Read By Light Alone for Free Online

grief-shaky words. She had put Ezra down for his night’s sleep; she had eaten a little something with Leah whilst watching children’s dramas; she had put Leah to bed – still awake, playing on one of her games, and then she had gone through to her own cot to watch her own screen. She had dozed a little, but woken at nine with an uncanny sensation that something was wrong. Leah was not in her room. Discovering this, she had searched the suite, for sometimes the little girl liked to tease her carer by hiding. When it was clear she was in none of these rooms, and after Arsinée had (she said) made her throat sore with calling her name (but not too loudly, for she did not wish to wake Ezra), she had picked up the baby – for he could hardly be left by himself – and ventured out into the corridor. Up and down, calling Leah’s name, calling for the darling child, over and over. Meeting guests coming and going and asking if they had seen a small girl, in her pyjamas, to be met with incomprehension, or the brush-off, or hostility. She had been by her own admission ‘in a state’ at this stage, weeping and disordered and not knowing where to go. So she had gone barefoot all the way down to the Kidarium, because she knew Lah-Lah liked to play there sometimes. But it was all closed, and switched off, and the bubblepit looked sinister and enveloping in the dark; and the furry robots, some taller than she was herself, loomed alarmingly as if they were liable to come to life at a motion. So she had fled to the ice-cream café, on the same floor, and walked amongst the booths and through the crowds of people, crying Leah’s name and weeping; and the bright lights and the noise had woken Ezra and set him off wailing too, and still Arsinée had wandered, calling the name, until security had come over to see what the commotion was. The guards called their superiors, and when they realized that a guest’s child was missing they called their superiors. Pretty soon after this, the surveillance net was programmed with Leah’s details, guards worked systematically from basement to roof, and then back down again. By the time George and Marie had been approached in the penthouse restaurant, the grounds had been searched, and teams sent out along the most likely exit roads.
    Eventually, under the continued pressure interrogation, Arsinée just crumpled, and nothing more could be got out of her except tears. What game had Leah been playing? I don’t know. Which show did you watch, in your cot? I can’t remember. What time precisely did you last see Leah, before you went through? I’m not sure, I don’t know, not precisely . They stuck a tab on her wrist, and this showed Arsinée to have consumed perhaps half a glass of wine that evening. This revelation increased the flood of tears prodigiously. ‘It’s true! It’s true! I’m a terrible person!’ She had, she sobbingly confessed, sometimes carried away the leftovers from her employers’ discarded bottles, and drunk them in secret, in private, when the kids were abed, never very much, never enough to make her lose control, but just a taste. Beautiful wine, and the lovely confusion it made in the thoughts. This was exactly the sort of thing she had never had the chance to experience before Mr and Mrs took her on. And then more tears. It was amazing, in fact, that she was able to weep as copiously as she did without simply drying up like a raisin. Tears, tears, tears.
    It was gruelling, extracting this testimony from the sobbing girl; and at the end Captain Afkhami smiled and patted her on the shoulder, before saying ‘And now I must arrest you.’ For George this was yet another mentally indigestible twist in the evening’s events. Marie had more presence of mind. ‘But who is to care for Ezra?’ she said, the baby still asleep on her shoulder.
    The lady captain faced her. If the thought occurred to her you are the child’s mother, and must care for him , then she at least had