The Vanishing Point

by McDermid, Val

  ‘Was it the TOmorrow Trust, by any chance?’ Stephanie was pretty sure she already knew the answer, but she had to ask.

  Johnny Sullivan pointed his finger at her like a pistol. ‘Got it in one. I assumed it was a tax dodge. It usually is round here.’

  ‘Did she leave a forwarding address?’

  ‘Only the lawyer. She didn’t get much post, but when anything does come, we pass it straight on to the lawyer.’

  ‘Do you know if Leanne was particularly friendly with anyone in the village?’ Nick leaned back in his chair, the picture of relaxed, sociable interest.

  ‘She had a bit of a thing for Paco. He runs the bar in the main square. She was pally with a British couple, Ant and Cat. The three of them used to hang about in the bar nattering to Paco. But I don’t think they’re in touch with her any more. Ant and Cat got married at New Year and they sent her an invitation via the lawyer. She never so much as sent a card or a wedding present, let alone turned up. They were really pissed off with her.’ That was the last nugget of useful information they got from Johnny Sullivan.

  As they waved goodbye, Stephanie said, ‘It sounds like Leanne had really had it with Scarlett. To turn her back on all of this, just because they had a row.’

  Nick grunted noncommittally. ‘It’s interesting,’ he said. ‘I want to see what Paco and the famous Ant and Cat have to say.’

  They found the bar without difficulty. Better yet, the three people they wanted to speak to were all there. It was a typical village bar; simple décor, basic menu and a friendly ambience. But as soon as they mentioned Leanne’s name, the temperature dropped. ‘Walked out on us without a word,’ bleached-blond Ant said, curling his lip in contempt. He rolled his shoulders, deliberately displaying his weight-room muscles. ‘She was Cat’s best mate but she just used you, pet. As soon as she was back with her celebrity pals, we were history.’ Paco nodded, polishing a wine glass with vigour.

  Cat, statuesque with an Amy Winehouse mane of raven hair that owed everything to the skills of her hairdresser, nodded sagely. ‘Dumped Paco there like he had the pox. Not so much as a postcard or a text. I lost count of the number of times I texted her and got nothing back.’ Ant patted her hand.

  ‘And voicemail,’ Paco chipped in. ‘She ignore my voicemail twenty time or more. She love that life in London, I know this. But I think she will come back because we have something good.’ He finished polishing the glass and replaced it on the shelf. ‘I love her. But is no point.’

  ‘That’s right, Paco. No point. How could we compete with the likes of Scarlett?’ Cat pouted, petulant as an adolescent.

  ‘After Scarlett died, did you not expect her to come home?’

  ‘Course we did,’ Ant said, flexing his forearms. ‘But she must have hooked up with some bloke with more money than sense.’

  ‘She always had an eye for the main chance.’

  It was, thought Stephanie, an odd judgement. Living in a small Spanish hill town and painting women’s nails for a living didn’t seem to her to demonstrate an eye for the main chance. What it had always said to her was that Leanne was a woman who knew her limitations and was happy to work within them. If she’d been a gold-digger or someone who was only out for what she could get, she’d had her chances when she’d been living at the hacienda. She’d had power over Scarlett and Joshu and she’d never chosen to wield it. But Ant and Cat had constructed their story as deliberately as Stephanie built the biographies of her clients and this was the version of Leanne that would be handed down now and for ever.

  A second beer in the bar produced nothing else of significance. It was clear to Stephanie that Leanne had made a life here then promptly burned her bridges behind her. But Nick saw a different set of possibilities.

  They weren’t the sort of possibilities that would fill anyone’s heart with joy.

  3

  They walked back to the car in silence, both lost in their own thoughts. Nick didn’t start the engine immediately. Instead, he said, ‘You have Leanne’s phone number, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Stephanie dug out her phone and thumbed through her contacts. ‘There it is. A Spanish mobile.’

  ‘I’d like you to send her a text.’

  ‘Saying what?’

  ‘Saying you’re planning to bring Jimmy out to Spain for a holiday soon and you’d love to get together. And then we’ll sit back and see what happens.’

  Stephanie gave him an odd look. ‘What do you think will happen? Jimmy being abducted has been in all the British papers. They do get them out here, you know. And it’s been all over the Internet. If she wanted to get in touch with me, she would have done it by now.’

  ‘Maybe. But I think you’ll get an enthusiastic text back saying something like, “What a great idea, when are you coming?” And when you give her dates, oh bugger, that’ll be exactly the week she’s booked to go to Thailand with friends.’

  She wasn’t stupid. She understood what he was saying. The realisation sat like a lump in her chest. This was the last thing she’d expected to discover on this trip. ‘You think someone else has her phone. You think she’s dead.’

  He reached for her hand. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t see any other explanation. We know she left to spend time with Scarlett before she died. Then they had a row and she walked out. She’d built a life here. This was the obvious place for her to come back to. But she didn’t. She walked out of a house in Essex and she was never seen again.’

  ‘But Simon spoke to her when Scarlett died. To ask her to come to the funeral.’

  ‘Did he? Did he actually speak to her? Or did he text her? We know her phone was live for some time after she disappeared. Paco left voicemail messages. If someone killed her, it would make sense to keep the phone live, to confuse the issue of where Leanne was. It would be easy enough to impersonate her in a text.’ Nick’s voice was gentle, but there was no sugar-coating his words.

  Unbidden, the tears started, fat and heavy on her cheeks. Stephanie began to shake, her teeth chattering. Nick pulled her close, waiting out the storm. When the first shock passed, her eyes and nose were swollen and sore. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said. She put her hand on his chest and looked up into his troubled face. ‘You suspected this before we came here, didn’t you?’

  He sighed. ‘It did cross my mind. Bad things sometimes happen to women who storm out into the night.’

  ‘You think some evil bastard picked her up? Took her somewhere and killed her?’

  Nick nodded. ‘Something like that. I think I need to talk to Essex police when we get home. The trail’s pretty cold by now, but they need to set up a murder inquiry. If the phone’s still live, it might give them a starting point for a search.’

  ‘Poor Leanne. She wasn’t the sharpest knife in the box, but she was a decent person.’ Then suddenly Stephanie sat bolt upright. ‘Wait a minute. You’re not being straight with me, Nick.’

  Startled, he pulled back. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know what I mean. It wasn’t some stranger that killed Leanne. It must have been someone at the house. Because her place in Spain was sold and the money went into the trust.’ Stephanie’s eyes were wide with horror. ‘Was there an accident? Did Leanne die in the house?’

  ‘Whoa,’ Nick said, twisting in his seat and gently gripping her shoulders. ‘You’re getting way ahead of yourself here. There’s other explanations, ones that make a lot more sense.’

  ‘I can’t think of one.’ Chin up, Stephanie was back in control now. She wanted answers and there was no fending her off.

  ‘What was Leanne’s job? What did she do for Scarlett?’

  ‘You know that. She was her body double, her impersonator.’

  ‘Exactly. To someone who was obsessed with Scarlett, Leanne was as good as the real thing. They might even have taken her in the mistaken belief that she was Scarlett. Now, the fact that you’re delusional in one area of your life doesn’t necessarily prevent you functioning like the rest of us in other r
espects. Our mystery man grabs Leanne and holds her prisoner. Sooner or later it dawns on him that this isn’t Scarlett. Which means he’s got to get rid of her and cover his tracks. He finds out about the house and business in Spain and realises the alarm will be raised if Leanne appears to abandon everything. He goes there and clears out her personal stuff under cover of night. Then he impersonates her in letters or emails or texts and sets up the sale of the villa. He doesn’t care who it belongs to or where the money goes because he’s not interested in money. He’s interested in Scarlett.’

  Stephanie shivered. It made such clear and terrible sense. There had often been obsessive fans hanging around outside the hacienda. The same faces showed up again and again whenever Scarlett did any public appearances. Sometimes they got too close and had to be warned off. One or two, like Megan the Stalker, had gone out of control. But what about the others, who managed to hold it together on the surface but who were mad as a box of frogs underneath? Nick’s theory answered all of the questions raised by Leanne’s disappearance much more convincingly than the notion that Scarlett or one of her circle could have anything to do with her death.

  ‘And in all the fuss and confusion around Scarlett’s death, nobody was paying much attention to detail,’ she said. ‘The trustees probably didn’t notice the money from the sale of the villa in amongst all the other cash that was coming in from realising Scarlett’s assets.’

  ‘Who are the trustees?’ Nick asked.

  ‘Simon, Marina and George.’

  ‘Maybe it’s time to talk to George,’ Nick said.

  ‘As soon as we get back to London. Do you still want me to send that text to Leanne’s phone?’

  ‘Oh, I think so. It’ll be interesting to see what a text from a dead woman looks like.’

  4

  It was after midnight by the time they returned to Nick’s flat. They fell into bed exhausted, but not too exhausted to take comfort in each other. Afterwards, when Nick had slipped into sleep, Stephanie lay awake, gripped by an abiding sadness. Jimmy was seldom absent from the front of her mind for long. She had imagination enough to create endless scenarios of misery and anguish for him. In spite of everyone telling her not to blame herself for what had happened, Stephanie could not escape the guilt that washed through her in regular waves. If they didn’t find him alive and well, she would feel tainted by her failure for the rest of her life. She’d made a promise to Scarlett and she had not kept it.

  Eventually, she drifted into restless sleep and morning rolled around far too soon. By some miracle, Stephanie’s whereabouts hadn’t leaked to the media. Nick was insistent that while the flat was still a safe house, they shouldn’t do anything that meant her breaking cover. That included turning up at George’s office or eating in the sort of restaurant where waiters had paparazzi numbers on speed dial. ‘Poor George was completely stumped,’ Stephanie told Nick after she’d spoken to the showbiz agent. ‘I suggested he could come here. You’d have thought I was suggesting he walk through South Central LA waving a wallet full of dollars.’

  Nick grinned. ‘I take it he’s coming here, then?’

  ‘Of course he is. He said he’d be with us around eleven. He’ll expect biscuits.’

  Nick crossed to the kitchen cupboards and produced a bag of cantucci and a packet of Florentines. ‘Will these do?’

  ‘Another demonstration that men are from Mars and women are from Venus,’ Stephanie said. ‘I couldn’t have these in the house. Well, I could. But they wouldn’t be there the next day. And if I’d known they were there, they wouldn’t be.’

  Nick grinned. ‘I’ll bear that in mind. By the way. I had an email overnight from Vivian McKuras. They’re running headlong into a brick wall over there.’

  ‘All the technology we’ve got now, and yet one man can walk off with a little boy and there’s no way of tracking him?’

  ‘The trouble with technology is that criminals understand what it can do just as well as we do. So they figure out ways to circumvent it. In a case like this, unless they get a reliable, quantifiable witness sighting, their best chance of tracing the perp and the victim is when they make contact about the ransom or the terms of release. No contact . . . ’

  Stephanie bit her lip, stricken.

  Nick slapped a hand against his thigh in anger at his stupidity. ‘Jesus, listen to me. Could I be any more insensitive? I’m sorry.’ He spread his arms out.

  She didn’t move towards him, but she shook her head. ‘It’s OK. I don’t want to be wrapped up in cotton wool. I need to know the reality of what’s going on. It’s hard, but I don’t want to be an ostrich about this.’

  ‘OK. But I’ll try to be a bit more considerate about how I express myself. One good thing – I asked McKuras to confirm to my boss that she still needs my input, so I’m cleared to carry on doing whatever unorthodox investigation it is that we’re doing.’

  Now she moved into his arms. ‘That’s good. When are you going to talk to the Essex police?’

  Nick looked over her head towards the glass wall with its spectacular rooftop view. ‘I wanted to discuss that with you,’ he said slowly. ‘Technically, I should speak to them asap. Suspicion of murder is not something a cop’s supposed to sit on.’

  ‘No, I can see how they’d take a dim view of that,’ Stephanie said, acid in her tone. ‘I can hear a “but” coming though.’

  ‘This is a pretty cold case now. And my primary concern is getting Jimmy back. While we’re still stumbling around in the dark on that, I don’t want to do anything that might provoke the abductor.’

  ‘You think the kidnap and the murder are connected? How? That doesn’t make any sense.’

  Nick moved away from her and started preparing the coffee machine. ‘I don’t know what I think. At the moment, it’s all one big confused jumble. For all I know, some demented obsessive is snatching people who were connected to Scarlett. Like a mad souvenir collection.’ He banged the worktop with his clenched fist. ‘Call it superstition, if that helps. I just don’t want the people we’re talking to about Jimmy to freak out because they’re getting calls from cops about a possible murder. There’s nothing more calculated to make people shut up about anything.’

  ‘So you want to wait? Not talk to anyone at Essex police about Leanne until we’ve got Jimmy back?’

  She saw his back stiffen and knew he was already preparing himself for not getting Jimmy back. Stephanie wished she didn’t know that. Because there was no way she could let herself concede there was the slightest chance that would happen. Someone needed to keep the flame alive. If that isolated her from Nick, hard though it would be, she’d still make that call.

  ‘That’s what I’m thinking.’ He turned back to her and raised his eyebrows in a question.

  ‘You’ll get no argument from me. Nobody but us seems to have noticed Leanne’s missing. I don’t think it’ll make any difference if we sound the alert today or in a month’s time.’

  Nick’s reply was cut off by Stephanie’s phone jittering on the worktop. ‘It’s from Leanne,’ she said, grabbing the phone. Nick leaned over her shoulder so he could read the text along with her. ‘Don’t thnk its a gd idea 2 get 2gethr. 2 sad 4 Jimmy & 4me. Soz. Lx.’

  Stephanie felt her heart contract. Nick’s guess had been in the ballpark. ‘You got it right,’ she said bleakly. ‘That’s not Leanne.’

  ‘But it’s someone who wants us to think Leanne is still alive and well. Somebody who doesn’t know we’ve been to Spain.’

  ‘That doesn’t exactly narrow it down.’

  ‘It does in a way, Stephanie. It lets her Spanish friends off the hook. Word of our visit will have gone round like wildfire. If any of them was responsible for her death, they’d never have answered your text. Whoever got rid of Leanne, it happened in England, before she went back to Spain.’

  Before Stephanie could respond, the entryphone beeped. Nick buzzed George up and went to the door to greet him. George walked in, tentative as a cat on new territor
y. Stephanie had positioned herself by the glass wall so George would get the full-on smack-in-the-face of the view as soon as he walked in. But he seemed oblivious to the panorama, crossing straight to her. He took her hands in his and gave her his most searching look. ‘My dear Stephanie,’ he said, his voice velvet with concern. ‘You must be beside yourself. What a terrible experience for you.’ He looked over his shoulder at Nick. ‘I’m sure Nick’s already got the bases covered, but if there’s anything at all I can do to help, all you have to do is ask. I am at your command.’

  Stephanie squeezed her eyes shut to fight the tears that welled up in response. ‘For God’s sake, George. Can you stop being quite so nice? I can take anything but kindness at the moment.’

  He chuckled and pulled her into a chaste embrace. ‘That’s my girl.’ He stepped away and looked around him for the first time, taking in the dozen or so guitars hanging on the walls or sitting on stands. ‘Do I take it you are something of a musician, Sergeant Nicolaides?’

  ‘Call me Nick, please. Yes, I play a bit.’ He waved George towards the squashy leather sofa that was his only concession to living-room furniture. ‘Please, have a seat. Coffee?’

  George caught Stephanie’s eye, one eyebrow raised in a question. ‘Yes, George, it’s safe.’

  Nick busied himself with coffee and biscuits while Stephanie took George through the story of the abduction and the disastrous FBI operation against Pete Matthews. The account of Pete’s experience gave him a moment’s grim satisfaction. ‘Serves the bastard right,’ he said. ‘Perhaps now he’ll realise that stalking you is rather more trouble than it’s worth.’

  When Nick returned, George got down to business. ‘How can I help you find Jimmy?’

  ‘We need to talk to everyone who was close to Jimmy or Scarlett. Somebody knows who’s done this. But they might not realise the significance of what they know,’ Nick said. ‘The roots of this offence probably run deep. That’s why we need to dig into the history.’