First One Missing (23 page)

‘You think I’m some grief-deranged mother. So does Guy. And maybe you’re both right. All I know is I feel it right here.’ She made a fist of her tiny hands and knocked it against her breast bone. Leanne heard the soft thud from across the table. ‘I thought Guy might understand, but he doesn’t. Too busy thinking about
her
, whoever she is. Well, good luck to her. Guy might look on the outside like he’s healed, better than me anyway, but what nobody sees is that inside him there’s a mass of scar tissue. Hard and lumpy and knotted up.’

Despite the sunshine, Leanne felt goosebumps rise up on her arms. Across the square a group of art students who’d been lounging in deckchairs drinking wine straight from a bottle started singing the theme tune from a children’s programme from years before. ‘Tinky Winky, Dipsy,’ they yelled, ‘Laa-Laa, Po.’

All the way back to the station, Leanne kept thinking about Emma’s tired face and the sadness when she’d said that thing about Guy having another woman and her not blaming him, and then the bitterness when she talked about the knotted scar tissue inside him. She remembered how she’d felt when Pete had first admitted he’d been seeing someone else. At first it had been almost a relief, knowing that she wasn’t going crazy after all. For weeks she’d been thinking something was wrong but whenever she’d asked him, he’d round on her, denying everything, making out it was her own paranoia. Then they’d been watching television side by side during a rare evening when they were both at home.
The Great British Bake Off
, it was. They watched it as a kind of food porn, each vowing to get the ingredients to make whatever it was the contestants were making that week, though they never did. For once she was relaxed, not thinking about anything apart from the show, and the cakes obviously.

And then he’d said it, out of the blue, without a preamble, without even looking at her. ‘I’ve been seeing someone else. She’s pregnant.’

Pete had cried later. She remembered that. He didn’t want to leave her. He loved her. But they’d both known that he would go. A baby was a baby in the end. Anyway, she’d found Will a few months later, so everything had worked out for the best, she supposed.

Pete wasn’t at the station when she arrived back, which was a relief. She couldn’t wait for this case to be over, so he could go back permanently to his own station two miles away and they’d stop being thrown together like ingredients in one of Mary Berry’s recipes. She went into Desmond’s office to brief him on her meeting with Emma. ‘She has no clue what he’s up to. She thinks there’s another woman.’ Awful to think there was a reality where your husband having another woman might turn out to be the least-worst scenario.

Back at her desk, she was just logging on to her computer when a call came through from reception. ‘There’s a Donna Shields on the line. She says she needs to speak to you.’

At first Leanne had trouble placing the name, then she remembered the sharp-faced woman with the red-raw complexion. She sighed. Could she get away with pretending to be on another call? No, she’d just call back again. And again.

‘Mrs Shields. What can I do for you?’

‘I did it. I’ve got the bastard!’ The woman’s voice was raspy and breathless, as if she’d been running, and there was a manic edge to it.

Leanne took out her notebook and clicked her biro on. ‘What do you mean? Who have you got?’

The tip of the pen hovered over the paper.

‘Jason. That cunt. My ex-husband. Like I told you, he’s not supposed to come within two hundred metres of me and Keira but he’s been out there all the time, not that you lot give a fuck. Anyway, earlier on I came home from picking up Keira from school and there he was sat in his car opposite the flat and I just lost it. He hadn’t seen me cos we came a different way on account of Keira needing to pick up her PE kit from her friend. It was boiling so he had his window down, and I just put my face right up to his and was yelling at him and then he put his hand out to grab my throat and I fucking saw red. I grabbed on to his hair – all slimy with gel it was – but I managed to get a bit from the front where he keeps it a bit longer and I yanked it out, so now I’ve got it. I’ve got the bastard.’

Leanne wrote ‘got the bastard’ in looping writing.

‘What exactly do you mean?’ she asked, although she had a fairly good idea.

‘What the fuck do you think I mean? I’ve got evidence, haven’t I?’

Leanne remembered about Donna Shields’ insistence that her husband was behind the Hampstead Heath murders.

‘You want us to do a DNA test?’

‘Yeah. You lot must have picked up something from all those poor kids. All you got to do is match it up to the hair and boof! Got him.’

‘Boof,’ wrote Leanne.

‘OK, Mrs Shields. Why don’t you pop the hair in an envelope, and hand it in to the duty sergeant on reception. If nothing else, it might help prove your husband was in breach of his RO.’

‘But you’ll test it for the other thing?’

‘It’s not quite as simple as that, Mrs Shields. If I submit a sample without following procedure, we wouldn’t be able to use it in court.’

‘Yeah, but you can get other evidence then, once you know it’s him.’

If only policing were as simple as most of the population believed it to be.

‘If Mr Shields was in breach of his restraining order, technically a crime was committed so I might have grounds to proceed with testing, though I’m not committing to anything. So fine. Yes, bring it in.’

‘Is that it?’

‘Pardon?’

‘I basically hand you on a plate the guy who’s been going around murdering kids and you tell me to pop into the station like it’s no big deal?’

Leanne took a deep breath. ‘As I say, Mrs Shields. If you drop in the sample, I’ll do my best to put it through our database and we should know within a few days if there’s any need to take things further.’

There was an explosion of air from the other end of the phone.

‘A few days!
Are you kidding?
How many people does he have to kill for you lot to get off your arses and do something?’

‘I do appreciate what you’re saying, Mrs Shields, but you must understand you’re far from the only person who’s contacted us convinced they know who the perpetrator is.’

After Donna Shields had rung off, Leanne tried to lose herself in typing up notes but the other woman’s voice kept sounding in her head, both accusatory and scared. She hadn’t been prepared for it, when she first joined the force as an idealistic twenty-one-year-old, how it would make her see men differently. Marriage differently. There were so many terrified women out there, living in fear of the people closest to them. Presumably Donna Shields had once thought she loved her husband. What had been going through her mind as she walked down the aisle towards him on her wedding day? Had she known then what he was capable of? Had she wilfully buried it so she wouldn’t lose the big day, the white dress? Or had it begun after that, the repeated belittling, the numerous tiny daily brutalities?

She gazed across the room at the desk where Pete sat whenever he was in this office. Marriage was a killer, all right. One way or another, it got you in the end.

27

It wasn’t that Rory expected much from his home life. All his mates had complaints about their parents. Jack W.’s dad was old. Ancient, even compared to his mum and Simon. He kept a stash of Viagra in the back of his sock drawer. Jack claimed he’d tried one and had a boner from Friday night till Monday lunchtime but Rory wasn’t convinced. And Sam P.’s mum was bipolar and either buzzing around the house like a malfunctioning robot or lying in bed for days on end. Rory had once gone round there after school and she’d come lurching out of her bedroom wearing a grey dressing gown and then cried because there wasn’t any milk.

But Rory couldn’t remember when the atmosphere in his own house had been worse. Granted, it must have been pretty bad right after Megan was killed, but his memory of those days and weeks was blurry – an endless round of police and relatives and people telling him he mustn’t blame himself, and being able to eat cereal whenever he wanted to because there was no one to tell him that it wasn’t a proper meal and that if he ate any more there wouldn’t be any left for the morning. And it hadn’t exactly been a laugh a minute that time a couple of years ago when his mum had found out something about Simon that made her stop speaking to him for a few days and describe him as a ‘selfish fat pig’ after two glasses of wine.

But this was different. The last few days, it was as if all of them were walking around with individual black clouds over their heads but no one was mentioning them. Simon had been bad-tempered and short with everyone, picking Rory up on everything he did. If he even so much as left his school bag on the kitchen floor for a nanosecond Simon would launch into a rant about respect and collective living. Rory always switched off as soon as Simon started speaking anyway, so he didn’t tend to hear the rest. Meanwhile, ever since the last Megan’s Angels meeting, his mum seemed to have been sucked down a black hole she couldn’t get out of. Talking to her was just like shouting down into the void from where her voice would come back faint and echoey.

Rory himself hadn’t been on top form lately either. He’d been getting more texts.
How does it feel to be a killer?
the last one had said. It had got so bad that the pinging noise of an incoming message on his phone now made him go rigid with anxiety. One time he’d confided in Jack H., who had put a hand on his shoulder and shrugged, which had been strangely comforting. But still he couldn’t bring himself to open up to his mum.

He was on his way home from school. The first part of the journey, to the clocktower, was always a bit of a laugh. There was a gang of them who usually walked together, devouring crisps and Haribo sweets his mother would never allow in the house. They used to call into the chippy on the way home, but that had gone the way of every single other useful place that had ever opened in Crouch End – namely been turned into a gourmet coffee shop full of double buggies and Eastern European au pairs. When Rory was little there used to be a Woolworths there, right in the centre, where he and Megan would buy pick ’n’ mix on a Saturday morning, but now that was a Waitrose.

He’d passed the clocktower and said goodbye to his friends, dodging a guy with a clipboard wearing a tabard and a fixed smile as he tried to sell charity to shoppers who resolutely refused to meet his eye. All the way home, Rory was thinking about the texts. They were really getting to him now.

That’s why he had finally given into Jack H.’s nagging to get Sanjeev involved. He’d held out against it for ages, not because he had anything against Sanjeev, who was actually OK for a geek and whose older sister was downright hot, but because he didn’t want everyone knowing about the texts. He was enough of a freak as it was. But Sanjeev, who in addition to being the cleverest in the year could also, allegedly, hack into any computer or mobile phone on the planet, read the texts without comment. Then he told him to leave it with him, and Rory had walked away feeling momentarily lighter.

It was a muggy day – the air was hot and heavy and smelled of overripe fruit. Rory had his blazer scrunched up in a ball in his bag and his white school shirt untucked, sleeves rolled up past his elbows.

As he made his way up the familiar street, he did the usual litany in his head: number 13, where he used to go to nursery as a baby, now remembered only in snapshots – a brightly painted animal mural, wedges of apple on a plate. Number 29, where his best friend from primary used to live before his parents got divorced and he had to move to Hertford with his mum. No, not Hertford,
Hereford
. His mum kept trying to explain the difference and turn it into an impromptu geography lesson, but as far as Rory was concerned it was exactly the same thing. Far was far. The hedge at number 42 where once a burglar had dumped the stolen bike he’d escaped on and Rory’s friend Hannah, who’d witnessed it all from her bedroom window, had had to give a statement to the police – to Rory’s then acute envy. His neighbourhood was as familiar and comforting to him as the sight of his own hand on the end of his arm. After Megan died, he remembered how everything inside him used to loosen up when he got to these few roads around his house, and he’d be surprised to realize how rigidly he’d been holding himself in.

Turning the corner into his road, he slowed down as he always did, trying to gauge the emotional temperature of his home through its red-brick façade. There had been times in the past when the house had stopped him dead in his tracks before he even reached the front gate, something about it telling him to turn round and go back the way he’d come, to knock on a friend’s door and pretend to be locked out, so he wouldn’t have to face whatever was there. But today the house was blank and uncommunicative, giving nothing away.

As he was heading up the path, Rory remembered it was his mum’s half-day, which could either be a very good thing, or a very bad thing. Sometimes on his mum’s half-day he’d open the front door and the whole house would be smelling of freshly baked bread and cakes. Other times she’d be shut off in her study doing God knows what, and when starvation pangs compelled him to go in to ask what was for dinner, she’d blink at him as if she wasn’t really sure exactly who he was. And then there were the times he’d come home and a big wave of sadness would come rushing out to meet him like a tsunami.
Thwack.

Today though, there was neither the baking smell nor the wall of misery. Instead, he heard voices coming from the kitchen.

He hovered in the hallway, his heavy bag still on his back. He was tempted to tiptoe upstairs to his top-floor lair without having to be paraded in front of whoever was in the kitchen, but on the other hand he was starving. He hadn’t eaten since lunchtime – he didn’t count the bag of salt and vinegar crisps on the way home. He needed proper food. He thought about the packet of bagels in the bread bin. He was sure there was a new jar of peanut butter in the cupboard.

‘Rory, is that you? Come through to the kitchen and say hello.’