‘Penny.’ A gritted-teeth smile. ‘You stayed over.’
‘Yes,’ said Penny brightly. ‘It’s almost like I’m living here at the moment.’
Yes, it is, isn’t it?
‘I’m done now,’ she informed Helen, and padded past her, heading for Tom’s room, her long dark hair dripping water on to the annoyingly blemish-free skin of her back, which was barely concealed by the towel.
As Penny reached Tom’s door, Helen said, ‘That’s my towel, by the way.’
‘Oh, sorry. I thought it was Tom’s.’ Penny’s face twisted into a regretful grimace she must have assumed looked kooky and endearing. Helen wanted to slap her.
‘Hang on,’ she said, then she opened Tom’s door, shimmied behind it until it concealed her body from Helen, then slipped off the towel and held it out for Helen. Helen had no choice but to walk towards Penny and take the towel from the outstretched hand of the giggling, obviously naked girl. Tom was no doubt enjoying the spectacle from his bed.
Helen didn’t feel the need to thank Penny for the return of her very damp towel. ‘Tell Tom I’ll see him at the café later.’
‘Okey-dokey,’ chirruped Penny as she closed the door.
Who the hell says Okey-dokey?
Helen could hear laughter from behind the door now as Tom said something to his girlfriend that she didn’t catch.
Just as well. I don’t want to hear it.
Helen dropped the now contaminated towel into the wash basket on the landing and went to the airing cupboard to get a new one.
It was better this way.
Helen reminded herself of that fact for the umpteenth time as she drove a few yards before halting yet again behind the temporary traffic lights by the ‘road improvement’ work being carried out in Durham city. The lights seemed incapable of letting more than three cars through at a time before reverting to red, ensuring drivers had a frustrating delay to their daily commute.
Helen and Tom usually went out together in one car, once the morning rush hour was over, but Helen lacked the patience needed to witness the excruciatingly perky Penny draping herself all over Tom, so she’d chosen a peak-time journey to the Rosewood Café for breakfast while she waited for Tom to catch up. It was a place where they often met Ian Bradshaw if they were working a case together, which reminded her that they still owed him a return call.
The lights finally changed to green again. Helen drove her car as close to the rear bumper of the one in front as she dared, willing them both through, but just as the vehicle ahead of hers went through the lights, they reverted to red once more, barring her way.
‘Shit,’ she hissed, her foul mood exacerbated by the combination of her snail-like progress and the constant presence in their lives these days of Perky Penny. It wasn’t that she didn’t want Tom to have a girlfriend. She had wished it often enough while she herself had been in a relationship, but, not for the first time, she wondered what the hell he was doing with somebody so young.
‘I met someone,’ he had announced on his return from his holiday.
‘Oh,’ was all she could offer in response. She hadn’t been expecting that. They had both, almost simultaneously, been through the messiest break-ups imaginable and Tom had, seemingly on a whim, invited Helen to go on the holiday with him. It was already booked and paid for – he had initially intended to go with his girlfriend but that relationship had ended in spectacular fashion. Helen had repeatedly said that it wasn’t a good idea and that she wouldn’t go with him. Ever the practical one, she had listened to her head and not her heart, despite the obvious mutual attraction between them. What if they fell for each other and started a relationship out there, a holiday romance that couldn’t possibly survive the reality of them both living and working together? Helen had known, if she went on that holiday with Tom, she would be running the risk of losing a friend, a business partner and her home.
She kept that stance right till the very last minute, then suddenly changed her mind and did something wildly impulsive for perhaps the first time in her life, driving to meet Tom before he flew out to Crete. Only to discover that he had already left for the airport.
Of course, she never told him. What good would that do?
Helen had put it down to fate, but she hadn’t expected Tom to return home a week later and tell her he had met someone. According to him, he spent the first couple of days wandering around listlessly on his own. Then he had gone to a bar and met Penny, who was on holiday with uni pals, and ‘her little smile just lit up the room’. Reading between the lines, they barely left the hotel room for the rest of the holiday.
‘Well, that’s nice,’ she had offered when he told her, burying her own emotions. ‘I’m pleased for you.’
Was she really, though? She had no claim on Tom. He was single, after all, and she had turned down his invitation, so he must have assumed she didn’t want him. Should she be more supportive? She told herself it wasn’t that. It was Penny. She was way too young for Tom: he was past thirty, while Penny was barely twenty. It would have been little more than a holiday fling if she had been from any other part of the country, Helen was sure of it. Trust Tom to pick a girl who was studying at Northumbria University. How bloody convenient.
‘But does this relationship with Penny have any future?’ Helen had asked him recently, alluding to her age.
‘I don’t know,’ replied the infamous commitment-phobe. ‘Who cares?’
It’ll burn out. It’s bound to.
And it’s better this way.
Helen told herself she was glad to be single and in no hurry to have another relationship. Peter had called her again the night before and left a long voicemail. Her ex was trying to be calm, as if their last face-to-face conversation hadn’t been the one where she called off their engagement and he called her … what was it? A cold bitch? Among other things. He had also convinced himself she was shagging Tom. Why did everyone always assume she was shagging Tom? She lived with him, but that was just out of convenience for work and their own safety, since there was a gangster out there who wanted them both dead.
Peter’s message had included a gently worded request for her to call him back, when she was ready. He explained that it wasn’t good to end things the way they had done, and he was probably right. He just wanted to talk. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Helen didn’t want to talk to Peter, but she felt bad. They had been a serious couple for a long time, so it would be strange if they never spoke again. Didn’t Peter deserve better than that? She wasn’t sure, so she did what she always did when a problem seemed intractable. She slept on it.
After years with Peter and his controlling ways, it was nice to be the only one making the decisions about her life: where to go, what to do, even the clothes she chose to wear. She blanched at the memory of Peter asking her once, ‘Are you wearing that?’ with a frown that had her scurrying to her wardrobe for alternatives. Now she felt angry at her younger, more malleable self for ever permitting that level of control by any man and vowed it would never happen again.
Tom never cared what she wore, but then there were quite a few things he didn’t care about. She wondered if he really cared for Penny or whether she would be gone in a few weeks, or months, maybe a year. The girl had lasted a lot longer than Helen had expected.
The lights changed at last, and she was through. Minutes later she reached the café, ordered some tea and toast and waited for Tom. She wondered if he’d managed to track down Ian Bradshaw and speak with him about the missing girls. The detective’s lengthy voicemail had been an appeal for help, and it couldn’t have been more timely. Missing persons had become something of a speciality of Tom and Helen’s, but Ian had explained that this case was different. People disappeared every year, in surprising numbers, often suddenly, but what was missing here, apart from the women themselves, were reasons, and that intrigued Helen. These women hadn’t left any clues or explanations behind when they had gone, just a handful of friends and family members desperate to disco
ver the truth.
Bradshaw left his desk and cautiously approached the vending machine, which for once did not have a hand-written ‘Out of Order’ sign taped to it. He placed his money in the slot, selected a hot drink … and nothing happened. Bradshaw examined the slot and saw the edge of his coin: it was jammed. He poked it with a finger, hit the surrounding area hard with the palm of his hand then resorted to rocking the entire machine carefully back and forth in an effort to dislodge the coin but it remained stubbornly stuck.
‘Oh, for fu—’ He never completed the sentence. Hugh Rennie was standing behind him.
‘I’ve been looking all over for you,’ he told Bradshaw. He sounded sheepish. ‘I know who she is.’
‘The woman in the woods?’ Bradshaw turned his attention away from the vending machine. ‘Go on.’
‘There was something I couldn’t quite put my finger on when I saw her, and then it came to me. It was the tattoo.’
‘The Celtic band on her wrist?’
‘I thought I’d seen it somewhere before, then I remembered. The woman who disappeared, she had a tattoo just like it.’
For a policeman, Rennie was not very good at explaining himself succinctly. ‘Which woman?’
‘Her name is Cora Harrison.’ He corrected himself. ‘Or at least it was.’
‘Right,’ said Bradshaw. ‘So when did she go missing?’
‘That’s the strange part,’ said Rennie. ‘About eighteen years ago.’
CHAPTER NINE
Tom arrived at the café late and full of apologies. Helen waved them away because she guessed the delay involved Penny and she didn’t want to know the carnal details.
‘I can skip breakfast,’ he offered, since it was obvious Helen had already eaten.
‘No, you can’t,’ she told him. ‘You’re hopeless on an empty stomach.’
‘You’re right.’ He ordered a full English. ‘Did you call Ian?’
‘Me?’ she asked indignantly. ‘I thought you said you were going to call him?’
‘I did, before we left Leeds, remember, but I couldn’t get hold of him, so I assumed …’
‘You assumed?’
‘Well, Penny came round, didn’t she? So, I thought …’
‘I would do it for you?’
‘For us,’ he argued. ‘For the business.’
‘Well, I didn’t, so why don’t you just call him now, before your breakfast arrives?’
‘Okay,’ he said tersely. ‘I will.’
Bradshaw forgot all about his cup of tea and the coin jammed in the vending machine. Rennie had his full and undivided attention.
‘You’re saying this woman was reported missing way back in 1979 and has only just turned up dead now?’
‘That’s right,’ confirmed Rennie.
‘Have we any idea where she has been for the past eighteen years?’
‘None,’ he admitted. ‘There was an investigation at the time, of course, but years ago it wasn’t taken quite as seriously if a young lass went missing. If no body was found, we tended to assume she’d run away from her parents, gone to London or somewhere, probably with a boyfriend. I mean, a lot of them did, and it was their business. If a girl was over sixteen, there wasn’t very much that could be done.’
Rennie went on: ‘I remember this particular girl disappearing, and one of our lads asked if there was anything distinctive about her. Her mother said she had a tattoo; a Celtic band thing here’ ‒ he put his right hand around his left wrist ‒ ‘we mentioned it in our appeal for information at the time. A lot of lasses have tattoos these days, but it was rarer than rocking-horse shit back then, so I remembered it.’
‘Just not at first?’ Bradshaw remembered Rennie gazing at the body of the woman in the woods.
‘No, I mean, yeah, just not at first. Her parents have been dead a while but there’s a brother. He was able to confirm it was his sister. That must have been a hell of a shock. He probably thought she’d been killed when she vanished. Now he has to cope with knowing she has been alive all this time.’
‘And was only killed recently,’ said Bradshaw. ‘Poor bastard. It’s incredible.’
‘Oh, that’s not the incredible bit …’
Bradshaw was just about to ask Rennie what the incredible bit was when he noticed Malone standing up at her desk and gesticulating at him. She was too far away to be heard if she called, but she held her hand to her ear with one thumb up and her little finger pointing down, the universal signal for ‘phone’.
Cursing her timing, he waved an acknowledgement. Rennie followed Bradshaw back to his desk and took a vacant seat near it, while Malone transferred the call.
‘Were you ever planning to call me back?’ asked the exasperated detective when he recognized the journalist’s voice.
‘I’m calling you back now,’ said Tom, ‘or haven’t you noticed?’
‘I meant yesterday.’
‘I couldn’t get hold of you but I asked my people to call your people. Didn’t they do that? If you can get down to the Rosewood Café right now, I might even buy you a bacon butty by way of apology.’
‘I’m a bit tied up just now but I can meet you later, if you’re interested.’
‘Let’s just say that we’ll give it some serious consideration, depending on the terms.’
‘The same as always,’ said Bradshaw. ‘Don’t tell me your price has gone up, because we can’t afford it.’
‘It was worth a try. Just don’t go questioning our expenses this time.’
‘That wasn’t me. It was an officious civilian in Accounts who took exception to your illegible handwriting and crumpled, coffee-stained receipts.’
‘Hadn’t you better tell me about these missing women?’
‘It’s easier to explain face to face.’ Bradshaw suggested a time for them to get together later. ‘That okay with you?’
‘Yes,’ agreed Tom. ‘As long as you can meet us at the Furry Friends Centre?’
‘At the what?’
‘Haven’t you heard of the place? Then you’re in for a treat.’
CHAPTER TEN
Ian Bradshaw was glad he had taken Tom Carney’s call ‒ at least now he would have some much-needed help ‒ but he was equally keen to get him off the line so he could hear what else Hugh Rennie had to say about the girl in the woods. They were sitting by Bradshaw’s desk in the open-plan HQ and Rennie was keeping his voice low, as if they were plotting something together and not just two colleagues discussing a case.
‘There were five of them that fitted the same pattern, all good girls,’ explained Rennie. ‘Not the kind who would suddenly vanish like that.’ He clicked his fingers to illustrate the suddenness of their disappearance. None of them was a tom or an addict, there were no controlling boyfriends or violent fathers, no crimes committed or skeletons in the cupboard, and nothing to be ashamed of ‒ unless all five of them were up the duff at the same time and didn’t want to tell anyone, which would be a bit of a bloody coincidence.’ He shook his head at the likelihood of that. ‘We interviewed everyone around them and all we found were genuinely devastated people who had lost a young woman from their family, suddenly and without rhyme or reason.’
‘That we know of,’ qualified Bradshaw.
‘Everyone has secrets, right?’ agreed Rennie. ‘And some secrets are darker than others. But we hit a brick wall.’
‘Just like now,’ said Bradshaw.
‘Just like now.’
‘This was back in 1979?’ asked Bradshaw. ‘Five women went missing in quick succession?’
‘In ’79 and ’80,’ Rennie corrected him, ‘but all within a year or so of each other. Then the disappearances stopped.’
‘Until now. What do you think happened?’
‘If they were abductions, then we assumed the man behind them either died or got time for other crimes, so he couldn’t carry on. Maybe he tired of what he was doing and stopped for some reason ‒ who knows? You can’t always work out what’s going on in their
heads ‒ nutters, I mean.’
‘Did anyone follow up on it later?’ Bradshaw asked. ‘Cross-referencing prison sentences with the dates when the disappearances ceased?’
‘There wasn’t much appetite for that back then. Remember, we didn’t have any bodies, so there wasn’t even any evidence that any crimes had been committed. The brass thought we had bigger fish to fry.’
‘And none of these women was ever seen again?’
‘One was,’ Rennie corrected him.
‘One of them was found?’
‘About a year after she disappeared. She was reported missing on 4 May 1979.’
‘You’ve got a bloody good memory.’
‘It was Election Day, when Margaret Thatcher first got into power. Not a date I’m likely to forget. The Tories have been in ever since, but it looks like that might change soon.’ Rennie didn’t offer a clue as to whether he thought this was a good thing or not.
‘This woman,’ said Bradshaw, to get him back on track. ‘What was her name?’
‘Sarah Barstow,’ said Rennie. ‘And when she reappeared she was in a right state.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘She was half loopy when they found her, wandering up and down an A-road on foot until she got hit by a car. Died in hospital a few days later.’
‘Did she ever regain consciousness?’
When Rennie answered it was in a careful and guarded manner. ‘I … believe she did … yes.’
‘Anyone interview her before she died?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not you, though?’
‘It wasn’t me,’ he said. ‘No.’
‘But someone did. And?’
‘It was all pretty incoherent, really, or so I was told later. She made some pretty wild claims, spoke a lot of utter rubbish. She was rambling on about some really quite bizarre stuff and not making much sense, by all accounts. They were saying she was like some hippy chick who fried her brain on LSD. We called her the stoned girl.’
‘In 1979? I’d have thought that was more likely in the sixties than the late seventies, wouldn’t you?’
The Chosen Ones Page 4