The Vanishing Read Online Free Page B

back-up power. Rachel had just finished her first consultation and for a time she stood in the windowless, darkened corridor outside her cubicle, listening to the running footsteps and voices. Then she decided to go down to the crèche and check on Lauren. There was no real reason to, and by the time she got there the lights were back on.
    She entered the crèche at thirteen minutes past ten, according to the wall clock with Mickey Mouse hands, which she looked at as she came in. She found Lovisa absent, but Millie – the other assistant – was fussing over a very young baby, who was crying. She looked for Lauren among the other kids playing on the floor and it took about ten seconds, she calculated, to realise that the reason she couldn’t see her wasn’t because she wasn’t looking properly, but because Lauren wasn’t there.
    The sudden, shocking perception of her child’s absence had come to her once previously, when Lauren had crawled off into some shrubs in a friend’s garden, so she knew not to give into it immediately, not to let loose and yell with panic. But that came pretty quickly once she discovered that Millie wasn’t even aware that Lauren was gone.
    All the predictable stages of reaction had followed. She could recall them less well now, because they had dragged into months of police enquiries and useless activity and all become blurred together in her (often drugged) recollection. The immediate responses were significant enough – the frantic combing of the corridors near by, then the hospital, then the street outside, before some kind of worse realisation began to set in – but oddly, they weren’t the moments that had stuck clearly in her head. Not like bending down and showing Lauren the daffodil.
    She had been living with the truth ever since. Lauren had been snatched. Someone had come in and deliberately removed her from Rachel’s world – possibly arranging the power cut to facilitate this, the police had said, waiting until Millie had run out of the room leaving the kids ‘ for just a few seconds ’ unprotected. It had taken months to realise, to fully sink in, but around ten minutes past ten on 14 April 1990 Lauren Gower had vanished.
    Twenty-two years ago. If alive, Lauren would be twenty-three years old now. If.
    They had told her that time alone could heal her, that she would get used to the livid absence at the heart of her life, that the need to live and move on would finally dull the agonising mental trauma. But they had lied. Nothing had changed. Only her limited ability to control her focus, to turn away from it. There was no living with it, and never would be, no accommodation with the horror. All she could do was avert her concentration and hang on. Fill her head with other things. By a sheer effort of will she had to trick herself that she was just like everyone else around her. The normal people. She had to pretend she was one of them.

5
Ile des Singes Noirs, Sunday, 15 April 2012, 4.20 p.m.
    Sara Eaton sat on the very end of the wooden dock, the letter in her hand, waiting. In front of her, shimmering in the intense afternoon sunlight, stretched the vast, translucent blue of the Indian Ocean, framed in the near distance by the twin horseshoe promontories of the island. The wide bays to either side of her – formed on the inside of the horseshoe – were rimmed with a thin edge of golden beach fringed by the palms and mangoes cascading out of the jungle interior. The view was stunning, and though she had sat here and gazed at it almost every day she had been here, it never failed to inspire, to lift her spirits, to leave her mentally gasping at whatever it was such perfect natural views revealed – something beyond the image, she thought, without being able to articulate it better than that.
    Today the sea was extraordinarily calm, the surface utterly unruffled by wind or waves – like a huge azure mirror, reflecting perfectly the rare clumps of high white cumulus. The