A father searches for his missing daughter at a business park, only to become a living ghost in a corporate nightmare
“I
knew she wouldn’t leave the floor, but still I felt the slow panic coming on. A supermarket form of dread – you expect to find the lost child in the next aisle, but the next aisle is empty, so you push on to the next … [until] there are not enough aisles left to give you hope.”
Tom Crowley’s eight-year-old daughter Hen (not her real name, but also not short for Henrietta) has gone missing, somewhere in the Piranesi-esque corridors of Tom’s workplace, Capmeadow Business Park. It’s bring your daughter to work day, and it’s not the first time that morning that he’s lost her. But this feels different – to Tom, and to the reader, who might briefly suspect that they are in a contemporary update of Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time.
Tom soon finds Hen, then loses her again – “properly gone this time” – or doesn’t. She is nowhere to be found on Capmeadow’s entry records or CCTV, because she may never have been there in the first place. Tom is convinced that he had an email about bring your daughter to work day, but he can’t find it, and no one else seems to have heard of it. When confronted with the evidence, he eventually signs a corporate-Stalinist affidavit “officially agreeing” that he never brought Hen to Capmeadow. But he continues to believe that he did, and becomes a kind of living ghost stalking the business park.
