Linda's writing inspiration:
One of the pivotal scenes in this novel
came to me eleven years ago when my son was a baby. It was a dark scene and
extremely harrowing but I was determined I would use it one day, I just needed
to find a story which would do it justice. I filed it away in my head, in the
compartment marked 'to be returned to'.
When my son was two-years-old, we took him
to Center Parcs, It was only a matter of months since Madeleine McCann had gone
missing. I settled my son down for the night in a fold-up bed wedged between
our own bed and the wall. I decided to check on him a couple of hours later. It
was dark in the room (we used travel blackout blinds as the early morning sun
tended to wake him) and it took a while for my eyes to adjust as I felt my way
across to his bed. But as soon as I reached it, I saw that he wasn't there. I
checked to see if he'd rolled off onto our bed or the floor - nothing. My eyes
were drawn to the window. We were on the ground floor and I'd left it open a
crack because of the heat. All I could think of was that he had been taken as
we'd sat in the next room. I felt sick. I called my husband, I was physically
shaking by the time he came in. I simply pointed to the empty bed, unable to
form any words. Fortunately my husband was considerably calmer than I was. He
put the light on and started a methodical search of the room. It was only when
he got down on his hands and knees and looked under the beds that he saw a small
bundle in the far corner. Somehow, my son had slipped down the narrow gap
between his bed and the wall (which I was sure he's head couldn't fit through)
and remained asleep there on the floor in his toddler sleeping bag, oblivious
to our frantic efforts to find him.
I didn't really sleep much that night, the
'what ifs?' running through my head. Having worked as a journalist for 15
years, I was well aware that 'I never thought it would happen to me', was the
most common response when people were interviewed about tragic events. But what
interested me was how what I'd done - or hadn't done - would have been
forensically examined by the media and public if my experience had turned into
something tragic.
A few years later I took my son to a park
we hadn't been to before and he asked to play hide-and-seek. I closed my eyes
and started counting. When I opened them again he was, of course, nowhere to be
seen. After ten minutes of fruitless searching, and with a clenching sensation in
my stomach, I thought how ridiculous it is that we watch our children like
hawks and then take them to a park, close our eyes and tell them to run away
and hide. Fortunately, I found my son shortly afterwards but again I was struck
by how things could have turned out differently and how I would have been
judged if they had.
In the subsequent years the idea of
writing a novel about a child who goes missing during a game of hide-and-seek
started to formulate in my head. I knew right from the beginning that I wanted
the abductor to be a woman. My husband, a photographer, had worked on the case
of the missing baby Abbie Humphries, who had been found safe and well with a
female abductor after 17 days. I started researching cases of women who had
abducted babies or children and as Muriel's character started to form in my
head, I realised the scene I had filed away in my head all those years ago
would fit perfectly into this novel. I'm not going to say which scene it is,
because I don't want to spoil the book, but you will know it when you come to
it.
Of course, since those early days the
advent of social media has meant that parents - and particularly mothers - are
judged and commented on even more. I was interested in the huge amount of
vitriol spouted on social media about the McCanns and other parents of children
who have gone missing.
And I think the truth is that often the
public want to believe that parents are responsible because then they can
reassure themselves that it couldn't happen to them. The truth, that sometimes
children do go missing and it is no fault of the parents, is a far more
unpalatable one.
I wanted my novel to be not so much a
whodunnit but, far more interestingly in my view, a whytheydunnit. At no point
did I sit down and think, 'I know, I'll write a psychological drama'. It was more a case that the characters and the
story chose me. I don't actually see this book as a big departure from my
previous novels, it is more of an evolution. I've always written about dramatic
events in people's lives and how they impact on those around them. My previous six
novels may have been categorized as
commercial women's fiction but they dealt with such issues as miscarriage,
domestic violence, a suicide attempt, traumatic brain injury, a child with a
life-limiting illness and a marriage breakdown. Hardly the supposed 'chick-lit'
fare. It was simply that with this novel, the dramatic event which occurred
happened to be a crime, which took me into new territory.
I hope I've written a thought-provoking
novel which will make readers think about how women are judged as mothers and
how the media likes to portray everyone as 'good' or 'evil', when the truth is
that there are so many complex reasons why people do the things they do and I
think we could all do with being more understanding and sympathetic to people
instead of jumping to conclusions.
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