Paternoster (21 page)

It was a pretty average tale: Chelsea was still at school, due to sit her A levels in June. She wasn’t an outstanding student but she tried hard and was hoping to go to university to do marketing studies in September. Her older brother was away at college, and the two siblings got on well.

‘Has he heard from her?’

‘He said just wait, she’ll come home,’ Susan said, ‘but it’s not like her.’

Thing is, girls of eighteen can be angels one minute and devils the next, Eden thought. Staying out all night and not coming home could be completely in character for the new Chelsea. Legally she didn’t have to come home at all. Eden could well imagine how claustrophobic this household could be, with a worrying, disabled mother and a brother who’d flown the nest. In the same situation, she knew she’d stay out all night occasionally, too, if she could.

‘What about boyfriends?’ she asked.

‘She split up from her boyfriend a few months ago,’ Susan said. ‘He’s in her class. Nice lad. I liked him. I don’t know if she’s got a new boyfriend, she won’t tell me.’

‘Any other friends?’

‘Lots on Facebook. Hundreds. I don’t know who they are.’

‘Can I see her room?’ Eden asked.

Chelsea’s room was a messy nest. Clothes were draped on top of each other over the open wardrobe doors, and shoes lay scattered about the floor. Cosmetics covered the dressing table, oozing gloop on to the polished wooden top. A pinboard above her desk was covered with photos – old ones, by the look of the curling edges, the girls in them aged about fourteen, not eighteen.

‘Does she have a camera phone?’

Susan pulled a face. ‘Always filming on it. Every time you turn she’s holding it up, posting stuff online.’

‘A diary?’

Susan hesitated. ‘She hides it. I found it when I was tidying her room once, and just put it back.’ The answer was too quick: she’d sat down and had a good read through. It suggested she didn’t know her daughter as well as she thought; felt there was something being held back or she wouldn’t have snooped.

Eden outlined her daily fees and the deposit she required.

‘The police are right: most people who go missing turn up again within a day. If you want to wait, that’s fine. If you want me to try and find Chelsea now, and she rocks up tomorrow morning, I’ll keep the deposit and charge you for the hours I’ve already worked on the case. It’s up to you.’

Susan bit back a sob. ‘I don’t care about the money. I just want her back. I know what everyone’s said, but I’m worried about her. Call it mother’s instinct if you like, but I can’t get rid of this awful feeling that something terrible’s happened to her.’

‘I’ll need some details, a recent photo, and her laptop,’ Eden said. ‘Where’s Chelsea’s father?’

‘At work.’

Her expression must have changed because Susan rushed to add, ‘He’s as worried as I am, but he had to go into work. His job always comes first.’

‘What does he do?’

A pause. ‘He’s in the civil service.’

In Cheltenham-speak that meant GCHQ. ‘I understand,’ Eden said. ‘Tell me if there’s any reason why his job might be connected with Chelsea’s disappearance. I’m happy to sign the Official Secrets Act.’

She’d signed it before. The memory of that time squeezed the breath out of her, a band tightening round her chest.

Susan nodded. ‘You don’t think … someone took her to get to him?’

Eden squeezed her arm and said, ‘It’s more likely she got drunk with her mates and was too embarrassed to come home, or afraid she’d be in trouble. But I’ll get cracking straight away. Call me if you hear from her.’

She tucked Chelsea’s laptop into her backpack, and slotted two photos of Chelsea into her notebook. The first photo Susan offered was of Chelsea in school uniform: prim, young and dull. Eden asked for one of her dressed as she would at weekends, out with her mates. In the second photo, Chelsea had aged five years. Amazing what a bit of lacquer and slap will do to teenage bone structure.

‘What do I do now?’ Susan asked, hugging her big sweater close about her.

Eden took in her grey face and lank hair, and a surge of pity rippled through her. ‘Have a shower, wash your hair, put a cold flannel on your face and lie down for half an hour,’ she said, softly. ‘You’ll feel better, I promise.’

She decided to go legit on the computer, taking Chelsea’s laptop to a computer repair shop rather than palming a twenty to some scrote outside the Magistrate’s Court. The shop offered unlocking and resetting of computers to those who’d password protected theirs and then promptly forgotten the password. She’d used them before to virus check disks and USBs clients handed to her, and knew they were just the right side of dodgy.

‘Long time, Eden,’ Nat greeted her. She’d got a new tattoo on her neck – a mermaid by the look of it, sinuous scales curving into her startling red hair. ‘What can I do you for?’

‘Can you get into this laptop for me?’

‘Easy. You want it all downloading and resetting?’

‘Just open it up for me, please.’

‘Might be safer if I take a copy, too, just in case.’ Nat already had the laptop open and powering up. ‘Jesus, this is slow. Probably got all sorts of crap on it. Want me to clean it up, make it a bit quicker for you?’

‘It’s not mine, it belongs to a client,’ Eden said. ‘Her daughter’s gone AWOL. I’m trying to find her.’

Nat whistled. ‘Won’t take too long, Eden. Have a seat.’

The seat was a stool with a ripped vinyl top and bulging yellow foam. Eden hoiked her bum on to it and watched Nat while she worked, trying to memorise the sequence in case it came in useful one day. Professional development, she thought, wryly.

Nat connected up an external drive to the laptop and transferred the contents of the laptop’s hard drive to the external drive, then reset the laptop to factory settings.

‘I’ll copy this lot off here for you,’ Nat said, plugging the external drive into a PC and clicking a few keys.

‘Can you show me the last things she did on the computer?’

‘Sure. Take a little while. How far do you want me to go back?’

‘A week.’

‘A week! These girls spend all day online, a print out of that is going to fill a library.’

‘Two days?’

Nat harrumped and set to work. She reloaded the laptop with the data she’d downloaded and passed it to Eden. ‘There’s no password on it now, so you can browse through if you like. And here are her passwords.’ She handed over a scrap of paper where she’d scrawled passwords for email, Facebook and Twitter accounts.

‘How did you get those?’

‘She kept a file on her desktop marked “passwords”. It’s not rocket science.’ Nat grinned at her and went back to work.

Eden surfed through the laptop. Lots of activity on Facebook, including photos taken the night before at a club: Chelsea with her friends, all of them in skimpy tops and false eyelashes, clutching blue drinks, and grinning into the camera, looking closer to twenty-five than eighteen. Three girls on a night out. One now missing.

The Facebook timeline indicted the photos had been uploaded at nine thirty, presumably only seconds after they’d been taken, and the tag facility identified the subjects as Chelsea Portman, Bryony Young and Olivia Gordon. A stalker’s dream.

As she was browsing, a message popped up on Chelsea’s page from Bryony, ‘Hey gorgeous, so you’re back in the land of the living LOL. Where’d you get to last night? XXX.’

A moment, and then the other friend, Olivia, added, ‘She was tooooo busy with the looovelyyyyy Zamir!’

Eden went to the settings on Chelsea’s Facebook page and opened up the security feature. The phone numbers of all her friends were there, captured every time they used a smartphone to update Facebook. She scrolled down until she found Bryony and Olivia, then called.

‘Hello, I’m Eden Grey, I’m a private investigator,’ she said when Bryony answered. ‘Chelsea didn’t come home last night and her mum has hired me to find her.’

‘Oh my God,’ Bryony said. ‘Chelsea? She was with us last night. I thought she’d … She’s not come home?’

‘No, and I’d like to talk to her friends to see if they’ve got any idea where she might be. Will you help?’

‘I don’t want to get her into trouble.’ Bryony played the dutiful loyalty card.

Eden sighed. ‘Believe me, she won’t be in trouble if she gets home safely.’ She allowed a small emphasis on ‘if’. ‘But she might be in danger, and that’s why I need to find her.’

They arranged to meet in a coffeeshop in town. Eden rang Olivia as soon as she hung up on Bryony, suspecting that Bryony’s first action would be to call her, and anxious to get in first.

She paid Nat for the work on the laptop and took away a sheaf of printouts. Arriving early at the coffeeshop, she analysed Chelsea’s keystrokes over the past two days. There was a lot of Facebook messaging, all of it a bit shouty; a couple of flirty emails to someone called ‘PacManDude’; and a bit of homework on the Tudors, neither accurate nor well-written.

In the pictures folder of the laptop were hundreds of photos of Chelsea: at parties, with her friends, and with a couple of men in their twenties. The dates on those photos went back three months. Was one of the men ‘PacManDude’?

Bryony and Olivia arrived together, their arms linked, and Eden bought them both iced coffees with swirls of squirty cream on top. The girls stared at her, wide-eyed, when she showed them her ID. Eden weighed straight in, keen to capitalise on the glamour she’d acquired through being a private investigator. In her experience, it quickly wore off.

‘You were all out together last night?’ Eden asked. ‘Where did you go?’

‘Vodka bar in Gloucester,’ Bryony said. Quickly she added, ‘We’re all over eighteen.’

Eden smiled. ‘I’m not trying to trip you up and I’m not going to go telling tales to your parents, I only want to find Chelsea and make sure she’s safe.’

Olivia dandled her straw on her bottom lip. ‘We left about eleven. School night.’ She pulled a face to indicate the injustice of this. ‘Chelsea left before us, about quarter to. She and Zamir had a row and she ran off. He went after her.’

‘Zamir?’

‘Chelsea’s boyfriend.’

‘What were they rowing about?’

‘She thought he was looking at other girls,’ Bryony chipped in.

‘He’d never do that!’ Olivia cried. ‘He really likes her.’

Bryony twisted her lip, not convinced. ‘He was, though. And he’s tried it on with me before now.’

‘No way!’

‘Yes way. The other week, when we were shopping and he was buying her that top and told me to try one on, too. I came out of the changing rooms and he made all these comments about my boobs.’

Alarm bells rang. Loudly. Eden interrupted with, ‘When did Chelsea meet Zamir?’

Bryony shrugged. ‘A few months ago.’

‘Is he at your school?’

‘No, he’s really old!’ Olivia laughed. ‘About twenty-five. Lots older than us.’

‘Older men are more mature,’ Bryony primly informed her.

Sure they are, Eden thought, sighing inwardly at Aidan’s mood swings and grumpy silences. Way more mature. ‘How did they meet?’

‘We were in McDonald’s and he just came over and started chatting to us. He’s really nice,’ Olivia said. ‘He friended her on Facebook, and emailed her that she looked nice, and was really sweet.’

‘When did he become her boyfriend?’

‘Not for ages. He bought her nice presents and that. Tops, and a bikini, and a handbag, and a necklace. Then they got together.’

God, it got worse and worse. ‘Did she meet his friends?’

‘He has one he hangs round with a lot. They both take us all out and buy us pizza and we have bottles of wine,’ Olivia said. ‘It’s really grown up.’

‘What are their names?’

‘Zamir is Zamir Sussman,’ Bryony said. ‘His friend is Vinnie Malik.’

‘They took you clothes shopping?’ Eden said. ‘Anything else?’

‘We all had makeovers one Saturday,’ Bryony stabbed her straw into the ice at the bottom of her glass. ‘Chelsea’s dad wasn’t happy about it. Said she looked cheap. And she was drunk when she got home.’

‘Zamir said she looked beautiful,’ Olivia said, wistfully.

‘Is this Zamir here?’ Eden asked, showing them the pictures on Chelsea’s laptop.

‘Yes, that’s him. And that’s Vinnie.’ Bryony pointed to a man just behind Zamir.

Time for the questions she couldn’t ask Chelsea’s mother. ‘Has Chelsea had many other boyfriends?’

‘A couple, at school.’

‘Did she have sex with them?’

Bryony and Olivia exchanged glances.

‘I’m not going to tell,’ Eden said gently.

‘No, she didn’t have sex,’ Bryony said, ‘but she wasn’t a prude either. She did some stuff with boys, but not all the way. She was romantic about it, said she was saving herself for the right boy.’

Olivia slid her straw in and out of her mouth, catching Bryony’s eye. Both girls blushed scarlet and giggled behind their hands.

So Chelsea was just dirty enough. Eden felt a stone in her stomach. Instinct and experience screamed that Chelsea had been singled out and groomed, reeled in over a period of weeks. And now she’d disappeared. Suddenly this stop-out teenager looked horribly like human traffic.

The costume was prickly. Rachel yearned to wriggle about and scratch a spot between her shoulder blades where the fabric was rubbing her skin raw. And now her nose was itching. She’d tried twitching it, but that didn’t work. If only she could move, instead of being stuck in this awkward pose. She hadn’t moved a muscle for hours. It felt like hours, anyway. She sighed deeply, a gentle whinny of despair.

She was back in Greville House with the other girls. No human table this time, though, but a series of tableaux: Samson and Delilah, David and Bathsheba, Cleopatra and Mark Antony. They were all in costume: the gentlemen guests at Greville House playing the male characters, and Mrs Bedwin’s girls filling the female roles. They had to maintain the poses, while the others in the room guessed what they were depicting. Rachel was Delilah, brandishing a pair of shears. Any more of this and her arm would drop off and she’d cut the gentleman’s head off.