Ready or Not

by Thomas, Rachel

  ‘Kelly,’ Kate reminded her. ‘Kate.’

  ‘Kate,’ she repeated. ‘Like I said, we’ve been fostering for years and we’ve had children with all sorts of problems stay with us. Children whose parents have had drug problems, even children with drug problems…in comparison, Sophie’s a delight.’

  Kate sat at the end of the sofa.

  ‘She lost her mother, you know,’ Mrs Evans told her, lowering her voice in case Sophie was within earshot. ‘Awfully sad business. Car accident. Whole family were in the car at the time, but her mother wasn’t wearing a seatbelt you see. Tragic, really.’

  ‘What about her father?’ Kate asked. ‘Does she see him often?’

  ‘Her father? Lord, no. Now, it’s not for me to cast judgement, but the authorities have said he’s unfit, you see. Didn’t cope very well after the death of his wife.’ She glanced towards the living room door and lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘Alcoholic. Lost his mind, by all accounts. Children were left to fend for themselves, more or less. Hit poor Sophie, bless her soul.’

  Kate felt sick. The room was suddenly very warm and she felt claustrophobic.

  ‘Are you OK?’ asked Mrs Evans. ‘You look white as a sheet.’

  *

  Kate stood at the open back door, breathing some much needed fresh air and wishing that she was anywhere but this claustrophobic kitchen with this sullen teenager. Sophie sat quietly.

  ‘Tell me about what happened to you, Sophie,’ she said. ‘After the accident.’

  Sophie paused before she responded. ‘What’s there to say? Dad hated us – me and Ben. Blamed us for Mum’s death, but especially me. I don’t blame him. It was my fault.’

  Kate sat back at the table. ‘From what I’ve heard, Sophie, it was neither you nor Ben’s fault. Your mother wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. It was an accident.’

  Sophie laughed bitterly and threw her head back, looking to the ceiling. ‘An accident? Nothing happens by accident,’ she said. ‘That’s just what they tell you to make you feel better. Only it doesn’t, does it?’ She lowered her face again and looked at Kate. ‘I was arguing with Ben because he’d taken one of my pens and chewed the end of it, just because I’d told him not to. I killed my mother over a gel pen.’

  Kate studied the girl’s sad eyes at she stared down at the table top in front of her and felt guilty at having thought badly of her at their first meeting. The girl was just a child – not as tough or headstrong as she liked to think herself – and she had already been through more than most people endured during a lifetime. No wonder she was so defensive and so uptight. She blamed herself for her mother’s death, and she would probably blame herself all her life.

  The girl shook her head, as if to snap herself from her daydream. ‘What do you need to know?’ she asked. ‘Look, you came about Ben, not me. I can tell you where Ben is. My father, the lying bastard, could have told you where Ben is.’

  For the briefest moment, Kate could have sworn she felt her heart falter. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, leaning forward on the table. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Whenever Ben goes ‘missing’ there’s only one place he’ll ever be,’ she said, rolling her eyes cynically. ‘Auntie Claire’s house. Mum’s sister. She lives in Newport now, been there a couple of years. I can’t remember her phone number, but it’s saved in my email inbox somewhere.’

  Claire had already been contacted and had denied seeing or hearing from Ben.

  Why would she lie to the police?

  Perhaps Sophie had got it wrong.

  ‘Why wouldn’t your father have told me this?’ Kate asked, hearing her own voice falter.

  Sophie laughed bitterly. ‘He’s a bloody liar,’ she said, angry now. ‘Everything that comes out of his mouth is a lie.’

  Kate sat back in her chair and thought of the lunch she had shared with Neil days before; the evening she had spent with him last night, the way in which she had confided in him and the things she had told him, things she told hardly anyone; the way he had kissed her cheek when they said goodbye.

  Another man who had knowingly misled her. Christ, Kate, she scorned herself. You can pick them.

  But surely he couldn’t know where Ben had been all week? Why would he let her head an investigation into the disappearance of a boy who wasn’t actually missing?

  Sophie was wrong. She had to be.

  ‘Is Ben close to your Aunt, Sophie?’

  She nodded. ‘Always has been. He’s always loved her to bits for some reason. If only he knew what she was really like.’

  Kate shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Sophie, I’m not following. If only he knew what?’

  Sophie looked Kate in the eye. ‘My dad doesn’t hate me because I caused the argument in the car that day,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘It’s just easier for him that way. He’s so busy hating me he hasn’t got time to think about what a bastard he is.’

  She stopped and bit her bottom lip, anger rising in her voice.

  ‘He hates me because I know what he is. Ask Claire. Her own sister. How could you do that to your own sister? She must have been the reason we moved here – all that crap about his job, I always knew it was bullshit. He was never working - he was always sneaking off somewhere. All that time on the computer, all those secretive phone calls. He used to make me feel like shit when I was younger – made me feel as though I’d killed my own mother and it was my fault that everything had gone tits up. Only, it wasn’t my fault, not all of it. It was shit even before she’d died.’

  Sophie turned her head away, trying to hide her tears from Kate. When she looked back again her mascara was streaked down her cheeks in black rivers.

  ‘My mother should have stayed around to find out the truth,’ choking back tears. ‘If the crash hadn’t killed her, finding out her husband was sleeping with her sister would have done the trick.’

  Thirty Four

  Chris couldn’t wait to see how Matthew would react to this.

  He rang the buzzer outside the club and waited for a voice on the intercom.

  ‘Chris Jones,’ he introduced himself, recognising the voice belonging to the woman he’d called less than an hour before. ‘We spoke earlier.’

  The intercom clicked off and they waited as the manager made her way to the door. She was smartly dressed in fitted trousers and tailored jacket and as the two men followed her into the club she walked with the air of someone who was too busy to be disturbed and didn’t really have the time to waste on them. It seemed they were inconveniencing everyone today, Chris thought.

  She led them through the main bar area and took them both to the office. The main floor of the club was deserted except for a woman who was cleaning the bar ready for this evening’s opening. Chris was disappointed that their visit hadn’t taken place later in the evening when Candy’s was opened for business. He would have loved to have watched Matthew’s reaction; the gangly, misplaced awkwardness that seemed to characterise him.

  ‘I’m new,’ the manager said brusquely. ‘I’ve only been running the place since just before Christmas. Some of these cameras don’t actually have any film in them, so it’ll be luck if you get what you want.’

  She spoke in a business-like manner and moved about the office briskly, as though her time should be spent more productively. She took a set of keys from the top drawer of the desk and opened the store cupboard in the corner of the office.

  ‘Why are some of them without film?’ Chris asked.

  ‘Expense,’ the manager said bluntly. ‘Seeing them there is usually enough of a deterrent, so there’s no need for all of them to be running.’

  Matthew caught Chris’ attention by kicking him in the ankle. He was staring at a pile of flyers on the desk, adorned with the image of an almost nude female wrapped provocatively around a pole. Chris gave him a look that said ‘so what?’

  ‘Is this a members-only club?’ Chris asked, ignoring Matthew.

  ‘Yes,’ she answered.

  ‘Could yo
u check, see if you’ve got a member called Neil Davies?’ he asked. ‘No rush,’ he added, trying to keep her sweet. He smiled and turned to Matthew who grimaced in response. He couldn’t wait to get out of there.

  ‘Will do,’ she replied.

  Minutes later she emerged from the store cupboard with a disc in hand. She passed two discs to Chris. ‘One’s just above the bar and the other is by the side of the dance floor,’ she explained. ‘Anything outside those areas I can’t help you with.’

  She sat down at the desk and logged herself onto the computer system.

  ‘Who am I looking for?’

  ‘Neil Davies,’ Chris reminded her.

  She typed the name and searched the database. She shook her head. ‘No, nothing,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘What about a Joseph Ryan?’ Matthew asked.

  She repeated the process. ‘Got him,’ she said. She raised one perfectly shaped eyebrow. ‘Quite a regular member by the looks of it,’ she commented, seeing the extensive list of visits Joseph Ryan had made during the past twelve months.

  ‘And he was here last night?’ Chris said.

  The manageress pressed a few keys and waited for a result. ‘Certainly was,’ she confirmed.

  Chris tapped the discs on his lap. ‘Thanks. I’ll hold onto these,’ he said. ‘We’ll see ourselves out.’

  *

  Matthew couldn’t leave the place quickly enough. He even avoided eye contact with the cleaner, who smiled at him as he made his way back through the club. Chris couldn’t help but laugh.

  ‘Alright?’ he asked, overly cheerily.

  ‘Fine,’ Matthew replied. He grimaced and stepped outside the club, exhaling loudly.

  Chris handed Matthew the disc when they got outside.

  ‘There we are,’ he announced. ‘A present. The pleasure can be all yours.’

  Matthew groaned and looked at the discs in his hand as though they might explode at any moment. ‘Thanks, boss,’ he mumbled. And then, ‘What are we actually looking for?’

  Thirty Five

  It took a moment for the information to register in Kate’s brain. She sat unnaturally still in the kitchen chair, a thousand thoughts colliding. From the thousand, one was prominent. Sophie watched her carefully; suddenly eager to make eye contact with Kate now she was the one holding all the cards. She realised she knew more than the detective did, and the thought seemed to empower her.

  ‘You see?’ she said to Kate, as if everything now made sense. Although her tone was still aggressive, there was a certain amount of regret in her words, as though pleased she’d got one up on the detective, but at the time, sorry she’d had to do so. ‘This is what my father does. He lies to people. He twists everything.’

  The thought that she had allowed Neil to get so close the night before made Kate shudder and she turned away from Sophie, trying to erase the memory of his lips touching her skin. She crossed the kitchen to the back door and leaned a hand against the doorframe, steadying herself. She stepped outside, breathing in the cold air; trying to get her thoughts in some kind of order.

  ‘You have to tell me everything, Sophie.’

  ‘Have to?’ Sophie repeated, twisting her mouth into an expression of distaste. ‘Why? We know where Ben is. I’ll go and check my emails now – get you Claire’s number.’

  Sophie got up and left the room. Kate sat down again and put her head in her hands. She was hot and confused and felt a headache coming on; just one of many that week. She suddenly felt extremely exposed and vulnerable. She had told Neil so many things about herself and her family: her missing brother, her father’s sudden death; her mother’s suicide. She had told him things that she had never told anyone; things that she had kept hidden in the back of her mind for years. Things that should have stayed there.

  He knew things about her that only Chris and Stuart knew. She’d allowed him to know too much about her and it was all down to her impulsive stupidity. She trusted people when she shouldn’t. Even now, after all these years in the police and all the bastards she had met during that time, she still made the mistake of thinking the best of people. She still thought that possibly, beneath it all, people were inherently good.

  Of course, she knew, they weren’t. Allowing Neil to get so close to her had been stupid and unprofessional and as she sat in the Evans’ kitchen holding her throbbing temples in her hands Kate began to realise the seriousness of her situation.

  Why would Neil have told her Ben was missing if he knew all along where his son was? He had asked her to help him – had treated her as though she was the only person who would possibly be able to find his son – when all the time he knew where Ben was, and must have realised that it would be almost impossible to find him if his aunt had been hiding him. After all, Claire had lied to the police when she’d been asked if she’d heard from Ben. Why would she do that? Why would she protect her brother-in-law in that way, especially if she was as close to her nephew as Sophie claimed?

  None of it made sense. Kate couldn’t understand why anyone would waste her time in that way; although it would explain why he had seemed almost certain that his son would be found safe. Of course he was certain. He knew. What sort of a father was he? What sort of man was he?

  Kate’s longing to see her own father was almost unbearable. She would lie half awake sometimes imagining she had heard him calling her from across the landing; then she would wake properly, adjust herself to the darkness and realise that there was no landing: she wasn’t in the house in which she had grown up and her father wasn’t there, not any more. She would never again hear him call her name.

  Time was supposed to ease these feelings, but time was the one thing that made them all worse, she thought. Every day that passed gave her yet more time to contemplate what had happened to her family; more time to think about all the mistakes she had made, and all the words that had been left unspoken. Time, and age, gave her more opportunity to consider the words she had heard spoken by her parents all those years ago; the arguments that they had mistakenly assumed her young ears were deaf to.

  It would be just the same for Sophie, Kate thought.

  Last night, over drinks with Neil, she had spoken about her mother with bitterness. She had left Kate when she had most needed her; when she was just a fourteen year old child with no other female influence in her life. In reality, she had left long before that, lost in the bottom of a vodka bottle. A bottle of pills and a litre of vodka had been her chosen goodbye.

  Suicide was the coward’s way out. Kate had tried for years, but couldn’t bring herself to forgive her mother for taking a route neither she nor her father could follow. They had needed her, both of them, but she had done what was best for her. Or what she must have believed was best, at least. The selfish way out. Yes, she had lost her son. But she still had a daughter who was very much alive, very much present, and needed her mother more than anyone.

  Yesterday, Kate had spoken about her mother with hate. Today, she felt as guilty as hell for feeling that way towards her. The bitterness she had displayed was like bile in the back of her throat, choking her with its sour aftertaste.

  But she knew what she had heard. Knew, but still couldn’t make sense of it even now.

  When her mother died, Kate hadn’t been taken from her father. No one from social services came by the house, prying into her family’s business or questioning her father’s capabilities as a parent. What was the difference between their situation and the Davies family’s then? Nothing of what Sophie had said explained why she and Ben had been taken from their father. People had affairs every day of the week; it didn’t make it right, but they didn’t have their kids taken away from them as a result of it.

  *

  When Sophie came back into the room she was carrying a slip of paper on which she’d written Claire Morgan’s phone number. Kate dialled the number from the pay-as-you-go mobile she usually kept in the bottom drawer back at the station, just in case, while Sophie sat opposite her. She ha
d picked up her book again and turned to the bookmarked page, but Kate could see from the corner of her eye that the book was just a prop that the girl had no intention of reading and she was instead waiting for her aunt to answer the call.

  Ben was safe and well at Claire’s house. She apologised profusely for not informing the foster parents of Ben’s whereabouts and for lying to the police, as if an apology was going to counterbalance the worry she had caused and the fact that she had wasted days of police time and resources. Claire was quick to emphasise the fact that she had only respected her nephew’s wishes when he had said he didn’t want to go back home, but she was the adult, Kate told her: she should have been the one deciding what was best for him, and what was best for him was to be where everyone knew that he was safe and well.

  Kate’s impatience was not subtle and she had the feeling her words were being wasted on the woman. She told Claire that she had wasted police time and had caused the foster family an unnecessary amount of worry, but this was again received with a pointless, weak apology. Claire said she would get Ben back to Pontypridd the following morning. She asked if she would be arrested, but Kate couldn’t think about that now. She had bigger things to consider.

  There was more that Kate needed to know. She looked at Sophie, who quickly turned her eyes back to her book. Kate went out into the hall to continue her conversation. She was gone for three or four minutes, during which Sophie tried to listen at the door.

  ‘I’ll let his foster parents know now,’ Kate told Claire as she came back into the kitchen, ‘but please make sure you get Ben to call them too.’

  ‘Yes,’ Claire said, ‘of course.’

  Kate was just about to end the call when Claire asked suddenly where she had got her number.

  ‘Sophie,’ Kate told her.

  There was silence at the other end of the line and for a moment Kate had thought Claire had lost the signal.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Claire said, still there. ‘Please give her my love, won’t you?’