The Missing Hours (9 page)

‘You coming?’ He sounds hopeful. Fearful.

How the hell did we get here?

‘I … yes. Yes. Okay.’

The reappearance of Selena Cole

DC Leah Mackay: Wednesday, 5.55 a.m.

WHEN THE PHONE
starts to ring, it shakes me awake, making my heart thunder in my chest. I turn, wildly at first, trying to remember where I am, look to the clock. My hand reaches out, groping for the phone that vibrates hard against the bedside cabinet.

Alex groans, covers his ears with his arms.

‘Sorry,’ I say, picking up the phone. ‘Hello?’ My voice sounds slurred to me, like I have been drinking.

There is an intake of breath on the other end. ‘Detective Mackay?’

‘Yes?’ I’m trying to place the voice, female, a hard edge.

‘It’s Orla Britten. Selena’s sister-in-law?’

‘Oh, hi.’ A vague recollection of handing Orla my card, telling her to call at any time. ‘Is everything okay?’

‘Yes. We … we found her. We found Selena.’

When I hang up the phone, I sit, for an unsteadying moment sure that I have dreamt it.

‘Who the hell was that?’ Alex’s voice is heavy, thick with sleep.

I push back the covers.

‘Lee, where are you going?’

‘My missing person. They found her.’

‘Okay. So?’

I pull on my suit trousers, hastily buttoning my blouse. I don’t look at him. Because he has a point. Missing person found. That’s it. Job done. The case is over. What happens next is nothing to do with me. Yet still I carry on getting dressed.

‘Jesus, Lee.’ He has turned away from me and I can see the bulk of his arms over his head.

‘Are you okay to get the girls to crèche?’ I hover by the bed, hesitant now that it is time to leave.

Alex grunts, not looking at me.

I hurry along the long hospital corridor, my heels clacking loudly. It is quiet in A&E. Just one other cubicle is in use, the curtains tugged tight around it, the soft sounds of snoring oozing their way from inside. I have been here, time and time again, with prisoners in handcuffs, the complainant left with a bleeding head wound because ‘she’s a slag, i’n she?’. I have never seen it this quiet before. It feels right somehow that it should be like this for the reappearance of Selena Cole, that the world is holding its breath, waiting to fill in the blanks.

She is stretched out, a pale figure, skin almost translucent against the dark of her hair. People move around her, a man in a white coat, his hands dancing quickly across the surface of her. Orla stands to one side, her eyes red and lined.

I feel my step slow, almost like I am afraid to go any further, see what I will see next. But my low heel catches, thrown off by the change in my pace, and scrapes across the linoleum floor, the sound shockingly loud in the silence. They turn to look at me, the doctor, Orla.

And Selena Cole.

I stare at her. I know that I am doing it and yet still I cannot stop. She is alive. She is before me, but the image of her is fluttering – one minute her inert body is swinging from a home-made noose, the next she’s alert, watching me. It seems that my brain cannot catch up, its expectations confounding the truth before it.

Selena is watching me with navy sinkhole eyes. She looks like I imagined and yet at the same time she does not. There is the dark hair, a shimmer of red, that falls to just above her shoulders. But it isn’t sleek like it should be; instead, roughened wild strands snake their way across her face as she lies on the hospital bed. There are the same wide features that I saw in the photographs, uneven and looking like they shouldn’t work, and yet somehow, when taken as a whole, coming together to make her look striking. But her lips are dry, chapped, her skin pale, like she has spent too long in the cold. Her cream sweater is blotched with mud, giving it a dappled effect. She has been crying.

The doctor spares me a quick look. We have met before. Medical staff, police, different sides of the same coin. We gravitate to the lame, the weary, the crazy. I can see him frowning, trying to place me, and I say quietly, ‘Stabbing in Hereford. Twenty-six-year-old male.’

The frown deepens then vanishes and he gives a quick, brisk nod. ‘That’s right. Good to see you.’

‘Everything okay?’

He knows what I’m asking. Like I said, different sides of the same coin.

‘No serious injuries. Some bruising, bumps and scrapes. No sign of concussion. Which is, well …’ He lets the words trail away.

I’m about to ask. I’m about to say, well, isn’t that a good thing? But I don’t get the chance, because then the doors fly open and a gurney hurries past us in a blur of metal and groaning and blood.

‘Be right back.’ He turns, his coat billowing behind him like a cape, and I spare a moment to consider the lie. It’s what we all say – just a second. Even though we know that what lies in front of us is bigger than a second could possibly encompass.

Now there are only three of us left. Me, the sister-in-law, and the woman who vanished.

I smile. ‘Hi, Selena. I’m DC Leah Mackay.’ She nods. Her navy-blue eyes dart back and forth across my face, reading me. I can see now that there is mud in her hair, across her face, that her fingernails are stitched with it. She seems stunned, unsteady, is gripping the metal bars of the hospital bed like she is on the deck of a storm-tossed ship.

‘Hi.’ Her voice is throaty, the words fully rounded, singing of a decent school, a good family. ‘You’re the detective?’

I nod. Yes. I’m the detective. It is so clear then, so uncomplicated. I’m the detective, responsible, capable, whole.

‘We’ve been worried about you,’ I say.

Selena Cole nods. Her eyes are swimming with tears, a dam that is one moderate rainfall from bursting.

‘Are you okay?’ I ask.

Selena looks at me. Takes a deep breath. And then it’s like she changes in front of me, her expression tightening, eyes becoming calm, as if she has simply shrugged off her victimhood. ‘Yes. My girls …’

Orla moves by me, takes her sister-in-law’s hand. ‘They’re safe. They’re asleep. Seth is with them.’ She glances up at me. ‘My husband. He arrived back from New York yesterday.’

‘Selena,’ I say softly, ‘can you tell us what happened?’

She stares at me, her lips moving like she is struggling to form the words. ‘I … I don’t know.’

‘You … what do you mean?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t remember what happened.’

I had prepared myself for many answers. Yet I had not anticipated this one. I nod slowly, even though I have no idea what I am agreeing to. Now I’m thinking head injury. But the doctor, he said no concussion. I look around, trying to find him, even though I know that he vanished through the swinging trauma-room doors, that even now he will be up to his knees in blood.

‘Okay.’ I’m playing for time, trying to get my brain to catch up with events. ‘What is the last thing you remember?’

Selena shifts her gaze, staring up at the ceiling tiles above her, the long, narrow gaudiness of the strip light. ‘Heather. Heather wanted to go and play. She was … she had so much energy. You know how they wake like that sometimes? Like a fizzy drink and someone has shaken the can? I thought, well I’ll take them. I mean, it was early, but we’d been up early because Tara couldn’t sleep and she’d woken the house up. So I thought, what does it matter what time it is? I’ll take them. Before the rain comes.’ Her fingers pull on the bed sheet, plucking it from the mattress, releasing it, plucking it again. ‘I remember putting their coats on. Heather, she wanted to wear her good shoes. They were supposed to be for school, but I … she was so determined. I remember closing the door behind us.’

‘And then …’

She turns towards me, looks at me dead on, a single tear sliding down her cheek, splashing silently on to the linoleum floor. ‘Then there’s nothing.’

Orla gives a low cough. ‘A taxi driver found her sitting on the bank of the River Wye at about 3 a.m. She had no coat, no handbag. He said she seemed confused. He brought her to the hospital.’

‘I remember being beside the river.’ Selena looks at her hands, at the mud that stains her fingernails. ‘It was so cold. I don’t know how I got there. I just … I didn’t know where my girls were or what had happened. Then the taxi driver passed me and he stopped and …’ She closes her eyes, covers them with her hands and lets out a sob. ‘The girls. I left them alone.’

I hang there for a minute, floating between two worlds. Then Orla sweeps forward, clutching at Selena’s hand, shushing her like you would a small child.

‘It’s okay, Mogs. It’s okay. They’re fine. Vida found them right away. She took care of them. They’re fine.’

I think of the Cole girls, sitting together on the sofa, wondering how their world had shifted this time. ‘Fine’ is perhaps overstating it.

But I don’t say that. What I say is ‘Mogs?’

Orla looks up at me, her face flushed like she has been caught out. ‘It’s what my brother used to call Selena.’

Selena wipes her eyes and smiles a small smile. ‘It was after Mog the cat. I told him on one of our first dates that they were my favourite books when I was a kid. It kind of stuck.’ She shakes her head slowly. ‘I’m sorry. I wish I could tell you what happened. But I can’t.’

I don’t know what it is, maybe a shift in the light, maybe a small movement that Selena makes. But I am staring at her sweater, at what I took to be mud.

Selena sees me looking, sits up a little straighter. ‘What?’

‘Dr Cole,’ I say. ‘Is that blood?’

A good man

DS Finn Hale: Wednesday, 9.15 a.m.

I HANG ON
the pavement, Cardiff traffic roaring. The door to the offices of Hartley & Newell stands ajar. I am, I admit, steeling myself, bracing for what comes next.

People flow past me, some stopping to give me a look, the rock in their particular stream. That would have to be my Native American name.

But then perhaps they are looking at me like that because they aren’t blind, because they can see that I look like a bag of boiled dog shit. As it were.

It was gone two when I got in last night. Even Strider was too tired to care, a brief glance, a quick wag of the tail, nothing more. I tumbled into bed, still fully clothed, lay there wishing I’d thought to put the heating on the timer, wishing that this old building had something even vaguely resembling insulation, and then, when I got really pathetic, wishing that I had someone who could have turned the heating on for me. I fell asleep at that point, insomnia a useless force against the need to escape introspection.

The pavement shimmies beneath my feet. An overweight woman wearing a backpack scowls at me and I grin back. She speeds up. Seems reasonable.

I look up at Hartley & Newell, then sigh heavily, theatrically, push my way through the flowing bodies. Where the hell are they all going? That’s what I want to know. Is there a party to which I’ve not been invited? I slowly climb the three broad steps.

It is the scene of a tragedy. You would know that even if you didn’t know. There is an air here, a heavy mist of grief. From a back office, someone talks in soft tones. One voice, no corresponding reply, so a phone call I’m guessing.

I walk to the reception desk, offer the girl behind it my warrant card. ‘Detective Sergeant Hale.’

The girl looks up at me. My God, she’s thin – the kind of thin where the head is bigger than the body, like you are balancing a ball on a stick. I wonder when she ate last. Where her parents are. And realise that, yes, I am officially getting old.

‘What?’ She looks confused, like I have spoken a foreign language.

She isn’t wearing make-up; she is agonisingly pale, pretty in a suffering kind of way. She looks like she is twelve years old. Okay. Maybe not twelve. Twenty-two? Twenty-three at a push.

‘I’m CID. I’m here about …’

‘Dominic,’ she says quietly.

‘Yes,’ I agree.

She doesn’t say anything for a moment, just looks down at her bitten nails. Then, a breath of air. ‘He was such a good man.’

There is the click of a phone settling into a receiver, slow clacking footsteps. Bronwyn Hartley leans against her office door and offers me a thin smile. ‘DC Hale.’

‘It’s DS now.’ The words slip out and I curse myself. Like she cares.

Bronwyn nods, but I’m not sure she has actually heard. Her mascara has run, formed thick lines around her eyes. I know Bronwyn, in that ambiguous way that I know many people – the same way I knew Dominic. That is to say, not at all, not really. I know her to say hello to. I have sat across a table from her as she works to defend the indefensible.

‘You all right, Fae?’ Bronwyn looks at the thread of a girl at reception.

Fae is crying now, quietly, using her sleeve as a handkerchief. She makes a little noise. Whether it is a yes or a no, I have no clue.

Bronwyn takes it as a yes, looks back to me. ‘You want to come on through?’

Bronwyn Hartley is attractive in an overly developed kind of way, with her thickly powdered cheeks, her densely crimson lips. I notice that the make-up looks clumsy and uneven. She must be … what? Fifty, maybe? But today she looks older, is walking like each step pains her. She pauses in the doorway, ushering me through, a nursery-school teacher shepherding her charge.

‘Fae,’ she says, over my shoulder. ‘Go grab yourself a coffee, okay?’

She closes the door without waiting for a reply, sealing out the mourning. ‘You should sit.’ She does the same, sinking into a high-backed leather chair. The desk divides us, and she rests her hands on it, painted nails luminous against the polished wood. They’re yellow. I find myself staring at them, wondering obliquely when this became a thing.

‘So,’ she says. ‘Sergeant. Congratulations.’

I smile. Cannot think of any suitable words in response. I can still hear Fae, even through the closed door, quiet tears that have become sobs. It’s a pungent reminder that, in truth, no one here gives a stuff about me.

‘How are you doing?’ I ask.

Bronwyn looks at me, surprised, and I wonder if I am that transparent. Or is it simply that in our superficial dealings, she has gained a better grasp of me than I have of her? That she has figured out that I don’t really do sympathy, that empathy is a skill of which I am in short supply. I open my mouth. Want to tell her that I am trying something, that I am attempting to be more than I have been. Then I shut it again, remembering that it doesn’t matter, not here, not today. Because all that matters is this death.