First One Missing (32 page)

He paused in the hallway and reached out for the front-door latch.

42

There were lights on in all the rooms, but no way of knowing what was happening inside. The wheelie bins in the concrete front yard obscured the window of what must surely be the living room and the upstairs curtains were drawn. As the car screeched to a halt, Leanne pressed her hands briefly to her eyes like she did when there was a horror film on the television she couldn’t bear to watch. Perhaps Pete recognized the gesture because he turned to her. ‘You OK?’ he whispered. She had no time to do anything but nod because now they were getting ready to jump out.

But were they too late? That was the question that had been ricocheting around Leanne’s head ever since she’d picked up the paper from the floor of Jason Shields’ bedroom and seen the photograph of the child. Of course they’d got straight on to the dating website and it had been the work of minutes to find an address for ButterfliesInMyTummy, but who knew how long he had been going round to the house, in all likelihood grooming the daughter. From the messages they’d sent each other through the website, it had been weeks since their first date.

Looking at the white front door with its mean diamond of faux leaded glass, Leanne had a terrible conviction that they were too late, that they’d failed the girl in the photo like they’d failed Megan and Tilly and Leila and Poppy. Yet how could they have known? Jason Shields was an outlier, an anomaly. No criminal record, except for the restraining order. Not on the Sexual Offenders Register. There were no clues they’d missed.

The driver turned off the engine and Leanne flung open her door, her eyes fixed on the house. She had one foot out of the car when the white front door suddenly flew open, revealing a very slight young girl wearing cut-off pyjamas, a cardigan and sandals. Right behind her, so close he must have been pressing on her back, was the man she recognized from his website profile as Jason Shields.

43

Emma replaced her phone gently on the bedside table and sat completely still, trying to absorb what Leanne had just told her. The light filtering in through the ivory curtains was grey and weak and she reckoned it must still be very early. Leanne had clearly been up all night. Her voice had that tightness to it as if it had been stretched to breaking point.

‘We’ve made an arrest,’ she’d said. ‘I didn’t want you to hear it from anyone else.’

It wasn’t anyone known to the police, at least not in that context, Leanne told her. He hadn’t confessed yet but the evidence against him was pretty conclusive.

Emma had listened to Leanne without saying a word, speaking only to thank her at the end. Guy hadn’t stirred throughout the whole thing. She always set her phone to silent overnight and she’d only woken up because she’d heard it vibrating against the glass of water on her bedside table.

It was over.

The words formed in her head, but still she couldn’t process them.

Tilly’s killer had been caught. They could get on with their lives.

So why didn’t she feel more euphoric? Surely she ought to be leaping around with joy, or at least waking Guy up to tell him the news.

She glanced over at him. He lay half under, half out of the duvet, one arm up at a right angle above his head, his face turned to the side so that his neck was long and straight.

How could she have thought he had anything to do with Tilly’s death? Her treachery made her feel giddy with shame. That she should have doubted this man who’d stroked her back and held back her hair when morning sickness sent her hunching over the toilet bowl, who’d sat on his own in his car outside strangers’ schools day after day to weep for his dead daughter because he still felt he had to be the strong one at home, the one who didn’t show weakness and protected them all, left her saturated with guilt.

She climbed back under the duvet and lay down. Guy looked so peaceful there, his arm flung up like a baby. Once she told him the news he’d want to be up making phone calls, doing things. And then the girls would be up and upset, just when Jemima had seemed in the last few days to be coming back to her at last, even allowing Emma to cuddle her the evening before as they sat watching television on the sofa. No, Emma wanted to leave him sleeping, just a little longer.

She turned over on to her side and shuffled carefully towards him, in small movements. There was a moment of hesitation when she wondered whether she had the right any longer to touch him. She was so out of practice, she could hardly remember what it felt like to have someone else’s skin against her own. Tentatively she reached an arm across Guy’s body and he shifted slightly in his sleep. She moved closer and then gently, hardly daring to breathe, she laid her head on his chest. Instantly his arm that had been flung up by his pillow came down and settled around her like a shawl.

44

Sally knew, before she was even fully awake, that she’d made a terrible mistake. Her mouth tasted like it had been coated with something sour and furry and there was a horrible fermenting smell in her nostrils. She opened her eyes and immediately shut them again, not wanting to believe what she now knew incontrovertibly to be the case. Self-loathing crawled all over her like a grubby hand.

Would she never learn?

She swung her legs over the side of the bed and slipped out of the bedcovers, disgustedly kicking off the knickers that were still hooked around one of her ankles. She was going to have to do some serious work on herself. Perhaps she’d take herself back to that luxury retreat on that island in Thailand. She hadn’t been sure about some of the stuff there. Who needed a breathing workshop, for goodness sake? Breathing was one of the very few life skills she’d managed to master. But she was sure the not-drinking had done her some good, and the meditation and the disgusting green juices. Slipping on the hotel dressing gown that was hanging over the chair and unhooking her handbag from the chair-back, she crept around the foot of the bed in which Simon Hewitt lay spreadeagled like a beached starfish.

Locking the door of the en suite bathroom, she looked at herself in the mirror and winced. She tried to piece together what had brought her to this dismal personal low, but piecing together the night before was like trying to work out a Sudoku – no sooner had she got one line of memory to fit than another burst right apart.

She knew she’d been feeling bad about Simon ever since she first found out about the existence of Nemo and realized for sure that he’d had nothing to do with the murders, and so when he called her yesterday afternoon to ask her if she wanted to go for a drink, she hadn’t declined, and besides she’d been lonely, with only the prospect of a Saturday evening on her own in the hotel bar. So she’d said yes, and they’d met for dinner and he’d made her laugh, and she’d remembered what she’d liked about him after all. And they’d shared a second bottle of wine, and then a third.

She slid down the tiled wall on to the bathmat she’d complained about on the first day after she’d slipped on it. She tried to guess how many hours she had until she had to present herself – all bright-eyed – at the house of the wife of the man in her bed, for the interview with Emma Reid that Leanne had managed to arrange in return for information. There was no doubt about it, she was a horrible person and she was going straight to hell. Unzipping her bag, she took her phone out of the inside pocket to check on the time, sliding it free from its smooth leather pouch. She saw she had a voicemail from Leanne Miller and cursed herself for having missed the call. Her lifecoach Mina had once accused her of self-sabotage. At the time Sally had been furious, but now she could see exactly what Mina meant.

‘Hello, Sally,’ came Leanne’s voice, sounding tired and slow. ‘I promised to keep you in the loop with developments on the Kenwood Killings case, so I’m calling to let you know we made an arrest last night. I thought you should know.’

An arrest. Sally sat up on her heels. She needed to be showered and out of there and down the police station before Ken Forbes and all the other arseholes got wind of it. She wished Leanne had been more forthcoming. An arrest could mean anyone.

All she knew for sure was that there was one person who could definitively be removed from the list of suspects, and that was because he was currently snoring away in her bed.

45

For the last few days, Rory had had a little residual glow thinking about the meeting with Jemima Reid in her Head’s office. But by Sunday morning, his good will had evaporated leaving just one thought in his head.
Why?
Why had he thought it was a good idea to throw his mobile into the pond? It had felt symbolic and life-affirming and liberating at the time, and it was just a crappy old thing, but still it was a phone.

What if Georgia Reynolds had rung him? She’d said she’d call him if she got stuck with the physics revision exercises they’d been set for homework. He couldn’t bear to think she might be imagining he was ignoring her. Getting a replacement phone was now a top priority. He knew he’d seen an old Nokia somewhere around the house. He ran through all the possibilities in his head. Basket on hallway dresser? No. Tray on the desk in Simon’s study? No. He’d gone through it just a couple of days ago looking for loose change that Simon wouldn’t miss. Got it! His mum’s bedside cabinet. That was where she kept her knickers and socks, but also where she kept the occasional ten-pack of cigarettes. She’d given up years before but still had the odd one, even though she thought no one else knew. He was sure there was a phone in there.

He crept down one flight of stairs and hovered uncertainly outside his mum and Simon’s room. He knew his mum wouldn’t be there. She always went to yoga on Sunday mornings, followed by a trip to the crematorium garden where there was a rosebush planted in Megan’s name. His mum insisted it calmed her to go there, although Rory had never noticed any evidence of this. She’d probably also call in to the supermarket to pick up cakes for this afternoon when that journalist was coming here to interview Emma Reid. Rory wondered whether Jemima would come too. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Simon’s whereabouts were another matter. Rory knew he’d gone out the previous evening. In fact, there had been a bit of a row about it, Rory now remembered. Simon was supposed to be at home but had called to say he was going out drinking with some old friends and didn’t know when he’d be back. His mum hadn’t been happy, but it happened pretty much all the time and she never seemed to get unhappy enough to do anything about it.

The bedroom door was slightly ajar and Rory nudged it open. Phew. The room was empty, bed neatly made, curtains pulled back. Looked like Simon hadn’t made it home at all last night.

Dropping to his knees next to his mum’s side of the bed, Rory pulled open the bottom drawer of the bedside cabinet. There was a jumble of tights in there – mostly black but some brown and some disgustingly flesh-coloured. The tights were all tangled together in knots and he pushed them gingerly aside, trying to touch them as little as possible. Finally, his hand closed around a hard rectangular object. Eureka! He pulled the phone out. It was dead, of course, and even older than he’d thought, though it had probably been a decent enough phone whenever she first got it. He wondered when his mum had stopped using it. If it was anything like her other phones, it was probably when she lost the charger. His mother couldn’t seem to grasp that you could get replacement chargers for phones or that there was a good chance a charger from the same manufacturer might fit several models. She still believed her laptop would work only with the specific lead it had come with.

Rory had a drawer full of chargers in his desk. Surely one of them would fit.

He slipped back out of the room and up the stairs just as the front door opened and his mum burst in.

Yesssss! His luck was definitely on the turn.

46

How was Leanne going to cope with going round to Helen Purvis’s this afternoon? She could hardly see straight. Slumped over a now-tepid coffee in the canteen, she toyed with the idea of ringing Emma to cancel, but she felt responsible. It was she who’d persuaded Emma into an interview as a return favour to Sally, and she’d promised to be there. No doubt they’d all be questioning her about Jason Shields, but she had nothing to tell them.

So far Shields had answered ‘no comment’ to everything they’d asked him, including his name. They’d been up most of the night, then he’d had a couple of hours’ sleep and now he was back in the interview room with Desmond and Pete, but as far as she knew there was no progress. Soon the solicitor he’d been assigned would get there and that would mostly likely be that. She was trying not to think of the ramifications if there was no confession and no further evidence. If the sample taken by Donna Shields was deemed inadmissible because Leanne hadn’t followed procedure in getting it tested, might the whole case against him collapse?

‘Got any speed?’ Pete dropped into the seat opposite her. His skin looked grey and there was a deep furrow above the bridge of his nose that she’d never noticed before. ‘Coke? Uppers? Pro Plus?’

‘Paracetamol?’ Leanne offered.

‘That’ll do.’

He’d brought over two coffees and drained his in one go.

‘You given up on Shields?’ Leanne tried to keep the note of panic out of her voice.

Pete shook his head. ‘On a break. He isn’t giving us anything at all in there, though you can see it’s costing him. There’s this little muscle in his neck that keeps spasming and you can hear his teeth grinding.’

‘Have you told the Botsfords?’

‘Yeah, I rang them earlier. It’s weird – I thought there’d be more of a sense of elation when we finally got him, but it feels a bit like an anti-climax. Do you know what I mean?’

Leanne nodded. She knew exactly what he meant. Maybe it was simply because they were so tired, or because Shields was so unforthcoming, but there was something about the man they’d brought in last night that felt too ordinary, too tawdry for the amount of damage he’d done.

‘Right, you two. I thought I’d find you here. There’s been a development.’