She felt sick with dread.
But now was not the time to cry. Now was the time to get on with it.
They all circled her, peered into the screen.
‘No … no. Not ringing a bell,’ said Callum, nibbling at his thumbnail with those big teeth. He looked around at the others. ‘Anyone else recognise him?’
They shook their heads regretfully.
‘Um, you’re sure no one’s seen him?’ she asked, hearing the desperate note in her voice.
‘What’s he supposed to have done?’ asked Becky, and again, she sounded scornful, as though Fiona was trying to pull the wool over their collective eyes.
‘He slashed her tyres. He threatened to throw acid over her. He was convicted of criminal damage and sending malicious messages eight months ago. They put a restraining order on him,’ said Fiona, and the widening of Becky’s eyes gave her a tiny measure of selfish satisfaction.
‘Oh,’ she said.
‘Shit,’ Iris simply hissed after a long moment. ‘What do we do now?’
‘We contact HES, I guess,’ murmured Callum, sticking his hands into his pockets. ‘Get them to send someone out to replace her …’
Becky made a contemptuous tutting noise. ‘For fuck’s sake. Way to miss the point …’
‘No, Callum,’ said Iris, sounding like a woman struggling to stay patient. ‘I meant what do we do about Madison?’ She rubbed her temples. ‘Something’s happened to her.’
The next move was obvious to Fiona.
‘I think I need to go to the police,’ she said. She felt weepy suddenly. This was all turning into a nightmare.
‘I’ve got Mads’ next of kin details on the laptop,’ said Callum. ‘Whoa, no, I don’t mean it like that.’ He must have seen Fiona’s face grow pale. ‘I mean, her contact in an emergency. Do you want me to go find it?’
‘Yeah, thanks, that would be great.’
He bustled out, while the others exchanged looks.
‘Where are you staying, Fiona?’ asked Jack, peering into her face, his thumbs hooked into his pockets.
‘I’m – I’m in Langmire, for now. The Fletts offered to let me stay on at the cottage,’ she said. ‘Just for a couple of days.’
‘That’s nice,’ said Iris. ‘They’re nice people.’ She was distracted, thoughtful.
‘I mean,’ said Fiona, suddenly flooded with embarrassment, ‘I think you guys are paying for that house, so if that doesn’t suit, I’ll get a hotel room in Kirkwall. I’m heading out to the police station there anyway …’
‘No,’ said Iris, raising a quelling hand. ‘Don’t give it another thought. It’s fine.’
‘Be good to have someone at Langmire, anyway,’ said Jack, rubbing his chin. ‘Just in case she comes back there. Yeah. You’d be doing us a favour.’
Iris nodded in agreement, still lost in thought. ‘Fiona’s right. I think the police are the logical first step,’ she murmured. ‘I mean, how do we know Madison didn’t phone in sick under duress? Didn’t text you under duress? No, I don’t like it.’ She raised her dark eyes to Fiona. ‘And you’ll keep us informed if you find out anything?’
‘Of course.’
‘Do you need one of us to go with you?’ Iris asked.
‘No,’ said Fiona. ‘Thank you. But I don’t think so.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I think you’re probably needed here more.’
Iris shook her head in impatience. ‘This is just a dig.’ She flapped a hand in the direction of the excavation. ‘The person buried here is going nowhere.’
‘Well, they might be going somewhere,’ said Callum, returning with a bulky laptop open in his hands, and once more his voice was both gloomy and yet self-satisfied. ‘There’s a big storm coming on Monday night and if it hits the site while it’s exposed …’
‘Callum, that is enough,’ snapped Jack, suddenly ferocious, his blue eyes cold and furious.
Everybody froze.
‘It’s fine,’ said Fiona into the silence, taken aback by this explosion.
Jack nodded, but his face was red, closed, his mouth tight. He stalked out of the tent.
Callum blushed, bent back to the laptop.
‘So this isn’t very helpful,’ he said. He seemed almost breathless, trembling. ‘Her emergency contact is Dr Fiona Grey on Saxon Street in Cambridge, who I’m guessing is …’
‘Me.’ Fiona was stunned, and oddly touched.
Of course she was Madison’s emergency contact.
9
Helly Holm Car Park, Orkney, January 2020
‘Caspar?’
Fiona was back in her car, her thigh and back aching from her stumble on the causeway path, the phone in her hand. Her face was pink and warm with windburn. Despite the cold, the sun was high and bright, the sea a cobalt blue.
She’d been passed to various people, some speaking English, some speaking French. The line had sounded staticky and distorted – well, she was calling Sierra Leone. Caspar was out there with Médecins Sans Frontières, and had been there for the past month.
‘Yeah, yeah, this is Caspar,’ came the heavily accented voice. ‘Who is it?’
‘It’s Fiona Grey,’ she said patiently.
‘Who?’
Fiona had spoken to Caspar numerous times in the previous year. He was an Austrian surgeon based in London. Madison had started dating him almost immediately upon finishing with Dom. Fiona had had dinner and drinks with them both at least half a dozen times, but he always seemed incapable of recognising her over the phone.
Years ago, an ex had said to Fiona, ‘I think you’re Madison’s friend. I don’t think she’s yours.’
Those words seemed to haunt Fiona right now.
‘Fiona Grey,’ she repeated, gritting her teeth against her irritation. ‘Madison’s friend.’
There was a long pause, so long that Fiona wondered if they had been cut off.
‘Caspar?’
‘Yes? What do you want?’
Accented English or not, there was no mistaking the hostility in his voice. Fiona was taken aback by it.
‘We’re looking for Madison …’
‘I don’t know where she is.’
‘Oh. It’s just that …’
‘She told me she no longer wishes to be in a relationship with me. Just told me over the phone, a week after I arrived in Freetown. She couldn’t even wait to tell me in person, when I got back to the UK. She cancelled our holiday this year and paid nothing back for the deposit.’ He let out a little huff of displeasure. ‘It is nearly five hundred euros …’
‘Ah, I see …’
‘All with no explanation …’
‘Ah. Ah. I’m so sorry to hear that, I didn’t know.’ Fiona felt she was fighting an uphill battle to get the conversation back on track ‘But listen, Caspar. She’s gone missing. She seems to have left her job and …’
‘I told you, I do not care. I haven’t spoken to her for three weeks and have no idea where she is or who she is with.’ It seemed to Fiona that he was breathing hard. In the background, she could hear raised voices in French, the sound of a crying child. ‘I am sorry, but I am very busy here. This is nothing to do with me. I have to go.’
The call clicked off.
Fiona stared at the receiver helplessly.
‘Shit,’ she hissed to herself.
∗ ∗ ∗
Kirkwall was a bustling hive of activity after the empty quiet of Grangeholm. The police station was in a tiny industrial estate, on the banks of a small, placid marine inlet. The tall grey building oddly resembled a chapel and was bordered by that flat, jewel-green Orkney grass that looked as though it had just been mowed, but was in reality a product of the endless wind that kept it shorter than any lawnmower could.
Fiona had managed to organise all the texts and emails Madison had sent to her, both before she’d set off and then after, compiling them all into an attachment that she’d send to the police once she’d spoken to them. This seemed the
easiest course, as she didn’t have access to a printer.
As she’d read through the texts she’d been sent since Wednesday, she felt increasingly sick at heart. Something was wrong, particularly with the texts – brushing her off one minute, overly charged with exclamation marks and textspeak the next. How had she not seen that something was wrong?
She’d known, she realised, but had been too distracted by the journey, by missing Adi, by work, by – and she had to be honest with herself now – the low-lying resentment she felt at being asked to put her own life aside to come up here on such short notice.
She’d played the martyr, but it seemed clear to her now that Madison had possibly been in real trouble, and Fiona, for all her protestations, had just not been there for her. True, Madison had been cagey, and keeping a frightening number of secrets (she dumped Caspar over the phone? And didn’t even mention it when we talked? Wow. Just … wow).
That said, in the cold light of the blue morning with its whipping wind shaking the car windows, Fiona realised it was very Madison. She was a creature of impulse. If she woke up one morning and decided Caspar should be gone, phoning him up and dumping him was in no way unexpected behaviour from her. She was not sentimental and never hesitated.
Particularly if she’d met someone new.
I should have asked the right questions. I should have wheedled more out of her. She shut her eyes, buried her head in her hands. ‘For fuck’s sake, Madison, where are you?’
10
Kirkwall Police Station, Orkney, January 2020
‘My name’s Fiona Grey. I want to report a missing person.’
‘I see,’ he said. The detective was an older man, perhaps fifty, hatchet-faced, as her mother might have said, and tall and thin with a slight stoop. Fiona hadn’t thought about her mother in months, and this remembered phrase – ‘hatchet-faced’ – unsettled her.
Where was her mother now? she wondered. She’d been back in Croydon the last time they’d spoken, three years ago, when Uncle Jamie had died.
She should look her up, find out if she was okay, but the thought always appalled her. She was terrified by what she might learn.
‘If you could just follow me.’
He held open the door as she scurried through it, passing into a corridor lined with offices. He walked in front of her now, opening one of the doors.
She was in an interrogation room, she realised, with mint-green walls and a cheap Formica table. She felt subtly intimidated, as though she was being confronted with some criminal act.
‘So I’m Inspector Linklater,’ he said. His voice was friendly enough, but there was something faintly chill in his grey eyes. ‘I just need to ask you a few questions about this missing person.’
‘Um, yes,’ said Fiona, trying to put a smile on. ‘Naturally.’
She was questioned thoroughly, on Madison’s age, name, and once again she told the strange story of being stood up at the harbour after her stream of texts. All of this was typed with great care into a laptop.
‘Was your friend on any medication, do you know?’
‘Um, like drugs?’ Fiona asked in alarm.
There was a short pause and his typing fingers stilled. ‘Well, I’ll get to that. I was thinking more of medicine – like insulin for diabetes, say …’
‘Oh no, nothing like that. She was fit as a fiddle, usually.’
‘Was she having any other problems, do you know?’
‘Hmm,’ said Fiona, offering him a weak smile and shrugging. ‘I guess. But you’d know about that.’
He frowned at her. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t follow you.’
‘Well,’ said Fiona, ‘I mean – Dominic Tate reappearing again.’
Inspector Linklater became very still. ‘Who?’ he asked.
She looked at him for a long moment. ‘You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Should I?’
‘Um …’ She was blushing again. Oh, Madison. You promised me you’d tell them.
His grey head had dipped to the screen in the meantime. ‘I understand there were some problems – ah yes, I see, he was convicted last March. Criminal damage and malicious messages. Six months’ suspended sentence …’ He glanced up at her. ‘So why don’t you tell me what happened?’
Fiona laced her fingers together on her lap. ‘Um, sure. So Dominic Tate. Madison was seeing him briefly. They only lasted about seven weeks.’
That steady gaze did not leave her face.
‘It was this whirlwind romance that ended badly.’ Fiona shrugged. ‘I was, well, I was never that keen on him, to be honest.’
‘Why not?’ he asked her.
Fiona crossed her legs.
‘He … well, there was something controlling about him from the very beginning. He was super-charming until you disagreed with him, even if it was over something trivial. The first time I met him we were all at the bar in this little arts theatre my college friend Carys worked at – she’d introduced them – and we’d all seen this new play together that Carys was raving about.
‘I thought it was really great, really thoughtful, but he hated it. There was no, “let’s agree to disagree”. It was this embarrassing, borderline aggressive thing, and he was getting red in the face so in the end I just yielded. He was Mads’ date and I don’t like confrontation. Carys did the same.’
‘I see.’
‘I mean, I didn’t say anything, it wasn’t me going out with him, but I thought it was a red flag. But at first Madison didn’t get it. She just thought I didn’t like being challenged, that he was entitled to his opinion. That I had misjudged how hostile he was because I was oversensitive. But then … she started to experience it herself.’
Fiona fell silent for a moment. ‘The more controlling he got, the less she wanted to see him. They had a big fight at my house, at my housewarming party, and he broke my window. I thought that would be it. But then I think they got back together briefly.’ Fiona felt that sharp lance of betrayal again when she’d heard – what do you mean, you’re giving him another chance?
‘Yes? When was that?’ asked Linklater.
‘I dunno. About a week before Christmas the year before last. She was always cagey on the details.’ Fiona swallowed.
‘Anyway, she finally finished it with him on New Year’s Eve after this big row, and it was really nasty this time, apparently – he wouldn’t physically let her get out of the car and was yelling at her, punching the door.’
‘That must have been very frightening for her.’
Fiona opened her mouth to agree, then shut it again. ‘You’d think so. But she’s fearless. It was me that had to persuade her to contact the police about Dominic – and by then he had already slashed her tyres and was posting all these vicious things on social media about her.’
‘What sort of vicious things?’
‘Oh,’ said Fiona, gesturing into the air. ‘She was a cheat and a liar and she’d get hers. And worse – in one of them he threatened to throw acid over her, in another he threatened to give her an “ISIS haircut”. Then he’d send over big bunches of roses to her work and cry on her voicemail for forgiveness until she disabled it. She’s very difficult to faze, but even she was getting alarmed by then.’
‘He was posting these things under his own name?’ Linklater was mildly incredulous, those grey eyes narrowing.
‘No, not the threats. He was cunning. He actually worked in IT – but he’d told Mads he was a theatre producer – this compulsive lying thing was one of the reasons she finished with him. The messages were posted on these anonymous accounts, tied to fake email addresses and pay as you go phones. He had access to all kinds of test phones through his work. But it didn’t matter. We all knew it was him. It was just that we couldn’t prove it.’
‘I see. But he was caught …’
‘Yes. One of the Instagram pictures was of her front door – she was living alone in Clapham, in this ground-floor flat with big picture
windows, really close to the street. It wasn’t very safe.
‘That was when I persuaded her to put CCTV in. Watching it back was the scariest thing.’ Fiona gave a little involuntary shiver at the memory. ‘When they arrested him for the tyres he admitted posting the threats. I don’t think they would have got him for that otherwise.’
‘And where was he posting this?’
‘Twitter, mostly. And tagging her on Instagram. Some fake accounts tried to friend her on Facebook but she didn’t accept. Anyway, these posts would only be up a day or two and then they’d be deleted and the account closed. Madison ignored them until the picture of her door appeared on Twitter. She worked for an archaeological unit in London at the time and she’d already had a nasty shock, because that same day her boss had had an anonymous phone call claiming Mads was stealing artefacts from work and selling them on eBay.
‘It was a complete fantasy, of course, and nobody ever believed it, but Mads was alarmed enough to do something by then, so we set up the camera, and …’
‘I see,’ said Linklater. ‘So that was the end of the matter?’
‘Um, that time, yeah.’
‘That time?’ He leaned forward. ‘There was more?’
‘Yeah. It started again, out of the blue, about two weeks ago. The threats started being posted online again. On Twitter.’
‘What kind of threats?’
Fiona opened her mouth, closed it again, intimidated by his frank, cool stare.
‘I … don’t know. I only saw one this time, the one on Friday night – they were gone by the time she told me about them. But it was the same as before – horrible messages calling her sexual names and threatening to hurt her. The exact same language as before. One came last night, and I managed to get a screenshot.’
‘Hmm,’ said Inspector Linklater, as she showed him the image she’d captured on the phone. ‘Charming.’
Fiona moved to withdraw her phone, but Linklater kept peering quizzically into it, his pale, lined brow contracting. ‘And this came the night you discovered she was missing?’
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