Vikki Wakefield on How to Make a Monster

Nothing drives my imagination quite like opening up to the questions surrounding an intensely personal fear—and nothing scares me more than the thought of losing a child. When I started researching and writing After You Were Gone, I was drawn into the heart-breaking world of parents and families of missing children. To lose a child is devastating enough, but to endure a lifetime of not knowing what happened to them?

This is the terrible limbo of ambiguous loss. 

In death, there is finality; there are processes, rituals, and a gradual progression through the stages of grief. To suffer ambiguous loss is to enter a relentless cycle of unresolved grief and hopelessness, and it takes strength, support and unity to survive. Rightfully or wrongfully, a degree of judgement and suspicion comes along with being the parent of a missing child and, while tragedy is the thread that ties some families together, it can also become a wedge that pushes them apart.

After You Were Gone is a psychological suspense thriller centred around a missing child, an abduction case gone cold, and a fractured family trying to find their way back to each other. The story opens with a wedding celebration: six years after her daughter Sarah was abducted, Abbie is getting married to a man she loves, and who loves her. While her loss is as raw as the day Sarah went missing, she is determined to move forward. But, within hours, Abbie’s life changes abruptly for a second time and she is faced with a choice: destroy her new life by following the instructions of an anonymous caller offering closure or maintain her fragile peace and continue the cycle of not knowing. 

What would you do if the unthinkable happened? What would you give up? How far would you go to know the truth? 

These were the questions driving the development of Abbie’s character and those of the people surrounding her in grief. As a writer and a mother, I was compelled to strive toward knowing what happened; as a consequence, Abbie makes unhinged decisions. While some will find her to be an unlikeable protagonist, I see her as a manifestation of flawed but unwavering parental love. Her desperation to know what happened to her child is deeply human and relatable, and it takes incredible courage to wander alone into an abyss. For Abbie, there is no other choice but to let herself fall—it’s the only way to break the endless cycle of grief.

Modern literature is littered with unlikeable and unreliable narrators. Readers either love them, hate them, or love to hate them, but the real test of an unlikeable character is: do they force us to test our own morality, and can we relate? During my research, two refrains common to many suffering ambiguous loss rose above the rest. The first was that the pain never stops. Without closure, there is no clear way forward; the finality of death is withheld. The second was that the parents of missing children would do anything—anything—to know what happened, even if it meant accepting that their child was never coming home.

Here’s the thing: men have been writing unlikeable female characters for centuries. Why then did it feel dangerous to write a character like Abbie, who not only self-destructs but takes the people who love and support her down with her? In these moments of doubt, I remember this quote by Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs:

“If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities.”

After You Were Gone explores themes of responsibility and blame, guilt and atonement, and examines familial relationships under extreme circumstances. It’s a character-driven psychological thriller, as much about the connections between mothers, daughters and sisters as it is about the mystery of a missing child. Set over three timelines—Before, After and Now—the story follows Abbie’s life from pregnant teenager to grieving mother, and to the present, when she must become a monster to defeat a monster.

No one is innocent. Everyone will be judged. The clues to solving the mystery of Sarah’s disappearance are all there, shrouded in the past, but the only way for Abbie to find the answers she craves is to sacrifice her future, and herself. 

What would you do?

After You Were Gone by Vikki Wakefield, No Exit Press £8.99 Out Now 

What happens to a family when a child goes missing? In a busy street market, Abbie lets go of six-year-old Sarah's hand. She isn't a bad mother, just exhausted. But when she turns around, her daughter is gone. Six years on, Abbie is in love and getting married. But her fragile peace is constantly threatened: not knowing what happened to Sarah. Then she receives a phone call from a man claiming to know what happened, but if Abbie tells anyone she'll never find out the truth. How far would you go to find your child?

Missing Children by Syd Moore

 

The subject of missing children is as emotive as it gets. Almost every parent or guardian I’ve encountered has at least one story to tell when they became aware that their child or children weren’t where they were meant to be. Often this heart-stopping nightmare is over in mere minutes, but on some occasions those minutes can stretch into hours, days, months or sometimes years. You’d imagine that the latter were rare, however when I was researching the subject for my new book Strange Tricks, I found the statistics published by the UK Missing Persons Unit (part of the National Crime Agency) particularly unsettling. In 2018/2019, for example, there were 75,918 children recorded missing by UK police forces and 218,707 incidents (some children go missing several times a year). 

Drilling down into this statistic I was comforted to learn that over half of these 200K plus cases closed within eight hours. Of the rest 80% were resolved within 24 hours. But that year there were also 1,514 children recorded as long-term missing. Generally this means that they have been gone for longer than 28 days. These cases can remain open for a significant amount of time: around 50% actually refer to children who disappeared before that year and were still not found. That’s around 750 children. 

This did not seem like an inconsiderable number. In fact, it made me wonder - if so many children went missing like this, on a regular basis, why did we not see more appeals across the media? We all remember the tragedies of Madeleine McCann and Sarah Payne, the press conferences, parental appeals and media coverage that followed every harrowing step of those investigations. But what of Alexander Sloley, aged sixteen, who went missing in 2008? Eleven-year-old Abdu Abdo not seen since September 2017. Or Carmel Fenech, a sixteen-year-old, who failed to return home to Crawley in May 1998? 

Like many crime writers I am lucky enough to have a 'source' in the police force who was able to enlighten me. 'When a child is reported missing,' she told me, 'you have to assess what level of risk of harm they fall into. There are three – low, medium and high. The higher the risk, the more quickly officers act.' My source explained, 'Nothing is taken for granted. You have to search the homes of missing children, as sometimes they might be hiding in the loft or the shed. They're children – they do that kind of thing. If they're not there you then have to ask lots of questions about the state of the home. If the children are happy there and see if there are any other red flags. We're now aware of grooming. So we have to find out if the missing child has been given gfts, or makeup, if they seem to have more money, if there has been a change in their behaviour or mood? You then have to move on to see there are any persons of interest in the area who might have something to do with the disappearance. Quite often this way you can locate a child. But obviously, it doesnt work all the time. Another of the key factors, with regards to ramping up the case, is the child's aaage. The younger the child, the more likely you might go to a CRA. Then information will be released to the public via traditional media and social media in the hope that this will lead to the safe recovery of the child'.

The CRA stands for Child Rescue Alert. This is a system run by the National Crime Agency, based on the American 'Amber Alert'. It was first piloted by Sussex Police following the abduction and murder of Sarah Payne and is pretty much a partnership between the police, the media and the puvblic. Its intention is to alert the public to the abduction or other high-risk disappearance as quickly as possible.

So why isn't it applied more often? Well, it seems that the British public are fickle – it has been concluded that an increase deployment of the CRA is likely to lead to oversaturation. It must, therefore, be used sparingly and only in the most problematic of cases. 

In many cases, once questions have been asked and answers gleaned it appears that some children have chosen to go missing. 'Looked after children (in Local Authority care), are of the highest risk of being reported missing. 1 in 10 looked after children are reported missing compared to 1 in 200 children.

The reason for children leaving home also vary. More than half of missing children have experienced conflict, abuse and neglect at home and 1 in 5 (later located) have said that they have felt forced to leave (Missingpeople.org.uk). Other reasons include mental health issues, abuse, domestic violence or child sexual exploitation.

It is a sad state of affairs but the 'voluntary' nature of their disappearance does contextualise those shocking statistics. Though there still persists a cause for concern – although most cases are solved, the children found and returned to safety, a minority never are. And even more disssturbing than that – some who disappear are never reported missing after all.

For more information on the subject please visit Missingpeople.org.uk

Strange Tricks by Syd Moore (Oneworld Publications) Out Now

Secretly Rosie Strange has always thought herself a little bit more interesting than most people - the legacy her family has bequeathed her is definitely so, she's long believed. But then life takes a peculiar turn when the Strange legacy turns out not just to be the Essex Witch Museum, but perhaps some otherworldly gifts that Rosie finds difficult to fathom. Meanwhile Sam Stone, Rosie's curator, is oddly distracted as breadcrumb clues into what happened to his missing younger brother and other abducted boys from the past are poised to lead him and Rosie deep into a dark wood where there lurks something far scarier than Hansel and Gretel's witch...