by Cari Hunter
“Rudd had her phone number, and—” Sanne stopped short as people began to file into the briefing room. “Come on. We’re being summoned. I’m sure Carlyle will fill in the blanks for you.”
“Can’t wait.” Nelson sounded genuinely intrigued. He bagged them seats close to the front and leafed through the notes that Sanne had distributed. As he reached the last page, he poked his nose over the top. “These don’t seem up to Carlyle’s usual standard. What did he do, copy and paste from Wikipedia?”
Burying her head in her file, Sanne stifled a laugh and said nothing.
*
“Not what I imagined.” Sanne squinted through the falling snow at a terraced house, its neat garden surrounded by a recently trimmed privet hedge. The front gate sat on both hinges, and clean venetian blinds hung at the bay windows. The entire street was tidy and quiet, the empty parking spaces suggesting that many of its residents were at work.
“Shall we?” Nelson stepped out of the car, his coat fastened high beneath his chin. Sanne met him at the gate, and they stomped the snow from their boots as he rang the front door bell.
Natalie Acre’s father had requested a late morning interview due to a run of night shifts starting that evening. He opened the door promptly and shook their hands without checking their ID badges. He was middle-aged, with a smooth-shaven head and a rounded belly, and his smart shirt and matching tie were so crisp that they looked fresh from the packet.
“Wilfred Acre, but I go by Wilf. Come in out of the cold and we’ll try to get to the bottom of all this.” The spotless carpeted hallway he led them down made Sanne want to take off her boots. “This is my wife, Barbara,” he said as they entered the living room. “And our son, Benjamin.”
Sitting prim and bolt upright against a support of several cushions, Barbara Acre nodded at her guests. A crutch was propped by the sofa, and the lower half of her left leg sported a sheepskin-lined brace. Multiple sclerosis had forced her into early retirement several years ago. Her fifteen-year-old son spoke when she squeezed his hand, but only to correct his name.
“Ben,” he mumbled, a furious blush rising to obscure the acne on his chin. Stuffing his hands into the overlong sleeves of his polo neck, he stared at the muted television as his dad urged Sanne and Nelson to make themselves comfortable.
“Can I get you a cup of tea?” Wilf began to pour from a cosy-covered teapot without waiting for an answer, adding milk and placing a biscuit on each saucer before passing the cups around.
Feeling as if she’d strayed into some surreal photo shoot from Good Housekeeping, Sanne took a sip of her tea and tried to settle the cup back on its saucer without clinking it. Tactical Aid had already cleared the house, but the atmosphere in the room was so strained that she half-expected Natalie to burst out from behind the bookshelf. A glance at Nelson told her he was similarly unnerved. With Eleanor’s advice still at the forefront of her mind, she swapped her cup for her notebook and signalled the start of the interview by uncapping her pen. She and Nelson had already decided that a direct approach would be best. There was little to be gained by meandering around the subject, with Natalie’s photograph smiling out from the newspapers on the coffee table.
“I know this must be difficult for you all, so thank you for agreeing to speak with us,” she began. “Can I ask when you last saw Natalie?”
“She came for lunch, a week last Sunday,” Barbara said.
“Have you spoken to her since then?”
Barbara shook her head, one hand absently tousling Ben’s fringe. “No, but that’s not unusual. She’s looking for work, and the job centre make her go in every day. She can’t always afford a taxi over here, and the buses are few and far between.”
“She doesn’t drive?” Nelson caught the detail as eagerly as Sanne. The only vehicle registered to Rudd was his van, which meant that the couple were either reliant on public transport now or on the lookout for a new vehicle.
“No. She passed her test a couple of years back but never got a car.”
Sanne thumbed through her notebook and scanned the details of Andrew Culver’s post mortem. According to the pathologist’s timeline, Culver had been murdered the day after that Sunday lunch. If Natalie had prearranged a date with him, it was likely she had been aware of Rudd’s intentions during the visit to her family. Wary of Barbara monopolising the interview, Sanne aimed her next questions at Wilf and Ben. “How was she on the Sunday? Did you notice anything strange about her behaviour or about anything she said?”
“She was just Nat,” Wilf said. His eyes strayed to the tabloids on the table and remained focused there as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. “She helped make the gravy and washed the pots afterward.”
“She played on my Xbox with me,” Ben offered, when his dad trailed off.
Sanne was jotting everything down, no matter how trivial. When nothing more was forthcoming, she changed tack and took out a photograph of Steven Rudd. “I’m sure you already know, but we think Natalie might be involved with this man. Has she ever spoken about him, or perhaps brought him here?”
There were head shakes all around. Barbara glared at the image as if her fury alone could tear it asunder.
“He’ll have caused all this,” she said, her voice a thin hiss of rage. “You mark my words, it’ll be nothing to do with our Natalie. Have you even considered that, eh? That he’s probably got her locked up or something? You splash her face all over the news without ever thinking that she could be a victim too! It was the same with that Culver lout, dragging her into all sorts. She’s been back on track since she split with him.”
Wilf tried to put his arm around her, but she batted him away and drank her tea instead. Ben shrank from them both, pulling at his woollen collar as the colour flooded his cheeks again.
Nelson leaned forward, his hands empty and wide apart. “At this point, we’re keeping all lines of enquiry open. We’re not sure exactly what’s going on, and we’re as concerned for Natalie’s well-being as you are, which is why we really need to find her. To that end, can you think of anyone she may have turned to for help or shelter? A close friend? Perhaps another relative? Or any place in particular that she has ties to?”
After a nod from Barbara, Wilf supplied a couple of names and addresses and ventured Bradford as another city that Natalie was familiar with. To their knowledge, she had no psychiatric problems and had experienced no recent traumatic events. She didn’t drink to excess, always smoked outside, and swore that she hadn’t touched drugs since a short-lived rebellious phase several years ago.
“Just look at her!” Barbara jabbed an insistent finger at the mantelpiece, prompting Wilf to take down a framed family photograph and hand it to Sanne. It was a studio portrait, everyone in their best outfits and smiling on cue. “Does she look like someone who could stand by and let a man be stabbed to death?”
Sanne didn’t try to provide an answer. She’d been on the force long enough to know that criminals rarely stood out in a crowd, that the man or woman next to her in the queue at the chippy, the one exclaiming over the price of cod, could be capable of the vilest act. Using a smudge of dust on the mantelpiece as a guide, she put the photograph back in its place and gave each family member one of her cards.
“You need to contact us immediately if you hear from Natalie or if you think of anything that might help the investigation,” she said, as Wilf ushered her and Nelson into the hall.
“Will you let us know if you find her?” he asked.
“Of course.” Sanne shook his hand, his calluses rough against her palm. “Thank you for your time, and for the tea.”
He escorted them out, barely letting them cross the threshold before shutting the door behind them. Momentarily dazzled, Sanne stood blinking in the glare of the snow. As the spots left her vision, she turned to Nelson, who looked as bemused as she felt.
“Days like this, I’m glad that my family’s only half-cracked,” she said.
Nelson shook his head, his cheeks puffi
ng out and then deflating as he exhaled. “I doubt we’ll hear a thing from Barbara. Natalie could turn up for tea and she wouldn’t tell us. Ben may be a better prospect, though.”
Sanne held the gate for him. “He was like a cat on a hot tin roof, wasn’t he? I’d suggest a separate interview, but he’d need a guardian present, and no prizes for guessing who that’d be.”
“Mummy dearest.”
“Aye. We’ll have to run it by the boss. See how she wants to play it.”
Nelson drummed on the roof of the car. “We better get those names back so the TAU can make a few house calls.”
“Yup. And then it’s an afternoon out at the canal for us.” Sanne grinned at his dismay. She far preferred fieldwork to office work. “Don’t be so mad. Look, the sun’s almost out.”
He followed her upward gaze and got a face full of snowflakes for his trouble. “You’re very mean to me,” he said as she started to laugh. “I might trade you in after all.”
Chapter Twenty-one
“So, who was it?” Emily dropped her fork onto her plate. She’d arrived home earlier than Meg had expected, to prepare a lunch that now sat untouched in front of her. Sensing what was about to come, Meg had only nibbled a piece of the quiche’s crust, and even that was sitting like lead in her stomach. The rich smell of oily cheese and spinach began to make her queasy. She pushed her plate away and looked across at Emily.
“It was my brother, Luke,” she said. She had already decided to come clean the moment Emily raised the subject. “He wanted money that I don’t have.”
Emily folded her cloth napkin along its creases and set it by her knife in a series of deliberate movements. She had schooled her expression so well that Meg had no idea what she was thinking.
“Has he done it before?” she asked eventually.
“Yes, several times. It started when my dad left.”
As careful as Emily was, she couldn’t conceal her distaste. Meg had seen it flare in her eyes on too many other occasions to mistake it now.
“So he was the one who ransacked your house?”
“Yes.” Meg could feel the argument coming, but she couldn’t do a thing to stop it. Besides which, she knew she deserved whatever Emily might throw at her.
“Why didn’t you tell me? Did you tell Sanne?”
Meg’s painkillers were long overdue, and her head pounded as she tried to answer honestly. “Because he’s my brother, Em. I didn’t want to shout it from the rooftops.”
“But you told Sanne.”
“Yes, I told her. She’s a detective. I asked for her help.”
“And your mum’s fall…” Emily spoke slowly, as if pulling the dates together. “Was that anything to do with him?”
Meg nodded, the motion sending stars spinning across her vision. “I didn’t want you to know. I was hoping he’d crawl back under his rock and that’d be the end of it. I never wanted to drag you into this.”
“You didn’t trust me.”
“No, I do trust you, I just—”
“How can I believe a word you say?” Emily’s voice rose without warning, and Meg shrank back, too recently damaged to cope with the threat. If Emily noticed, it changed nothing. “You lie and you lie to me, and all the while you’re running to Sanne behind my back.”
“It wasn’t like that.” Meg could summon little more than a whisper, the reasons why she had lied slipping like sand through her fingers, until one truth caught and caught fast. “I don’t want this,” she said, and even as she spoke, something seemed to loosen inside her, something that had been battened down for months as Emily tried to mould her and adjust her and fix her.
“What exactly do you want, Meg?” Emily pushed against the table, jarring the plates and cutlery. “No ties or commitments, and a quick fuck with Sanne whenever you feel the urge?”
“Leave Sanne out of this,” Meg snapped. “Think whatever you like about me, but this has nothing to do with her.”
“Just give it time,” Emily said in a mocking singsong. “You’ll realise that’s another lie.”
Meg lowered her head, all but admitting that Emily was right, because Sanne was there at the back of everything, and Emily had never quite measured up. Guilt and regret hit her hard enough to double her over. “I’m sorry,” she said. “For all of this, for everything.”
“So am I.” Emily’s voice had regained its edge. “But I think you should leave.”
Using the table for leverage, Meg pushed to her feet and walked unsteadily into the bedroom, where she threw toiletries and a handful of clothes into a bag. She couldn’t carry much, and Emily made no attempt to help her as she returned to the living room.
“I phoned a taxi for you.” Emily was curled on the sofa, her face pale but her expression indifferent. “I told him you’d wait down in the lobby.”
Meg had no response to that. She left her key on the kitchen table and closed the front door quietly behind her.
*
The TAU officer on the towpath with Sanne was a good foot taller than her. Every now and again he remembered to slow his pace in deference to her inferior stride, but for the majority of the afternoon she had been hurrying in his wake like a toddler lagging behind an impatient parent. It was a problem she had never experienced with Nelson, who almost equalled the man’s height but somehow managed not to make her feel small.
“Hey, Graham, it’s this one!” she shouted above the chug of a narrowboat braving the ice, as he barrelled past the gap in the hedge that led to their next warehouse.
With traffic grinding to a standstill in the snow, EDSOP were working on foot, each available detective assigned to a TAU officer and two uniforms and given a list of buildings to serve search warrants on. Sanne’s first warehouse had belonged to a meat-packing company, and more than an hour later, she could still smell raw mince and innards. Somewhat predictably, she had found neither Rudd nor Acre hiding among the sausages. Warehouse number two was marked as derelict.
“Are you sure this is it?” Graham asked, retracing his steps with obvious reluctance.
Sanne had memorised the directions before setting out. She gave him a look that stopped him in his tracks, and then she squeezed through the hedge.
He might not have been the brightest spark on the TAU, but he knew how to kick a door down, taking point with his baton in one hand while his other rested close to his Taser. He yelled a warning into each of the dingy offices attached to the main warehouse, sending birds squawking for the rafters and rats sprinting for cover.
Sanne shone her torch across the floor, searching for footprints or recent signs of inhabitation: a fire pit, takeaway cartons, human excrement. She saw nothing of the sort, and a mounting sense of futility made her tear her list as she scribbled a line through the building’s name. EDSOP didn’t have the people or resources for this. It was a massive city-wide manhunt being undertaken by a handful of detectives and whatever additional manpower could be scrounged from departments with none to spare. Rumour had it that neighbouring forces were being asked for assistance, but every force had its own problems, and at this rate it was only a matter of time before the next body showed up.
“What a waste of a fucking day.” Graham spat his gum into the snow and immediately began to chew a fresh piece. “Those idiots will be in Tenerife by now, getting a tan while we wade through shit looking for them.”
“Yeah, probably.” Sanne thought nothing of the sort, but it seemed easier not to argue. “We should start heading back. We’re at least an hour from the van. We’ll miss our lift if we leave it any later.”
“Sounds good to me.” He set off at a fair clip and was already out of sight when her mobile rang.
“Hiya, Nelson.”
“Hey, partner. How’s the knucklehead treating you?”
She laughed, relieved to hear a friendly voice. “I think most of his brains are in his boots. What are you up to?”
“We’ve called it a day. We’re about half a mile from the van. Well, I thi
nk we are. The map is a little vague.”
“The map or your understanding of it?”
He huffed indignantly, but then his voice turned serious. “I’m actually phoning to warn you.”
Sanne hesitated, midway through the hedge. “Warn me about what?”
“Zoe.”
“Oh God, what about her?”
“She’s on Jay’s team—they went out after you—so she’ll be on the van with us.”
“Great.” As Sanne spoke, a thorn snagged her trouser leg, ripping a hole behind her knee. She yanked the cloth loose, muttering half to herself, half to Nelson. “Perfect end to a perfect bloody day.”
*
Thornbury House was a family-run bed and breakfast that prided itself on reasonable prices, locally sourced food, and above all, its setting. Hidden in an acre of land on the outskirts of Sheffield, the converted barn had views over the hills and provided easy access to the Snake Pass. Meg and Sanne had spent a week there one winter when snow had caused havoc over the tops, and it had become Meg’s refuge whenever the weather left her stranded. With her brother still evading the police, and with Sanne having more important things to do than ride to her rescue once again, Thornbury had been the first place she contacted.
The elderly Pakistani taxi driver had taken one look at her in the apartment lobby, clucked his tongue, and picked up her bag. To her relief, he wasn’t the chatty type, but he parked within a hair’s breadth of the hotel’s entrance before running round to open her door.
“Beautiful, eh?” Breathing deep, he patted his chest and made a show of filling his lungs. “Maybe you can smile again here.”
She did smile for him then, her nerves soothed by the sight of the peaks rising from the valley, white and endless.
“Much better.” He grinned, revealing betel-stained gums, and offered her his arm to escort her to the front desk.
Once she’d been booked in and fussed over by the proprietor, Meg embraced the solitude of her hotel room like a long-lost friend. She locked the door and sat on the bed in a patch of sunlight, staring at the hills until she noticed the tears splattering on her jeans. Unsure why she was crying, she wiped her face and went over to the window. Cold, woodsmoke-tinged air drifted in when she opened it, and birds chattered in a nearby hedge. It began to snow again as she stood there, a heavy burst of fat flakes that rapidly filled the footprints someone had left across the lawn. With nothing more pressing to do, she dragged one of the armchairs across and draped a blanket over it. A complimentary selection of homemade biscuits rekindled her appetite, so she brewed tea to go with them and set everything on a tray. Cocooned in the blanket, with biscuits to dunk and the snow bringing an early dusk, Meg could think of only one thing that she was missing, but she left her mobile untouched in her pocket and didn’t call her.
