A Narrow Trajectory

by Faith Martin

  ‘And not even Jake could get her to stop,’ Curtis said bitterly.

  ‘Not even Jake?’ Hillary pounced. ‘Jas usually listened to Jake, did she? I know he said that they were close, but I wasn’t sure how much of that was just wishful thinking on his part.’

  ‘Oh no, he was right. Jas adored him, didn’t she, Rose?’ Curtis said promptly.

  Hillary turned to see that Rosemary was also nodding her head emphatically. ‘It started off as hero-worship of course,’ she said, with a fond smile. ‘Do you remember how she used to follow him around like a hopeful little puppy?’

  ‘Jake said he found it flattering, rather than annoying,’ Hillary prompted.

  ‘Yes, he was always very good with her. Very patient – some boys would probably have reacted badly to being saddled with a little sister. But he never resented her and she could tell that and adored him for it. When she was ten, she even made him promise to wait for her to grow up so that they could be married. Very serious about that, wasn’t she, Curt?’ Rosemary laughed. ‘She’d researched it and everything. I can remember them now, sitting on the sofa together, and Jas solemnly explaining that, just because they were legally stepbrother and sister, it didn’t mean anything, because they weren’t related by blood.’

  Curt laughed. ‘I’d forgotten that. She’d talked to a vicar about it, hadn’t she or something.’

  ‘A biology teacher, I think it was,’ Rosemary corrected. ‘Anyway, she’d got slightly confused about blood groups, or something, but she’d got the gist of it right. Because they didn’t have the same genes, they could marry.’

  ‘And what did Jake say to that?’ Hillary asked, her lips twitching in amusement.

  ‘Oh, he was very good about it,’ Rosemary said instantly. ‘He didn’t laugh at her, like I was worried that he might. Children’s egos are so fragile, aren’t they? Instead, he said that he found it all very interesting, and that of course he’d wait for her to grow up, but he tried to point out that by the time she had done so, she might not be quite so keen. And that she’d probably have found a really cool and good-looking boyfriend for herself by then, and would turn her nose up at her old-fogey brother. And he promised her that he wouldn’t hold it against her if she did.’

  ‘That made her so angry – as mad as a hornet if I remember,’ Curt cut in with a laugh of his own. ‘Ten years old, pigtails down to here,’ he indicated a spot about mid-thigh on his own body, ‘and as ferocious as a hunting lioness. She stamped her foot and insisted that she wouldn’t change her mind and that he’d better wait for her, or else.’

  Hillary nodded. ‘She sounds like someone who knew her own mind. I take it that strong sense of self only made it more difficult to reason with her later on about the drinking?’

  ‘Yes. She defended her friends to the death, saying that we were all just jealous of them because they were young and having a good time. And she laughed when we tried to use what happened to her own mother as a warning. She scoffed and said she’d never do drugs. She had far more sense.’ Curtis shook his head. ‘And like a fool, I believed her. At first.’

  ‘We all did. Jas was so bright, Hillary, you see,’ his wife cut in anxiously. ‘She was clever at school and pretty and popular and seemed to have the world at her feet. She was fascinated by Jake’s success and seemed so inspired by it and also determined to do well herself. As you know, she was nearly seventeen by the time Jake sold his company for all that money and started investing it in real estate and what have you.’

  Hillary nodded. ‘She wasn’t jealous of him then?’ she probed carefully. ‘After all, he was the famous young entrepreneur, the hot-shot, IT whizz-kid. The golden boy. Most teenage girls would have resented all that.’

  ‘Oh yes, I know what you mean,’ Rosemary said at once. ‘And of course, I do think she was a bit envious. I mean, how could she not be? Jake was buying himself a Jaguar, and that big house in Oxford and what have you. What young girl wouldn’t dream of that kind of lifestyle for herself?’

  ‘But,’ Curtis put in quickly, ‘she didn’t resent Jake having it. She was genuinely pleased for him.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Rosemary was quick to agree.

  Hillary nodded, sensed they were becoming a little uneasy, and decided to move on. ‘And it was around this time that you noticed she was into drugs?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Both of them spoke almost at once.

  ‘Did she ask Jake for money?’

  ‘Yes. But he wouldn’t give it to her. Not when he realized why she wanted it,’ Rosemary said. And for the next hour or so they went over the same ground that Jake had already covered – charting the girl’s slow, inexorable slide: the pregnancy that ended so badly; the futile stints in rehab; the leaving home, being found, the coming back and then the promises to go straight and keep clean. All ending, of course, in her final disappearance, when even Jake’s PIs couldn’t find her.

  ‘I don’t know what more we could have done,’ Rosemary finally said. By now, she was tearful, and had cried softly off and on into a steadily disintegrating piece of tissue. Her husband was white-faced and equally despondent.

  ‘But Jake was generous to her in other ways,’ his mother continued. ‘He wouldn’t give her cash to feed her habit, but he took her places – swanky restaurants and nightclubs. He took her out in the jag to rock concerts and even abroad – to places that she’d always wanted to go. Monte Carlo, where he taught her how to play roulette and blackjack. He even rented a yacht and took her across the Mediterranean in it. That was a reward for staying clean for six months. And for a while, it seemed to distract her.’

  She paused and then shook her head. ‘But always, she slid back down into her old bad habits. We all tried everything we could to make her see how good life could be away from constant highs and lows. But nothing seemed to work.’

  In the silence that followed, Hillary sighed a little. ‘Did Jake tell you that I’d need a list of the names of all her friends?’

  ‘Yes, we have it here,’ Rosemary said, rising to pick up a piece of paper from the mantelpiece. ‘But these are the friends she had in school, mostly. The others, the ones she knew as an adult … in that world … we just don’t know who they are or where they live.’

  Hillary took the information with a small smile. ‘That doesn’t matter. They’ll either be in the system, in prison, or, more likely than not, dead.’ She hesitated delicately, but knew from Jake that they had already discussed the harsher realities of drug addiction. ‘You do realize that people who live as Jas has been living…’ She trailed off, already seeing that she didn’t need to spell it out.

  Rosemary paled, but nodded bravely.

  ‘You don’t have to tell us,’ Curtis said harshly. ‘She’s probably dead. We haven’t heard from her for more than two years. Not even begging letters for money. We know that this,’ he waved a hand helplessly in the air, ‘new investigation you’re following probably won’t end well, but we just need to know. It’s the not knowing that kills you. And the worst thing of all is thinking that she might still be alive somewhere, and desperate for help, but we just don’t know about it. You understand?’

  Hillary did. Hope was a bitch. It tormented you far more than pain or grief ever did.

  ‘I don’t know what Jake’s promised you,’ Hillary said gently, ‘but I’m not a miracle worker. I can only do what can be done. I’ll work on this to the best of my ability, and I can promise you that I won’t give up looking for Jas until either I find out what’s happened to her, or I’m convinced that there’s nothing else that can possibly be done. But I have to warn you – sometimes, the families of missing people never do get answers. You should be prepared for that possibility.’

  Rosemary was still staring down at the tissue in her hands. Her lips trembled, but Hillary saw her nod.

  Curtis said nothing.

  Slowly, and grimly feeling that she’d brought enough misery to their lives for one day, Hillary ro
se and let herself out of the house.

  Once inside the cold interior of her car, she thought for a long while about what she’d learned thus far. As she did so, she became increasingly aware of her lowering mood. The truth was, she didn’t have a good feeling about Jasmine Sudbury’s case. She didn’t have a good feeling about it at all.

  Eventually, she turned the ignition key and Puff the Tragic Wagon coughed apologetically and stalled. She swore at him softly, and tried again, without success.

  It took her another couple of minutes to coax the old Volkswagen into life, and then she headed back to HQ, trying to think of something besides the Sudburys.

  It wasn’t hard to find a distraction.

  There was nothing stopping her from starting the process of moving into Steven’s house permanently now. At least that wouldn’t be so hard. It wasn’t as if she’d need a removals van or anything. All she’d have to do was cruise the Mollern a little further down the canal to her new private mooring, and bit by bit, transfer the bulk of her belongings through Steven’s overgrown back garden.

  The thought of their lugging her bits and bobs to and fro from the canal under the watchful eyes of his neighbours made her smile.

  With all that they had on their plates – the stress created by Steven’s new job; the dangers Jake would face when dealing with Darren Chivnor and her growing unease about the Jasmine Sudbury case – she was beginning to suspect that smiles were going to be hard to come by for quite some time.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Wendy didn’t mind the drive to the south coast and to Hayling Island, even though it was a grey, cold and miserable day. No doubt in the summertime the road would be clogged with sun-seekers and holiday makers, but the goth in her loved the misty, murky atmospheric days of winter. And not even congested roads, bad drivers and water spray from passing artic lorries pricked her pleasantly gloomy mood.

  Beside her in her beloved Mini, Jimmy Jessop had a very different view of the proceedings. For a start, the low-slung, cupped seats were playing havoc with his back, and the dreary weather was giving him a severe case of the doldrums.

  But Rebecca Tyde-Harris’s parents had retired to the coast last year, and over the telephone had sounded more than keen to be interviewed. Something about their desperation and gratitude that their daughter’s case hadn’t been totally forgotten made him decide on the spur of the moment that the interviews would better be done face to face.

  He’d have been even more disgruntled if he’d realized that the bright youngster beside him – and who’d been listening in on the telephone call – had twigged straightaway the true reason for the road trip. And that now Wendy knew that, really, he was nothing but a big-hearted softy under his stern and grizzled former-sergeant exterior, she wouldn’t be so much in awe of him.

  They had to rely on the Mini’s sat-nav to guide them the final half-mile or so to the Tyde-Harrises’ residence, which was isolated on the very outskirts of the town. Wendy for one wasn’t disappointed by the Tyde-Harrises’ choice of residence for their retirement.

  Set at the end of a short and gloomy laurel-lined drive was what had once been an old rectory. The rain had turned its uncompromising grey façade even darker, and a number of higgledy-piggledy steeply pitched grey slate roofs ended in leaking guttering. Add to that a multitude of small leaded windows that looked as if they hid a hundred Victorian secrets, and the goth was in her element.

  ‘Wow,’ she said, looking at the dripping evergreen foliage that was climbing up one of the walls towards a round window set under the eaves. ‘Can’t you just imagine some poor lunatic uncle, who’d been locked away in the attics by his relatives to starve to death, just haunting the place and plotting his revenge? This place is way creepy,’ she said enthusiastically.

  Jimmy, who had far more of an eye for the practical cost of real estate prices these days than architectural aesthetics, looked at the large edifice and instantly concluded that the Tyde-Harrises certainly wouldn’t miss the reward money they’d offered for news of their daughter. Should they ever have to award it.

  ‘Tyde-Harris was something in banking, wasn’t he?’ he grunted. ‘Retired just before they frazzled the economy?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Wendy agreed absently, still fantasizing about what it must be like to live in a genuine, haunted Victorian vicarage.

  Swearing under his breath and wincing, Jimmy climbed out of the car with some difficulty and straightened his recalcitrant spine. He’d already taken a couple of aspirin that morning, but he supposed wearily that he’d have to take two more later. Not that he liked taking pills as a rule, but this backache which had been coming and going for weeks now, seemed to be suddenly digging in with a vengeance.

  Old age was a bitch.

  He regarded Wendy, who was already skipping like a spring lamb towards the house and craning her head upwards, with a jaundiced eye.

  ‘Bloody hell, that’s an actual gargoyle,’ she said happily, pointing up towards a piece of sculpted stone. ‘See? It’s supposed to be a face.’

  Jimmy grunted something that might have been appreciative. And then again, might not. He rang the bell.

  It was answered suspiciously quickly by a tall, flabby, white-haired man, dressed casually in dark navy trousers and an expensive-looking, diamond patterned jumper in tones of dark blue, grey, white and sludgy-green. The fact that he’d got to the door so quickly told Jimmy that he – and probably his wife – had been awaiting their arrival for quite some time. Probably, Jimmy thought with a pang, they’d both been standing at the window for the last half an hour or so, watching for a car to come up the drive.

  He swallowed back a familiar feeling of rage and helplessness, one that always assailed him when meeting the family and friends of victims of violence, and gruffly displayed his ID and introduced himself.

  ‘Mr Jessop, I’m Richard Tyde-Harris. Miss Turnbull, please come in.’

  Jimmy saw the elderly man look Wendy over with a briefly bemused expression, and was glad that today, the goth wasn’t dressed particularly outrageously. Instead, she’d confined herself to a long black granny dress that looked as if it had been used to mourn the passing of Queen Victoria, and had added a cracked black biker’s jacket for warmth. She still had all that black muck caked around her eyes, Jimmy noticed fatalistically, but her hair, for once, was free of any strikingly coloured dye and lay in a fairly well-behaved blob around her face.

  ‘Come into the drawing room. Margot’s laid some tea. I hope you like ginger cake,’ the old man said, leading them into a dark hall with original tiles on the floor and a dark wood panelling.

  Jimmy didn’t like ginger in any form, but gave a pleased smile. ‘One of my favourites, thank you, sir. But you needn’t have gone to any trouble.’

  As they stepped into a room that was dominated by a large stone fireplace, he sensed Wendy tense and turned to follow her wide-eyed gaze.

  Margot Tyde-Harris was rising from a large, richly brocaded sofa and was watching them anxiously. Like her husband, she was probably now well into her sixties, but looked much older. Although even Jimmy – no expert when it came to women’s fashion and accessories – could tell that she was immaculately well-groomed, he felt himself wither a little inside as he took in her appearance.

  The woman was so thin she looked anorexic. She had wonderful bone structure, and was still very handsome, but her cheekbones stood out like razors. Her eyes had sunken back into her skull, but blazed out at them with a dark blue fire that could almost be physically felt.

  He sensed Wendy shiver with pity, and understood why.

  It might have been more than five years since Rebecca Tyde-Harris had last been seen, but for this woman it was probably only yesterday. And what’s more, as Margot moved towards them, offering a hand festooned with diamond, emerald and ruby rings, one look in that ravaged face told Jimmy that this woman was in no doubt at all that her daughter was dead. There was no hope in her expression, only a savage kind of grief and helple
ss rage.

  Her husband introduced them, watching her anxiously all the time.

  ‘Mr Jessop,’ she said, and her voice was both upper class and melodious. Her hair was pure white and arranged in a simple, elegant chignon. Diamonds studded her ears. Her hand, in his, was so bony he felt like he was shaking hands with a skeleton and he nodded mutely, at that moment unable to speak, and carefully disengaged his hand.

  She turned and looked at Wendy with much gentler eyes. ‘Hello, my dear. Please sit down and have some cake.’

  Jimmy knew from the files that Rebecca had been their only child – and clearly having a young woman in their house again had struck a chord with the grieving mother. And Wendy, who was no slouch when it came to reading situations either, smiled at her tremulously. ‘Thank you,’ she said meekly. ‘I’d like that.’

  They all sat, and Jimmy cleared his throat in the awkward, momentary silence that followed. Margot graciously began to cut the cake and poured tea from a large china teapot into Spode cups so delicate they were almost see-through.

  ‘Have you any news of Becky?’ It was Richard Tyde-Harris who broke the ice first.

  ‘No, sir, nothing specific,’ Jimmy responded at once. ‘But as I said on the telephone, we work for the Crime Review Team. It’s our job to take another in-depth look at cold cases. And at the moment, Thames Valley are doing a review of missing persons, specifically those of missing women, and our boss, DI Hillary Green, has passed on Rebecca’s case to us.’

  ‘Ah yes. We did some research on the inspector. I hope you don’t mind,’ Richard said, with a quick glance at his wife. ‘The internet is such a useful tool, in spite of all its shortfalls. I have to say, we were rather relieved and reassured by what we learned—’

  ‘Oh, yes, Hillary is fantastic.’ It was Wendy who couldn’t help interrupting. She knew she shouldn’t have and she sensed Jimmy’s displeasure even as she did it, but Wendy didn’t care. Her eyes were fixed on those of Margot. Her every instinct was screaming at her to do everything she could to try to heal some of the damage that had been done to her. ‘Every cold case she’s worked on so far, she’s always solved.’