“So you didn’t see her yesterday?”
Both Tom and Simon shook their heads.
10
After leaving Oliver Ryder’s house, Mitchell and Melissa drove out to the Goulding’s house, which was on the edge of the village. Melissa wasn’t sure what they were doing there, but didn’t ask, she was sure she would find out soon enough without doing so.
“Sergeant, constable.”
The strong, Germanic accent of Anna Becker, the Gouldings’ housekeeper, could not entirely mask her concern at finding the two police officers on the doorstep. “Have you found Lucy? I’ve heard about poor Georgina; it’s so terrible, her parents must be devastated. Nothing’s happened to Lucy, has it?”
“Not as far as we know,” Mitchell told her reassuringly. “We haven’t found Lucy, but we don’t have any reason for thinking anything has happened to her. We’re here to talk to you and Mrs Goulding, she is home, isn’t she?”
Anna Becker nodded. “She is. I’ll ask if she will see you.”
Mitchell was not happy to be left to wait on the doorstep, fortunately, he did not have to wait long.
“Mrs Goulding will see you,” Anna said when she returned.
“Good mor…” Mitchell started to say when he was shown into the office, he cut himself off when he saw that Theresa Goulding was on the phone.
“Anna said you wish to speak to me,” Theresa said once she had hung up the phone. “I assume, since you don’t have her with you, that you haven’t yet found Lucy.”
“No, not yet,” Mitchell admitted, not that he could pretend otherwise. “We’re investigating, though, to try and work out where she could have gone.”
“I hope you are having more success than you did when you investigated Georgina Ryder’s disappearance.” Theresa’s voice betrayed her doubts. “I understand that if it was not for Mr Wild, you would still be in the dark as to the whereabouts of that poor girl, and that you have no idea who is responsible for attacking her.”
Mitchell was not surprised that news of the morning’s discovery had reached Theresa, he was sure everyone in the village had heard about it by now.
“Do you know Mr Wild?” he asked, thinking that if she did it would lend weight to the theory that Lucy had returned to the village the previous afternoon to see the author.
“No, we haven’t met, yet,” Theresa dashed his hopes. “Though I have written to him regarding the charity event I am organising for next month. I don’t see that that has any relevance to Lucy’s disappearance, however, unless there’s something you need to tell me.” She fixed Mitchell with a look that would have done an interrogator proud.
“At this stage, we have nothing definite,” Mitchell told her. “But we have spoken to several people already about Lucy and her last known movements. Kelly told us she saw Lucy yesterday lunchtime, leaving school, and that she didn’t return for the afternoon session.”
“I was already aware of that. In fact, I told Inspector Stevens as much when he called to see if Lucy had returned home, as if I wouldn’t have called him straight away if she had. Surely you haven’t come here to tell me what I already know.”
Mitchell shook his head vigorously. “No, of course not, but I assume, when you spoke to Kelly…”
“I didn’t speak to Kelly,” Theresa said quickly. “It was Anna who called Lucy’s friends.”
“Yes, of course, Kelly did say as much, she also told us that as far as she knows, Lucy left school at lunchtime to return here to Oakhurst, so she could meet someone; she couldn’t say who though, Lucy didn’t tell her.”
Theresa responded to that without hesitation. “It must be Oliver Ryder. I can’t tell you how many times her father and I have spoken to her about that hooligan – too many times. I swear, she only goes out with him to annoy us. If Sir Virgil should ever find out the sort of person she is seeing, well, I don’t know how he would react, but he wouldn’t be happy. Have you spoken to him yet?”
“Sir Virgil?” Mitchell couldn’t think why he should speak to the famously tough entrepreneur.
“Oliver Ryder. Why on Earth would you think I meant Sir Virgil?” Theresa gave Mitchell no chance to answer the question. “Surely you realise that Oliver has to be your prime suspect in Georgina’s…her murder,” her voice stumbled for a moment, “and Lucy’s disappearance. You’ve never been the brightest of people, Lewis, but even you must see the connection; first his cousin disappears, after apparently leaving his house, and then Lucy, his - his girlfriend, disappears after leaving school early to come back to the village to see him.”
“We don’t know that it was Oliver Lucy came back to see,” Mitchell said, not reacting to Theresa’s out of character display of emotion. “But we will be asking him about Lucy, and about Georgina, just as soon as we catch up with him. First, though, we have some questions we need to ask you, and we need to take a look around Lucy’s room.”
“What on Earth for?” Theresa asked, startled. “Surely you don’t think you’ll find Lucy there. I can assure you, it was the first place Anna and I looked.”
Mitchell hastened to reassure Theresa. “Of course not, but we do need to search the room for anything that might tell us who Lucy was coming back to see.” He continued hurriedly when he saw that Theresa was about to speak again, “Kelly couldn’t tell us who that was, but Lucy did, apparently, indicate that the person she was meeting was someone who could make her dreams come true. Her dream, as far as Kelly is aware, being writing. Because of that, we believe she may have been intending to meet Mr Wild; we want to see if there’s anything in Lucy’s room that might indicate she knew, or had any connection with, Mr Zack Wild.”
The startled look on Theresa’s face grew. “Writing? Are you talking about Lucy’s scribblings?” She shook her head in disbelief. “You can’t believe she has a dream that has anything to do with writing. The only things Lucy dreams about are money, shopping, and causing problems for her father and me.”
“You may be right,” Mitchell said. “But we still need to check to be sure. And if it isn’t Mr Wild she was coming back to see, we might be able to find out if it was Oliver Ryder, or someone else. We might also be able to find out if there’s anyone we should be talking to that we haven’t previously thought of, anyone that might have a grudge against Lucy.”
Briefly, Theresa looked as though she was going to debate the suggestion that someone could have a grudge against her daughter. “Very well, do whatever you need to,” she said finally.
“Thank you.” Mitchell was about to leave the office when he thought of something. “If you don’t mind, can you tell us where you were yesterday afternoon, from about half one onwards?” He figured that was the earliest Lucy could have made it back to the village.
Theresa looked mortally offended. “Are you trying to suggest that I may have had something to do with Lucy’s disappearance?”
“No, of course not,” Mitchell said hastily. “I didn’t mean that at all. I just want to find out where everyone was, so I can be certain of their movements.”
Theresa did not look mollified, but she did deign to answer him after a brief pause. “I was in town from ten o’clock yesterday morning until a little after five. I was in a meeting with Beth Weald from Action on Homelessness until about midday, and after that I was working with the committee to organise the event we are running next month. If you wish to check, you’ll find that I have more than half a dozen witnesses, including Anna – she was there to help me.”
“Thank you, that saves me asking Anna where she was,” Mitchell remarked. “I’ll try and finish my search of Lucy’s room as quickly as possible so I can get out of your hair”
Melissa turned her attention from the bookcase to the housekeeper. “What should be here?” she asked, indicating the large gap on the second shelf from the bottom.
Anna left her post by the doorway and bent to examine the gap. It was a few moments before she straightened up. “Six or seven books,” she said, without seeming t
o be aware that her answer was all but useless since it was obvious that it was books that were missing.
“Who are they by?” Mitchell asked, guessing at the thinking behind Melissa’s query as he joined the two women.
Anna’s brow furrowed. “They’re all by the same person, I remember that, a man, but I can’t remember his name.” She bent again to run her eyes over the other books on the shelf. “It begins with a W. They’re big books, heavy, hardbacks; Lucy won’t take them from the room, they’re so heavy, she only reads them here. You’d think, given how many times I’ve seen Lucy reading them, I’d remember who they’re by, and what they’re called.”
Melissa frowned. “If they’re too heavy for Lucy to take them out of the room,” she said slowly, “why would she have taken them all off the shelf at the same time? You haven’t seen them anywhere around the house, have you? They’re not anywhere in the room as far as I can see.”
“No. If I had, I would have brought them back up here.”
“Do you remember when you last saw the books, and where they were?”
“Yesterday morn…” Anna started to say, before stopping so she could cast her mind back. After several moments, she nodded. “Yes, they were there yesterday morning. I did my dusting, and I remember the only gap was here.” After a brief search for the right spot, she put her finger on a book on the third shelf. “This one wasn’t here when I dusted yesterday.”
“You’re certain that that book was missing, and the other books were here, when you dusted yesterday?” Mitchell asked. When Anna nodded, he went on, “What time did you do the dusting?”
“Between half-past eight and nine o’clock; after Lucy left for school, and before I went into town with Mrs Goulding.”
“Is it possible that someone other than Lucy could have taken the books?” Mitchell asked. It didn’t surprise him when Anna shook her head. “Okay, so if Lucy is the only one who would have taken the books, and they were here when Lucy left for school yesterday, she must have come home at some point.”
“Could the books have been by someone called Zack Wild?” Melissa asked.
Anna’s face brightened and she nodded quickly. “Yes, that was it; I can’t think how I could have forgotten it, it’s such a simple name to remember.”
Melissa looked significantly at Mitchell, though her gaze quickly moved from him to the desk. “Do you want me to check it?” she asked, indicating the laptop that sat on it.
“You’ll have to,” Mitchell told her. “I wouldn’t have a clue what to do. While you do that, I’ll check the rest of the room.”
Immediately, Melissa crossed to the desk and settled into the luxurious, padded swivel chair. It was only when the Windows logo appeared on the screen that she thought to worry that the system might be password-protected – fortunately, it wasn’t.
Melissa sat and stared at the desktop screen for more than a minute, unsure how to proceed. Finally, she decided that the place to start was Lucy’s email and social media accounts; sixteen was recent enough for her to remember how keen teens were on social media, and how often they used it. The moment she accessed her email account, she saw that Lucy got more emails in a week than she got in a month. Most of the emails were notifications, of one sort or another, from social media, indicating that it was a good idea for her to check Lucy’s Facebook, Twitter and other accounts.
It took a while to go through the emails, and when she was done Melissa moved on to the social media accounts themselves. She didn’t expect to find anything on any that she hadn’t already seen in the notifications, which had had nothing to do with Lucy’s disappearance, but she had to check anyway.
“What do you make of this, Mel?”
The distraction was a welcome one and Melissa spun the chair away from the desk to get to her feet. When she reached the bed she saw that the small pile of clothes Mitchell had dumped out from the laundry basket was made up of a school uniform and some underwear.
“When did you last empty this basket, Mrs Becker?” Mitchell asked.
“Yesterday morning,” Anna answered straight away. “I put a load of laundry on before going into town with Mrs Goulding.”
“It definitely looks as though Lucy came home yesterday afternoon,” Mitchell observed.
Melissa nodded her agreement as she reached out to pick up the underwear, saying, “This is odd, though.”
“Why d’you say that?” Mitchell wanted to know. Looking extremely uncomfortable, he stared at the items in Melissa’s hand.
“Well, I can understand Lucy changing out of her uniform, if she was planning on meeting someone, especially someone like Mr Wild, she would have wanted to wear something better, but why would she change her underwear.” The look on her face conveyed her confusion. “I imagine she already put on clean underwear before going to school.”
“Yes,” Anna confirmed that.
“Then why change, unless…” Melissa’s voice trailed off as a thought occurred to her.
“Unless what?” Mitchell asked.
“Unless…unless she was planning something more than just meeting Mr Wild, or whoever it is she was going to see,” Melissa finished.
“What do you mean?” He realised what she meant before she could answer. “Surely you don’t think she could have been intending to…to have sex with Mr Wild.”
“Or whoever she planning to meet,” Melissa said. “I can’t think why else she would have changed her underwear. Speaking as a woman, the only reason I’d change my underwear, if I already had fresh on, was to put on something sexy for whoever I was meeting. How well do you know the clothes in Lucy’s wardrobe?” she asked of Anna.
“Pretty well,” Anna said. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve washed everything, so I should know it.”
“Can you tell us what’s missing, what she might have changed into?”
“I think so.” Anna’s voice betrayed a touch of doubt, nonetheless she moved away from the bed and over to the wardrobe so she could look inside.
“Did you find anything on the computer?” Mitchell asked of Melissa while the wardrobe was being checked. “Anything that shows if it was Wild she was planning on meeting, or someone else?”
“Not so far. I’ve checked her emails and her social media accounts, but there’s nothing there; if she was talking to someone about meeting up with them, or about meeting up with someone else, she wasn’t doing it through any of them.”
“Could she have done it in code or something?”
“It’s possible I suppose,” Melissa said doubtfully. “But I can’t see why she’d have done so; she didn’t even have a password on the laptop, so she obviously didn’t worry about anyone looking at her stuff. If she did have a code she used, it’ll be almost impossible for us to figure out what she was saying; we don’t even know who she might have been saying it to, since she apparently didn’t talk to Kelly about it.
“I’ll have a look at her internet history, maybe there will be something there to help us.”
Mitchell left Melissa to work on the computer and joined Anna at the wardrobe. “Can you tell us what Lucy changed into?”
Anna nodded, her eyes on the colourful array of clothes in the wardrobe. “A mini-skirt, a red micro thing that’s positively indecent - her parents don’t normally worry themselves about what she wears, but if they’d seen this skirt, they’d have had plenty to say about it - and a low-cut top, red, like the skirt.”
“If that’s what she was wearing, I don’t think there’s any doubt she wanted to get attention,” Mitchell observed unhappily as he wrote down the details of the outfit Lucy was most likely wearing when she left the house the last time.
Melissa listened with half an ear to the housekeeper, but she was more interested in her search of Lucy’s internet history. It didn’t take her long to discover that there was only one thing on there of interest, and it was the site Lucy had visited before leaving the house to see whoever it was she came back to the village to meet.
“Yes. We’ll have to go back later and find out what he knows.”
“You don’t want to go now?” Melissa asked.
“No.” Mitchell shook his head. “We’ll speak to Oliver first, see what he knows, if anything, then try and speak to Mr Wild. He might, genuinely, not have been home when we tried earlier, so we should give him some time to return from wherever he’s gone. If he’s not home later, we’ll have to think about how we’re going to find him.”
Melissa shut the computer down once she had determined there was nothing more to see, and went with Mitchell as he returned to Theresa Goulding’s office.
“I assume you did not find Lucy in her bedroom,” Theresa said when Mitchell was once again standing in front of her desk.
“No, we didn’t. We did find evidence that Lucy came home and got changed, and evidence to suggest who she might have come back to see.”
“And who might that be?” Theresa wanted to know. “Not Oliver Ryder, I take it.”
“No, not Oliver.” Mitchell debated for a moment whether to say anything more, in the end he decided he should. “We believe Lucy was intending to pay a visit to Zack Wild. She has a number of books by him, according to Anna, all of which are missing, and the last thing Lucy did on her computer before leaving home yesterday afternoon is check Mr Wild’s website.”
“Do you really think that’s proof? I realise I have not met Mr Wild yet, but I cannot imagine he would be involved in whatever has happened to Lucy. I don’t suppose you are aware of it, but Mr Wild is not just a successful author, he is a former detective inspector.”
“How do you know that?”
“One of the committee members from my charity told me; since we are interested in gaining his help with the charity, it was necessary that we know as much about him as possible.”
Written In Blood Page 7
