The Missing (25 page)

‘Fitted in? Fitted in with what?’

Vickers gave me a look. ‘You don’t think that this is connected with what’s happened to poor little Jenny Shepherd? Why else do you think Blake and I are here?’

‘But I don’t see –’ I began. He put his hand on my arm.

‘Sarah, look at the facts. We’ve got a young girl dead. This man, who was known to her, who is one of her teachers, turns up far from home in a street that, as the crow flies, is not far at all from where Jenny lived. He’s been half-killed by person or persons unknown. Jenny’s suffered a violent death. This is too much of a coincidence for me to ignore it. Anything that happens on this estate – anything – could have something to do with Jenny’s murder. I’ve now got two very violent crimes that are well outside the usual run of criminal activity in this area. If I look at each of them in isolation, I’ll make a bit of progress here and there; I might get lucky and run across a witness, or my murderer might just be waiting for a chance to confess. Not very likely, but it does happen. If I keep them
separate
, I’m waiting for a breakthrough that might never come on both of them. But put them together, and I start seeing all sorts of patterns, do you understand? Points of coincidence. It’s like algebra; you need two parts of the problem to get the third.’ The DCI’s face was bright with enthusiasm for his job; he really loved what he did. I was momentarily sidetracked by the reference to algebra, my mind off chasing a rabbit that was the memory of being told I had no mathematical capabilities, none at all …

Vickers went on, ‘Now, don’t be fooled into thinking I’ve decided that whoever killed Jenny is also to blame for this. It’s a possibility, and it’s got to be explored, but I’m not fixated on that, you understand. There are lots of ways these two crimes can be connected, Sarah. Lots of ways.’

I caught a sideways look from those sharp eyes and, like a good pupil, offered a suggestion. ‘Revenge?’

‘Right you are.’ He beamed at me in an avuncular way. ‘Our boy Geoff could have been up to his neck in what happened to Jenny, and it doesn’t take a genius to spot that. He’s a bit of a lad, I’ve heard. We know Jenny was sleeping with someone, and he certainly had the opportunity to get to know her, to tell her she was special, to get her to do whatever he asked of her. Wouldn’t be the first time a teacher took advantage, would it?’

‘But that doesn’t fit in with what Jenny told Rachel,’ I objected. ‘Or the photograph she showed her.’

‘I don’t,’ Vickers said carefully, ‘believe every word of what Rachel told us. Jenny might have lied to her, to put her off the scent. And Rachel might be lying to us, even now. Someone might be trying to get us to look in the
wrong
direction. We haven’t found the photograph, you know, or anything else that would prove Rachel was telling us the truth.’

I couldn’t believe that Geoff had been sleeping with Jenny; he wasn’t like that, but I knew that the chief inspector wouldn’t listen to me any more than he had listened to Rachel. ‘Jenny was pregnant. Can’t you check the DNA to find out if he was the father?’

‘Don’t worry, we will. But it will take a while for the results to come back. Besides, the point just now isn’t whether Geoff Turnbull was guilty of abusing Jenny Shepherd, but whether someone might
believe
that he was. Someone puts two and two together. Maybe they have a bit more information than we do. Maybe it’s just a hunch. But whatever it is, they feel they have to do something to get justice for Jenny, and they aren’t prepared to wait for the Old Bill to get around to it.’

In my mind’s eye I saw Michael Shepherd, a man transformed by grief, a man with a dark look in his eyes, and knew that Vickers saw the same thing. I could imagine the explosive power that might be unleashed if that combination of rage, guilt and suspicion acquired a target.

‘Andy,’ Vickers said, with a nod in Blake’s direction, ‘will be having a word with interested parties in due course. We can’t go waking them up in the middle of the night without any evidence, but it’s worth a chat, don’t you think?’

I could see how it fitted together neatly, but I was still sceptical. I would never, ever believe that Geoff was capable of abusing a child, and not just because he had been so single-minded about pursuing me. It just didn’t fit in with
what
I knew of him, his enthusiastic interest in women, not girls. I found it hard to conceive that he could have abused her and it was impossible to accept that he might have killed her. Then again, I had seen him agitated a few hours before, and I couldn’t shake the doubt that made me feel. I didn’t know for certain what Geoff was capable of. I had to assume that he was guilty of
something
, or else why would he have ended up getting his head bashed in?

I was also feeling guilty on my own account. I suspected that Vickers would have liked to know about another violent incident, the attack on me. I didn’t have his faith in the power of coincidence, but it would be another part of the picture he was creating. But as I opened my mouth to tell him about it, the words died unspoken. First and foremost, my reasons for not reporting it were still valid. Secondly, he might not understand those reasons. And thirdly, I still didn’t think it was relevant. If I had been right all along and Geoff was the one who attacked me, well, he was now well and truly out of the picture. I wouldn’t need to worry about him while he was in hospital.

But the main reason why I didn’t say anything to Vickers was more fundamental: I didn’t trust him. And I was pretty sure that he didn’t trust me. Whether it was that he was picking up on the confusion I was feeling about Geoff, or whether he had ideas of his own, there was, for the first time, an edge in what he was saying to me. And with that in mind, it behoved me to be wary. With an effort I dragged myself back to the present, to the reality of cold feet and a terrible urge to yawn, and prepared to match wits with the policeman.

Vickers had wound down to silence, but now he turned to me again with a gleam in his shrewd eyes. ‘If you knew anything that might be relevant, given what I’ve been saying – if you knew there were connections that I should know about, is what I mean – you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?’

‘Well, you’re leaving out the obvious one,’ I said stiffly, knowing that Vickers had nudged me in this direction, knowing that to avoid mentioning it would arouse more suspicion than it would allay. ‘I knew Jenny too. I taught her. I found her body. And all of this –’ I waved towards the car, not wanting to think about what it signified. ‘– has happened right on my doorstep. So I’m right in the middle of your coincidences, wouldn’t you say?’

Vickers smiled thinly and I saw with sadness that I had been right to be suspicious.
But I liked you
… I gathered together all of the logic I could muster. ‘However, I think there’s a flaw in your reasoning.’

He raised his eyebrows.

‘This has nothing to do with me. I don’t know anything about what happened to either of them.’ There was a thin, thready quality to my voice that spoke of exhaustion. ‘Sometimes coincidences are just that. Why does there have to be a connection between the two?’
Or even three?
More than ever, I was sure I had been right not to give Vickers that little piece of ammunition.

‘There doesn’t have to be a connection, but for now I’m going to assume there is. Just because you aren’t willing or able to see it doesn’t mean you don’t know something that would be of interest to me. Two crimes like this
–
two violent assaults – and of course I’m going to see a link.’

‘I think you’re looking for patterns that don’t exist because you don’t have the first idea what happened to Jenny. Add
that
into your equation.’

‘We have various lines of enquiry. We’re not at liberty to discuss them with members of the public at present, but this is an active investigation.’

‘Well, that’s not what it sounds like,’ I said waspishly. ‘It sounds like you’ve got no ideas and no proof, and you’re trying to make this fit some hypothesis that you’ve been working on since Jenny’s body was discovered. I know what you police do. If you don’t have evidence, you start getting creative.’ The face of my poor father, interviewed time and time again, came into my head. The cloud of suspicion that had surrounded our family, that could have been dispelled by the investigating officer if he had only cared to. I spoke again, my voice low and passionate. ‘You can forget about me implicating myself. I’m not involved in this, and I don’t know why circumstances are conspiring to make you think that I am. All I know is that I’ve done my best to cooperate from the start. I don’t know why this has happened to Geoff, or why Jenny was murdered, and if I did I would have told you long ago.’

‘We’ll see,’ Vickers said, his eyes cold. ‘We’ll see.’

‘Are you finished with me?’

‘For now. But you can expect us to be in touch.’ Vickers started to stroll towards Blake’s car. ‘Don’t go on any long holidays, OK?’

I stalked back to the house. In the hall mirror, my eyes
were
bright with anger and my hair was wild. My lips were compressed into a hard line, and it was with an effort that I relaxed them. I knew Vickers had intended to rattle me, and it had worked. But I also felt that I didn’t know anything that could be of use to him. The mugging was a red herring, but I couldn’t tell him about it now – I’d had every opportunity to mention it, after all. So now I was hiding something from the police, feeling guilty about it, and looking guilty too. If I wasn’t careful, this was all going to go very wrong indeed.

The one thing that I didn’t want to think about was Geoff, but as soon as I acknowledged that to myself, I couldn’t think about anything else. I checked the clock in the kitchen – almost five – and gave up on the idea of going back to bed. As I made a mug of tea, I slowly worked through the facts one by one. Geoff was in hospital. That was bad. Very bad. He had head injuries. My stomach squeezed at the thought. He could die. He could survive, but barely. He could be permanently compromised. He could recover fully. I wanted to believe that the last outcome was the most likely, but I just didn’t know. Blake and Vickers had looked grim when they talked about him. I stirred the milk in, no longer sure that I wanted to drink the tea but committed to making it. Were they trying to make me feel guilty so I would tell them everything I knew?

I sat down at the kitchen table and watched the steam curling up from the mug. The ironic thing was, in spite of my shouting at Vickers, I was inclined to agree with him. I did feel guilty. If I had just been a bit nicer to Geoff – if I had acted on the feeling that someone was watching
me
– if I had got them to investigate who attacked me – then everything might have been different. Although I hadn’t tried to put myself there, somehow I was at the centre of everything. It would have been nice to understand why.

A blackbird is digging in the lawn on a sunny evening in April. I sit on the doorstep and wriggle my toes inside my shoes. The rules are very clear: I have permission to sit there, but not to leave the front garden. If anyone speaks to me, I am to go indoors and call for Mum. Warned away from people, I have become very shy.

The blackbird is beautiful, a glossy bird with round, amber-red eyes that stare at me unblinkingly as he bounces around the lawn, working at the grass to pull up clumps of moss. He is building a nest in the holly bush next door, hauling as much as he can carry to where his brown-feathered mate is organising the construction. She keeps up a steady stream of encouraging song. I am shading my eyes, trying to see her in the branches, when a voice says hello. The blackbird shoots up from the lawn in a whirr of startled wings. I jump to my feet, on the point of running indoors, but the man
standing
at the end of the drive looks friendly. He’s holding a dog on a lead, a red setter, and the dog is prancing about excitedly, tail wagging.

‘Nice evening, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I say, almost without making a sound.

‘Is this your house?’

I nod.

‘We’ve just moved in down the road. Number seventeen.’ He nods towards it. ‘I’ve got a little girl around your age – Emma. She’s nine. How old are you?’

‘I’m nine too,’ I say.

‘Great. Well, maybe you can come around and play with her sometime. She’s looking for a new friend.’

I nod, beaming. A new friend. Already I am imagining a girl as dark as I am fair, a girl who isn’t afraid of heights or spiders, a girl who likes animal stories and ballet and dressing up in old clothes to act out scenes from books.

Behind me, the front door opens so violently that it crashes back against the wall inside the house.

‘Get out of here!’ My mother’s face is contorted, almost unrecognisable. ‘Leave my daughter alone!’

The man takes a step back, pulling the dog behind him, stiff with shock. ‘I’m sorry – I – I should have thought. It’s just – we’ve just moved in down the street and—’

‘He has a daughter,’ I say to Mum, wanting her to understand, wanting her to stop looking at him like that.

‘Don’t you teach her not to talk to strangers? Don’t you care about her safety?’ Her voice is too loud.

The man apologises quickly and walks away. He doesn’t say goodbye. I hope that he will come back with his daughter, that we can still be friends once I’ve explained about my mother and Charlie and the rule.

Mum waits until the man is out of sight, then grabs my arm, hard. ‘Go inside and go to your room! I told you not to talk to anyone.’

‘But—’ I begin, anxious to defend myself.

‘Inside!’ She pulls me through the door and flings me towards the stairs, letting go of my arm when I am off balance so I fall, knocking my head against the banister. I begin to cry, wailing for my father, for my mother, for comfort of some kind.

Mum is standing with her back to the front door, leaning against it with her hands to her mouth. Her eyes are round and I can see her skirt vibrating as she shakes. There’s a movement to my left. My father is standing in the living-room doorway, eyes not on me but on Mum. I stop screaming, but keep up a steady whimpering to remind Dad that I am there, on the floor, hurt.