, which was roughly three times what Roger was earning. The hours were sensible too, with Rachel starting on half-time until Lauren reached eighteen months old. The crèche was within the clinic itself.
    Two full-time nursery assistants looked after eleven children belonging to doctors who worked there. Lauren had quickly taken to one of them – a twenty-one-year-old called Lovisa Dahlbacka, who whispered in Swedish to Lauren – and that had made the mornings easy. There had never been any crying or hanging on to Rachel.
    This morning had been the same – so that Rachel’s last ever contact with her child had been unthinking, fleeting, void of the significance the moment was to later acquire. Rachel had simply passed Lauren to Lovisa, then bent forward and kissed her on the nose. Lauren, as usual, hadn’t even appeared to notice that this was a transition. She was with Lovisa now. She would see her mummy later. Then Rachel was rushing off, because her first appointment was for nine, and would be waiting.
    At three minutes to ten the entire clinic suffered a power cut which lasted nearly fifteen minutes, an event which caused a measure of quiet panic since most of the systems had only limited