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the sofa and buried her face in her hands and started crying. I watched her break down in front of me and couldn’t find anything to say. I hate people doing the things I do, and doing them better. As she was better than me at most things, you can imagine the hate I stored up. She asked me to go through what had happened again and I obliged, knowing that it was the kind of thing I would have asked. I knew what she was looking for: a clue, a hope, a rational explanation. I think she feared the worst even then, though she wouldn’t acknowledge it. At each twist and turn in the story, at each full stop, she measured herself against the pain and came up short. Nothing I have ever said or done had done that to her.
     
    The male officer returned in the evening and sat us down together. He had a sombre look on his face and I knew he had no news: at least, no good news. My ex-wife’s face crumpled right in front of him. The muscles which held it together sagged under the blow; this was a fight too far. I knew she would go on, the way she always went on, but it was without hope, or heart, or conviction. When hope goes, so does life. You still perform the operations, the basic routines of existence, but there is no purpose any more. The break in the clouds you looked for as a child is filled in with dark, impenetrable grey. You clutch at anything to redeem the moment: if she’s not found today, she’ll be found tomorrow; if she’s not found then, she’ll be found the day after; if her body is found, you hope it was quick and she didn’t suffer, or if she did suffer, you hope it wasn’t for long: if some stranger got hold of her, you hope she didn’t cry for you or her mum and you hope her face wasn’t too tearful when they hurt her; you hope her little body was spared the bruises and the pain; as hope recedes your expectations recede and what you ask for gets more pathetic, and more insignificant until there is nothing left: just the truth. Then you realise it made no difference at all. No one was listening. The world went on without you; you could not stop those events from happening.
    I think I’m going to cry.
    ‘I’m sorry, we’ve found nothing. The CCTV at the door isn’t working so we can’t be sure she didn’t leave that way, but it seems unlikely. There were lots of people going in and out. The basement is still a possibility. That door was open, as you know, but we haven’t been able to trace anyone yet. We’re doing our best.’
    He paused.
    ‘What about inside the building?’ I said.
    ‘We’ve looked everywhere: risers, cupboards, shafts, anywhere a child could get.’
    ‘And the flats themselves?’
    The officer looked at me carefully. ‘Yes, that, too. Everyone is being checked.’
    My wife glanced at us. She hadn’t thought about that. ‘What are you saying?’
    I couldn’t look at her.
    ‘You can’t tell, can you?’
    You can’t tell about anyone.
     
    Half an hour later, I was on my own. My ex-wife and the officer had gone. I said she could stay if she wanted, but she couldn’t face it, I know. It was too close to things. If things had been the other way round, I wouldn’t have stayed, either. I would have gone off, had a walk, got drunk, tried not to think about things, tried not to think about her .
    It was then that my visitor arrived. I felt them come in when I took my clothes off and was trying to sleep. They were pointing at my clothes and wondering if I’d folded them correctly. I tried to ignore them but they were so insistent, I had to look, and indeed my clothes were a little awry, although not quite as bad as they’d made out. I put them down, hoping that was okay. But my visitor wasn’t having it. They insisted I do it again. I knew what was coming, but was as powerless to stop it as I had been with my daughter. I put them down five times, then another five, until twenty, thirty, fifty times had passed and I stood there so consumed with self-hatred, I could have killed