by C J Parsons
‘But spaghetti bolognese is your favourite.’
‘I feel yukky.’ Carrie was about to check her forehead when the doorbell buzzed.
Josh’s head snapped towards the sound.
‘That must be the police,’ he said. ‘Shall I go—’
But Carrie was already rushing towards the door.
The buzzer sounded again as she peered through the peephole, which offered a funhouse view of DCI Campbell and her Irish colleague. She threw open the door and stood facing them across the threshold, breath coming fast.
‘Who is it?’ she asked immediately. ‘Who is the suspect?’
‘It’s too early to use the word “suspect” at this—’ the policewoman began, then her head suddenly rocked back as though she’d been struck. She was staring into the house, eyes wide, lips parted. ‘Why is Josh Skelter in your house?’
Carrie glanced over her shoulder at Josh, who was clearing the table, Sofia’s uneaten plate of spaghetti in his hand.
‘He is staying with us temporarily as an extra security measure.’
Juliet’s eyebrows slid into a V-shape.
‘So the two of you are . . . what exactly? Friends?’
‘We are in a sexual relationship.’
‘Really? How . . .’
‘That’s not important,’ Carrie interrupted, as jagged nerves tore through her last scrap of patience. ‘Can you just tell me who is in custody? Do you believe it to be the same person who took Sofia?’
Juliet cast one last look at Josh (now scraping food into the bin) before shifting her attention to Carrie’s question.
‘We haven’t formally arrested anyone. We are currently speaking to a person of interest, but at this stage we don’t have enough evidence to lay charges.’
‘Who is the person of interest?’
There was a high-pitched shriek from the direction of the street.
The three of them turned to see a pair of young women struggling out of a taxi. One of them must have been drunk, because she had lost her footing and was clinging to her friend’s arm with both hands, nearly pulling her over. DCI Campbell sighed and returned her attention to Carrie.
‘Can we discuss this inside, please? I need to ask you a couple of questions.’
‘What do you know about Tara Weldon?’
Carrie stared across the dining table, eyes shuttling back and forth between the two officers. Sofia was lying on the sofa wearing headphones attached to her iPad, so the only sound was the clatter of cutlery as Josh loaded the dishwasher. He had retreated into the kitchen when DCI Campbell said she needed to speak to Carrie alone.
‘What do you mean?’
The policewoman’s notepad was in her hand, pen suspended above it.
‘Had you ever crossed paths with her prior to the day Sofia went missing? Perhaps at the park?’
‘No. We met for the first time that day.’ She stared across at the DCI, confused, blinking. ‘I don’t understand this. Why are we still discussing my friends and contacts? Hasn’t the investigation moved on from this stage?’
‘Friends?’ DCI Campbell repeated, lifting one eyebrow. ‘Are you . . . have you and Tara Weldon been in contact since Sofia’s abduction?’
‘Yes.’
The policewoman ran a hand along the side of her hair, fingers pausing on one of the clips there.
The male officer spoke for the first time.
‘Tara Weldon is a person of interest in this investigation.’
His words hit Carrie like a wave, knocking right through her, upending all her newly built hope and trust, sending it scattering.
Tara was the suspect.
She sat perfectly still, waiting for the shock to fade and become manageable. But it kept rebounding, slamming back into her. The police were in her home because they believed that Carrie’s best friend – let’s face it, her only friend – had stolen and imprisoned her daughter.
She spread her fingers against the surface of the dining table, pressing down hard, taking comfort in the solidity of it, the immutable fact of the wood.
No.
This was a mistake. The police had been wrong before – not once, but twice. First about Simon, then the park keeper. And they were wrong again now.
‘Tara was with me, leading the search, right after Sofia disappeared. It is therefore impossible for her to have been involved in the abduction.’
‘Not right after,’ Juliet corrected. ‘According to your statement, you conducted a solo search of the entire playground and the children’s woods before Tara appeared on the scene.’
‘Yes. But that wouldn’t have provided her with enough time to remove Sofia from the park and then transport her all the way to Perivale, let alone return afterwards.’
But even as she said the words, Carrie knew they must be redundant, because the officers would surely know that already; anyone with the most basic geography of London could have worked it out. So why were they still pointing the finger at Tara? It didn’t make sense. Unless . . .
‘Do you think she was working with someone else? An accomplice? Because otherwise it’s . . .’
‘Carrie,’ DCI Campbell interrupted.
‘Yes?’
‘It would be helpful if you could just answer my questions for the moment. I’m not able to provide answers to yours because I don’t have them yet. Right now, experts are going through the contents of Tara’s computers and mobile phone, so we hope to have more information soon.’
‘But why? Why would she do it?’
‘At this point, we’re still working to establish that she did do it,’ Juliet said. ‘As things now stand, the evidence is purely circumstantial. All we can say with certainty is that Tara was in both Granger Park and Tudor Park at the time of both abductions. But that could just be a coincidence.’
Could just be a coincidence.
Carrie grabbed on to the words like a lifeline. Coincidences happened. It was a fact of life. It wasn’t even that big a coincidence, when you thought about it. Because although the two parks were miles apart, they were both very popular. At this time of year, tens of thousands of people probably passed through them every day. So why shouldn’t there be some overlap?
But even as she clung to it, she could feel the lifeline slipping through her fingers. Because this wasn’t the only coincidence, was it? There had been another chance meeting, another unlikely coincidence. One that she’d kept from the police.
Josh came out of the kitchen just long enough to place a steaming French press and three mugs on the table before retreating behind the counter again.
The coffee hadn’t had time to steep, but Carrie pushed down on the plunger anyway, watching it descend through the brown murk. Her throat felt tight, as though it were trying to stop her next words, trap them inside.
‘Tara met Sofia before the abduction.’
The two officers exchanged glances.
‘You never mentioned that before,’ DCI Campbell said.
‘I wasn’t there and only found out about it a short time ago.’
‘Can you provide more details? When, where and under what circumstances?’
‘At a child’s birthday party at the south end of Granger Park about two weeks before the abduction.’ Carrie poured coffee into mugs. ‘Tara was the caterer. She rescued Sofia’s balloon from a tree. They had a brief conversation.’
DCI Campbell’s pen raced across the small pad.
‘What did the two of them discuss during that conversation?’
‘Pets and animals.’
The two officers swapped another of those glances. Carrie didn’t need to be able to read faces to know what that one meant.
‘Did Sofia mention her interest in penguins?’
Carrie placed the newly filled cups in front of her guests. If they wanted milk or
sugar, they could add it themselves.
‘Yes. Sofia was wearing face paint that made her look like a cat. Tara mentioned having a cat. Sofia said cats were her second favourite animal after penguins. That is all I know.’
DCI Campbell crossed her legs, propping the notepad on a raised knee. Her pen zipped back and forth.
‘When you first met Tara, right after Sofia went missing, what exactly did she say to you?’
‘She introduced herself and said she would help me find my daughter. Some other mums had come over and she asked them to help. Then she organised a search party, assigning people to different parts of the park.’
‘But she didn’t send anyone to the closed-off section at the north end, did she?’ the male officer asked.
‘No.’ Carrie poured milk into her cup and watched the clouds it made, churning across the surface like an arriving storm.
DCI Campbell looked up from her pad.
‘Did she or anyone else suggest contacting the police immediately, prior to the search?’
Carrie took a sip of coffee. It tasted weak.
‘I asked her whether we should call the police. But Tara thought we would be able to find Sofia ourselves.’
This time when DCI Campbell and her colleague made eye contact, they added on a little nod as well.
The policewoman jotted on her notebook, then added a teaspoon of sugar to her coffee. ‘So it was only after the search was complete and had failed to produce Sofia that Tara agreed to call 999?’
‘She was the one who suggested it. And made the call herself.’
‘OK.’ Another teaspoon of sugar went in, then another. ‘Adding the time you spent searching on your own to the time it took to organise the search party and the half-hour search itself, would it be accurate to say that the police were alerted roughly an hour after Sofia’s disappearance?’
‘Yes.’
More sugar. There must be five spoonfuls in there now.
‘Let’s move on to your subsequent encounters with Tara. When did you meet her next?’
‘We ran into each other at Bundy’s indoor play centre and she invited us – Sofia and me – to visit her workplace the following Wednesday. After that she came here for dinner and drinks. On a later occasion, she assisted me with a work matter, then we had lunch near my office. And we went to a bar for drinks last Friday.’
She had hoped this information would be sufficient. No such luck.
‘Can you take me through those encounters, one-by-one, telling me everything you remember about them?’ DCI Campbell said. ‘The things you discussed and any interaction Tara had with your daughter?’
So Carrie told the two officers about the magical-everything cupcakes and Tara’s help putting Sofia to bed. About the chats over coffee, then wine, then cocktails. About dancing in the living room and relationship advice in the nook of a Soho bar.
The policewoman wrote it all down, transforming warm moments of friendship into cold pieces of evidence. And as she watched DCI Campbell’s pen racing back and forth, a dark stain began to creep across the memories, corrupting them. Until none of it seemed real any more.
Sofia felt sick. Hot and sick. Also her head hurt. She’d tried to tell Mummy about it, but then the police people came. They were gone now, but Mummy and Josh were in the kitchen, which all of a sudden seemed far away. They were talking and not paying attention to Sofia, who was lying on the sofa with the iPad beside her. She could still hear Peppa Pig in the headphones, but she wasn’t watching any more. The screen was too bright; it made her eyes hurt, and her brain kept floating away from the story. She felt a ball of sick growing inside her, getting bigger and bigger until she thought she was going to puke all over the sofa. But then it shrank back down and the sick stayed stuck inside, which was worse.
Sofia had never felt so hot before. It was scary. She wanted Mummy to give her a cuddle and some medicine. Her head flopped sideways so that her cheek was lying on the sofa. She could see Mummy and Josh standing talking to each other across the kitchen counter.
‘Mummy.’ Her voice came out like a whisper, even though she’d tried to shout with all her best strength. Mummy didn’t hear her and she couldn’t see her either, because she was facing the wrong way. But Josh was facing the right way.
He nodded in her direction and said: ‘Looks like she’s dozing off. Why don’t I pop her up to bed, then we can discuss this further.’
Good. He could tell Mummy she was sick. He came and picked her up, making a wave of sick go up and down. It filled up her throat so she couldn’t talk again until they were already upstairs, going into her room.
‘I’m sick. I want Mummy.’
‘Your mother and I have some very important, grown-up things we need to talk about right now. I’ll send her up a bit later.’
‘But I need her now. I’m scared.’
Josh put her into her pyjamas and tucked her in without even remembering to brush her teeth.
‘There’s nothing to be scared of. All you need is a nice glass of water and a good night’s sleep.’ He went away and came back with water, which he put up to her mouth. She heard her teeth chattering against the glass and that made her feel even more scared.
‘Close your eyes and I promise you’ll feel better in the morning.’
He got up and walked to the door.
‘I want Mummy,’ Sofia said, starting to cry.
He looked back at her from the doorway and sighed.
‘Tell you what: I’ll send her up in ten minutes to give you a goodnight kiss. But only if you promise to try and go to sleep until then.’
‘OK.’
Sofia lay staring at the cartoon stars feeling sick and boiling hot and headachy, listening for her mother’s feet on the stairs.
But Mummy never came.
Twenty-seven
‘I don’t believe you wanted to harm either of these girls,’ Alistair said, tapping the two photos on the interview room table. ‘I understand why you did it. And I sympathise.’
Tara stared straight ahead, hands in her lap, face a blank mask. Which was hardly surprising, Juliet thought. She must have built strong walls around this subject to keep herself going for the last five years.
Tara’s motive lay in the file on the table between them, spelled out on two soulless, bloodless forms. In the heartbreakingly short gap between dates.
Clarissa Weldon. Date of Birth: 2 September 2014. Date of Death: 11 August 2015. Juliet lifted the file’s cover to let Tara see the birth certificate, before dropping it shut again.
‘She would have been turning six soon, just like Sofia,’ Alistair said softly. ‘And Zoe’ Juliet noticed a small tightening in Tara’s jaw as her mask buckled slightly under the pressure. ‘You wanted her back. So you decided to take another girl. A girl the same age as Clarissa would have been.’
Tara crossed her arms tightly over her chest. Shook her head.
‘No. That’s not true.’
Alistair removed another photo from the file, placing it beside the two images of Sofia and Zoe. A baby’s smiling face.
‘She had your ex-husband’s brown eyes and your dark hair,’ he said. ‘Both the girls who went missing had the same colouring.’
‘No.’
‘No, they didn’t have the same colouring? Because clearly . . .’
‘No, I didn’t take them. No, I didn’t try to steal another child to replace the one I’d lost. Clarissa is irreplaceable. It’s offensive to suggest I would simply exchange her for another child, like some sort of . . . broken doll. Clarissa is gone for ever and no one on this Earth can change that.’
Juliet watched Tara’s features closely, waiting for the feeling to come: that satisfying sensation of facts clicking into place as pieces of the puzzle slotted themselves together to create a coherent picture. It was bound to happen at some point duri
ng this interview, as her instincts confirmed what the facts had already told her: that Tara Weldon was behind both abductions. That she had enlisted the help of a petty drug dealer to get Sofia out of the park. Perhaps Nick Laude hadn’t even known what he was getting into. Perhaps she’d told him there were drugs hidden inside that sack.
Alistair drummed his fingers against the edge of the table.
‘When did you and your ex-husband split up?’
He and Juliet had discussed these questions beforehand. She’d wanted him to take the lead in this interview so she could focus all her attention on Tara’s voice, face and body language.
‘Seven months after Clarissa died.’
‘And what was the reason for that?’
Tara fixed him with an empty stare.
‘He didn’t like my grief.’
Alistair’s hand dipped inside the file again, like a magician reaching into a hat. He pulled out a stapled, three-page document and held it up (ta dah!) so that she could see what it was. Then he tossed it onto the table beside the baby photo. Tara’s gaze didn’t shift. She stared across the table at him with those empty eyes.
‘According to your medical records’ – he circled a palm above the pages – ‘you suffered from serious depression between 2015 and 2016 but refused to seek treatment.’
‘What treatment would you have suggested I seek? There was a real and compelling reason for me to be incredibly sad. No cocktail of chemicals was going to change that. And anyway, I didn’t want to numb my feelings about Clari. They were all I had left of her.’
‘It didn’t have to be chemicals. You could have sought counselling.’
She shook her head. ‘I had no desire to pour my heart out to some stranger. I only wanted to share those thoughts and feelings with my husband. But he wanted us to move on.’ Her eyes settled on the baby photo for a moment before she tore them away again, clamping her gaze on Alistair’s. ‘He put all her things in storage and said there was no point dwelling on the past. That’s the word he used: dwelling.’
‘So would it be fair to say that you have been unable to get over the loss of your daughter?’
