Stolen by Deborah Moggach

Author:Deborah Moggach
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448156733
Publisher: Random House

Sixteen

‘HE TOOK THEM to Buenos Aires,’ the woman was saying, ‘and I hired a private detective to try and find them.’

‘How long have they been gone?’ asked the reporter.

‘Five years. He was spotted once, in a supermarket, with one of the boys, but he saw the detective and got out the back. It’s like the earth has swallowed them up.’

The lights were dark in Linda’s flat. It was suffocatingly hot. The woman went on talking in her flat Scottish voice. It was two weeks later, and the group was holding some sort of press meeting. There were a lot of mothers there, women I’d never seen before. All their faces had that hard, drained look. Slides came on a screen in quick succession. They showed children – school photos, holiday snapshots. All the children were smiling. They flashed on the screen, one by one. A little boy flashed on, upside-down. I was jammed between two newspaper reporters, who were writing notes.

‘These are some of our lost children,’ Linda was saying. ‘And there are many, many more. The number of them is growing, as there are more and more mixed marriages, and as the divorce rate throughout the world rises …’

Tom was somewhere, the other side of the room. He had made me come here.

‘… there are children abducted to thirty-two countries,’ Linda was saying. ‘Many of them are truly lost, their fathers have kept them hidden. The problem is greatest in male-dominated, Muslim societies where fathers have all the rights. In some cases, they have already married their daughters off. Many of these children can no longer speak English. Some of them haven’t seen their mothers in ten years. Some of them think their mothers have died. One father showed his little girl a photo of a tombstone and said it was her mother’s …’

Her voice echoed, down the end of a tunnel. Still the slides flashed on. My heart was palpitating; I was getting these panic attacks nowadays. They mostly happened when I was alone. Sometimes I couldn’t breathe.

‘… nobody can guess the damage done to these children. We must realize that we’re talking about children’s rights here, not just the rights of parents. Nobody consults the children in these cases; they are just used as pawns. It’s an international problem. Our group is putting pressure on the Foreign Office. We urgently need a special mediator to negotiate these cases. We need a fund set up, because these mothers become crippled, financially, and they cannot even get Legal Aid. And we need closer legal liaison between countries, and more pressure at diplomatic level …’

I struggled to my feet and pushed past the bodies. Somehow, I got to the door.

Down in the street, I took deep gulps of air. It was a grey, clammy day. My lungs were clogged up. I wished I hadn’t left my Valium at home. I started walking down the road, towards the tube.

Then I heard footsteps behind me.

‘Marianne!’

It was Tom Wainwright.

‘My phone’s ringing!’

‘What?’ he asked.

‘I know my phone’s ringing!’ I looked at my watch.

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