The Pure in Heart (10 page)

‘Did you tell him?’

‘The results? Oh sure.’

‘And?’

‘I don’t know if he took it in. He said –”Good”.’

‘But why is he going, for God’s sake?’

‘A lot of reasons, a lot of things I didn’t take in. The chief why lives in New York and her name is Lainey. She’s fifty-four.’

‘I don’t believe this.’

‘No.’

‘What a bloody thing to come home to.’

‘Yes.’

Karin moved
her wine glass slowly round and round between her hands and now and then it caught the firelight and the wine glowed.

She felt warm. Warm. Comforted. Cared for. Numb.

‘There is one thing you need to think about … you’ve had two major shocks … the murders and now this. These things can take their toll.’

‘Bring the cancer back, you mean.’

‘Just be aware. Step up all your therapies and be vigilant.
Sorry to preach the medical line, it isn’t the moment but it is important.’

‘I’m not sure I care now.’

‘Oh yes you do. You care all right. You don’t let the buggers get you down. He’ll be back.’

‘Or it will.’

‘No.’

‘The worst thing he said was about that, actually. He said he couldn’t face living with a cancer victim
any longer … that he could accept an illness that took you over and then
you got better but one that changed you for good was different. He said I’d thought about nothing but cancer for the last year, paid no attention to anything else … that I’d … I’d let it define me and now I needed it and he couldn’t take that.’

‘Jesus.’

‘I hadn’t seen it, Cat. It’s my –’

‘Don’t you dare to say this is your fault.’

‘Well, isn’t it?’

‘And the woman in New York? I suppose that’s
your fault too?’

‘She makes him feel alive. New York makes him feel alive. Apparently. I just had no idea there was anything wrong between us. I mean … there wasn’t anything wrong. It never crossed my mind.’

‘None of the usual? Phone calls … spending more money … being away a lot?’

‘Mike’s always been away a lot, he runs three international businesses, doesn’t he? He spends half his time on
the phone to them when he isn’t travelling.’

A light flashed briefly across the drawn curtains as Chris Deerbon’s car came into the drive. ‘What am I going to do, Cat? What do people do?’

‘They fight,’ Cat said. ‘Your life was worth fighting for, wasn’t it?’

‘I’ve always hated those images … cancer and war, cancer and battles, fighting and struggling.’

‘Well, there’s the alternative.’

‘What?’

‘Giving in. Surrendering … put it how you like.’

‘Oh God.’

Cat got up heavily from the chair. ‘You’re in the blue room. I’ve put things out for you … go and have a deep bath, light a scented candle. Supper isn’t for half an hour. I need to talk boring admin to Chris about the locum.’

She put out her arms and hugged her, and for a moment Karin felt the weight of the unborn baby against her.
The old longing for children, usually at the back of her mind now, stung sharply again.

The expression on Chris’s face as Cat went into the kitchen stopped her short.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘You know Alan Angus?’

‘Neurology. Sure … what?’

‘His son’s at St Francis … Year older than Sam.’

‘Small for his age? A bit … well, an old-fashioned kind of child?’

‘He’s missing.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They
have a school lift with two other families … Marilyn Angus left David at their gate this morning, waiting for the lift as usual … it was due in a couple of minutes. It turns out that when the people arrived David wasn’t at the gate … one of the other children went and rang the bell, but there was no answer so they just left. Thought he must have gone in with his parents after all and
they’d forgotten
to ring and change the arrangements. But David didn’t go to school. They marked him absent and of course thought no more of it until four o’clock when his mother arrived to pick him up and he didn’t come out. No one has seen or heard anything of him since ten past eight this morning.’

‘Oh dear God.’

Cat’s legs gave way and she sat quickly down on the sofa. Her eyes had filled with tears. ‘How
did you hear?’

‘Local radio just now.’ He sat down. ‘It’s not Sam,’ he said quietly. ‘It is terrible and all too imaginable but it is not Sam. By the way, I thought I saw Karin’s car outside.’

‘You did. She’s in the bath. Mike’s left her.’

Chris groaned.

‘He can’t stand living with a cancer victim so he’s found consolation with someone called Lainey in New York. I suspect there’s more but
she hasn’t said yet. Oh and her scans are clear – she had her three-monthly check today.’

They sat in silence, Chris resting his hand on Cat’s stomach. Upstairs the bath water began to drain out. Cat’s baby shifted its limbs, pinching a nerve in her side as it did so but she did not move. She was suddenly felled by the tumble of events one on top of the other, drained after too many uncomfortably
sleepless nights. She was tired, leaning against Chris in the warm kitchen, the ginger cat purring on her other side. Then she opened her eyes.

‘Chris? Go up and check on Sam … and Hannah.’

Chris Deerbon got up and left the kitchen without a word.

‘Remind you of anything?’ Nathan Coates stood at the window of the DCI’s room, looking down at the departing press – television vans and radio cars racing off to catch the next news bulletin.

Serrailler had wanted the press on side from the start and had done the briefing and taken the usual questions. Now, he was looking at the map of Lafferton and district pinned to the wall on the
far side of his office and did not reply.

‘Missing persons. That’s how the other started. I hate it. Rather get me teeth stuck into the Dulcie estate lot.’

Serrailler turned round. ‘You’re not here to do what you fancy, you’re here to do the job.’

‘Guv.’

‘The Dulcie kids aren’t going anywhere. We are.’ He picked up his jacket.

Nathan followed, almost at a run to keep up going along the corridor,
and two at a time down the stairs.

‘Where first, guv?’

‘Sorrel Drive. Talk to the parents. Forensics will have started on the house and you know what message that gives out.’

‘Yeah, you report your nine-year-old kid missing, next minute your rooms are full of men in white suits scraping bits off the carpet.’

‘Still, we know the father was doing his ward round at the hospital from before
eight. Mother was the last to see the child when she left him at the gate and was at her office by eight thirty. They’ve nothing to worry about.’

They got into the car.

‘This isn’t like that missing persons case … OK, those women vanished apparently into thin air, and now a schoolboy does the same, but you can rule out a hell of a lot of possibilities here from the start.’

‘Grown women might
go off of their own accord. Nine-year-old boys don’t.’

‘Well, it has happened, especially where there’s been bullying.’

‘My gran blames the internal combustion engine.’

‘Your gran has a point. Fast cars, fast roads, easy access to and away … People living in Leeds and doing a series of house raids in Devon, paedophiles driving commercial vans snatching a child in Kent and driving it to Dumfries
… where do you start?’

‘Are we talking to other forces?’

‘We are … with missing children it’s one of the first priorities.’

‘Thought you might have wanted to bring Sally.’

Sally Cairns was one of the most experienced DCs at Lafferton, married to a traffic sergeant with the motorway force, mother of four teenagers and very happy to remain at constable rank. She was the best they had when it
came to dealing with families and children.

‘Sally is terrific and very sensitive … but she is also a mother. This case is going to be difficult and distressing. Sally can handle that, of course, but I think we need to be as detached as we can be and neither you nor I have children – OK, I have a nephew and you have younger brothers, and God forbid either of us is hard or unsympathetic, but not
being parents does give us a certain distance. We’re going to need it.’

If Nathan had thought before asking his next question, he might have stayed silent, but caution was not one of his strong points.

‘Do you think you’ll ever have kids?’

Telling Emma about it later, he said that for a split second he heard the swish of the blade.

But Serrailler only said, ‘How should I know?’ as they turned
into the avenue and headed for the Anguses’ house, cordoned off with bright, fluttering police tape. The men in white suits were everywhere.

What does it feel like, Nathan thought, going into the wide hallway of the house, with its staircase curving up ahead of them and the sort of landscape pictures he judged wishy-washy on the pale green
walls. What can it be like to go out one morning and
everything’s hunky-dory, and at the end of the day, wham, your kid’s gone, just … gone? Jesus.

He had only to look at the face of Marilyn Angus to see what it was like. All the pain in the world was there. She looked desperate, not so much pale as a terrible waxen colour, with brown smudges and swelling under her eyes, and a look in them Nathan was never to forget.

The uniform PC who had been
sitting with her left at Serrailler’s signal and the DCI went across at once. He did not offer to shake hands but put his hand for a moment on her shoulder before he sat down.

‘Saying that I’m sorry is useless but I hope you know what we feel for you, and in the meantime saying that I will move heaven and earth to get your son back as quickly as possible is not useless. I mean it.’

Nathan looked
at his DCI. This was what singled him out, an iron-hard determination, that honesty, the way he knew what to say when, the way he spoke the truth. That was why he himself would follow Serrailler anywhere and hoped he could be half the policeman he was.

‘I’m sure I should get you something …’

Serrailler stopped her with a movement of his hand. ‘Mrs Angus, you know how all this works, I don’t
need to explain. You know there are a lot of questions I have to ask which you have already been asked, and that it’s going to be painful and that you’re confused. But anything you tell us may be
useful. I’ve had a briefing from the uniformed officers who first spoke to you but I need to hear some things for myself. Don’t worry if you remember things you forgot or if you contradict something you
said earlier, people do when they’re under stress.’

‘Thank you … this morning is like a film reel running across my mind, over and over again. What he said, what I said, what he looked like … whatever went on last night. His face. I just see David’s face.’

‘Yes. And I mean to be sure you’ll see it again, just as before, and that no harm will have come to him.’

‘It must have. How could harm
not have come to him by now?’

Marilyn Angus got up and stood at the mantelpiece, fiddling with a tiny gold clock, turning it round and round.

‘I want to ask you about David at school.’

‘He loves St Francis.’

‘Good. Does he have any particular friends there?’

‘The boys we share the run with … they seem to be a little gang … I don’t mean that as in “bad gang”, just … they’re always together.
Caspar di Ronco … Jonathan Forbes … Arthur Maclean … Ned Clark-Hall …’

‘Do they fall out?’

‘They’re always falling out … boys do … there’s a bit of pushing and shoving and it’s all settled. They don’t bear grudges, they can’t be bothered.’

‘Any he doesn’t get on with?’

‘If you mean is there any bullying, I’ve thought about that but the answer’s no. The school comes down hard at the first sign
of it … they had a real problem a few years ago and they don’t mean to let it happen again. I’m sure there’s just nothing at all of that kind. David’s a popular little boy, he’s very cheerful. Is. Was …’

‘Is,’ Serrailler said firmly, looking straight at her.

‘Oh God, I hope you’re right.’

‘Is he bright?’

‘Yes, he is. That isn’t a proud mother talking. I don’t think my geese have to be swans.
Our daughter Lucy isn’t too hot academically. But David isn’t bright in the obvious way … he thinks a lot, he’s creative, makes things, works things out for himself, goes into subjects … the latest is Pompeii. He reads everything he can get his hands on about it … he likes to spend time by himself. And then of course there’s football.’

‘Does he support any team in particular?’ Nathan spoke for
the first time. She looked at him as if she had forgotten that he was there.

‘Manchester United. They all pretend to be fans of one big team or other … Chelsea, Spurs.’

‘Pretend?’

‘They’re just little boys … it’s a bit of a pose, isn’t it? What do they know?’

The interview went on, Serrailler leading the mother quietly through her son’s behaviour at home, probing tactfully but with needle-sharp
exactness
into family relationships, alert to hints of any possible tensions or unhappiness. She answered without hesitation, moving about the room, touching furniture, picking things up and replacing them, running her hand occasionally through her short curly hair. They were with her for almost an hour before the DCI stood up.

‘You’ll have someone with you, the family liaison officer, as I’m
sure you’ve been told and you’ll be kept in touch all the time.’

‘My husband had to go to the hospital … A patient he’d operated on developed some complications … no one else could deal with it.’

‘Fine.’

‘You mustn’t think … read anything into that …’

‘I wasn’t going to.’

As they left, Chris Deerbon arrived.

‘I’m their GP. I wanted to check them out.’

‘She’s OK … looks shattered but she
seems to be holding it together. He’s had to go to the hospital.’

Chris shrugged. ‘He’ll be needed … he’s the best neurosurgeon in the county. Any thoughts, Si?’

‘No, too early. Is Cat OK?’

‘It’s upset her … she breaks up pretty easily just now. Call her.’