by A J McDine
She clasped her hands together. ‘Anything.’
‘You can stop spreading lies to your obnoxious little shit of a son. The last thing Nate needs right now is to be told his sister is dead.’ I looked over her shoulder to the school gates and saw Nate trailing out, dragging his bag on the ground behind him. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, I’d better go.’ I fixed her with an icy glare. ‘I’d like to say it was a pleasure, Octavia, but I’m afraid I’d be lying.’
‘They haven’t found Immy yet, have they?’ Nate said as we walked back to the car.
‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘How did you know?’
‘Because you would’ve brought her with you to pick me up.’
‘I would,’ I agreed. ‘How was school?’
‘It was all right.’
‘Did Fergus give you any grief?’
A glimmer of a smile. ‘I told him his mum was a cow.’
‘Nice work, kiddo. And I told his mum he’s an obnoxious little… oh shit.’ I swiped the parking ticket from the windscreen of the car and scoured the street, spotting a traffic warden tucking another ticket under the windscreen wiper of a white Range Rover Sport a few cars away. Blood pounded in my ears as I marched up to him and slapped the ticket on his chest. ‘My daughter is missing, and you have the bloody cheek to give me a parking ticket. Well, you can take your ticket and you can shove it up your…’
‘Mum!’ Nate cried, tugging my arm. ‘Don’t.’
The traffic warden took a step back. ‘I should advise you, madam, that I’m wearing a camera.’
My hand fell to my side. Christ, what was wrong with me? I was usually so self-controlled. The traffic warden, meanwhile, gave a small start of recognition. ‘You’re Imogen Cooper’s mum, aren’t you?’
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
‘Thought so. I saw you on the lunchtime news. We’ve been asked to keep an eye out for her.’
Nate squeezed my hand. ‘That’s good, isn’t it, Mum?’
I squeezed his hand back and found my voice. ‘It is. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have lost my temper. I know you’re only doing your job. It was the final straw today, you know?’ To my shame, my voice was thick with emotion.
‘No problem, Mrs Cooper. I understand.’ He pointed at the ticket crunched up in my hand. ‘Unfortunately, I can’t rip it up once I’ve issued it, but if you appeal, I’m sure the council will take your circumstances into consideration.’
‘It’s OK, it’s only money.’ My eyes fell to the camera on his chest. It was so obvious I didn’t know how I hadn’t noticed it before. But rage had blinded me. ‘I really am sorry. You won’t be…’ I faltered.
‘Don’t you worry yourself, Mrs Cooper. Damn thing’s been playing up all day,’ he said with a wink.
‘Thank you so much.’ I slipped the parking ticket into my bag. ‘Come on, Nate, we’d better leave the nice traffic warden in peace.’
‘We’re civil enforcement officers these days, Mrs Cooper. We haven’t been traffic wardens for years. I hope you find little Imogen.’
Back in the car, I folded my arms on the steering wheel and groaned. Nate eyed me anxiously.
‘What’s wrong, Mummy?’
What could I tell him? That Fergus bloody Barton and his frightful mother were probably right about Immy, and we were the idiots for still believing she might be alive? That his dad was in love with his godmother and, for all I knew, was planning to leave us? That my life, my ordered, perfect, enviable life, began spiralling out of control the minute Immy vanished from our garden and was now in danger of imploding?
Instead, I lifted my head and smiled at him. ‘Nothing, sweetheart. I’m fine. Listen, I need to pop into work on the way home.’ His face fell. ‘I’ll be quick, I promise.’
‘What will I do at your work?’
‘You can watch CBeebies on my phone.’
‘I’m too old for CBeebies.’
‘I’ll find you some pens and paper and you can do some drawing.’
‘Will Sheila be at your work?’
I nodded.
‘All right then, I’ll come.’
I pulled up beside Sheila’s Fiat 500. Bill’s Range Rover was nowhere in sight. He was cutting it fine if he was going to make his meeting. It was a good job I dropped by.
Nate scrabbled out of the car before I’d unclipped my seatbelt. He stood on tiptoes and tapped the passcode into the keypad. I followed him along the corridor towards the small suite of offices at the back.
Sheila looked up from her computer in confusion.
‘Cleo, I wasn’t expecting to see you today. And Nate. What a lovely surprise.’
I dumped my bag on the floor by her desk. ‘I wanted to join Bill for his meeting.’
‘Meeting?’
‘He told me not half an hour ago that he was meeting a supplier at three-thirty. I couldn’t see his car. Is he running late?’
Sheila turned to her screen and began tapping at her keyboard. ‘Let me check his diary.’ She nodded to herself, then glanced at me. ‘There is a meeting, but it’s at the supplier’s depot.’
I drummed my fingers on her desk, frustrated at the wasted journey. ‘Which suppliers?’
She turned back to the screen. ‘Blackberry Organics.’
‘Do you have their address?’
‘I don’t, Cleo. I’m sorry. You know what Bill’s like. He keeps everything in here.’ She tapped the side of her head.
‘When he makes an appearance, can you ask him to phone me?’
‘Of course.’ She bit her lip. ‘I expect you’re getting fed up with people asking, but is there any news about Immy?’
‘No,’ I said in a heavy voice. ‘There’s no news.’
Chapter Twenty-One
‘Change of plan,’ I said to Nate, picking up my bag. ‘We’re going home.’
‘But I’m thirsty,’ he whined.
‘I have some of those Fruit Shoots you like in the car,’ Sheila said. Seeing my raised eyebrows, she added, ‘I popped down to Asda in my lunch-hour. I hope that’s OK?’
‘Of course. You are allowed a lunch-hour, Sheila. I just didn’t think Fruit Shoots were your thing.’
‘Mother’s taken a fancy to them,’ she said. ‘They’re easy for her to sip now her Parkinson’s makes holding a cup so difficult.’
For a moment I forgot about my own problems and looked at my secretary properly. Shadows ringed her eyes, and her make-up looked as if she’d applied it in the dark. Normally her favoured white blouse and dogtooth checked polyester trousers were starched to within an inch of their lives, but today her blouse looked rumpled, as if she’d plucked it out of the wash that morning. What must it be like, having to juggle caring for a frail parent with a full-time job? Yet not once had Sheila complained when I’d left her holding the fort after Immy went missing.
‘Sheila, is everything OK?’
She pushed her chair back and ferreted around in her bag for her car keys. ‘Don’t you be worrying about me. I’m fine.’ She smiled at Nate. ‘Shall we find those Fruit Shoots, little man?’
Before I followed them out, I peeked at Sheila’s computer screen to see if Bill had included the name of the person from Blackberry Organics he was meeting. My eyes narrowed as I checked and rechecked his schedule for the day. Apart from a nine o’clock meeting with our head chef Nigel, it was empty.
The four o’clock pips were sounding as I turned into our street.
‘Mum, there’s a police car outside the house,’ Nate said.
Adrenalin surged through me, and my grip on the steering wheel tightened.
‘D’you think they’ve found Immy?’ he asked.
I closed my eyes for the briefest of moments. ‘I hope so.’
Stuart must have seen the car pull up because the front door swung open as we approached. I could tell by his face that the news wasn’t good.
‘What’s happened?’ I demanded, as Nate ran past us, dragging his bag behind him as he raced up the stairs, t
hump, thump, thump.
‘Sam Bennett’s been here for the last half an hour. She has an update on the search, but she wanted to wait until you were home so she could tell us together.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Where the hell have you been? I told her you’d be home by half three.’
‘I had to pop into the office,’ I said, my hackles rising. How dare he question me when he was having an affair? ‘You could have called me,’ I added.
‘I did. Several times. It went straight to voicemail.’ His face darkened. ‘Fuck’s sake, Cleo. You can’t go off grid at a time like this. How the hell was I supposed to know where you and Nate were?’
I looked at my phone. It was dead. But I was meticulous about not letting the battery drop below thirty-five percent, a random figure I’d chosen so I never risked being without my primary form of communication. My chest tightened. Christ, I really was losing it.
I followed Stuart into the front room in silence. Sam Bennett placed a mug on the coffee table beside her and stood.
‘Cleo,’ she said, waving her hand at the sofa. ‘Why don’t you and Stuart sit yourselves down.’
We did as we were told. I wondered if she noticed the gap between us.
‘As you know, Immy’s disappearance was declared a critical incident yesterday morning. I’ve come from a gold group meeting at the nick and I wanted to brief you on where we are.’
Sam opened her pocket notebook, thumbing through it until she found what she was looking for. ‘We’re continuing to search the river with the help of a police underwater search unit, police dogs, Kent Search and Rescue, Kent Fire and Rescue and, as of this morning, the local coastguard. In terms of boots on the ground there are upwards of forty officers and volunteers looking for Immy.’
‘So why haven’t they found her yet?’ I said.
Sam sucked her cheeks in. ‘You live here. You know how big the search area is.’
I didn’t say anything, because I knew she was right. The river was flanked by several fishing lakes, the largest of which was over thirty acres. We loved having the lakes on our doorstep and enjoyed nothing more than a weekend walk along the riverbank with the children watching the moorhens and spotting kingfishers. But since Sunday they had assumed a sinister air, hiding infinite possibilities for harm and concealment.
‘The search of the river continues, but we also have to consider the possibility that Immy somehow let herself out of the side gate into King Street,’ Sam said. ‘It’s a short walk past the church and the allotments to the lakes.’
‘But the angling club keeps the gates locked,’ I said.
‘Most of the time,’ she agreed. ‘But a witness has come forward to tell us that the club left the gates unlocked for a period of about two hours on Sunday afternoon while a work party was clearing the banks of Stour Lake, which is the furthest lake from the angling club’s car park. So, it would be remiss of us not to search the lakes. And the entire area is crisscrossed with culverts, gullies and drainage ditches which all need checking.’
Sam gave a bright smile. ‘On a positive note, we’ve had a phenomenal response to the media appeal. No confirmed sightings of Immy yet, but it’s safe to say that the entire county is keeping an eye out for her. The special incident line has been swamped with calls.’
I licked my lips and asked the question I’d been avoiding. ‘And what about the other possibility, that someone took Immy?’
She closed her notebook and slid it into the voluminous black leather handbag at her feet. ‘DI Jones and his team are still following a number of lines of inquiry, but the most likely scenario is that she fell in the river.’
I imagined Immy’s fingers, all white and wrinkly, like she’d spent too long in the bath. Tendrils of her hair wrapping around woody bulrush stems like the arms of an octopus. I imagined her choking for breath as her little lungs filled with water. Her green eyes, wide with shock, glistening with tears. The river, once a desirable selling point for our Grade II listed home, was no longer a thing of beauty, it was a malevolent force at the bottom of the garden, spiriting my baby away.
My hands began trembling, so I sat on them and took a deep breath. ‘You think she drowned,’ I said.
‘Look, I’m not going to sugar-coat it,’ the officer said. ‘The longer Immy is missing, the higher the probability that something untoward has happened to her. But all the time there’s no evidence to the contrary, you and Stuart have to cling to the hope that she’s alive.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
I replayed Sam Bennett’s words in my head as I went upstairs to check on Nate. ‘Cling to the hope that she’s alive,’ she’d said. And she was right, I realised with sudden clarity. Until the police found a body, we had to assume Immy was alive. Because if we gave up hope, we had nothing.
I found Nate sitting cross-legged on the floor in his sister’s room, his Anakin Skywalker figurine in his hand.
‘Hey, kiddo, everything OK?’ I said, settling on the floor beside him.
‘Immy must be somewhere,’ he said, frowning. ‘She’s not Obi-Wan Kenobi. She can’t just disappear. Why can’t anyone find her?’
‘The police are doing everything they can. We need a bit of luck, that’s all.’
He turned to me with sorrowful eyes. ‘Can’t you look for her? You know her better than anybody, even though she didn’t come out of your tummy like I did.’
‘The police don’t want me getting in the way.’
‘There must be somewhere you can look.’
He was right. There was somewhere. I scrambled to my feet, and, as an afterthought, bent down to kiss his forehead. ‘You’re right. She’s not Obi-Wan Kenobi. She must be somewhere, and I’m going to see if I can find her.’
I was halfway out of the door when he called, ‘Mummy?’
‘What is it, sweetheart?’
He gave me a watery smile. ‘May the Force be with you.’
I drove along the M2 towards Chatham. It was a relief to get out of the house, away from Stuart’s misery and Sam’s professional concern, and to be doing something proactive. I turned the radio up and let the music wash over me as the Porsche chewed up the miles.
Before long, I turned off the motorway and followed the satnav past retail parks and industrial estates into the former dockyard town.
Sam had said Niamh’s last known address was a squat opposite a fish and chip shop in Chatham’s Luton Road. She said it meaningfully, like I should have heard of the place. Curious, I googled it before I set out. Not only was Luton Road the epicentre of the town’s red-light district, it was also infamous for murder, drugs and robbery, according to a local news website. One particularly disparaging critic on a site listing Britain’s worst places to live had described that area of Chatham as “the festering cesspit of Medway”. It didn’t augur well.
I felt the heat of a hundred eyes on the car as I neared the centre of town. Porsches were a rare sight, it seemed. As I stopped at a set of traffic lights, a skinny boy in a hoody and grey tracksuit bottoms leered into the driver’s side window, his face so close I could see the bum fluff on his chin.
‘Nice wheels,’ he said, slamming his hand on the roof of the car. ‘Wanna give me a ride, lady?’
I shook my head and stared at the traffic lights, willing them to turn green. The boy screeched with laughter and thumped the roof again, harder. After an eternity, the lights changed, and I hit the accelerator. The boy gave a grunt of surprise and sprang backwards. When I looked in the rearview mirror, he’d stepped into the middle of the road and was giving me the finger.
My heart was still hammering in my chest when the satnav announced I’d reached my destination a mile or so later. I pulled in behind a bus layby to slow my pulse and get my bearings.
I knew from Google Maps that Luton Road was a long, straight street lined with terraced houses interspersed with the occasional betting or vaping shop, off-licence and takeaway. Hoping there was only one fish and chip shop among them, I checked my mirrors and pulled out
, scanning left and right as I crawled along the road.
I wasn’t even halfway along when I saw a blue-painted shop frontage with a red neon sign in the window - Dockers’ Plaice. It had to be it.
Spotting a space a couple of doors down, I parked the car and checked the houses opposite the chippie. They were particularly rundown. Crumbling concrete driveways had long replaced the front gardens, and the rendering on the houses was cracked and grubby. Any of them could have been a squat. I tapped the steering wheel, wondering which one to try first.
As I sat in the car, paralysed with indecision, an elderly woman pulling a shopping trolley stopped outside one of the houses, produced a key from the pocket of her mac and let herself in the peeling, mustard-yellow front door.
I jumped out of the car, locked it, and crossed the road before I changed my mind. I knocked on the yellow door twice. Loud enough to be heard, not loud enough as to be threatening, and waited.
A dog yapped, and the door opened a fraction. The old woman, still wearing her coat, looked me up and down, her pale blue eyes appraising.
‘Yes?’ she said.
I smiled. ‘I’m sorry to trouble you, but I’m looking for an old friend of mine who lives in the area.’
The woman arched an eyebrow and cackled with laughter. ‘I think you must be mistaken, love. Your type don’t live round here.’
‘Her name’s Niamh. Niamh O’Sullivan. She’s Irish. About five foot five with long, dark red hair. I was told she lived opposite the fish and chip shop.’
‘An old friend of yours, you say?’
‘Well, not friend exactly. She was my au pair. She looked after my son.’
The old woman tutted. ‘You let a girl like that look after your son? She can’t even look after herself.’
‘You know her?’
‘She works the streets, love. Although I haven’t seen her out for a while.’ She unlatched the safety chain and a scruffy terrier bolted out and cocked his leg on a downpipe outside the house next door.
