Ready or Not

by Thomas, Rachel

  ‘Someone’s been ringing for you,’ she said. ‘Seems keen – he’s phoned about three times.’

  Kate waited a beat. Not another missing child, she thought. Not today.

  ‘Andrew Langley,’ the girl told her.

  ‘Don’t know him,’ Kate said hurriedly. ‘What did he want?’

  ‘He said to tell you he’s got news about Daniel.’

  Twenty

  Chris Jones waited while Lauren Carter finished guiding a young couple through the advantages of single-storey living. Close enough to eavesdrop he couldn’t believe the crap that had clearly been drummed into these workers at estate agent school, or whatever training it was they went through in order to qualify in the trade of selling people false hope and properties that were rarely worth the purchase price. Surely the couple on his side of the desk – who appeared intelligent and savvy enough to know better – were not going to fall for this well rehearsed bullshit? Didn’t they know that a ‘spacious apartment’ translated as a ‘poky flat’?

  The couple left and Chris took the seat that the man had vacated.

  ‘Good afternoon, sir. How can I help you?’ Lauren asked. She sounded like a recorded voice on a telephone answering service, the words so rehearsed that she could probably recite them in her sleep. Chris wondered if she was even aware that the man she had been having an affair with was dead. The red rims around her eyes suggested that, despite the fact that she was putting on a convincing façade for the public, behind the cheery salesperson disposition there was much more going on.

  Chris looked around the shop floor. There was only one other woman on today; an older woman who looked across at him sternly.

  Chris took his ID from his pocket and placed it on the desk. ‘Is there anywhere a bit more private we could talk?’ he asked.

  *

  In the staff room at the back of the building a hysterical Lauren Carter sobbed loudly and snivelled into a huge handful of tissues. Her shoulders heaved and her body shook so violently that Chris thought she was going to make herself sick.

  ‘Why is this place open today?’ he asked sympathetically.

  Lauren laughed bitterly. ‘That old cow out there,’ she said through her tears. ‘Business is business and all that.’

  Chris shook his head and said nothing. It seemed totally unreasonable to expect Joseph’s colleagues to work today after what had happened, regardless of how close they may or may not have been.

  Lauren choked back another surge of tears and tried to calm her shaking voice. ‘Who told you about us?’ she asked through her sobs.

  Chris said nothing. It wasn’t his place to tell Lauren that someone she regarded as a friend had shared her sordid little secret with the police, though Anna had done the right thing in doing so. Maybe Lauren would know nothing that would lead them any closer to finding Joseph’s killer, but whatever information she could give would help Chris build a picture of the man.

  They already knew enough to know he hadn’t been the man his wife had thought him to be.

  ‘I thought it couldn’t be true,’ she sniffled. ‘I thought it couldn’t be him, it couldn’t be. I was already at work when I heard what had happened – I couldn’t leave or people would’ve started asking questions. Why should I be that upset over him? I’m only someone who works in the same place. I’ve got no right to cry over him, do I? Not this much anyway.’ She put her head in her hands and Chris allowed her a few moments to empty herself of tears.

  ‘Am I in trouble?’ she asked, sitting up and wiping her face with the backs of her hands.

  She looked far younger than her years, Chris thought, watching her as she noisily blew her nose. She was obviously incredibly naïve and impressionable. It told him plenty more about the kind of character Joseph Ryan had been, if the information Anna Ferguson had given him was anything to go by. He was a man who took advantage of vulnerable young girls and probably discarded them like wastepaper when he’d decided he’d had enough.

  ‘Why should you be in trouble?’ Chris asked.

  Lauren shrugged and began once again to sob into her handful of tissues. ‘I knew he was married,’ she confessed. ‘I’m sorry, I really am. I was stupid, I know. And he has kids. I should never…But he had a way about him, you know? He sort of talked me into it and…well…before I knew it, there I was. I thought he loved me.’ Her shoulders heaved heavily and she made a loud wail as she tried to catch her breath.

  ‘Your affair with Mr Ryan is none of my business or my concern,’ Chris said, the sympathetic tone becoming more scathing and less patient now. ‘I need to know if you saw him yesterday.’

  Lauren tried to compose herself, but she wasn’t able to for long. She put a hand to her mouth, trying to hold back her shaking sobs. She sat up in her chair and straightened her sleeves. ‘Yes,’ she said, after a deep breath. ‘I saw him yesterday. To be honest, we’d had a bit of an argument. He’d been telling me for ages that he was going to leave his wife, but he never told her about us. I don’t think he was ever going to do it, was he?’

  Chris thought this probably wasn’t the best time to inform Lauren, who was obviously younger and even more naïve than her appearance suggested, that married men in their late thirties don’t leave their wives for teenage girls, no matter what promises they made.

  ‘He said I was going on at him,’ she continued, rubbing at her eyes, which were already red and puffy. ‘He kept saying he was going to tell her about us but he never did. He was always making some excuse, saying it wasn’t the right time and he didn’t want to upset her. He said it wasn’t fair on her. Then he used the kids to try and make me feel guilty. What about me though? It wasn’t fair on me either, was it?’

  ‘Where did you last see Mr Ryan?’ Chris asked, trying to divert the emphasis from the couple’s affair.

  ‘I saw him at work in the morning,’ Lauren said, playing nervously with her blonde hair, which was tied in a knot at the back of her neck, ‘but I only worked a half day, so I left at lunch. I came back when I knew everyone else would be gone and he was in the pub across the road.’

  ‘The Horse and Hound?’ Chris established.

  Lauren nodded.

  ‘Who was he with, Lauren? When you saw him in the pub?’

  ‘He was on his own at first,’ Lauren recalled. ‘I spoke to him for a bit and he told me I was getting too full on.’

  ‘At first,’ Chris said, trying to avoid the onslaught of tears again. ‘You said he was on his own ‘at first’. Who was there after that?’

  Lauren shrugged. ‘Some mate of his,’ she said. ‘I’d never seen him before. Joe said his name was Adam.’

  ‘Surname?’

  She shrugged. ‘No idea – he didn’t say. Just Adam.’

  Chris went to a sink in the corner, took a glass from the cupboard above it and filled it with cold water. He took the drink and handed it to Lauren, who accepted it gratefully.

  ‘What did he look like, this Adam?’

  Lauren shrugged and sipped at her water. ‘God, I don’t know,’ she said. Her shoulders began to drop as her body lost its tension, though she continued to cry loudly and took a moment to compose herself again; breathing deeply and putting her drink down on the table between them.

  ‘Dark hair,’ she said finally. ‘Like, quite dark hair. Nice looking, I remember that. A bit younger than Joseph, I reckon.’

  She paused, trying to remember more.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t pay that much attention.’

  Chris noted down the details Lauren gave him. The description was the same as Anna had given. Perhaps this man had been the last to see Joseph Ryan alive.

  ‘One last thing,’ he said. ‘You don’t know where Joseph and Adam were heading after the pub, do you?’

  Lauren looked up at him with bloodshot eyes.

  ‘No,’ she said bitterly and her mouth twisted into a petulant, hard-done-by grimace. ‘How would I know? He never told me anything, did he?’

&nbs
p; *

  Outside on the high street Chris turned his mobile back off silent. He had a missed call from Matthew Curtis and pressed the return call option. Matthew answered after a few rings.

  ‘Boss,’ he said, ‘we’ve had a call from Diane Morris – Michael Morris’ wife. She said there’s something else she remembers, but she’s not sure whether it’s important.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Apparently Michael had a friend, only known him for a few months. Helped him fix his car or something. Mrs Morris said she’d never met him.’

  Chris waited for the punch line. ‘Name?’ he prompted, but he thought he already be able to guess.

  ‘Adam,’ Matthew replied.

  Twenty One

  Kate tried Andrew Langley’s number three times and left two answer phone messages. On the first she realised her voice bordered on desperate, so she left a second, trying to calm the shaky, anxious words that spilled from her mouth before she had time to rein them into some sort of coherence. When she couldn’t get through to him a third time she typed his name into Google. Andrew Langley: Plumbing Services, Kent. Andrew Langley: Solicitors, London. Andrew Langley: Private Investigator, Bristol.

  Kate ran a finger over the screen, tracing the name. She clicked into the website and was greeted by a photograph of a man younger than she’d expected, perhaps early forties, with the kind of face that, against all rules of commonsense, Kate would probably trust without knowing anything about the person behind it. Her job should have taught her by now that people were rarely as they appeared, but it seemed lately she was easily fooled by a nice smile and a handsome face. And she would allow herself to be drawn by anyone who might have news about her brother.

  Kate found the number for Andrew Langley’s office but once again there was no answer, just an answer machine recorded by someone she assumed to be Andrew’s assistant. She didn’t leave a message in case she was calling the wrong Andrew Langley, although she doubted Andrew Langley the plumber might have news about her brother. She hung up and noted down the address for his Bristol office on a scrap of paper, making sure she remembered to take it with her when she left the station.

  Though it was still early, Kate was due to finish work and there was nothing more she wanted to do than jump into her car, drive to Bristol and track PI Andrew Langley down. So what if she risked pursuing the wrong Andrew Langley? So what if she looked like a deranged woman who had lost a grip on her senses? Yes, she thought, he could be yet another person leading her on a fool’s errand, but if there was even the slightest chance that he might know something that could lead her closer to Daniel she couldn’t afford not to chase it up. Maybe he had known him at school, or worked with him. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that someone knew something.

  Instead of stalking private investigators there was one last thing she needed to do before she took her evidence on the Stacey Reed case upstairs and confronted Clayton with it. She was certain that by tomorrow – after the relevant information had come back from Morgan’s Vehicle Rental – she would be able to show the Superintendent proof that should satisfy even him. She couldn’t abandon this little girl because of something someone somewhere may or may not have known about Daniel. He’d waited thirty years for her to find her. Kate was sure he wouldn’t begrudge her one more day for this.

  However, as it happened, what Kate needed to do now was nothing to do with the Stacey Reed case. She was going to pay a visit to Neil Davies’ daughter.

  *

  Sophie Davies lived with a foster family in Caerphilly. She had been with them for over two years, after social services had decided it would be beneficial to both children and father if Sophie and Ben were placed into temporary care outside of the family home. Kate had no idea how long ‘temporary’ meant in terms of Sophie and Ben, and Neil hadn’t divulged any details about the nature of his children’s situations. What Kate did know was that she didn’t have much time for social workers or the ‘service’ they provided. All too often, she had seen them get it disastrously wrong with unforgivable consequences. Children as individuals were forgotten and it was often the parents that became the sole focus of the social workers’ time. They often seemed to be a law unto themselves.

  Kate had wondered often in the past few days why Neil’s children had been taken from him. Sometimes there was a parent, or parents, who were alcoholics, drug addicts or violent towards their children. In rarer cases, parents were emotionally unstable in other ways. Nervous breakdowns, anxiety disorders, OCD…there were numerous mental health issues that were taken into consideration when deciding whether a parent should keep his or her child.

  Kate could only assume that, following the death of his wife, Neil had been unable to cope. It wasn’t unusual for a person to be crippled by the death of a partner. Sometimes it took years for that person to even begin to return to a normal life, or the most normal they could achieve in the absence of someone they had spent most their adult life with. Sometimes a parent found they were unable to look at a child without being reminded of their spouse and this in itself became an obstacle to parenthood. It seemed the most natural thing in the world that Neil would find it hard to cope without his wife.

  Like he had said, it wouldn’t be forever.

  Kate wasn’t going to visit Sophie entirely unprepared. She had already done a Google search on the accident and had managed to find a small piece from a local newspaper: ‘Local Teacher Dies in Car Crash’. It was the end of July 2007 and the family had been on their way to West Wales for a camping holiday. The report suggested that the accident had been caused when the driver’s attention had been distracted by the two children in the back seat. Neil had been driving.

  The news report was brief, but it provided enough information for Kate to make the assumption that Neil blamed himself for his wife’s death. Whatever had happened with the kids to make him take his eye of the road, it had been a long enough distraction for him to veer into the opposite lane, headlong into a lorry. Sarah, his wife, hadn’t been wearing a seat belt.

  She had researched the crash before deciding to visit Sophie, if only to feel that she knew a little more about the elusive man who had entered her life by chance and had such a sudden, inexplicable impact on her. It had helped to piece together the edges, but there was still a huge gap in the middle where Kate didn’t know where to begin.

  Sophie’s new address had been instantly recognisable to Kate who had grown up in the same area, and it had been from within the castle grounds not far from her childhood home where her brother, Daniel, had gone missing all those years ago during an innocent game of hide and seek. Kate felt an aching sadness creep over her as she drove through the town centre. She had so many memories of this town – of her father and her mother; her missing brother – and it always had the same effect on her whenever she made a return; that chilled, eerie feeling of hopelessness that wouldn’t let her forget her own guilt and regrets.

  Kate tried to distract herself, for now, from her thoughts of Andrew Langley. One thing at a time, she told herself. Do this now: think about Daniel later.

  She pulled into the estate where Sophie lived and slowed down in order to find the right house number. A man was washing a car on the driveway of the house she sought.

  ‘Who’re you looking for, love?’ the man asked as Kate made her way up the drive. He had a thick northern accent and a welcoming face.

  ‘I’m looking for Sophie,’ Kate said.

  ‘She’s in the house. Who shall I say’s asking for her?’

  Kate reached into her pocket for her ID. ‘Detective Inspector Kate Kelly.’

  The man put his sponge on the roof of the car, the smile he had worn now creased into a look of concern. ‘Everything’s alright, is it?’ he asked worriedly. ‘She’s not in trouble, is she?’

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ she reassured him. ‘I just wanted a little chat with Sophie about her brother.’

  *

  Inside the house Sophie’s foster
father made tea and then left Kate in the kitchen with Sophie. She was a pretty girl, Kate noticed, despite the thick heavy make up that darkened her eyes, and for the first time she wondered what Sarah Davies had looked like. She assumed by looking at her daughter that she had been an attractive woman. Kate felt a sudden, ridiculously ill-timed twinge of jealousy and immediately reprimanded herself for being so stupid and inappropriate.

  Sophie seemed sullen, but she was fifteen, so perhaps it came with the territory, Kate thought. She pushed her mug away from her with fingers that wore an array of heavy, cheap jewellery. ‘I don’t even like tea,’ she said. ‘What’s that all about? There’s been an emergency – let’s have a cup of tea. Someone’s dead – we’ll have a cup of tea. Ooh, police woman’s here – better put the kettle on.’

  Kate felt the hostility from the girl rising like the steam that wafted from her own cup of tea.

  ‘I want to talk to you about your brother,’ Kate said. ‘Ben,’ she added, as if Sophie might need reminding.

  Sophie shrugged nonchalantly and scratched her button nose. ‘Whatever he’s done it’s nothing to do with me,’ she said. ‘We don’t see each other.’

  ‘Do you have any idea where your brother might be, Sophie? A friend’s house that he might be staying at?’

  Sophie studied Kate and twirled a long strand of blonde hair around her finger. ‘What my brother gets up to,’ she said slowly, as though Kate hadn’t listened the first time, ‘is no business of mine. Social services made sure of that.’

  Kate understood the bitterness in her voice, but still felt that for someone whose brother was missing, Sophie Davies was being a touch insensitive. Either she wasn’t fully aware of the situation or she was purposefully trying to be as difficult as possible. Kate suspected the latter.

  ‘You do realise that your brother’s missing, Sophie, don’t you?’ Kate asked.

  Sophie tutted impatiently. ‘Missing?’ she smirked, eyeing Kate with a smug sneer. ‘He goes missing at least three times a year.’ She rolled her eyes and flicked the hair out of her face. ‘It’s tradition.’