by Steven Dunne
Brook glanced at his watch. ‘We’ll certainly check. If you could go downstairs and finish that list of contact numbers for her friends and sort out a recent photograph? We just need to finish off in here.’
To leave two men in their daughter’s bedroom left the Blakes looking momentarily ill at ease, but eventually they padded off towards the stairs. As soon as they turned away, Brook flicked the call button on his phone.
‘That letter’s a fake,’ said Noble. ‘No proper address. No email.’
‘And a spelling mistake,’ agreed Brook, holding the phone to his ear. ‘It looks more like amateur DTP than a company document.’
‘How come her father didn’t spot it?’
‘Too much stardust in his eyes.’ Brook rang off. ‘The phone number doesn’t exist.’ He got to his knees and started searching under the mattress.
Noble started removing all the drawers from the cabinets, looking for documents taped to the underside. ‘But his wife isn’t so star-struck.’
‘I’m guessing she’s not even seen it. She’s not interested.’ Brook planted his face on the carpet and scanned the floor. He pulled a wad of glossy photographs from under the bed.
‘Becky’s portfolio is under here.’ The photographs were in a heap and partially stuck together by the Blu-tack still adhering to the corners of the prints and the wall. Brook prised them apart and arranged them on the mattress. The teenager posed at them in a variety of moods and outfits.
‘I wonder why she took them down?’ asked Noble.
Brook knelt back down to be sure he’d missed nothing. He slipped a latex finger into the small gap between the make-up bureau and the carpet, and slid out a piece of folded paper. He opened it gingerly. This time the letterhead was a more professional affair, with all the usual contact information. Brook read the text quickly and passed it to Noble.
Dear Miss Blake,
Thank you for recently sending us your portfolio. It is with regret that I have to inform you that we don’t feel you have the look that we are currently seeking. This is a subjective judgement and other modelling agencies may well feel differently . . .
‘She wrote the other letter to herself after receiving this,’ said Brook sombrely. ‘So her parents wouldn’t think she was a failure.’ He smiled sadly down at the photographs. ‘And then she couldn’t face looking at herself.’
‘And bolted because she couldn’t handle it?’
‘Could be – this is our second missing kid in personal turmoil.’
‘It would only be temporary.’
‘Sure, it’s just a failed job application to us but it’s a shattered dream to Becky Blake. This is probably the first time anyone’s said no to her, John. When you glide through your youth without a care in the world, that first reality check is the hardest. And the bigger the dream, the bigger the shock finding out life isn’t lived on your terms. Unhappiness is not a product they sell on TV. Some don’t know how to cope with it.’
‘You’ve got a TV now, have you?’
Brook smiled. ‘It’s just for research. I haven’t joined the human race. Yet.’ He selected one of the photographs of Becky for use in the inquiry. ‘We’d better make a move.’
‘Live Forever,’ read Noble from the leaflet. ‘Young, Beautiful, Immortal. What the hell are they up to?’
‘I’m not sure. But at least we now know they’re acting in concert. This was planned. These kids weren’t abducted. They left of their own volition.’
‘Is that good?’ asked Noble.
‘For now.’
‘You’re sure the phone and the leaflet weren’t on the bed?’ said Noble, looking at the two artefacts on a chest of drawers beside the bed.
‘I didn’t find them,’ replied Adele Watson’s mother. She was a shrivelled, prune-faced woman with a leathery complexion and prematurely grey hair which she wore in long knotted strands. Despite the Family Liaison Officer informing her to expect a visit from CID, she was in her nightclothes and a large hooded dressing-gown that completely engulfed her. The contrast with the hard tanned body of her good-looking husband, a builder by trade, was stark.
‘Mr Watson?’ asked Noble.
Brook glanced up at James Watson from his examination of a large wardrobe. He seemed to be in a daydream, like Fred Blake, just staring, saucer-eyed, at the crumpled duvet of his daughter’s bed. With a twenty-year-old daughter of his own, he wasn’t surprised by Watson and Blake’s reaction. Brook had given it a lot of thought – too much. Mothers were important to young girls, but fathers and daughters shared something unfathomable – a dark and mysterious bond that was always delicately balanced and easily contaminated.
‘Jim,’ prompted his wife.
Adele’s father snapped out of his reverie and looked at Brook. ‘That’s how it was.’
‘On the chest of drawers?’
‘I just told you.’
‘And the bed was dishevelled?’
‘If that means was it a mess, yes,’ replied Watson.
‘On or off?’
‘What?’
‘The phone.’
‘Off.’
‘Did you check her calls?’
‘I tried to.’
Brook looked up at him sharply. ‘So you touched the phone.’
‘Obviously. But I put it back exactly as it was.’
‘You never told me that,’ snapped Mrs Watson.
‘That’s because there was nothing to tell you, woman. I thought her last calls might show me where she’d gone, that’s all,’ he explained to Brook.
‘And did they?’
Watson shook his head but didn’t make eye-contact. ‘The SIM card’s gone. She must’ve taken it with her.’
Noble bagged the phone as well as the Deity leaflet, which was identical to the other two they’d collected. ‘But if you tried to check her calls, you must have known your daughter’s SIM Pin.’
‘I told you. The SIM card’s missing.’
‘But you didn’t know that when you tried to turn it on,’ added Brook.
Watson nodded. ‘One-one-nine-two.’
‘My daughter would’ve died under torture before divulging that to me or her mum,’ said Brook, playing Happy Parent for a moment.
‘It’s her date of birth,’ snarled Watson.
‘Did you also check her computer for emails?’
‘Her laptop’s gone.’
‘Gone?’ Brook glanced over at Noble then walked back to the wardrobe he’d looked in earlier. He plucked a laptop case from a hook on the back of the door. It was empty. ‘Without this?’
Watson shrugged. ‘She must have taken it in a rucksack instead.’ Brook fixed his eyes on Adele’s father. There was more than shock in his eyes. There was resentment. He understood it. It was part of the strange connection between fathers and daughters – the teenage girl pushing towards womanhood, the father, her jailer, imposing adolescence. Were Adele Watson and her father fighting this ancient battle? Brook recognised defeat in his face. What else would there be? Only one winner.
‘Have you checked if Adele has her passport with her?’ asked Noble.
‘No,’ replied Mrs Watson.
‘Can you see if it’s still in the house?’
‘I’ll go,’ said Watson. ‘It should still be with our passports. We went to Tenerife last summer.’ He turned away.
‘Go with him, Sergeant,’ said Brook. Noble looked up at his DI. There was an edge to his voice that Noble had learned to detect. Something was wrong. He turned to follow Watson into another bedroom.
Brook smiled to reassure Mrs Watson, but she was oblivious to the sudden undercurrent. He ambled round the room and ran a finger across a shelf of books containing works by Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf and Beryl Bainbridge as well as the anthologies of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath amongst others. He picked up the Plath book and opened it to the first page. In a beautiful hand Adele had written I am, I am, I am.
Brook returned it to its place and gestured at the al
most bare desk. ‘Is this where she kept her laptop?’ he asked. Adele’s mother nodded.
A lone book sat there instead. The Collected Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.
Brook smiled. ‘That takes me back.’
‘It’s new,’ said Adele’s mother. ‘She bought that last Friday.’
‘The day of the party? She has her own money then.’
‘Some. Though she isn’t one to spend it on clothes and phones. Jim practically has to drag her out to buy her clothes.’
‘Does he?’ said Brook. ‘I thought that might be more of a job for her mother.’ Mrs Watson shrugged her disinterest. Brook opened the anthology to the bookmarked page. ‘A Dream Within A Dream.’ He closed his eyes, repeating the poem out loud from memory.
‘Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
This much let me avow –
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream:’
Brook hesitated and was forced to look at the text.
‘Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.’
‘Yeah,’ Mrs Watson said dismissively. ‘Her head was full of that sort of crap.’
Brook looked at the page. A single word had been written in the margin. Miranda. He closed the book and picked up a photograph in a cockleshell frame. A dark-eyed beauty glowered back at him through intense and mysterious brown eyes. He sensed a pent-up fury in her, an eagerness to be heard, noticed. He thought of his own daughter, Terri – oh, so impatient for the freedoms of adulthood. Adele and Terri weren’t far apart in age or taste. Edgar Allan Poe for Adele Watson – with Terri it had been the poems of Robert Frost and the music of Radiohead, to confer the illusion of depth, suggest a worldliness that was yet to arrive.
Brook pulled open the drawers of the bureau and took out a purple box from one drawer. There were three fountain pens inside. ‘Nice pens.’
‘She loved writing – you know, the old fashioned way,’ said Mrs Watson. ‘Poems, essays. She was very bright. She had a place at Cambridge next year.’
Brook looked at her. Past tense again. ‘Where?’
‘Cambridge,’ she repeated, louder and slower for Brook’s benefit.
‘No, where did she write? I don’t see any papers or writing books here.’
‘She had a notebook for ideas. If it’s not there, she must have taken it with her.’
‘What about a diary?’
‘Not sure. But it’s all online these days, isn’t it?’
Jim Watson returned with Noble. ‘It’s gone. She must have taken it.’
‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it?’ said Mrs Watson. ‘She’s gone abroad somewhere.’
‘It’s a possibility,’ said Noble.
‘ “Live Forever. Question Mark”,’ said Brook.
‘Pardon?’
‘Is that one of her poems?’
‘How did you . . . ?’
‘It’s written on this blotter here,’ said Brook, peering down at it. He gestured to Noble to add it to the Exhibits Officer’s list then pulled off his latex gloves. ‘Or maybe she copied it from the leaflet.’ He smiled at the Watsons then looked casually at the walls.
‘Jim Morrison, James Dean, River Phoenix,’ he said, noting the posters dotted around Adele Watson’s walls. ‘Young, beautiful and immortal,’ he added, suddenly thoughtful. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked, nodding at a fourth poster.
The Watsons shook their heads.
‘It’s Kurt Cobain,’ said Noble. ‘He was lead singer with Nirvana.’
‘Was?’ enquired Brook.
‘He shot himself.’
‘And that?’ Brook enquired, pointing to a poster of a young blond man over Adele’s bed.
Watson scoffed loudly. ‘That? That’s a faggot.’
His wife frowned at him. ‘That’s Alexander Skarsgard. He’s in True Blood.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Brook.
‘It’s a show about vampires, if you can believe it?’ spat Watson. ‘And it’s full of faggoty actors like him pretending to be men.’
‘You’re not a fan,’ observed Brook patiently.
‘Please,’ he sneered. ‘People will swallow anything.’
‘I like it,’ said his wife. ‘The men are hot.’
‘Jesus, Roz, give us a break.’
‘Your husband’s right, Mrs Watson,’ Brook said gravely. ‘All actors are gay.’ Noble looked away, trying not to smile.
Watson became animated. ‘Thank you, Inspector. But try telling that to my wife and daughter.’
‘I mean, proper women are attracted to real men,’ continued Brook. ‘Firemen, soldiers . . .’
‘Exactly,’ Watson agreed.
‘. . . builders,’ Brook threw in.
Watson went back into his shell as his wife squinted suspiciously at him. ‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ he muttered.
‘So Adele is more interested in actors than builders,’ said Brook.
‘Well, her boyfriend isn’t an actor,’ said Mrs Watson.
‘Boyfriend?’ enquired Noble, looking at Brook. ‘You didn’t mention that before.’
‘With a Porsche, as well,’ said the shrivelled woman. ‘You should speak to him.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘She didn’t tell me. Jim saw him though.’
‘I never saw him,’ blustered Watson. ‘But he dropped her off last week and she was crying. She said he’d dumped her.’ He smiled coldly at the detectives. ‘So maybe that’s who you should be out looking for.’
‘And you don’t know his name?’
‘No,’ said Watson.
‘Perhaps Adele mentioned him in an email?’ suggested Brook.
‘No. Her laptop’s gone – I told you.’
Brook held up a hand in apology. ‘So you did.’
‘And he drove a Porsche,’ said Noble, making a note.
Watson hesitated now. ‘Not definitely. But a sports car of some kind. Or maybe it was a saloon.’
‘You told me it was a Porsche,’ said Roz Watson.
‘Either way, an older man,’ prompted Brook, fixing his eye on Watson. ‘With money.’
‘I would think.’
Brook smiled warmly at the husband and wife. ‘Well, if you could go downstairs and finish that list of contacts with PC . . .’
‘. . . Crainey,’ finished Noble.
‘Right. And keep out of Adele’s room in case Scientific Support Officers need to do any work.’
‘There’s something wrong there,’ said Brook, when they were standing under the streetlight outside the front gate.
‘I know. They seemed more angry than concerned.’
‘And they didn’t mention their daughter by name the entire time. At the Blake house it was Becky this and Becky that – same with Mrs Kennedy and Kyle.’
‘Now you mention it,’ said Noble, passing Brook a cigarette.
‘Another odd thing – he seemed happy telling us his daughter had been dumped. That’s not normal. Contrast that with a typical father like Fred Blake who thinks no one’s fit to breathe the same air as his daughter. Anybody dumping Becky Blake would be bad-mouthed for the rest of his life.’
‘Think Watson has an idea who the boyfriend is and plans to confront him?’
‘That might explain his memory loss over the Porsche.’ Brook took a deep lungful of smoke. ‘But there’s more to it than that. His daughter’s missing but he hardly seems surprised or worried.’
‘Like he knows where she’s gone?’
‘Or maybe why she might go.’
‘Something to do with him, you think?’
Brook shrugged. ‘Possible. We need to search the house.’
‘Looking for what!’ exclaimed Noble.
‘The laptop, for one thing. And something containing
Adele’s writings.’
‘You think Watson took Adele’s laptop?’
‘Maybe. Or maybe she hid it herself. Either way, Becky and Kyle both left their laptops behind. So where’s Adele’s?’
‘Maybe they need one between the three of them so she took it.’
‘And not even put it in its case?’
‘It’s odd. But why would Watson take it?’
‘No idea. Perhaps he thinks there’s something on it – a poem or a piece of writing or an email – he doesn’t want anyone to see.’
‘Containing what?’
‘Who knows? It may be no more than father and daughter butting heads over her choice of boyfriend, but girls can be pretty vitriolic behind your back.’
‘What about Mrs Watson? Do you think she’s covering for her husband about something?’
‘I’m not sure she knows there’s anything amiss, not deep down.’ Brook smiled sadly. ‘Maybe even he doesn’t.’
Noble nodded. ‘So it may all be in his head.’
‘Or Adele’s. Teenage daughters are younger versions of our wives, John, so it’s not a huge leap for that relationship to be corrupted. The boyfriend could have triggered something in him that caused conflict. Our daughters having sex with other men is the secret dread of all fathers, the first thing we picture when boys start looking their way. It’s even worse when older men are looking.’
Noble kept silent, waiting for a corroborating anecdote from Brook’s own past parenting. It didn’t arrive. He threw his butt to the pavement. ‘I’ll put in a call to Social Services tomorrow. See what pops up on the Watsons. So where does this leave us?’
‘With three unhappy kids looking to change their lives,’ Brook said. ‘Three abandoned mobile phones and three leaflets. This website . . .’
‘Deity?’
‘We need to find out who’s behind it. Tell Cooper to start on it as soon as he gets in tomorrow. And get a warrant for the Watson house.’ Brook looked at his watch then back to the front door as the uniformed FLO closed it behind him. Brook stepped to the rear of his car and opened the boot. He took out the small tightly packed bin bag retrieved from the Kennedy dustbin. ‘It’s gone eleven, John. Can you get a lift back with . . . ?’