Just Keep Breathing

by GS Rhodes

  DI Kidd turned back to Caleb.

  “Is your mum home?” he asked.

  Caleb shook his head.

  “Right,” he said. “Then you’re coming with us.”

  ◆◆◆

  When they made it back to the station, the rest of the team had gone home. DI Kidd had told them to. DS Sanchez had volunteered to stay on with him to help deal with Caleb. She wanted this finished with as much as he did, and maybe the anticipation of waiting until tomorrow was too much for her. Keeping the rest of the team around for the night wasn’t necessary.

  Before they went into the interview room, Kidd slipped into the Incident Room and quickly dialled John’s number. He picked up on the second ring.

  “Hey,” John said down the phone, a little out of breath. He was moving around as he spoke. “I’m not late, am I? I was just getting my things together to come and meet you.”

  “You’re not late,” Kidd said. “I’m glad I caught you. Look, something’s come up.” They were words that he’d said to Craig a thousand times before, words that he didn’t want to be saying to someone as kind and sweet as John, at least not at such an early stage of their relationship, if he could even call it that. “I wouldn’t do this unless I had to, I promise.”

  John let out a breath that distorted into Kidd’s ear.

  “Ben,” he said. “It’s fine.”

  “It is?”

  John sighed. Kidd could hear him sitting down. “Sure,” he replied. “You’ve got a whole investigation thing going on. It was only a drink, right?”

  He sounded disappointed. Ben could hear it in his voice, and he hated that. He hated so much that he was making someone else feel that way.

  “No, no, it wasn’t just a drink,” he said, perching on the edge of DC Campbell’s desk. “This was supposed to be me making it up to you that we didn’t get to see one another last night. And then…” he trailed off. He didn’t want to get John too involved in it. The world was hard enough without knowing about all the darker things that happened in it. “Like I said, something came up in the investigation. We’re about to interview someone, it shouldn’t take long.”

  “Ben, honestly, we can reschedule for tomorrow if—”

  “No,” Kidd interrupted. “Give me an hour, an hour and a half and I’ll call you. I want to see you.”

  Kidd could hear John smiling down the phone. “I want to see you too.”

  “Good.”

  “Okay,” John said. “I await your call.”

  “I’ll be as quick as I can.”

  “Be quicker,” John replied.

  They hung up the phone and Kidd found himself staring at it, the backlight illuminating his face in the darkened Incident Room.

  “Everything okay?”

  Kidd practically jumped out of his skin, nearly dropping his phone in the process. “Christ, Sanchez, you nearly gave me a heart attack.”

  “Alright, skittish,” she said. “Caleb is ready, if you are.”

  Kidd nodded. He needed to get his head back on the case.

  He followed DS Sanchez out of the Incident Room and down the corridor to one of the interview rooms. Caleb was sat at the table, a disposable cup steaming in his hands, the phone face-up on the table. There were notifications popping through on the screen, hundreds of them at a time.

  “How long has that been happening?” Kidd asked.

  “Pretty much since I turned it on,” Caleb said. “People were worried about her, I’m not surprised she switched it off.”

  “If it had been switched on, we would have found her,” DS Sanchez said as she took a seat across from Caleb.

  “She didn’t want to be found,” Caleb said.

  “What makes you say that?” Kidd asked.

  “She told me,” he said. “At first, I think she was just out to punish her parents a little bit. After that, I think she just didn’t want to deal with everything anymore, all the pressures of her life.”

  “The popularity?” Zoe asked.

  Caleb nodded. “She didn’t really want it, I don’t think. It happened because she is… was pretty sociable, fell in with the right crowd. Or the wrong crowd, depending on how you looked at it. But it meant that, with everything happening for her mum too, everybody was always looking at her. She had nowhere to escape to.”

  “Which is why you think she escaped to you?” Kidd asked.

  Caleb shrugged. “Maybe. We were friends, like I told you, but I wasn’t part of her group.”

  “There were no pictures anywhere of the two of you together,” Kidd said. “Doesn’t that seem odd?”

  “No,” Caleb said bluntly. “Just because it’s not been obsessively documented online doesn’t make it any less real. She was my friend. We’d hang out in the library sometimes when we both had work to do. She’d come over occasionally and…maybe it’s stupid.”

  “What’s stupid, Caleb?” Zoe asked.

  “She told me that she felt like she could be herself,” he said. “Like, she didn’t have to perform for anyone if it was just the two of us.”

  Kidd eyed the boy carefully. “Did you like her?”

  “She was my friend,” Caleb said again.

  “Did you like her more than a friend?”

  “I don’t know about you but not every single boy is after getting his end away,” Caleb snapped. “She was just my friend.”

  Kidd sat back in his chair and took a breath, watching Caleb as his eyes darted from the cup to DS Sanchez, to DI Kidd, to the phone, and back again. He didn’t know where to look, didn’t really know what to do with himself. It had to be pretty intimidating being in a police station all by yourself at sixteen.

  “Caleb,” Kidd said. “Would you mind taking us through everything that happened with you and Sarah since last Friday?”

  “All of it?”

  Kidd nodded. “Every last bit.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Caleb was very thorough. He took them through everything that had happened since he met Sarah on Friday afternoon after school. They had gone back to his house—his mother had been working late—and spent the afternoon and evening together. The later it got, the more confused Caleb got about her going home. She told him that she didn’t want to, so he let her stay. It wasn’t the first time it had happened.

  She stayed with him until Monday. When reports went around at school about her having gone missing, about the parents phoning the police and actually reporting it, Caleb got scared and told her all about it. He was meant to be seeing his grandparents that evening because his mum was working late, so he packed up and headed off to see them, thinking that she would go back home now that things had gotten serious. That she’d wait for his mum to vanish off to work and she would go back to her house.

  He went to school from his grandparents’ house on Tuesday, and when he found out she was missing, he thought that maybe she was still going to be at his when he got home. But she wasn’t.

  “Hold on,” DS Sanchez said. “So when did you last see her?”

  ‘The last time I saw her was around six o’clock on Monday night,” he said. “When I got home from school, I had to go to my grandparents’ house because both my parents work late. Mum is a little bit cagey about me being home alone. I assumed she’d go home and I’d wake up the following day to news that she’d been found or whatever.”

  “So she was with you for the whole weekend and your mother didn’t notice?” Kidd asked.

  “She works pretty odd hours most of the time,” he said. “She works at Kingston hospital and was on early shifts so she worked for most of the day and then would be so exhausted she would go to bed quite early. She thought I was doing homework. But I didn’t think it would be that long. After Friday night she went home and—”

  DS Sanchez sat up a little straighter. “Sarah went home?”

  Caleb nodded. “She went back to her house on Saturday morning after my mum had gone to work, but then showed up to see me a few hours later and was so up
set, told me she didn’t want to go back there. I told her we could ask my mum if she could stay at our house but she was having none of it because our parents are friends, they’ve been friends for years. She asked me to keep it a secret so I did.” He sniffed. “I just didn’t think it would end up like this.”

  DI Kidd looked across at DS Sanchez. He didn’t know how well it all checked out. And it still meant that there was an entire day that was unaccounted. And her going home and coming back upset meant that somebody in that house had seen her. Kidd shook his head. It was hard enough to get things out of the parents before, but having to do it now that Sarah had died was going to be twice as difficult. They likely blamed him for not finding her sooner. Truth be told he was starting to blame himself for not acting quicker.

  “Do you know who she spoke to when she went home?” Kidd asked.

  Caleb shook his head. “She was just really upset. She was crying and, I mean, I could barely get a word out of her. I didn’t know what to do so I chose not to talk about it. I’m sorry. That’s really all I’ve got. I’ve told you everything.”

  DI Kidd took a breath and looked across at Caleb. DCI Weaver would put his head in the smasher for letting the lad go home, but it was late. It was late for both of them and DI Kidd knew that he wasn’t going to get any further with this right now.

  “Thank you, Caleb,” DI Kidd said. “You’ve been very helpful. Just one more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Can you tell us a little bit about your dad?”

  Caleb froze. That wasn’t good. That wasn’t good at all.

  “What about him?” Caleb asked.

  “I want to know what he’s like,” Kidd said, trying to act casual. “There was an incident at the school reunion the other night. He attacked Sarah’s dad.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “Exactly,” Kidd said. “Would you say your father is a violent man?”

  “Not really,” Caleb said. “He…he has a temper. But he’s working on it.”

  “A temper?” DS Sanchez said.

  “Yeah, but he’s working on it,” Caleb said, with a little more urgency.

  “Why would you say he has a temper?” DS Sanchez asked. “Did he get angry a lot before he and your mother broke up?”

  “They fought a lot,” Caleb said. “There was always a lot of yelling, a lot of…I don’t know…plates smashing and stuff. They didn’t fit. That’s what Dad said.”

  “But you say he’s working on it?” DI Kidd asked.

  “He’s started doing yoga,” Caleb said, a little bit of pink colouring his cheeks. “He really likes it. And he runs now. Apparently, he goes out for long runs to clear his head. Any time he gets frustrated he does that to get it out of his system, so he’s getting better.”

  A chill covered Kidd’s body. He knew that Caleb hadn’t meant to say anything incriminating about his father, but all of a sudden he was worried about Norman Kaye’s whereabouts. He didn’t want to show any of that to Caleb though. It was pretty clear from where Kidd was sitting, that Caleb was loyal to his father. The last thing he would want to happen would be for Caleb to tip him off that they were going to be looking into him again.

  So DI Kidd fixed a smile on his face, offering it to Caleb. “Thank you for all of your help this evening,” he said. “Honestly, you’re helping us build a better picture of Sarah’s final movements. You’ve been great.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “Can I…can I go now? My grandparents are expecting me and if I don’t show up soon they’re going to be calling my mum all worried and I don’t want to do that to her.”

  “Sure,” DS Sanchez said. “You’ve given us everything we need.”

  They left the interview room, Caleb heading down the corridor to use the bathroom before they left. Zoe turned to Kidd immediately.

  “You buy it?”

  “The kid seems upset,” he replied. “I buy every word. We need to talk to his father.”

  “And Sarah’s parents,” Zoe added. “We need to find out who she spoke to before she went back to his all upset. I’d put serious money on it being her sleaze bag of a dad.”

  “You really don’t like him, do you?”

  “He’s a twat.”

  Kidd choked on a laugh. “Concise.”

  “I’ll put it in the report.”

  The door down the corridor opened and swung closed behind Caleb Kaye as he walked down the corridor towards them.

  “I’ll get him signed out,” she said quietly. “Tell John I said hello.”

  “How did you—?”

  “You were staring all lovesick at your phone, I’m not blind,” she said with a wink. “Have a good night.”

  He smiled. “You too.”

  ◆◆◆

  DI Kidd left the station and messaged John to say that he was on his way. John quickly replied asking him to meet him at the riverside. DI Kidd turned around and headed there, waiting under a streetlamp and staring out of the water, unable to keep thoughts of the case out of his mind.

  One of Sarah’s parents had lied about the last time they saw her. Whatever happened when they saw her on Saturday felt important. That was what had driven her to not go home, to think that anywhere but home was safe. And what of Norman Kaye? They’d already gotten the impression from Alexandra Kaye that he was pretty unhinged, but hearing from the son that he had a temper didn’t sit right with Kidd either. Tomorrow was going to be a busy day, he could already feel it.

  “Even from behind you look defeated,” John said as he stepped up next to Kidd.

  Involuntarily, Kidd leaned over and kissed John quickly on the lips before going back to staring out at the water, staring over at the spot where Sarah had been found that morning. It had been quite a day. All he wanted to do right now was forget about it.

  “Hello to you too,” he said, leaning on the railing next to him and stepping a little closer. Kidd could feel his body heat radiating and breathed in the calming scent of John McAdams. “You okay?”

  Benjamin Kidd turned to John and took him in—his gorgeous open face, the little smile tugging at the corners of his mouth—and instantly felt a little calmer just because he was here. He didn’t want to rehash the details of his day right now, he just wanted to spend time with John. So he pushed it from his head as best he could and smiled.

  “Better now you’re here,” he said. “Shall we?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  He didn’t know how much longer he could go on like this.

  It hadn’t meant to go this far, he knew that from the start. Once she was in the house, he just wanted to scare her. He hadn’t expected her to run. He certainly hadn’t expected to have to run after her.

  He still ached from it, not that he would say that to anyone. He wouldn’t want anyone getting suspicious. The only hope he had is that he wasn’t seen. So long as he wasn’t seen, everything would go to plan and everything would be alright.

  He lay back in bed and stared at the ceiling, the white paint swirls overhead that were a little bit hypnotising in the streetlight pouring in through the crack in the curtain. He was tired, exhausted even, and no amount of counting sheep was going to help him drop off with all the things he had on his mind.

  How much longer will it be? he thought.

  He debated going out for a run just to ease his mind but thought better of it. It was cold out.

  He picked up his phone, tapping out a message that he quickly deleted instead of sending.

  His mind was all over the place.

  She was dead.

  It was a thought that made him sit up so sharply in bed that his head swam. She was dead. He’d seen it on the news, not that he’d needed to. He’d been there as the life had drained out of her body, drip drip dripping into the river, and floating off down the Thames.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have left her there, he thought. All it would take was someone snooping around, a little bit of DNA left on her and they’d have me.

  He h
ad so much to lose.

  His phone buzzed on the nightstand and his eyes widened as he saw the message. It hadn’t been what he wanted to see, it was the last thing he wanted to see. His pulse quickened, his breathing coming in ragged, quick.

  Now he really was in trouble.

  Without thinking, he got out of bed and pulled on his tracksuit, flicking the hood up over his head before he walked out of the house. The blood was rushing in his ears, rushing so much he wasn’t sure if anyone heard him leaving, if anyone saw him.

  Sarah’s death had been an accident.

  This one wouldn’t be.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  After an evening of taking his mind off things with John, Kidd came into the office the following morning ready to tackle the day. When he made it into the Incident Room, he grabbed Sarah’s phone and unlocked it using the code that Sarah’s mother had provided.

  “Check the messages,” DI Kidd said handing it to DC Ravel. “She had loads coming through last night while we were talking to Caleb, a never-ending stream, there has to be something in there.”

  DC Ravel scrolled through, as Kidd watched over her shoulder, past the names that he recognised—Dexter, Taylor, Caleb, Jonno—and past a few more he didn’t, until she reached one marked Mum.

  “Try those,” Kidd said.

  DC Ravel clicked in and opened the messages. It was a stream of emotional messages asking her where she was. If you scrolled back far enough, you could see where they had started out as just asking when she was going to be home. It was on Sunday they went into full-blown panic.

  Sarah. Please, just tell me you’re okay.

  Sarah, I’m starting to get worried.

  ANSWER YOUR PHONE!

  Please? Sarah?

  There weren’t too many more after she was reported missing. Once the report had been put on file and Laura had started posting things on social media with reckless abandon, Kidd imagined she’d given up on trying to reach her daughter by text.