by T. M. Logan
Abbie frowned, looking from the detective to her mother, and back again. ‘I don’t get it. Why not?’
‘Because,’ Preston said, ‘it’s not his blood.’
64
Abbie
‘What?’ Abbie said, blinking at the detective. ‘I don’t understand.’
Preston looked at her, as if trying to decide how much to reveal. When he finally spoke, his voice was flat. ‘The blood in your dad’s car is not his own.’
‘You just said that,’ Abbie snapped.
‘These are simply the facts,’ Preston said evenly. ‘Just trying to keep you up to speed with the investigation.’
‘I don’t get it, any of it, what does this mean?’
‘We cross-referenced it with DNA profiles provided by relatives in another missing persons case, and we got a match.’
‘To whom?’
‘These are only preliminary findings of course, so—’
‘WHO DID IT MATCH TO?’ Abbie shouted, her eyes glistening with tears.
Claire put a hand on Abbie’s arm. ‘It’s OK, Abbie.’
Preston sat back in his chair, studying her. ‘The blood is a DNA match for George Fitzgerald,’ he said.
Abbie’s usual olive complexion had faded to deathly pale, all the blood drained from her face. ‘That’s impossible,’ she said numbly. ‘There must be a mistake.’
‘No mistake,’ Preston said. ‘I spoke to Ed last week in relation to threats he’d made against Mr Fitzgerald. We know they had a history of bad blood going back a few years, with your dad intervening in your relationship.’
‘He didn’t intervene, he was trying to get George to back off after I broke up with him.’ She paused as the full meaning of the detective’s words sank in. ‘You’re not suggesting that my dad had anything to do with George disappearing?’
‘Mr Fitzgerald’s blood is in your father’s car.’
‘It’s ridiculous to think Dad would hurt him, or anyone else.’
‘In which case—’
Ryan leaned forward, elbows on the table. ‘Abbie is right,’ he said forcefully. ‘This is crazy. Ed’s a lovely guy, I cannot believe for one second that he would have done something like that. I haven’t known him for very long, but I can tell you it wasn’t in his nature.’
‘In which case,’ Preston repeated, ‘it would be good to eliminate him as a line of enquiry.’ He turned again to Abbie. ‘He was also having a hard time getting his head around your marriage, is that right?’
Claire said, ‘He’s always been very protective of her.’
‘So, just to recap,’ the detective said. ‘He was unhappy with Abbie’s new relationship, he’d been accused of assault, he’d lost his job and was seeing a therapist. He was also taking anti-depressants. Is it fair to say Ed was in quite a fragile state of mind?’
Abbie watched as her mum’s face creased and dissolved into tears.
‘Things had been getting on top of him a bit.’ Claire put her head in her hands and began to cry in earnest, soft, breathy sobs from deep in her chest. ‘Oh God, this is my fault, I should have talked to him, listened to him. Given him more time. But instead I . . . I pushed him away. It’s my fault.’
Preston put his pen down, lacing his fingers together on the table. ‘Everyone has their breaking point, Mrs Collier. Most of us won’t even know where ours falls until we’ve already crossed it.’
Abbie passed her mum another tissue. ‘How much blood was there?’ she said quietly. ‘In Dad’s car? Was it like a few drops, or more than that?’
‘An amount that we would deem significant, in evidence terms.’
‘Are you sure it’s George’s?’
‘DNA samples given by his parents and his sister are enough to establish a familial link.’ He pulled a picture out of his file, a printed image on an A4 sheet of paper. ‘Tell me, Mrs Collier, does your husband possess a crowbar?’
‘A what?’
He slid the picture across the table.
‘We found it in your husband’s car, under the spare tyre in the boot. It had traces of George Fitzgerald’s blood on it.’
65
Abbie
‘I don’t care if the police have advised us not to, I want to go up there,’ Abbie said. ‘To where Dad was last seen.’
It was the first thing she said when they all walked out of the police station, dazed and bewildered by DC Preston’s revelation that her father was now a suspect in the unexplained disappearance of George Fitzgerald. It was a warm July morning, blue sky and glaring sunshine, but the beautiful weather felt like a sick joke after what they had just heard inside.
‘Up to Derbyshire?’ Ryan said. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Anything has got to be better than sitting around here, waiting for the police to call us in again. There must be something I can do. If I go up there I could talk to people, show Dad’s picture, ask if anyone’s seen him.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ Ryan said, leaning into her so his forehead gently touched hers. ‘We’ll go together.’
‘Really?’
He pulled her in for a hug and she felt that warmth, that glow that always surrounded her when she was enfolded in his arms.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Not going to let you go on your own, am I? And I know the area a little bit.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, her head resting against his chest. ‘Don’t know what I’d do without you.’
‘Hey, you know what? We could make some posters with his picture, put them up in shops and car parks, places like that. Might help jog people’s memories.’
‘That’s a great idea.’
Claire watched them, creases of worry lining her face. It looked like she had aged ten years in the last two days.
‘I could come too,’ she said.
‘Probably better if one of us stays local, Mum, stays at home,’ Abbie said. ‘The police might need to speak to us again, and if Dad turns up . . .’
She didn’t finish the sentence.
*
Abbie watched as copies of her dad’s face churned out of the printer, one after the other. Two days ago she had woken up on Monday morning with her head full of work and weekend plans. Now there was no space for any of that. Tomorrow was Thursday and Ryan had taken another day’s leave so they could drive the fifty miles to Edale, put up posters and try to find some kind of clue to her father’s disappearance.
She picked up one of the print-outs. In large capitals across the top was the word MISSING, above a picture of Ed bundled up in coat and scarf for Bonfire Night last year. She was worried it was a bit too smiley, but her mum said it was the best and most recent shot they had of him dressed for the outdoors. Below the picture, the text read: ‘Edward Collier, aged 48, went missing on Sunday 12th July around the Edale/Ladybower area. If you saw him or have ANY information about his whereabouts, please pass your information to the Police on 101, or text 65650 quoting incident number R661/20.’ She’d added mobile numbers for Ryan and herself, just in case someone wanted to call direct.
She laid it back on the stack. She’d made 100 copies and wasn’t sure if that was far too many or not nearly enough. She paused, struck again by the desperate wording of the appeal: virtually the same as George’s sister had used on social media. Could her dad really be involved in the disappearance of her ex-boyfriend? Was it even possible? A few months ago she would have said no – never – but now? She no longer knew what to think.
Ryan appeared in the doorway to the spare bedroom, car keys in hand. He picked up one of the posters, studying it and nodding slowly.
‘These look good,’ he said, then frowned. ‘Sorry, not good, that sounded wrong. They look right. Should jog some memories. I’m going to the shop to get some tape and drawing pins, and plastic wallets to protect them from the weather. Anything else you can think of?’
‘No,’ she said, sitting down at the desk. ‘Thank you, Ryan.’
‘It’s the least I can do.’
&n
bsp; ‘It doesn’t seem real,’ she said. ‘Not at all. It’s all so crazy, like something you read about in the news.’
‘It’s a lot to get your head around,’ Ryan said. ‘But you have to stay positive, that’s what your dad needs right now. And besides, it’s incredibly hard to just disappear completely. I genuinely believe that we’ll find him – it’s just a matter of time.’
‘Really?’ Her voice was taut with hope.
‘Really.’
That was so like him, she thought. Relentlessly positive, despite all the things he’d faced – his parents splitting up, losing his mum, losing friends in Afghanistan – he was always optimistic. It was what she loved about him. Even envied, at times.
And yet there was something bothering her too, catching on the edges of her mind like a hangnail that kept snagging on her clothes. Something that didn’t quite add up. From the police station this morning; what DC Preston had said about the evidence they had presented, but she couldn’t pin it down. Her mind throbbed from fear and only a few hours’ sleep.
With a sigh, she stacked the posters together and put them into a cardboard folder in her rucksack, ready for tomorrow. She turned the radio on and flicked to the local BBC radio station, in case the police had put anything out about her dad’s disappearance. Flicked from channel to channel, then gave up and opened up her iPad to check for new messages on the social media appeals she had posted. There were lots of notes from friends but also strangers; so many good wishes and prayers for Ed’s safe return.
Sending all best wishes xxx
You are all in our thoughts and prayers x
If there’s anything we can do, let us know xx
Nothing, though, that would help find him.
And the weird nagging feeling was still bothering her, still tugging on her sleeve.
It was only when she got to the bottom of a thread of comments on her Facebook post that she worked out what it was. Something that Ryan had said, when they heard that blood had been found in her dad’s car. Defending him in front of the detective, insisting that he was not a violent man.
It wasn’t in his nature.
That was it. Wasn’t. Past tense.
She stopped. Her mind circled, trying to remember his exact words. Ryan had been defending her dad, insisting he wasn’t capable of hurting anyone. Was that how he’d said it? Had he even said that? In those words?
66
Abbie
Ladybower Reservoir was dark and still, the surface of the water barely disturbed by the soft breeze.
It was early afternoon on Thursday and Ryan’s Audi was parked in the little layby where her dad’s car had been found three days before. Abbie had tried so hard not to look at the torn-off flutter of yellow crime scene tape hanging limply from one of the trees at the edge of the car park. For a moment she imagined her dad’s Peugeot here, but the thought made her want to scream, so she tried to shake it away. Ryan took her hand. He had attached posters to the sign in the car park and at the low fence that led down to the water, so the scene was now like a macabre hall of mirrors: her father’s face everywhere she looked.
They stood side by side in the sandy earth at the water’s edge, his arm wrapped lightly around her, staring out at the water. The reservoir ran the length of the valley, at least two miles from end to end, but it was deep and narrow here: from where they stood, the far shore was perhaps only 150 metres away, a thickly wooded incline rising up from the water’s edge.
No one had stopped at the layby in the twenty minutes they had been there. It was deathly quiet. Abbie crossed her arms, tried to visualise her dad driving here with a bottle of vodka and several packets of amitriptyline. Tried to see him sitting behind the wheel of his car, swallowing back the pills, the drink, then making his way down to the water’s edge.
She couldn’t picture it. Couldn’t imagine him doing it.
Which made her frustrated and confused and terrified, all at the same time. She had come here partly because she wanted to understand, to see what might have happened for herself. But she just couldn’t see her dad coming here to take his own life; he would have known the impact it would have had on her and her mum, and he would never have wanted that. Never. They had all suffered the loss of poor Joshua together, and her dad would never have wanted to inflict that kind of pain on his family again. Maybe that’s just selfish wishful thinking, Abbie thought, but it’s true. I want it to be true.
‘I don’t get it,’ she said, turning to her new husband. ‘Why is there no body? If someone searched around this reservoir, surely they’d find a body. It would float or something, wouldn’t it?’
‘I suppose,’ Ryan said gently, the wind lifting his hair. ‘I don’t think it would sink, would it?’
‘That’s what I mean. Why haven’t they found anything?’
‘Big place to search, isn’t it? A lot of water.’
Ryan said whole villages had been swallowed up in the making of the reservoirs up here, not just Ladybower but two more to the north. On the drive up he’d told her about these drowned villages, Ashopton and Derwent, submerged far beneath the surface of the water when the valleys were flooded decades before.
Abbie looked back up the slope, towards the road. From the car park down the bank, to the edge of the water, was a distance of perhaps twenty metres. Hardly anything at all – even if you’d drunk nearly a bottle of vodka and swallowed handfuls of pills.
‘There should be police divers, shouldn’t there? Checking the reservoir?’
‘They started searching a bit lower down,’ Ryan said. ‘They’ll be working their way up here, the officer said.’
‘They should be doing it here now.’
‘I can ring that detective again if you like, ask him about it?’
Abbie barely heard him. ‘You know, Dad might have just walked away,’ she said. ‘Taken himself off. Decided to go for a longer walk and then got lost. He might have thought he was going to come back to the car.’
Ryan put an arm around her shoulders, gave her a gentle squeeze. ‘Maybe.’
‘You don’t sound very convinced.’
Ryan kissed her on the side of her head. ‘I suppose I’m thinking, if he was planning to use the car again he wouldn’t have left the keys in it.’
Abbie turned to look at him. ‘What? Who told you that?’
‘The police mentioned it.’
‘Did they?’
‘Yesterday, that detective constable.’
She frowned. ‘You sure?’
‘Positive.’ Ryan said. ‘But I guess no one really knows what it means, do they? Your dad might have just forgotten the keys.’
‘God,’ Abbie rubbed her temple. ‘I can’t even remember him saying that, my head is in such a mess.’
‘Don’t be so hard on yourself,’ Ryan said, rubbing her back through her thin summer jacket. ‘That’s what I’m here for, right? I’m always here for you.’
Abbie thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps Dad changed his mind at the last minute, but thought he shouldn’t drive if he’d had that much to drink? With the tablets as well.’
‘Perhaps.’ Ryan nodded uncertainly. ‘Come on, we should put some more posters up.’
They drove the three miles south-west to Castleton, a hub for walkers exploring the north end of the Peak District. As they parked the car, Abbie’s phone pinged, three texts arriving in quick succession as the mobile picked up a signal again. All from her mum.
How’s it going? Are you OK? Are you in Edale yet or did you go to the reservoir first? x
Another, straight afterwards.
Did you get my text? Where are you now? X
Then a third message.
You OK? Text me x
Abbie replied to say she was OK but had only just got a phone signal back, and that was why she’d not returned the text straight away. She told her where they’d been and what they were doing next, then sent another quick follow-up that she hoped would calm her mum’s nerves a little.
They each took half the posters and taped them to telegraph poles in the village, a community noticeboard and signs at the trails that led up onto the moors. Then they went to all the shops, pubs and cafés in Castleton’s main street, showing Ed’s picture and asking if anyone had seen him in the last few days.
The elderly manager of the little convenience store let Abbie put one of the posters up in the window, and took another for behind the counter.
‘Thank you, dear,’ the white-haired lady had said, studying the printed image. ‘My husband is always taking pictures up there, he might have a few from last weekend. Is there an email address as well where we could send them? I’m not very good with texts. All a bit too fiddly for me.’
‘I can give you mine?’
Crap. Email, Abbie thought afterwards. They should have put an email address on too. Maybe they could set one up, just for this, then they could all monitor it. That was a good idea.
Abbie took out a pen and scribbled her personal email at the top of the sheet. ‘Thank you so much,’ she said. ‘I appreciate your help.’
‘I hope your father turns up safe and sound,’ the lady said.
Ryan was outside the post office, looking at his map. ‘Your dad’s car was spotted at Edale car park, let’s try there next with some posters.’
They drove up towards the pass into the next valley, past the humped peak of Mam Tor skimmed with clouds.
Email, she thought again.
What about her dad’s email? What if there was something in there that would help to find him? A clue to where he’d gone? He was always checking it and clearing it, keeping his inbox tidy and forwarding her random links about teaching, and new films and TV shows he thought she’d be interested in. She’d tried to nudge him towards WhatsApp and Messenger but he’d always stubbornly persisted with his twenty-year-old Hotmail account.