Her Last Tomorrow (3 page)

‘I didn’t suggest anything of the sort, Mr Connor,’ McKenna says, offering a disarming smile. She glances back at the newspaper clippings and nods.

A uniformed officer knocks on the already-open door to get our attention.

‘Sorry to bother you,’ he says, holding up a mobile phone in his gloved hand. ‘But this was on the side in the kitchen. Is it yours?’

‘Yeah,’ I say, standing and holding out my hand. ‘Thanks.’

‘Ah, no, sorry,’ he replies, dropping it in a polythene bag. ‘We’ll have to take it, I’m afraid.’

I look at McKenna for some help.

‘Does Ellie have her own mobile phone?’ she asks.

‘No, of course she doesn’t,’ I reply. ‘She’s five years old.’

‘Then he’s right,’ she says. ‘It’ll need to be checked. There’s a possibility she might have tried initiating contact with someone using it. Are there any laptops or computers in the house which Ellie might have used?’

‘Well yeah, of course. I’ve got a MacBook in my office. Tasha’s got a work laptop and tablet but she’s got them with her. She’s gone to a conference. She’s on her way back, but she’s taken a train so I don’t know how long she’ll be. Ellie doesn’t really use them, though. She’s only five.’ I sit for a moment before McKenna’s last comment sinks in. ‘What do you mean by “initiating contact”?’

McKenna glances sideways at the uniformed officer, who swiftly leaves the room. ‘In a surprisingly large majority of cases concerning missing or kidnapped children, we find that the child had a prior relationship with the person who took them. Now, of course we don’t know that Ellie has been taken but we need to ensure we have all the evidence to hand and consider every possibility, especially considering her age.’

It still doesn’t quite make sense. ‘But why do you need my laptop and mobile phone?’

DI McKenna exhales heavily. ‘We’ll need to just check she hasn’t had any online contact with anyone. It’s routine.’

The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. ‘Jesus Christ, she’s five years old!’

‘You’d be surprised,’ she replies, keeping her voice much calmer than mine.

I know I need to keep my frustrations to a minimum and keep calm to maximise the chances of finding Ellie quickly.

‘Which school does Ellie go to?’ McKenna asks. ‘Have you called them to check she hasn’t gone in by herself?’

The first thing that hits my mind is the thought that I’ve got officers trawling through my belongings, confiscating my car and mobile phone and they’ve not even bothered to check whether Ellie’s just at school. ‘They called me,’ I say. ‘To ask why she wasn’t in.’

I can see the way McKenna’s looking at me and I can tell what she’s thinking. She’s thinking it’s odd that I didn’t call the school earlier and that I had to wait for them to phone me. She’s right. It is odd.

‘Which school does she go to?’ she repeats.

‘Hillgrove,’ I reply.

McKenna’s eyes narrow. ‘That’s quite a way away,’ she says. ‘You can’t be in the catchment area for that one, surely.’

‘We aren’t,’ I reply. ‘She was at Parkview for a while but Tasha had a falling out with the head over some behavioural thing of Ellie’s. And she won’t send her to St Hilda’s because it’s a faith school.’

McKenna nods. Again, I can tell what she’s thinking.

‘Just easier sometimes to go along with these things, isn’t it?’ I offer.

McKenna just smiles.

I breathe a huge sigh of relief once they’ve gone back to the station to circulate the photo of Ellie on their system. On more than one occasion while McKenna and Brennan were here I felt like a suspect in my own home, as if what had already happened that morning wasn’t bad enough.

I keep running through that moment in my head. All sense of time has been warped by the adrenaline and sheer panic, but I can only have been in the house a minute at the most. She can’t have got to the end of the road on her own in that time, which means someone must have taken her. It’s the only logical explanation.

In that time, the person who took her must have been nearby. I rack my brains, trying to think what I saw when I put Ellie in the car. Was anyone walking past? Were there any cars parked up? Try as I might, I can’t visualise anything. All I can see is the empty car seat.

I look out the living room window and try to jog my memory, but it’s no use. My eyes scan past the end of the drive, across the road and up at the front window of number 39 across the road. I see the silhouette of the man who lives there, standing as still as a statue in his front room, his shape outlined by the sun that streams through from the back of his house. A few moments later, he walks away and his figure recedes.

There have been stories and rumours about this guy. Derek, his name is. He must be well into his late eighties by now. He was easily in his sixties when I was at school, when we lived about three quarters of a mile away from here.

We used to have to walk down Rushmere Road each day to get to school, and Derek would often be seen standing at his front window, just staring out. On the rare occasions that he’d ventured outside, there had been all sorts of stories about what he’d said or done to kids at the school. I’d always assumed they were just silly schoolboy rumours made up about a lonely old guy who lived on his own. I never thought anything more of it.

When we came to look at this house before buying it, it did cross my mind but only fleetingly. After all, the guy was overwhelmingly likely to be completely harmless, if a little odd, and for all we knew he didn’t live there any more anyway. Of course, since then we had come to realise that he did still live there.

Being Derek’s neighbour gave us a completely different insight. He was no longer the weird recluse, but the man who always knew everything that was going on in Rushmere Road. He’d been here since the houses were built and this was his domain. Whenever we’d had a party, we’d invariably get a visit from the local police at some point, saying there’d been a complaint from a neighbour.

Having spoken to the neighbours on both sides about this, they’d both denied complaining and said they’d both had the same issues in the past and had suspected Derek. Of course, nothing had ever been done about it as the noise would’ve been barely audible from the road, let alone Derek’s house. He just didn’t want to see other people having fun. As far as I’m concerned, living on your own and as you want to is absolutely fine by me, but don’t try to stop other people having fun.

I don’t know of any of our neighbours having ever had a conversation with Derek. The only time anyone ever sees him is if they happen to be looking out of their window at eight o’clock in the evening when, regular as clockwork, Derek takes a black bin bag out of the house and puts it in his wheelie-bin.

In a roundabout way, he got what he wanted anyway. We haven’t had a party in years and I don’t recall any of our neighbours even having had the TV up loud.

A thought occurs to me. The amount of time Derek spends standing at his front window, he’s more likely than anyone to have seen something. His front window is right opposite ours, and he could see our whole driveway. Any sign of something going on across the road and he’d be straight there with his binoculars out.

Before I’ve even thought about what I’m going to say, I’ve slipped my shoes on and I’m out of the door, jogging down the driveway and across the road to number 39. I knock on the door and wait, catching my breath. There’s no answer.
 

I knock again, knowing damn well Derek’s in as I’ve just seen him. I think maybe he’s a bit deaf, so I knock louder. He’d better not be deaf, especially not after complaining about the noise so much. After a few moments I sigh and walk back down his drive. As I reach the end, I spin on my heels and catch sight of him disappearing behind a curtain as my eyes meet the window.

I march back up his drive and knock on the window.

‘Derek, I just want to speak to you. Please. I’ve got a problem and I want to know if you saw anything. I need your help.’

Silence. Well, that went well. There’s no way I can force this guy to open his door. The best I can do is mention him to the police as a potential witness and hope they don’t think I’m losing the plot. They’ll have to speak to him at some point anyway if they go door to door.

As I get back to the end of his driveway and start to look down the road to see if it’s safe to cross, I hear the sound of Derek’s front door unlatching. I slow and turn around just as it opens. I walk back up the driveway carefully, trying not to seem too anxious or keen. Derek just looks at me, his eyes narrowed, looking both concerned and suspicious at the same time.

‘Thank you,’ I say, unable to think of anything else. I stand a good fifteen feet away from him, not wanting to get any closer. I consider this an achievement as it is. ‘I just need your help. I’ve lost my daughter. My little girl, Ellie. She disappeared this morning. She was in the car, then I went inside to get something and I came back and she was gone. I wondered if you saw anything. Maybe a strange car, people acting suspiciously. Anything.’

Derek looks at me for a few moments longer, then lowers his eyes to the floor. ‘I didn’t see anything,’ he says, as he takes a step back and closes the door.

I feel completely helpless. There’s no other word for it. I can either blindly walk the streets, as I did for a good half an hour after speaking to Derek, or I can do as the police told me and wait at home in case Ellie returns.

When I got back to the house I sat on a stool at the breakfast bar in the kitchen and rested my head on my arms on the counter. I tried to calm my racing mind and think more clearly, trying to remember what I’d learnt from these ‘mindfulness’ websites. I must have nodded off, because the next thing I hear is the front door closing and Tasha marching through into the kitchen.

‘Oh my god, Nick,’ she says, flinging her arms around me. ‘I couldn’t phone on the way back. I tried, but I had no signal and just as it came back my battery died. I was going to charge it up at work, but—’

She stops speaking as I sob onto her shoulder.

‘Where are the police?’ she finally says as I wipe my eyes.

‘They’re out looking. There were two here earlier. Two PCs and a couple of detectives. They wanted to know more about her, what she looked like. I gave them a photo from the living room.’

‘What happened? Where could she have gone?’ she asks.

I shake my head slowly and sadly. If only I could answer that question. I’ve tried to answer it myself a hundred and one times already this morning.

‘I don’t know. I put her in the car, belted her up and then she said she’d forgotten something. A picture of Miss Williams. I told her to forget it and we’d take it in tomorrow, but you know what she gets like. I ran back to the house, grabbed the picture, came back out and she was gone.’

‘How long were you in there?’ Tasha asks.

‘A minute. If that.’

‘Oh god, Nick. Why couldn’t you have taken her with you?’

I feel slightly as if I’m being accused of something. I know there’s no justification for leaving a five-year-old girl on her own, but this still doesn’t seem right.

‘It was a minute, Tash. Seconds. We were already late for school and I just wanted to get in and out again. Listen,’ I say, trying to pacify her but also trying to convince myself. ‘The police said she probably isn’t far. She might just be hiding in a neighbour’s garden somewhere, thinking it’s all one big game. You know what kids are like at her age.’ I don’t mention my suspicions, fast becoming assumptions, that she’s been kidnapped.

‘Jesus Christ, Nick. How could you be late? You were up at five!’

I’ve got no response to that.

We sit in the living room and can barely look at each other.

‘We should be doing something,’ Tasha says. ‘We can’t just sit here.’

‘I know,’ I say. ‘I feel helpless but there’s nothing we can do. We need to wait here in case she comes home.’

Tasha’s head darts up and she looks at me. ‘What do you mean
in case
?’

‘I mean in case she comes back to the house on her own before the police find her,’ I say, trying not to panic her. Tasha under stress is just about the worst kind of Tasha there is. I need to try and keep things calm for all our sakes.

‘Was the car locked?’ she asks after a few moments of silence.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I was gone for a minute at the most,’ I say, sighing.

‘A lot can happen in a minute, Nick. A lot
did
happen in a minute!’ she replies, her voice growing in volume.

‘Look, I know it’s my fault, alright? It was a fucking stupid thing to do. Don’t you think I don’t know that?’ I hope the pleading in my eyes is enough to defuse her anger.

Before Tasha can say anything else, the doorbell goes. I go to the front door and answer it. It’s McKenna again. I usher her through into the living room, trying to read their faces, hoping they have some news.

‘Good news first,’ she says, fishing my mobile phone out of her pocket. ‘You can have this back. They’re almost finished with the laptop, too. Another officer will drop that by later.’

I don’t even need to ask if there was anything of interest on it. I know there wasn’t.