Evan Blessed

by Rhys Bowen

  “It’s okay. I hurt it when I fell into the bunker.”

  “What bunker?”

  “The bunker where I thought he was hiding you,” Evan said. “He pushed me in and then shut off the air supply.”

  Bronwen reached out and took his hand. “Oh Evan, how awful for you.”

  Evan smiled. “Lucky I had a squad car and it was parked where it could be seen from the road or neither of us might be here right now.”

  “I do hope you won’t have to wear a sling for the wedding, Evan,” Bronwen’s mother said. “It will spoil the pictures.”

  “Mother!” Bronwen glared at her. “Damn the bloody pictures.”

  “Bronwen!” Mrs. Price said.

  Evan grinned to himself.

  Chapter 28

  An hour later he was riding beside D.I. Watkins, joining holidaymakers in the Sunday mass exodus from Wales.

  “You’d think our economy should be booming with all this tourism, wouldn’t you?” Watkins said.

  “Most of them have their own caravans, look you,” Evan said. “They probably bring their own food as well and all we get out of them is the occasional ice cream or drink in the pub.”

  “You’re a cynic, boyo, you know that.”

  “I haven’t exactly been through the happiest of times, have I?” Evan said. “It’s going to take a while to get over this.”

  “Of course it is,” Watkins said, “but I’ve no doubt a wedding will cheer you up.”

  “I still can’t believe that it’s less than a week away,” Evan said. “I hope Bronwen will be well enough.”

  “How did she seem this morning?”

  “Remarkably bright.”

  “She’s a tough girl, Evan. Many women would have cracked after what she’s been through.”

  “I still can’t come to terms with Shorecross getting off so lightly,” Evan said. “Do you think the judge will buy the insanity defense?”

  “Oh, I’d say he was clearly round the twist, probably has been all his life.”

  “So he’ll wind up in some cushy insane asylum where they’ll let him stroll the grounds and play his piano. It doesn’t seem fair, does it?”

  “Isn’t that the first thing you realized when you joined the police force?” Watkins asked. “Life’s never bloody fair. Good people get their heads bashed in. Bad people walk away free. It’s only very occasionally that we actually see justice done.” He slapped on the rim of the steering wheel. “I hope to God we find out what happened to Shannon. I don’t like leaving it not knowing.”

  “I agree,” Evan said.

  The motorway skirted to the north of Chester and soon they were crossing the Mersey into Liverpool. Shannon Parkinson lived in one of those faceless suburbs that sprawl out from every major city. Neat semi-detached houses built before World War II, front gardens with gnomes and birdbaths, men outside polishing cars and mowing pocket handkerchief—sized lawns, children riding scooters. The house and garden were well kept although there was no sign of life and the curtains were drawn. Evan suspected that the family might be away and was surprised when he knocked on the front door that it was opened quickly by a middle-aged woman, smartly dressed in a summer suit and heels.

  “Can I help you?” she asked warily. “We’re just off to church. If you’re from a newspaper, we’re not talking to anyone.”

  “It’s Inspector Watkins and D.C. Evans, North Wales Police, madam,” Watkins said, stepping forward. “I take it there’s been no news on your daughter then?”

  “How can there be when the likes of you haven’t done a damned thing?” she snapped, her face contorting with bitterness. “She may not be an important case to you, but she’s all we’ve got. Our precious joy.” She put her hand up to her mouth and turned away.

  “Now, Mother, don’t distress yourself again.” A tall, gaunt man, dressed in his Sunday suit, came out of the living room behind her. “Did I hear that you’re policemen? You’ve nothing to tell us, have you?”

  “I’m afraid not, Mr. Parkinson,” Watkins said. “But I don’t want you thinking that we haven’t done everything we could. We’ve searched the whole mountain several times, we’ve had divers in the lake where we found her glove …”

  “Glove? I didn’t think she took gloves with her. I told her to and she said it was the middle of summer and I always fussed too much.”

  Watkins glanced at Evan.

  “Paul Upwood identified a glove we found as Shannon’s,” Evan said. “Bright red wool.”

  Mrs. Parkinson shook her head. “She never wore gloves. She’s one of those young people who never seem to feel the cold. Even in winter she’d go out without a coat. Her father told her she wanted her head examined, but she never listened to us, did she, Father?”

  “Too headstrong by half.” Mr. Parkinson nodded agreement. “We weren’t exactly happy with her going on this trip but she went anyway.”

  “Why weren’t you happy?” Evan asked.

  “I didn’t trust him,” Mrs. Parkinson said. “He wasn’t the right young man for her.”

  “He seemed like a nice enough bloke,” Evan said. “Well mannered, attending the university.”

  Mrs. Parkinson shook her head. “There was just something about him I didn’t like. Shannon changed after she started going out with him.”

  “You’re not suggesting that he had something to do with her disappearance, are you?” Watkins asked.

  The Parkinsons looked at each other, then Mr. Parkinson shook his head. “He worshipped the ground she walked on, I’ll say that much for him. He’d not have let Shannon get hurt.”

  Mrs. Parkinson glanced at her watch.

  “Sorry, you were on your way to church,” Watkins said.

  “That’s all right, if there’s anything else we can do to find our Shannon,” Mr. Parkinson said, looking at his wife’s face. “The wife doesn’t like to be late usually.”

  “Is there anything else we can tell you?” Mrs. Parkinson said. “We’ve been over everything with the local police, so I really don’t know what to say …” Her voice trailed off into hopelessness.

  “By all means, go ahead to church then,” Watkins said. “But maybe first you could give us the names and addresses of Shannon’s best friends. Sometimes young girls will confide something to a best friend that they keep from their parents.”

  “Like what?” Mrs. Parkinson looked perplexed.

  “If she was planning to run off somewhere on her own maybe? Go into hiding for a while?”

  Evan saw a great wave of relief flood over her face as she realized her daughter might still be alive. “Why would she want to run off and put us through all this worry?”

  “Because you disapproved of her young man, maybe?” Evan suggested.

  “You think it was all a plot and she’s off somewhere now with that Paul?”

  “It’s possible.”

  Mr. Parkinson shook his head violently. “No, she’d never put us through all this worry. She’s a good girl at heart. She cares about her mum and dad.”

  “Shannon’s best friend was Amy Illingsworth,” Mrs. Parkinson said. “She lives round the corner on Milton Drive. I think it’s number twenty-eight. It has a monkey puzzle tree in the front garden. I can never understand why people plant those things. Ugly as sin, aren’t they?”

  Evan noted the number.

  “Thanks very much for your help,” Watkins said. “I can tell you now that for a while we thought she’d been captured by a madman. We discovered a bunker, you see. Only it turns out he had nothing to do with her disappearance. So now we can put out feelers all over the country and hope for better news, can’t we?”

  “Oh yes.” Mrs. Parkinson’s face glowed. “I do hope so.”

  “I hope we haven’t raised her hopes too high,” Evan said as they drove away. “If someone’s not found after a week, the outcome isn’t often good.”

  “If she’s run off anywhere, the friend will know,” Watkins answered. “All we have to do is pers
uade her that it’s in Shannon’s best interests to tell us.”

  Amy Illingsworth’s house was indistinguishable from the Parkinsons’, except that the front garden was paved over and a motorbike was parked there. An unkempt woman, still in her housecoat, opened the door.

  “Yeah? What do you want?” she demanded. “And it better not be bloody Jehovah’s Witnesses again.”

  “North Wales Police, madam,” Watkins said. “We’d like to speak with your daughter Amy, if we may.”

  “Amy? She’s not done anything wrong, has she? I told her she was asking for trouble, staying out all hours at those bloody clubs.”

  “She’s not done anything wrong, Mrs. Illingsworth,” Watkins interrupted. “We understand she is Shannon Parkinson’s best friend. We hoped she might help us in our search for Shannon.”

  “Oh. Right. But I don’t know how she can help you. She’s been that worried.” She went to the foot of the stairs. “Amy!” she yelled in a voice that would cut metal. “Get yourself up and down here. We’ve got policemen wanting to talk to you.”

  A few minutes later a bleary-eyed girl, her face bearing the smudged remains of last night’s makeup, came into the room.

  “It’s Sunday morning. Only time I get to sleep in all week,” she complained, flopping into the nearest armchair. “Anyone got a fag?”

  “I’ll make us all a cup of coffee,” the mother said, and disappeared tactfully to the kitchen.

  “Have you heard anything about Shannon yet?” Amy asked.

  “Nothing. That’s why we came to see you,” Watkins said. “We wondered if she’d maybe confided something to you about her plans.”

  “Plans?”

  “Such as running away from too strict parents?”

  Amy looked surprised. “They’re not too strict. They spoil her rotten. Give her everything she wants, they do. Not like my mum.” She lowered her voice for the last phrase.

  “Paul Upwood claims that they forbade her to see him and watched over her like jailers,” Evan said.

  Amy’s lip curled in a sarcastic smile. “He said that, did he? He’s a bloody liar, then. The only one who watched over her like a jailer was him.”

  “Paul?”

  “Yeah. He was too bloody possessive by half. Told her what to wear, wouldn’t let her put on makeup, that kind of thing. She turned into a zombie after she started dating him. We had a falling out over it. He wouldn’t let her see me anymore ‘cause I’m too common, apparently. I said to her, ‘You choose, it’s either him or me.’ And she said, ‘You know I can’t go against him.’ But I tell you what”—and she leaned forward in the chair—“she was getting right fed up with him. In fact, I think she’d met someone else she fancied more.”

  “So you think she might have run off to be with another bloke?” Evan asked.

  Amy considered this. “Yeah. It’s possible. She’d want to hide out for a while so that Paul couldn’t come and find her.”

  “You’ve no idea who this other bloke was, have you?” Evan asked.

  She shook her head. “Like I said, we weren’t speaking much before she went on holiday. I only saw her the once and I told her it was daft, going away with him. ‘You hate walking and fresh air and all that healthy stuff,’ I told her. And she said that Paul had set his heart on it and she didn’t want to let him down. ‘But it will be the last time,’ she said.”

  “What did she mean by that?” Watkins asked sharply.

  Amy shrugged. “I expect she’d made up her mind to dump him for that other bloke.”

  “And you’ve no idea where she met the other bloke?” Watkins asked. “A local, is he?”

  “Like I said, we haven’t been talking much. Paul cut her off from all her old friends. So I’ve really no idea. It’s not likely to be anyone from school. She liked older men.” She attempted to smooth down her unbrushed hair. “So, I’m sorry, I can’t really help you. I wish I could.”

  Watkins and Evan made their exit before Amy’s mother appeared with the coffee.

  “We should pay a call on the local police and have them interview Shannon’s school friends,” Watkins said as they drove away. “Maybe she confided about the new boyfriend to someone else. But she could have met him anywhere.”

  “Too bad it’s the summer holidays,” Evan said. “If anyone is away from home at the moment, it will be assumed that he’s off on holiday. Shannon could have arranged to meet him and faked tiredness on the mountain as an excuse to get away from Paul without a fuss.”

  Watkins nodded. “That does seem the most likely scenario. We’d better get onto the media again and have her picture shown. She’ll have to have surfaced somewhere.”

  “Funny about the glove, though,” Evan said. “Why would Paul lie about it?”

  “Unless he was trying to place her somewhere that she hadn’t really been,” Watkins said thoughtfully.

  “And why would he do that?” Evan asked.

  Watkins paused for a long moment before he said, “What if she’d told him she was leaving and going off with someone else? It might have been a way of salvaging his pride, or of punishing her.”

  “Seems like a ridiculous length to go to,” Evan said. “If we hadn’t scoured the whole mountain, I might have thought that he’d got rid of her himself and planted the glove to hint that it was an accident.”

  “But then her body would have turned up in the lake.”

  “That’s true.”

  They drove on in silence. Evan played through the scenes in his mind. Paul had seemed distraught and yet certain things didn’t make sense. He had claimed he was much fitter than she was and she couldn’t keep up with him. And yet he had puffed and panted when Evan took him back up the mountain. Evan shut his eyes, picturing the scene again for himself. Even if Paul had come down the Pyg Track quicker than Shannon, the mountain was bare for most of the way. He’d only have had to look back and he’d have seen her. What if they hadn’t been on the mountain at all?

  “What’s on your mind, Evans?” Watkins asked. “How do you see this?”

  Evan took a deep breath. “You know what I’m thinking, sir? I’m wondering if they ever went up Snowdon. Paul Upwood was out of breath by the time we’d gone over the first crest when I took him up with me, and yet he claimed they had words because she couldn’t keep up with him. So how about this: what if she told him she was planning to leave him? We know he worshipped the ground she trod on, according to her parents. We know how possessive he was. What if he wasn’t prepared to let her go? What if he killed her and has hidden the body somewhere else—somewhere far away from Snowdon?”

  “That would be looking for a needle in a haystack, wouldn’t it?”

  “I’m not so sure,” Evan said. “They didn’t have a car with them, so they could only go where the Sherpa bus and their own two feet would take them. We know they were staying at the youth hostel and both were seen at breakfast that morning. The bus driver doesn’t remember them on his route, so they must have walked. The question is, in which direction?”

  “We did put up some posters and nobody came forward to say that they’d seen her that day,” Watkins reminded him.

  “Of course. He would have deliberately chosen a less traveled route, probably one with some trees, and not too steep either, the way he panted.”

  “We’ll take a look at the map when we get back, but in the meantime I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. Fancy a fry-up at the transport café?”

  “I never say no to a good fry-up,” Evan said. “Especially since I’m about to embark on a life of healthy eating with Bronwen.”

  “Your last meal, like the condemned prisoner’s, then.” Watkins chuckled.

  “Sorry, but I find it hard to smile about last meals at the moment. I hope to God we find Shannon Parkinson’s body if he did kill her. I don’t want another man getting away with murder.”

  “We’ll find her. As you said, he wasn’t much of a walker. And he can’t have had time to bury her properly.
We’ll have the dogs out again and she’ll turn up, sooner or later.”

  They pulled into a transport café called the Traveller’s Rest and walked away from the counter with plates piled high with eggs, beans, chips, sausage, bacon, mushrooms, and fried bread.

  “Enough cholesterol to kill an ox,” Watkins commented as he dipped the fried bread into the egg yolk, “but it looks wonderful.”

  Evan was just putting the first forkful to his lips when he stopped. Yolk dripped down onto the rim of his plate.

  “Hang on a minute,” he said. “I was just remembering that first time that Paul Upwood showed up at my cottage. He wasn’t at all out of breath. You know the climb up to the cottage, don’t you? It’s steep enough to make even Charlie Hopkins pant a little. So that must mean that Upwood hadn’t come up the hill at all. He’d come down from above. You know there’s a path that follows the stream up between the Glydrs and Mynedd Perfedd. I think he could have managed it without too much difficulty.”

  “Any woods up there?”

  Evan paused to think. “Not many trees, but plenty of rocks, oh, and there’s that little reservoir on the other side.”

  “Right,” Watkins said. “As soon as we’ve finished this, I’ll have men up there. And I suppose I’d better call out the divers again.” He sighed. “We better find a body. HQ is going to nail me for going over budget this month.”

  Evan looked up from his meal. How often they made light of tragedy in their profession. Finding bodies was just part of the job. But now he’d had his own personal brush with tragedy, he found he couldn’t smile at Watkins’s quip. Finding the body meant a lifetime of grief for a family. He’d never forget that again.

  Chapter 29

  Before the day was out, Shannon Parkinson’s body had been found, tangled in a clump of reeds at the edge of the small lake. A warrant was issued for Paul Upwood’s arrest. Evan was annoyed that he hadn’t been allowed to join in the search to look for Shannon, but by the end of the day he had to admit that his shoulder would not have appreciated the hike. In fact, the stress and exhaustion of the last two days suddenly caught up with him, so that he was fast asleep in a chair in the duty room when Watkins came to find him with the news.