A Promise to the Dead: A gripping crime thriller with a brilliant twist

by Victoria Jenkins

  The silence in the kitchen was punctuated by a knock at the front door.

  ‘I’ll go.’ The FLO left the room, leaving Hannah and Linda in an uncomfortable silence.

  ‘Do you want to go for a drive?’ Hannah asked, knowing her mother wouldn’t leave the house while there was even the slightest chance Kieran might happen to just walk back in. Linda had closed in on herself since his disappearance, immersing herself in old photograph albums and home videos, poring over his images as though she might be able to recreate him somehow and place him back in the house with them. Though Hannah imagined her mother would vehemently deny the accusation, it was obvious to anyone that Linda had always favoured Kieran. He didn’t annoy her in the way Hannah so often did, and Hannah supposed that had been enough to push him to the number one spot.

  Linda shook her head. Hannah was relieved; she had offered to take her out in the hope that her mother would reject the suggestion, but at least no one could accuse her of not making the effort. When she turned to her daughter, Linda couldn’t hide the impatience on her face. Without speaking, she managed to make Hannah feel that she was somehow responsible for her brother’s disappearance. ‘Are you staying for dinner?’

  Slamming her mobile phone down on the breakfast bar, Hannah fought to hold back a wave of fury. What was the matter with everyone? Tea … food … as if everything could be cured through sustenance. She pulled her purple hair from her face and tied it back in a ponytail before heading for the back door, feeling her lungs tighten in their desperation for some fresh air, but her departure from the room was stalled by the FLO’s return. She was followed by a young man wearing a grey shirt beneath an open navy-blue duffel coat. He was holding a police ID badge in his hand.

  ‘This is Detective Constable Jake Sullivan,’ the FLO introduced him.

  ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘We’ve still no leads on your son’s whereabouts, I’m afraid,’ DC Sullivan said, cutting short Linda’s already severed optimism. ‘Mrs Robinson, is your husband at home?’

  ‘Darren’s working away. He’s not due back for a couple of days. I told the other detective that on Friday.’

  The family had until today been seen mostly by a female detective: a woman not much younger than Linda who had burn marks to the side of her face that she did nothing to try to conceal. Hannah wondered what had happened to her. She had tried not to stare at the burns for too long, but the more she tried to avert her focus, the more she found herself unable to drag her attention away. It occurred to her that had she been afflicted with the same scars, she might have made an attempt to cover them with make-up. Maybe the other woman hadn’t felt the need to hide. Perhaps that was something Hannah needed to try out for size.

  ‘DI King,’ DC Sullivan reminded her. ‘You told her that your husband has been in Devon since last weekend?’

  Linda nodded. ‘Why, what’s the matter?’ Her attention shifted from the detective to her daughter, returning to DC Sullivan when he produced his phone from his pocket and searched it for something before passing it to her.

  ‘Do you recognise this number plate?’

  Hannah watched as Linda looked at the image on the phone. When she moved behind her mother to take a look, she could see the photograph was taken from CCTV footage. ‘It’s Darren’s,’ her mother said. ‘You obviously know that already or you wouldn’t be here asking me about it. Could you just please get to the point?’

  ‘This recording was made on Thursday evening, near the Millennium Centre in Cardiff Bay.’

  A silence followed. Hannah stepped back and moved away, but her mother continued to study the photograph as though staring at it for long enough might somehow alter what was shown there, removing any implication that put her husband under suspicion. Hannah knew more than her parent possibly realised. She knew that when he had been spoken to, her father had lied to the police about where he’d been on Thursday evening, telling them that he had been in Devon. If her mother’s response to the image was anything to go by, Hannah suspected she had also been lied to by him.

  ‘What are you saying?’ she eventually asked.

  ‘We need to speak with your husband, Mrs Robinson.’

  ‘You’ve spoken to him already.’

  ‘He needs to come back to South Wales,’ DC Sullivan clarified. ‘We’d like to talk to him face to face. I suggest you speak to him, and advise him that it’s necessary for him to come home.’

  In the silence that followed, Hannah tried to push back the doubt that was creeping closer to the front of her mind.. She knew that Kieran’s disappearance alone should have been enough to bring their father back to the country. The fact that it hadn’t made him appear increasingly suspicious, as well as inexplicably insensitive.

  ‘You think he was involved in Kieran’s disappearance?’ her mother eventually said, her tone still clipped and defensive. ‘This is ridiculous.’ She thrust the mobile phone back at DC Sullivan. ‘First you’re saying there was an accident, and now what? Now you think Darren’s hiding something?’

  ‘He’s lied to everyone about where he was on Thursday. Unless you already knew he wasn’t in Devon as he said he was?’ DC Sullivan raised an eyebrow that questioned her mother’s honesty. Hannah anticipated that the look was only likely to be met with resentment.

  She watched her mother’s mouth fall open, apparently unable to articulate her outrage at the suggestion that she might have helped cover for her husband in some way. Instead, she looked to the FLO, exasperated. If she was searching for help, though, it was quickly evident she was looking in the wrong place. The woman really was as useless as Hannah had suspected.

  DC Sullivan turned to Hannah and offered her a faint smile. She didn’t return it, but he seemed undeterred by this. ‘I know you’ve been asked this already, but how had your brother been in the days and weeks leading up to Thursday? Any unusual behaviour, or signs that there was something wrong?’

  ‘Why are you asking Hannah?’ her mother intervened, obviously still smarting from the detective’s previous comment. ‘I know my son better than anyone – I’d have known if there’d been something wrong. He was fine. If you’re suggesting he’s killed himself, then this is getting even more ridiculous.’

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything, Mrs Robinson,’ DC Sullivan said quickly. ‘I’m just saying that sometimes we don’t know people as well as we think we do.’

  The FLO shifted uncomfortably in the corner of the kitchen, eyeing the kettle as though another cup of tea might help to resolve the tension that had gripped the room. Hannah noticed her mother suck in her top lip as her jaw tautened.

  ‘You don’t seem to have any updates on my brother,’ Hannah said coldly, seeking an end to what seemed a pointless visit, ‘so unless there’s something else, I suggest you get on with the job of finding him. If you want to talk to my father, perhaps you should go and find him yourself.’

  DC Sullivan hesitated. His pale face had speckled with red blotches, embarrassment settling upon his cheeks. ‘I do understand your concerns for your son, Mrs Robinson.’ He attempted to force eye contact with her, but his efforts were in vain. His comment had hit hard and there was no going back from it now. Linda’s eyes were fixed to the floor, the fingers of her right hand gripping the kitchen worktop so tightly that her knuckles had whitened.

  Hannah’s eyes widened as though questioning why DC Sullivan was still there when they had made it obvious he was no longer welcome. ‘Ask DI King to come next time, will you?’ she said.

  She followed him to the front door and slammed it shut with force once he was outside. Heading quickly into the front room, she pushed aside the closed curtain and watched the detective as he lingered on the pavement. Then she turned back to the room. The photographs of her and Kieran as children that had once lined the walls had all been taken down from where they had hung, replaced in recent years by a fresh coat of plaster and a lick of paint. Her mother could say what she wanted, but nothing was going to hi
de the truth: she didn’t want Hannah’s face looking down at her while she watched TV in the evenings. Removing only the photographs of her daughter would have made it too obvious, so she’d had no choice but to take them all down, Kieran included.

  Hannah gritted her teeth and pushed her fists into the pockets of her skirt as she fought back angry tears. Where was Kieran? And where was her bloody father? She needed to speak to him, now more than ever.

  Why had he been in Cardiff Bay on Thursday night?

  And just what had he been arguing with Kieran about on Wednesday?

  Four

  DC Chloe Lane knocked at the door of the student property, noting with disgust the small mountain of bin bags left inside the front wall of the narrow strip of concrete at the front of the house, their contents – weeks old, if the stomach-churning stench of rotting waste was anything to go by – spilling out across the ground. The central panel of glass in the front bay window of the house had been smashed; behind it, a makeshift attempt had been made to protect those inside from the elements, the effort stretching as far as a flattened cardboard box and an intricate web of masking tape.

  Her own student days were not a time she looked back on with particular fondness – her estrangement from her family had led to a dark period of isolation and choices she would have preferred never to have had to make – but one thing Chloe prided herself on was that she had always been hard-working and determined, and she couldn’t remember ever having lived in a state anywhere near this, regardless of how tight money had been. She was no obsessive cleaner: having lived with Alex for six months the previous year, she imagined her superior would vouch for the fact. This, though, she thought as she held her breath at the front door, was beyond any reasonable excuses.

  The door was answered by a young woman wearing a pair of long-sleeved cotton pyjamas and the previous day’s make-up. She had been crying, her reddened eyes only partially hidden behind a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. Chloe presumed this was Gemma, who she had spoken to over the phone earlier that day. The girl’s number had been stored on Matthew Lewis’s mobile, and texts between the two arranging where and when to meet the previous day had been found when his phone activity had been accessed.

  ‘Gemma?’

  The girl nodded and stepped aside, allowing Chloe into the house. Inside, the smell didn’t improve. Gemma, seemingly oblivious to the odour apparently embedded into the walls and carpet of the hallway, reached her hands behind her head and pulled her hair up into a messy bun, knotting it with an elastic band she had around her wrist.

  ‘I’m sorry about the mess,’ she said quietly, waving a hand aimlessly to her side. ‘I keep reminding them I’m not their mother.’

  Chloe followed her into the living room and picked her way through the debris to the sofa. A games console had been left on the floor, and the dirty carpet was littered with empty cider cans and the remnants of last night’s takeaway: plastic containers housing leftover korma and tikka, a paper bag of prawn crackers, and a tub of curry sauce that had tipped over and been left to ooze on to the rug.

  ‘How many of you are living here?’ Chloe asked, wrinkling her nose.

  ‘Five. I’m the only girl. You can probably tell that by the state of the place.’

  She wondered how Gemma put up with living in this chaos on a daily basis, but she guessed the mess in the house was the last thing on the girl’s mind at the moment. ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘In bed, probably,’ she said with a shrug. ‘Is there any news on Matthew yet?’

  Chloe shook her head. She had given Gemma the few details they were in possession of when they had spoken earlier. She needed to know as much about the previous day as possible if they were to have any chance of forming a picture of what had happened to Matthew and Stacey while they were up on the mountain road. Finding Matthew was their first priority, but with no leads and nothing so much as hinting at his whereabouts, the team was already feeling the pressure of time against them.

  ‘His parents …’ Gemma bit her bottom lip. ‘Have you seen them?’

  ‘Not personally. They’re beside themselves, obviously.’

  Alex had been to the Lewises’ house in the early hours of that morning, after leaving the scene of Stacey’s murder on Caerphilly Mountain. Chloe, meanwhile, had undertaken the unenviable task of informing Stacey’s parents of her death. Both couples had reacted as anyone might have expected, their initial shock morphing into grief and anxiety that quickly overwhelmed them.

  ‘Tell me about yesterday.’

  ‘We met up outside the train station and went for lunch on St Mary’s Street, a couple of hours before the match started.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘The Italian on the corner, the one opposite McDonald’s. I can’t remember what it’s called now. You know … that chain place.’

  Chloe nodded, knowing the restaurant Gemma was referring to. ‘When you say “we” …’

  ‘There was me, Matthew, Stacey and two other friends from school.’

  ‘That’s how you know Matthew? From school?’

  Gemma nodded and rubbed her left eye, leaving a smear of mascara across the bridge of her nose. ‘We were in primary and comp together. I’ve known him all my life, really.’ She looked away as though embarrassed for some reason. ‘I’ve always got on better with boys. The girls at school used to hate me for it. They used to call me a slag, that sort of thing. It was never like that. I just find boys less complicated.’

  Chloe wondered where that kind of boy had been when she herself was younger: the ones who were less complicated. She was being unfair, she thought, quickly chiding herself for her momentary cynicism. In her experience, people were complicated in equal measure.

  When Gemma looked back at her, her eyes were glassy with imminent tears. ‘Where the bloody hell is he?’

  ‘We don’t know. That’s why it’s so important you tell me everything you can. Even if it might seem insignificant to you, the more we know about Matthew and what happened yesterday, the greater our chances of finding him.’

  ‘That’s the thing, though … I don’t know anything really. I wish I did, I might be able to help then. We hardly see each other any more – we’re both so busy with final-year exams. Yesterday was the first time we’d seen each other in at least a month.’

  ‘Had you met Stacey before?’

  ‘Once. At a party a few months back. Matthew didn’t seem that keen on her at the time. Then they split up for a while – maybe a month or so. I was surprised to see her yesterday, to be honest.’

  ‘You weren’t expecting her to be there?’

  ‘He just hadn’t said anything about her coming.’

  ‘It was Matthew who booked the tickets for the game, then?’

  Gemma nodded. ‘He always books the tickets. We try to go every year, for the Six Nations. It’s kind of a tradition now, even when we haven’t seen each other for a while. It gives us a chance to catch up.’

  ‘You said Matthew and Stacey split up for a while. Do you know why that was?’

  The girl nodded, but looked away again, avoiding Chloe’s eye. She sighed before she spoke. ‘We kissed, Matthew and I. I don’t know why, it was bloody stupid. I’ve known him all my life and we’ve never done it before – I’ve never wanted to either. He’s more like a brother than anything else. It sounds really weird now I’ve said that, doesn’t it, but we were both drunk and it just happened. Anyway, he told Stacey about it. I knew he would. Matthew’s a good guy. He’s honest.’ She looked at Chloe now, her eyes almost pleading with her. ‘Whatever happened up on that mountain, Matthew didn’t hurt Stacey. I know it. He just wouldn’t. He’s never hurt anyone.’

  ‘If you two kissed and Stacey knew about it, why would Matthew bring her to the game with you yesterday?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t get to ask him. I wanted to, but she didn’t let him out of her sight all day.’ Gemma picked at a loose thread on the seam of her pyjama trousers. �
�If anything, I think maybe she came with him to prove a point. In front of me, you know, but also to him as well. She spent the day flirting with the other boys, all to get at Matthew, I think. It seemed to be working. He was on edge all day, and that’s not like him. It was like she was trying to make him see what he’d be missing if they split up, or trying to prove the point that she could get someone else if she wanted to. The atmosphere was awful – it was really uncomfortable.’

  Stacey’s unusual choice of outfit for a rugby match was now starting to make sense. If there had been tension between the couple – visible enough for other people to have noticed them – then perhaps the theory that they had both got out of the car following an argument wasn’t far from the mark. They just hadn’t been arguing over the empty fuel tank, as previously presumed.

  Gemma’s face dropped as she realised the possible implications of everything she had said about Stacey’s behaviour, as well as Matthew’s reaction to it. ‘He didn’t kill her,’ she said, shaking her head as though reading Chloe’s thoughts. ‘Matthew couldn’t hurt anyone.’

  The girl didn’t need to persuade her, Chloe thought; it seemed as unlikely to her as it did to Alex, though with Matthew nowhere to be found, it was obvious that his guilt was the conclusion everyone was likely to jump to.

  Just where was he now? If he hadn’t hurt his girlfriend, there seemed no reason for him to hide. And if he wasn’t hiding, it suggested he had been taken somewhere against his will.

  But by who? Chloe wondered. And why?

  Five

  Darren Robinson took a drag of his cigarette and surveyed the expanse of open ground that lay in front of him. The building site had been prepped for work to start there the following week, and the project would be one of the biggest in a long while. He could have done with taking a break after the recent housing development he had worked on back in Cardiff, but taking breaks never made anyone rich, and besides, he needed to make himself scarce from South Wales for the time being.