What Goes Around.

Beth was in a rush, stopping her car and shouting, “Come on, Tilly, I've not got all day” 

In the back, Tilly pulled a face, “Can I not stop here?”  

“Don’t be silly,” she snapped, slamming her door and opening the back door in one quick movement. “Just get out.” The last bit came across a little too harsh, and a few customers in the car park looked over and scoffed.  “Why have you brought that thing?” Beth pointed to Tilly’s toy rabbit; it was a gift from her grandmother and never left her side. 

As Beth walked into the store, a woman wearing an oversized coat, which was one of Beth's pet peeves, along with white sports socks and sliders, bumped into her. The woman didn't acknowledge Beth and simply continued into the shop to find the few items she needed. As Beth queued to pay, her IBS began acting up, causing stomach cramps and an urgent need to find a bathroom.

Paying the checkout girl, Beth dragged Tilly towards the toilets, “Please wait there, hold mummy's shopping,” with her hands she pointed to the floor, “Don’t move”. 

“Ok Mummy,”  

Beth closed the door, lifted her skirt, dropped her knickers, and sat down. 

Inside the store, 

Sam was wandering up and down the aisles, her mind blank; she had no money so she couldn't buy anything. It was just a thing she started doing, Saturday morning, come to the store with the extra pockets sewn into the coat, it was easier to steal.  

With two large jars of coffee and some prime stake in her pockets, Sam thought it was time to leave. She found herself in the corridor to the toilets, “Hello,” she said to the young girl leaning against the wall. “What’s your name?” 

“Tilly,” She lowered her head, looking at the floor. 

“Are you on your own?” 

Just as Tilly was about to tell her about her mum in the toilet, an alarm sounded, a man with a security uniform came out of a door near the toilet looking flustered, “Out please, can’t you hear the alarm,” he opened his arms to shepherd Sam and Tilly out as the left the corridor a mass of people met them all rushing the same way, Tilly grabbed Sam's hand. Sam looked down at those blue eyes looking up at her, smiled and walked with the flow.  

Beth was having trouble with her motion; she thought I should never have come out. I really didn’t need to come out, then the alarm sounded. Trying to finish up, and cleaning herself made her anxiety jump too high, “Tilly,” she shouted through the door, “Tilly Love, are you ok?”  No answer, just the sound of the alarm.  

Beth looked around the store, which was empty except for the persistent alarm. She called out, “Tilly, Tilly,” her anxiety intensifying. Proceeding quickly toward the main exit, her heels echoed through the deserted aisles. Upon reaching outside, she observed a large group of people assembled behind a fire cordon in the car park. 

“Tilly!” She screamed, scanning the crowd. Her eyes landed on a security guard. “My daughter! She was by the toilets!” 

The guard gestured toward the assembly point. “Everyone is over there, love. Relax.” 

Beth pushed through the throng until she saw a familiar small figure. Tilly was standing by the edge of the road, her hand firmly gripped by a woman in a faded, oversized coat—the woman Beth had ignored while rushing into the shop. A car stopped beside them. Beth started to run, "Tilly, Tilly”  

The blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl turned to see her mum running across the car park, shouting, and then she was pushed into the back seat of the car. 

Beth froze as the car door slammed shut. The engine roared, and the tyres screeched against the asphalt, leaving a haze of blue smoke where her daughter had stood seconds before. 

Beth cried out, “Tilly!” Her voice trembled with emotion. She rushed toward the car’s bumper and fell onto the gravel. The shopping bags she’d made Tilly hold had spilt across the road; their contents scattered everywhere. 

The woman in the faded coat had disappeared as well, now sitting in the front seat of the car. A wave of dread washed over Beth as she suddenly understood. 

The security guard ran over, radio crackling. "Which way did they go?" 

Beth couldn't speak. Her stomach cramped again, a cruel reminder of the urgency that had made her leave Tilly alone in the first place. She had been so consumed by her own schedule and her own discomfort that she’d treated her daughter like a piece of luggage left out in a corridor. 

As the sirens of the fire brigade arrived for the false alarm, Beth looked down at the pavement. There, lying in the oil-stained grit, was Tilly’s cardigan; it was the only thing left. 

Earlier, those who had ridiculed Beth for her cold demeanour were now rendered silent; their chatter replaced by a thick, oppressive stillness. On running to the toilet, Beth needed to be alone to cope with the Illness, now she found herself truly alone. 

Four years later. 

“You ok, Boss?” 

“I’m good, why?” 

“The date..., it’s...,” 

“I know the date, I know what day it is. What I don’t want is to be kept being reminded..., OK” 

The radio on Ben’s jacket came to life, “Got him, he’s on the bus, I can see the driver and one passenger, a young girl, looks about seven, eightyish.” 

Ben keyed his mic. “Control, this is Delta 1, we can confirm the fugitive has boarded a local bus, we have eyes on, we see the driver and one passenger, a tender age girl. Do we have permission to go over?”  

“Negative Delta 1, stand down, await further orders.” 

Ben hit the back wing of the car he was crouched behind, leaving a big dent. Mack gave him a look as his brows raised, meeting in the middle.   

“What!” he lifted himself to look at the bus, “Control, there is movement on the bus, we need to act now” 

The bus engine groaned as it lurched away. Ben didn’t wait for a reply from Control. He signalled Mack, and the two of them vaulted over the car, their boots pounding the tarmac. 

"Delta 1, we are moving!" Ben shouted into his shoulder mic, ignoring the frantic protests crackling back at him. 

Through the grimy rear window of the bus, Ben saw a flash of movement, a man in a dark hoodie pulling a small girl into the aisle. The girl’s face was pressed against the glass for a split second. She looked terrified, clutching something small and grey on her chest. 

"Wait," Ben skidded to a halt, his heart hammering against his ribs. "Mack, look at the girl." 

Mack squinted through his binoculars. "Small, blonde... she’s holding a toy. A rabbit?" 

Ben felt a cold chill that had nothing to do with the morning air. He remembered the case like it was yesterday. He had a child, a girl, who was the same age as Tilly, in fact, in the same class at school, and he couldn’t comprehend how he would feel if someone had taken her.  

The mother, Beth, had become a local pariah, a woman who had lost everything in a moment when her illness had taken over. Ben had seen her just that morning, sitting outside the same store where it had happened, staring at the spot in the car park where she'd last seen her daughter. 

The bus suddenly swerved, tyres screeching as the fugitive forced the driver to take a sharp turn toward the old industrial estate. 

"He's heading for the docks!" Mack yelled. 

"Not today," Ben hissed. He sprinted toward his unmarked car, Mack diving into the passenger seat. 

They intercepted the bus at the narrow bridge. Ben jammed his car across the lane, forcing the bus driver to slam on the brakes. Before the vehicle had even stopped rocking, Ben was out, service weapon drawn, his focus narrowed to the man holding the girl in the doorway. 

"Let them go, Miller!" Ben roared. 

The fugitive, a man named Freddie Miller who had been on the run from a string of robberies, looked panicked. He held a knife close to the girl's throat. "Back off! Or she gets it!" 

The girl wasn't seven or eight. Up close, she looked older, her face thin and pale, but those blue eyes were unmistakable. She wasn't fighting. She looked exhausted, as if she had been running for four years straight. 

"Tilly?" Ben called out softly, his voice trembling. 

The girl’s eyes flickered. At the sound of her name, she didn't look at the officer; she looked down at the tattered, earless stuffed rabbit in her arms. 

In that moment of distraction, the bus driver, a war veteran who had seen enough trouble for one lifetime, swung a metal fire extinguisher at Miller’s head. The fugitive slumped, the knife clattering to the floor. 

Ben was up the steps in a heartbeat, shielding the girl as Mack moved in to cuff the unconscious man. 

An hour later, the car park was once again filled with people, but this time the mood was electric with shock rather than judgment. A police cruiser pulled up, and Beth stepped out. She looked older, her hair greyed at the temples, her expensive clothes replaced by a simple, functional coat. 

She saw Ben standing by the ambulance. She remembered him; he nodded toward the open door. 

Beth walked forward, her legs shaking. Inside sat the girl, wrapped in a shock blanket. As Beth approached, the girl looked up. There was no running, no screaming "Mummy." There was only a long, heavy silence. 

Tilly reached into the folds of the blanket and held out the tattered rabbit.  "You told me not to move," Tilly said, her voice a raspy whisper. "But the man said we had to go." 

Beth fell to her knees, the harshness of four years ago finally breaking into a thousand pieces of regret. She didn't reach for her shopping or her phone; she reached for her daughter’s mud-stained hand. 

The onlookers, some of whom remembered that terrible Saturday four years ago, watched as the woman who once was in so much of a rush had finally stopped the world, for the only thing that mattered. 

The detectives eventually pieced it together. Miller hadn’t been part of the original kidnapping; he was just a low-level thief who had been lying low in the same derelict squat where Sam, the woman in the oversized coat and sliders, had kept Tilly all those years. When the police raid started closing in on him for the robberies, he panicked and bolted for the bus. 

Sam had spent four years hiding in plain sight, moving from one shadows-and-dust apartment to another, raising Tilly as a quiet, ghost-like companion who never went to school and never spoke to strangers. If Miller hadn't been so desperate to save his own skin, they might have stayed in those shadows forever. 

Beth sat in the back of the ambulance, her fingers tracing the frayed ears of the toy rabbit. She looked across the car park at the bus, now a crime scene cordoned off with yellow tape, and then at the man in handcuffs being pushed into a police van. 

She realised that her own frantic impatience four years ago had started this clock, but it was a criminal’s frantic fear that finally stopped it. The irony was a bitter pill to swallow.

She had spent years blaming the universe, but the universe had used a villain to do a hero's work. 

The silence between mother and daughter was vast, a canyon of four lost years they would have to learn to bridge, one day at a time. Beth gripped Tilly’s hand, promising herself she would never be in a rush again. She knew with a haunting certainty that if it wasn't for Miller trying to get away on the bus, Tilly might never have been found. 

What goes around comes around.