‘That would be lovely, Frank. Shall we go now, if you’ve finished?’
They didn’t go far – just to the sandwich shop on the corner – but it was good to get out of the office, and Maggie filled her lungs with cold air. They made their choices, and sat down at a plastic topped table.
‘Only tell me as much as you want, Maggie. I’m not going to push you for details, but I know something’s wrong.’
Maggie swallowed. She couldn’t tell him much. It would be wrong to reveal anything that might put Frank in a difficult position with the police, if it ever came to that.
‘If it helps, you can pay me a nominal sum – the cost of my sandwich – and that would make you my client. I wouldn’t be able to divulge anything you tell me then.’
‘No, it’s okay. We don’t have to go that far. I’m a mess because of problems I’m having with Duncan.’ Her eyes filled with tears, but she blinked them away. ‘He’s left home, and at the moment I’m not sure there’s a way back.’
‘Why do you think that? If you love him, surely there’s always a way back?’
Maggie shook her head. ‘I do love him. At least, I love the person I thought he was. I’m not sure what I think now.’
She stirred her cappuccino, watching the chocolate melt into the foam. Frank said nothing, waiting for her to say more.
‘He’s done something stupid, Frank. Got himself into a situation with some seriously evil men.’
‘Are you saying that Duncan’s evil?’
Maggie looked up. ‘Oh no. I don’t think that for a minute. But he’s lied to me. Not just recently – for the whole time we’ve been married.’
Frank took a bite of his sandwich and chewed. He swallowed, took a sip of mineral water and put his sandwich down.
‘People lie for a lot of reasons, you know. Sometimes it’s because they don’t have faith that the truth is acceptable, and they want to create a better image of themselves, present themselves in a beneficial light. The first thing you need to do is understand why he lied. Did he think, perhaps, that you wouldn’t want him if you knew the truth about him? And if that’s the case, you have to ask yourself if he’s right?’
She was puzzled, and Frank read her expression.
‘If his lies were to cover up his own insecurity – you know, the way someone might lie about having been made captain of the football team when in fact they weren’t even picked to play – then it’s not that important. It means he probably thought you wouldn’t think him worthy of you. But if he lied to cover up something that might make you question your love for him, something that tells you about his fundamental moral code, that’s a different matter.’
He understood. She knew he would. She listened as Frank talked to her about truth and lies, and how to deal with her confusion. He didn’t ask for a single detail.
‘In the end,’ he said, ‘you should make your decision about Duncan based not on whether he’s lied to you, but on whether the version of him that you know now is one that you can still live with. Still love.’
After twenty minutes, Maggie’s mind felt much clearer. She had to forget his lying and focus on who Duncan was. ‘Thank you, Frank. I needed that.’
He smiled at her. ‘Will you have him back, do you think?’
‘I don’t know. There’s a lot to sort out. While I understand much more about truth and lies now, thanks to you, there are consequences to his lies that I don’t want to go into, and I haven’t yet formed a picture of the new Duncan – the one with the lies stripped away. It’s too soon to say, but I love that man so much it’s hard to imagine a life without him.’
‘So where’s he living?’
‘For the moment he’s in a hotel.’
‘Is he close enough to visit?’
‘Yeah, he only went as far as Heaton Park. We managed to find a place that was reasonably priced but family run. He was in one of those soulless chain hotels before – okay for a night, but that’s about it. One way or another, though, we need to sort this before much longer.’ She pushed back her chair. ‘I’d better get back. I’ve got a mountain of stuff to do before the end of the day, and the kids need me to be home at a sensible time. Thank God my sister’s come to help out.’
She was sorry to go. Frank had an air of calm about him that soothed her. Nothing ever seemed to faze him, to shatter his composure, and she wished she could somehow acquire the wisdom that made him so phlegmatic.
Frank reached out a hand and clutched Maggie’s wrist gently.
‘If you need somebody to talk to, I’m always happy to listen, you know. But we may have to do it via email for a while. That’s the other thing I wanted to tell you. Now that we’ve sorted Alf Horton’s psych profile, I’m taking myself off to a conference in South Africa. I’m leaving this evening.’
Maggie was disappointed. She had been hoping that whatever happened she would be able to confide in Frank.
‘Well I, for one, will miss you,’ she said as she bent down and impulsively kissed him on the cheek. ‘See you when you’re back.’
‘You’re looking a bit more relaxed,’ Neil, one of Maggie’s colleagues, said as she passed him in reception. Neil was leaning against the desk talking to one of the receptionists, and Maggie realised she had seen him there rather a lot recently. She smiled for what felt like the first time in days. It was good to see somebody happy.
Neil said something quietly to the receptionist and followed Maggie towards the lifts.
‘Good lunch?’ he asked.
‘It was good to get out,’ Maggie responded.
‘You and Frank seem quite buddy. How long have you known him?’
Maggie frowned. ‘You know how long I’ve been here. I met him a couple of days after I arrived.’
Neil gave her an odd look. The lift doors opened and they stepped inside. Neil pressed the button for the third floor.
‘What?’ she said.
‘It doesn’t matter that you knew him before, you know. We’re all glad to have you on board. It was the right decision.’
‘What the hell are you talking about, Neil. You’ve lost me.’
‘You do know he recommended you to the partners, don’t you?’ Neil must have seen her blank expression. ‘He said you would be an asset, and you were wasted where you were. I – well, to be honest, we all – thought you must have known him. Some thought you’d probably had or were having an affair with him, but it didn’t matter because you’re good at your job.’
Maggie was confused. She had never heard of Frank Denman in her life until she came here.
‘He must have been following your career, Maggie. I’d be flattered, if I were you.’
The lift doors opened and Neil sauntered off towards his office.
Maggie had been surprised when she had been contacted to see if she would be interested in joining the firm. She had assumed the recommendation had come from a circuit judge she had impressed. It seemed she was wrong.
Frank probably had cases all over the country, of course. He could easily have seen her in court and thought her name worth putting forward. She just wished he had mentioned it to her.
53
12 years ago – August
Tom pushed open the door to the CID office and made his way to his desk. It felt like only yesterday that he had been here, and he couldn’t believe that a month had passed. He was glad to be back at work – not because he didn’t want to spend time with his family, but because he was beginning to feel a bit redundant. Kate seemed to have everything under control, and he felt more relaxed than he had in a while. Lucy was his baby. He loved her – adored her – and it was his name on her birth certificate. He was never going to question her parentage again and felt at peace with his decision.
He felt considerably less at peace with what he now discovered at work. During his absence the double murder case had been assigned to somebody else, and Tom was shocked to find that they appeared to be no further on. It was out of his hands now as Victor Elliott w
as adamant that Tom should be given less demanding crimes to solve while he was having disturbed nights with the baby.
‘We need people who are alert and on the ball, Douglas. We’ll put you back on the heavy duty stuff when your eyes have lost that piggy-pink look they’ve got now.’
So Tom had no choice. But he believed the two dead girls had been short-changed, and he wished he could persuade Elliott to put him back on the case – not that he had ever felt it was his own. Tom had barely found the time to follow the lines of enquiry dictated by his boss, let alone go off on some of the tangents that might have had potential.
Philippa Stanley had also been assigned back to his team.
‘Do you want me to speak to the boss and get you back on the murder cases?’ he had asked.
‘Thank you, sir,’ she had responded. ‘But I don’t think progress is being made in the right direction, and he’s never going to listen to me. The DI working the case now is an Elliott clone, so I’d rather work with you, if that’s okay.’
Tom had been flattered but still felt he should have been doing more.
‘There’s one thing I did do after you’d gone, though,’ the young detective said. ‘You asked me to check on Michael Alexander – to try and keep tabs on him.’
‘And?’
‘And he’s gone. He’s left the university.’
‘Where’s he gone, exactly?’ Tom asked.
‘He’s gone home to nurse his mother. Apparently she’s very ill and hasn’t got long to go, and so he’s told his tutor that he needs to be with her.’
Tom looked at Philippa. ‘And I don’t suppose he left an address, did he?’
‘No. And I wasn’t able to give it much time because the DCI thought we were barking up the wrong tree. Why are you looking so intrigued?’
‘Because I don’t believe a word of it. Check his mother out. Let’s see what’s really going on.’
Becky didn’t look up as Tom sat down in the chair facing her desk. She was checking down a list on her screen and didn’t want to lose her place, but she had recognised Tom’s footsteps as he marched across the incident room towards her desk.
‘Give me a second, would you?’ she said. ‘I don’t want to lose my thread. I’m nearly there.’ She returned her attention to the list, not expecting to find much. But then she did. Becky looked hard at the screen, clicked on the link, and knew she was right. She glanced at Tom. She was going to have to tell him, but there was other more urgent stuff too, and none of it was going to cheer him up.
‘I’ve got a bit of news. Since finding the counsellor is a possible link between Adam Mellor, Ben Coleman and Michael Alexander we’ve been combing through their backgrounds. As you pointed out, Michael Alexander was in care for most of his life, so we’ve been in touch with his foster mother, Patricia Rowe. Well, that’s not entirely true. We’ve been in touch with the home she’s in. She has Alzheimer’s, so sadly she’s not going to be able to help us much.
‘The detective constable who went to see her asked at the home about regular visitors. One of them is a Stacey Meagan – another of Mrs Rowe’s ex-foster children – and so the detective decided to pay her a visit. Stacey sang Mrs Rowe’s praises and said she was the best foster mother ever, but when the detective asked about Michael, she said that Pat – as she called her – didn’t seem able to recognise what the rest of them saw. That he was a “bad lot” – in her words. But she had no idea where he was.’
‘So another dead end, then,’ Tom said, his frustration apparent.
‘Not entirely. As the detective was leaving, Meagan said to her, “What’s all the sudden interest in Michael anyway?”’
Becky saw Tom’s eyes glint, and she knew she had him. ‘It turns out that Stacey Meagan had been contacted on Facebook by somebody trying to track Michael down. Somebody called Grace Peters. But before you get excited, we don’t know who she is. There’s nothing on her profile; she never communicates with anybody, and hasn’t got anything in her personal details at all. And we all know how helpful the Facebook guys are going to be. It’s not as if she’s committed a crime.’
‘Bollocks,’ Tom said. ‘We could have done with that. Anything else?’
‘Ben Coleman – the surgical registrar who worked on Hayley’s ward – he never caught his plane to Antigua.’
‘Hah!’ Tom said. ‘Tell me something I didn’t know.’
It was the opening she needed, but Becky wasn’t sure whether to mention what she had discovered or not. She had been trawling the National Crime Agency’s databases and only just found it. She hadn’t had time to review the information so she could easily be wrong. One thing about Tom, though, was that he never blamed anybody for wrong assumptions if they were made for the right reasons.
‘We talked a couple of days ago about checking through the bodies found in the canals to see if anything came up. Do you remember?’ she asked.
‘Yep. What have you found?’
‘I found nothing in Manchester - none of the “pusher” cases matched – so I extended my search to cover the marks on the legs and searched the NCA’s National Injuries Database. On the off chance.’
‘And…?’
Becky pointed to the screen.
Tom leaned over her shoulder. ‘Well, bugger me.’
54
Maggie had no idea how she managed to get through the rest of the day. She hadn’t wanted to go into the office, but she knew the future was uncertain and before long her job might be the only thing she had to support her and the children. So she stuck it out to the end of the day. She had spent every moment since lunch on her own, thinking, making deals with herself, evaluating the options. And now it was just after six and she was no nearer to a solution.
Josh had sent her a text from Suzy’s phone asking her to pick him up from his football practice, and for one awful moment she had worried that she was going to be terribly late. There had been an accident on the motorway, and traffic had been backing up on all the main roads. But she was nearly there now, and only about ten minutes late, thank goodness.
She turned onto the side road that led to Josh’s school, surprised not to see a flood of cars coming in the opposite direction full of muddy kids in football kit. Maybe practice had overrun. As she got closer to the school, though, a knot of worry started to build inside her. There were no lights on. The school was in darkness.
She turned into the entrance – but the gates were locked. There was nobody there.
Where the hell was Josh?
Maggie had never picked him up from football before – it had always been Duncan. Where was her boy?
She pulled her phone from her bag and quickly dialled home.
‘Come on, Suzy, pick up the bloody phone,’ she said quietly, desperate for her sister to answer.
‘Hello?’
‘Oh, thank God, Suzy. I’ve come to school to pick Josh up and everywhere’s in darkness. I don’t know where he is – there’s nobody here.’ She couldn’t control the panic in her voice.
‘Shit, I’m sorry, Mags. I should have insisted on going back for him. He said it would be better if you picked him up. Do you want me to try to find a number for somebody from the school – the head teacher, or somebody?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve let him down, Suzy. He didn’t need this.’
‘Is there another entrance to the school playing field?’ Suzy asked.
And then it came to her. The school only had a small field, and football practice was always at a nearby park. But which one? What had Duncan said about football practice? Think, Maggie. Think.
Then it came to her. It was quite a big park – not huge like Heaton Park – but it was open all the time, so at least Josh wouldn’t be locked in. It had to be there – about ten minutes’ drive away.
‘Got it,’ she shouted down the phone and hung up.
Surely his teacher wouldn’t have left him there alone? But that wasn’t the point. With everything that had happened, Josh would think
she wasn’t going to come for him.
She slammed the car into reverse to get out of the school’s entrance and set off in the direction of the park as fast as she dared, praying that she had the right place.
The problem with the park – assuming she had chosen the right one – was that there were several entrances, and Maggie didn’t know which one was closest to the football pitches. It wasn’t helped by the fact that with the overcast skies it was now nearly dark.
‘Oh Joshy, I’m so sorry, sweetheart,’ she said to herself as she drove into the first entrance she came to. Not only was he totally confused about his dad disappearing; now his mum had failed to pick him up. She was fairly sure that the usual time was six and it would be nearly twenty past by the time she got there. He must be worried sick.
Into her head came an image of her telling Josh about his father – who he really was, what he had done. She couldn’t do it. Whatever else happened, her children mustn’t grow up believing their father was a monster. She couldn’t let that happen.
There was a small, but empty, car park ahead, and she raced into it, slamming on the brakes and abandoning the car where it stopped. She couldn’t see any goal posts. There were some rugby posts poking up above some trees over to her right. Maybe the football pitches were near.
‘Josh,’ she shouted at the top of her voice. ‘Joshy, where are you darling?’
There was no answer.
She was suddenly hit by a mad thought. Could Duncan have come to watch today – hidden in the bushes and then taken Josh himself? It was the sort of thing he might do. He would want to let his son know how much he was missing him. She hoped and prayed she was right, because it meant Josh was safe. Equally she hoped she was wrong, because how was she going to explain to Josh that his daddy wasn’t coming home just yet?
She started to run, but her heels sank into the muddy turf. It didn’t seem to have stopped raining or snowing for more than five minutes since they had arrived in Manchester, and the ground was sodden. She stopped for a moment and kicked her shoes off, bending to pick them up. She tried to run and shout at the same time, but she was soon out of breath.
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