Killing Coast, A (Detective Inspector Andy Horton)
Page 26
Horton recalled that blue van. But that could have been a decoy, and perhaps the girl with the dog, the man with the canoe or the jogger with his iPod plugged into his ears had been watching Stanley and waiting. And why now? Simple: Horton had made contact with him and with the social services, and if Sawyer knew that, then so too did the person who wanted the real reason behind Jennifer’s disappearance kept secret.
Well, on Monday Horton would return to the social services offices to see if they’d managed to find any more files about his childhood, but he knew they wouldn’t have. Just as in 1978 someone had wiped the trail clean, so they had now. Only this time they’d left a small trace: a missing photograph. The fact that the photograph was missing was his first big break, and it was their first mistake. With a grim smile, Horton swung the Harley eastwards and headed for his yacht and home.
AUTHORS NOTE
That Charles X fled to England from France in 1830 and there was a dockers’ strike at Southampton in 1981, forcing passengers to disembark from the SS Canberra off Spithead instead of Southampton, is fact. The existence of the Esmeraude Collection and the SS Agora are entirely the result of the author’s imagination.
Susan Elizabeth Hague is a real person whose husband bid at a charity auction for her name to be used in this DI Andy Horton novel, thereby helping to raise £1,500 for the Sarah Duffen Centre, Down Syndrome Educational Trust, in Southsea.