Ready or Not

by Thomas, Rachel

  Prologue

  1981

  The little girl and her brother dashed in and out between the tables, stumbling and laughing as they took turns to chase each other. No one minded: they, their father and the man he sat and spoke with were the only ones in the beer garden and the children’s laughter helped pierce the unsettling silence of the afternoon. It was February 1981 and winter was coming to an end, though still cold enough to freeze the edges of the lake that formed part of the castle moat. The sun struggled to punch its way through a fresh wave of clouds and the air, for the first time in months, felt a little less bitter. A fortnight’s worth of snow clung to anything that would hold it, but was at last beginning to melt on the ground, leaving puddles of muddy slush underfoot.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do,’ their father said to his companion sitting opposite him. ‘We’re barely managing.’ He glanced at the other man’s drink and shook his head, disheartened. ‘I can’t even afford to buy you a pint.’

  He looked across the garden to his children and raised his cold drink to chapped lips.

  ‘Don’t worry about it. I wish I could help you, but I haven’t got much on myself at the moment, mate. There’s nothing I can offer you,’ his companion replied. He shivered and pulled his jacket closer to his chest. ‘Bloody stupid not letting us take the kids in there,’ he said, nodding at the pub. ‘New landlord thinks he owns the place.’

  The afternoon darkened towards early evening. The man, disappointed again, smiled wryly and watched as his daughter climbed the fence that circled the beer garden. ‘Not too high,’ he called over. ‘I thought you were going to play hide and seek?’

  He scanned the garden furtively as if expecting someone. He rested an elbow on the garden table and sighed heavily. He’d already been to the job centre three times that week, but there was no work about and another five hundred men were scrabbling for the same few opportunities. The factory had shut down suddenly, without warning, leaving hundreds of families without an income. His wife was tearing her hair out, making his life a misery, and they had two kids they could barely afford to look after.

  His daughter had spotted a mother duck and her six ducklings waddling across the grass on the other side of the fence that separated the beer garden from the castle grounds. She watched and giggled as they sashayed from side to side and called her brother over to see.

  ‘Look,’ she said, pointing a skinny finger at the little duck that waddled slowly and lagged behind the others. ‘That one’s got a really big bum.’

  Her brother raised a hand to his mouth to cover a giggle. He pushed his floppy blond hair away from his bright blue eyes and began to pull himself up onto the bottom rail of the fence. He gripped the posts with chubby hands, struggling to get a better look.

  ‘I don’t care what it is,’ their father, was saying. ‘Please, mate. I’m desperate. Any job’ll do.’

  He twisted nervously and looked around him.

  ‘Expecting someone?’ his friend asked.

  ‘No, no,’ the man replied. ‘I just…it doesn’t matter.’

  The little girl climbed to the top bar of the fence and pulled herself over to the other side. She reached back over and offered her brother a hand. She tugged him over the fence and laughed playfully as he missed his footing and stumbled, grabbing her trouser leg to stop his fall.

  ‘Hide and seek,’ the girl suggested quickly. She had already spotted a group of trees that looked an ideal hiding place. ‘Count to ten then come and find me.’

  Her brother, typically obedient and used to his sister’s rules of the game – the main one being that she always got to do the hiding - placed a hand over each eye and began counting slowly and deliberately. He pouted slightly behind his hands and wondered when he’d get a chance to do the hiding. The little girl ran quickly to the trees and stood with her back to the widest trunk. She positioned her feet carefully, making sure not to tread on any dead twigs or fallen leaves that would make a noise and draw attention to her hiding place. She peered once around the trunk, heard her brother get to ‘eight’ then turned back and stood frozen behind the tree, the lowering clouds casting ominous patterns on the frost rimed grass.

  She took a deep breath and waited.

  Tuesday

  One

  February 2011

  Detective Inspector Kate Kelly sat at her desk watching a silver bug wriggle its way across a pile of paperwork that had been there longer than she had. It confirmed the fact that her office was well overdue a spring clean, although de-cluttering was really the last thing on her mind. The thought was, however, a welcome distraction from the little girl who gazed down at her from the wall.

  The case Kate was working on was almost two months old and they seemed no closer to finding out what had happened to Stacey Reed. She had considered every possible scenario, every tenuous link. They were losing sleep over it; or at least, Kate Kelly was. She knew it should worry her that she had started dreaming about this child, but this was nothing new: Kate often dreamed about missing people. In fact, missing people occupied most of her thoughts, her time and her energy.

  There was something, somewhere that had been overlooked; something that somebody was missing. Something she was missing. She stared at the scattered case file on her desk; its papers littering her workspace like eagerly shed gift-wrap. Photographs of Stacey Reed: school pictures, family Christmases, birthdays. Statements from her mother, her step father; eye witness accounts; stills from CCTV cameras on Taff Street. What was it she just wasn’t seeing?

  Kate pushed a stray strand of dirty blonde hair from her face. Her eyes, usually bright, were dull with the strain of fatigue and she could feel a heaviness behind them that signalled the unwelcome onslaught of a migraine. Her pale skin looked grey beneath the artificial glare of the strip light and she had again that morning noticed the rapidly developing lines forming in the corners of her eyes as she had tiredly applied a layer of make up; a forlorn attempt to make herself look less like a customer at the mortuary.

  In the past twelve months she’d noticed a big change in herself. She caught herself unconsciously checking her reflection in car windows, glass doors, sometimes a little shocked that she could barely recognise herself. She was starting to look old and didn’t like it. Either she was ageing badly, she thought, or it was this place; it was enough to put creases in the face of a cherub.

  Then, in a typically self-deprecating Kate way, she had told herself to stop being so bloody vain and get on with it.

  She aimlessly flicked one of the cardboard coffee cups that littered the desk. One unfinished drink had been knocked over and left to drip onto the floor, its remains forming a cold, brown puddle at her feet. Kate’s untouched breakfast – a strawberry cereal bar and a bruised apple that, like her, had seen better days – was still sitting amongst the debris of her work where it had been abandoned that morning. She couldn’t face food. Eating, like so many other things, seemed a fruitless task when there were so many other more important jobs to be done.

  Kate chewed distractedly on the end of her pen before stabbing the nib at the scribbled sheet of paper in front of her. Yet again, another potential lead had led nowhere and Kate felt as though she’d been knowingly lured along a path that had inevitably come to a dead end; another brick wall for her to bang her head against and another time-waster for her to quietly direct her frustrations at.

  She studied the picture of the girl on the wall. Her young face was imprinted on Kate’s memory and she could now recall small details that only a parent would usually have known. Mousey brown hair; shoulder length with a straight, harsh, home-cut fringe that gave her the appearance of a child from a sepia photograph of a bygone age. One eye ever so slightly smaller than the other: the lef
t. A small, upturned nose; a nose her face had yet to fully develop around.

  Stacey Reed. Six years old. Last seen December 12th outside Pontypridd market, carrying a green bag shaped like a frog and a cheap Christmas stocking with a snowman sewn onto it. Merry Christmas, Reed family.

  Kate thumbed absentmindedly through the case file, trying to shuffle it into some kind of order; as if hoping that the pieces may accidentally fall into place and the answer appear, staring her in the face like some unlikely card trick. It wasn’t the first time a case had caused her so much anxiety and unrest. Most cases involving children usually ended up on her desk, so she’d had plenty of practice. With each missing child that went unfound Kate fell further into despair, feeling that any lack of progress was her personal fault and a reflection on her abilities as a detective. She knew her level of involvement in these cases chanced affecting her judgement, but she couldn’t help taking each case as a personal challenge to her own capabilities as a police officer.

  In the corridor just outside her office door, PC Matthew Curtis who usually worked on the floor below kicked the coffee machine and cursed loudly as it suddenly started spewing boiling water. He leaned on the machine, his skinny arm outstretched; his palm flat against the buttons. She watched as water continued to spurt out from the mouth of the drinks dispenser, spilling over the cardboard cup, and wondered why Matthew hadn’t yet realised that the water kept coming because he was leaning on the button. What a prat.

  He cursed beneath his breath, moved away from the machine and frowned at the soaked knee of his trousers. He looked up and down the corridor, checking that no one had been there to witness his not unusual clumsiness. He didn’t notice Kate watching him.

  He had always struck Kate as being curiously gangly and awkward, like a thunderbird whose strings were too slack. Fairly new to the job, Matthew Curtis had recently started working alongside DI Chris Jones, but when he wasn’t with his new boss he seemed to spend his time skulking up and down the corridors of the station like a shadow: looking busy, but never seeming to actually achieve much. Kate had attempted to strike up a conversation with him once, for the sake of pure politeness as much as anything, but had found the experience to be pretty laborious and difficult. Matthew had smiled awkwardly, avoided eye contact, and made a brief comment about having to be somewhere else. An excuse to get away from her, Kate recalled, and then wondered if perhaps she was being a little overly sensitive and paranoid. Maybe he was just anti-social, or the only copper in the country who was shy.

  The coffee machine on the floor below was obviously still not working and the one outside Kate’s office was also on its way out. It either wouldn’t work at all, or wouldn’t stop working: there was no happy medium. Looking back at the chaos of her desk, Kate was able to relate to it.

  She reached for the phone and pressed nine for an external line. She punched in Chris’ mobile number, as familiar to her as her own, and waited as it rang several times before he answered.

  DCI Chris Jones was Kate’s mentor as well as her superior. A calm, practical man, he offered a voice of reason in a world that often seemed to lack any. She had learned more from him than anything she had picked up during police training and she could always rely on him for an attentive ear and an honest opinion. At times, too honest.

  ‘Hey,’ he said distractedly. There was a noise at the end of the line, as though Chris had dropped the phone.

  ‘Hey,’ Kate echoed.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, his attention now with her. ‘Holly’s being a bit lively. How’s it going?’

  He had his four year old daughter with him. Kate had met her a few times, but only in passing when she’d bumped into them in town. A cute kid, Kate thought, although most kids were cute. It was only the parents that made them any different.

  Kate heard Holly calling for Chris in the background, competing with the noise of the TV.

  Kate sighed. ‘It’s not,’ she admitted.

  ‘No joy with the Stacey case?’

  She looked again at the photo on the wall, almost willing the still, smiling image of the girl who hadn’t been seen in almost two months to miraculously find a voice and start giving her answers to her many questions.

  ‘None.’

  ‘Are you still in the office?’

  ‘Yeah. The number comes up on your phone if you hadn’t noticed.’

  Chris laughed. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve sort of got my hands full here at the moment.’

  As if on cue, there was a loud clattering in the background, as though something heavy had toppled over and its contents had bounced across an uncarpeted floor.

  ‘Shit,’ Chris said.

  ‘I can call…’

  ‘Hang on a minute, Katy.’

  Kate waited at the end of the line whilst Chris went to see to his daughter. There was another bang in the background; something that had teetered and hung on for dear life had given up the ghost and gone crashing to the floor with the rest.

  ‘Everything ok?’ Kate asked when Chris came back to the phone.

  ‘Yeah. Honestly, I can’t turn my back for two minutes. This house is not exactly child friendly.’

  ‘How long have you got her for?’

  ‘Just another hour. Lydia’s coming back to pick her up.’

  At the mention of Chris’ ex-wife there was an awkward silence. Her name was rarely brought up in conversation between them; it had been less than a year since she had walked out on him, still too soon to be discussed without awkwardness and discomfort on both their parts. Kate never knew what to say to him, or even if he wanted to talk about it at all. He was a private man and she had the sense to let him speak in his own good time, as infrequent as that was.

  Kate wasn’t too sure that she wanted to talk about it either.

  ‘Look,’ Kate said, breaking the silence. ‘I’ll speak to you tomorrow. Go back to Holly, it was nothing important.’

  Chris paused, as though selecting his words from the dictionary of things that wouldn’t offend her. Kate had begun to recognise the sound of his silences. ‘Katy,’ he said, ‘are you sure you’re coping?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kate replied too quickly, her tone coated with a defensive edge. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

  ‘The case,’ Chris said, although she didn’t need reminding. ‘You know…everything.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she assured him, doing her best to lie convincingly. She leaned back in her seat and had the good grace to blush. She had always been a terrible liar. It was a skill she had always felt she should try to improve upon. It seemed to work wonders for others and was almost an essential skill for a police officer. Fight fire with fire, and all that; that seemed to be the way in which most of her colleagues operated their professional lives.

  ‘It’s just frustrating,’ she told him, her voice still on edge. ‘Time wasters. Do you know, we had an old woman call in yesterday, said she’d seen a little girl matching Stacey’s description walking through the railway station with a middle aged man at around 4 o’clock the day after she went missing. I’ve sat through bloody hours of footage, watched tapes from every camera at the station and the main street outside and found nothing. I’ve spoken to the staff who worked the shift. Not one man with a girl Stacey’s age – not even one that doesn’t look like her.’

  ‘How old was she?’ Chris asked. ‘The woman who called.’

  ‘I don’t know, elderly, I think. Seventies, maybe. Why?’

  ‘There was probably nothing malicious in it,’ Chris reassured her. ‘Just a mistake, that’s all. She probably thought she was helping.’

  Kate sighed and made an aimless doodle on her notepad. ‘I know. I know. It’s just frustrating,’ she repeated.

  Outside in the corridor someone else was battling with the coffee machine. The clanging of metal and incessant whirring of the reluctant dispenser got on her nerves. Give up, Kate thought. Half the nervous energy in the building was either caused by caffeine overload or pure bloody frustration w
ith the vending machines.

  ‘You need a drink,’ Chris declared. ‘Just a half for medicinal purposes.’

  Kate glanced at the clock on the far wall. It was a quarter to six. ‘Just a half then,’ she agreed. ‘Usual place? Seven?’

  ‘See you there.’

  She hung up and turned back to the case file. She couldn’t let this one go. She couldn’t let anything go. Somewhere, there was an innocent girl waiting for Kate to find her. There had to be some clue somewhere – something that had somehow been overlooked – that would lead them to Stacey. After all, she was the specialist in missing children cases: wasn’t she? If she couldn’t find her, who could?

  Chris would come up with something. Without realising, Chris had helped her before, on so many other cases; never forcing an opinion or a theory on her, but allowing her to absorb his words and his thoughts, compare suppositions and come to a conclusion as to the most effective way to move forward. A passing comment, an outsider’s opinion: he was an invaluable resource, one she often thought she’d have difficulty functioning without. He was her friend, and sometimes it was good just to see a friendly face and hear a kind word. It often seemed to Kate that the world was sadly lacking in both.

  Before leaving her office she looked again at the picture on the wall. The wide eyes of the little girl who stared back wrenched at an emotion Kate tried not to bring to work with her, but all too often found it hard to leave at home. She took a moment to collect herself and fought back the urge to cry tears of frustration. Where are you, Stacey, she thought? Where the hell are you?

  Two months was a long time in a missing child case. Chances were they could be looking for a body, but while others might have, Kate couldn’t allow herself to think in that way. Stacey was a child: a real girl, someone’s daughter, not a crime statistic that could be filed as unsolved. She wasn’t prepared to give up on this girl; not until she knew for sure, one way or the other.