by Carla Kovach
‘I pick my friend up here, for work. We’re on the afternoon shift. I went in for a coffee with her first. When we finished, I saw this car and thought about what you said. I don’t know if it’s the one you’re looking for but it’s silver and it’s a Peugeot and my friend doesn’t recognise it.’
Another woman waved out of her living room window and hurried out, locking the door on the tiny terraced house as she did. ‘I’d forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on.’ She held her phone up and smiled.
Gina scrutinised the number plate. It was indeed a silver Peugeot and it was, without a doubt, Susan’s car. ‘Thank you for calling. It is the car we’re looking for.’
The rotund woman standing beside Felicity checked her watch before doing the buttons up on her oversized cape-like coat. ‘We’re going to be late now. John will dock our break if we don’t get a move on or worse, we’ll have to make time up.’
‘Sorry, Detective. Is there anything else you need us for?’ Felicity straightened her beret.
‘Can I just take your name?’ Gina looked at the friend.
‘Alicia Downing.’
‘Did you see this car pull up or have you seen anyone by it at all?’
Alicia shook her head. ‘I hadn’t even thought about it until Felicity knocked on the door this morning. Cars are always parked here, they’re always a nuisance but I recognise a lot of them. There’s a large apartment block there and they seem to prefer parking out here instead of in their own courtyard. I’ve moaned to the management company no end. Anyway, I thought it was one of theirs and that maybe someone there had a new car.’
The little silver hatchback had blended in well with all the other cars parked up on the road and the pavement. It didn’t look special in any way. Gina nodded to Jacob. They were definitely going to need the tow truck. He pressed a button and held his phone up.
‘Have you seen this woman before?’
Alicia pulled her glasses out of her bag and peered closely at the photo. ‘No, although I have seen the appeal on the television. She’s missing. You’re looking for her. Pretty girl. I hope she’s okay.’
‘Has she got something to do with Dale?’ Felicity asked.
Gina didn’t want to give too much away. ‘We’re just concerned for her safety. If you see her, will you please call me straight away?’
Alicia took a card from Gina. If Susan did come back looking for her car, maybe Alicia would call them. ‘Will do. I did see something weird. On Tuesday, I saw a man lurking around. I didn’t recognise him. He was pacing up and down the bit of road here. It was evening and dark but I caught a glimpse of him as he walked past the streetlamp over there. I remember this because I made sure my door was locked.’
A man, lurking around by Susan’s car on the night she failed to pick her son up from nursery. She grabbed her notebook. ‘What did he look like?’
‘I don’t know, but he had a bit of shine on his head. Either no hair or not much. That’s all I can remember.’
‘Thank you. After work, please go to the station and make a formal statement. In the meantime, if you see this man again, call us straight away.’
‘Will do.’
Gina left the two women and watched them huddled together, gossiping and speculating, before they got into Felicity’s car and drove away.
Gina’s stomach growled as she peered through Susan’s car window. Jacob’s reflection appeared beside her. She pulled out a pair of blue latex gloves and slipped them on before trying all the doors. Locked, just as she’d suspected. ‘The woman I just spoke to, Alicia Downing, said she saw a man lurking around by this car on the night Susan disappeared. We’re looking for someone bald or with not much hair. Ah ha, I’ve just spotted Dale’s missing paperwork.’ The folders on the backseat marked up with Dale’s name on the sides gave her all she needed. ‘She did go there to collect his paperwork.’ She removed the glove and began chewing her thumbnail. ‘Why were they speaking with raised voices? That has baffled me. Even as a friend, if they were having words, would he still have hired her to do his books? Why oh why? Give me the answer, Jacob. What are you thinking?’
‘I’m thinking that this gets more baffling by the minute. I agree, we need to find our bald male lurker.’
Gina closed her eyes as she ran through everyone she’d come across this week in her mind. ‘We need to get to Mary’s. They’re a strange family. She couldn’t wait for me to leave earlier. I wanted to speak with Clare who was apparently in the shower. When I went to leave, I saw her at the bedroom window. I’m also sure she was outside the house the other night, in the rain, watching me as I left. We need to get more out of Mary.’
‘Clare isn’t bald and she’s female.’
‘State the obvious, why don’t you? I’m not suggesting our lurker is Clare.’ She flicked his arm in a joking manner after she pulled her other glove off.
‘Just pulling your leg, guv. On a serious note, do you think she may have something to do with this?’
‘We need to consider that a possibility. Great, the tow truck’s here. Let’s leave them to their job and catch up later when Keith has worked his magic. I suppose this has to go in the forensics queue for when he’s finished at the house. That’ll please him.’
‘Jennifer will probably do it.’
‘Ooh, Jennifer. I saw you talking to her earlier.’
‘Shut up, guv.’ Jacob flinched and turned his head to the side. ‘Woah!’
‘Your tooth?’
He nodded and got in the car where he proceeded to prod his cavity.
‘You want to get that looked at. Need to make sure your mouth is kissable if you’re hoping to date Jennifer.’
He rolled his eyes as he fiddled with his tooth.
Gina’s phone beeped. It was a message from Keith with a photo attached.
We found this under Dale’s pillow. I thought you’d want to see it straight away.
Keith.
Opening it, Gina’s jaw dropped. She recognised two of the three kids in the photo. There was a connection, and it went way back in time.
‘Jacob, check this out. We’re on to something here.’
Thirty-Four
It felt like Gina was going around in circles just like her empty stomach. Once again, she was back at Mary’s house; it was almost as if she’d never left.
‘Stop playing with your tooth. Someone’s coming.’
‘It hurts, guv.’ Reluctantly, Jacob dropped his hand to his side.
As they waited for someone to answer the door, Gina’s senses were alerted to the slamming of an interior door followed by a raised voice. It was only Mary’s voice she could hear, she had to be on the phone. Clare’s name was called, then nothing. Maybe Clare had hung up. She heard the same door fling open and bounce off the wall before Mary finally opened the front door. Mary wiped her damp red eyes. The smell of burnt toast crept up Gina’s nostrils. Saliva began to fill her mouth as she thought about chomping down on something warm and buttery.
Jacob followed Gina towards the kitchen, passing Howard’s office as they headed through. The man’s thick grey hair flopped a little as he turned his head in an animated way, giving them a smile as he continued talking about servers and hard drives on the phone. Mary closed the door on his conversation and put the kettle on. ‘Coffee?’
They both nodded and smiled.
‘Have you heard anything at all?’ Gina had to ask before they started.
Mary pulled three mugs off the shelf and pierced a new jar of coffee before spooning the granules into the mugs. The kettle began to growl into action, first gently, then aggressively, like an angry toddler building up to a tantrum. Gina inhaled the coffee’s scent. Opening a new jar was one of life’s simple pleasures in her world.
Mary dropped a spoon into one of the cups. ‘No, nothing.’
‘Are you alright?’
The woman wiped a tear away. ‘This is tearing my family apart. Clare is still convinced that Susan has just run off for a while,
Howard isn’t really getting involved and just makes me tea all the time. I don’t bloody well want tea, I’m sick of tea and I’m sick of no one doing anything.’
‘I can assure you that we are taking all this very seriously, Mary. I need to ask you something.’
Water spluttered out of the overfilled kettle as it hit full-on tantrum mode. Gina imagined Clare’s little boy boiling over in this manner. He was a lively toddler. As Mary poured, the water sloshed a little. She passed the coffees across the breakfast bar just in time to pull the bitty tissue from up her sleeve and catch the falling tear. ‘There’s no milk.’ A tiny fleck of tissue stuck to Mary’s cheek. Gina’s hand almost twitched, wanting to remove it for her, just like she would have done with her own mother. She clenched her fist, trying to suppress the urge.
‘Thank you.’ Mary forced a smile. Gina almost wanted to cry for her, the woman was heartbroken.
She is not my mother. She is not my mother. Gina repeated those words in her head before pulling her phone from her pocket and opening the photo that Keith had sent her. ‘We have good reason to believe that Susan knew the man who we found dead this morning, Dale Blair. I know this is a shock for you, but I have to show you a photo we found in his house today.’
‘I knew it! Now we all know that something has happened to her and that I’m not just some crazy mother who is fretting over her errant grown-up daughter.’ She bent her head to the side as she looked at the photo. ‘She can’t be more than fourteen here, but that’s definitely our Susan. My little Susie, that’s what we called her back then.’
‘Do you know the other two children?’
The woman took Gina’s phone and held it closer to the window where the sun shone through, showing off the various brown tones in Mary’s dyed hair, from chocolate to chestnut shades. ‘I recognise the boy. The kids used to pick on him because of his weight and Susan brought him home a couple of times before she ran away. I remember him being upset, in tears actually. I did what any parent would do, I let her go upstairs with him and I took them a drink up. She wasn’t up to no good with him. He was upset and she was comforting him, that’s all.’
‘Do you know his name?’ Gina knew he was called Dale but she wondered what Mary knew.
She shook her head. ‘Is that Dale? Is he the man you found by the river?’
‘We believe so. We are doing everything we can to find Susan. She is our absolute priority. Is there anything you think we should know?’
‘No! Why would I not tell you something if I thought it would bring Susan back home?’
Gina didn’t want to lose her cooperation. She backed off slightly and smiled sympathetically. ‘How about the other girl in the photo? Do you know her?’
‘I’ve never seen her before. I’m pretty good with faces.’ The girl with the long black hair and pasty complexion stared back at the camera, the intensity of her worried stare making Gina want to break away. Gina had seen that very same expression in her own face while tending to her wounds after Terry had attacked her. The girl didn’t look bruised but the fear was there, the fear that her secrets would one day surface. She glanced across at Susan and Dale, they too had a distant look about them.
‘Do you know who may have taken this photo?’
‘No. It wasn’t me, that’s for sure. I’d remember the girl if I’d taken the photo.’
‘Do you know where this photo might have been taken?’
Mary scrunched up her nose as her gaze flitted to the background of the photo. A brick wall with a few unruly brambles climbing up the one end. ‘No, I can’t say that I do.’
‘Mary, I need to ask something of you.’
A dried up tear marked its path down Mary’s cheeks, shining like a silvery stretchmark as she turned into the light.
‘May I have access to Susan’s house, to search it? I know you showed us around but we may find something else that leads us to finding Susan. We have found her car too and we will need to search that.’
‘You’ve found her car?’
Gina sipped the black coffee. ‘Yes, on Damson Close. Do you know if Susan knows anyone who lives there?’
‘No, well she’s never mentioned that she does. She knows a lot of people because of her work. She was probably picking some paperwork up.’
‘She was seen leaving Dale’s house on the day that she disappeared but her car wasn’t parked outside his house. We’re working on the belief that she parked there and walked the couple of roads to Dale’s house.’
‘That doesn’t make sense. Why would she do that?’
Jacob scribbled a few notes and blew on his hot coffee before gulping it down.
Gina was the one to shake her head this time. She was hoping that Mary could tell her the answer to the question.
‘She hasn’t been herself lately, Susan. It all seemed to start with a little reunion at the pub a few months ago. I remember her saying that she was going but I don’t think she was really looking forward to it, she seemed a bit tense. Since then, she and Ryan have split up. It was soon after that night she told him it was over. She doesn’t tell me anything. I asked her why, and nothing. I don’t even know who she was meeting at this reunion.’
‘You know why!’ Clare walked through the door. Gina hadn’t heard her creep through the front door and she must have been listening for a while to understand where they were with the conversation.
Gina had wanted to hear what Clare had to say and now was her chance. ‘What do you know?’
‘We don’t know anything. You’re just guessing at that, Clare.’
‘I’m not. Ryan told me, he’s told me a few things recently but you’d rather remain in denial. That reunion, he went there on that night and he saw her with a man. They argued and the next thing, Susan wants him gone. All this time she’s blaming him to get a divorce and she was cheating on him.’
Gina allowed her mind to wander as mother and daughter bickered. Gina turned her back to them and gazed over at the photos on the dresser. There were a few of the kids, a couple of Mary and Howard and a large family photo. Gina gazed at Susan. Ryan had his arm around her. She scrunched her eyes as she looked closer. He definitely had a crew cut. He wasn’t quite bald but it was close. In the dark, their witness, Alicia, wouldn’t have noticed if the lurker had short fair hair. Her heart rate increased as she swigged the rest of the coffee, devouring every last bit in the hope that the caffeine would pick her up but not cause her to tremble. Mary hadn’t answered her question. ‘Mary, we would need access to Susan’s house and car. Would it be okay if we took a look? We need to find Susan.’ Gina felt her hands clench as she waited for an answer. It would make their job easier if Mary said yes. At the moment, she didn’t want to treat Susan like an outright suspect, she needed to keep Mary on side. Susan may even be their next victim if the investigation didn’t get a move on.
‘She wouldn’t like that at all,’ Clare shouted.
‘But she’s not here. She’s missing and, for all I know, the same person who killed that man by the river could have Susan. Yes. Do whatever you need to do. I have all her keys and I give you full permission to use them.’ Mary stomped across the tiled floor and rummaged through her bag until she reached the bunch of keys. ‘She gives me spares of everything. I look after the kids a lot. I also went and cleaned as the place was an absolute state. The place stank of allsorts and I wanted it to be nice for her when she returned.’
Every muscle in Gina’s body relaxed and she smiled as she took them. She was a little disappointed that Mary had cleaned Susan’s house but still, they had full access to everything they’d need. She only hoped that Susan’s whereabouts would become apparent. For Mary’s sake she really did hope that Susan wasn’t involved in Dale’s murder, but she had to consider that Susan chose to park two streets away so that no one on Dale’s road would know she had visited, reducing her chances of being seen. She was now sure that Susan was in imminent danger.
‘I have this.’ Mary reached into the botto
m of the cupboard under the sink and handed over a blue shoebox.
‘I thought you were taking that back to Susan’s house. You can’t show anyone else that!’ Clare went to snatch the box but Mary slapped her hand away.
‘I can and I will. They’re just drawings and poems. Silly things she did as a kid.’ She handed the box to Gina. ‘I found it at her house. It’s probably nothing but it may help you understand my daughter better. I just want you to find her.’
Clare shook her head and stormed out of the room.
‘Thank you.’ Gina held the box under her arm. Between the box and the search, she was sure that she’d get a better insight into Susan’s character. She took one last look at the photo on her phone. Jacob was glancing over her shoulder. She swallowed the lump in her throat as she reverted back to her plain screensaver.
When they left she glanced back at the house and saw Clare stomping around the living room doing up her raincoat as she argued with her mother.
Thirty-Five
Susan Wheeler lived on the type of road any family would love to live on. A fairly new estate full of large detached houses, neatly trimmed shrubbery and not a hint of graffiti or litter. The only sound to be heard on the cold Friday afternoon was that of the distant traffic on the carriageway. As Gina pulled up behind the van and police cars, she imagined this to be the perfect cul-de-sac to bring a family up in, the perfect home Susan stood to lose in the event of a marriage breakdown. Would Susan’s share of the house only stretch to a tiny property? Possibly a maisonette maybe, located nearer to the high street. Cleevesford was quite a sought-after area and prices were higher than average for the area.
She knew from hearing stories of many a divorcee that both parties normally lost out in the end. Had this all been too much for Susan? Maybe she’d snapped. Had she been in some sort of relationship with her childhood friend, Dale? It was possible that he’d tried to end things with her. Was the copy of Jane Eyre on his bedside Susan’s?
