Carol ignored her, but Sarah found herself stopping and staring, sinking into a medicated fug as a random image popped into her head: Oliver’s wooden dog, whose tail wagged when you pulled it along. He loved it. It had been a present from Evie, a sort of joke, a commemoration of their own childhood ‘pets’.
When they’d been about nine, the twins had spent a giggly afternoon in the woods selecting the perfect logs to transform into the perfect pets – Evie’s long and elegant with a sticky-out bit at one end that looked like a head, and Sarah’s squat and cute and amorphous.
After they’d smuggled them into their room, Evie had begun painting eyes on hers.
‘He’s a dachshund,’ she had announced. ‘What’s yours?’
Sarah had been drowsing in bed. ‘A woodadoodlum.’
And there had followed five minutes of the two of them laughing so hard that Evie had had to smother her face in her pillow. ‘A woodadoodlum!’ she’d kept repeating. ‘A woodadoodlum!’
The next day, they had selected Kennel Club names for the log dogs. They’d looked up the German dictionary in the vicarage library and found that ‘tree’ was ‘baum’ in German, and Evie had decided that her dachshund was Baron Fritzl von Baum-Baum. After a lot of thought, she had suggested La Belle Dame Sans Merci for Sarah’s dog, familiarly known as Belle. The Baron was in love with Belle, but she would have none of it. Evie had recruited Jacob, who did the garden and odd jobs around the vicarage, to help her attach a toy car to each corner of the Baron so that he could roll along smoothly, as befitting his status, when out for a walk on his lead – a length of bright blue nylon string – while the distinctly unaristocratic Belle bounced along, head over heels, on her scruffy old bit of rope. What fun they’d had, stopping at lamp posts and waiting, hands on hips, as the log dogs did their ‘business’.
They had drawn up elaborate breed standards. At Crufts, they decided, in the woodadoodlum class the judges would be looking mainly for cuteness, but also for well-defined grain, no cracks – or as few as possible – and the bark still to be in place. When Belle, without warning, had shed her bark one day outside the butcher’s, they had howled in mock dismay and collapsed against the wall in hysterics, much to the bemusement of passers-by.
People in the village must have thought the vicar’s twins had a screw loose.
‘Sarah!’ snapped a voice, yanking her back to the overheated corridor, to Carol’s hostile glare, to Oliver who was missing, who was missing, who was missing –
And Sarah couldn’t do anything about it, she couldn’t even think properly about it because her head was all over the place, because these bitches had pumped her full of drugs because Lewis had told them she was delusional and didn’t have a child because –
Because what?
‘We haven’t got all day,’ said Carol. ‘If you’re not bothered about the doctor, there’s other folk he can be seeing.’
Sarah shook her head. ‘Sorry. Yes, sorry.’
Where was he? Where was Oliver?
Please let him be with Evie.
But that made no sense. Evie would never just take him without telling her.
Oh Evie! I need you!
‘Sarah.’ The doctor smiled. ‘Hello – it’s nice to see you looking better. Come on in.’
As if it were some sort of social occasion. She almost expected him to attempt an air kiss.
The room was too bright, winter sun streaming in at the windows, making her want to cover her eyes with her hands and crouch down on the floor and sink back into the fug. But she managed to smile back at the doctor and follow him across the bright expanse to the chairs, Carol lumbering behind. The room was trying hard not to be institutional, with tub chairs arranged around a coffee table and framed photographs of serene misty lochs and mountains on the walls. But the tub chairs were covered in maroon wipe-clean faux leather stuff, and there was nothing on the coffee table except a box of tissues. Like every room in the place, it was boiling hot.
And now, even through the meds, she could feel the white mist, as Evie called Sarah’s panic attacks, gathering, trying to claim her, making her pulse race and her chest tighten. Grey splodges threatened her vision, but she looked straight through them. She fought them. She needed to keep it together if this man was ever going to believe her.
Carol escorted her to one of the chairs and waited until she’d sat down before leaving.
The doctor sat in the chair opposite, hitching up the knees of his suit trousers. There was a blue folder on his lap with her name on it, Sarah Booth, but he didn’t open it. He didn’t even look at it. ‘My name’s Jagan Laghari.’ He was in his fifties, she guessed, with clever black eyes in a fleshy face. ‘I’m going to be your psychiatrist while you’re here.’
She wanted to take Jagan Laghari by his sharp lapels, by his already tightly knotted navy polka-dot tie, and shake him, scream at him that this was just wasting time! He had to call the police and make them find Oliver!
Into her head flashed Oliver’s face, his trusting little face, his cherub mouth slightly open in a little ‘Oh’, the way he looked at you when he was worried, concerned, but quite ready to be reassured –
‘Okay,’ she said, and smiled what she hoped was a pleasant, normal smile.
Which was all wrong. Why would she be smiling, with Oliver gone?
Oliver! It was so terrible that it almost didn’t seem real; it didn’t seem possible that it had happened, that Oliver had just suddenly gone. It had happened, though, hadn’t it?
Her heart lurched. A pit threatened. A pit she could so easily fall into –
Dr Laghari opened the folder. ‘You’ve been having a bit of a bad time, haven’t you?’
She heaved a breath. ‘You could say that, yes.’
‘Do you remember what happened yesterday?’
Another breath. ‘I’m hardly going to forget that my son is missing.’
He looked at her, but said nothing.
‘And so is my sister Evie. Lewis Gibson, my GP... for some reason he told the police that I don’t have a child, but I can easily prove that I do. Easily. It’s Lewis who needs to be in here, not me. The only explanation I can come up with is that he’s had some sort of… mental breakdown. Why else would he say that Oliver doesn’t exist and – and section me when all I’m trying to do is find him?’
‘As far as I know, Dr Gibson doesn’t have any issues of that nature.’
‘But –’
But what? Her stupid fuzzy brain was too slow. Thoughts kept coming and then dancing away from her, and her stupid fuzzy brain was too slow to catch them.
Oliver. The one certainty she had in all this. Oliver is missing.
‘The police,’ she said, ‘need to start looking for Oliver. My hope is that Evie has him.’ She clamped her trembling jaw shut. She took a moment. He was looking at her with such kindness in his eyes, such patience, that she was able to continue, sooner than she had thought possible: ‘Can I call her? Or can you?’
He nodded. ‘We’re trying to contact your sister.’
‘Oliver goes missing and Evie does too – that can’t be a coincidence.’
‘So what do you think has happened?’