‘Nice souvenir,’ Barry said.
He could hear the shower running upstairs as he walked across to the table and sat down to study the picture. He picked the placemat up carefully so as not to disturb any of his wife’s meticulously arranged tableware. He leaned it up against a wine bottle and sat back.
Barry and Angela, Ed and Sue, Marina and Dave.
Not that anyone was necessarily standing next to their partner. He remembered them bundling somewhat awkwardly into a line, squeezing together as soon as the cameras had been handed over. Sue on one end standing next to Angie, Ed up close to Marina in the middle, then Barry and finally Dave at the other end.
Some more tanned than others, more at ease.
Barry didn’t dwell overlong on his own appearance. He almost always thought he looked like a bag of shit in photographs. There were a couple of him and Nick he was reasonably fond of, but that may have been because they were the only pictures of his son he possessed. That he was allowed to possess. He looked predictably awful in this one though, in a shirt Angie had forced him into buying which was too big and way too flowery.
‘He reckons it makes him look like a gay darts player,’ Angie had said. She was a glass or two to the good, in one of the bars near the beach, a night or two after the six of them had got together. She leaned across to kiss him on the cheek. ‘Don’t you, darling?’
‘It’s not me, that’s all.’
Ed, of course, had been unable to resist. Flapping his wrist around and lisping, ‘One hundred and eighty!’
Fucking hilarious …
In the photograph, Ed was showing a few too many of those nice, straight teeth, whiter than white against his tan. Angie was smiling too, more or less, and Marina, while four-eyed Dave on the end had that slightly superior look you caught sometimes, when he thought nobody was looking. Maybe the picture was taken before he was quite ready, but he definitely had that expression, something close to a smirk; you should think yourselves lucky I’m even talking to you idiots. To be honest, whatever face he had, Dave Cullen was a funny-looking sod: skinny as a stick, with bad skin and a wispy beard like some student or whatever. Geeky, that’s what Angie had said. Certainly not what you’d call an oil painting, though Marina didn’t seem to have any complaints, so maybe he was hung like a donkey or something.
It was Angie who had said that as well, like she should be so lucky. Like Barry had nothing worth writing home about.
Looking at the six of them, in shorts and sandals, brightly coloured shirts and sunhats, he decided that Sue probably looked the most … natural. A half-smile sort of thing, as though she’d just turned around and found a camera pointed at her. She had her hair up, showing off her shoulders. In fact, all of her was looking pretty good and Barry tried not to compare her slender figure with Angie’s, but it was hard with the pair of them standing side by side like that. Funny, but in terms of being sexy or whatever, it wasn’t an in-your-face thing with Sue. Not like it was with Marina, who was a bit, you know, obvious. In actual fact, you wouldn’t give Sue a second look nine times out of ten, but every so often you just got this feeling – at least Barry did, at any rate – that whatever she wanted people to think, she probably went like a train given half a chance.
There’d been plenty of talk about what Sue and Ed got up to. Dave and Marina too, come to think of it. As per bloody usual, Barry and Angie had talked about sex a damn sight more than they’d actually done it.
Down to him, no getting round that.
Angie had been good about it while they’d been away, he couldn’t fault her on that score. Saying that it didn’t matter, because she was happy enough just to read her book and that it was far too hot to be doing any of that anyway. Letting him off the hook.
It wasn’t too hot in bloody Crawley though, was it?
He let his head drop, then lifted it again, trying and failing to ease a little of the tension in his back and shoulders. It wasn’t difficult to work out what was going on, was it? There was no great mystery about why certain parts that should be working weren’t, no need for cuddles or counselling. He had a cow of an ex-wife and a bossy twat of a brother and both of them wound him up to the point where he felt like something was going to snap.
End of story.
‘You just need to relax,’ Angie kept saying.
Oh … you reckon?
He did his best to keep calm and to pretend that he didn’t think it mattered either. Truth was though, he knew it was only a matter of time before she started dropping hints about ‘seeing’ someone. Made some joke about buying tablets off the internet. The sad, simple, sodding truth was, the tension was everywhere except his cock, and the irony was that not being able to do the business in the bedroom was making him even angrier.
A vicious cycle, or circle, whatever the fuck it was.
He realised that the water had stopped running upstairs. He listened, heard Angie’s footsteps as she walked from the bathroom to the bedroom. He should probably go up himself and change into a clean shirt or something.
Make an effort.
Barry took one last look at the photograph as he carefully laid the placemat back in position. Five people staring straight at the camera. And him.
He wouldn’t say anything, but he couldn’t help wondering if this was really the best photo that Angie could find. If there was not one when, at the crucial moment, he had at least been looking the same way as everyone else. His eyes where they should be, on the woman with the camera, and not fixed on something two feet to the left of her.
One of the pictures only half coloured in.
NINE
Detective Jeffrey Gardner awoke thinking about Patti Lee and Amber-Marie Wilson. He lay staring at the ceiling for a few minutes, until the urge to visit the bathroom proved too strong, then he tried to slip out of bed without waking his wife.
The clock said 05.17.
His wife asked him if everything was all right and he said ‘shush’ and told her to go back to sleep. When she threw back the covers, he told her there was no need for her to get up as well.
‘I’m awake now anyway,’ Michelle Gardner said.
He was still thinking about Patti Lee and Amber-Marie over breakfast, while his five-year-old daughter was busy decorating the kitchen floor with Froot Loops. While his wife cooked eggs and tried to talk to him about something they were supposed to be doing that coming weekend. She could see that he wasn’t really listening and called him on it. He apologised, and when he told her what was on his mind, Michelle nodded, and said, ‘I think that woman needs to go home.’
Gardner knew his wife was right. He’d heard the same thing every day for a couple of weeks now. Almost every one of his colleagues on the Crimes Against Persons Unit thought it was crazy that the girl’s mother was still around, but there were few volunteers to have that awkward conversation and plenty of reasons people could think of not to bother.
‘It’s not like she’s hurting anybody, is it?’
‘Her choice, right?’
‘What’s that place cost anyway, like fifty bucks a night …?’
He thought about it on the way to drop his little girl off at school. Then, once he was alone in the car, he began to think specifically about what he might say; trying certain phrases out loud as he drove south through the city towards Sarasota Police Department Headquarters.
‘You need to be at home, Patti. You need to be around the people that care about you.’
Gardner was not convinced that Patti Lee Wilson would respond to that kind of cheesy crap, to any kind of crap now he thought about it, but it was the best he could come up with. He talked it through with a couple of the other detectives during the morning. He asked what his sergeant thought, while he wrote up reports and fielded telephone calls. The place was busier than usual, the atmosphere in the building a little more serious. The Chief of Police had been knocking heads together the day before and the entire Criminal Investigations Department was still buzzing following th
e murder of two elderly French tourists the previous week.
‘Now’s a good time, Jeff,’ the sergeant said. ‘It’s been six weeks, and with everything that’s going on around here right now, the truth is nobody’s paying that woman’s case a whole lot of attention at the moment.’
‘We’re still treating it as a homicide though, right?’
‘For sure,’ the sergeant said. ‘We’re looking for a body now, no doubt about that.’ He waved an arm towards the dozen or so detectives who were working flat out on the tourist murders. He lowered his voice. ‘But we got bodies with this one, we got two of the damn things. There’s nothing much we can do on the Wilson case until that little girl turns up.’
‘I guess not,’ Gardner said.
The sergeant – a well-built black man, same as Gardner, but a dozen years older – reached for his coffee cup and swirled what was left in it around, like it might help. ‘And there’s no point in that little girl’s mother being here to see us do nothing much, is there? You know what I mean?’
‘I know what you mean.’
As far as the Sarasota Police Department was concerned, it might well have been a good time for Patti Lee Wilson to go back to Atlanta. It certainly made a degree of sense in terms of workloads and the allocation of manpower, but this was not the reason Jeffrey Gardner had woken up thinking about the mother of the missing girl. He knew that going home would be the right thing for Patti Lee Wilson. How in God’s name could sticking around in the place where she’d lost her daughter, waiting on the only news she was ever going to get, possibly be doing her any good?
‘Until that little girl turns up …’
At lunchtime, Gardner sat in a delicatessen full of cops on Ringling Boulevard – a paper napkin tucked into his collar to keep food off his shirt and tie – and tried to come up with other things to say that might convince the poor woman to leave. Perhaps it would be better to take a more common-sense approach to this, he thought. Be practical about it. In the end, he decided he would just start talking and see how it went, so as soon as he’d finished his turkey-breast sub, he got in his car and went to pay Patti Lee Wilson a visit.
It had been on Good Friday, six weeks and one day earlier, that Amber-Marie Wilson had been reported missing from the Pelican Palms Resort on Siesta Key. That initial 911 call – Patti hysterical and struggling to breathe – had come in just after four o’clock in the afternoon, and by Easter Sunday, Gardner had known it by heart.
Every whisper and strangled sob.
‘She just wandered off … must have … and I’ve searched and looked everywhere and … she wouldn’t go far, she would never do that.’
‘Could you repeat that address?’
‘Jesus Christ, you have to get over here right now, OK?’
‘You need to try and stay calm, ma’am.’
‘Listen, you need to know that she has some problems, you know? She has some … mental difficulties. Oh God … she’d trust anyone. Do you understand what I’m saying? Anyone …’
He drove five and some miles east on Fruitville Road, then turned south just shy of I75. He was soon moving through an area of town dominated by industrial parks and warehouses. He could hear the sand and grit striking the side of the car as he drove. He passed lumber yards, repair shops and plumber’s merchants, then slowed as he approached a budget motel next door to a low-rent strip mall.
Where she had been living this past month and a half.
By sundown on that first night, the smart money was on Amber-Marie having been taken. Every shop and bar had been checked, every inch of beach and, as soon as the Marine Patrol had been brought in, as much of the water as could be usefully searched before the light had gone.
Siesta Village was hardly a hot spot as far as crime was concerned and apart from a couple that had been put up privately by security-conscious bar owners, there were precisely two CCTV cameras on the main stretch of the Beach Road. Amber-Marie could be seen walking out of the Pelican Palms on the single camera at the resort’s main entrance/exit, but there was no sign of her on any other camera anywhere in the village.
In whichever direction she had walked, Amber-Marie had simply wandered on to the street and disappeared within a few minutes of leaving the side of the pool at the Pelican Palms. Nobody questioned in those first few days had any useful information. Nobody remembered seeing her and, despite repeated appeals, not a single witness came forward to say that they had seen anything suspicious.
‘She’d trust anyone.’ Patti said that to Jeff Gardner the first time she saw him, and she kept right on saying it.
She was not going to argue with the smart money.
Gardner understood that those first, ‘golden’ twenty-four hours probably seemed an eternity to Patti, but for him and the other detectives brought in from the Crimes Against Persons Unit, they went by in a flash. They became forty-eight hours quickly enough too, and long before that first week was out, the case had slipped off the front page of the Herald-Tribune, and was no longer a lead item on the local TV news.
Careful to make sure that the girl’s mother was nowhere within earshot, most detectives began to talk about Amber-Marie Wilson in the past tense.
A homicide case, in everything but name.
Not for Gardner though, not completely. How could he not have at least a shred of hope? How could he see the unconditional love on the face of his own little girl and write off Patti Lee Wilson’s daughter? He could not bring himself to give up on her, whatever common sense told him. He had to keep faith, especially with a girl who was … damaged.
‘Makes her special though,’ Patti had told him that one night. Beer on her breath in a parking lot near the beach, shivering a little as the temperature fell. ‘Amber-Marie doesn’t see the same things other kids see, you understand? She doesn’t see the bad things.’
Gardner had wrapped her jacket around her and put her into the back of a cab. He had thought, not until now.
He slowed and turned into the front lot of the Brigadoon Suites, parked up next to a faded orange Subaru with a battered front wing. Climbing out of the car, he glanced across at some of the brightly lit signs in the strip mall next door. Not for the first time, he thought how handy it was for any guests at the Brigadoon Suites who needed twenty-four-hour dog grooming or refurbished computer components.
He walked towards a two-storey block of rooms, a wooden stairway at each end.
Almost every inch of the place was the colour of an old ballet shoe, dusty pink or rose or whatever they called it on the side of the tin. Gardner had seen plenty of similar colour schemes at places like this. Wall-to-wall purples, greens and gunmetal greys. The owners had clearly seen little need to splash out and had opted to save money on paint by bulk-buying colours that were – quite rightly – unpopular elsewhere.
He saw the door of the manager’s office open and watched an old woman walk out. She looked at him, but he just raised a hand. He did not need telling the way.
Climbing the pink stairs, his hand on the flaking pink banister rail, he tried to get at least a few words clear in his mind. He did not want this to take all day. It was after lunch, and he wondered if she would have started drinking yet.
He walked to the door of Room 1224 and knocked. Stepped back and waited. Knocked again.
‘You looking for the mother?’ He turned to see the old woman from the manager’s office. She had followed him and was already halfway up the stairs. ‘The mother of that girl who disappeared?’ The woman was leaning on the handrail, panting, a hand pressed to her narrow chest. ‘Well, she’s not here, so …’
Gardner said, ‘Thanks,’ and walked away from the door, swearing under his breath. Why had he wasted his time driving all the way out here, when he’d known all along where she would be?
TEN
‘I’m happy to drive back, you know,’ Marina said.
‘It’s fine.’
‘I just thought you might want a drink.’
‘A drink,
singular, maybe,’ Dave said. ‘When have you ever seen me drunk, though? When have you ever known me to want to get drunk?’
‘I was just saying, because you always drive, that’s all.’
‘I want to drive.’
‘Fine then.’
‘Why aren’t we moving …?’
Having studied the map earlier that day, Dave had decided that they would probably be better off heading south towards the M23 via Crystal Palace and Croydon as opposed to the series of back roads that were an alternative during busier periods. He didn’t think there would be too much traffic through south London early on a Saturday evening. Within ten minutes of leaving the house, they were held up, Dave tapping his fingers impatiently on the wheel. ‘Should have gone with my first instinct,’ he said. ‘A23’s always a nightmare …’
‘It’s fine,’ Marina said. She looked at him, a half-smile. ‘We’ve left plenty of time.’
They had left the house in Forest Hill at six-thirty, for a journey that should have taken no more than an hour. Dave had been waiting at the door in his jacket, the car keys in his hand, shaking his head as Marina hurried down the stairs, her make-up only half done. ‘I just think it’s rude to be late,’ he said.
‘We won’t be late.’ She flipped down the sun visor and checked her make-up in the small vanity mirror. ‘We’re not supposed to be there until eight. If we hadn’t hit a bit of traffic, we’d have been early.’
‘We don’t want to be the last ones there, do we?’
‘Don’t we?’
‘Well, you miss out on … conversation, whatever.’
‘You think they’ll talk about us if we’re not there?’
Dave glanced over at her.
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