by Anna Smith
‘Hi, Andy.’ She smiled broadly. ‘I thought for a minute you were going to ask me to dance.’
He laughed. ‘Christ, I’m as rough as a badger’s arse this morning.’
‘Maybe it was the ice, Andy. That’s a killer in this country.’
‘Yeah. Nothing to do with the eight Jack Daniels and five tequilas.’
‘Well, it certainly brought out your dancing feet,’ Rosie laughed. She knew Andy Simpson would not be for shifting in case he missed anything. He was a London-based investigative reporter for the Post’s main rival in England and Scotland, and though they were both old hands who respected each other, she knew he would turn her over at the drop of a hat.
She heard the door open, and was surprised to see Jamie O’Hara standing in front of her.
‘Rosie,’ he said, as if they knew each other better than they did.
‘Hello, Jamie.’ Rosie took a deep breath. She’d be lucky if she got one sentence out. She spoke fast.
‘Listen, Jamie, I’m really sorry. Really very sorry. It’s a terrible time, but I just want to try to impress upon the family that we can be of some help. We need to get Amy’s picture everywhere. I know it’s hard—’
Jamie put his hand up to silence her. Rosie saw it was trembling slightly. So unlike him. She had seen Jamie O’Hara on the steps of the High Court in Glasgow many a time, triumphantly making a speech about a miscarriage of justice as some toe-rag villain who’d just got off stood smirking beside him. Now O’Hara looked pale and drawn, his eyes bloodshot. Amy was his best friend’s little girl, and Rosie could imagine that he was trying to keep it together to support the Lennons as another day passed without news of the kid. She almost warmed to him.
‘Look, Rosie,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen the letter. I see what your paper is trying to do and I understand. We’ve all had a talk in there.’ He jerked his head in the direction of the house. ‘I’m sure you’ll understand that Jenny and Martin are in a real state. They’re completely beside themselves. Honestly.’ His lip slightly quivered.
Rosie was a little surprised he seemed to be finding it hard to cope. He took a deep breath.
‘So … So what we can’t do – won’t do – is give an exclusive to anyone. Martin and Jenny aren’t even in a position to talk today, but they will come out to the door and you can all have a minute to take a picture. The only statement will be delivered by me. We’ve put together some brief words, but there will be no questions.’
No surprise or disappointment there. She had expected something to come from the family, but despite McGuire’s ambitions, she’d known the Post wouldn’t be allowed to run the show.
Rosie spread her hands in submission. ‘That’s fine, Jamie. That’s perfectly fine. I can understand the family don’t want to say anything at the moment. But if they feel up to it another time, I hope you’ll bear me in mind.’
Jamie nodded, and turned to go inside.
‘And, of course, all of the press would be the same,’ Andy called as the door was closed.
‘Christ,’ he said, as they walked away from the door. ‘That Gilmour charm. Works every time. You’re a chancing Arab, you know that?’
Rosie smiled. ‘Gie’s peace. I got you a picture you wouldn’t have had, you ungrateful bastard.’
‘Yeah, but you were trying to pull a sneaky one on the rest of us.’
‘Well.’ Rosie took his arm. ‘You’d be disappointed if I wasn’t, pet.’
Ten minutes later, when the front door opened, the news teams were five deep on the patio.
Jenny Lennon blinked as the flashbulbs went off, and clutched her husband’s hand so tightly that Rosie could see her knuckles turn white. Her face was ashen, her eyes swollen from crying. Her auburn hair was swept back, emphasising her high cheekbones and the hollows of her face. Jenny was a beauty, better-looking in the flesh than in the pictures in today’s papers. But she looked gaunt already, and it had only been two days since Amy vanished. Martin’s dark eyes were watery and distant, and he was clearly blinking back tears. The cameras whirred and the TV crews filmed for a minute before Jamie O’Hara stepped forward and cleared his throat.
‘Thank you for your support.’ His voice shook. He swallowed. ‘As you can imagine, this is the worst nightmare for any parent. Jenny and Martin are understandably too upset to be interviewed, so they have asked me to appeal to anyone who has any information on Amy’s disappearance to contact the Guarda Civil.’
He looked up, his eyes intense, then back at the paper.
‘We know that by now Amy could be anywhere, so we are asking everyone – wherever you are – to take a look at her picture and please contact the police if you have any information at all that may lead to her being found.’ He swallowed again and there was a pause as reporters waited to see if he was finished.
Tears streamed down Jenny’s cheeks. Martin put his arm around her shoulder.
‘Do you have a message for the person or persons who took Amy?’ Rosie chanced it.
Jamie looked at her. Tears spilled out of Martin’s eyes.
‘All we can say is please, please don’t harm Amy. She’s just an innocent little girl. And she’ll be missing her mum and dad,’ Jamie said as he ushered the Lennons back into the house.
A voice from the huddle of reporters shouted, ‘Can anyone go through the events of the morning she vanished please, Mr O’Hara?’
Jamie O’Hara looked over his shoulder and glanced briefly before turning away. His face was grey.
Rosie had never ever seen him like that.
CHAPTER 6
As soon as Jenny woke up, the agony came coursing through her like a torrent. Her eyes were tight and stinging from crying herself to sleep.
She could hear Martin moving quietly in the kitchen and she turned over, stretching across to his side of the bed where it was still warm and she could feel and smell where he had lain all night with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling.
In the stillness, the rush of the sea on the shore was rhythmic and constant. She’d slept fitfully, in the crook of Martin’s arm, but even as he stroked her hair and whispered words of encouragement, Jenny had wondered if it was her guilt that made her sense that he wasn’t the same. Surely he couldn’t suspect anything, she’d asked herself over and over again? It wasn’t as though she and Jamie had always flirted with each other. There had been nothing. Nothing in the fifteen years they’d known each other would have made her think they – she – could have done what they did.
The night before it happened was the first time Jamie had ever behaved as though he had any desire for her. Even then, it should never in a million years have interested her, but it did. She agonised over it. Maybe it was the predictability of her life every day that made her step out of the mundaneness for one reckless walk on the wild side. Or perhaps, deep down, she hadn’t forgiven Martin for that one indiscretion he’d confessed to last year with the girl in his office, and somewhere in her head she wanted to get even. But suddenly, the night before, Jamie had come on to her in the bar and Jenny had responded, and had been stupid enough to allow it to carry on the next morning.
She curled up, wrapping her arms around herself. If only Jamie hadn’t come to the house, catching her off guard. If only she had just pushed him away, laughed it off, she and Martin would be lying here waiting for Amy to come bounding into the bedroom, eager for the day to begin.
She dragged herself out of bed, her fit, athletic body now weary and heavy, and padded into the kitchen where Martin stood with his back to her, staring out as the early morning light spread across the beach.
‘There’s coffee,’ he said, without turning around.
Jenny’s stomach dropped. He knew something. He suspected.
She crossed the kitchen, poured herself a coffee and sat at the table. Martin came over and sat down without looking at her for a moment. Then when he did, she could see the redness of his eyes, the dark shadows on his pale, lean face. He looked suddenly old. Silence hung
in the room.
‘I keep thinking,’ Martin said, his fingers clasped around the mug. ‘I keep thinking, if only I hadn’t gone out for a run. If only I’d relaxed, read a book, just sat around the villa. But no. I had to go fucking running. Like I had something to run for. I’m supposed to be on holiday, so why couldn’t I sit on my arse and relax instead of this fucking running regime every day. If I’d just been in the house and you were in the shower and Amy got up, I’d have been here. But I wasn’t here.’ He shook his head. Tears welled up. ‘I wasn’t here for her Jenny, and she got up. And maybe someone took her. And her daddy wasn’t here to stop them.’ He started to sob.
Tears rolled down Jenny’s face. She ached with guilt. She leaned over and put her arms around him, holding him tight to her chest.
‘Sssh … Ssssh. Don’t. Don’t beat yourself up like that. It’s not your fault, Martin. It’s not, it’s not.’ Jenny stroked his hair. ‘We’ll find her, Martin. We’ll find Amy.’
If she kept telling herself that, if she kept hoping, maybe just for an instant Jenny would forget that this was all her fault. Maybe she could put the guilt away and hide it so he would never know. Then Martin looked up at her and spoke.
‘I keep thinking,’ he said. ‘Did Jamie not see anything as he was walking down here. I mean he wouldn’t be thinking of Amy or anything else, but is there anything at all he might have seen? Might have missed?’
Jenny said nothing. She eased herself away from Martin and went back to her chair.
‘Jenny,’ Martin said, softly. ‘What was Jamie doing anyway, coming down to visit when he didn’t even know if we were in? He knows I’m always out running. I mean, you and Amy could have been out walking.’
Jenny looked at him.
‘I don’t know, Martin. What difference does that make? Jamie just happened to be out for a walk. Who knows? You can’t make him feel he should have seen something. He was just out for a walk.’
Jenny got up and went to the sink. She turned on the tap and started to rinse her cup vigorously. She could feel Martin’s eyes on her. Her legs felt weak. She heard him get up from the table and then his arms went around her. He turned her to face him and looked into her eyes. Jenny looked back, her eyes filling with tears. Martin studied her face for a moment, his dark eyes suddenly seeming cold. He shook his head.
‘We’d best get organised, Jenny. We have to be at the police station this morning to go over everything again.’ He left the room.
From the balcony off his bedroom, Jamie watched his two sons playing football on the beach. Daniel dived after the ball with his big brother and collapsed into fits of laughter when Sam jinked away from him and shoved him on his backside.
At not quite five, Daniel was too young to know what was going on. When he asked where Amy was, he was told she was away for the moment but they were looking for her. He had questioned a bit more, but Alison was always on hand to change the subject, giving him something else to focus on. Sam knew though, and he had looked dark and confused these past two days. He was six, and had enjoyed being the little man of the three kids, ordering them around and showing them who was boss. Amy had followed him everywhere like a shadow, and Jamie could see he missed her and was confused by all the activity.
He pulled on a pair of light trousers and a fresh shirt and looked at himself in the mirror. His suntanned face was paler now and his eyes were tired. He could hear Alison working in the kitchen, preparing lunch for the the Reillys who were coming round to hear more about the police investigation while Jenny and Martin were at the police station.
He bit his lip, thinking of how meticulous the police had been when they interviewed him about what happened the morning Amy disappeared. He had his story down to a tee, so much so that he was beginning to believe it himself.
He knew that was the only way. To be totally convincing, he had to convince himself that all he was doing was walking on the beach and decided to visit Jenny and Martin. If he really concentrated, he could put out of his mind that stupid moment where he brushed against Jenny in the kitchen and suddenly they were all over each other. What in the name of Christ possessed him, he kept asking himself. The night before when he made a pass at her, it was because he was quite drunk, but for some reason he couldn’t get it out of his mind. He woke up horny the following morning at the thought of her, and that’s what drove him to go down there.
He knew Martin would be out for a run. But what the hell was he thinking about? He rubbed his face with his hands as he thought of Amy. Someone must have taken her. They must have. But when the cops were asking him details of his every move that morning, they kept quizzing him, asking did he not see anyone at all on the beach?
Jamie told them that all he saw was the windsurfer getting his board sorted. They asked again and again, their eyes searching his face, but he knew he could keep his expression deadpan even though he thought they suspected something. He managed to keep it up, although the little police sergeant never took his eyes off him all the time the other cops were asking questions. And he was the same with Martin and the Reillys when they were all together in the house, all of them catatonic with shock and panic. They had sat all night talking, crying, going over and over it again. Jamie had stuck to his story, and so had Jenny. But he felt that John Reilly had a look on his face that said he knew Jamie and Jenny weren’t telling the truth. And poor Martin. He just kept blaming himself for being out of the house. That was the hardest part. How could he tell his best friend that it wasn’t his fault?
But Alison knew. Jamie was sure of it. Even while she was comforting Jenny, Jamie could sense that she knew. Because of his womanising all their married life, Alison had stopped believing him years ago. She knew by instinct that he was with Jenny when Amy disappeared. It was written in her face. But he also knew that for the sake of Daniel and Sam she would go to her grave before she would ever do anything about it.
CHAPTER 7
Rosie sat sipping iced tea in the shade of a pristine white canvas umbrella on the sprawling terrace of the Puente Romano. Through the palm trees and rose-bush-lined paths to the beach, she could see wealthy hotel guests basking in the afternoon sun on blue-and-white striped loungers. There was so much Botox and so many silicon tits, it was hard to know who was middle aged. You could never tell down in Marbella, as Rosie had found during previous assignments on the Costa. The whole place was a blizzard of cocaine, where the rich partied so hard it was easy to look middle-aged by the time you were twenty-seven. But one thing was certain, nobody roughed it around here: ‘If you’ve got it flaunt it’ was stamped all over them, from their Louis Vuitton beach bags and gleaming Rolex watches to the fake breasts as hard as Tupperware pudding bowls. The idle rich … That crap about the meek inheriting the earth was obviously just something God threw in to help you cope when you were on the bare bones of your arse.
Rosie had ordered smoked salmon salad while she waited for Matt to come back from uploading the morning’s pictures onto his laptop in his bedroom. She pondered on the doorstep scene earlier with Amy’s parents and Jamie O’Hara. The tension and the sense of tragedy had been palpable. Jenny and Martin Lennon were completely broken. The chances of their little girl being found alive were getting slimmer by the hour.
‘Hello. Excuse me, Miss?’
A voice from behind. Rosie glanced over her shoulder and was surprised to see a young boy approaching. He looked hesitant and apologetic.
‘Me?’ Rosie said, lifting her sunglasses above her eyes. She looked up at the boy. She wondered if he worked in the hotel, but he wasn’t wearing a uniform.
‘Yes. Sorry, Miss.’ The boy was at her side, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. ‘May I speak with you?’
Rosie swung round so she was facing him. She looked him up and down. Dark and skinny, but strikingly beautiful. He looked like a rent boy, and she half smiled to herself. Surely she didn’t look old enough to be in the market for a gigolo? She waited for him to say something.
A little switch flicked inside her head. This boy had followed her here.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s right.’ She motioned him to sit. ‘But how did you know I was here?’
The boy sat down. He looked at her with large liquid brown eyes that dominated his face and gave him an innocent look. But the dark smudges under those eyes told another story.
‘I heard you say to someone you are going back to the Puente Romano, so I think maybe you living here.’ He shifted in his seat. ‘I wanted … I want to talk to you because you are in the newspapers. And I think I have some information for you.’
Rosie’s heart did a little dance and her instincts told her to brace herself. From where she was sitting on a Saturday afternoon, she didn’t have a story for Monday’s newspaper that wouldn’t have been all over the weekend papers and television. Anything, however off the wall, even if it came in broken English from a skinny rent boy, had to be listened to.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I’d be glad to have a talk with you. Would you like a drink? Something to eat? Are you hungry?’
Her eyes flicked up and down the boy. He looked vulnerable, like a little vagrant who had scrubbed his face and combed his hair so he could get past the reception in a place that would happily kick people like him into the gutter. But Rosie wasn’t daft. He would be on the make alright. He wouldn’t have followed her here otherwise. Any minute now he’d name a price, but she knew she would have to listen. The white-waistcoated waiter appeared with her salmon salad and a basket of bread. The boy looked at it and swallowed.
‘Can you bring some of the special chicken, please,’ Rosie said to the waiter. She looked at the boy.
‘You okay with some chicken? A drink?’
‘Yes, thank-you.’ His eyes brightened. ‘I’m hungry. Can I also have Coca-Cola please?’