by M K Farrar
Erica ate standing up at the kitchen worktop, barely even tasting what she was eating. She savoured the wine a little more but knew she needed to go to bed and get some sleep. This new case was a big one, and they needed as many bodies on the job as possible which meant an early start.
An arm wrapped around her waist, and she held back a scream.
She twisted in her husband’s arms. “Bloody hell, Chris. You scared the shit out of me. I didn’t hear you come in.”
He only wore the boxer shorts he slept in, his bare chest warm from being in bed. “Sorry. I wasn’t exactly quiet.”
Erica let out a shaky breath. “It’s my fault. I was completely lost in thought.”
“About the case?” he asked.
“Yeah, it was a mother and daughter killed. The husband is missing. We don’t know if it was someone else responsible or him yet.”
“Shit, that’s horrible. I don’t know how you do it.”
She smiled. “Having a good man at home helps.”
Chris wasn’t only a house husband; he also ran his own business designing websites and doing other internet-based things that she didn’t quite understand. He’d gone part time since Poppy had been born, and she’d gone back to work full time, and he never complained about trying to balance the two.
He leaned in and kissed her. “Glad to hear it. Now can I take you up to bed?”
“Absolutely. I’m shattered.” She tried not to react to the disappointed look on his face. “Just give me five minutes to finish up here and go and give Poppy a kiss goodnight.”
“Don’t wake her,” Chris warned over his shoulder as he turned from her to leave the kitchen.
“I won’t.”
She finished her wine and stacked the glass and her empty plate in the dishwasher, then went up to the bathroom and cleaned her teeth. Then she sneaked into her daughter’s bedroom. A nightlight effused the corner of the room in a warm yellow glow, and her gaze went to the cot that held the sleeping form of her daughter. Her little arms were splayed either side of her head, her lips parted in her sleep. The baby sleeping bag covered her feet and torso, and she’d kicked off the extra blanket Chris had tucked around her when he’d put her to bed. Her special toy—a little white bunny with a blanket attached to it—had fallen halfway through the bars, so Erica picked it up and tucked it in closer to Poppy’s cheek.
I’ll never let anything or anyone hurt you, she silently swore to herself.
“Goodnight baby-girl,” she whispered. “I love you.”
Chapter Nine
DI RYAN CHASE GOT INTO the office early. There hadn’t been any developments overnight, and Douglas Lloyd still hadn’t been located. They had a busy day ahead of them, and he intended to call a briefing the minute everyone else arrived.
“Did you manage to get some sleep?” he asked DS Swift as she dumped her bag down beside her desk.
She nodded. “A few hours.”
He imagined she’d been much like him, awake early, mind racing, aware that things needed to be done, and that wasn’t happening while they were lying around.
He hadn’t seen Donna when he’d got home last night. It had been late, and everyone had already been in bed, much as he’d expected. He’d hovered outside their bedroom door, listening for any signs that his wife might still be awake, but if she was, she’d done her best to pretend she wasn’t. In the end, deciding it was best if he didn’t wake her, he took himself into their spare room. He was knackered and would probably snore his head off, which would only make things tenser between the two of them. He’d set his alarm for five, aware he could get by on that amount of sleep, but then had needed to check that he’d set it for the right time several times over. Sometimes it was impossible to silence that niggling thought in his head, insisting that he’d pressed the wrong button and would sleep right through it refusing to leave until he’d done so. He told himself it was because he needed to be in early—which he did—but there was also a part of him that knew he was avoiding Donna. He’d made sure to nip into Hayley’s bedroom before he’d left, giving her a kiss and a cuddle and tucking her back in again. She’d probably get up and crawl into her mother’s bed earlier than normal, but they’d most likely both fall back to sleep again. It was a Saturday, after all.
There was no such thing as weekends for a detective when there was a big case on.
“Any progress overnight?” Erica asked. “I see the husband still hasn’t been located.”
Ryan dragged his hand over the top of his head. “Nope. The son of a bitch has vanished into thin air.”
“Or he’s been snatched and is a victim in all of this as well.”
“Perhaps, but that hidden phone doesn’t exactly put him in a good light.”
“True, but just because he has secrets doesn’t automatically make him capable of killing his wife and daughter.”
Ryan offered her a dry smile. “You think far too highly of people, Swift. Give it another few years, and you’ll be a dried-up old pessimist like me.”
“You must have at least a couple of decades on me, sir,” she said, teasing him.
“Funny.” He jerked his chin towards the briefing room. “We’d better get in there.”
His boss, DCI Mandy Hirst, was already in the room. She was a serious, compact woman in her fifties with short grey hair and sharp, light-blue eyes behind her glasses.
One wall had been covered with the photographs of the two victims’ bodies, a head shot of Douglas Lloyd, together with several shots of the car—exterior and interior—and a map pinpointing the distance between where they were all found. He pressed his lips together and shook his head at the images. No one should have their lives ended in such a brutal way.
“Good morning, DI Chase.” The DCI didn’t smile. “DS Swift. I’m expecting a busy day so we can make some progress on this case. I don’t like having two murder victims and no one under arrest yet.”
Ryan nodded. “We should have reports from the pathologist and hopefully from forensics as well by the end of the day.”
There were effectively two crime scenes that were being processed—the house and the car. There was no doubt in Ryan’s mind that the two were linked, but getting confirmation that the blood inside the car was Douglas Lloyd’s would help to solidify the pattern of events. Had he acted alone? Was the blood due to the car accident, or had he been injured before he’d got behind the wheel—if it was even him who’d been driving?
News got round of the early morning briefing, and gradually the rest of his team filed in and found seats.
DCI Hirst stood up. “Good morning, everyone. We have another busy day ahead of us. I’d like to think we’ll have someone in custody by the end of the day so don’t let me down. Now, I’ll hand you over to DI Chase.”
Ryan took up his position at the front of the room and did a roll call for each of his team members and then looked to his sergeant.
“You conducted an interview with one of the boys, Liam Gilbert, yesterday evening?” he checked.
“That’s right,” Erica said, “and DC Penn spoke with Conner Lowry. Both their stories match up, and they’re both saying the doors were shut when they found the car, which means whoever was inside was well enough to not only open a door to get out, but then bothered to shut it behind them. This means, assuming Douglas Lloyd was even inside the car, he was clearly not badly injured enough to prevent him making a getaway or else someone else closed the door and helped Lloyd.”
DC Mallory Lawson, one of the detective constables, stood. “We have a neighbour who says she saw the family car, a silver Ford Focus estate, pull out of the drive at about four-thirty. The car was then found about a thirty-minute drive away at five-thirty. Which means we have a window of half an hour where whoever was driving crashed and then escaped and abandoned the vehicle.”
“Did the neighbour happen to see who was driving, or how many people were in the car?” Ryan asked.
“Unfortunately not. She just noticed the vehicle reverse out
of the drive.”
Ryan paced from one side of the room to the other as he spoke. “I want all CCTV footage between five and five-thirty of the roads around the accident site. We must have caught the car before the accident. And if a second car was involved in getting him away from the crash site, we could have that, too.”
“We still don’t have a murder weapon yet,” Erica added, “and we’re still waiting on Digital Forensics to crack a phone that was found hidden in the house. Reports are that Douglas Lloyd liked to gamble, but whether or not that has anything to do with what’s happened to his wife and daughter is yet unclear.”
Ryan nodded. “I want us to speak to everyone close to the family, including any friends or relatives. Find out if there’s anything behind the gambling rumours. Right now, CCTV is going to give us our best lead. We believe a vehicle must have picked up Lloyd since the dogs lost his scent suddenly on the road. If we can find that car, we can find him. Let’s not end the day until we do.”
He made sure everyone knew what actions they needed to take and ended the meeting. Before he left the room, he checked DCI Hirst was happy with the lines of enquiry they were following, and then he went back to his desk. He logged on to his computer to see the coroner’s report had come in on the mother and daughter. It made for grim reading. Elizabeth Lloyd had been stabbed three times in the stomach with a serrated blade approximately five inches in length. She’d died from the resulting blood loss leading to heart failure. Her daughter hadn’t been stabbed but had been suffocated. From the bruising on her face, it would seem a large hand placed over her mouth and nose had been all it had taken. Neither of the victims had been sexually assaulted. Blood and skin cells had been retrieved from beneath both the mother and daughter’s fingernails which indicated that they’d fought back. Forensics were processing the findings to see if the DNA matched that of Douglas Lloyd’s or any DNA that had been found in the car.
Someone approached his desk, and he lifted his head to see one of the young detective constables, Mallory Lawson, standing there. Mallory was in her twenties and had an alternative look for a police officer, which she toned down for work. There were several holes in her face—her nose, under her lip, and in her ears—that spoke of piercings that had been removed at some point, and he was pretty sure she hid a number of tattoos under her work suit. He had no idea what her natural hair colour was, but right now it was dyed jet-black and shaved underneath the longer upper layer. She made him feel like a dinosaur.
“Boss, I thought you’d want to know that we have the CCTV footage back from the shop that’s a mile down the road. It catches the Lloyd’s Ford driving past at seventeen-oh-three, but it’s impossible to make out who’s in the car. I’ve sent it over to see if someone can blow up the images some more, but I don’t have my hopes up on that.”
“What about other cars that drove past?” he asked. “Have we got some licence plates? One of them might have stopped to pick up the driver.”
“Yes, several. It might be a quiet road normally, but at that time in the evening, with everyone coming home from work, it wasn’t. The CCTV has recorded forty-one cars driving between the time our car went past and the boys finding the accident.”
He blew out his cheeks in frustration. Forty-one cars and drivers were going to take some time to work their way through. The more time it took them, the harder it was going to be to track down Douglas Lloyd.
“Can you and DC Penn follow up on each of these licence plates and speak to whoever was behind the wheel at the time. Even if we can’t find whoever picked up the two injured people, we might find someone who saw something but didn’t bother to report it. You know how people like to convince themselves whatever they saw was nothing because that’s easier than going to the trouble of calling it in.”
“Or they go the other way and report every tiny thing and have their noses in everyone else’s business,” she commented.
Ryan rolled his eyes. “I’m not sure which one’s worse.”
Chapter Ten
MICHELLE HAD BARELY slept all night and instead had lain awake listening for the sound of the door opening and Russell’s feet on the stairs as his made his way up to bed. She tried his mobile phone number for the hundredth time, but it went straight to answer phone. There was no point in leaving a message—she’d already left numerous ones all saying the same thing. Who could she call who might know where he was? She didn’t even have the numbers of any of his friends, and he didn’t do social media, so it wasn’t as though she could track any of them down from there. Besides, Russell didn’t really have many close friends, not people he saw regularly, anyway. The people they hung out with tended to be her friends and their husbands or partners. He had the odd person he’d mention who he went to school with, but that was all. He’d even had her brother as his best man at their wedding. Perhaps she should have seen something strange in that, but she hadn’t at the time, thinking instead that it was good of Russ for including her brother like that. He didn’t have any family of his own, and the friends he had from school lived far away—one in Australia and the other in Hong Kong. Men weren’t like women; they didn’t have close friends. Not that she had many herself lately. There were some school mums she got on okay with, but she wouldn’t exactly call them friends.
“Where’s Dad?” Max asked, coming down the stairs in his pyjamas, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “Is he not home yet?”
“Oh, he had to stay away with work,” she lied. “Now, who’s hungry?”
She wanted to divert his attention, worried that if he asked too many questions, she might show her true feelings and only make him worried, too.
Max stuck his skinny arm in the air as though he was trying to answer a question at school. “Me, me!”
She ruffled his hair. “Good to hear it.”
Normally, on a Saturday morning, she’d make the effort to cook something, but she was too distracted to focus on making pancakes or frying bacon today. Instead, she pulled out a box of cereal, a bowl, and some milk and let Max get stuck in.
She went to the living room and stood at the window, looking out onto the road at the front of the house, praying she would see Russ’s car pull into the drive. She picked up her phone and checked it for a missed call, but there wasn’t one. She tapped her fingers against her lips. Should she call the local hospital and see if anyone matching his description had been brought in, or even the police and report him as missing? A heavy weight had lodged itself into the middle of her chest, and her stomach churned. She hadn’t been able to eat anything that morning and had barely managed a couple of sips of tea. Deep down, she was filled with that gnawing certainty that something huge had shifted in her world and from today, nothing was going to be the same.
When could she even call the police about a missing person? Was it twenty-four hours, or was that some bullshit myth people banded around? Had it even been twenty-four hours yet? When would they count that from considering Russell normally worked away, so it wasn’t as though she’d actually seen him since Monday morning? Mentally, she calculated the last time she’d spoken to him. It had been Thursday evening, when he’d called to say goodnight to Max. She hadn’t got the impression anything had been wrong then, but now she was doubting everything.
With her hand shaking, she searched up the number to call the local police station. This didn’t feel like she should be calling nine-nine-nine, as it wasn’t technically an emergency, was it? They’d probably just look at her with pity and comment how plenty of boyfriends and husbands didn’t come home on a Friday night. They’d think he’d got drunk and picked up some woman and gone back to hers and would come crawling home sheepishly with a bad hangover and an apology. Despite knowing this, she still needed to call. She’d tell them how he wasn’t like that, and how he’d never stayed out without letting her know where he was before.
She closed the lounge door quietly, hoping Max wouldn’t notice or try to interrupt her. She thought he’d take the opportunity to s
neak some time on his tablet, most likely hiding back under his covers in bed.
She looked up the non-emergency number, dialled, and the operator answered.
“Hello, I’d like to report a missing person.” Her eyes filled with tears as she said the words out loud, and a painful lump choked her throat. “It’s...it’s my husband. He didn’t come home last night after he finished work, and I haven’t heard from him since.” A tear escaped her eye and slid down her cheek.
“Could he be staying with family or a friend?”
“No, he doesn’t have anyone.”
“Okay, let me take some details. Let’s start with his name.”
She rattled off everything the call operator was asking her, the whole time praying Russell would show up and make her look like an idiot.
“Mrs Mabry, your husband isn’t classed as a vulnerable person, so this won’t be considered an emergency. I’ll make a log of it, and I’ll get a police officer to come around and speak to you in due course.”
Flutters of panic danced in her chest. “Do you know when that will be?”
“Whenever we have someone free, Mrs Mabry. We’re very busy.”
She was getting the brush-off, that much was clear, but she wasn’t going to give up that easily. In her mind, there was nothing normal about this situation. Nothing at all.
Chapter Eleven
ERICA WAS AT HER DESK when her phone rang.
She answered. “Swift.”
“It’s Mike Pembroke from Digital Forensics. Thought you’d want to know that we managed to get into the phone that was found at the Lloyd house.”
Erica sat up straighter. “Did you find anything interesting?”
“The phone only has a few numbers on there, the majority of which appear to be unregistered. There was one number that was registered, however, to a Michelle Francis Mabry, and there are a number of missed calls and answerphone messages that have been left on the phone over the past twenty-four hours from the same person.”