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

by Victoria Jenkins

  The desk sergeant glanced at his colleague in the office behind him. ‘Saw him earlier,’ the man said with a shrug, answering the look before returning to the paperwork he had been studying.

  ‘If you’d like to leave a message, I’ll make sure DC Sullivan gets it.’

  The young woman gritted her teeth and threw her head back, casting her attention to the ceiling for a moment before returning it to the officer. ‘No, I don’t want to leave him a message. I want to speak to his superior … now.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but in that case you will need to tell me what it’s about.’

  She fumbled in the pocket of her jeans for her mobile phone before jabbing at its screen with a stubby finger. ‘Kieran Robinson,’ she said, putting the phone down on the desk and pointing at the photograph of her brother. It was the same photograph that had been used across the internet since his disappearance four days earlier: a grinning Kieran at a Christmas party, a length of tinsel draped around his neck and his arm slung around the shoulder of a faceless person who had been cut from the image. ‘Recognise him?’

  The desk sergeant’s unchanging expression only enraged her further. ‘Just another face to you, I suppose,’ she said, throwing her arms in the air. ‘What does it matter?’ She slid the phone back towards her and returned it to her pocket.

  ‘Everything okay?’ DC Chloe Lane had entered the building through the main doors. She was looking windswept, her brunette hair unusually untidy as she hurriedly pushed it behind her ears. She slipped her jacket from her shoulders and hooked it over an arm.

  ‘No,’ the young woman snapped, turning to her. ‘Everything is not okay.’ She pulled her phone out of her pocket before jabbing in her passcode. ‘Kieran Robinson. I’m his sister.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Chloe said, raising a hand and signalling for the woman to follow her. ‘I know who you are. Come on through.’

  Hannah Robinson shot the desk sergeant a look as she followed Chloe through a set of double doors and into the main corridor that ran the length of the station. Chloe ushered her into one of the family rooms and waited for her to take a seat.

  ‘Everyone just forgotten about him then? Didn’t take long, did it?’

  ‘I can promise you that’s not the case,’ Chloe tried to assure her. Kieran Robinson had now been missing for almost four days. The last sighting of him had been well publicised in the hope that someone might come forward with information, but so far they were drawing blanks on all lines of inquiry. Where he had gone and what had happened to him after the last known footage of him was filmed remained a mystery, although the most popular theory was that he had fallen into the water and drowned.

  His family couldn’t accept that not finding Kieran’s body didn’t mean it hadn’t happened.

  ‘Why isn’t there any progress, then?’

  Chloe sympathised with the woman. It was frustrating when an investigation seemed to draw to a halt before it had really begun, but a lack of leads meant this was the case more often than the police liked to admit. The sad fact was that 48 per cent of cases that involved people who went missing after going on a night out remained unexplained. But no one wanted someone they loved to be the main character in one of those mysteries.

  ‘It’s Hannah, isn’t it?’ Chloe said. She remembered Kieran’s sister from a news report broadcast over the weekend. ‘We’ve looked at everything we possibly can with the information we currently have – Kieran’s movements on Thursday evening, who he was with, where they went. You know his mobile phone hasn’t been accounted for, but his laptop has been reviewed and there is really nothing at the moment to suggest that his disappearance is in any way suspicious.’

  ‘Not suspicious? He’s gone bloody missing, how much more suspicious do you need?’

  ‘What I mean,’ Chloe said, ‘is that there’s no evidence at this point to suggest that he has come to any harm.’

  ‘Your most popular theory seems to be that he got pissed and drowned. That sounds like harm to me.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Hannah. I wish we had more to tell you, but at the moment you know as much as we do. We’re still making inquiries as to where he may have been during those missing hours between him leaving the comedy club and being out on the waterfront. I really am sorry. I know how difficult this must be for you.’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Hannah said flatly. ‘You haven’t got a clue.’

  Chloe bit her tongue. She knew only too well how losing a brother felt – how being haunted by a mystery could consume a life, throwing everything else into doubt – but saying so wasn’t going to ease Hannah’s frustrations or offer her any form of comfort. Grief couldn’t be compared or measured.

  ‘He’s just another statistic, isn’t he?’ Hannah challenged, leaning forward in her seat.

  ‘Not at all,’ Chloe said, feeling the heat of the woman’s hostility burn her like a flame. ‘I promise you we’re doing all we can. We’ll keep running the television and social media appeals and hopefully something will come in that can help move the investigation forward.’

  ‘And that’s it? That’s the best you can do, is it?’

  Chloe knew nothing she could say would help make the family’s situation any easier. ‘You’ve been assigned a family liaison officer?’ she asked, wondering why Hannah had come to the station. Any queries or issues should have been directed to the FLO: that was what they were there for.

  Hannah rolled her eyes to the ceiling. ‘That woman who comes over to make the tea, you mean? Not sure how she justifies her salary. Anyway, I came here for a reason. DC Sullivan. He here?’

  ‘As far as I’m aware. Do you need him for anything in particular?’

  ‘Need him? The only thing I need is for him to stay the hell away from my family.’

  The heat of Hannah’s hostility intensified, and Chloe felt herself inwardly wince in anticipation of the revelation that might be about to follow. Whatever Jake had said or done, if it was enough to anger Kieran Robinson’s sister in this way, then it would be sure to annoy Alex, something Jake seemed to have excelled at during the past few months.

  ‘What are you referring to?’

  ‘He more or less told my mum that perhaps Kieran wanted to go missing.’

  Chloe gave an involuntary exhalation of despair. She didn’t want to believe this might have been the case, but she knew Jake well enough to know it was more than likely. He was prone to opening his mouth before he engaged his brain; something that had landed him in deep water on several occasions. ‘What do you mean, more or less? What exactly did he say?’

  Hannah sighed. ‘He said, “Sometimes we don’t know people as well as we think we do.”’ She sat back and folded her arms, her mouth twisting into a grimace as she waited for Chloe to respond.

  Chloe tried to keep her reaction neutral, but it was almost as though Hannah Robinson was taking some sort of solace from her discomfort. She didn’t entirely blame her. If the family already believed the police weren’t treating Kieran’s disappearance seriously, then Jake’s remark had only served to aggravate their dissatisfaction.

  ‘In what context was it said?’ The comment was crass, but Chloe struggled to believe that even Jake could be so insensitive as to say something like that. She could only think – and for his sake, hope – that it had been poorly timed and misinterpreted in some way. Yet knowing him as she did, there was a part of Chloe that doubted it.

  ‘Context? There’s an appropriate context for that sort of comment, is there?’ Hannah shook her head, exasperated. ‘My mum’s in bits about Kieran. She’s climbing the walls not knowing what’s going on. That was the last thing she needed to hear.’

  ‘I’ll have to speak to DC Sullivan about this,’ Chloe told her, knowing that any attempt to defend him to this woman would be pointless. Where Hannah was concerned, it seemed, the damage was already done, but Jake needed the chance to relate his version of events. There was always another side to everything, though he was going to need to come up wit
h something pretty inventive to keep Alex off his back on this one.

  ‘You do that,’ Hannah said, sitting back and letting it be known she was going nowhere. ‘In the meantime, I’d like to make this complaint formal.’

  Eight

  The last thing Alex wanted to be greeted with on her return to the station was the news of Hannah Robinson’s complaint against DC Jake Sullivan. Frustration powering her pace, she sought out the young constable, finding him midway through a telephone conversation at his desk in the incident room. Waiting for him to end the call, Alex tried to swallow her anger until they were away from the prying eyes and ears of the rest of the team. Gossip was never anything but detrimental, and until she had heard both sides of the story, she didn’t want news of the complaint to reach the rest of the team. She tried not to pass judgement before knowing all the facts, but where Jake was concerned, it had become too easy to assume the worst was correct.

  ‘My office,’ she mouthed.

  He slouched into the room five minutes later, his shoulders hunched. This constant air of just-woken-up was one of the things Alex most disliked about Jake. She wanted to shake some life and energy into him. There were different approaches to the job they did, each with its own merits, but sometimes Alex felt Jake tried too hard to carve out his particular style of detective work, appearing so blasé that anyone might have been forgiven for thinking he didn’t care for the cases he worked on.

  His manner now suggested he realised exactly what he was guilty of, but if he was aware of the inappropriateness of what he had said to Kieran Robinson’s mother, Alex couldn’t help but wonder what on earth had made him go ahead and say it in the first place.

  ‘We’ve had Hannah Robinson in. Kieran Robinson’s sister. She said you made an inappropriate comment about the nature of her brother’s disappearance.’

  Jake’s failure to deliver any kind of response to the claim suggested he knew what Alex was referring to. A red flush was already starting to creep up his neck, spreading across his checks like a mottled rash. For someone who so often came across as arrogant, this characteristic seemed oddly out of place.

  ‘What exactly did you say?’ she asked, closing the door to her office. ‘Hannah claims you suggested Kieran might have wanted to go missing. Is that correct?’

  ‘That’s not what I meant. It came out wrong.’

  Alex sighed. ‘You think?’

  She sat at her desk and studied Jake’s face with an attention that was visibly uncomfortable for him. ‘Making inane comments within the four walls of this station is one thing. This is something else entirely. So come on then … if it came out wrong, how was it meant, exactly?’

  Jake shifted from one foot to the other and shoved his hands into his trouser pockets. It made him look like a schoolboy summoned to the head teacher’s office, heightening Alex’s irritation still further. She wished he had a little more about him: some spark of wit that went beyond the standard bantering office humour that was his usual forte. She even suspected she’d have a greater respect for him if he was to argue with her on something rather than attempting to simply skirt around the subject.

  ‘I was trying to offer them some comfort.’

  ‘By implying that Kieran might have made a conscious decision to leave his family with this worry hanging over them? That he could have killed himself, even? How in any way might that act as a source of comfort?’

  Jake’s thin lips remained tightly clamped together, his jaw tensed as though forcing back a reaction he knew wasn’t likely to be well received. ‘They think something bad has happened to him. I was just saying maybe it hasn’t, that’s all.’

  ‘Because suicide would be somehow easier to cope with?’ Alex didn’t bother to keep the exasperation from her tone.

  ‘I never said the word suicide.’

  ‘I don’t think you needed to. The insinuation was there.’

  Jake shifted on the spot, avoiding Alex’s eye.

  ‘So what do you think might have happened then?’ she pressed him. ‘Because the rest of us are working with the evidence … it’s what we’re supposed to do. You did show up for your training, didn’t you?’

  Jake looked past her, his tongue pushed into his cheek and his focus fixed to a point on the far wall. It was clearly taking everything he had to hold back what he really wanted to say. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted eventually, his words clipped. ‘The comment was misjudged. I’m sorry.’ His tone suggested there was no remorse within him at all.

  Alex sat back. She didn’t want bad feeling among the team, particularly during a case of this scale. As irritating as DC Sullivan could be on occasion, she didn’t believe he had intended any malice. Stupidity wasn’t a crime, though at times it could prove to have just as many consequences.

  ‘I don’t want you to have any further dealings with the family for now.’ She sighed. ‘DCI Thompson’s going to get hold of this, and it’ll be for me to defend you. Again.’

  Jake nodded, still not meeting her eye. Alex was no longer sure his body language was a result of embarrassment. There was an arrogant detachment to Jake that she had always disliked, though since it apparently went unnoticed by everyone else, she had sometimes wondered if she was imagining it.

  ‘I don’t expect you to.’

  ‘You’re a part of this team. Start proving you deserve your place here, please.’

  He left the office and returned to the incident room, where shortly afterwards Alex joined him and the rest of the team. She needed to update everyone with what they now knew about Matthew Lewis and Stacey Cooper.

  ‘Right,’ she said, bringing the chatter around her to a close. ‘Here’s what we know so far. Stacey was twenty and employed as a receptionist at a health spa in Blackwood. Matthew is twenty-one, studying football coaching at the University of South Wales.’

  ‘You can get a degree in football?’ DC Dan Mason said, raising an eyebrow. He had been a member of the team for as long as Alex could remember, and over the years had proved to be a solid and reliable detective. Events of recent months had shaken him, reaching too close to home, but hadn’t stopped him from being as steadfast as ever. They had, however, made him more cynical than he’d been before.

  ‘You can get a degree in just about anything nowadays,’ Chloe responded.

  ‘Both live at home with their parents,’ Alex continued. ‘We know that on Saturday they’d been to Cardiff to have lunch with friends before going to the stadium to watch the game against Italy. After the match ended, they went to the Prince of Wales on St Mary’s Street, still with the same group of friends. Both Matthew and Stacey were drinking, and we know that the plan had been for them to stay with Matthew’s cousin Antony, who lives in Roath. I’ve spoken to Antony. He received a text from Matthew at just gone half ten to say he and Stacey wouldn’t be going over. No explanation. He tried calling Matthew but there was no answer. Matthew’s phone records confirm this.’

  ‘Argument?’

  ‘Between Stacey and Matthew? After speaking to the friends they were with in town, it seems likely. Apparently there was a bit of tension between them. It seems Matthew wasn’t happy with the way Stacey was behaving.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Dan asked.

  ‘Flirting with his friends, mostly. Matthew had kissed another girl a while back, one of his friends – he told Stacey about it, and by all accounts she seemed to be doing her best on Saturday to get her own back.’

  ‘Is that enough of a motive for him to have killed her?’

  Alex shook her head, her scepticism obvious. ‘It doesn’t make sense. As far as anyone knows, Matthew didn’t have access to a gun, and even if he had, why would he have been carrying it in the car with him on Saturday? I don’t buy it at all. This is South Wales, not Compton. We should hopefully know more once we get the details of the weapon back. Someone else was involved at some level, whether it was someone who was in the car with them that night, or someone they met along the way.’

 
; ‘Hitchhiker?’ Jake suggested.

  ‘They were young, but I don’t think either of them was stupid. Who in their right mind would stop to pick up a stranger at that time of night?’

  ‘People do stupid things all the time,’ Jake said, defending his suggestion. ‘We’d all be out of a job if they didn’t.’

  He didn’t meet her eye, but Alex caught the implication. What she had said to him in her office had hurt, and he was still smarting from it. She had to admit he had a point. Alex herself wasn’t exactly free from a history of poor decision-making. Her divorce had been followed by a string of liaisons with her ex-husband; too many to be plausibly referred to as misdemeanours. More recently, an encounter with Dan had brought her poor decision-making into the workplace. Regardless of what happened next, she still felt she had some making-up to do. The next chapter in her life was where she felt certain she could begin to right the wrongs she was guilty of.

  ‘He was driving under the influence of alcohol,’ Chloe said. ‘That’s pretty stupid for a start.’

  ‘Which leads us, perhaps,’ Alex said, shaking herself back to the present, ‘to what they were doing up on the mountain road. He lives in Blackwood, she lives in Nelson. The quickest way from Cardiff back to either of their homes would’ve been straight up the A470, particularly at that time of night, with the roads quiet. So why take the mountain route? Had he planned to meet someone there, the person who was responsible for killing Stacey?’

  She knew she had to cover all possibilities, but even as she asked the questions Alex felt in her gut that nothing this premeditated had led to the couple being up on the mountain road that evening. The silent response that came from the rest of the team seemed to suggest the same.

  ‘If that was the case,’ Dan said eventually, ‘then where’s Matthew now? Say he had organised for someone else to be there. Wouldn’t he have waited for us to arrive, made out they’d been attacked at random and then claimed he was a victim too?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Alex said with a shake of her head. ‘You’re right. It’s too implausible.’