“That day,” Sophie carried on, “he said Trixie had run away. He asked if I’d help him look. We walked down the road. He said he needed to get her lead from his van.” She swallowed, her fingers wrapping tightly around the strings.
“It’s OK,” Elea reminded her. “You’re safe now.”
“He...he grabbed me. Then—he put something over my mouth. It smelled weird. Everything went dark.”
A wave of anger surged through Elea, but she kept her expression composed, focusing on extracting the crucial details from the young girl, who was struggling to give a free account.
“Can you tell me what he looked like? Start from the top of his head and work your way down to his feet. Can you do that for me?”
Slowly, and without faltering, Sophie spoke of an ordinary-looking white man with a beard and shoulder-length brown hair. Such simplified descriptions often came from children. Elea drilled into the detail, comparing his height with her father, as well as asking about his skin colour, gait, smell, accent, and more.
“He smelled of liquorice. He spoke like you.”
Elea faltered, her heart seeming to stop mid-beat. She wanted to go into details about every word he spoke, but this was about getting Sophie’s first account. She blinked as her body seemed to right itself.
“He had a scar on his face.” Sophie’s voice turned quiet.
Each response was a gift landing in Elea’s outstretched hands. Her chest tightening with emotion, she eyed the glass of water on the table. Swann would surely be watching. If he detected a shake in her hand, then he’d have her out of there. She was too invested, too emotionally involved, but she was making progress. She coughed to clear her throat and left the water where it was.
“You OK?” Ness’s voice filtered through her earpiece. Elea delivered a tiny nod.
With each question, Sophie’s mother grew more tense. Elea sensed her need to intervene. “Where was the scar exactly?” she quickly asked, her thoughts half in the room and half with Liisa: dare she dream that, after all this time, she’d finally got a substantial lead?
Sophie nodded, touching the right side of her mouth. “Here. Behind the beard.”
Elea wanted to hug the young girl, to tell her that she was doing great. But she kept her features even. Sophie had paled and she hadn’t got to the worse bit yet. “And when you say he spoke like me—in what way? Do you mean he was serious, or was it his tone or his—”
“His accent. He sounded like you.”
Oh my God,Elea thought.It’s him. We’re so close.
“What happened next?” she ventured, after exhausting the list of descriptives. But Sophie was turning inwards, tightly interlocking her fingers. “You had a doll when we found you: where did that come from?” Changing the subject sometimes helped to move things along.
“He gave it to me.” Sophie’s voice was barely above a whisper. She looked to her mother. “I want to go home.”
“And you will, sweetheart,” Elea said, giving her mum a pleading look. “Soon.” She would have to quicken her questioning, get to the guts of the matter while looking after the little girl in her care. Deeper probing could come later on. “But we really need to know what happened next, if you can.” Elea hadn’t forgotten about the social worker in the other room.
Sophie scratched her head and pushed her fringe off her face. “He was carrying me into the house when I came to...My room was cold, always dark. He took my shoes. Sometimes,” she whispered, her eyes brimming with unshed tears, “he would shout at me to be good; and once, when I tried to run away, he slapped me across the face.”
Fiona’s lips formed into a thin white line as her daughter shared the details of her ordeal.
“Thank you for being so brave, Sophie.” A small smile of encouragement rested on Elea’s face. “Every detail is so important. Is there anything else you can remember about the house? Any sounds? Were you in the city or the country, do you think? Could you hear sounds outside?” Given that she’d been found at the cathedral doors, they’d presumed Sophie had been kept nearby, but that might have not been the case.
“He...he said if I shouted, he’d know. Sometimes I could hear the bells.” She stared down at her hands and unlocked her fingers. “There was a woman,” she said finally, her eyes meeting Elea’s. “I heard her voice.”
Elea’s heart jolted, as if someone had clamped down with a defibrillator and suddenly brought it to life. The part that died the day she lost Liisa. She took a breath to speak and nodded slightly as Ness checked in over her earpiece. “Can you tell me anything about the woman? What you saw or heard?”
But Sophie shook her head. “I didn’t see her. They were in another room.” She stared into the middle distance, caught in the past. “Once, I heard crying. That’s when he’d turn up the TV.”
Elea’s mind was racing. He turned up the TV to drown out the sounds of another person crying. Surely that meant that they were captive, too?
“Did you hear any names? Was she a grown-up like me and your mum? Or younger, like you?”
Sophie shrugged, retreating into silence. The strain of recounting her ordeal was beginning to take its toll.
“Listen, Sophie, you’ve been incredibly brave today. Let’s move on to something else, OK?” Elea suggested, trying to ease the tension in the room.
“OK,” Sophie agreed, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.
