The woman on the floor stretches out her arm. ‘Sal, get me some paracetamol, please. I am … so sick.’
‘You’d better go to bed and sleep it off,’ says the older woman sarcastically. ‘I doubt if you’ll be able to keep the paracetamol in your stomach anyway.’ She gazes at me, making up her mind. ‘Okay then. Sally, this man would like to speak to you. He’s police. It’s about one of your friends at school.’
Glancing at me suspiciously, the girl shrugs. Grabbing a hooded sweatshirt from the coat rack, she pulls the zipper up to her chin. ‘I know. Bradley told me.’ She nods and begins pinning her dull dark blonde hair up onto her head, a plastic band ready between her teeth.
‘Perhaps it’s best if you come outside,’ I say gently.
The older woman screws her eyes half shut, still uncomfortable with the whole situation. ‘Okay, but only for ten minutes. And you stay within my sight, Sally. Understood?’
‘Yes Nan.’
We take a seat on a bench almost opposite the house. The grass is short and thin, recently sown and cut showing bare patches. A nearby bin is overflowing with plastic bags, and dog waste is dumped at the foot of the pole.
'Is this about school?' she asks, which reminds me that she didn't go to school today and there is clearly nothing wrong with her health.
'No.'
‘My mum’s not always like that,’ Sally says apologetically, sitting down and pulling her feet up, hugging her knees and resting her chin on the faded fabric of her jeans.
‘I’m not here to talk about your mother,’ I say slowly.
‘Am I in trouble? Or mum?’
‘Have you done something illegal?’
‘Nope.’
‘Then you needn’t worry.’ I smile reassuringly and see her bright blue eyes soften. ‘It’s Leanne Lobb I’d like to talk about.’
‘Oh.’ Her face turns red, and I notice a vein begin to throb in her neck.
‘I don’t know anything about Leanne, sir.’
‘I think you do, Sally. I’m told you are her friend.’
‘No. Siobhan is her friend. They are always together.’ Hurt has long ago mixed with acceptance of the inevitable.
‘Sally, Leanne wasn’t at school today. She didn’t go home last night. Do you have any idea where she might be?’
She hesitates long enough to suggest that she knows something. ‘No, I don’t.’ A pause. ‘What does Siobhan say?’
‘I haven’t spoken to her yet.’ I try to sound casual. I called Siobhan Carter’s address but there wasn’t anyone at home. Along with the school's rather odd policies, I wasn't offered mobile phone numbers. ‘You weren’t at school today either.’
‘No.’ Her head drops and she doesn’t answer. Instead, she changes the subject completely.
‘I don’t like it here. I don’t like it here at all. They think we’re filth.’ She looks round accusingly, gesturing at the semi-detached houses similar to that of her grandmother’s. Most drives are empty and none of the net curtains have moved since we sat down on the bench.
‘You’ve recently moved here, haven’t you? You must give them a chance.’
‘They don’t give us a chance!’ An outburst of hurt and fury.
As if on cue, a neighbour appears from behind a garage. He doesn’t look in our direction but I’m sure he’s seen us. He is with a dog, black with a white spot round one eye, like he’s wearing a white patch. He looks as though he’s going to crush anything he can set his teeth in, preferably a living creature or a human body part. Pulling the leash, the man is barely strong enough to keep the dog at bay. I look at Sally, who still has her feet up on the edge of the bench, wishing I could do the same.
‘He’s one of the worst.’ Sally speaks with a subdued voice. I’m not sure if she means the dog or its owner.
As I gather my thoughts to find a way to tackle the reason for this conversation, I watch the dog dragging his owner along, rather than the other way round. He is sniffing the ground, stopping to lift a leg at each post holding a letter box – front doors are not close enough for postmen to deliver the mail quickly.
The dog halts on the pavement. The owner, forced to stop with him, looks away to pretend not to notice that the dog has crouched down to relieve himself.
‘And he thinks we are filth,’ Sally says, emphasizing the fourth word with a mixture of anger and disgust. Her voice is loud enough for the man to hear her. ‘He doesn’t even clean up the mess.’
The man moves on, carefully avoiding the dog mess in the middle of the pavement. No poo bag is pulled out of a pocket, not even to scoop it up and move it towards the gutter.
‘I hate it here,’ Sally continues. ‘I liked it better when we lived on the estate.’
‘Which was where?’
‘Near Leanne’s.’
‘Penmarric Drive?’
‘Yeah.’ She nods gravely, pointing with her chin towards her grandmother's house. ‘Mum got into arrears with the rent.’ A statement rather than an expression of hurt or shame. ‘We couldn’t stay there. We barely had time to take our stuff when Col came to collect us.’
‘Col?’ I would like to change the subject again and find out about Leanne’s possible whereabouts, but Sally is fidgety and nervous and I don’t want her to run off.
‘Uncle Colin.’ She shrugs indifferently. ‘We have to call him uncle, but he’s our Nan’s new man.’
‘Your step granddad?’
Her smile lights up her face and I can see beauty lurking. ‘They’re not married, thankfully. He’s two years older than my mum. He could be her brother, says mum, so that’s why they think it’s more appropriate for me and Brad to call him uncle.’ The flatness in her voice speaks volumes. It explains how her life must have been to date, why she doesn’t seem impressed by her changed circumstances.
‘He has his own room. Uncle Colin. A fitness room. He spends hours in there, but I think he watches porn films rather than use his exercise machines.’
‘Does he have a job?’ I ask sympathetically.
She shrugs. ‘They say that our Nan once won the lottery.’
‘I see,’ I say, wondering whether she overheard someone and hasn’t understood it was meant as a euphemism.
‘We’re in the spare room,’ she continues in the same flat tone. ‘Mum, Bradley and me. I sleep on the floor on an inflatable mattress that deflates about three times each night.’ She stops to show a rueful smile. ‘If I’d known that, I would have carried my bed on my shoulders.’
I glance at my watch. Her grandmother strikes me as a strict woman who sticks to her own rules. Sally was only allowed ten minutes. Eight have already gone. ‘Tell me about school yesterday. Did you hear anything about any plans Leanne might have had? A secret perhaps?’
'No. I'm sorry.'
‘So you have no idea where Leanne went yesterday after school?’
'No.'
'Do you have any idea where we can find her?'
‘No.' She pauses, staring at her tattered trainers. They have bright yellow laces. ‘Have you looked on … like Facebook?’
It hasn’t even crossed my mind, but I realise that it would be the first place to find out about someone nowadays. Especially with teenagers. More likely one of my younger colleagues has already been investigating Facebook.
‘I’d like you to tell me.’
‘I can’t help you, sir. You’d best speak with Siobhan.’ Avoiding my eyes, hers follow the man and his dog disappearing into a back garden, the proof of their outing still present on the pavement.
‘If there is anything you remember, or if you hear something, please call me, Sally.’ I hand her my card and, without a word, she slides it into her trouser pocket.
‘Mum had a bad day,’ she says slowly, not meeting my eyes. ‘My Nan said I had to stay with her, clean up, make sure she didn’t come out of our room.’ The statement holds no emotion, not even an inkling about her real feelings.
Then there is a small girlish giggle. ‘I had to
make sure mum kept quiet. My Nan’s bridge friends came this morning, you know. Mum would be too much of an embarrassment.’
7
The sky is filled with rain when I pull out of the cul-de-sac, leaving Sally on the bench, staring at me. I turn on the radio and just pick up the tail end of live coverage of a terrorist threat in the White River shopping centre in St Austell, which turned out to be a false alarm. A 34-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of wasting police time. Two relatives, a couple of about the same age, are being questioned.
Before she disappears from view as I turn the corner, I see in the rear mirror that Sally has lowered her feet and is swinging her legs frantically. Her body language suggests guilty relief. She couldn’t tell me anything useful about Leanne, but I can’t dismiss the feeling that she hasn’t told me everything she knows.
By the time I drive into Newquay, it is raining. Hard. The air is cold. Wipers sweep full speed. Tyres splash through puddles and headlights of oncoming vehicles seem to evaporate in the spray that creates a mist above the tarmac.
The car park at the rear of my apartment is almost empty and I park as close to the entrance as I can. I have to negotiate a shopping bag with too many items in it and an umbrella that has two broken spokes and flips inside out with every gust of wind. Water drips down inside my collar, trickling down my spine. There is a smell of autumn in the air already, although it is only the beginning of September.
I’ve always liked autumn but now I feel like I’ve missed out on something. Perhaps it’s because this summer hasn’t been good to me. The shock of the disease, surgery and its aftermath, the murder case that involved so many more deaths than I had anticipated, the girl in the hospital, the murderer waiting for the first day in court. If it ever comes to that.
My flat is cold and damp, the windows are obscured by gusts of wet wind. Turning on the heater, I wake my laptop from hibernation and find a different phone number of Siobhan Carter’s family in BT’s directory. Victor Carter. The name sounds slightly familiar, but I can’t remember how or why I have heard of him.
Sally mentioned Facebook. Newspaper articles spring to mind. Notifications shared by hundreds of so-called friends, sending open invitations to parties while parents have gone out for a weekend break or a well-earned holiday. Binge drinking parties, drugs and whatever is in fashion, making a mess of the parent’s home, damaging property, leaving a mess.
Leanne is fourteen, her friend is one year younger. I’m not sure if I’m too old to think that the girls are too young for that kind of behaviour. Somehow, Leanne's parents and her mentor at school gave me the impression that she is young and innocent, but perhaps that vision is clouded by too much parental and adult love. I presume it depends who her friends are and how much she is influenced by them.
I’ve spoken with Sally in person, which seems a bit silly now that I recall that people, especially the young, tend to use social media – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram – to tell everyone what they’re doing. Some people warn of the dangers of doing this, claiming that every detail of our lives is now stored somewhere in the digital warehouses of numerous databases. Waiting for disasters. We may all be concerned about our personal privacy, but that doesn’t seem to exist in the virtual world. We perceive it as unreal, which makes us careless about the potential dangers.
But to find out more about Leanne, I decide to register online on some of these websites and make contact with new ‘friends’. I find that daunting in itself. I don’t have many friends in real life and I’ve never seen the point of befriending strangers for no other reason than that they’re somehow connected to other people I vaguely know. Perhaps I’m cynical, perhaps I have seen enough in my police career to be wary and careful.
Eventually, I find Leanne through Sally’s list of friends. She calls herself Leanne Jayne, not Leanne Lobb. She has 367 friends, varying from friends from school to family relatives – and a lot of others I can’t place straightaway. Her profile picture is a selfie, face cut off at the chin, the shape slightly distorted because of the angle, making her forehead large and her eyes and nose bulge. I recognise her from the little gap between her front teeth. Other pictures are very much alike. Almost all are selfies, cut off randomly, either with or without Siobhan Carter. None with a boy or a young man that might be a reason for her disappearance. I scroll through her ‘posts’, ‘likes’, ‘shares’ and ‘comments’. People tend to post and share interesting or funny information. I find most of them irrelevant and boring. Cats that can sing, dogs running round chasing their own tail, a video of a parrot in a cage cursing the life out of any normal human being. Poems and sayings, clothes and shoes. But there is also a world of information about a 14-year-old schoolgirl. I have never met her, but I know her taste in music, what clothes and shoes she would love to own, where she went on holiday the last few years, the fact that her 6-year-old rabbit died two months ago. But there is nothing to help me to find her.
Feeling somehow that I have failed, I call her father, hoping that she has come home and that he is now too embarrassed, having made a fuss by calling the police, to let me know she’s safe and sound.
‘Not a word from her, inspector.’ His voice is low as if he’s already given up hope.
‘Police are looking for her, Mr Lobb,' I say, feeling the weight of responsibility on my shoulders. 'I have no doubt we will find her sooner rather than later.’
‘I hope so.’ He doesn't believe it.
‘Do you have a Liaison Officer with you, Mr Lobb?’
‘Yes. Isabel Ward. She’s very helpful. Elsie’s gone to her sister for a while.’
‘If there is anything I can do for you …’ I try to sum up statistics about missing persons, how many actually return safely, almost always with quite innocent explanations about where and why they went, but he can only think of what he’s seen on TV and read in newspapers: dead bodies in ditches, hit by a car, or worse, victims of rape left to die alongside a deserted country lane.
‘She’s been gone for hours, inspector.’ His next question, unspoken, hangs in the thin air between us: why haven't the police found her yet?
‘We will find her, Mr Lobb,’ I say but somehow I don’t sound convincing, I know it’s not very professional, but I feel emotionally involved, as if I knew and care for the girl personally.
Returning to my laptop, I get her Facebook page back on screen and scrutinize it again, eventually finding what might be hidden secrets in comments on previous posts. And there it is: a brief comment on someone else’s post about a new song by a recently discovered talent in pop music. ‘I am soooo excited!!’ Leanne responds.
The comment was posted at ten past four on the afternoon she disappeared, about an hour after she left school. Which tells me that at that moment she was safe and happy. Excited.
The only person I can think of who might shine a light on this for me, is her best friend, Siobhan Carter.
8
Although many people have cancelled their landlines and only rely on mobile phones and internet connections, I haven’t and don’t. I’m from a slightly older generation and as mobile phones don’t always work in my area, not even at home sometimes, I still have a landline and an old-fashioned answer phone. I punch in the number of Siobhan’s home and, although the phone is picked up by someone almost immediately, there is no accompanying voice responding. I hear heavy breathing, a click, hissing and whispers, and eventually a voice.
‘Hello?’ Curt and loud.
‘Is that Mr. Carter?’
‘Yes?’ His voice drops to a whisper and I can hear his footsteps loud on a laminated floor as he is taking the phone somewhere more private.
‘Who is this?’
‘I’d like to speak to Siobhan.’
More footsteps, muffled voices and the quick tapping on a keyboard. A silence follows and I wonder briefly if I’ve dialled the wrong number. Then there is another click. Dry and crisp. He has put me on speakerphone.
‘What do you
want?’ His voice echoes vaguely against the walls.
I have seen his picture on the website of his company: a man in his early forties, a friendly smile that causes creases alongside his eyes. His eyes, invisible on the photo as he narrowed them against the light, gave the impression that they too were soft and friendly. Hearing his voice changes my first impression of him abruptly.
Deciding that I’d better come to the point quickly before he cuts me off, I assume that I am speaking to the right person.
‘Mr Carter, I have information that your daughter is …’
‘Wait!’ He clears his throat like a smoker who every morning gets out of bed and has to deal with lungs half blocked with phlegm. ‘Wait! Ehm ... my daughter?’ He sounds as though he is unsure he has a daughter.
‘Siobhan.’
There is a long silence. I hear subdued sounds in the background, someone opening a door, a high-pitched female voice asking if anyone wants more coffee or tea. It feels like I have interrupted an important meeting until I hear a woman’s voice, breaking, ‘Oh my God!’
‘Who is this?’ he barks in my ear.
I can almost imagine him pacing up and down, hands on his back, every so often gesticulating to express what he means. He is like a caged tiger, impatient and with suppressed frustration by nature.
‘Is Siobhan at home?’
This time the silence lasts so long that I almost believe the connection is lost. ‘Hello? Mr Carter?’
‘Who are you?’
‘I really do need to talk to Siobhan, Mr. Carter. It is important.’
‘She’s ... No. You can't.’
'Is she ill?'
'Ehm ... yes.'
'But this is an important matter, Mr Carter. A matter of life or death. Police are ...'
‘No. Police got nothing to do with it.' A brief silence, heavy uncontrolled breathing, arguing voices in the background.
'Listen, mate, stop calling me and wasting my time.'
What every body is saying: DI Tregunna Cornish Crime novel Page 6
