by T. M. Logan
‘No,’ Claire shook her head. ‘I have my work laptop or I use the iPad. Abbie has her laptop from school and she’s living in Beeston now anyway, with her husband.’
‘We’re going to need to take a look at that computer. I’ll get someone over. If you can also give me details of close friends and relatives, places he liked to visit, that would be very useful. And a recent photograph.’
‘Of course. Whatever you think will help.’
‘There’s something else we’re going to need.’
Claire listened in horrified silence as the detective asked for Ed’s toothbrush, for the extraction of a DNA sample. Her head had started to throb, a pulsing pain behind her eyes.
She nodded, mute, as Preston continued.
‘Any medical history we should know about?’ he said. ‘Serious conditions, allergies, recurrent illnesses, mental health issues?’
‘No,’ Claire shook her head. ‘He’s hardly ever ill.’
Preston glanced up from his notepad, eyebrows drawn together.
‘Nothing at all? Depression, for example?’
‘He’s been worried about our daughter and son-in-law. And he’s been talking about our son recently, seeing a therapist for grief counselling.’ She told the detective about the child they had lost so many years ago. ‘Do you think that could be relevant?’
‘We found a number of items of interest in Ed’s vehicle.’ He flicked to another page in his notebook. ‘A 75cl bottle of vodka, almost empty. Three empty packets of amitriptyline indicating that he could have taken as many as forty of the—’
Claire looked up, the sudden movement sending a new stab of pain through her head. Ed’s search history. Amitriptyline overdose.
‘What?’
‘Each pack has fourteen pills, there were three packs, we found a couple of loose tablets in the driver’s footwell of the car but no sign of the rest so it’s possible he took—’
‘No, I mean Ed’s not on any kind of drugs.’
Preston glanced at his notes, then back at Claire.
‘He was prescribed them last year.’
‘By whom?’
‘We checked with his GP, a Dr Entwistle? He was prescribed them a few months ago in relation to generalised anxiety and depression, a fifty milligram dose to be taken daily.’
‘Are you sure that’s right?’ Claire said haltingly. ‘I didn’t know about that.’
‘His name and address are on the prescription sticker on the packets. You had no idea your husband was taking these?’
‘No,’ Claire said, her voice so quiet it was almost a whisper. ‘But he’d done some internet searches about the drug.’
Preston flipped to another page of his notes.
‘Amitriptyline, one to be taken daily. A fairly common tricyclic anti-depressant according to Dr Entwistle, routinely prescribed for depressive and anxiety disorders, sometimes for ADHD and bipolar disorder. It’s possible that he wasn’t taking the daily dose but was salting them away instead.’
‘It was among those Google searches he did,’ Claire said. ‘The effect of combining it with alcohol, and how much you’d need if you wanted to . . .’
She couldn’t finish the sentence.
62
Claire
The fear was constant, jangling around in her veins like an electric current she couldn’t switch off.
Tuesday passed in an increasingly desperate flurry of phone calls to friends and relatives, texts and emails, messages to anyone who might have an inkling where Ed could have gone. Someone must know something, surely? Although if he had kept his anti-depressant prescription a secret from his wife and his best friend, who knew what other secrets he was keeping from the rest of the world.
Both Claire and Abbie wanted to drive up into Derbyshire, to the spot where Ed’s car had been found, but DC Preston had strenuously advised them against it while searches in the area were still ongoing. Uniformed officers had swept the banks of Ladybower Reservoir for clues and a police diving team was being brought in from Manchester to carry out an underwater search.
Abbie paced up and down the lounge, her face pale. ‘Should we get the media involved?’ she said. ‘One of my colleagues used to live with a guy who works at the Nottingham Post. We could try him?’
‘The police are doing that,’ Claire said, her stomach churning. ‘They said they would handle the publicity side of things.’
Instead Abbie put out calls on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, using a recent picture of Ed and asking all of their combined followers – more than 2,500 across the three platforms – to share and retweet and repost their appeal for any information about Ed’s whereabouts.
He’ll die of embarrassment when he sees his face plastered all over social media, Claire thought. Hot tears rising to her eyes before she was able to blink them back.
She managed to track down the therapist Ed had mentioned, who flatly refused to reveal anything about their sessions on the phone, citing patient confidentiality. Although after ten minutes of Claire’s pleading, Dr Rebecca Barnes had reluctantly agreed to meet and talk face-to-face in between her afternoon appointments, to answer a few strictly-off-the-record questions on a yes/no/no comment basis.
Claire had faced the woman down in her small office, an unremarkable little room with deep leather armchairs and abstract paintings on the wall.
‘Was my husband clinically depressed?’
Dr Barnes gave her an apologetic smile. ‘No comment, I’m afraid.’
‘Were you worried about Ed having a breakdown of some kind?’
‘Sorry, I really can’t comment on that either.’
‘Come on!’ Claire had shouted in frustration. ‘Give me something! His life could be at risk! Did he ever talk about hurting himself?’
‘No.’
‘Had he ever talked about suicide?’
‘No.’
‘Would a patient who had suicidal thoughts normally open up to his therapist?’
‘That would depend on the patient.’
She asked a dozen more questions before it became clear that Dr Barnes wasn’t going to reveal anything further. She stormed out, nearly knocking over a young couple waiting in the corridor outside.
By the time she got back home, Jason had arrived with a bag of food from Asda and had taken up residence in the kitchen, next to Abbie hunched over her laptop.
‘You need to eat something,’ he’d said, holding out a sandwich to her. ‘Keep your strength up.’
But Claire had no appetite. The world was still turning, and her husband was still missing. She went to call Preston again. His phone rang six times and then went to voicemail. She didn’t leave another message.
‘What about hospitals?’ Jason said.
‘The police have checked them.’
Tuesday night was worse than Monday. She made up Abbie’s bed and hugged her goodnight, promising to wake her daughter straight away if any news came in. Then sat in bed with her laptop until the early hours, studying all the information on the website of the UK Missing Persons Unit until she couldn’t focus any more. Eventually she turned out the light and lay on her back, staring into the darkness, shivering with cold under the duvet, thinking of things she needed to do tomorrow. More lists of people to ring, questions to ask, emails to send.
When sleep finally came, she dreamed of her husband.
Dark, anxious dreams in which they were on a pier somewhere, an old-fashioned seaside pier, sitting side by side looking out onto the ocean. Ed was trying to speak to her but there was a pane of glass between them; she could see his lips moving but she couldn’t hear what he was saying. She couldn’t make out what he was trying to tell her. She turned to look at the sea for a moment and when she turned back to him, he’d gone. And then it wasn’t a pier anymore but the wooden deck of a floundering ship, the end tipping upwards as it sank, everything sliding towards the dark water below and she was sliding too, there was nothing to hold onto and she couldn’t reach the�
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An urgent trilling shook her awake, the bedsheets drenched with sweat.
For a moment she thought the noise was her alarm and she reached out blindly to hit the snooze button for a few more minutes of peace. She felt wretched with tiredness, wrung out and aching all over.
The noise continued. Her phone. ‘Detective Constable Preston’ flashing up on the screen as she snatched it off the bedside table.
‘I’m sorry to call so early, Mrs Collier.’
His voice, with its curving Yorkshire vowels, was like a shot of pure adrenaline and within a second she was fully awake.
‘It’s fine,’ she blurted, squinting against the dawn light leaking through the curtains.
‘I need to talk to you, about your husband.’
She held her breath and said a silent prayer. Please be good news. Please be good news. ‘Have you found him? Is he safe?’
There was a pause on the line, enough time to hear the murmur of other conversations and raised voices somewhere in the background.
‘I think you’d better come in,’ Preston said finally. ‘To the station.’
63
Abbie
Abbie threw on her jeans and one of her dad’s sweatshirts. Her mum didn’t say a word as they hugged in the doorway to her old room. She closed her eyes for a second, then forced them open as images of her father flickered through her head.
‘We should go,’ Abbie said, leading her mum through the house as Tilly meowed at their feet.
By the time they had fought their way through early morning traffic and pulled into the police station, Ryan was already waiting in the car park. Standing there in his dark suit and sunglasses, tall and capable and dependable, Abbie realised with a pang how much she needed his strength.
He gave her a hug, enfolding her in his arms.
‘How are you doing?’ he said softly.
‘Not great,’ she said into his shoulder, clinging tightly to him. ‘Thanks for coming in.’
Radford Road police station was a two-storey 1980s redbrick showing its age, with high walls and narrow windows. Preston met them at the front desk, buzzed them through a heavy security door and showed them into an interview room where they sat around a small table that was bolted to the floor.
Preston sat down opposite them, brows knitted tightly together. ‘Thanks for coming in at short notice. I need to ask, have any of you heard anything? Heard from Ed?’
‘No,’ Abbie said. ‘There’s been nothing, has there Mum?’
Claire shook her head, dark bags heavy under her eyes.
Abbie took her mum’s hand, the skin cold to the touch, and gave it a squeeze.
‘I should warn you,’ Preston said, ‘you may find some of the things I’m going to tell you rather upsetting.’
‘What’s happened?’ Abbie asked, her stomach turning to water. ‘What is it?’
Preston opened a green cardboard file and took out some loose sheets of paper. ‘When the officers searched the immediate area near Ed’s vehicle,’ the detective said, ‘they found his mobile phone on the bank of the reservoir, just below the car park. Right by the water. The battery was completely flat but when it was recharged we were able to unlock the phone and find some text messages saved in the drafts folder.’
He took a sheet of paper out of the file and laid it on the table in front of them. They were printouts, with Ed’s number at the top of each message.
Abbie, having you was the best thing that ever happened to me, I hope you will remember that. I’m so sorry for everything, I’ve made such a mess and I don’t know how to put things right. I’ve done some terrible things and I’m so sorry to have let you down. With all my love, Dad xxx
Abbie felt something break inside her. Tears rising, brimming, spilling down her cheeks.
Ryan put a comforting arm around her shoulders, pulling her into him.
The next saved message looked as if it had been intended for her mum.
You were always much more than I ever deserved, I hope one day you can forgive me. I’m sorry for the decisions I’ve made and for what I’ve done. You put your faith in me and I’ve let you down in the worst way possible. Look after Abbie. She has always been the best of us. With all my love, always, Ed xxx
Claire was crying now too, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. She read the text again, and then for a third time, steadying the paper with a shaking hand.
‘No, no, no,’ she whispered through her tears. ‘Ed, what have you done?’
Abbie disengaged from Ryan’s embrace, turning to hug her mum, the two of them sitting like that for a moment, crying and sniffing and clinging to each other.
Finally, Abbie said: ‘But these texts weren’t sent?’
‘No,’ Preston said. ‘It’s possible Ed’s phone either ran out of charge, or he was still in two minds about things while he was writing them. The 4G coverage up there is also pretty patchy so he may have been unable to send because he had no signal. We still don’t know for sure at this stage. But we have to look at the very real possibility that he has come to harm, and that he may have harmed himself.’
‘Not my dad,’ Abbie said, her voice hitching and breaking on a sob. ‘Not him. He would never do that, never.’ She dissolved into fresh tears as Ryan rubbed her shoulder. He pulled her closer again, kissing the side of her head.
‘I’m not saying definitively that is what’s happened,’ Preston continued, ‘but we have to look at it as a very real possibility based on the evidence we’ve gathered so far.’
‘He wouldn’t do that,’ Abbie whispered.
Preston pointed to a line in the first text. I’ve done some terrible things. ‘What do you think he means by this?’ He asked. ‘It’s repeated in both messages, in different ways.’
Abbie shook her head.
Preston tapped the sheet of paper with his index finger. ‘Can you think of anything at all that might have been troubling his conscience?’
He let the silence unfold, waiting for someone to fill it.
‘He never forgave himself,’ Claire said eventually, as if in a daze. ‘For what happened to our son, Joshua.’
Gently, Preston said: ‘What happened to him?’
Claire stared at the table for a long moment. When she finally spoke, her voice was a blank monotone.
‘He was knocked down in the road when he was three years old. He was at nursery, they went to the park one day and he just slipped away from the staff . . .’ She stared at the wall. ‘Ed said he’d felt something wasn’t right with the nursery, he had an instinct about it from the very first day, but he ignored it. He thought he was just being paranoid.’
‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ Preston said quietly.
‘It wasn’t his fault,’ Claire sighed, ‘but he always blamed himself.’
‘Is there anything more recent than that, do you think?’ the detective said, writing in his notebook.
‘No.’
‘Did he talk about anything in the days leading up to Sunday that seemed unusual?’
Abbie sat forward, a memory surfacing. ‘He asked me about Manchester,’ she said. ‘Whether I’d ever gone with Ryan on one of those Sundays when he went to the cemetery to visit his mum’s grave.’
‘And what did you tell him?’
‘I didn’t reply, I was still quite angry with him at the time.’
‘Any idea why he might have been asking that?’
‘No, none at all.’ She hesitated. ‘Dad was . . . he questioned everything that Ryan said. I assumed it was all wrapped up in that.’
Preston turned towards her husband. ‘Did he ever talk to you about this, Ryan?’
Ryan thought for a moment, shook his head. ‘Don’t think so. We talked about a lot of things, about Abbie, my job, volunteering, what I thought of Nottingham, all that kind of stuff.’ He shrugged. ‘God I wish I could be more helpful.’
Preston nodded but didn’t make a note.
‘Three kisses,’ Abbie said, absent
ly. ‘He normally signs a text with one.’
‘He normally doesn’t write messages like those,’ Claire said.
‘His thinking may have been disordered by this point,’ Preston said. ‘Depending on the quantity of drugs he’d ingested, the amount of alcohol consumed and the way the one interacted with the other. It’s likely that coherent thought would have been impaired to some degree. Although it’s hard to be precise about the extent of impairment until we . . .’ he tailed off.
Abbie stared, waiting for him to finish. ‘Until what?’ she said.
‘Until it’s possible to get a sample.’
‘A sample?’ She stopped as realisation dawned, her face crumpling. ‘Oh. You mean . . .’ she left the sentence unfinished.
Claire took Abbie’s hand. ‘Let’s not think about that yet, love. All right?’
‘There’s something else I need to tell you about.’ Preston said. ‘We’ve done some preliminary forensic work on the inside of the vehicle and I’m afraid to have to tell you that traces of blood have been found.’
‘Blood?’ Abbie said, her voice cracking.
‘In the boot and on the driver’s seat.’
Claire put a hand to her mouth. ‘Oh my God,’ she said.
‘So what does it mean, that you found blood?’ Abbie said. ‘Does it mean someone’s hurt my dad, maybe taken him somewhere? Is that what you’re thinking?
‘Not exactly, no.’
‘But . . .’ Abbie held out her hands in exasperation. ‘If there’s blood, it could mean there was a struggle, a third party, or . . . I don’t know, what do you think it means?’
‘Abbie, baby,’ Claire said in a whisper. ‘He could have done it to himself. Cut himself.’
‘There are a number of possibilities,’ Preston said. ‘Different lines of enquiry.’
‘But it could be that your theory about him being in the reservoir is wrong, then?’ Abbie’s voice rose with hope. ‘It could be that, couldn’t it? If his blood’s in the car, it could be that someone else was involved? Someone’s taken him against his will, maybe? Kidnapped him, maybe holding him somewhere?’
Preston shook his head and sighed. ‘We’re not treating it as evidence of a self-inflicted injury or that he was taken against his will.’
