Twenty-Two
It’s the first time in my life that someone has suggested things may not have been as they seemed. It’s not just making me dizzy with excitement, it’s like there’s a sliver of light at the end of the tunnel. The ghost of a possibility.
Which is why I’m back in Chris’s office, begging, and praying.
“You cannot be serious, Rachel! Please!” Chris bellows. He’s thrown his pen across the desk and it’s bounced off to the floor by my feet. I bend down to pick it up.
“I’ve never been so serious in my life,” I say, depositing the pen back on the desk.
“Don’t be so dramatic. I’ve already got a headache.” Chris drops an Alka Seltzer in the tall glass of water. It bubbles and fizzes. I point a finger at the glass.
“That’s not going to help you. Those are for heartburn.”
“I’ve got that too. Close the door.”
He sits down with a sigh. I do as he says and as I turn I catch Vivian's eye. I give her a quick smile.
“Tell me again, Rachel, I just want to make sure I heard you correctly.”
“You heard me correctly. Get Jacob back in, Chris, please. We can’t do it without him. It’s not working. He’s the one with the experience. With the ideas, if you don’t mind me saying.”
“You asked me to fire him, remember?”
“That’s not true, and you know it. I just related something I heard that seemed important to relay. That’s all.”
“I don’t understand you. One minute you tell me not to trust him, the next you can’t live without him. Which is it today?”
“It’s about priorities. The podcast is good, really good. It’s getting the downloads and the sponsors, which is fantastic. But now what? We have to do more than just recap what happened twelve years ago. I can get some interviews—”
“So you keep saying.”
“—but so what? It’s not called, What Happened to the Forsters, is it? None of this is helping us to find Mm—Molly.” I can’t say my own name. It doesn’t matter how many times everyone around me says it. “We need more. We need dirt. Jacob has the experience we need for that. He worked as an investigative radio journalist. It says so on his LinkedIn page and—”
“You checked out his LinkedIn page?”
“I did, I’m not afraid to admit it. It’s a public page anyway, it’s not like I broke into the Internet.”
Chris shakes his head quickly in confusion. “Okay. Stop. Let’s backtrack here. What do you want, Rachel? Wait, I just got a weird sense of déjà vu when I said that.”
“I want—I would like you to please call Jacob and offer him his job back.”
“Three weeks ago he was a liar and a cheat. That’s the Jacob we’re talking about, is that right?”
“I never said he was a liar and a cheat.”
“You implied it.”
"No, I didn’t. He was a liar, true, if omitting something is a lie, but I never said he was a cheat. But anyway that entire thing was a mistake. I have it on good authority that he’s sober now. I also have it on good authority that he’s as good as you thought he was. We never had anything to worry about. That ex-boss just had an axe to grind.”
“Rachel—”
“I made a mistake. I'm admitting that. And I’ve already apologised to him personally.” That raises Chris’s eyebrows.
“Now, I’m apologising to you,” I continue. “I’m sorry I made a mess of things, Chris. But I’m trying to fix them and we need him. We need him to get this podcast to the next level.”
“I swear If you hadn’t just been on a holiday, I’d tell you to take one.”
He eyes the ceiling. “What does Vivian say?”
“I haven’t told her yet, I wanted to talk to you first.”
“Can you get her in here, please?”
This is good. If Chris wants to run it past Vivian, then at least he’s considering it.
I lean back and look through the glass. I am sure she’d be looking this way, and I’m right. I make hand gestures to beckon her in. She raises her eyebrows as if she hasn’t been looking at me, as if this is all a surprise.
“Come in here!” I mouth. She raises her eyebrows higher, if that was even possible. Oh I get it. If you want me, you can come and get me.
I stand up and pop my head out the door. “Vivian, would you please come in here? If you’re not too busy?”
“Certainly,” she replies breezily.
She’s inside with a couple of long strides. I close the door after her.
“Sit down, Vivian. Rachel, the fickle one over here, now wants Jacob to come back and work with us.”
She shoots me a confused and more than mildly suspicious look.
“Just listen, okay?” I plead.
“Personally,” Chris continues, “I’m in favour. We haven’t replaced him yet—frankly I haven’t had the time. He’s bright, he has good ideas, he’s an excellent editor, and these days I find myself doing his job as well as my own.”
Vivian bristles. “Excuse me? And what have I been doing? Chopping liver?”
“You’re right. My apologies. You’ve been a great help with the editing side of things. Thank you. Anyway.” He sighs. “If, and that’s a big if, Jacob hasn’t taken up another position somewhere, how would you feel about that, Vivian?”
I hold my breath. If things between us had been the way they used to be, then I would know exactly how Vivian feels about that, and anything else she happens to have feelings about.
“Who will be hosting the podcast?” she asks.
“You will,” I reply quickly, before Chris has a chance to say anything.
He gives me a stern look, but doesn’t contradict me, which is the main thing.
“You’re doing a great job, Vivian,” he says. “If you want to keep hosting, and I hope you do, then it’s yours.”
“You’ve got the better voice,” I add.
She nods. “What would Jacob be doing?”
I jump in again. “I suspect Jacob would have some strong ideas about the direction. He’s got the experience. He knows where to dig.”
She scoffs. “I think I’ve done just fine on my own.” I note that she’s excluded me, but I don’t bite.
“Yes, but things are really heating up now. I think between the three of us we can get this podcast to move in the perfect direction. We can bring the focus back to Mm—Molly.”
“What about as news editor? Is he going to take over from me? I’ve been doing the bulk of it,” she says.
I make a face. “Maybe you could share the load?” I suggest, just as Chris says, “Yes, he would take over from you,” just as Vivian says, “Because I can’t do everything around here!”
I laugh with relief. “I thought you wanted to do it! Keep doing it I mean.”
“No way! The podcast? Yes! My own column? Absolutely. Editing the freaking paper? ‘Scuse my French, Chris,” he blinks his forgiveness, “but that’s hard work and, no offence, but it’s boring.”
“Okay, then,” he says.
I clap my hands.
“Let me think about it,” he adds.
“Okay. Thanks, Chris.”
When I get back to my desk I see through the blinds that Chris is already on the phone.
“What was that all about?” Vivian whispers beside me. I’m so surprised that she’s talking to me the way she used to, I don’t know what to say for a second.
“I kinda made a mistake,” I reply softly. “I’m trying to fix it.”
“What did you do?”
“I misjudged him.”
She shrugs. “Sounds like you’re making a lot of mistakes, Rach.”
Twenty-Three
I’ve never met someone who works out of a coffee shop before. But that’s what Tom Sneddon does. He didn’t want to meet in our office and frankly I couldn’t care less.
But I don’t feel very confident handling this interview by myself, for the obvious reasons. I’m worried I would give myself away. He is a private
detective after all. Since Jacob is working with us again I got him to meet us too.
It’s a pretty ordinary coffee shop, which is fine, but it’s not particularly inviting. There’s no background music, no pretty flowers on the Formica tables. I don’t have to ask for help in order to pick Sneddon out. He’s the one sitting at a corner table that is covered with files dripping with papers. The only other people are a young couple at a table by the window, and an attractive woman in her sixties reading a newspaper.
“Are you Tom Sneddon?”
He stands and offers his hand for me to shake. “You must be Rachel. Please.” He indicates a chair for me to sit.
I tell him that Jacob will be here shortly and order an espresso, then immediately regret it. I’m jittery enough as it is.
I hear Jacob’s voice next to me. “Sorry I’m late.”
“No problem,” I reply. I’m so relieved to see him, I could kiss him.
I turn to Tom. “So, you still work as a private detective?” I ask, unsure how to begin.
“Not really, not anymore. I’m retired now, but I still get the odd job here and there. This place is handy for meetings, they don’t mind me.”
Jacob has introduced himself, and now pulls out what looks like a heavy-duty audio recorder. “It’s a Zoom,” he explains, watching me studying it up close. “Broadcast quality.”
I nod.
He puts on a pair of heavy-duty headphones while Tom shuffles through the papers on the table until he finds what he’s looking for.
“It’s all a bit bulky, isn’t it? Not exactly spy material,” I say to Jacob, pointing my chin at the equipment.
“We’re not spying on anyone, Rachel.”
I wonder what Sneddon thinks of our mindless chatter. Then Jacob winks at me. “But I do have a wireless mic too.”
He pulls out what looks to me like a small black box. He explains to me how it works, that it has a receiver which looks to me like the exact same box, and you plug that one into the zoom, and the other is wireless with a fifty-metre range, but it’s not quite as good quality as the mic on the Zoom, and pretty soon I wish I’d never mentioned it.
“It was an odd case, that one,” Sneddon says, flicking through a notebook. “Six years ago, I received a call to track a missing person. That’s not an unusual task for me—it’s the bulk of my work. I don’t do divorces. Anyway, I remembered the case, of course, the Forster murders.”
“Sorry, wait, who hired you?” Jacob asks.
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugs. “It’s not that unusual. People want to stay anonymous for reasons that they’re not prepared to share with me. But as long as they don’t ask for anything illegal, and I still get paid, I don’t care. My clients expect confidentiality. It comes with the territory.”
“Okay. Could you start from the beginning?”
“Sure.” He takes a sip of his coffee, licks his lips. “I got a call from a man—let’s call him John Smith. I’d been recommended to him, he didn’t say by who. Again, this happens. I don’t need to know. He wanted to find Molly Forster. He said he was writing a book about the case.”
“Was he?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Who knows? There hasn’t been a book, but what does that mean? Maybe he gave up the project. But he wanted to find Molly, even though the Chief Constable at the time, Edward Hennessy, was certain that Dawson, the bloke who killed the Forsters, must have killed Molly outside the house and buried her somewhere.”
“But Dawson had already left three bodies behind in the house, why would he go to the trouble of hiding Molly’s? That’s what I don’t understand,” Jacob says.
“That’s right. And that was John Smith’s point as well. He didn’t think Dawson had hidden her.”
I am staring at my hands.
“You said Molly was in Spain, six years ago. How do you know?” Jacob asks.
“I did all the checks to see if she’d surfaced anywhere, as Molly Forster, but she hadn’t. So she was either dead—which is where I’d have placed my bet back then—or she no longer called herself Molly Forster. If that was the case, she probably would have gone to London at some point, and there are only so many networks you can tap into when you’re young and without resources. Molly would have been eighteen when I went looking for her, so I put it out there that I was looking to buy a new identity for a young woman, no more than twenty. That’s definitely unusual. Girls that age who run away don’t fork out tens of thousands of pounds for false papers.”
“And you found someone who had recently sold a fake identity to a young woman around that age,” Jacobs says, nodding.
“Nope. I found nothing. So I did the next thing, I looked for children who had died young, preferably around Molly’s age. Names that Molly might have known about before she went missing. Then I checked to see if they’d suddenly reappeared, and bingo. Susan Bishop had died in Whitbrook and would have been around the same age as Molly. Same Susan Bishop had applied for a driver’s licence when she turned eighteen. She travelled together with a small-time criminal and they ended up in Barcelona. I lost her trail, but I found him through a car he hired. He marked me though—he was smart, that one. I told my client I might have found her, that she might be the girl living with that bloke, but we had to move pretty fast. These people know how to disappear, and they know how to do it quickly. Next thing, the client said thanks very much, that’ll be all. I got paid in full and some more and that was that.”
Gabriel had told me never to get a driver’s licence in Susan Bishop’s name. When I asked if it would come up, that I—she—was dead, he said not exactly, it’s not automatic, but it creates a record out there. When I asked again, what would happen if I got one? He said, probably nothing, unless someone went looking.
I did it anyway. I got myself a driver’s licence, and then someone went looking.
“So you don’t know if they tracked her down after that?” Jacob asks.
“Nope. But I do know the bloke died shortly after.”
I have to look down at my lap again at that. I want to get out of there. I don’t want to hear anymore. Back then, I really thought that Gabriel had died because the people he was running away from had caught up with him. It is devastating beyond belief to know for a fact that he had died because of me.
“Do you know how?” Jacob asks.
“Car accident. Ran off a cliff. There were no witnesses but from the state of the car, it was highly possible he got help.”
“What are you saying?” I blurt.
“I think he was chased and the car got rammed off the cliff.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw it.”
“You did? But I thought you said the client finished the contract?”
“Yeah, but the accident happened the next day. I was still in Barcelona. I was packing up to leave, and I saw an item on the news. I recognised the car. So I went to take a look.”
“Did the police say it had been deliberate?” Jacob asks.
He shrugs. “I don’t think they looked into it too closely. Like I said, there were no witnesses, no one came forward. The guy had been living on his own apparently, which was interesting in itself, because I knew that wasn’t true. The car had some damage. It showed there’d been a crash, and it also looked to me like another car had run into the back of it, but who was to say when that happened? But I knew. I’d followed that car, and I knew it hadn’t been in an accident before. That damage wasn’t there in the days prior.”
“What was his name?” Jacob asks.
“He called himself Gabriel Delgado. I knew him as Angelo Cifuente.” He shrugs. “I don’t think either name was the one he was born with.”
The Angel Gabriel. How appropriate.
“You okay, Rachel?” Jacob says.
I look up. “Yeah, sure, why?”
He studies me for just a second. “No reason.”
He turns back to Tom. “What happened
then?”
“Nothing. I went home, got my money and didn’t think about it much after that. Until your podcast.”
“And her name was Susan Bishop, you said.” Jacob is making a note. “You sure it was Molly?” he asks.
“Yep, I am.”
“Why?”
“Like I told you, after I found them the client told me to drop it and paid in full. No explanation. Now why would they have done that if the job wasn’t finished?”
We stay silent, mulling over what Tom has just said.
“That with the fact that Delgado was killed, yeah, I’m sure. I’d found Molly. And before you ask,” Tom says, “I don’t know where she went, or where she is now. Or even if she’s still alive.”
Twenty-Four
I’m standing in our bedroom, trying to pack.
“I don’t understand why you even want to go?” Matt’s tone is whiny. Churlish. He’s in a foul mood. He’s been so weird lately, I can feel an argument building. That’s how it is with him. If something is bugging him, he will chip away at it quietly, silently, until it comes out in one big shouting match. We’re not quite there yet, but it’s coming, and no amount of ‘what’s the matter’ and ‘is anything wrong’ will make it happen faster. I know that by now. Matt will explode when he’s ready and not a moment before.
But I have my own demons to contend with at the moment. I can’t stop thinking about what Tom has confirmed. There’s another piece to that puzzle, too, one that no one knows about. When Gabriel and I moved to Barcelona, I glimpsed a different life stretch out in front of me. A life with freedom and even joy. We got a small flat by the beach, which sounds more glamorous than it was. We played house. He went to work in the evenings, sometimes I would pop into the bar for a drink, pretend I was a tourist. He’d flirt with me. It was the closest I’d been to having a normal life. I was the housewife. I washed his clothes in the tiny washing machine in the basement, then I hung them outside the window like everyone else did. Our street was so narrow you could almost touch the clothes hanging on the opposite side. Well, not quite. But it was hot and we all kept our windows open, and you could smell what everyone was having for dinner. Children would play downstairs in the narrow street and their squeals and shouts bounced up the facades. It was like living in the midst of a busy, happy village. Susana! They’d call me, the other women in the street. They’d practise their English with me and I’d practice my Spanish. I laughed so much during that summer, there were times when I even forgot about everything else.
Missing Molly Page 10
