A Narrow Trajectory

by Faith Martin

  Margot nodded solemnly. ‘I’m very glad to hear it. I have to say that neither my husband nor I were particularly happy with the original investigation into Becky’s disappearance. Please don’t think that we’re complaining, or take what I’m saying personally, it’s just that we sensed the police officers we spoke to were not committed to finding our daughter. That’s why we felt obliged to offer the reward, which is still on offer, by the way.’

  Jimmy coughed.

  Wendy, for once, had the good sense to open her mouth only to put a piece of ginger cake into it.

  ‘I’m sorry you felt that way, Mrs Tyde-Harris,’ Jimmy said, but wasn’t about to defend his colleagues. In point of fact, there was very little that he could say in mitigation. Prostitutes and junkies went missing all the time – sometimes with tragic results, but far more often than not, they’d simply moved on, or were having a stint in hospital, or had simply lost touch with their families and so-called friends. As such, they were never a top priority with investigators.

  ‘But we’re very thorough in the CRT, and as Wendy has said, DI Greene is an extremely competent investigator. We just have a few questions we need to ask you,’ he began gently.

  Over in his seat by the fireplace, Jimmy saw Richard Tyde-Harris stiffen with tension. His wife, however, didn’t react at all, and Jimmy supposed that whatever cold and distant place she now inhabited left no room for such emotions as anxiety or dread.

  ‘So, tell us all you can about your daughter,’ Jimmy Jessop said carefully.

  As Wendy and Jimmy were interviewing one set of grieving parents about their missing daughter, Hillary drove from Middleton Cheney to the more southerly boundary of the county to talk to another grieving parent in the small market town of Wantage.

  But unlike the baroque, spooky splendour of the Tyde-Harris residence, Diana Allen lived in a cramped, terraced housing association residence overlooking a rather dispiriting street of shops, industrial units, and a county council car park. When she answered Hillary’s knock, she was wearing a puce-pink, fleecy jogging outfit, with pink and white trainers, and was busily smoking a cigarette. Her fingers were stained yellow with the nicotine, and her long, brown hair was fast turning grey. Her small brown eyes looked slightly myopic, making Hillary wonder if she wouldn’t be better off with glasses.

  But perhaps a trip to the opticians was beyond her budget right then.

  ‘Yes? Sorry, luv, if you’ve come about the dog barking, I told her next door …’ She began to point, with her cigarette to the house next door, ‘that he’s just excitable… .’

  Hillary produced her ID and Diana Allen paled slightly.

  ‘Bloody hell, he’s only a Jack Russell, not a Doberman. He don’t make that much noise, they’ve got to stick the roz … They didn’t have to call you lot in.’

  ‘This isn’t about a nuisance call, Mrs Allen.’

  ‘Thompson. I ain’t been Mrs Allen in years, luv.’

  ‘Sorry, of course. My fault,’ Hillary said, and meant it. She’d meant to re-read Lydia Clare Allen’s case file in the car after parking up, but she’d forgotten to. She was still pondering her grave doubts about Jasmine Sudbury when she should have been concentrating on the job in hand. Now she remembered that her second missing girl’s mother had remarried when Lydia was about to become a teenager.

  ‘That’s all right. I don’t mind, only Trev Allen was a bit of a bastard. Used to knock me about, see, so I like to forget that I was ever called that.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Can I come in for a quick chat, Mrs Thompson?’

  ‘What’s this about then, if it’s not about our Chester?’ she asked warily.

  For a brief moment, Hillary Greene wondered if she really was losing her marbles, since she had no idea who Chester was, then realized that the woman must still be talking about her noisy canine.

  ‘It’s about your daughter, Lydia Clare, Mrs Thompson,’ she began, then could have kicked herself as the other woman went as white as milk and began to sway alarmingly on the doorstep. She took a staggering step to the side and leaned heavily against the doorframe.

  ‘You’ve found the poor mare, then? She’s dead, isn’t she?’ she wailed. ‘I always knew it. Where…? When…?’

  ‘No, Mrs Thompson, it’s nothing like that,’ Hillary quickly reassured her, and stepping forward, helped the other woman down a slightly dirty hallway and into an equally dirty kitchen. There she sat her down and made her a cup of tea, as well as a mug of instant coffee for herself, as she explained who she was, and what she was doing there.

  Five minutes later, Diana Thompson had a bit more colour in her cheeks, and was industriously puffing away on her third cigarette of the encounter. Her tea went largely ignored.

  ‘So, you haven’t found her body then? Hell, I don’t know whether to be glad about that, or cry.’

  Hillary regarded the woman opposite her thoughtfully. They were sitting around a small Formica-topped table that was peeling at the edges, with an excitable Jack Russell terrier cross, barking around their ankles.

  ‘You’re sure in your own mind that Lydia is dead then, Mrs Thompson?’ she asked quietly.

  The other woman grimaced, shouted at the dog to shut up – which it didn’t – and then sighed heavily.

  ‘Yeah, course she is,’ she said fatalistically. ‘I know my Lyd. She was a good girl. She wouldn’t have left me hanging this long, even if she was mad with … She would know I’d be going out of my head with worry, and she wouldn’t want to think of me suffering, like. She was soft, like that. Oh, I know what they all say about her round here,’ she added, with a bitter glance out of the window at the street outside, ‘but she had a good heart, my Lyd. Too good, if you ask me. People took advantage of her. Not that anyone would admit it. No, their precious boys and menfolk are all saints,’ she snorted bitterly, and took a vehement drag on her cigarette.

  Hillary nodded. She didn’t have to ask what Diana meant. She could already see it all. Lydia Clare Allen, according to her file, had been a pretty girl. Originally with long brown hair like her mother’s, she’d dyed it blonde. It spoke of a girl who relied on her looks to get what she wanted. Not particularly bright at school, a girl who looked to men to fulfil her dreams. And of course, such a girl would soon earn a reputation, and would not be looked upon kindly, especially by wives and mothers who found their menfolk flocking around the honey pot like so many randy bees.

  ‘I understand you reported her missing when she didn’t come home for Christmas. That would be Christmas of 2012?’ Hillary tactfully changed the subject.

  ‘Yes. She was supposed to come home Christmas Eve and stay till Boxing Day. He was going up north to see his family that year, so I invited her to spend a few days with me. Stop me being lonely, like. My other girl, Shirl, she has kids of her own, and so had her hands full. And I didn’t want to be alone.’

  Hillary nodded, picking out the relevant bit of information. ‘You say “he” was going up north. This would be…?’

  ‘Danny,’ Diana said shortly. ‘My better half.’

  ‘I take it he and Lydia didn’t get on?’

  Diana grunted a grim little laugh. ‘Like chalk and cheese them two. Trouble was, Lyd had always been a bit of a daddy’s girl. And she had always been Trev’s favourite of the two. So she took it bad when I’d finally had enough of the beatings and kicked the bastard out. I threatened to have him put away if he didn’t leave us alone. Anyway, when I met Danny later, Lydia was never going to take to him, was she, the man who took her daddy’s place?’

  She shrugged, stubbed out the cigarette and lit another one. ‘To give him his due, he tried hard with her, at first. Danny, I mean. But let’s face it, you can’t really expect a bloke to put up with the constant cheek and backchat for very long, can you? And Lyd was a stubborn little tyke. Once she got something into her head, she wouldn’t let it go. She was only twelve, but she’d decided she was going to hate Danny, and so she did.’

  She sighed heavi
ly and stared out of the grimy window. A kind of weary drizzle had started outside and fitted the mood in the room perfectly.

  ‘Is that why she left home when she was just sixteen?’ Hillary probed delicately.

  ‘Yeah. Course. The moment she could leave school and get a job, she was off. For the bright lights of bloody Oxford! I ask you!’ Diana laughed harshly. ‘Still, at least it wasn’t London,’ she said bleakly. ‘I remember thinking, at the time, how glad I was that it wasn’t London. That’s where girls always run off to, innit? But Oxford’s just up the road by comparison, right? So I thought she’d be safer there, somehow. Being closer.’ Again the woman gave a harsh bark of laughter. ‘And look how wrong I was about that.’ Again she took a vehement draw on her cigarette, as if she couldn’t get the nicotine into her system fast enough.

  Hillary stirred her mug of instant coffee and fought back the urge to cough and wave the cigarette fumes out of her face. Then she said, ‘How did Danny react to her leaving home?’

  Diana shrugged one puce-pink shoulder negligently. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish, I expect. Not that he said so. But I could tell … and to be fair, the atmosphere in the house did get better after that. I mean, when you live in a small place like this and two of you are always at loggerheads and nit picking over every little thing … Well, it was a relief to me, too. Not that she was gone, you understand? I missed her like crazy.’

  ‘Yes. But not to have the constant tension must have been an improvement,’ Hillary said.

  ‘It were wonderful, to be honest,’ the girl’s mother admitted guiltily. ‘But I still missed her, like I said. She was always bright and sunny with me. She was the sort of kid who always saw the bright side of things, know what I mean? Even coming from round here, with nothing to look forward to. She always thought things were gonna get better.’

  ‘She was an optimist?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s it. Optimist. That was my Lyd. She was gonna meet Mr Right, who would take her off to the Ritz or something. That was her dream – like in one of those James Bond films, you know, where this beautiful bird steps out of a fancy sports car and goes into some posh place.’

  For a moment, Hillary had a fleeting vision of Jasmine Sudbury, being escorted by her handsome stepbrother onto the deck of a yacht about to sail the Mediterranean, and abruptly shook it off. But the eerie meeting, even if only in her own mind, of two lost, pretty, young girls, left her feeling vaguely uneasy and slightly dizzy. One who’d been given the dream, and thrown it all away. And one who would probably have sold her soul to visit a casino in Monte Carlo. And both of them had ended up working the streets.

  Hillary sighed and forced her mind to focus. ‘Lydia got a job in Oxford, I understand? She was sharing a flat with some other girls?’

  ‘Yeah. A flat. Right.’ Diana echoed dryly. ‘More like a doss house. I only went there once – a gloomy old place that was empty and about to be made into flats or something. Big place, dank and water damaged. Peeling wallpaper. They were obviously just squatting there before the builders could throw them out, but Lyd showed me to ”her” room, pleased as punch she was by these big sash-window things and a view of some toffee-nosed college or other. All she had was an old mattress on the floor and her clothes hung from some nicked rail-rack from Debenhams.’ One puce-pink shoulder shrugged again. ‘But she was pleased with her life. Said she was living in Oxford with the vibe and the buzz. I can see her now – wearing a white dress with pale blue flowers. She looked pretty as a picture. She told me that Oxford was full of rich, posh boys, and that all she had to do was nab one for herself. She’d got this part-time job in a coffee shop, waitressing, washing dishes, whatever. She seemed to think that some Brad Pitt lookalike was going to wander in any moment and order a café latte and take one look at her and swoon at her feet. Take her home to meet Mummy and Daddy in some Sloane-Ranger house in Chelsea or on their country estate in the Berkshire Downs.’

  She shook her head and gave another bark of laughter. ‘What could I say?’ she appealed to Hillary, waving her cigarette helplessly in the air. ‘I couldn’t tell the dozy mare that life wasn’t like that, could I? ’Sides, why should I? She was sixteen, pretty, and living away from home for the first time in the city. I was glad she was happy. I was glad she was a … what did you call her?’

  ‘Optimist.’

  ‘Yeah. Right. Optimist. Why not? What was to keep her here, in this place, anyway?’ she added bitterly, looking across at the blacked-out façade of the betting shop opposite, where an old man had just entered, no doubt intent on blowing his pension.

  ‘And who knows. If she’d had just the littlest bit of luck, something nice might have happened to her.’ Diana Thompson sighed wistfully, and then shook her head, as if sensing the extent of her folly.

  ‘Can you give me a list of her friends, Mrs Thompson?’ Hillary broke the silence gently.

  ‘Why? What for? The friends she had here are all either married or have moved away, or still living at home with their parents ’cause they can’t afford a place of their own. They won’t know nothing about anything. They lost touch with her when she left. And as for her so-called friends in Oxford …’

  Diana Thompson grimaced.

  ‘Well. You know what they led her into. Lyd was a good girl, before she left home. Yeah, boys had been paying her attention since she hit puberty, but she was still a good girl. Didn’t drink, neither, not like she got to doing later. Or any of that other stuff.’

  Hillary decided there was no point pressing her on the ‘other stuff’. Why rub salt into the wound?

  ‘Besides, I only ever met that one cow – her so-called flatmate. And she was no friend of Lyd’s, I can tell you that. That Chinese bitch,’ she added tartly.

  Hillary ignored the racial slur, guessing from her tone of voice that Diana’s antagonism came from something more personal.

  ‘You’re referring to Sasha Yoo?’

  In Lydia’s file it had been noted that, at the time of her disappearance, she’d been living in one of Medcalfe’s many properties. A between-the-wars terrace that had been converted into four tiny flats, she had been sharing the top floor flat with another girl in Medcalfe’s stable.

  ‘Yeah. Her. You want to find out what happened to my Lyd, you should talk to her. She hated Lyd. I could tell, even though I only met her the once,’ Diana Thompson spat. ‘I’d gone to Oxford one summer for the sales, and me and Lyd met up at one of the open air cafés near the old bus depot. We were having this lovely cream tea, for a treat like, and then Lyd’s face sort of dropped and I turned and saw this girl coming towards us. All smiles and poison, that one. Pretended it was a coincidence that they’d met, and all that, but all the while she’s angling for Lyd to introduce us. So she does, and I learn she’s the flatmate. I could tell that the tall, skinny cow was looking down her nose at us, laughing behind my back and such.’

  She paused, then flushed slightly, as if aware that she was losing her temper.

  ‘Sorry. I dunno why I’m going on about her. It isn’t as if what she thought about us mattered, is it? She was just another pro.’ Then she suddenly pinched her mouth shut, as if realizing what that said about her own daughter.

  Hillary tactfully steered the conversation into a different vein. ‘Why do you think she might have had anything to do with your daughter disappearing, Mrs Thompson?’ she asked briskly, careful to keep her voice professional and crisp.

  Diana sighed heavily and finally took a sip of tea from her cup. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m not saying that she would have hurt Lyd. Or maybe she would. I don’t know. She was just … vicious, you know? Oh, she was beautiful, and like I said all smiles. But there was something about her that gave me the creeps.’

  She stubbed out her cigarette and rubbed her hands restlessly along the tops of her legs. ‘And I don’t think the coppers at the time talked to her properly. Not leaned on her like. Let’s just say that I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it turned out that she knew something
, but kept quiet about it. She would have looked out for number one, let me tell you. She wouldn’t have given a damn about what might have happened to Lyd.’

  ‘I’ll be certain to check that out,’ Hillary said gravely, and when the other woman raised her tear-darkened brown eyes to look at her doubtfully, said flatly, ‘and believe me, Mrs Thompson, I’ll talk to her properly. And if I think she knows something, we’ll find out what it is. The Crime Review Team will do our best to find out what happened to your daughter.’

  For a moment, Diana Thompson’s lips wobbled, as if she was going to cry, but then she looked away again, back out of the grimy window, to the grimy street outside, and simply nodded.

  ‘Good,’ was all she said. Then lit herself another fag.

  Under the table, the dog began to bark again.

  Once Hillary was back in the driving seat of her car, and yet again trying to coax her car’s engine to turn over, she knew that she would have to talk to Daniel Thompson at some point.

  Just because Lydia had been one of Medcalfe’s girls, and had probably come to grief at the hands of some punter, didn’t mean that a hostile stepfather could be overlooked.

  But not everyone on her team was at that moment engaged in the heart-breaking business of trying to reassure the parents of missing girls that their children hadn’t been forgotten.

  Jake Barnes was too busy trying to convince himself that he wasn’t scared. And he was only partially succeeding.

  He, Steven Crayle and his new boss were at that moment seated around Rollo’s desk, coming up with the next step in their plan to coax Darren Chivnor into taking their bait. And the more he thought about the moment that he would have to come face to face with the knife-wielding thug again, the more Jake’s heart rate accelerated uncomfortably.

  He could still see in his mind’s eye that cold, dark toilet block in the park and the wicked flash of the blade that Darren Chivnor had seemed to produce out of nowhere. He still had nightmares about it – nights when he’d wake up with the sensation that he’d been running for his life, a cold sweat running down his spine, his conscious mind not quite able to recall the dream that had awoken him.