Deborah Teale – Vine, as was – prayed secretly, fiercely, for a son, not a daughter. But first Abbie and then Lauren arrived. She crouched over their baskets at nights to hear them breathe; she clutched at their hands. She wouldn’t let them out of her sight. They reached Joanna, they overtook her and they left her behind. In the attic, the boxes of Joanna’s clothes stood unopened.
The case was never actually closed. Nobody made a decision. But there was less and less to report. Officers were reassigned. Meetings became more sporadic, then merged into other meetings, and then the case wasn’t mentioned at all.
Rosie, Rosie. Wait for me!
Chapter One
It was ten to three in the morning. There were four people walking across Fitzroy Square. A young couple, huddled together in the wind, had made their way up from Soho where they had been at a club. For them, Sunday night was coming gradually to an end. Though they hadn’t said it to each other, they were delaying the moment when they had to decide whether they were getting into separate cabs, or into the same cab. A dark-skinned woman in a brown raincoat and a transparent polythene hat tied under her chin was shuffling north along the east side of the square. For her it was Monday morning. She was going to an office on Euston Road, to empty bins and vacuum floors in the dark early morning for people she never saw.
The fourth person was Frieda Klein and for her it was neither Sunday night nor Monday morning but something in between. As she stepped into the square, the wind hit her full on. She had to push her hair away from her face so that she could see. Over the previous week the leaves on the plane trees had turned from red to gold but now the wind and rain had shaken them free and they were rippling around her like a sea. What she really wanted was to have London to herself. This was the closest she could get to that.