Exposed

by M. A. Hunter

  ‘I know these don’t do nearly enough to reflect my appreciation, but I hope you will accept them regardless.’

  He seems genuinely sweet, and there is a kindness to his eyes that I didn’t expect to see. I know appearances can be deceptive, a lesson I learned only too well with Aurélie, but I can’t leave him on the doorstep, so I accept the gifts and allow him to enter. I don’t think I’d be so brave if Rachel weren’t inside with me.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says, rubbing his gloved hands together, as if he’s just stepped out of a snow blizzard.

  I show him to the living room, which is barely half the size of the office Anna and I were trapped in last night. I can’t help wondering how much he really knows about last night. Presumably he will have been alerted to the fact that Anna and I had triggered the alarm on the safe, but there isn’t anything in his demeanour to suggest he’s aware of my complicity in the break-in. It troubles me that he knows my address, and that he’d have the audacity to come here in person if he truly was guilty of the things Daisy accused him of.

  ‘How is Daisy today?’ I ask, sitting on the sofa, allowing him the armchair.

  He too sits. ‘Slept like a baby from all accounts, the poor thing. But she was keen to return to school this morning, despite her guardian’s suggestion to stay off, given the media interest in her story.’

  I can only assume she’s told her family the same tale she spun for the police, but I still can’t get over what he’s hoping to achieve by coming here today. If he wanted to give me flowers and champagne, he could have had them delivered.

  ‘You’re a writer, or so I understand?’ he says next, his eyes casually taking in the small space.

  ‘That’s correct,’ I respond. ‘Well, I’m more of an investigative journalist, but have produced accounts of my work in novel form.’

  His gaze meets mine, and he smiles warmly again. I can’t say why, but my nerves are on edge, and there’s something I simply don’t trust about this man.

  ‘It truly is a fine skill to have. Writing, I mean. I’ve had publishers chasing me to produce my memoirs, but I just don’t have the discipline to sit and write. I have such admiration for those who can.’

  All this positivity and schmaltz is making me feel nauseous, but I remain gracious, trying to play my cards close to my chest.

  ‘Well, it pays the bills,’ I self-deprecate. ‘Have you travelled far today?’

  ‘We were in Southampton – my wife and I, that is – having been waiting for news on Daisy.’ He stands suddenly. ‘We’re due back in London this afternoon, so I won’t take up any more of your time.’

  I stand too, tightening the belt around my dressing gown, ready to show him to the door, but he takes a step forward and thrusts out his hand, which I nervously shake.

  ‘If there’s anything I can do for you in return for your endeavours, then please get in touch. A donation to the charity of your choice perhaps? Think about it, and if there’s anything I can do, you’ve only to say.’

  He promptly moves to the door and opens it himself, signalling for the chauffeur to open his door without turning back to say anything further. I remain on the doorstep, waving as the car pulls away, before closing the door and returning to the living room.

  Rachel appears from behind the bathroom door a minute later. ‘Who was at the door? Delivery?’

  I don’t respond, slowly playing the scene through my head once more. I don’t understand why he went out of his way to drive ninety minutes down the road to deliver flowers and then immediately return. It’s a kind gesture, and maybe that’s just in his nature to be that way, but I’m not convinced. I know my own thoughts are sounding as paranoid as Anna, but I can’t help thinking this morning’s charade was nothing more than him testing the water to see how much I know about his potential involvement with the ring. Maybe he was hoping that turning up unannounced would catch me on the back foot and I’d accuse him outright. Or maybe it was his subtle way of telling me they know where I live.

  I wish I could just see what’s really going on here, but before I can face Rachel again, there is a second knocking at my door, and part of me isn’t entirely surprised to see Daisy Beauchamp beneath a baseball cap.

  ‘We need to talk,’ she says.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Then

  Portland, Dorset

  The moment Emma stepped out through the school gates, she knew something wasn’t right.

  ‘Auntie Hayley?’ Emma frowned, approaching the woman whose eyes were puffy behind her thick-rimmed glasses. ‘What’s going on? Where’s Mum?’

  Hayley didn’t respond at first, her lips straining as she resisted their tremble. ‘She’s at my house, love.’

  In the years and months since Anna had disappeared, one thing had been constant: her mum collecting her from school. It had even become a cause for resentment. Emma had lost track of the number of times she’d asked whether she could walk home with her friends, or at the very least that her mum wait further along the road, rather than waiting in the playground like the mums of the children in Year 3. It was embarrassing to be the only student collected from the playground.

  At least Hayley had waited at the school gate, but the pain and upset on her face was gaining odd looks from the other parents standing nearby.

  ‘Why’s Mum at your house? Why isn’t she here?’

  Emma thought back to the morning, trying to recall whether her mum had said her best friend Hayley would be collecting her instead, but there’d been no mention of a change in plans. Even if something had come up last minute, Bronwyn wouldn’t have allowed it to stop her collecting Emma from school. She was obsessive about knowing where Emma was at all times of the day, and the only time she would ease up was when Emma was in school or with her dad. Even then she had to be the one to drop and collect Emma. It was as if she feared Emma following in Anna’s footsteps if given even a few minutes of freedom.

  Hayley’s lips wobbled again, and the tears in her eyes were magnified by the lenses covering them. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that something was very badly wrong.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere until you tell me why Mum isn’t here,’ Emma said, planting her feet, her overactive imagination already conjuring up worst-case scenarios.

  ‘Sh-she had some bad news, that’s all. Sh-she asked if I would collect you and bring you back to mine.’

  More of the parents were starting to stare at the two of them and, hating being the centre of attention, Emma reluctantly eased her stance. It wasn’t like Auntie Hayley was a stranger. She wasn’t an official auntie, but that was how Emma’s mum always referred to her, and Emma had seen enough of the two of them together to know she didn’t represent any kind of danger.

  She followed Hayley along the grass verge, the two of them walking in silence, Hayley struggling to keep her emotions at bay. They stopped at her car – a silver Ford Fiesta – and Emma waited for Hayley to get in and lean across to pull up the locking mechanism.

  ‘Oh, I don’t have a child seat,’ she said. ‘Oh God, I didn’t think… Maybe we’ll have to leave the car and get a taxi…’ She looked as though she was about to release a tidal wave of sobbing.

  Emma clambered in, and pulled the door closed. ‘I’m sure it’ll be fine. Just drive slowly, and I’ll sit up straight.’

  Hayley’s face brightened momentarily; she quickly nodded and fastened her belt, helping Emma to do hers. She started the engine and pulled forward, narrowly avoiding a Mercedes coming the other way. Emma braced herself for impact, but the Mercedes managed to swerve and avoid them, sounding a blare of its horn. They were on the receiving end of an angry glare from the driver, whom Emma recognised as Cindy’s dad.

  Hayley allowed the car to roll back to its space at the kerbside, before crumpling onto the rim of the steering wheel, her face buried in her arms and her shoulders rocking as she sobbed long and hard.

  Emma’s overactive imagination was playing havoc with her nervo
us system. For the bad news to have upset fun-loving and easy-going Auntie Hayley this much, it had to be catastrophic. A conveyor belt of possible causes moved swiftly through Emma’s mind, each slightly worse than the previous. And then her mind focused on one scenario that terrified her more than anything else: it had to be about Anna.

  Since Anna’s disappearance, their mum had ploughed all of her free time and energy into searching for her: time spent researching other missing-children stories; weekends spent handing out flyers to members of the public in Portland and Weymouth, and other neighbouring towns in Dorset; hours spent writing to MPs and local police authorities, begging them not to give up on Anna’s case. More than three years’ effort, ignoring the cynics who said she was already dead. To learn that all that struggle had been wasted was the only thing that would have kept Bronwyn from coming to collect Emma from school, and the only thing that could have resulted in Hayley being inconsolable at the wheel.

  ‘Please don’t cry, Auntie Hayley,’ Emma tried, gently rubbing her hand across the older woman’s back, and feeling the sting of tears biting at her own eyelids. ‘Please just tell me what’s happened. I’m a brave girl; I can take it.’

  Emma couldn’t believe the words tumbling from her mouth, but her grandma had always said that when receiving bad news it was better just to rip off the plaster, and hear it as soon as possible.

  ‘Only once you know what has to be accepted can you figure out how to deal with it,’ she would have said if she were with them in the car now.

  Emma had been devastated the day her mum and dad had broken the news that Grandma had passed away in her sleep. She’d overheard her mum telling Hayley that Grandma had died of a broken heart, following Anna’s disappearance. Even though her grandma had no involvement in what had happened, she’d blamed herself for Anna not making it to her house.

  ‘I should never have encouraged her to come alone,’ she’d said to Mum when they hadn’t known Emma was listening in.

  ‘Please, Auntie Hayley,’ Emma tried again, ‘tell me what’s going on.’

  Hayley started at the sound of Emma’s voice, and it seemed to be the impetus she needed to push herself up off the steering wheel and quickly dry her face with the sleeves of her woollen jumper.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she muttered over and over. ‘What must you think of me? I’m supposed to be setting a good example. I’m sorry, Emma.’

  It didn’t bother Emma that Hayley had cried in front of her, but she wasn’t happy at her lack of information.

  Putting the car in gear once more, this time Hayley checked both ways to make sure there were no cars coming before pulling away from the kerb. They’d been sitting in the car for so long that most of the school traffic had already moved away from them, and they didn’t see another moving vehicle until they approached the traffic lights at the bottom of the hill. Emma continued to watch her, but Hayley looked as though she was deliberately avoiding making eye contact, on the assumption that she wouldn’t have to speak to Emma if she didn’t acknowledge she was even in the car.

  ‘Let’s have some music,’ she said, fiddling with the dial of her radio, just as the news bulletin was finishing.

  ‘And in local news, police called to HMP Portland in the early hours of this morning are—’

  Hayley slammed her hand against the stereo, switching it off. She glanced nervously in Emma’s direction, before quickly focusing back on the road as the traffic lights transitioned to green.

  A fresh item appeared on the conveyor belt in Emma’s mind, and her palms became clammy instantly.

  What does it mean, Dad? What happens in two days?

  She pictured the look of fear in his eyes as she’d asked the question, the shards of glass on the carpet from the broken window reflecting sunlight back on his face like a chandelier. He hadn’t answered, claiming he had no idea why anyone had targeted his home with such a message fastened to a brick, and even tried to claim they’d probably targeted the wrong house. Emma hadn’t believed him then, and now all the pieces of the jigsaw were starting to hover in the air before her eyes.

  The guy in the white Adidas tracksuit top with black wavy lines, who’d seemed to be threatening her dad in some way; the apparent riot at the prison that had ended with her dad bearing a scar to his neck; the burglary at the bedsit; the green case. It all had to be connected, and now the police had been called to the prison. Emma wouldn’t have thought anything of the news bulletin if it weren’t for Hayley’s determination to shut it off before Emma heard the full report.

  Her mum’s words now played through her mind on a loop: nothing’s ever perfectly innocent where you’re concerned, John.

  He’d told her not to mention the green case to her mum, and he’d refused to phone the police when his home was burgled. What had he got himself mixed up in that now had the police visiting him at work? Had they arrested him? Was that why her mum had stayed away from the school and Hayley had come instead?

  And if he had been arrested for whatever that green case represented, did that mean she was in trouble too? Handling stolen goods was a crime; they’d learned that at school when a uniformed police officer had talked to them at assembly earlier in the year. Her tummy felt uneasy, and the clamminess had now spread to her neck. The panic only worsened when she saw the blue and luminous yellow chequered pattern on the police car parked two doors away from Hayley’s house.

  ‘Your mum’s waiting for you inside,’ Hayley said, killing the engine, but making no effort to exit the car.

  ‘Aren’t you coming in?’ Emma asked, unstrapping her belt.

  Hayley shook her head, but couldn’t speak as her eyes filled in an instant.

  Emma’s breathing was shallow, and bile bubbled in the back of her throat as she climbed out of the car and moved towards the uPVC door, pulling down the handle, and stepping through. She took one final glance back at Hayley, whose head was buried in the palms of her hands. A seagull squawked somewhere overhead as if trying to warn Emma not to proceed.

  Taking a deep breath, Emma hurried along the hallway, finding her mum huddled up on the three-seat sofa in the bay window. Her eyes were red raw, and the tissue she was clutching was soaked through. She looked up as Emma fell into her side.

  ‘What’s happened, Mum?’

  Emma avoided looking at the policewoman who was seated in the armchair, a cup and saucer in her hands.

  Bronwyn took a long, hard look at her daughter, using both hands to brush the hair away from her face, and then to just gently hold her face. ‘I’m so sorry, my darling. It’s your dad… He’s… He’s died.’

  Emma blinked over and over again, her brain unable to process the words. It was as if her mum had got the script wrong. She was supposed to say he’d been arrested for doing something wrong, something involving that infernal green case!

  ‘Did you hear what I said, Emma?’ her mum asked gently, her eyes glassy.

  Emma’s internal voice was screaming and yelling, telling her she’d got it wrong, but the message hadn’t spread to her face, as she reacted unexpectedly: she laughed.

  ‘This isn’t a joke, Emma,’ her mum said, barely keeping her face from scrunching in on itself. ‘He’s died.’

  The internal voice took control of Emma’s body, but rather than erupting in the shower of anger and denial, it dragged her up from the sofa, sending her satchel crashing to the laminate flooring. Before she knew it, she was through the hallway, out of the door, and tearing across the road, not caring what others had to do to avoid her. Her feet hit the sand a moment later, and her arms pumped and legs bounced as she thundered across the beach, not wanting to look backwards, desperate to put as much distance as possible between herself and the news she refused to accept.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Now

  Weymouth, Dorset

  Daisy doesn’t wait to be invited in. Instead, she pulls the baseball cap lower over her eyes and barges past Rachel and me, and into the living room. She proceeds
to close the curtains Rachel has not long opened, thrusting the room into darkness.

  Turning on the overhead light, I join her on the sofa. ‘Daisy, what on earth are you doing here in Weymouth? Your great-uncle was just here.’

  ‘He’s many things, but I wouldn’t describe him as great. And yes, I know he was just here; why do you think I waited until now to knock on your door?’

  She’s speaking quickly, there is a shine to her cheeks, and her fingerless gloved hands are fidgeting rapidly. She’s either nervous about being here, or perhaps suffering similar withdrawal symptoms to Anna’s yesterday.

  ‘Well, how did you get here?’ I ask next, suddenly conscious that if DI Oakley or even Jack turned up here, I’d have a helluva lot of explaining to do.

  ‘I pretended to go to school,’ she begins, wiping grubby fingers across her chin, ‘but then caught a train down here. I had a change of clothes in my bag,’ she says, removing the sports bag from her shoulders, and sliding the strap to the floor, ‘and now my uniform’s in here.’

  ‘But you shouldn’t be here, Daisy. What if the school contacts your guardian or uncle?’

  ‘Relax,’ she says, breathing slowly for the first time since she arrived. ‘School thinks I’m taking a few days to recover… It’s only my guardian who thinks I’ve gone back to school.’

  She lifts the peak of the cap so I can see her eyes better, but I don’t share her cheeky grin.

  Rachel is watching from the other side of the room, and I’m not entirely sure Daisy has spotted her there, until she looks directly at Rachel, and nods.

  ‘What are you doing here, Daisy?’ Rachel tries this time.

  Daisy opens the sports bag between her legs and pushes clothes to one side, until her fingers tighten over the edge of something which she then proceeds to grapple out. A glossy box of black plastic peeks out of the bag, and as she continues to pull, a large square of plastic emerges in her hands. She looks up at me before handing over the external hard drive, and then extracts a black power cable and USB cable from her bag.