Part Six: The Work That Followed
Sarah arrived at the hospital at eight that evening with a bag full of things — Emma’s favorite blanket, somehow retrieved from a phone call to a neighbor who had a spare key, a change of clothes, a thermos of soup that she pressed on Daniel with the specific urgency of a woman who expressed love through feeding people. She took one look at her brother’s face and put her arms around him without saying anything, which was what he needed and what she had always known how to provide.
Emma woke briefly when Sarah came in and said “Geoffrey” with the proprietary air of a child ensuring the cat was accounted for, and then went back to sleep.
“He’ll be very glad to see her,” Sarah said, which was a generous characterization of Geoffrey, who was largely indifferent to people but would, Daniel suspected, tolerate Emma’s attentions because Emma had the patient persistence of someone who had decided an alliance was worth pursuing.
The police came that evening — a family liaison officer named PC Marsh and a detective constable named Okafor, who were careful and thorough and asked good questions and wrote down everything Emma said when she was awake enough to say it. They photographed the marks on her wrists where the crate door had pressed, and took the information Daniel had, and told him what would happen next in the methodical way of people who had procedures for these situations and followed them carefully.
Claire was located two days later.
She and the man she’d been with — Marcus Webb, thirty-nine, no fixed employment, two prior domestic incidents from a previous relationship — had driven to the Lake District, where they had checked into a holiday let under Webb’s name. The detectives were, as they described it to Daniel, not particularly surprised by this pattern. Webb, it turned out, was known to them. Not the kind of known that meant he should have been easy to find, but the kind of known that meant a pattern existed in a file somewhere, not yet fully assembled.
He was charged with child cruelty and child abandonment. Claire was charged with neglect.
Daniel did not speak to Claire. He received a message from her, through a solicitor, which he read once and did not respond to and which Sarah, when she heard about it, described using language that he had not previously heard her use.
The family court became relevant again, but differently this time.
He sat across a different table from a different judge and he told the story he’d been living since he turned onto Millbrook Lane, and the judge listened with the particular attention of someone whose job was to look at situations like this and determine what was true and what was needed, and what was needed was clear.
Emma came to live with him. Permanently. With supervised contact provisions that were, in practice, unlikely to be exercised in the near term.
