He steps around me and crosses the foyer, reaching the main doors, which slide open automatically. Reporters and photographers have surrounded a car outside. Sarah and Dale Hadley appear from the open doors, quickly flanked by detectives, who shepherd them into the station.
Vic McBain stops and steps back as the couple approach the door. Sarah Hadley looks up and their eyes meet. She looks away. In that moment something passes between them—a knowledge that goes beyond the familiar. Pain. Hurt.
Sarah passes through the revolving door and takes hold of her husband’s hand. There are hairline cracks in the make-up around her lips. McBain watches her, studying her body as she enters the lift and the doors close. Turning, he pushes past the media scrum, head down, his shoulders hunched.
I have seen that look. I have seen it in the mirror. I saw it last night in Drury’s eyes when he couldn’t comfort Victoria. It diminishes a man when he can’t make a woman happy… when he makes her unhappy. The world is no longer rich and colorful. All he can see is the poverty of things.
How did it happen? I wonder. I picture Sarah Hadley standing beside Piper’s bed, holding an article of her clothing, as if discovering something new about her daughter. Recalling the best moments. Trying to keep her alive. She clutched at every piece of misinformation and rumor, consulting psychics and fortune-tellers. Vic McBain introduced her to one of his girlfriends who claimed to have the gift. She told Sarah the girls were alive. She gave her comfort. Hope.
Mourning can be lonely. Grief can be shared. Sarah couldn’t look at her husband because he reminded her too much of Piper. Vic McBain understood. And then one night they came together, most probably in some out-of-the-way hotel room or a clumsy adolescent-style coupling in the back seat of a car. I don’t know who seduced whom. It doesn’t matter. Vic McBain had made it possible for Sarah to be herself again—not the campaigning mother or the media spokesperson or the woman locals took pity upon when they saw her pushing a trolley in the supermarket…
She could escape the whispers and stares, becoming anonymous for a few hours, suspended between fantasy and reality, feeling pleasure instead of loss, or perhaps feeling nothing at all.
For all her campaigning and sacrifice, Sarah Hadley has a streak of self-loathing that is wider than the M25. She married an unattractive man with money, a man who loved her, but she didn’t feel the same way about him. She fucked her way to the middle rather than the top. She could have accepted that and slept in the bed she made, but then her daughter went missing and she blamed herself, thinking she deserved to be unhappy. She deserved a marriage on life support and sordid sex in a cheap hotel room overlooking a cut-rate carpet warehouse.
Vic McBain has reached the corner and is waiting for the lights to change. I catch up with him.
“I know what you’re hiding,” I say.
He doesn’t answer.
“Just tell me one thing. After that I promise I’ll leave you alone. On the night of the blizzard, were you with Sarah Hadley?”
He blinks at me, a strong, silent man, lost for answers.
“I’m not going to tell her husband,” I say. “Nobody else has to know.”
He wipes a finger across the corner of each eye.
“She deserves better than me,” he says. “She deserves to find her daughter.”
33
Behind the glass door of the conference room a volley of flashguns are blasting light through the frosted panels. From outside it looks like a gunfight without the noise. Reporters and photographers are crammed into the overheated room, taking up every vantage point.
Dale and Sarah Hadley enter through a side door. The light seems to imprison them. Phoebe is clutching her mother’s hand, eyes downcast. The younger children have been left at home, cared for by friends or relatives.
The family are seated at a long table. Camera shutters continue clicking. Once again Piper Hadley has captured the nation’s attention. For a second time her fate is being debated across garden fences, in pubs and office canteens. Comparisons are being drawn with other high-profile kidnappings, names like Sabine Dardenne, Elizabeth Smart and Natascha Kampusch; the miraculously returned.
DCI Drury takes a seat beside the Hadleys. He waits for the camera shutters to fall silent.
“The body recovered from Radley Lakes six days ago has been identified using dental records and next of kin of the deceased have been notified. I am now in a position to formally release the name. We are investigating the death of Natasha McBain, aged eighteen, who went missing from the village of Bingham on the weekend of August 30, 2008. The official cause of death is drowning.”