After Anna - Alex Lake

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a five-year-old in such a vulnerable position? It was appalling, it really was.

      But it was good for you.

      Not so good for her, and definitely not so good for her poor, soon-to-be grief-stricken, self-hating parents, but good for you.

      No one saw you. You were sure of that. You’d been watching them closely. Watching them mill around the school gates, waiting for their spoiled progeny to emerge so they could pepper them with inane questions.

       How was your day? What did you learn? Were you a good girl, my princess? Were you a brave boy?

      They were raising a generation of precious, weak children, who thought the world revolved around them, that it would adapt itself to their whims, would always allow them to win and never force them to struggle. It was a silent disaster, and it was creeping into every corner of society and no one was doing anything about it.

      Except you. You are going to do your part to stop it, however small that part is.

      And it starts with the girl.

      She is yours now. Now, and forever. You like things to be yours. You have never been good at sharing. You would rather destroy something than share it. You know it is not your most attractive trait, but you don’t fight it. There is no point. It has always been that way.

      And you will not share her. She is yours. Vanished into your car; traceless.

      It has gone very, very well. As well as could have been expected.

      You have to admit to being a little bit pleased.

      You have to admit that you allowed yourself a pat on the back.

      Have you been lucky, even? Maybe. You need luck. Everyone does. You are no different, at least not in that regard. In some others, yes. In some other ways, you are very different. Better. More clear-sighted. More decisive.

      So maybe it wasn’t luck, after all. No, you don’t think it was. It was down to good planning. Yes, you prefer that. It was down to good planning. And ability, of course. Nerve and skill. It was you who’d done it, you who’d made it happen. Luck was not part of it.

      Not that you are becoming complacent. That would not do. That way, disaster lies. Complacency is the path to failure. And you did not take the girl, did not get this far, to fail at the last.

      So now she sleeps, the girl, dark-haired and beautiful and young, she sleeps in the back seat of your car. She is drugged, hidden away from prying eyes until the time comes for you to use her for the purpose for which you took her. For the purpose that meant you had to take her. It is a shame she has to be involved in this; a shame that she will pay the price for what others have done. It isn’t fair, you know that, but then the world isn’t fair. Life isn’t fair. You know that, too. Fair doesn’t come into it. Does the wolf slaying the lamb worry about fairness? About wounded innocence? No, it cares only about its hunger. There is no fair or unfair for the wolf. The wolf takes what it needs, and its need is the only justification necessary. Right, wrong; fair, unfair: they play no part in its world.

      And they play no part in yours either. There is only strong or weak, winner or loser. The cry of it’s not fair is just a tool the weak use to constrain the strong. You cannot let it influence your actions.

      And you don’t. You didn’t. You won’t.

      Fair does not come into this.

      Fair is for the weak.

      For the losers.

      As you drive away you allow yourself a smile. Apart from anything else, this is going to be fun.

PART ONE: BEFORE

       1

       Life is Complicated

       i.

      She was going to be late. Again.

      Julia Crowne looked up at the clock on the wall of the boardroom. It was one of those Swiss railway clocks, with the blocky minute and hour hands. She happened to know that it was not an imitation; it was the real thing. It went with the polished wood of the oval conference table and the comfortable leather chairs. Nothing but the best for the boardroom. The clients they met in here were reassured by that kind of thing.

      Two forty p.m. The meeting about the custody of a child was supposed to be over by now, but it had not gone well, mainly because her client, town councillor Carol Prowse, was being unreasonable. It was understandable, since she had come home to find her husband, Jordi, a poet and part-time English teacher, in bed with one of his former students, but it was not making things easy.

      Under the table Julia’s foot tapped nervously. She had to pick up her five-year-old daughter, Anna, from school at three p.m., and she couldn’t be late. They had an appointment at three thirty to collect a cocker spaniel puppy from a woman who had been surprised when she woke one morning to plaintive cries and came downstairs to find that her dog – who had been suffering from a mysterious listlessness for the last week – was producing puppies at an astonishing rate.

      The woman was a nurse and she worked the late shift; she had agreed to wait until three thirty, but that was as long as she could hold on. Julia and Anna had spent hours getting ready for the puppy: buying the bed, choosing where to put it, selecting the name (Anna had settled on Bella, which Julia thought was a fine name for a puppy), stocking up on dog treats, planning where they would take her for walks, and Julia did not want to have to deal with the disappointment that would follow if she had to tell Anna that the puppy would not be coming home that evening after all.

      Even more than that, Julia needed the puppy to be a source of nothing but joy and affection, because she was going to be facing her own custody battle soon enough and, if it was anything like Carol Prowses’s, Anna would need all the distractions she could get.

      Julia hadn’t found Brian in bed with one of his students – thankfully, since he taught in a junior school – or with anyone else, for that matter. If she had she probably wouldn’t have cared, which was exactly the problem. She liked Brian. She thought he was a good man and a good dad and a good husband – well, an OK man and an OK dad and an OK husband – but she just wasn’t inspired by him; no, it was worse, she wasn’t interested in him. He was like a work acquaintance that she knew in passing but didn’t really care about. The kind of acquaintance whose troubles you might hear about – did you hear Brian’s getting a divorce? – and think it was a shame but it wasn’t really any of your business. That was how she felt about Brian. He just didn’t belong in her life anymore.

      It hadn’t always been like that. For a while she had kept a photo of her and Brian on the first day of their honeymoon on her desk at work. They were on a white sandy beach on the Greek island of Milos. They had just finished eating a meal of grilled fish and the sun was setting behind them. She’d asked the waiter – a Greek fisherman who doubled up as a beachfront restaurant owner in the evening – to take it.

      Afterwards, they stood, arm in arm, facing the sea.

      This is heaven, she said. It’s amazing. The world is such a magical place.

      Brian laughed. You sound like you’ve been smoking too much dope. Like when we used to get stoned and stare up at the stars.

      But this is real, Julia said. It really is heaven. Our feet in the water, nothing to worry about for the next two weeks. And nothing to do right now but go back to our room …’ she kissed Brian’s cheek, taking note of his muscular arms and flat stomach, then ran her hand through his salt-stiff hair, ‘where we can see if we can find a way to spend a few hours of our honeymoon.’

      They

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