Not any more.
Silence rang in her ears, as well as her own shrill cries as she neared the lake and searched for the two boys – her own the older, and in charge.
‘Dominic! Zachary!’
A plastic sword lay discarded next to the path, and she picked it up, panic rising in her chest. She heard splashing and clenched her fists. She’d specifically ordered Dominic not to let Zachary in the water. It was only by the earl’s good grace that he was invited to play with his only grandson, and Linda could see that privilege ebbing away too.
Suddenly she spotted them. Dominic was holding Zachary by the feet as the younger boy splashed around frantically, trying to keep his head above the surface of the water.
‘Dominic!’ Her shriek caught the seven-year-old off guard, and he dropped Zachary’s feet, sending him under the water. Linda waded in, heedless of her shoes and tights, and grabbed the little boy, who coughed and spluttered. Dominic stood knee deep in the water, glaring at his mother as she held the younger boy up and cradled him, bouncing him up and down on her hip in an attempt to stop his tears. Zachary coughed water and swallowed hard.
‘What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?’ she spat at her son, who trailed his hands in the water beside him, shamefaced at having been caught out.
‘Teaching him to swim,’ he said quietly.
‘Drowning him more like!’ Her own words surprised her, and she marched out of the lake, dripping wet. Dominic remained standing in the water, sulking.
‘It was only a game,’ he said defiantly. Linda scowled at him.
‘Get out of there! I’ll be sacked!’
‘What’s sacked?’ the boy asked. Linda didn’t answer, simply tutting and tending to the toddler in her arms.
It was only years later that Zachary told her what Dominic had done next.
As she had fussed over the little boy, her son had raised his hand and drawn it across his throat in full view of the toddler. Zachary didn’t say a word, but began to shake. ‘He’s in shock!’ Linda cried, hitching him higher on her hip and starting to run back to the house. She had less than ten minutes to soothe him before the earl expected him ready for his trip.
* * *
Dominic stayed at the lake as his mother scurried back to the house. He spotted a fat frog making a racket in the mud. It sat proudly taunting him, and he waded across to the shore where it guarded its patch. Quick as a flash, the seven-year-old grabbed a rock and brought it crashing down on top of the amphibian, splattering its guts and severing its head. He glanced up at the big house and sniffed as the small ripples of a wave caused by the morning steamer washed away the frog’s entrails.
Chapter 24
Kate Umshaw drove to the drab building on the outskirts of Penrith where the cold case files had been moved five years ago. A statement had been released to the press and it was becoming near impossible to smoke outside Eden House. Usually, missing persons’ cases saw the odd journo harassing the offices of the local mountain rescue, but the news of the reopening of the Freya Hamilton investigation had sent the media into a frenzy.
Already, details of Freya’s drug abuse and promiscuous past had been reported, and the press were trying to do the same to the reputations of Hannah Lawson and Sophie Daker. The photos of the three girls had been published side by side, and a trickle of national correspondents had appeared, asking questions. It was a good time to get out of the office, despite the fact that it was a Saturday and normally Kate wouldn’t be there in the first place. She’d left her girls home alone, squabbling over hair straighteners, and slammed the door behind her.
She parked in an empty spot on the street and stubbed out her cigarette. It would take her all afternoon to trawl through the paperwork that hadn’t yet been transferred to the database. Cumbria certainly didn’t see the volume of cold cases that other constabularies did, but it was a loose end that needed tying up, and no matter how insignificant the entries seemed upon first glance, she needed to make sure that their missing trio weren’t masking a precedent they’d missed. It was a long shot, but if Freya Hamilton could slip through the radar of two constabularies, then there might be more. Everybody knew about the head that had been found by an amateur diver in Wast Water ten years ago: who knew what else there was. It was high time that the files were sorted out anyway.
A bored uniform sat at a desk and sipped from a dirty mug, no doubt pissed off to be working on Saturday morning, and no doubt hung-over, judging by his eyes. Kate nodded and introduced herself. Her ID was checked and she was given free rein to roam in the two box rooms containing the archives yet to be inputted on a twenty-first-century system powered by electricity rather than manpower alone. The task suited her. She took off her jacket and began with the nearest box, planning to work her way through until her watch said five o’clock. She’d packed a sandwich, and settled down to an afternoon of peace and quiet away from the office. The bucket she’d passed on the way in, crammed with fag ends, told her that she could pop out for a quick break any time she pleased. She felt as though she had been given a day’s leave.
The severed head case from Wast Water had its own box, and she flicked through it slowly. The identity of the man – Asian descent, in his late forties, rest of body never found – had never been established. Machinery Accident was written in red across the top of the case file, and Kate wondered if the senior investigating officer had been satisfied with the outcome. Everybody had heard of the case and there were plenty of quarries and mines around the place where a labourer could get into bother. The inquiry was ten years old, and every year, the DNA profile was inputted into the updated pool of results in London, with no joy.
It didn’t fit her MO, but that wasn’t the point: she’d learned over the years that only methodical and deliberate searching ruled anything, trivial or not, out of a case. She glanced at the grisly remains in the glossy photographs and thought about the head resting in a freezer somewhere in a Carlisle lab. She hoped that one day, a family somewhere would get the answers they craved.
On her fifth box, she stopped and rubbed her neck. She was quickly making her way through her flask of coffee, and thought about asking the uniform at the front desk if there was a kitchen where she could fill it up. She put the box back on the shelf and looked around: there was more here than she’d thought. She’d narrowed it down somewhat – or Kelly had – to females of a certain age, possible origins outside the Lakes National Park, and inside a five-year window working back from present day. As she stretched, she scanned the file names and reached into her handbag for her pack of Marlboro Gold. A label caught her attention: it read in bold, on the front of a box file, Cold: Bones – Hartsop.
Hartsop was a tiny hamlet next door to Brothers Water on the way to Kirkstone Pass. Kate stopped looking for her lighter. She rarely saw the tag ‘bones’ on anything. It was extraordinary, and so piqued her interest.
She pulled the box down and opened it.
It was a sparse enough file, only a few pages thick. The victim’s name was Abi Clarence, and she’d last been seen five years earlier, at Edinburgh Waverley train station, reportedly on her way to start a job at the upmarket Peak’s Bay Hotel on the southern shore of Ullswater. Kate scanned the information and found a statement given by a Mr Roger Morden: the man who’d found the remains in a glade near Hartsop three years ago.
Mr Morden had been out with his wife. It was a wet, miserable day and they’d walked the perimeter of Brothers Water, deciding to eat a picnic by a pretty bridge near Pasture Beck that they’d read about in a Wainwright guide. Roger Morden was clearly a talker. He detailed in the transcript how soggy their sandwiches had become in the downpour, and how sodden their socks had got on the flooded path round Brothers Water. All was redeemed, though, when they sheltered under a glade to dry off. That was until Roger had taken a closer look at some debris under the trees.
Roger Morden coached junior football and, as a result, had trained and taken an interest in anatom
y and physiology when he was studying first aid. It was this that made him take a more scrupulous look at what he’d spotted. If he hadn’t, then the remains of Abi Clarence might have lain there for years to come, undiscovered still. Mr Morden’s keen eye had identified part of an iliac crest as well as a sacrum, and it was lucky he knew the difference between the skeleton of an animal and that of a human being. The report detailed the painstaking description that he had given on the differences between the two, and how he’d known he’d found something more sinister than simply a few scattered bones from a roadkill or a hunt.
To the horror of his wife, he’d handled the bones and held them up to gauge the width and breadth of the sacrum in particular. His wife had scolded him but couldn’t stop him delving further and popping the items in a bag to take to the nearest police station. It turned out to be Keswick. A sceptical police officer had filed a report and sent the bones off for analysis. When it came back that they were indeed human, Roger Morden had been thoroughly investigated as a person of interest. The star witness was exonerated fairly quickly, though, and proved to be a stellar help to the investigation. But it wasn’t Roger Morden’s tome of a statement that made Kate Umshaw reach for her chair and discard the cigarette she’d intended to smoke.
It was the photograph of Abi Clarence. She’d been identified from DNA extracted from the sacrum and matched with a hit from a drug rehabilitation programme in Edinburgh: the girl was an addict. The image had clearly been taken before her preferred mind-altering substances took hold, because she beamed into the camera, a mere seventeen years old, with fresh skin and bright eyes. Kate searched the file and found another photo, which was dated two months before the last sighting on CCTV in Edinburgh: in this one, her eyes had sunk and her cheeks had grown gaunt, clear signs of the grip of addiction. Kate wondered how on earth the girl had managed to land a job at the Peak’s Bay. Like Freya Hamilton.
She read on. Without evidence of cause of death, the coroner had ruled it inconclusive, and so the case hung suspended between accidental drug overdose, death by misadventure and natural causes, any one of which could have resulted in the girl’s decomposition under a bush. Homicide wasn’t suspected.
Besides, Abi Clarence had never even been reported missing.
Chapter 25
‘If you don’t want to meet the guys, then what about a training run with me?’ Johnny was trying his hardest to distract Kelly. It was pool night, but Kelly couldn’t be bothered. In the whole time she’d been back in Cumbria, she’d missed only a handful of Saturday nights with her old school pals, Andy and Karl. Three had quickly become four when she’d introduced Johnny. But tonight she couldn’t be moved.
It had been a long time since she’d forced her team to work at the weekend, so Johnny knew that her cases must be weighing heavily. Two missing girls was enough to lose sleep over; he should know, he’d searched for plenty of young walkers in the fells. The difference was that for the most part, the latter showed up alive and well. These girls had been missing for almost a week, and now Kelly was telling him that there might be more.
He massaged her back. She sat between his legs with her head down, mumbling about the idiots who lived at Wasdale Hall. He’d never heard of the place, but then an outsider wouldn’t have. Johnny had only lived in Pooley Bridge for five years, after selling up in Salisbury following the divorce from Carrie. Ancient gossip passed him by, and he kept himself to himself. That was why he’d chosen the Lake District: anonymity suited him.
Kelly groaned. Johnny had found a stubborn knot near her scapula and pressed his knuckle into it. She winced but didn’t stop him.
‘What’ll relax you more? A pint or a run?’ he asked. ‘I know you’re knackered, but that’s an excuse to do nothing. I can tell that you want to sit here all night and read about work, but I’m not going to let you.’
Her notes were strewn all over the floor of the lounge, and they would probably stay like that for the coming weeks. He’d seen it before. They’d be like an extra piece of furniture. He’d once tidied her files from the exact spots where she’d left them, and she’d gone ballistic. He hadn’t made the same mistake again.
She tutted. ‘I want to sulk, and drink wine,’ she said.
Johnny laughed. ‘Right, I get it. We can do that later. Come on, come for a run with me. It’s amazing out there, and it’ll clear your head, you know it will.’ He stopped rubbing and she lifted her head, turning round to look at him. ‘Tell me what to read – I’ll read anything,’ he said. ‘We can go over it when we come in.’ He wasn’t giving up. He knew he was right.
She looked through to the patio doors, where late-afternoon sunlight filled the small terrace, and sighed. He’d won.
Kelly got up and went into her bedroom. Ten minutes later, she’d pulled on her running kit and tied her hair back. Johnny knew that apart from exercise and alcohol, until recently she had done little else to relax. Only a swim in a cold lake, or a climb to the peak of a fell – along with the bottom of a glass – took away the incessant need to chew over facts and check her laptop. Nowadays, an evening with him, spent walking, talking or next to him in bed, also did the trick. She texted Andy and Karl, telling them of the change of plan.
She’d introduced Johnny to her two old school pals four months ago. Andy had been warm and welcoming, keen to get to know the man who was taking up so much of Kelly Porter’s time, but Karl had been less so. It was obvious that he still hoped Kelly would fall for him one of these days. Johnny found the game amusing, and watched Karl with interest when he tried to impress her with a new joke or his physical prowess.
They drove to Buckholme Wood and parked next to the tiny River Lowther that ran through it. It was on the very edge of the National Park, and a hidden gem. Johnny was in training for the Lakeland 100, which he’d vowed to do before his fiftieth birthday. The event was unique because it didn’t go over the famous peaks, instead meandering through stunning valleys, challenging bridleways and some of the most beautiful areas within the park. Johnny had done most of the Wainwrights. He wanted something different, and coming in at a cool hundred miles, with no breaks, the Lakeland 100 was a mammoth task.
Buckholme Wood was a perfect training ground. They ran through forest and across tracks, and it felt as though they were in the middle of nowhere. They didn’t see another soul. For the most part, they remained silent. Johnny knew that Kelly would speak when she was ready.
He had never had a girlfriend he could run with. Carrie had never shown any interest, and no one else could keep up with his pace. He always ran on his own, or with men. Kelly was different. She not only kept up, she also didn’t mind getting dirty, and they jumped over becks and bogs, never slowing much at all. They’d decided to go for a fairly steady ten miles, and they were halfway in when she began.
‘We told the families of the two girls that we think they’ve met with foul play,’ she said. It was a big deal and wasn’t lost on Johnny. He’d never notified a family of a loved one’s death before, but he’d been to plenty of funerals. Mud splashed up their legs, and their breath billowed out in front of them like smoke; it was soothing, and with every step, Johnny could tell that Kelly felt a little less stressed.
‘What made you come to that point?’ he asked. He’d lived through serious investigations with Kelly before, and he knew how she worked. He also knew that the more she talked, the more she wound down.
‘Injured walkers don’t normally disappear, especially when there’s more than one of them, and they don’t leave mobile phones and half-filled hip flasks behind.’
‘Injured?’
‘There was blood on a bag belonging to one of the girls, and minute traces where it was found. No emergency call was logged. It’s been almost a week with no bank transactions.’ Kelly listed her reasons as she jumped over some boulders.
‘Have you got any good leads yet?’ Johnny asked. She was opening up to him and he could see that her shoulders had given up some of their tension and
her arms were moving more freely.
‘My team are working their arses off, but it’s early days. We’ve got a few leads but they’re not major.’
‘What about the other missing girl?’
‘Tenuous, but I’m not happy about it. Something stinks. I asked Rob to look into the background of the campsite manager where the two girls were staying, and he found out that the man was working at the Peak’s Bay at the same time as Freya Hamilton. He’s an oily character. I don’t trust him.’
‘Enough for an arrest?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Kelly said cynically. ‘If I arrested everyone I didn’t trust, London would be a pleasantly quiet place to live.’
‘But then you wouldn’t be here,’ Johnny said.
‘Sometimes I think that still might be a good thing.’
‘Why?’ She’d taken him by surprise.
Kelly stopped and bent over, taking in air. They’d come to a branch in the track and she would let Johnny decide which way to take: over the top to make their lungs scream, or around the long way for stamina. He chose the former.
‘I bumped into an old friend of mine the other day and she basically called me a stuck-up cow. She said I’d gone away because I thought I was better than everyone else, as if I looked down on my old mates.’
‘What a bitch.’
‘I know, but …’
‘She’s got under your skin?’
‘Yes.’ The incline made talking difficult. Kelly bent slightly as Johnny held a branch up over her head. She ran beneath it and he ducked under too, letting it fall behind him. He loved watching her run: her body twisting from side to side as her legs powered her forward, her auburn hair flicking from side to side in its ponytail. Johnny stayed behind her and she looked over her shoulder.
‘Have I lost you?’ she shouted.
‘No, I’m just enjoying the view,’ he called back. She laughed, basking in the compliment.
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