Emma was a realist, though, and she knew that – had David lived – she would never have spent another night in his bed. The fact that he had even contemplated putting his wife and daughter through a few hours of terrifying hell to get himself out of a hole kept hitting her, like a punch to the head. She would never have felt safe with him and would never have allowed Ollie to be left in his care. She was sorry he was dead, but her life with him had been over the minute she learned what he had done.
Emma was finding it really difficult to let Ollie out of her sight. She sat with him while he slept and had to stop herself from moving his cot into her bedroom. Just because fear ran through her each time she heard footsteps on the gravel path, she didn’t have to make her little boy feel like that.
Tom had been a source of strength, although she knew he was struggling with the knowledge that Jack was alive and out there somewhere. Just as she was.
‘I feel I should pack in my job and go and find him, Em,’ he’d said one day, sitting at her dining table. ‘But it’s not what he wants – I know that.’
He had seemed so sad since those dreadful few days. She knew he had a girlfriend; he had mentioned her briefly when she visited his house. But when she asked Tom if he would like to bring her round some time, he said, ‘Not at the moment,’ and she hadn’t been able to get anything more out of him.
Every night Emma went to sleep thinking of Jack and of what might have been. She relived the moment when he’d touched her, the feel of his body as it pressed against hers in the vault. She had been terrified, and yet there was a heat coming from him that communicated with her at some level. Even before she realised who he was, she had felt electricity fire through her. Then she had seen his eyes, and she was lost again.
Her nights were taken care of, checking on Ollie and dreaming of Jack. But there was something else that she and Ollie did, and would continue to do for as long as it took.
Each morning as they came downstairs, Emma had a quiet word with the portrait, still hanging in the hall.
‘I’m not giving up, Caroline,’ she said.
Then, most days of the week, Emma and Ollie took the car and drove into Manchester or Stockport – changing the times and the venues as often as they could.
Emma then found the most crowded place and put an upturned plastic box on the ground next to Ollie’s pushchair and climbed up on it. People always turned to stare, and that’s when she started shouting.
‘Tasha! Natasha Joseph! Come home, Tasha.’ Ollie joined in. ‘Tassa,’ he shouted.
She chose places that were busy with shoppers, thinking that small-time crooks – the kind of people that Tasha might know – would be out and about picking pockets, stealing mobiles. She stopped every child that was on the street when they should have been in school and showed them Natasha’s photograph. She took fresh sandwiches and cakes to give to the homeless – all they had to do in return was take the picture of Natasha and show it to as many people as possible. She printed thousands of posters, and gave handfuls to anybody who looked as if they might be living the same life as Natasha – or whatever she was calling herself now – asking them to find the girl in the photo and give her the poster.
More often than not, the posters would be dumped as soon as Emma had walked on – sometimes in a bin, but usually dropped indifferently onto the pavement. That was okay, because on the poster was more than just a photo of Natasha. There was a picture of a smiling Ollie with a message in a speech bubble, and the more posters floating around the windy alleyways, settling against greasy walls, lying in the dusty streets, the more chance that somehow it would reach its target and she would read the message.