I don’t think there is anything wrong physically. I can nearly always sort myself out later. It must be all in my mind when he’s with me, so is it my fault? Trouble is, when I’m lost in that moment later, on my own, it’s not him I’m thinking about.
11
Well, on the bright side, at least he had managed to go through the entire thing without saying the word ‘fuck’. Other than that, it was hard to think of anything positive to say about the press conference and Black probably wouldn’t bother to watch it on the late-evening news. He already knew how stiff and awkward he must have appeared and how he had so easily lapsed into that emotionless fact-speak police officers fall back on when they have to describe a murder or missing-persons case. The main thing was that the message was now out there. Alice Teale is missing. I’m leading the investigation. Please help us to find her.
‘How did it go?’ Beth asked him as she walked into the room, and he frowned at her.
‘I survived.’
When it seemed that was all he was going to reveal, she said, ‘I spoke to Chris Mullery.’
Black grabbed his coat. ‘You can tell me on the way.’
‘On the way where?’
‘I want to walk where Alice walked,’ he said, ‘on the day she vanished.’
They pulled into the large empty car park, got out of Black’s car and surveyed the school building. It was a lopsided, sixties-built, three-storey construction with scaffolding covering around a third of it from floor to roof height to enable workmen to fix its crumbling façade. It was easy to see what work was needed. Most of the exterior was made up of coloured glass panels beneath large, grubby windows. Each floor had a different colour, with red panels on the ground floor, blue on the first and a garish yellow on the top. Whether you liked that look or not, and Beth didn’t, it was undermined by the many broken panels that had been boarded up with wood or simply left empty, exposing the bare metal behind them. There were so many broken panels, Beth wondered if it was a rite of passage for pupils to smash one.
‘It’s a bit grim, isn’t it?’ observed Beth.
‘None of the schools round here have been given any money for building projects for years, so they put these up instead.’ Black drew her attention to a row of three small, flimsy buildings off to one side of the school on a raised portion of land close to its playing fields. ‘Prefabs are supposed to be a temporary solution but these have probably been here for a decade.’
There were no signs of life in the main building, with lessons and after-school clubs long over, but Beth noticed something. She pointed to a window set back from the front of the school where the middle of the building curved inwards to form a U-shape.
‘A light,’ she said.
‘In the U-bend.’
‘The what?’
He half smiled, and it was the first time Beth had seen him being anything other than completely serious. ‘That’s what the kids call it.’
How could he know that?
‘Someone must have left it on.’ But as she said that a shadow crossed the window. Somebody was moving around in there.
‘Could be a cleaner or a caretaker,’ he said, ‘but there’s no car in the car park. Let’s have a nose round.’
They left their car and went down the side of the building nearest the prefabs so they could walk its perimeter. They passed the kitchens then a set of rear doors that opened out into a courtyard with a covered walkway that had presumably been built to keep out the cold. Judging by the wind that whistled through its numerous broken windows, this had been a forlorn hope.
‘Look,’ said Beth. She’d spotted a large green car parked by another side door, some way from the rear doors. It was partially obscured by a wall.
‘That’s an XJ,’ said Black appreciatively, ‘in racing green,’ and they walked up to the car. ‘Nice. Not the caretaker’s, though. In fact, who can afford a Jag on a teacher’s salary?’
‘It’s a few years old,’ said Beth.
‘Even so, the bodywork is gleaming. Somebody loves this car.’ He took out his notebook and wrote down the registration number. ‘And they’re still working, even at this hour.’
There was nothing in the car that gave any clues to its ownership, so they left it to complete their tour of the school’s perimeter. They passed a large gymnasium and a couple of offices before curving back round to the main doors.
A wide path led away from those thick wooden doors, then diverged, one route leading you to the teachers’ car park and the other a pedestrian walkway which went out of the grounds towards the two rows of pensioners’ cottages. This was the last walk Alice had made before she disappeared.
‘I don’t understand how she could just vanish,’ said Beth.
They were standing in front of the school but facing away from it, looking along the path Alice had taken. ‘I keep thinking about it,’ said Beth. ‘Literally no one saw Alice after she walked down here. She had to have gone through the buildings there’ – she pointed to a narrower path that split the rows of retirement cottages – ‘but if she emerged, how come no one spotted her?’
Black didn’t comment, but he was at least looking in the same direction.
‘If she was snatched off the street, it’s a main road, so surely someone would have seen it. It wasn’t that late. If she’d screamed or struggled …’
‘Perhaps she knew the man,’ he said. ‘Assuming it was a man.’
‘It usually is,’ she reminded him.
‘How many murders have you worked?’
‘None.’ And you know that already, you miserable bastard. ‘But I’ve read the stats. Women don’t normally kill, and they very rarely murder other women, so it’s probably a safe assumption that, if someone has abducted Alice, it’s likely to be a man.’
‘Never assume,’ he told her. ‘Look to the evidence, always.’
She sighed audibly.
‘What?’ he demanded.
‘Nothing.’
They walked towards the pathway and considered Alice’s route between the cottages. ‘DI Fraser’s team knocked on every door here. Nothing remotely sinister. It’s all OAPs – a few former miners and their spouses. Alice’s grandfather lives here and he didn’t see her either. By nine o’clock, curtains would have been drawn and they would have been staring at their TVs. A girl could pass through unnoticed. I agree she probably wasn’t snatched from the main road, but she could have been picked up by someone she knew. I doubt she would accept a lift from a stranger.’
‘What about CCTV out front?’
‘There’s nothing,’ he told her.
‘Further down the road into town, then.’ She thought back to her training. ‘Can we log all the cars that went down the street around that time, get the reg numbers, talk to the owners to see if they all had a good reason to have been there at that time? If they can’t account for their journey, or they know Alice …’
‘There’s no CCTV between here and Collemby town centre, and precious little once you get there.’
‘Really?’
‘You don’t know Collemby,’ he told her. ‘It’s like the land that time forgot. Towns in the north-east go one of two ways. If they have good transport links, with tourist attractions and gift shops, they can spend a bit of money to lure people in, but Collemby isn’t Alnwick or Warkworth. The town has been going downhill for years. You don’t invest in CCTV in a place like this. There are a few cameras on a couple of the shops and one outside the pub in the marketplace, but they point down so they can clock anyone up to no good outside their property. They’re not aimed at the roads or at capturing car-reg plates.’ He seemed irked that he had to explain this to her.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’m just trying to understand how no one has seen her at all since that night.’
‘There have been numerous sightings,’ he said, and that surprised Beth, ‘just no credible ones. Her picture has been all over social media and in the national and local newspapers, as well as on the regio
nal TV news bulletins, so we’ve had calls from the public. Some were nutters or attention-seekers; others said they were sure they had spotted her, but there are a lot of girls who look a bit like Alice … and we’ll be inundated tomorrow.’ He meant following the press conference.
‘What if she’s a runaway?’
‘Her description has been issued to port authorities and airports in case she tries to leave the country, but she didn’t take her passport, so that seems unlikely. Other forces have been notified and asked to look out for her.’
‘Do you think she’ll be okay? I know you don’t like to assume, but you must have worked a few cases like this one.’
‘I have,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t look good.’
‘Will we get anyone else to help us now it’s been on national TV?’
‘I doubt it. It’s all about resources, or the lack of them. We currently have four separate ongoing suspicious-deaths inquiries, as well as two confirmed murders. They take precedence over missing-persons cases.’
‘Because missing people usually turn up?’
‘Normally, they are found or just come home again.’
‘But you don’t think this girl is just a missing person?’
‘I don’t know,’ Black admitted. ‘We’re trained to classify missing-persons cases. We look for triggers. Does she have a reason to leave? Is she being abused at home, mentally or physically, or simply neglected? Does she have a history of depression, self-harm or a mental instability of some kind? None of that applies here.’
‘Exam pressure, then?’ offered Beth.
‘She had an unconditional offer from one university and several conditional ones for grades she is likely to comfortably achieve. Her parents aren’t the pushy kind. I don’t think they even expected her to try and get into a uni.’ Then he said, ‘She could have had money worries, I suppose.’
‘She lives pretty frugally,’ said Beth, ‘and has a part-time job.’
‘What about her dad?’ asked Black. ‘Is he bad enough to run away from?’
‘I’d be tempted, if I was her, but she was planning to leave for college anyway. Wouldn’t she hang on for a few more months?’
‘That would be the sensible move,’ he agreed. ‘But then what about this guy Alice’s neighbour saw through her bedroom window? Could that have been her boyfriend or was it someone else?’
‘It could have been him, but the neighbour said he looked older, and Chris told me they never went to her bedroom, only his, because he wanted to avoid bumping into Alice’s father, which I can believe.’
‘Then we need to find this mystery man,’ he said. ‘He could be the key.’
They returned to the car and Black drove them back to the city, dropping Beth at HQ so she could pick up her own vehicle from the otherwise almost-empty car park.
‘I thought I’d take a look at her online presence,’ she told him before she got out of his car. He didn’t reply. She was starting to get used to the fact that he was a man of very few words and sometimes silence was as good as it got with him. She took it to mean he didn’t think it was a terrible idea. ‘See if she’s on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram – all that.’
‘It’s late,’ he reminded her, ‘and I need you to meet me in Collemby in the morning. There’s a lot of people to get round.’ He meant there wouldn’t be time.
‘I’ll do the social media tonight, and I’ll give you a report in the morning.’
Again, silence. It would help if she had a clue what he was thinking. Was he impressed, unimpressed or didn’t he give a damn? Did he think scanning Alice Teale’s Facebook page was a waste of time?
Just when she thought he wasn’t going to offer an opinion at all, he said, ‘There probably won’t be much there, not if it’s public. If we can show probable cause, we can get a warrant to view her private messages on Facebook and Twitter. That’s something we should explore in the morning.’
‘But it won’t do any harm if I have a look in the meantime.’
‘Suit yourself.’
12
Was there anything more depressing than coming home to the cold, empty flat you used to share with the man you loved? If there was, Beth couldn’t think of it right now. It was the same every night these days and the reason why she chose not to spend too much of her time here any more. She would have sold the place, if she had possessed the energy to put it on the market and keep it pristine enough for viewing. As it was, she barely felt energized enough to pick dirty clothes off the bedroom floor and keep a little food in the fridge. She opened it now to see what was in there.
Beth remembered a time when she used to cook proper meals every night – fresh food with real ingredients – but that was when she was cooking for two. It seemed pointless to go to that much effort when there was no one here to appreciate it. A microwaveable chilli con carne two days past its sell-by date looked the least worst option. She considered binning it, but there was no mould growing on it and she had nothing else in. Beef was safer than chicken, right? She slid off the cardboard sleeve, grabbed a small, sharp knife, stabbed the film as if it were her mortal enemy and popped it in the microwave. The four minutes needed to cook her meal was long enough to change into jogging bottoms and a baggy T-shirt then pour herself a large glass of white wine. She ate from a tray balanced on her knees and placed her laptop on the sofa next to her. This was where Jamie used to sit when they watched TV together, before he left Beth for her.
She quickly banished that thought in case it grew and festered. Before she knew it, she wouldn’t be thinking about Alice Teale. Instead, she would be drunkenly stalking her ex-boyfriend on social media to see if there were any new photographs of Jamie with the girl who had ruined everything.
Don’t think about it, Beth. Not now.
She took another swig of wine and realized she had almost finished her first glass before making any real inroads on the chilli. She set down the glass and googled ‘Alice Teale’. She had to skip several newspaper reports on the girl’s disappearance before she found what she was looking for. Alice was on Facebook and her page had a public setting. As she ate, Beth scrolled down the girl’s timeline and immediately realized Alice had not updated her page in a long time. Beth knew young people were deserting Facebook in droves, mainly because their parents were on it, but judging by the dates of her most recent posting, it looked as if she had stepped away from it around the time she was dating Tony, her then ex-boyfriend’s best friend. Had there been negative comments on here about that, or had she just wanted to lie low for a while?
Beth switched to Instagram and scrolled through dozens of pictures of Alice getting ready for nights out with friends, and others where the evening was in full swing. Kirstie and Chloe featured prominently. There were lots of photographs of Alice with Chris. Her life in the sixth form was also a regular topic and there were pictures from the various clubs she participated in, along with a number of photographs she had taken herself. There were shots of the countryside: rivers, fields and treelines, often with orange sunsets above them. Alice had made a point of noting the make and model of camera she had used to take these. Comments were numerous and largely supportive. There was nothing here that gave any hint of a grudge against the girl.
Beth switched to Twitter and followed Alice on it. Her presence here was less personal, more political. Alice had a social conscience. She was broadly left wing, which was no great surprise in the north-east and for someone her age, but she also supported causes dear to her heart, including animal welfare and gender equality, and there were retweets on sexual health, as well as campaigns for the eradication of various forms of cancer, 10k runs she had undertaken and, some way down, a picture of Alice standing with other young actors at what appeared to be the aftermath of a performance or rehearsal of a school play. She was on the side of the stage, looking to the left and slightly upwards. Alice was smiling and her gaze was almost adoring, but it wasn’t directed at her boyfriend, who was also in the picture, at the other
end of the group. Instead, she was beaming at a young man with brown hair at the centre of the photo who looked a little older than Alice – mid-twenties, perhaps. A teacher, thought Beth: he had to be.
A handsome bugger, too, and Alice clearly thought so, but had it been reciprocated? Judging by the smile he was flashing back at the beautiful young girl on the stage next to him that night, it was. Perhaps Chris had noticed this, too, which was why his face was like thunder.
13
No matter how late she stayed up the night before, Beth was nearly always awake long before the alarm. The first hint of sunlight against the curtains would be enough to break her sleep and begin the usual relentless round of over-thinking, starting with the realization that Jamie was gone and wasn’t coming back, and moving on to a recap of all the reasons why.
Beth told herself to do the one thing that could banish those negative thoughts for a little while. Get up and out of her bed then go for a run in the park.
She ran three laps of the lake with only the ducks and a lone dog-walker for company before she came to a halt. Beth had spent her running time thinking about Alice Teale, the company the teenager had kept and just who might be responsible for her disappearance. The missing girl continued to dominate her thoughts while she showered, dressed, ate toast and drank a mug of coffee before climbing into her car. It was still absurdly early.
Black had asked Beth to drive herself to Collemby so she could meet him at the town hall that morning. She was not looking forward to this. He had been one of the reasons Beth had stayed up so late. After monitoring Alice Teale on social media, Beth had switched her attention to Lucas Black and read more of the coverage of the shooting incident which had left a man dead and her police partner castigated by the tabloids for his actions that day. Knowing that she had no choice but to work with Black, she had been searching for something – anything – that might explain why he had gunned down an unarmed civilian outside his own house. The closest she had found to this was a suggestion that he might have thought Rory Jordan was armed and had become confused in the dark. Was this possible? God, she hoped so, but it didn’t seem very likely.
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