The Missing Hours (3 page)

There are no houses here.

If you follow the arc of the road, tracing it down the hillside that is about to be swallowed in cloud, the eye struggles to pick out anything, just layer upon layer of green. No towns. No villages.

Nothing.

What the hell were you doing up here?

I glance back to the body, the mysterious dead, my gaze snagging on Willa as she moves about it, white forensic suit stark against the grey of the day.

‘Nearly done?’ I yell. My words slip away, fighting with the rain.

She stops, looks up at me, and I hear her voice, distant, reedy, straining against the wind. ‘Patience is a virtue, Sergeant. You should try it some time.’

Sergeant.

Eighty-two days. I have been a detective sergeant for eighty-two days.

I’m working very hard to pretend I know what I’m doing.

I nod, although I’m pretty sure she can’t see it. ‘Okay. Carry on.’

I hear the flutter of a laugh, so out of place in the wind and the rain and the smell of death.

What were you doing up here? How did you, whoever you are, manage to get yourself killed on a mountain in the middle of God’s green nowhere?

‘Hey, Willa?’

‘Sweet God! What?’ She is looking up at me, her hands on her hips.

She’s fine. That’s her ‘I’m listening’ pose.

‘You seen any cars pass by since you arrived?’

I can just about make out a heavy sigh. Or it could be the wind.

‘No, Finley. I haven’t noticed. I’ve been too busy chatting to you.’

I grin, wave. ‘Right. Sorry. Carry on.’

Eighty-two days. I shiver, rain seeping beneath my collar. It’s my first murder as a detective sergeant. That’s no surprise. We don’t get that many murders here, buried on the border of England and Wales, surrounded by mountains and countryside and sheep. It’s hardly Mogadishu. But the call came into the office: a dead body on the mountain road, a little way outside Hereford.

We all sat up a little straighter – you do when you’re CID in a small force and someone says the word ‘murder’. I looked for Leah, my eyebrows raised in silent communication, but she had already gone, on her way to the missing person case.

And the pieces slid into place for me. The missing person, found.

I blink the raindrops away. Think that I need to call my sister, give her a heads-up that her missing person may not be missing any more. She laughed when I handed it to her. A nice easy one, she said. Grown woman pops to shops without telling anyone, will saunter back in an hour or two wondering what the hell CID is doing in her living room.

I look at the body. I don’t think anyone is going to be sauntering anywhere any time soon.

‘Sarge?’ The uniformed officer hurries closer, ducking under his hat, like that will make a damned bit of difference to the rain, and I glance over my shoulder, looking for the sergeant. The person in charge. Then I realise. It’s me.

The patrol car is parked at an uneven angle, blocking the road, its blue light swirling. The back door is slightly ajar. I can see the foot, wet from the rain, twitching, a tan work boot tapping against the door.

‘Sarge?’ says the uniformed officer. ‘The witness, he wants to know if he can go.’

I look from him to the car and the tapping foot. You and me both, mate.

‘I’ll come and talk to him.’

The witness is chewing his nails, has brought them down to the quick. He is broad and rugged, I’d guess maybe fifty, fifty-five. He looks up at me, down, his eyes darting back through the windscreen to where the body lies.

‘Darren Crane?’

He nods, and I can see the muscles in his jaw, pulled so tight that you’d swear it was lockjaw.

‘I was only going to work,’ he says, not waiting for me to ask. He isn’t looking at me, is staring through the windscreen, his eyes clamped on Willa, on the body. ‘I drive this way every day. You never see anything on this road. Quiet road it is. And I’m driving along slow, like because of the weather, and I see this, well, pile of clothes, so I thought.’ His words come too fast, each chasing the tail of the one that came before it, his breath quick, unsteady.

Is he about to have a heart attack?

‘I don’t know why I pulled over. Not really. There was just, there was something about it. Something not right, you know?’

He looks up at me, eyes seeking reassurance. I shuffle through responses in my head. I’m not really the reassuring type. But he’s looking at me and he’s waiting, and so I arrange my face into what I hope resembles a smile, and wonder if he believes me.

‘So, I pulled in.’ He gestures, to the grass verge, the body, his words coming easier now. ‘I thought it was clothes, see. I thought … we have problems with fly-tippers sometimes. They come up here, dump stuff, and I thought that was what it was. Then, it was weird, it was like the whole thing shifted, and then I could see … well, it was a body, like.’

He stops, coughs, and I suddenly realise it is to cover a sob.

Jesus.

I wish my sister was here. She’s the people person. I’m more the doer.

‘You, ah, you okay?’ I ask.

He coughs again, wiping his face with a hand. ‘Aye, well, shock, see. You don’t expect it, do you? To find a body, I mean.’

I should call Leah, warn her. That her missing woman isn’t going to be coming home. There were kids, too. Two of them. Two girls. Just like Leah’s twins.

Dammit.

‘Poor bastard, though. I mean,’ Darren Crane looks at me, expression searching, ‘what do you think he did? You know, to end up here?’

‘Well, I …’ Then I hear what it is that he has said.

He.

My thoughts sputter, and now I feel like I’ve been walking down a staircase and the bottom step wasn’t where I was expecting it to be. I take a long breath, sucking in the smell of death.

‘Finn?’ calls Willa. ‘Detective Sergeant! Any chance?’

‘Stay here, please,’ I mutter.

I head back to the car, pull on the white Tyvek suit, the cold wind wrapping its way along the mountain road, tugging at it. Place a mask over my face.

Willa studies the scene at her feet, her head circling as she scans it for any details she may have missed, her lips moving in private calculation. I step closer, feeling the tension race up my back, across my shoulders. Knowing that at any moment she is going to turn and walk back towards me and tell me what she has found, and then, just like that, it will become my problem. Well, not my problem. The problem of about forty of Hereford’s finest. But it will feel like my problem.

I guess that’s the trouble with having been a sergeant for eighty-two days. Everything feels like your problem. There has been no time for the shifting ground to settle beneath my feet, no time to settle in, to establish myself in this new role amongst the people who were my friends eighty-three days ago. They look at me differently now, like dug-up World War II ordnance. It may be harmless, inert, just a lump of old metal. On the other hand, it may blow up and take your leg off. Who knows?

Willa waits, looking at home here, in amongst the death and the odours. An attractive girl, dark and, appropriately, willowy. You wouldn’t look at her and think that she spends her days surrounded by dead people and bodily fluids.

I cough, awkward suddenly. ‘You all done?’

‘For now.’ Her voice is muffled by the forensic mask. ‘You want to see?’ She doesn’t wait for me to answer, just moves aside, pointing towards the inert form.

The body is lying on its side, and for a moment, you could fool yourself that he was asleep, curled in on himself as he is. I see dark hair, cut neatly, a steel-grey suit, skin so white that it seems to glow. Oozing darkness, blood that has seeped from a wound in the neck, settling around his collar.

‘Can you believe it?’ asks Willa.

‘No. Well, yes.’ I feel like I have walked in halfway through a conversation. ‘What?’

‘Well, I mean, I don’t know him well, but still …’

I move, with careful footsteps, closer to the dead body and the edge, closer to the drop down below. His eyes are closed, his face is slack. He looks different to the way he looked when I saw him last. More dead, mostly.

‘Shit,’ I say.

‘Yup.’

Auntie Orla

DC Leah Mackay: Tuesday, 10.12 a.m.

I CLOSE THE
front door softly behind me, ease it on to its catch. I cannot bear to let it slam, to have the Cole girls be startled by the sound. They have enough to be afraid of. It’s stopped raining now, but the memory of it still hangs in the damp air. I stand there on the doorstep and breathe in the chill autumn air. Look to the mountains, their peaks lost in cloud. I feel like I am waiting for her, that if I just stand here long enough, the low metal gate will swing open and Selena Cole will come walking through it. That there will be a reason, something that explains and absolves this vanishing.

Selena Cole has been missing for two hours. Two hours away from her little girls. She doesn’t know where they are. She doesn’t know that they are safe, that they aren’t just sitting in the playground, on the rain-sodden grass, waiting for her to return. She has to return. She has to come back so that she can find them, usher them into the warm.

But it’s been two hours and she hasn’t come back. Which makes me think that she cannot. Which makes me think that something is very badly wrong here.

Heather sat, her sister curled into her so close that there was no daylight between them, watched me like I had the answers, her face creased into a frown far too old for her years.

‘She was wearing jeans. She had a white jumper on.’ She handed the information to me, a precious parcel, and you could see her thinking that this stuff was critical, it was what would bring her mother back to her. ‘Her hair was down.’

I sat alongside them, tried not to notice when the younger girl shuffled away from me, still closer to her sister, even though I wouldn’t have believed that was possible. ‘How was Mummy when you saw her last? Was she happy or sad?’

The elder girl thought, her gaze resting on her little sister’s fingers, wrapped inside her own. ‘She was sad.’

‘Is Mummy sad a lot?’

A stricken look flitted across her face, and I wanted to kick myself, wanted to take it back, to make it okay, but I could do none of those things. The little girl stared past me, at the red patent shoes on her feet, and tears filled her eyes, spilling down her cheeks.

I stand on the doorstep. Simply breathing. In. Out.

Where are you, Selena?

Did you walk or were you dragged?

I went through the house, an intruder, rummaging through drawers, opening cupboards, looking for something that might hold a secret. I stood in Selena’s bedroom, longer than I needed to, gazing out of the low windows, the framed view of the hills beyond. This would be her sanctuary, a space of her own. The bed had been made, the cover pulled straight and tight, pillows stacked at its head. Did she do that this morning, in amongst the noise and life of two young children? Or was the bed not slept in at all?

Two bedside cabinets, painted in a distressed white. On one, the detritus of life: a book, a glass of water that had begun to accumulate dust, hand cream, the top not quite screwed on. On the other, a shrine to death: a family picture, the four of them preserved in a gilt frame, a hardback book, its angle so perfectly square that it must have been lined up that way. The husband’s side, I presumed.

I stood, watching the dust motes dance in the light, taking a moment to breathe. Then I pulled open the drawer. Looking for a diary. A letter. Something. Anything.

What happened to you, Selena? Was it the grief? Or did that monster get you? The one that chases mothers, the one that screams that you will never be enough, that you are failing, that your children will lose simply because their mother is you. Did it overwhelm you finally, forcing you to stumble, fall?

I thought about last night. Sitting on the floor of my laundry room as the washer whirred, the dryer shook, my head aching with all I had to do. Wanting to cry and knowing that I couldn’t, because Tess and Georgia still needed their bath, still needed their story and for Mummy to do the voices they loved. Still needed so much. And that fleeting, traitorous thought of how easy life used to be, in the before.

I searched through the drawer. Jewellery boxes, perfume, a photo album. And a small bottle. I pulled it free, squinting at the faded writing in the low light. Cipramil.

Selena was taking antidepressants.

I tucked the pills into an evidence bag, just in case. There was a name on the bottle, the prescribing physician, Dr Gianni Minieri. I made a quick note in my notebook, wondering what Dr Minieri would have to say.

I stand on the doorstep, look at the tumbling hills, and think. Selena was grieving. Selena was depressed.

I look to the garage door.

It is closed.

I stand there, staring, my feet seemingly unwilling to move. It is Schrödinger’s cat. If I do not open the door, then Selena Cole is both in there and not in there, both alive and dead. If I do not open that door, then we can stay balanced on this knife edge, and I will not have to tell her children that their last remaining parent is gone.

But the problem with balancing is that sooner or later you always fall.

I walk slowly across the drive. The rain has soaked the crisp autumn leaves, slippery beneath my feet. The ground feels treacherous, the wisdom of my senses no longer to be trusted. I reach out for the handle, a pre-emptive catch for a fall that has not yet happened.

I grasp the handle, turn, push.

The garage door slides upwards, revealing darkness. My brain screams, rushing through the new experiences. Is that death? That smell, the one that never leaves you, is that it? Or is it my brain filling in the blanks, handing me what I expect to find? The formless shapes in the gloom, is that her, her body hanging from a makeshift rope attached to the rafters?

I blink, feel the darkness diminish.

No.

There is the car – a red Range Rover Evoque. Nice. Expensive. There are shelves, neatly stacked with tools, seed boxes.

There is no body. No Selena.