Ready or Not

by Thomas, Rachel

  Neil smiled reassuringly. ‘No one disappears, Kate,’ he said, matter-of-factly. ‘They just remain unfound.’

  There was a sadness in his words. For a moment it was as though everything around them had stopped. She once again felt like a teenager, locked in an unbelievable, unlikely moment with the school heart throb; elated and excited at finding he was the first person to understand her. She was sixteen again and suddenly anything was possible.

  The longing to touch him was there again, unbearable.

  He had barely touched his drink, Kate noticed. He smiled and she felt reassured, so reached for her own drink and took a cautious sip.

  ‘You OK?’ he asked. There was genuine concern in his voice and he studied her as though trying to read her; as though he had known her for years and already knew what she was thinking.

  Kate nodded. ‘Fine,’ she said.

  ‘You must think badly of me,’ Neil said.

  ‘Why would I?’

  ‘Sitting here, drinking with you when my son is missing.’

  The thought had occurred to Kate. She had noticed that Neil seemed far too calm at first; almost too relaxed. When he had given her his mobile number at the station it had been because Kate needed it and would have to contact him with regards the investigation, surely. But hadn’t there been an ulterior motive? One that was evident to them both? And hadn’t it struck her as strange at the time, though she had ignored the doubt that questioned the action?

  And that look he had given her…that was certainly not for his son’s benefit.

  Kate thought of Dawn Reed and Nathan Williams, watching TV and enjoying a take away; laughing together as though they hadn’t a care in the world. It was as though they had forgotten their daughter; as though the tears and fears of previous weeks had been quickly shrugged off and forgotten. Walking in on the cosy domestic scene had angered her. It made Nathan Williams a heartless bastard and Dawn Reed a cold, unfeeling mother.

  But Neil wasn’t the same, she reasoned with herself. He was here because he cared; he wanted to help her find his son. He was trying to stay positive, helping her to keep faith in herself and her abilities as a detective. Neil was looking away from her, his attention distracted by the noise and lights blaring from a fruit machine at the far side of the room and a man who had just hit the jackpot, frantically scrabbling around in the cash tray for his winnings.

  Kate studied Neil’s profile. A strong jaw, good skin; he was the type of man who exuded a strong personality: a man who inspired confidence in others by doing very little. He had thick hair and youthful good looks; he could easily have passed for a man in his twenties. He blinked slowly, as though in a permanent daydream, and Kate noticed again how long his eyelashes were.

  ‘Why do you do it?’ Neil asked, turning back to her. He saw her staring at him and she averted her eyes quickly, embarrassed at being caught out.

  ‘Do what?’ she said, twisting her hands anxiously in her lap.

  ‘The job. Why this job?’

  Kate cleared her throat and aimlessly stirred her drink. ‘It’s as good as any I suppose.’

  Neil smiled. ‘A poor answer,’ he said kindly. ‘It must be dangerous at times?’

  ‘I’ve been lucky,’ Kate told him.

  In eleven years she had been fortunate enough to avoid ever finding herself in situations worse than the aftermath of bar fights. She had never been assaulted - apart from the odd drunken shove - although several times threatened; she had got away lightly so far, she knew. There was always time though.

  ‘What are you looking for, Kate?’ Neil asked suddenly, distracting her from her drink.

  She raised her eyes to his. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘I watch TV,’ Neil replied. ‘I read detective novels. What keeps you going, Detective?’

  He leaned his elbows on the table and rested his head in his hands. He studied her intently, almost playfully, and smiled that slightly lopsided smile that made Kate feel so inexplicably uneasy. She couldn’t gauge the emotions behind the smile. Something between mischief and sympathy.

  ‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read,’ Kate told him, returning the smile.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  There was a moment’s silence in which they both drank. The man at the fruit machine had left with his evening’s earnings; the hubbub quietened again and was replaced with the hum of laughter and chat that encircled them and kept them pressed into their private corner of the pub.

  Before she had time to think about what she was saying, Kate was speaking. ‘My brother went missing,’ she said quickly. ‘It was a long time ago. I was seven. He was three. We were playing hide and seek by Caerphilly Castle. I was hiding. I did most of the hiding - I never really liked doing the seeking.’ She smiled sadly. That game. Such an innocent way to pass the time: such a cruel circumstance in which to find yourself suddenly an only child. What good was hide and seek without someone to play it with?

  ‘He never came,’ she finished. I waited behind a tree. He never came to find me.’

  As she talked, Neil listened attentively, his eyes fixed on her face.

  ‘I should have let him hide. If he’d hidden and I’d been looking for him, maybe I’d be missing and he’d have been safe. If I hadn’t been so selfish maybe he wouldn’t have disappeared. Been taken. Sorry,’ she said, checking herself. ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this.’

  Neil looked down at the table as she finished.

  ‘That’s a lot of maybes, Kate,’ he said. ‘What happened to him?’

  Kate shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But like you said – people don’t just disappear.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Neil said. ‘It must have been so hard for your parents.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Unbearable,’ she said eventually. ‘They never recovered.’

  She looked down again at her hands in her lap. It was a long time since Kate had last spoken to anyone about her parents. Stuart and Chris both knew the subject was off limits. She had rarely spoken to Stuart about her mother or father; there’d never really been the right time or the right reason to do so. She hadn’t been sure enough about him, not really; not deep down certain enough to trust him with the details of her past. Maybe she had always known that one day they would separate and there was no need for him to know more than was necessary for the time that preceded their parting.

  Chris knew more than Stuart ever had. He had listened as she talked and though he kept his feelings to himself Kate knew, unquestioningly, that he absorbed each and every one of her words. They didn’t belong to his past, or to a story that he would ever be a part of, but she knew that the details were important to him: that day, the aftermath; the years since that had shaped the woman Kate had become. Chris had been there for her through the worst of times, but he realised that the memory of both her mother and her father was something Kate usually wished to keep private.

  Yet here she was, spilling the details of her past; as natural as though she spoke about it with strangers on a daily basis.

  ‘My mother blamed my father, my father blamed me. Their relationship afterwards…well…it wasn’t really a relationship, more of an ongoing divorce procedure that was never finalised. They didn’t speak and when they did speak they argued. I sort of crept around the house like a ghost, trying to stay out of the firing line. My mother couldn’t let go, she wouldn’t believe that he was really gone. The more time that passed, the more she drank. Eventually, that was all she did.’

  Kate paused to sip her drink. ‘After seven years a missing person is officially pronounced as dead. In legal terms,’ she clarified. ‘In truth, most people, especially the police, assume that the person’s dead long before that. So the police, my father, everyone else, had all accepted Daniel’s death long before seven years had passed. Not my mother though. Not me. And it seems I may have been right.’

  Neil raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Someone contacted me today,’ she told
him. ‘Someone who claims to have news about Daniel.’

  ‘What does he know?’ Neil asked, raising an eyebrow. ‘Seems strange that someone would be in touch now, after all this time.’

  Kate shrugged. She didn’t want to consider the time that had passed; only the possibility that Daniel was still alive and that someone knew what had happened on that day all those years ago. ‘I don’t know yet, I haven’t been able to get through to him.’

  Somehow, speaking about this to someone she barely knew seemed easier; she was detached; she could talk without fear of judgement and resentment or pity. The pity was the worst of it. Judgement was something that was seldom passed. In fact, Kate knew that the only person who really judged her for what happened that day was herself. No one could really believe that she could have in any way prevented her brother’s disappearance: she had been just a child, and children were vulnerable, naïve; easily led. It was only Kate who thought she hadn’t done enough to protect her little brother.

  Pity, though, was something Kate had faced in waves. The faces of the paramedics who carried her mother’s body from the house, the looks of strangers who met her and remembered her story from the newspaper they had probably glanced at before moving on with the rest of their day. The rest of their lives. And she was still the recipient of those simpering, well-intended looks of sympathy now, despite the thirty years that had passed. From Clayton. Occasionally, from Chris.

  Neil hadn’t offered her any sympathy. He had questioned – challenged her, even – and treated her no differently than he had that afternoon, before he knew her story. So it didn’t matter if she spoke and her words made little sense.

  ‘Recovered,’ Neil said, repeating Kate’s choice of word. ‘Are your parents…?’

  Kate nodded. ‘My father died about eighteen months ago. My mother…’ She trailed off, paused and took a breath. ‘I was fourteen,’ she finished.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me any more,’ Neil said. He reached across the table and touched her hand briefly. His touch sent a shiver through her arm.

  ‘Excuse me for a moment,’ Kate said, knocking her knee on the table as she stood quickly.

  She crossed the lounge and went to the toilets. She felt uncomfortably warm and opened the top buttons of her blouse. Checking her reflection in the mirror, she saw her face and chest were flushed. The teenager in her was there again, unsettled by the handsome boy with the nice smile who had appeared from nowhere and shown an interest in her. Kate leaned forward onto the sink and rested her forehead against the cold tiles. She closed her eyes and tried to clear her thoughts.

  She looked up again. Her fringe was damp with perspiration, sticking like seaweed to her forehead. She ran the cold tap and wet the palm of her hand then attempted to rearrange her fringe, unsuccessfully. She felt dizzy and sick and waited a few moments for her heartbeat to slow down and her colour to return to normal.

  Tomorrow, she thought, I could finally be closer to finding Daniel.

  It was exactly what she had wanted all her life.

  Yet now that the possibility had been presented to her, the thought filled her with an alien sense of dread.

  What would she say to him? Where would they begin?

  Now, more than ever, Kate wanted to talk. She had been carrying her missing brother around with her like an invisible burden, allowing it to press itself down on her until the memory of him left an indentation on her soul. It combined with the bitterness she felt towards her mother for leaving her when Kate had needed her most and the weight of guilt her father’s unexpected death had left.

  So she went back to him and she talked. In a quiet corner of a pub, in the presence of someone she had only just met but felt she had known a lifetime, in a way she never would have thought herself capable of – wholly, honestly – she talked. She told Neil about the scars her brother’s disappearance had left on her family; her mother’s alcoholism and suicide and her father’s silent grief, which had slowly eaten away at the flimsy relationship they had tried to maintain as Kate had grown older.

  She explained how the relationship between her parents had tainted her views on married life, and why every man she met she judged with a certain cynicism; not because they were inherently bad, but because a relationship fraught with unhappiness and bad luck could change the very core of a person. She couldn’t rely on herself to be enough for one person; not with the lifestyle she led and the commitments she had made to her work when she’d joined the police.

  Words fell from her mouth like weightless bubbles, each one carrying away the dead weight of a repressed anxiety.

  With every word, she felt that something had been lifted.

  On the way home, Kate felt lighter. Neil walked silently beside her, having insisted on accompanying her back to the flat. They strolled along companionably and Kate found that she was talked out: she had spoken for long enough; had said enough – too much if anything, she thought – and Neil respected her wish to say no more, just walk in silence in the chill of the February evening.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, as she stopped outside her building. ‘I’m not usually like this. I must have talked your ear off.’

  She turned to him, expecting him to reply. Instead he responded by reaching for her arm and wrapping his fingers gently around her elbow. He leaned towards her and kissed her gently on the cheek. His soft lips warmed her cold skin; she felt his breath chasing the wind: there for a moment, then gone.

  He put his hand to her head as he pulled away, pushing his fingers gently through her hair.

  ‘Stop apologising, Kate’ he said. ‘You have nothing to be sorry for.’

  It was only later, when lying alone in bed, that Kate realised she knew nothing about Neil. What had happened for his children to be taken away from him, the ways in which his wife’s death had affected him: she had talked and talked and she had asked him nothing. She didn’t know the first thing about him.

  In return, he had offered no insight of his own. He hadn’t volunteered any information or given anything away in passing. He was a closed book; a mystery. Somehow it only served to make him even more alluring.

  He had listened. Listened, and seemed to understand.

  Friday

  Twenty Six

  Chris and Matthew pulled out of the Gabalfa housing estate at the north end of Cardiff. They had just been to visit Jamie Griffiths’ widow who was living in a different house now, but still on the same estate where she had stayed since her husband’s death. Chris hadn’t been involved in the initial investigation, but knew the man who had headed the case. Finding out the relevant details and getting hold of a copy of the case file had been relatively straightforward and he’d had a chance that morning to read up on the details before visiting Griffiths’ wife.

  Their meeting with her had been brief. She was a young woman, but she had the hard edges of someone who’d lived a troubled life and the way she had stood in her living room doorway, arms folded, face tight, said she’d already had enough and wasn’t going to let them push her any further.

  They went through what had happened eleven months earlier. She had got home late from work that day and made dinner for their two kids before Jamie had arrived home. He’d been drinking, she said; enough to be able to smell the alcohol on him when he’d come into the living room. She and Jamie argued about the money he’d just spent in the pub and he’d left the house at around half eight. That was the last she’d seen of him. She took their two children to her mothers for the night, suspecting that Jamie would get home in an even worse state, and went straight to work from there the following morning.

  Chris could fill in the blanks. Jamie Griffiths had spent three hours in a pub on Caerphilly Road. He’d left at twenty to twelve after a row with the pub landlord, who’d been asking him to leave for twenty minutes. He’d had six pints, two games of darts and a piss on the floor of the men’s toilets. After leaving the pub he made it as far as the bus stop, where someone caved his head in with a
lump hammer.

  *

  Back in the car Matthew quickly jumped to the conclusion Chris could have predicted he would.

  ‘Reckon she did it?’

  Chris started the engine. ‘No.’

  ‘But she said…’

  ‘I know what she said, Matt,’ Chris said, putting the car into first gear. Whoever done it done us all a bloody favour, he recalled. ‘Doesn’t mean she killed him. Anyway, she’d have been questioned months ago – if she was guilty we’d have known about it by now. There was someone else’s blood found at the scene – whoever murdered Jamie Griffiths was a bit sloppy about it.’

  Matthew fumbled for his seat belt and cleared his throat.

  ‘You OK?’ Chris asked, watching him.

  ‘Fine,’ Matthew said. He pushed his head against the headrest. ‘So it wasn’t our man, Adam, then?’

  Chris turned out of the estate and pulled onto the main road. ‘Not necessarily,’ he said. ‘But if it was, he’s cleaned up his act a bit.’

  They drove back out of Cardiff, heading for the A470 to take them back to the valleys.

  ‘What’s the link then?’ Matthew asked, easing into his seat. The sickness he had felt a moment ago was easing slightly. Being in the Griffiths’ house had made him feel claustrophobic and he couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

  Chris tapped the steering wheel. ‘I don’t know,’ he confessed. ‘Her reaction to her husband’s murder is completely different to Stephanie’s and Diane’s. Joseph and Michael were both hiding something from their wives – Jamie doesn’t seem to have been doing the same. Not that we know of anyway.’

  ‘Why do you think she’s glad he’s dead?’

  ‘That’s not what she said.’

  ‘As good as,’ Matthew said. ‘“Did us a favour”, she said.’

  ‘People say things they don’t mean,’ Chris reasoned.

  ‘She’s angry about something though,’ Matthew said. ‘What did he do to her that was so bad she’d be grateful to his murderer?’