Burning Greed

by Diane M Dickson

  Charlie wasn’t stupid, he picked up on her mood. “I’ll take care of it, Tanya. No wild parties, I promise.”

  She managed to summon a grin for him. “Oh, I know you will, mate, it’s just that I don’t really want to do any of this. I know it’s the right thing, I know I don’t have much choice, but it really does rankle. Bloody Serena, why the hell couldn’t she just have got pregnant if she wanted to cause a drama. Oh sorry, that was a stupid thing to say. You will keep me up to date on the Jane Doe though, won’t you? Ring me every day and immediately if there’s anything important. And when you’ve seen Dr Hewitt give me a call and if you could record the interview with Alan Parker, send me a copy.”

  “Yes, I will. I promise. Anyway look, you’ll be back by the end of the weekend I’ll bet and send me back to my hovel.”

  She nodded glumly and turned away to head for the stairs. “I’ll pack my stuff and get an Uber to the station.”

  “I can take you.”

  “No, it’s fine.” As she spoke she opened the Uber app and began to order a car. “What!” She held the phone away from her, staring at the screen. “Oh, for god’s sake. I’d forgotten about that.”

  “What?” Charlie asked.

  “This card, there’s a problem with it. I had trouble in the restaurant. I meant to sort it out but then we caught the case.”

  “Well, you need to do that pretty soon. If you leave it, the bank can be stroppy about repaying any money that you lose. What’s the problem with it? Has the account been hacked?”

  “I don’t know, it just says rejected. Oh look, I’ll have to do it on the way. I’ll ring the helpline. I haven’t time now. Is the offer of a lift still open?”

  “Yes, of course. But you need to hurry, you don’t want to miss the train on top of everything else.”

  She clomped up the stairs muttering to herself. “Bloody Serena. Soddin’ Fiona.”

  Charlie grinned, but he also said a silent prayer that Tanya’s family would not be riven with grief.

  Chapter 15

  Fiona parked in New Street and gave her sister directions by phone, as Tanya dragged her suitcase behind her through the late night city. She had visited before, of course, and liked Edinburgh, but tonight the only thing she wanted was to be heading in the other direction, to be going home, the problem with her niece sorted, her duty done.

  She had spent much of the journey talking on her phone. At the last minute she had decided to travel first class, paying with her second credit card and feeling grateful that she had more than one piece of plastic. Now that it had been forced back into her mind, she had known she would need to sort the bank problem by phone, quickly if possible. Not something she could do in a crowded carriage, and she convinced herself that she needed privacy anyway, in case Charlie rang with news about the case. By the time she reached Scotland, she was regretting the extravagance.

  Charlie did ring, but not with much news, just to let her know that the team had gone home. Dan and Paul had come back from the post-mortem and told them that evidence of blunt trauma to the back of the skull had been confirmed, and it was most probably the cause of death. This effectively ruled out any chance of an accident, so he was meeting with the medical examiner first thing in the morning, but a report was being typed up before then. He would also see Alan Parker before noon. The main development was a figure seen on the closed circuit recording. It was a decent image and the beat officers were touring the clubs and bars. They had traced the man who had raised the fire alarm. Dan had arranged to go and see him, just in case there was anything else he could tell them. Charlie wanted to chat, she did not but couldn’t swerve it without being rude.

  He asked the inevitable question. “Did you sort things with your bank card?”

  “Oh yeah. That’s fine.” As she lied, nausea turned her stomach and she felt cold sweat on her forehead, stickiness under her arms. She couldn’t tell him, couldn’t tell anyone, that she had overspent on her card so much that the bank was threatening to cancel all her plastic. She had no overdraft arrangement and the leeway that they had given her was going to cost a fortune. Every day the fine would increase until payday, still a week away when she would, possibly, clear the overspend, but not her credit debt. She hadn’t been able to access her bank accounts on the train because the security settings of the sites withheld approval on 4G connections. She had been horrified by what she had been told, had argued that there must be some mistake at their end, but she would log on as soon as she had a secure line, and see just what had happened. She’d jotted down her recent spending, the stuff she could immediately remember, and with a surge of acid in her belly, determined that maybe it wasn’t a mistake by the bank after all.

  She had cancelled three outstanding orders immediately but was disgusted with herself for letting things get so very far out of hand. Now that she no longer had the income from renting out her house, and with the expense of the redecoration, plus the treats she had bought herself, well, her money was spent. She had passed through panic and settled into hoping that when she looked, it would not be as bad as she feared.

  When her sister stepped from her car and she saw Fiona’s ravaged features, took in her dishevelled appearance, she knew it would be a while before she would be able to get back to this new and frightening problem.

  Fiona’s eyes were red and puffy, she wore no makeup and, instead of the usual cold, air kiss that marked their meetings, she had leapt from the car and wrapped her arms around Tanya, clinging to her while she sobbed into her shoulder.

  “Hey. Come on, calm down, Fi. It’s okay, I’m here now and we’ll soon have this sorted.”

  “We have to find her, we have to find her tonight. I don’t know where my little girl is. I want her home. Tanya, find her for me.”

  Of everything that had happened, this total breakdown of her sister’s cool exterior was the most shocking. Tanya helped Fiona back into the car, taking the keys.

  “Let me drive, you’re in no state. Come on, Fi, get a grip.”

  As they turned out of the car park, she patted her sister’s knee. “Come on, it’s going to be fine. We’ll fix this,” she said. But now, with the situation suddenly become starkly visible, Tanya’s concern had increased. This was real, this was happening.

  Chapter 16

  The younger children had been farmed out, staying with school friends for the weekend at least. Graham was quiet. He sat in his big leather chair before the dead fire, his head lowered, his hands in fists on his lap. He had nodded at Tanya as she walked into the room. Just a one-word greeting was all that he managed. His eyes had swum with moisture and he turned away.

  “He’s just got in,” Fiona said. “He’s been out, walking the streets, all the places we know that she goes. The shopping mall until it closed, the cafés and bars, clubs. Oh, we know she goes to places where she’s not supposed to – they all do. They have fake ID.”

  “You know this, and you haven’t done anything?” Tanya was shocked at the seeming lack of parental control. “You let her do stuff like that?”

  Fiona chewed her lips. “It looks bad, I see that, but it’s so hard, Tanya; nobody prepares you for this crap. They hand you a baby and that’s it, that’s it forever and you do the best that you can. You want to make them happy and when they’re Serena’s age they can only be happy when they’re the same as all their friends. She had a curfew, and she kept to it, up until now anyway.” She paused for a moment, gasped out a sob and wiped her eyes.

  “We trusted her, we thought that if we treated her like an adult she’d behave like one. She never came home drunk, nothing like that. We thought we were getting it right. I didn’t want it to be like it was for me, for us. Me, always in early to do my homework, always in bed before ten because there was school in the morning, music class, language school, extra tuition. I know they weren’t as strict with you, I envied you that.” She couldn’t continue but perched on the edge of the sofa and let the tears come.

  “Yo
u envied me! I always reckoned it was because they didn’t really care what I did, where I went. As long as I wasn’t causing trouble, they were glad to have me out from under their feet.”

  Tanya stopped speaking. This wasn’t the time, there would probably never be a time when there was any point in going over it. Their parents were dead, and it was all in the past. The reality of Fiona’s childhood had been very different to Tanya’s own, but maybe it wasn’t quite what she had thought it was. She shrugged, she had spent years trying to let it go and didn’t want it all brought back. She was surprised though, it had seemed that Fiona had it all under control: the job, the motherhood, life in Scotland among what Tanya could only ever think of as posh friends; and yet here was her sister, admitting to being vulnerable and insecure. But of course she was, her daughter was missing, she was scared stupid. Once this was all sorted the situation would revert to the way that it had always been, Fiona with the glittering prizes and Tanya constantly trying to prove herself. She tried to calm things a bit, bring the tension down.

  “Anyway, I never did much – no clubs, no bars.” She gave a short laugh. “No money. You can’t do much with no money.” There was no response.

  Tanya looked at them, her only living relatives – these people that she hardly knew – broken and devastated and realised that the only way she would help them was to step back, to be what she was, to do what she did well.

  “Okay, I’m going to bed and you should as well.” She was ready for the shocked expression, the shaking of heads, she had seen it before in other houses, with other parents. “Look, she’s not coming back tonight. There’s nothing we can do right now, the police are aware of her, they will be watching in the streets. It’s too dark to look any more and I need to sleep. I can’t function well when I’m dead on my feet. I’m having a few hours and then I’ll go through everything, right from the start, I’ll talk to my colleagues at the local station and then I’ll find Serena. Okay?”

  It was a foolish promise, weakly rooted in emotion, and Tanya knew it for a mistake as soon as she had spoken. What she didn’t say was how long it might take, where the girl might be when they found her, and in what state. But right then, she meant it, she would sort this, it was something that she knew how to do.

  “Come on, have you got any sleeping pills, anything like that?”

  Fiona shook her head. “I don’t use them.”

  “Well, okay then, we’ll all go to bed. You need to rest. We have to go through everything tomorrow and I need you both thinking clearly. Come on.”

  Tanya stood up and held out a hand. Graham shook his head. “Sorry, I can’t. The very idea of getting into bed when I don’t know where she is, appals me. It’s okay. I’ll sleep here, by the phone.” He lifted the handsfree and waved it at them. “I’ll see you later.”

  Tanya helped her sister upstairs and left her outside the door to the guest room. It was only when she heard the click of the door handle to the master suite that she remembered her bag, still in the hall, beside the stairs. She went back down. The door to the lounge was ajar, a slender bar of light streaked across the carpet. She heard her brother-in-law speaking low and quiet. She didn’t hesitate for long but stepped back quietly and stood in the dim hallway listening.

  He said, “Fiona’s sister’s here now, I don’t know what she thinks she can do. I’m at the end of my tether, I want to see you. Meet me, meet me tomorrow and we’ll talk about what we do now.”

  She heard him arrange a time and she heard him murmur endearments. She thought of her sister upstairs, more than likely crying into her pillow, and her heart sank because this was another complication. She wasn’t a fool, she knew what she had heard.

  Chapter 17

  The alarm was set for five-thirty, but Tanya was already awake when it started to bleep. She could hear movement in the house, the drumming of water in the shower, doors opening and closing. She didn’t imagine that Fiona had been able to sleep much, but at least they had a break from each other and the desperate anxiety.

  It was too early to call Charlie Lambert, but she checked her email just in case. Nothing had happened overnight, which wasn’t a surprise. She sent him a message: ‘Send me everything as soon as you have it. Things are pretty bad up here, but I’ll fit it all in’.

  Graham had made coffee and he turned as she walked into the kitchen, dressed in jeans and hoodie but with her feet bare. He gave her a rueful smile.

  “I’m sorry. I was pretty rude last night,” he said. I just want to say thanks for coming. I really appreciate it. I don’t know what you can do really but having someone on the inside – sort of thing – it feels good. You’ll be able to make sure they don’t take their eye off the ball. I know it appears that Serena left on her own, but it’s so unlike her and…”

  He shrugged and turned to the window. He placed his hands on the edge of the worktop, his arms braced as he leaned forward, his head lowered. “I just want her back. Once she’s back we can sort out any problems, you know, work out why she’s done this. We had no clue, no idea that she was so unhappy.”

  “Are you sure?” Tanya said.

  He turned to look at her, a frown lowering his dark eyebrows. “How do you mean? Of course, I’m sure.”

  “I’ve had some experience, well, you know that and sometimes, actually quite often in a case like this, the clues have been there and have just been missed by the family. That’s something I want to do today, I want to get into the real ins and outs of your lives. Things that might not seem important to you, or didn’t at the time, but could be a clue to what was going on in her life. She left for a reason and I reckon she probably had a destination in mind when she went.”

  “We’ve checked her accounts, there was nothing. Fiona is the joint account holder, with Serena being too young to open one on her own. That was one of the first things we did. She hadn’t bought tickets or anything as far as we could tell,” Graham said.

  “I need to look at the statements later. If you could print them out for me that will help.”

  Tanya poured coffee and took a piece of toast from the plate on the table. She looked up at Graham. She was waiting, holding onto her knowledge from last night. It was still just possible there was an innocent explanation for what she had heard, and if so then he would be telling them, or at least telling Fiona, where he was going, who he was meeting. No point stirring up the waters, the atmosphere was already charged and brittle.

  Fiona came into the room. Her long hair was still damp, pulled back from her face in a ponytail. She poured a drink and sat at the table, opposite to Tanya.

  “Right, let’s get on with this,” she said.

  The brusqueness of her tone, the no-nonsense look on her face was reassuring. This was the Fiona that Tanya could work with, the helpless mess of the previous evening was too much of a stranger; her sister was back, maybe not in appearance, but the steel was back in her nerves.

  Tanya opened her laptop and clicked on the folder she had labelled ‘Serena’. “Send me copies of her bank statements and then I want to see any homework books, any diaries, anything like that. I need to go through her room.”

  “They already did that, the other officers,” Graham said.

  “Yes, I know, and I’ve seen the reports, but I need to see for myself to get a feel for it all.” She paused. “All credit to the local force but they might have missed something.”

  Tanya’s laptop beeped, she glanced at the screen. “Oh, I need to read this. Won’t be long.” Her fingers flew across the keyboard, she was aware of them both watching her. She looked up and shook her head. “It’s nothing, it’s about my other case. A report from Charlie.”

  “Your other case?” She saw immediately the glint in her sister’s eyes. Her stomach knotted. She should have told them straight away, but she simply hadn’t, she wasn’t used to sharing information about her life. She nodded. “Yes, the arson case I’m working on.”

  “But you’re not doing that now. You�
�re here to help us now, aren’t you?” Fiona was frowning.

  “Yes, of course I am, but I’m running this as well. It’s fine, we’ve got it sorted. I just to need to read this, it’s a report from the medical examiner and I might need to act on it.” She saw the fury flair, the look of disbelief.

  “You can’t be serious. Your niece is missing. My little girl has vanished and you’re putting it aside to deal with some dead stranger. I don’t believe this. Tell me, why exactly have you come?” As Fiona railed at her Graham crossed the kitchen and put his arms around his wife.

  “Hey, come on. Don’t get like this.”

  “Don’t get like this! Look at her, here we are in the middle of trying to work out just what’s happened with Serena and she breaks off, my sister, her aunt, breaks off to talk to some medical examiner.”

  “No, I’m not talking to him, this is just the report. I’m just reading the report. It’s fine, honestly it’s fine.”

  Fiona stood up and turned towards the door. “I should have known, I should have known that we would never be important enough for you to leave your precious career, your precious job. Christ, we’ve never mattered to you, have we? I don’t know why you’ve come if all you’re going to do is carry on with your other work.” She stormed from the room, Graham pounding after her and she heard them running up the stairs and then the slam of the bedroom door.

  For a moment there was quiet. Tanya sat in the empty room, the click and tick of the radiator as the heating came on and the chirp of birds in the garden were the only noise now. She paused for just a moment before turning back to her laptop and opening the file from Charlie, she dragged her notebook across the table, flipped over the page and picked up her pen.