The muslin draped over the buggy hood to shade the sleeping baby has fallen to the floor. Almost before you have registered it something shivers through you. Those wings again, not defeated after all, not even retreating, just turning to make a closer circle, slow ripples in the air.

They never find the woman, or the baby. CCTV, Newsnight, the front page of the Evening Standard: nothing. Friends and well-meaning strangers say, It’s not your fault, or, It could have happened to anyone, but of course it is, and of course it couldn’t, wouldn’t. The policewoman at the station: I’m sorry, just to clarify, she was a stranger to you? A complete stranger? Someone you’d never seen or spoken to before?

Your sweet, sweet baby, and the cluster of things you know about her. Her hands still in fists, and the way she’d started to laugh. The cracked, tender patches on her feet and elbows where you nightly rubbed in emollient. The way it felt to lay the warm soft bundle of her down in her Moses basket, bottom first, then gently lolling head. The way she gazed in wonder at the mobile of aeroplanes above her changing mat. The nights after vaccinations where her temperature rose and her little body twitched and trembled and you held her, rocked her, bounced her. 7Her Babygro with the flamingos on, and her little vest with dinosaurs. A tiny hand on your chest as she fed. Still, nightly, year after year after year, your body aches for her.

The years slip by. They are three and one, and chasing each other through the glittering fountains in a park. They are four and two and feeding the swans, eating oversized ice creams side by side. They are seven and five, on a trampoline. Eight and six, nine and eleven. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen, teenagers, allies and enemies, officially adults, going, going, gone.

The marriage doesn’t survive, or rather, it does until the new baby’s born and you feel too guilty and wracked with anxiety to hold it, let alone risk loving it. Your husband goes for full custody of both and you don’t fight it. You stay together for the sake of the boy, but separate by mutual agreement once he turns eighteen, and of course you never have another baby. He doesn’t remember his baby sister at all, though he sometimes pretends he does.

‘Mummy,’ your son says. ‘Mummy,’ tugging on your hand.

‘My baby,’ you say, to the cafe in general. ‘Have you seen my baby?’

Asking. In general and at random, too loud at first and then even louder. My baby, have you seen my baby.

Some faces look at you, cease talking, wary, blank.

‘Your mother took her,’ someone says.

‘My mother,’ you say. Your mother. Your mother is across the water, hundreds of miles away. 8