Just Keep Breathing

by GS Rhodes

  “You’re not under arrest, Mr Harper,” DI Kidd said calmly, resisting the urge to tell Chris that if he pointed at him again he would probably snap his finger in two. “We had a few things we needed clearing up. The whereabouts of Sarah on that Saturday being one of them. These messages for another. What were you hoping to achieve with them?” he asked. “Was it a scare tactic?”

  “Something like that,” he replied.

  “Was she scared of you, Mr Harper?” DS Sanchez asked. “Did you like that she was scared of you?”

  Chris Harper laughed. “She wasn’t scared of me at all,” he said. “Sarah Harper wasn’t scared of anyone. We made her that way and it was probably our biggest mistake.”

  They let that sit in the room for a moment longer. Chris sat back in his chair, still looking through the messages he’d sent to his now-deceased daughter. He looked upset, distraught, a shadow of the confident man who had sat in front of them two days prior. He looked like he would shatter at any moment.

  “I can’t believe these were the last things I said to her,” he said. “And now she’s gone and…” He trailed off, turning his gaze back to Kidd and Sanchez. “My wife is going out of her mind with all this. She’s posting about it all day every day. She just wants justice. I want justice.”

  “We’re doing our best, Mr Harper,” DI Kidd said. “But withholding information from us wasn’t the way to go about it. We were trying to create a picture of her final movements. Keeping things from us slowed that down.”

  “I know,” he said, wrestling with something in his head. Kidd could see words dancing on the tip of his tongue.

  “Mr Harper?” DS Sanchez said. “Whatever you need to say, you need to tell us. Everything helps at this point.”

  He sighed. “I don’t want to be disloyal to a friend,” he said. “But given everything that’s happened. I…I’ve discussed it with Laura enough.”

  “What?” Kidd asked.

  “Norman,” he said. “I think…I’m wondering if…?” He trailed off and Kidd found himself holding his breath. They were done with him. It was Norman they needed to find now.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  “What do you mean he’s not there?” DI Kidd barked down the phone. DC Campbell had been trying to get through to him for the past half an hour, his phone buzzing on his desk and annoying DC Ravel like you wouldn’t believe. She pretty much threw the phone at him when he walked in.

  “I mean he’s not here, sir,” Owen said down the phone, audibly wincing. Which Kidd sort of enjoyed. “We knocked, we checked next door, he’s not in.”

  “Let me get you the address of where he works, he might be there,” Kidd said, heading over to his desk and shuffling through his notes.

  “That’s what Powell said, sir,” Owen replied.

  “Well, he’s got a brain, Campbell, I’d expect him to say something like that,” Kidd snapped. He found the address and read it out, Owen repeating it to DC Powell who Kid hoped against hope was writing it all down.

  “Thanks, boss. We’ll report back!” DC Campbell hung up the phone and Kidd found himself staring at his handset.

  He’ll just be at work, Kidd thought. He’ll be at work, and then they’ll bring him in here, and it will be fine. Nothing else is happening here.

  But he couldn’t shake the feeling that it was. His instincts were telling him that there was something else going on here, something that he couldn’t nail down and it was irritating him. He started reading through the notes DC Ravel had gotten from her interview with Ms Chowdhury. It was what he’d been expecting really—all of it a secret, no one allowed to know, sneaking around between houses but nothing incriminating. What was he missing?

  DS Sanchez appeared at the door balancing three cups of tea on one hand. She delivered one to DC Ravel and then one to him. She sat on the couch between the two of them.

  “Anything?” she asked.

  Kidd shook his head.

  “Kidd practically strangled Campbell down the phone,” DC Ravel said, taking a sip of her tea and raising a careful eyebrow at Kidd. “I honestly thought you were going to reach through the phone and punch him, sir.”

  “If the technology were available, I would upgrade immediately,” he said. “He’s not home though. Norman Kaye, he’s not at his flat.”

  “Maybe he’s at work.”

  “S’what I’m hoping,” he said.

  Zoe watched him as he took a sip of his tea. “You don’t think he is though, do you?” she asked. “You think he’s done a runner?”

  “If he’s guilty, then maybe he knew we were onto him or something,” he said. “Or maybe he just thought it’d be better to get away from here before we did end up getting onto him.”

  “You think the anger is enough of a motive?” Zoe asked.

  Kidd shrugged. “It might be,” he said. “You saw how quickly he saw red at the school reunion the other night. And everything that Alexandra Kaye said, how much of a maniac he was from Chris Harper. So maybe…”

  But maybe not, he thought. He couldn’t stand the waiting around. He walked over to the Evidence Board and dialled Caleb’s number. The phone was switched off. That was the last thing he needed. He tapped in Alexandra Kaye’s number and dialled that instead.

  It only managed to ring for a second or two before Alexandra picked up.

  “Hello? Caleb?” she squeaked down the phone.

  “No, it’s DI Benjamin Kidd,” Kidd replied. “I tried phoning Caleb but his phone was switched off. I take it he isn’t home?”

  “No, he isn’t,” she replied. Her voice was so high pitched, it ripped right through Kidd. “He hasn’t been home since yesterday.”

  “Yesterday?”

  “Yes,” she said, frustrated now, angry even that he wasn’t hearing what she was saying. “He was supposed to be at his grandparents’ house but he never got there.”

  “We spoke to him last night,” DI Kidd said. “He came to the station, gave us some information, then DS Sanchez dropped him home.”

  “His stuff isn’t here,” she said. “I looked in his room, he’s taken his bag, he’s taken everything. But he didn’t make it to my parents’ house last night.”

  “Have you already reported him missing?”

  “No, I’ve been working!” she snapped. “I didn’t know. I had no idea. I think…” She trailed off, her voice catching on a sob.

  Kidd looked up to see Zoe staring at him.

  “What?” she mouthed at him.

  He grabbed a Post-it Note from her desk and wrote down CALEB MISSING in block capitals. She hurried to the other side of the room and grabbed the phone.

  “Owen? It’s Zoe,” she said into the receiver. “No, wait, shut up. Shut up a second.” He obviously did. “Caleb is missing. Norman Kaye’s son is missing. We need to…” She looked up at Kidd. He nodded. “We need to treat Norman Kaye as a suspect in this. Go back to the house, we’ll get a warrant, break the fucking door down, and see if he’s in there.”

  She hung up the phone and walked out of the room. Seconds later DCI Weaver was in the room with them. He looked confused. He also had a napkin stuffed into the top of his shirt, probably from where he’d been recently eating his lunch. When he realised, he tore it out and threw it in the bin.

  “What on earth is—?”

  Kidd shushed him. “Ms Kaye, I need you to calm down,” he said. “What are you trying to tell me here?”

  “I think it’s Norman,” she said. “I’ve got messages from him.”

  “Is he saying he has Caleb?”

  “No, nothing like that,” she said. “When your DS was here the other day, the woman.” DS Sanchez would love that. “She asked if I wanted to report him for what he was saying, the threats he was making, and I said no, and now…now I don’t know if…if I’ve…” She trailed off. DI Kidd knew what she was getting at. She didn’t know if her not wanting to cause problems with her ex-husband had ended up costing her son his life. He didn’t want that to be the
case either.

  “We’ll get on it, Ms Kaye,” he said, turning back to the Evidence Board, to the mugshot of Norman Kaye staring back at him. Could they really have read him so wrong?

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  There were few things DI Kidd hated more than waiting around. He liked to be out there, doing things, finding the bad guys, picking up the evidence, solving cases, but right now he was at a loss. DC Campbell and DC Powell were heading back to Norman’s flat to find out if he was keeping Caleb there after all. DS Sanchez had gone to his place of work to see if he had shown up there. DC Ravel was tracking every credit card number that Alexandra Kaye could give them, trying to get a signal on his phone which was, like Caleb’s, switched off.

  None of it looked good. And DCI Weaver wasn’t impressed.

  “We bloody had him!” he barked. His breath stank of the curry ready-meal he’d had for lunch, the stench enough to make Kidd want to hold his breath. “We bloody had him and you let him go!”

  “We had him, yes, but he’d not done anything yet.”

  “He had the girl, if we’d kept him here—”

  “We had no reason to suspect him,” Kidd barked. “He’d gotten into a fight with Chris Harper who had pretty much given us no reason to think it was him.”

  “Well, how about you look at this then?” DCI Weaver grabbed his computer screen and swivelled it around so violently he nearly threw the thing off the desk. It was the Laura’s Facebook page. She was talking about something, nearly two hundred thousand people watching her.

  The title of the video was chilling: Another child missing. Are the police doing anything?

  The comments that were flying in below the video all agreed with her, condemning the police, people saying that something must be done.

  “After what happened with Sarah, I feel the need to speak up for parents whose children are missing,” she said. “Alexandra Kaye is a dear friend of mine and after everything that’s happened to me, it only seems right that I use my platform for good and get the word out that her poor son Caleb is missing.”

  She picked up her iPad, a picture from Caleb’s Instagram on it. The heart button went crazy, hundreds of people had to be pressing it at once, filling up the side of the screen.

  “We’d not informed the press,” DCI Weaver said gravely, switching off the video. “Alexandra Kaye told us less than an hour ago, and Laura Harper is acting like she’s BBC News 24 all over Facebook, spreading it, making us look like idiots. She’s been making us look like idiots the whole time,” he added. “No wonder the Super is breathing down my neck about it. He just wants an arrest to be made. He wants to be able to tell the press something.”

  “Right.”

  “She’s still calling for Dexter to go down for Sarah,” he said. “I know you’ve told me he’s innocent, told me that the parents locked him away all weekend, but she doesn’t know that. She’s got her followers out for blood and I don’t know what she’s going to do if she doesn’t get her own way.”

  “Then we need to get Norman for it,” Kidd said flatly. “That’s the only thing we can do. We need to get Norman arrested for it, charged with it, and announced so that this vitriol will end.” He looked back at the screen that was now facing away from him. “There’s no way we can stop her?”

  “Caitlyn asked the same thing,” he said. “She’s been in the house with her the whole time, having to listen to it all, watch all the bullshit.”

  “But it’s her free speech,” Kidd said.

  “Fuck her free speech.”

  “Dangerous road to go down, boss,” Kidd replied.

  “But she’s—”

  “Saying stuff we don’t agree with, but it’s what she believes,” Kidd finished for him. “I don’t think it’s about all that anyway.”

  Weaver knew where he was going with this, Kidd didn’t need to go over it again. It was the same theory he’d had about her from the start. So much of this was to do with getting attention. That’s what it had all been about really. Whether the attention was positive or negative, her number of followers was going up and that seemed to be all she cared about. But it was dangerous. Kidd hoped that DS Sanchez was having more luck than he was.

  ◆◆◆

  DS Sanchez went with uniformed officers in tow to Norman Kaye’s place of work. He worked in the ASDA just outside of Kingston town, a stone’s throw away from the flat that DC Campbell and DC Powell were currently busting into, hopefully, to find Caleb. Based on what Alexandra Kaye had said about him, the last thing she wanted to do was deal with Norman on her own.

  They pulled up.

  “Do you want us to come in with you?” PC Eve was pretty new to the force. He had a baby face and the keen attitude of somebody who was fresh out of the academy and he wanted to impress.

  “Might scare him off if he’s in there,” she said flatly. “But thank you. I’ll keep you on radio. If he’s in here, we just need him arrested as cleanly as possible. Don’t want to alarm him.”

  “You think he’s dangerous?” PC Grant had been in the force for longer than DS Sanchez, his grey beard a little bit wispy around the edges. One year away from retirement, as he liked to keep reminding her. He also liked to remind her that he would miss her every day once he was retired, which was a sentiment that Zoe didn’t share.

  “He might be,” she said. Though what she really wanted to say was more than likely. Given what Alexandra Kaye had said to them, they needed to proceed with caution. And based on what she’d seen of him at the school reunion, she would. “Like I said, I’ll radio.”

  “You be careful now,” PC Grant said. She resisted the urge to tell him to go fuck himself, reminded herself he was old and from a different time, but it was a few shades too condescending for her to take lying down. She shot him a look that would make Medusa quake and opened the car door.

  She felt in her back pocket for her handcuffs, just in case. Beneath her shirt was a stab vest—you could never be too careful with things like this. She didn’t know what he would try.

  The ASDA was bright white, an assault on the eyes when you walked in from the semi-dark of the outside. There were a lot of people milling around, baskets in hand, focussing on their shopping, no one paying attention to her. Which was, of course, what she wanted. If she’d have walked in there flanked by two police officers, then she wouldn’t have had any chance of catching Norman Kaye by surprise.

  She walked the aisles slowly at first, checking the bakery counter, the rotisserie, the fish, he was nowhere to be seen. All she knew of him was that he worked there. What his actual job could be anything, which meant he could be anywhere.

  She looked down every aisle and couldn’t see him, making her way to the freezers at the end of the store and down towards the checkout. If he was here, that was likely where she’d find him.

  And she was right.

  He was stood by the self-checkouts, a look on his face that told her he was bored, that he was barely paying attention, which was exactly what she needed. If she could catch him by surprise maybe—

  No.

  He looked up. He caught sight of her. That flicker of recognition flashing across his face before he realised that she was here for him.

  And the panic.

  The panic that, in her eyes, told her that he was guilty.

  Without a second thought, he dropped everything and bolted for the door.

  “Fuck’s sake!” she growled, grabbing the radio from her pocket. “We’ve got a runner,” she said. “I’m going after him. Coming out of the exit now.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  “Nothing?” DI Kidd said down the phone. “There’s nothing?”

  DC Campbell made a noncommittal noise down the phone. It was enough to make Kidd want to throttle him.

  “Going to need a little more than that, Owen,” he grumbled.

  “There’s not a lot of anything here, sir,” he replied. “There’s a little bit of furniture, a bed in the bedroom, another in the
spare, which I guess must be Caleb’s when he comes here, but there’s nothing of note.”

  “You’ve searched the whole place?”

  “Forensics have just shown up, sir, they’re looking for anything that might point to Sarah Harper having been here,” DC Campbell said.

  DI Kidd nodded. There was no point looking for Caleb’s DNA, it would be all over it. But if they could find any trace of Sarah, that would be enough to convict, that would be enough to get this finished.

  “Right, thank you, Campbell, good work. Get back here as soon as you can,” he said before hanging up the phone.

  DI Kidd turned back to the paperwork he’d been looking at, the interviews he’d already conducted, trying to figure out what it was he had missed. There had to be something. If there was nothing in Norman Kaye’s apartment, where on earth could Caleb be? Where could Sarah have been kept the night before she ran off?

  It was all coming from that same direction, the direction of Norman’s flat. There was something obvious staring him in the face and he just couldn’t get a handle on it. It was maddening. He opened Sarah’s website and started looking again, scrolling through the posts, through the abbreviations. It was staring him in the face. He knew it. It was here somewhere. It had to be.

  D is on my last nerve.

  What if…?

  There are too many lies, too many fights, and I don’t think I can take it anymore.

  Could it be that…?

  D needs to change and he needs to change now.

  Kidd could feel it coming to him when his phone started ringing.

  ◆◆◆

  DS Sanchez bolted out of the ASDA and down London Road as fast as her feet would carry her. There was no way on this planet she was going to let him get away. She could see him up ahead, his high-vis jacket he’d been wearing in the store giving him away from a good distance.