by Cari Hunter
Her every movement dulled by fatigue and an unfamiliar pang of loneliness, Sanne stacked the crockery and put it away. She was hungry but couldn’t summon the energy to make anything, so she opened a packet of biscuits and filled the kettle. While she waited for the water to boil, her eye strayed to the phone, and she had to tamp down the urge to call Meg. Instead, she shoved an entire biscuit into her mouth in the hope that a sugar rush would banish her maudlin mood. The first biscuit having failed to yield a miracle cure, she tried a second and then a third, washing them down with tea.
Half a packet and two mugs in, she was more inclined toward contemplation than self-pity, and able to accept that she sometimes missed coming home to Meg. Although she loved having independence and her own space, after a day like today there would have been comfort in knowing she wasn’t going to spend the night alone.
“Maybe I should just get a cat,” she said, despairing at her habit of talking to herself. At the very least, a cat would make her feel less crazy. Still toying with the idea, she dunked another biscuit, waiting until the last moment before rescuing it. Two chocolate chips escaped and floated on top of her tea.
“Come here, you little buggers.” Using a teaspoon, she scooped them out. As they melted, sweet and warm on her tongue, another pang—this one far more pleasant than the first—reminded her of that morning. She smiled, feeling her ears turn hot. Although she occasionally coveted a more conventional relationship, there were definite advantages to an unofficial and unpredictable one.
Dunking a final biscuit in Meg’s honour, she tried to decide whether she could be bothered having a shower. She grinned as she walked upstairs. Another benefit to living alone: no one complained if you went to bed mucky.
Chapter Fifteen
It felt like a dance, though a strange one. The stick would swish through grass, more grass, slightly longer grass, and then hit a solid object, making Sanne drop to her knees. For a few tense seconds, she would dig around in the weeds, until she found a piece of metal or a plastic carton that someone had tossed into the undergrowth, and the routine would start all over again. To her left, Nelson swore as brambles snagged around his legs. To her right, a line of detectives and uniformed officers, all making the same halting progress, stretched the width of the field adjoining the reservoir. Wind whipped across the vast body of water, driving sharp showers before it and making conversation difficult. The line was approaching a patch of woodland, and Sanne eyed the trees with apprehension. Finding anything significant in the field had been unlikely, but the forest was a far better place to conceal a body.
Nelson touched her arm, making her jump and drop her stick. Using her foot, she levered it up so she could grab back hold of it.
“Sorry,” he said. “Looks like we’re taking a break before we head into there.” He nodded toward the pines swaying in the wind.
“Right.” She scanned around for somewhere dry to sit, before giving up and flattening out the plastic charity bag she always kept in the pocket of her hiking jacket.
Nelson sat on it with her and offered her a packet of crisps. “You’re quiet today. Late night?”
“Late enough.” She hadn’t slept well. Every time she’d shut her eyes, she’d heard screaming. It had taken hours to persuade herself that the noise was only the storm, shrieking around the eaves. She crinkled up the half-finished packet and stuffed it into her rucksack. “I saw Eleanor before I left the office.”
“And?”
“And I told her I wasn’t sure about Ned Moseley.” She wiped her greasy fingers on the grass, savouring the feel of the cool stems instead of meeting his eyes. She and Nelson were the ones who had raised initial suspicions about Ned and been instrumental in his arrest. Now she felt her lack of conviction was letting their partnership down.
“I spoke to one of the lads from SOCO this morning.” Nelson screwed his own packet into a tight ball, and his fingers were still clenched around it as he continued. “He’d been tasked to log that porn they found, after the first bloke they asked lost his breakfast over it. Most of it’s imported from Eastern Europe, and he says it’s the worst sort there is. If Ned gets off on that kind of thing, there’s no telling what he might have done to those girls. He’s sick, San. Don’t be taken in by his lost little boy act.” He offered her a hand and pulled her to her feet.
“You’re probably right,” she said. Then, quieter, her eyes fixed on the tree line, “Do you think she’s still alive?”
In her peripheral vision, she saw the faint shake of his head.
“I think he killed her the night he dragged her out of that cave.”
*
The shout made the hairs stand up on the nape of Sanne’s neck. Frozen in place, she strained to pick out further calls amid the racket the trees were making in the strengthening wind. In the hours since lunch, she had scoured her designated patch of forest, tripping over concealed roots and snarling at the tangles of undergrowth. The continuous tension had given her a throbbing headache, but she had found even less among the trees than she had in the field, and now the light was beginning to fail.
A stranger’s voice crackled in her earpiece. “We’ve found some sort of hut, and it smells fucking rancid. Request EDSOP and SOCO. Over.” A volley of details followed, including coordinates.
Sanne heard Nelson yell her name. Her hands damp around the wood, she drove her stick into the ground to mark her place, before picking her way in his direction. Each step she took felt leaden, as if she were a condemned prisoner making her final walk. It reminded her of taking the long way back from school so that her dad might be in the pub before she got home. She had often stumbled into the hallway, tired out and freezing cold, but still feeling victorious because she had seen through the window that the television in his room was off.
Realising belatedly that Nelson had stayed behind to wait for her, she fell into step with him. He didn’t ask if she was okay. She knew one glance at her face would have answered that question. Ahead of them, a group of men crowded close to a wooden hut barely the size of a garden shed. Its rough finish implied it had been constructed on the spot using timber from the forest, and two large holly bushes gave it excellent camouflage.
“Wasn’t meant to be found, was it?” she murmured. The woodland was privately owned, and the lack of rubbish and tracks suggested that few people trespassed.
Nelson made a grunt of assent as he broke a path through the bracken. Ten yards farther along, the smell reached her, an insidious, foul yet sweet odour of decay that hit the back of her throat with such intensity she felt as if she were chewing on it.
“Jesus,” Nelson said, clamping his sleeve across his nose and mouth. He kept walking, though with more caution, and Sanne forced herself to follow, trying to get used to the stink before she had to deal with her colleagues.
“It’s locked, but we just spoke to the landowner,” Scotty Ramsden told her, as soon as she and Nelson were within earshot. In contrast to the hut’s dilapidated nature, the padlock securing its door was new. “To his knowledge, the only buildings on this area of the estate are fishing shelters and barns closer to the lake. He gave us permission to bust it open. Everyone on board with that?” He made the question sound general, but he looked to his EDSOP colleagues for their consensus. “Right, then. How the hell are we getting in?”
In the absence of battering rams and crowbars, brute force was the only option. Standing off to the side, Sanne watched Nelson and Jay Egerton shoulder-charge the door. They crashed into it twice before a panel in the middle splintered, allowing them to peel back half of the wood. A swarm of black flies rushed out through the gap, and Jay recoiled, turning to retch into the nearest bush.
Without giving herself time to think, Sanne went up until she was shoulder to shoulder with Nelson. Holding her breath, she shone her torch alongside his.
“Gamekeeper taking the law into his own hands?” he said quietly, and she nodded, too relieved to be angered by the carnage in front of her.
At the far side of the room, a glut of flies crawled across a table thick with blood, guts, and patches of fur. Fox pelts hung from nails in the walls, and carcasses of a buzzard and a goshawk had been flung into a corner. Traps and snares were neatly stacked against the table, along with a wooden box, which Nelson drew toward him and flicked open to find a set of butcher’s knives. Every inch of the room was visible, and there was no sign of Rachel.
Leaving Nelson to call in the find and decide whether forensics were necessary, Sanne stumbled away from the hut. A fly crawled across her cheek. She batted at it with numb fingers and then scrubbed the skin with her fist. Nausea threatened to embarrass her, so she found a spot hidden behind a standing stone and sank to the ground, hugging her knees to her chest and waiting for the sickness to fade. Gradually, her stomach settled, but the smell seemed to have seeped into her pores, her hair, and the fabric of her clothing, making her feel filthy. She stood up and used rainwater collected in a concavity in the rock to wipe her face and hands. With the scents of moss and earth counteracting that of putrescence, she retraced her earlier route, looking for where she had left her stick. Just as she reached the spot, her radio buzzed, the display showing Nelson’s number.
“Just checking in.” His voice was soft with concern.
“I’m okay. I’m back on my patch.”
“Me too. If I grin, you might just be able to see me.”
She laughed. “Idiot. We calling it a day soon?”
“I think we’ll have to. You ready to go home?”
“Yeah.” She leaned on her stick, using it to prop herself up. “If I never come back here, it’ll be too soon.”
*
Sanne dropped her phone on top of her bag and thumped her head back against the driver’s seat. According to Joan Cotter, Geoff was off work with a tummy bug, and jobs at the garage were stacking up fast, which meant at least another week of driving around on tyres that barely gripped the road. After the day she had had, the prospect of finding somewhere else to deal with them seemed like too much effort, though, so she scribbled the date suggested by Joan into her diary.
As if determined to push her over the edge, her phone rang the instant she turned the key in the ignition. Leaving the engine running for warmth, she flicked off the windscreen wipers, and rain obscured her view within seconds. Although the number on her screen had been unfamiliar, she recognised the panicked voice on the end of the line.
“Sanne?”
“Hey, Josie. Everything okay?” There was no response, but Sanne could hear Josie sobbing in frantic bursts. “Josie, listen to me. I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s going on. Are you on your own?”
“Yes, I didn’t…” Josie trailed off, her breath heaving over the line. “I can’t talk to my mum or Helen about this.”
“Talk to me, then.”
A gust of wind rocked the car. Sanne peered up at the swaying trees that surrounded the small car park, and was about to reverse out of harm’s way when Josie began to speak.
“I saw the news. Everyone’s been trying to stop me from watching it, and they never bring me papers, but I’ve got my phone back, and the Internet works in here, so I know he’s still in custody.” She was crying again. “What’ll happen to Rachel if you keep him in there? Hasn’t anyone thought of that? She’ll die if he doesn’t tell you where she is. Please, Sanne, you’ve got to make him tell you where she is. Please don’t let him leave her on her own. Oh God, she’ll be so scared.” It was a child’s plea, hopeless and unrealistic, and punctuated by the high-pitched tone of an alarm.
“Fuck,” Sanne whispered, all too aware of what had happened the last time Josie had been so distressed. “Josie? Josie, say something, love.”
There was no answer. Despite repeated attempts, Sanne couldn’t get a response. Eventually, in desperation, she ended the call. Not knowing the number for the ITU, she selected the name at the top of her directory instead.
Meg answered on the second ring.
*
The rapid thump of Sanne’s boots echoed in the almost deserted corridor. A young nurse turned to stare, four cartons from the canteen stacked precariously between her hands and chin. Trying not to look like an escapee from the psychiatric block, Sanne gave her a wide berth and headed for the stairs. She hit the staircase door with both hands and took the steps three at a time. Her imagination had been working overtime as she careened along the Snake Pass, but she found the ITU in its usual tranquil state, and the nurse at the desk waved her through without checking her ID.
Room three was also peaceful, with all but one of its lights extinguished and the sound of deep, regular breathing telling her that Josie was asleep. Sitting close by the bed, Meg was keeping a loose grip on Josie’s fingers. She smiled as Sanne walked over.
“Is she all right?” Sanne asked. The monitoring equipment had been scaled back since her last visit, but the numbers on the remaining machines were a reassuring green.
“She’s better than she was when I got here,” Meg said. “An old bloke had just arrested, which meant that half the staff were jumping up and down on him, and no one had noticed Josie having a meltdown. I’d paged Max on my way up. He came and gave her a mild sedative, and she was so knackered it knocked her out in minutes. I did tell her you were coming, but she probably won’t remember.”
Sanne ran a trembling hand over her face and sank into the closest chair. She bent low, leaning her head on her folded arms. There was a rustle, followed by a hollow thud, and she opened her eyes to see a vomit bowl set strategically by her feet.
“Don’t think I’ll need that,” she muttered.
Meg reached for her wrist and palpated her pulse. “You’re tachy, and you look like crap. Keep your head down for a minute.”
“It’s been a bad day, and she gave me a fright, that’s all.” Despite her protests, Sanne stayed where she was. The fact that she couldn’t see Meg or Josie made it easier for her to explain. “We were searching the woods around Long Edge reservoir, and I thought we’d found her. There was this hut and a terrible smell.” She gagged involuntarily, though nothing came up.
Meg rubbed her back. “What was it?”
“Gamekeeper, illegally trapping predators. But, Jesus, for a few minutes I was so sure it was Rachel.”
“Did you speak to Eleanor?”
“Yes, she—”
A cough from the bed made Sanne break off and raise her head. In the dim light, Josie was beginning to look around. Her lips moved, but she didn’t yet seem capable of speech. Reacting first, Meg dropped a straw into a cup of water and held it for her to take cautious sips.
“Shit,” Josie whispered, wiping up a dribble of water with her good hand. “Did I have another bleed?”
“No. Dr. Maxwell gave you something to help you sleep,” Meg said. “You were only out for an hour or so.”
“You’re Meg, aren’t you? From A&E.” Josie shaped the words slowly, obviously struggling to recall the details. She relaxed a little when she noticed Sanne. “Hey. Sorry if I scared you.”
Sanne waved away the apology. “I’m just glad you’re okay. Do you remember why you called me?” At Josie’s nod, she left her chair and sat on the edge of the bed. “I spoke to my boss on the way here, and she’s decided not to ask the CPS—that’s the Crown Prosecution Service—for another extension on Ned Moseley’s custody.”
“What does that mean? Are you letting him go?”
“It means he’ll be granted bail tomorrow and released.” She held up a hand to stop Josie from interrupting. “I’m telling you this in strictest confidence. DI Stanhope will speak to you tomorrow, but she gave me the go-ahead to come and see you tonight. We’ll be keeping him under surveillance twenty-four seven, and the hope is that he’ll slip up and lead us to Rachel.”
The operative word there was “hope,” and it was a slim hope at that. All too aware of previous kidnap cases where victims had starved to death after the arrest of their assailants, howe
ver, the brass were keen to give surveillance a chance. Three teams would monitor Ned around the clock, with Sanne and Nelson supervising the first night shift. The investigation and searches would continue in the meantime, but Ned Moseley remained their only suspect.
Josie had pushed herself up, her eyes bright and alert as she digested the information. Sanne didn’t warn her that Eleanor doubted Ned would leave the house and suspected that, even if he did, all he would lead them to was a body. For the sake of Josie’s health, Sanne wanted her to think positively until she had a definitive reason not to.
“No blabbing, I promise.” Josie mimed zipping her mouth shut. “Oh, hey, you’d better warn your boss that I’m being downgraded to High Dependency in the morning. I think I should’ve gone today, but they didn’t have a free bed.”
The news lightened Sanne’s mood. “Congratulations.”
“Yeah. I don’t care where they put me as long as it has a window.” Josie grimaced at the four blank walls surrounding her.
“HDU definitely has windows,” Meg said. “And I know a few of the nurses on there, so I might be able to get you a bed with a view.”
It was such a simple proposition, but it made tears shine in Josie’s eyes. “I can’t remember the last time I saw the sky,” she said.
*
“Has your bum gone to sleep, or is it just mine?”
The car rocked as Nelson slid the driver’s seat backward and shuffled around until he was satisfied with his new position.
“I’ll give you half an hour.” Sanne set the alarm on her phone and propped it on the dash. “If you can keep still for that long, you win a bag of Haribo.”
“Half a bloody hour? That’s not fair, San. My legs are longer than yours.”