Just Keep Breathing

by GS Rhodes

  “What’s up?” she asked, concern spreading across her face. “What the hell happened after I left you? You didn’t get beaten up by some thug again, did you?”

  “No, nothing like that,” Kidd said sitting down in his chair and leaning back.

  “Then what?” Zoe asked, entirely puzzled. She pulled the chair over from her own desk and sat down. “Come on, you’re killing me here.”

  He didn’t know where to start. He didn’t know whether to brief her on the case or tell her about what Andrea had sent him last night. Given how things had been going with John, he didn’t know how impressed she would be with him dredging up the past. But he hadn’t expected Andrea to be in touch. It had been over a month since he’d messaged her after all.

  “I—” But Kidd didn’t get a chance to finish, the door to the Incident Room flew open and DCI Weaver barrelled in like a charging bull. The door crashed against the desk behind the door and all eyes suddenly moved to him, a well-built man in a pristine blue suit, his temper as fiery red as his hair. He looked around at each of them, probably trying to land on DI Kidd. When they did, he pointed a meaty finger at him.

  “You ready?”

  Kidd got to his feet. “Not briefed them yet, sir,” he said. “Was waiting for Campbell, and yourself, of course, to show up.”

  “Fine, fine, fine,” Weaver grumbled, looking around the room again. “And where is Campbell?”

  “Went to get breakfast,” DC Powell said through a mouthful of croissant. “Think he was heading to Pret, sir, he shouldn’t long.”

  “He should already be here,” DCI Weaver growled.

  “No harm starting without him, sir,” DI Kidd said. “He’s a few steps behind the rest of us at the best of times, might as well start as we mean to go on.”

  DCI Weaver clearly didn’t know whether DI Kidd was joking or not, his mouth twitching at the corners like he was unsure whether or not to smile, laugh, or verbally smack Kidd in the face. He shook it off and turned to address the whole room.

  “I had a case file land on my desk last night,” he said, holding a thin, yellowing folder in his beefy hand. “It’s a bit of a doozy and requires your full attention immediately. I briefed DI Kidd last night, but there have been more details since, so gather around please.”

  They did as they were told, following DCI Weaver to the front of the room and the empty Evidence Board. They perched on the edges of desks, sat on wayward chairs, their eyes fixed on him as he addressed them like a general would his troops.

  “We have a teenage girl missing on the borough,” he said.

  “Oh,” DC Powell said, involuntarily because he quickly clapped a hand over his mouth. “Sorry, sir.”

  “Oh?” Weaver asked. “What do you mean oh?”

  “Nothing, sir, I just thought it was going to be more…serious…” DC Powell looked like he wanted the ground to swallow him up. Kidd wanted it to as well.

  “Well,” Weaver said through gritted teeth, his face getting redder by the second. “It might not sound like a lot, but the parents are known in the community, Dad works for a local building firm, lots of houses around the place, Mum is some kind of Instagram influencer, something to do with cleaning I think.”

  “Cleaning?” DS Sanchez echoed, incredulous. “Really?”

  Weaver waved the folder. “I’ve got pictures of her feed to prove it. It’s…harrowing,” he said. “They post everything about their lives online, and that includes the disappearance of their daughter Sarah Harper. She went missing four days ago, no one has seen her, no one has heard from her, apparently her phone has been switched off all this time so the parents are losing their minds. Understandably, of course, but it means they’re breathing down my neck and so are a lot of their followers.”

  “How do you mean, sir?” DC Ravel asked.

  “Social media,” he said. “It’s a scourge on our society, means everyone is in everyone’s business. So we’ve got all of their followers bombarding Twitter and Facebook with posts wanting to know where she is, wondering why we haven’t done anything yet.”

  “And why haven’t we?” Simon asked.

  Big mistake. Weaver rounded on him.

  Has he been taking notes from Campbell? Jesus, Kidd thought.

  “They reported her missing yesterday,” Weaver snapped. “She has a boyfriend, they thought she might have been staying with him, an awful lot of friends that she could have been staying with too, so when she didn’t show up all weekend, they just assumed she was with them.”

  “Hardly seems responsible,” DS Sanchez remarked.

  “I did think that,” Weaver said. “But they obviously trust her enough to go off and do her own thing most of the time, give her that freedom. Just so happens that this time it’s backfired majorly, because they can’t get a hold of her. No one can. Her phone is off and everything.”

  He handed the folder to DI Kidd, who took it gingerly and opened it up, looking at the photographs of Sarah. She was sixteen years old, blonde, beautiful, filtered to high heaven in the selfies that they’d tracked down of her. She had a lot of friends too, or at least the pictures made it seem that way. She was popular. Perfect. That didn’t sit right. Kidd feared the worst.

  “She didn’t show up to school on Monday and the school rang her mum to find out what was going on,” Weaver said. “She had no idea where she was and started ringing around the parents of the friends, of the boyfriend, and they hadn’t seen her since the previous week.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Kidd muttered, looking through more of the pictures. There were more photos of her with friends, a lot of friends. All of them looked somewhat similar, striking the same poses, faces fully made up, fingers in a peace sign, legs bent. Not one of them had any contact with her? He found it hard to believe that she’d just disappeared off the face of the earth.

  “There are a lot of people looking at us for this one,” Weaver said. “She’s high profile. Media is already breathing down our necks and want a press conference arranged ASAP. Superintendent Charles wants one as soon as this afternoon, if we can manage it.”

  “This afternoon?” Kidd echoed. “That’s not enough time. What will we have to say? They’ll gut us.”

  “We’ll tell them we’re looking into it, hope it calms down the crazies gunning for us online.” Weaver sighed, running a hand over his face. “You on this, Kidd?”

  “Yes, boss,” Kidd replied, turning to his team. “We need to set up a timeline. Find out who last saw her and when, try and figure out where she could have gone. I assume we’ve got a trace on the phone? If it gets switched on, I want to know about it. We’ll check CCTV around the school, check social media profiles, all that.” He turned to DC Powell, handing him the folder. “Pop these on the board, would you DC Powell?”

  “Sure thing, sir,” he said, getting up from his seat and immediately tripping over his own feet. The folder spilled out across the floor, photographs, documents, the small amount of evidence that had been handed to DCI Weaver late last night.

  DI Kidd looked at his boss, who was currently in the process of rolling his eyes at DC Powell for his clumsiness. He looked tired. He probably hadn’t slept. DI Kidd could relate.

  He got down and started picking up the wayward photographs with DC Powell, whose face was burning red, muttering to himself about being stupid. DI Kidd cursed himself for thinking it.

  “You’re alright, Simon,” he said quietly. “Easy now.”

  DC Powell looked over at him and smiled. “Thank you, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  “It’s fine, it—”

  But something caught Kidd’s eye, something that made him stop dead in his tracks. He picked up a photograph of the family together, one he hadn’t come to himself while he was inspecting the folder.

  “This the parents, sir?” he asked, holding up the photo to show DCI Weaver.

  DCI Weaver squinted at the photo before nodding. “Yes, apparently they came in to report it themselves, then went live on Instagram t
o talk about it, asking anybody with information to come forward if they knew anything. This is going to be a doozy, Kidd, the mother is a total nightmare. Why do you ask?”

  He looked down at the picture one more time. There was a woman who looked very similar to Sarah, now that he thought about it. She was slender, peroxide blonde, striking a similar pose to the one that her daughter struck. She looked deliriously happy, one of those photographs where either the photographer had told a joke beforehand or they’d just decided to make it look as natural as possible by laughing through it. As he looked closer at her, really took in her face, it dawned on him.

  “This is Laura Martins,” he said.

  “Laura Harper,” DCI Weaver corrected.

  “Right, right, but that’s not what I knew her as,” DI Kidd said, staring down at the photo in disbelief. He shook his head. “I went to school with her.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  He remembered her so well now. She’d always been one of the popular girls at school, surrounded by friends, going out on Friday nights and always having stories running around the school about her that she vehemently denied. She was a star. It was hardly surprising that she’d managed to transform that real-world stardom into some kind of internet fame.

  He recognised the husband as well, though less so. Christopher Harper had been a student at his school too, and they were in the same year, but he was one of the sports guys, someone who Kidd had tried to avoid if he could manage it. It was exactly the kind of person he would have expected Laura Martins to end up with.

  DC Powell got to work setting up an Evidence Board. He put the photos of Sarah on one side and the photos of the parents on the other, under the heading of suspects. You could never be too careful with things like this, and as with most missing persons cases, you would have to rule out the parents first. Most people would be surprised to know how many times it had turned out to be the parents all along. He hoped that wasn’t the case this time.

  DC Ravel got to work looking at Sarah’s social media, tracking down the names of the people she was photographed with most often. They’d be the people they would need to speak with first at the school, they would be the ones who would help them figure out a timeline.

  DC Campbell appeared shortly after DCI Weaver had vanished. Bloody convenient timing, DI Kidd had thought. Kidd had filled him in and then sent him straight back out to gather coffee and pastries for the team.

  Ben returned to his desk, flicking through the evidence they had so far—which wasn’t a lot—and scrolling through Laura’s Instagram. The fact they had gone to school together still floored him. He hadn’t thought about her for the past twenty-five years or so and here she was, cleaning on the internet for hundreds of thousands of people.

  DS Sanchez appeared at his side.

  “So, that certainly puts the whole school reunion thing in perspective, huh?” she said, pulling up a chair to sit beside his desk. “I take it you’re definitely going now.”

  “For sure,” DI Kidd said, not looking away from the screen. She seemed to still hang around with people they’d gone to school with. There were people whose faces he recognised in a vague sort of way, but couldn’t for the life of him remember what their names were. It was like she hadn’t moved on from those days, hanging out with the same people, probably talking about the same things they had always talked about, reminiscing about old stories.

  The comments section on the post where she announced that Sarah was missing—with a photograph of the two of them standing next to one another, looking gorgeous in the same outfit, same poses, the lot—was flooded with people wishing them the best, wishing for her safety, saying they were sending up hopes and prayers. Kidd’s mind boggled at these strangers being so invested in the lives of someone they didn’t even know.

  “I can—” The door swung open again, DI Kidd half-expected it to be DCI Weaver storming in again with new information or to give Simon the bollocking he had avoided earlier on. But instead, DC Campbell stood in the doorway, several cups of coffee in a carrier, a paper bag bursting with pastries.

  His grin was wide like he had just found the girl out on the street, his fake tan still as orangey-brown as ever, making his teeth seem all the whiter. He wasn’t a bad guy, Kidd knew that. He just had a tendency to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, or make light of a situation that really didn’t need to be made light of.

  After the last case where he’d been battered by the guy who ended up being their murderer, he’d toned down some. But that only seemed to last as long as he had a bruise on his forehead. It had faded, and so had any sense of him being a decent human being.

  “The cavalry has arrived!” DC Campbell proclaimed, handing coffee to DC Ravel, a mint tea to DC Powell—DI Kidd tried not to rip into him for it—and two more coffees to Kidd and Zoe. He took an almond croissant for good measure. He was bloody starving.

  “What do you want me to do, boss?” Campbell asked, mock saluting and throwing a pain aux raisins across the room. “Oops.”

  “First of all, I want you to pick that up,” DI Kidd said, suppressing an eye roll. “Then, I want you to get in touch with the parents, Laura and Chris Harper. I’d love to get an interview done today if possible. I can go to them. It’s probably easier. Have they sent a Missing Persons Officer?”

  “They requested it,” DS Sanchez said. “Been run off their feet apparently.”

  “Of course they did,” DI Kidd replied. He wouldn’t be surprised if a photo of them showed up on Laura’s Instagram page sooner rather than later, or a full review of how they were performing. “Okay, Campbell, if you could get on with that for me, that will be great.”

  DI Kidd returned his gaze to the screen and Laura Harper’s social media. It was fascinating the number of people who were invested in her life, in how she cleaned her living room, in where her family were going on trips. When he clicked on Sarah’s profile, he saw that she had a lot of followers too, many of whom had probably come from her mother.

  They were presenting themselves as this perfect family, the perfect house, the perfect life, everything so squeaky clean. But nothing was ever that cut and dry, DI Kidd knew that. They probably wanted Sarah found so quickly because it made things look bad. How can you be the perfect parents if you don’t even know where your child has gotten to?

  DS Sanchez was still at his side. DI Kidd turned to her.

  “What’s up, Zoe?” he asked.

  “You were going to tell me something before DCI Weaver came in,” she said. “I’m not trying to push you or anything, but it seemed like it was going to be important.”

  He looked at her for a moment, the image that might be of Craig flashing up in his mind again. Did he even want to tell her? She was his friend, but would she think less of him for still looking for Craig while starting things up with John? He wasn’t sure he wanted to tell her. Maybe he was making something out of nothing, a mountain out of a molehill, a sighting out of a blurred CCTV still.

  “No,” he said. “I was just going to tell you about the case, that’s all. DCI Weaver just beat me to it.” His focus needed to be on the case right now. He couldn’t get distracted by yet another wild goose chase looking for Craig Peyton. It hadn’t worked when he’d had his time off and went gallivanting across Europe, it certainly wasn’t going to work now. It would only really succeed in making him more miserable. He needed to accept that Craig was gone.

  “Oh,” DS Sanchez replied. “Never mind then, I thought it was going to be something serious.” She moved to walk away.

  “Oh, actually,” DI Kidd said after her. She turned around. “You want to come to this school reunion with me?”

  She eyed him curiously. “Sure, I can if you want,” she replied. “I thought you were going to take John.”

  “I was,” Kidd said. “But things have changed a little in the last hour. I wonder if it might be good for us both to be there. And if I go with John, I’m not going to be focussing on the case and…” he traile
d off and took a moment. “You never know what’s going to come up. If Laura and Chris are going to be there, maybe something new will come to light.”

  Zoe nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Sure. You don’t think John will mind?”

  DI Kidd hesitated. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I’m sure he’ll understand.”

  But he had that creeping feeling in his stomach that he was putting work before his personal life again, that thing he’d told himself that he needed to stop doing. But it wasn’t a big deal, was it? John would understand. It was a work thing. It would be fine.

  As DI Kidd turned back to his computer, staring at the perfection of Laura Harper’s life. He wasn’t so sure.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  With everyone on task, DI Kidd and DS Sanchez left Kingston Police Station to make their way to Sarah Harper’s school. It wasn’t lost on Kidd that it was the same school he had attended over twenty years ago. Although it had since been transformed into an Academy, he wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of going back.

  “We could send someone else,” DS Sanchez said as they walked out into the car park. Zoe took a set of keys out of her pocket and clicked them, her favoured blue Focus in the corner lighting up as they approached. “Campbell could do this questioning if you want.”

  “I don’t know if notes about one of Sarah’s teachers being attractive is going to help us here,” Kidd parried.

  “He’s not that bad,” she replied, rolling her eyes. “You just don’t seem keen.”

  “No, no,” Kidd said. “You know me, Zoe, scene of the crime and all that. I just want to get started.”

  He didn’t want to go but he knew that he had to, that he needed to start where Sarah was last seen. He needed to get on top of this and he needed to get on top of it fast, if DCI Weaver’s attitude was anything to go by.

  “I wonder if any of the same teachers are there,” he said as he climbed into the passenger seat. “Last time I went back was…I don’t know, ten, fifteen years ago? And it still looked exactly the same as it had done before.”