Safe

by Jane Adams

“Now, wherever you are, inside or out, this is with you. Within reach. The gun too. You leave the cottage, these go with you. Now, I’m going to program the phone with one number and you’re going to memorize that number, just in case, just in case you lose this phone. If the worst happens, you call that number and ask for help and tell them Harry gave it to you. You got that?”

  “Whose number is it?”

  “Hopefully, you’ll never need to find out. But if you do, if you do have to call this number, then you do exactly what they tell you. Promise me. Because if you have to call this number, it means I’m gone and you need help from someone else. This is your last resort, girl. You understand that?”

  “Harry, I don’t want to . . .”

  “I said, ‘You understand that?’” He allowed a hard edge to creep into his voice again and was satisfied when she nodded.

  “So if this is someone who can help us, why don’t we call them now?” Lauren asked.

  A fair question, Harry thought. So why didn’t they? The truth was, Harry wasn’t sure what calling this number might also bring down on their heads. He would trust his contact to help Lauren, if only because they would see some advantage in it.

  “It’s not as simple as that. Lauren, you’ve got to trust me on this. You understand? My contact will help, but there’ll likely be strings attached. And I don’t like strings.”

  She waited as though to see if he’d say more but seemed to give up when it was clear he was done with the subject.

  “If everything else goes wrong, I call that number,” Lauren said.

  “Good girl. Now, we watch a bit of telly and then we go to bed and get a good night’s sleep.”

  She looked at him, wide-eyed. Then she seemed to relax a little.

  “OK, I can do that. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to sleep, Harry, but finding a film or something would be good.”

  Lauren glanced at her watch and looked surprised. “I thought it was much later, but it’s only six thirty.”

  Harry nodded. It did feel later. The day and the previous night seemed to have stretched out in an eternity of anxiety and running and tension. She had slept in the car, despite what she had been through, but Harry knew that sometimes shock did that to a body.

  “And we’ll have hot chocolate,” Harry said. “I picked up some marshmallows, we can do hot chocolate just like we did when you were a little thing. You used to love Harry’s hot chocolate.”

  He saw Lauren blink back tears. He was trying so hard to focus on the normal and the ordinary and he needed her to try equally hard if they were to keep their spirits up.

  “I’d like that,” she said. “I’d like that, Harry.” And he could see how surprised she was to find that it was really true.

  Chapter 11

  At evening briefing, Clarke took his seat and listened as the rest of the team reported back on their day. It was finally his turn and he filled in the gaps, talking about his odd feeling about the Sykes place and then asking DS Denise Allwood about the Sykes girl.

  “Not at school today, and it took me a while to get that out of anyone. They’re all, ‘We can’t give out confidential information to anybody but parents.’ But I hung around the gates at leaving time, and asked one of the girls, who looked about Lauren’s age, if Lauren had left yet. Said I had a message for her from her dad. She looked at me a bit funny, but she told me that Lauren hadn’t been at school. So I looked worried and she said she’d tried phoning Lauren but got no answer on her phone. Goes by the name of Sophie Richardson, apparently in the same class, so I struck lucky. Then one of the teachers came out and wanted to know what I was doing there, and Sophie’s mum came over and hustled her daughter away. I had to explain who I was to the teacher, but by that time everybody had gone. Sorry.”

  “Find an address for this Sophie Richardson,” Clarke instructed her.

  “Anything from the post-mortem?” DCI Henderson asked.

  “Nothing conclusive, but again, the whole thing stinks.”

  Someone cracked a joke about dead bodies tending to have a bit of an odour. Someone else laughed. Clarke ignored them. He indicated photographs on the operations board. “As you can see, a good chunk of face is missing, brain, back of head. Blast caught him full on this side of the face so anything that might have happened before, will have been mostly obliterated.”

  “Mostly?”

  “Probably completely,” Clarke conceded. “But there is one small thing which is interesting.” He indicated another photograph. “This section of skull, you can see the break where the rest is shattered and at first, we thought it was simply that. But you look more closely and there’s a distinct curve on this section and a particularly distinctive pattern, star cracking around it. If you looked at a single bullet wound, and the skull was otherwise intact, this is what you’d see.” He pointed to the drawing that Si had made for him. “It might be nothing, it might just be a chance artefact, but it is suggestive.”

  “Suggestive of what? That someone shot him first, then fired a shotgun in his face to cover it up?”

  Clarke shrugged. “It’s a small anomaly, probably nothing.”

  “Note it,” his boss agreed. “If it’s nothing, no harm done. What’s the interest in Sykes’s daughter?”

  “We caught a rumour, a couple of weeks back, that the Perrins were looking at wedding venues. Charlie is the only unmarried Perrin, or was. You put that together with the rumours that the Perrin and the Sykes OCGs are planning combined operations, and it again is suggestive.”

  “Lauren Sykes is just a kid,” someone objected.

  “She’s seventeen. She’s legal. Carole Perrin was only a year older when she became Carole Josephs.”

  “And Josephs is now Perrin’s right-hand man. Though you didn’t see him today?”

  “No, I spoke direct to the boss. Carole Josephs said her husband was away. To be honest, when I went to the cottage, I didn’t get the impression of a man living there with her. It struck me as being her place. The kid’s away at school, I believe.”

  “Thomas Josephs. Yes.”

  Clarke was thoughtful for a moment. “And do we have anything on this other woman, this Sam Barker?”

  Detective Constable Janice Owens stood up. She had a sheaf of papers in her hands. She came to the front and asked Clarke to start passing them along. “There’s not much, but her background is interesting. She started working for Carole Josephs about two years ago and is her PA and studio assistant. She’s got a PhD in History of Art, studied at the Courtauld Institute which I’m told is pretty high-end and she’s arranged four exhibitions for Carole Josephs in the last couple of years. She’s only twenty-nine but seems to have some really good industry connections and she seems to know her stuff. She studied art restoration at the Courtauld and she’s had a couple of solo exhibitions. She’s a painter, not a sculptor.”

  “And anything interesting in her background?” Clarke could feel the excitement and guessed Owens had something up her sleeve.

  “Barker’s her mother’s name — her mother reverted after she got divorced. But Dad is far more interesting. Timothy Hughes O’Farrell. Originally from round here, but . . .”

  “Took himself off to Manchester about fifteen years ago. Made a name for himself up there. Killed in an armed robbery, if I remember right,” DCI Henderson commented.

  Clarke raised an eyebrow at his boss. “You’ve got a good memory.”

  “I arrested him once or twice. Before he graduated to the armed robbery gig. Right little scrote he was. Then he got married and seemed to straighten himself out for a bit, or at least I don’t remember him being arrested for anything. Marriage didn’t last and he was back to his old ways again. I don’t know what happened to the wife, she left town and took the kid with her.”

  “And now the kid is back and working for the Perrins. Gus Perrin will have checked her out. His background checks would put MI5 to shame.”

  “She has no record. Not even a parking fine.” />
  “Does she live at the farm?” Clarke asked, skimming down the sheet he had been given. “Ah.” The current home address was recorded at the bottom of the other side. “So she’s shacked up with someone called Marty Baines. What do we know about him?” The name ran a vague bell, but he could not place the man.

  Owens was ahead of him. “No record, he sometimes drives for Perrin, but not in that way. He’s actually employed as Perrin’s physio. Does hydrotherapy sessions with him in the pool and that sort of stuff. Like the rest of his employees, Perrin insists he lives on site and they’ve got a cottage right on the edge of the estate, just where the boundary meets the village. I’ve got his bank records, nothing untoward, or with hers. They don’t seem to pay rent on the accommodation, but they pay their own utilities and food. Council tax . . .”

  She trailed off as though suddenly disappointed that there was nothing more to tell, but it was interesting, Clarke thought, to get even more of an insight into the way Perrin ran his business. Like Sykes, he had moved into more legitimate areas in the last decade but Clarke assumed this had been largely so that he could launder his money from the less legitimate areas. And it seemed in keeping with the way Perrin liked his life to be organized that he should want his own personal physiotherapist living on site. He wondered if this Marty Baines was fully comprehending of Perrin’s organization. He’d have to be completely stupid not to know what Perrin was.

  “And no sign of Harry Prentice?” he asked. “Sykes reckoned he might have gone fishing.” There was laughter in the room at the idea that Harry Prentice might do anything as peaceful as sitting on a riverbank.

  “Anything further on the fire?” DCI Henderson asked.

  Clarke consulted the notes he had been looking through earlier. “Not much more than we knew this morning. Four points of combustion, petrol as the accelerant. It looks as though cans were emptied out and left in situ. Everything would have gone up pretty fast. The fires had already been started, is the guess, by the time the patrol car came by. The arsonists were almost unlucky.”

  “I’ve had a word,” Henderson said. “Suggested that they should have continued with the pursuit, just radioed in. But they were understandably worried about anyone being inside and potential threat to life overrides other concerns.”

  “They made the best call they could under the circumstances,” Clarke said.

  Henderson nodded. “So let’s summarise what we have here,” he said. “We have the death of Charlie Perrin. We have Harry Prentice AWOL and his house burned to the ground. We have a seeming absence of personnel at the Sykes place and Sykes’s daughter also seems to have buggered off. We have rumours of a proposed marriage between the two families. The groom’s now dead and the girl nowhere to be found . . . Of course, she might just be staying with friends. She might be playing hooky for the day, but I personally can’t see Kyle Sykes allowing his daughter to be anywhere but under his eye.”

  “Just because she wasn’t at school, doesn’t mean there’s anything up, Allwood commented. “She could simply be off school sick.”

  “In which case, the school would have been informed. They insist on that. Her class teacher would have known and so her friend would probably have known, too. Besides, what teenager fails to answer their phone?” Clarke knew he was playing devil’s advocate and Denise could probably be right. But that feeling remained, nagging at the back of his brain, that things were not right at the Sykes place. That something else was going on here.

  “So we presume the girl is missing,” Clarke decided, looking to his boss for approval.

  Henderson nodded.

  “And we assume that Charlie Perrin’s cause of death has been fudged or otherwise lied about.”

  “We assume that’s possible.” Henderson was a little more chary of agreeing to that. “But, yes, we keep an open mind.”

  “Do you think the two things are linked?” Allwood sounded almost contemptuous of the idea and, glancing around the room, Clarke could see that others felt the same way.

  “She’s just a kid.”

  “Agreed, she’s just a kid.” DCI Henderson nodded. “But she’s Kyle Sykes’s kid, not some little innocent who knows nothing about anything. I’m inclined to agree that the two incidents may be linked. I’m more interested in the fact that Harry Prentice seems to have gone off the radar at the same time as Lauren Sykes. Prentice and his wife practically raised the kid after her mum was murdered.”

  “And we all know what Harry Prentice was, back in the day,” Clarke added.

  “And that was?” Allwood asked.

  She was still relatively new to the team, Clarke remembered, as she cast him a puzzled look.

  “Harry did time for GBH and conspiracy to murder,” he explained. “Though Sykes’s legal team got him off on a technicality that led to a retrial.”

  “But he was guilty?”

  Clarke waited until the knowing sniggers from various members of the team had died down.

  “Anything or anyone Kyle Sykes wanted dealt with and Harry was the one to do it. Harry was Kyle Sykes’s triggerman. Sykes wanted someone out of the way — Harry saw it was done.”

  Chapter 12

  Sophie Richardson was on the phone to her friend Cora. “You mean she’s gone missing?” Sophie was both impressed and a little scared at the idea. “No, no one’s found her yet. But there was that woman asking questions outside the school. Did you see her? She had this, like, reddish hair and a scruffy old coat on.”

  Cora had not seen the woman. Sophie remembered that she’d already left by then. “I thought it was funny when Miss Harris didn’t know where she was today. She’d not called in sick, anything. What did her dad say?”

  “Only that he was worried about her. He wanted to know if she’d said anything. But I mean, Lauren never says anything.”

  Sophie laughed. Wasn’t that the truth? She’d done tennis club and swimming club and music with Lauren, all after-school activities that had thrown a group of them together. Lauren was friendly and that, but she was always a bit distant. “Do you think she sounded a bit weirder than usual this last week or two? I mean, that day when Miss Bence was talking about all our A-levels and she said something like, ‘I probably won’t be here for them anyway, so what does it matter?’”

  “Do you think she was thinking of running away, then? Do you think she’s been kidnapped? I mean, I know her dad’s meant to be loaded.”

  “What, like yours, you mean?” Sophie could hear her mother calling her from downstairs. Something about a phone call. She wondered immediately if Lauren’s dad was calling her home as well. After all, she and Cora were probably the closest Lauren had to what you might call friends in the entire school. “Got to go, Mum says there’s a phone call down on the house phone. Do you think it’s him?”

  Moments later, she was telling a very polite-sounding Kyle Sykes she had no idea where his daughter might’ve gone to. That, yes, she did extra classes with Lauren, and that, yes, they did the swimming club together and the school orchestra. No, they didn’t get much chance to talk about anything. It wasn’t like Lauren ever came to sleepovers or anything like that. And, no, she didn’t know who else Lauren might be close to.

  “Close to,” she said to her mother after she’d hung up the phone. “No one’s close to Lauren Sykes.”

  “She’s come here a time or two,” her mother objected. “She came to the barbecue in the summer and I think one time before that, didn’t she?”

  Sophie rolled her eyes. “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean we’re close. She isn’t like the rest of us. She’s dead serious. And anyway, you didn’t like it when she came here for the barbecue. Uncle Andrew said something about her dad, and then you got all worried and you were so pleased when she went home early.” She looked at her mother, letting the observation hang. She’d listened into the adult conversations, of course, the almost-row that Sophie’s mum and dad had had later in the evening. The one that implied that Lauren’s father was not jus
t a businessman but was a criminal as well.

  “Yes, well. She seemed like a very nice girl, that’s all I can say. And hopefully nothing’s happened to her. Are the police involved, did Mr Sykes say?”

  Sophie shook her head. She was already on her way back upstairs, eager to let Cora know this latest bit of gossip. Eager to speculate and to find out who else Mr Sykes had phoned that evening.

  * * *

  Lauren curled up next to Harry on the small sofa. She’d brought a blanket from the bed and sat with it round her shoulders, with a mug of Harry’s hot chocolate in her hands. They were watching Die Hard. She had watched the film many times, as had Harry, but they heckled and cheered and held their breath in the tense moments and just forgot themselves for a while. By ten o’clock, Lauren was drooping with exhaustion and the film was almost ending. She was relieved when everything was done and dusted and she could legitimately take herself off to bed.

  Harry hugged her. “Go get some sleep,” he said. “I’m just going to have a quick look outside.”

  She couldn’t bring herself to move until he was back. It seemed like forever but in reality was only about five minutes. He seemed unsurprised to see her still on the sofa, staring absently at the television.

  He switched it off. “It’s a filthy night out there. The wind is coming off the sea and bringing the rain with it. You can’t see a hand in front of your face.” He seemed quite happy with that, apparently taking solace in the idea that nobody would want to be out on a night like this. “Off to bed with you now.” He picked up the mobile phone, the gun, and a package of cash off the table and handed them to her.

  It was like being slapped with a dose of reality. Lauren found again that she wanted to cry. But instead, she hugged Harry goodnight and went to her room. She put her coat on the back of the chair next to the bed, her jeans and jumper where she could grab them quickly and her shoes, unlaced, beside the bed. Shove your feet in your shoes, tuck the laces in so you don’t slip on them, and get out. That’s what Harry had told her. Money in the pocket of your coat, phone in the other one, gun by the bed on the bedside table. She had planned her possible routes out of the cottage, thinking about all eventualities. The doors, the window, where she could hide if they got into the cottage and she was still there. Harry had left the keys to the four-by-four in the ignition, just in case. She’d never driven anything like his big car, but she figured she could manage if she had to.