‘How many victims?’
‘Two. One dead, one injured. Both gunshot wounds.’
I realise as I say it that they won’t send paramedics in now until armed police have cleared the house and neutralised any threat.
‘Anyone else hurt?’ the operator says.
‘Not sure.’
I step over Angela’s prone form and move further into the room but it is a wreck, everything turned over, drawers emptied, baby clothes and sheets and bottles of formula milk strewn across the floor. My eyes search out the wooden crib in the corner. It is on its side, broken in on itself, the wooden bars snapped, the mattress upended and laying beneath the frame. Something else. Small. Delicate. Pinned beneath the cot, motionless. Lifeless.
The 999 operator is still talking but I can’t hear him anymore.
No. No. No.
A sob rises in my throat as I realise what it is.
A tiny arm sticking out from under the bedding.
63
I stumble to the overturned cot, my eyes blurring with tears.
A drumbeat hammers in my head, Kathryn’s unspoken plea and my own promise.Please protect Mia. Please protect Mia.I knew there was danger, andI’ve failed her. We’ve all failed her. So many wasted lives. Kathryn, who sacrificed herself to protect this child, all that she had left of her sister. Angela and Gerald, shot by the man who almost killed their daughter a year ago. Zoe, locked in an endless sleep in the white room two floors below.
Less than twenty-four hours ago I was here with Mia while she giggled and smiled, Angela cuddling her granddaughter, talking to her, feeding her. I held Mia myself, felt the warmth of her little body, the touch of her tiny fingers on my cheek.
Now she’s gone. All gone.
I let my phone fall to the floor, pulling the frame of the upturned cot away as gently as I can to reach the tiny body beneath. Moving the broken slats and shifting the frame of the cot to the side so I can lift the mattress away. Touching her arm as gently as I can, I feel for a pulse at her wrist but there’s nothing, the skin waxy and smooth, the fingers already stiffening in death. I push the mattress away to move more of the weight off her. This most innocent victim, the only innocent one among all of us.
I wipe more tears away with my sleeve and reach under the bedding with one hand to pull carefully on her arm with the other, not wanting to look at her but knowing that I must. I slide her body gently out.
A gut-punch of disbelief, of horror and grief and confusion all mixed together.
Not Mia.
Not a body. A doll. Just a baby-sized doll dressed in a white sleepsuit, blue eyes staring up at the ceiling, tufts of synthetic blonde hair brushed neatly to the side.
I collapse back onto my heels, the relief rushing over me like an avalanche, blanketing me, a held breath bursting from my lungs. The relief is so powerful it’s almost unbearable, a high more intense than any drug. Mia is not here, which means there is still a sliver of hope. I shift the rest of the bedding to double-check she’s nowhere beneath it. No.
I go over to check Angela again. Her pulse is still there but the sheet next to her wound is soaked with blood. I pull out another clean sheet from a drawer and press it on, slide a cushion under her head.
The 999 operator is still on the line when I retrieve my phone.
‘I’ve got to go,’ I tell him. ‘Second-floor bedroom, female victim in her seventies, critically injured. Please hurry.’
I hang up and lean down close to Angela’s ear, hoping she can hear me.
‘Hold on, Angela. I’m going to find Mia.’
It’s what she would want me to do. Whatshewould do, in my place.
I grab the shotgun and stand up. The smell of petrol is overpowering, sharp and oily and burning into my nostrils. Mia’s nursery is soaked with it, the cot, the chest of drawers, dark splashes on the carpet. One spark and this whole room would go up like a bomb, everything ablaze within seconds.
So why hadn’t it been lit?
I look into the other rooms on this floor. Spare bedrooms and a bathroom. All untouched. As far as I’ve seen, the nursery is the only room that has been turned upside down and soaked in petrol. Not methodically but fast, rage-fuelled destruction as he searched in vain for the one thing he’d come here to find. I stand in the middle of the debris, trying to make sense of it. There’s enough petrol poured in her room to turn it into an inferno, her guardians dead or injured, and no sign of Mia.
