First One Missing (2 page)

As far as Jemima was concerned, famous was being on
The X Factor
or
Made in Chelsea
. Everything else was hardly worth bothering with.

Caitlin already looked close to tears. She was so easily upset these days, wearing her emotions on the surface like an extra skin.

‘You’re just jealous because you never get picked for anything,’ she told her sister, her voice perilously high. Emma longed to squeeze in next to her at the table and enfold her in her arms and press and press until all her worries disappeared. But she knew Caitlin would squirm free of her embrace, and Jemima would triumphantly add it to her ever growing dossier of evidence that Emma favoured her youngest. So instead she stayed anchored to the kitchen worktop spooning ground coffee into the cafetiere as Jemima responded with an infuriatingly sarcastic laugh. In the background, the exhaustingly upbeat radio presenter bantered with the newsreader who was about to read the headlines.

Caitlin’s face had now become blotchy with frustration. Finally she let loose with a volley of angry phrases which Jemima countered with equal vitriol. Emma hesitated, wondering whether to intervene, knowing if she did she risked becoming the focus for their combined discontent. Then over the top of the girls’ high-pitched voices, she heard on the radio a name that cut right through the cacophony of sibling anger, through the whirring of the microwave as it heated milk for the coffee.

Tilly Reid.

At that same moment, Emma’s mobile phone began to ring. Jemima had set it to blare out a ubiquitous pop song which increased in volume with each passing second until it filled the room.

Even without looking at the display she knew the name that would flash up there.
Leanne Miller.

Conscious that the girls had halted hostilities mid-fight and were listening in silent anticipation, Emma pressed the green phone symbol to answer the call.

‘Emma? I’m so sorry,’ began the voice she hadn’t heard in nearly a year, the voice of all her nightmares rolled into one.

Emma didn’t wait to hear what Leanne was sorry about. She didn’t need to.

‘There’s been another one, hasn’t there?’

2

There were some parts of the job that got you down, no two ways about it.

Leanne wasn’t just talking about the emotional stuff. You expected a bit of angst when you were dealing with families suddenly plunged into a living hell. Anyway, she was supposed to be trained to deal with that sort of thing. ‘Stress management’ was something they were very big on in those Family Liaison Officer training sessions. Yeah, right! She remembered going to her first assignment equipped with all these strategies and techniques for dealing with the pressure, keeping her emotional distance, blah blah blah. She’d felt nervous, but prepared, quietly convinced she was ready for whatever she might encounter, the commendations of her supervisor still ringing in her ears. Now she cringed to think of how naive she’d been – as if stress was something that could be managed, like accounts or office admin. As if human emotions could be neatly packaged up and kept at a nicely appropriate distance.

Leanne hadn’t been there five minutes before she realized there was no training for dealing with grief. You could only witness it and absorb it. Course she was careful not to use that word ‘absorb’ at the debriefing sessions with Occupational Health. You couldn’t really – not if you wanted to stay doing this job. Instead, she might say ‘empathize’, as in ‘I empathized with the family’s feelings’. But she was always quick to add that she remained objective.
I know my first job is to investigate and never to counsel
, she told them. She knew all the jargon. She’d been doing it off and on for nearly eleven years.

Training or no training, some days it could really get you down, and today was one of those days.

She’d been woken up shortly after six by a call from Desmond. As soon as she’d seen his name on the screen, her heart practically hurled itself up through her mouth. Detective Chief Inspector Desmond wasn’t the type to place an early call to wish you a good morning or to check you’d done your positive affirmations for the day.

‘We have another murder on our hands,’ he told her. No preamble. No pleasantries.

As Leanne snapped her phone off, Will raised himself up on to his elbow and gave her the quizzical look that could still melt her, with his right eyebrow arching up into his floppy brown hair. Will knew better than to talk to her after she’d been woken up by the phone. Well, after she’d been woken up, full stop. ‘You’re like an old motor,’ Leanne’s ex-husband Pete used to say. ‘Need a lot of warming up in the morning.’

Leanne sat back against the pillows for a while, trying to take in the implications of what had just happened, but her brain seemed to be operating a half-hour delay behind the rest of her.

After a while, Will got up, wrapping Leanne’s old towelling dressing gown around his skinny frame, and padded away to make the tea. Leanne still couldn’t really get her head around someone making her tea in the mornings. She couldn’t remember Pete ever bringing her up a drink to bed throughout their entire twelve-year marriage. And he’d rather have gone downstairs stark naked than wear something of hers. He’d have called it ‘emasculating’.

Leanne lay back in the bed that used to belong to her and Pete but now belonged just to her (and Will sometimes), on top of the worn blue and white gingham duvet she and Pete had got as a wedding present, as Will clattered around the kitchen down the hall.

She tried to focus her thoughts on the conversation she’d just had. Or, more to the point, the conversation she was going to have to have now that she’d had the conversation she’d just had.

It was fair to say Leanne was not looking forward to calling Emma Reid.

Desmond had assured her there had been no leaks to the media.
Yet
. Was ever a three-letter word so weighted with unspoken pressure? Leanne knew that dead children were gold dust to the media. When she’d first started doing the job, she’d been shocked by the lengths to which reporters would go to get a story, trotting out the same old lines: ‘People find it cathartic to talk about it.’ ‘Maybe your story will prompt someone who knows something to break their silence.’ And the odious last resort, ‘If you don’t talk to us we’ll still write the story anyway. Wouldn’t you prefer to have some control over what we say?’ That awful
Chronicle
journalist Sally Freeland being a case in point.

Since getting together with Will, she’d become much more cynical. Not that Will was exactly the archetypal hard-bitten hack. As features editor on a small-circulation marketing magazine he was far more likely to be writing about the latest perfume campaign than a crime investigation, but still he knew how the business operated, and as a result Leanne liked to believe she was now less shockable. She knew it was only a matter of time before someone from the media called Emma Reid asking for her reaction to the news. It was imperative that she got in there first.
Imperative
. Already she was talking like Desmond.

When Will came back into the room, carrying two mugs of steaming tea, Leanne was still exactly where he’d left her.

‘Yours, I believe.’ He extended the mug she always used, the one that had ‘Diva’ emblazoned across the side – a present from Pete in better times.

As Leanne blew across the surface of the tea, Will studied her face, looking for clues as to what was going on.

‘All right,’ she conceded. Although he hadn’t said a word, Will’s endless, exaggerated patience was always guaranteed to push her towards indiscretion. ‘One of my old cases has, well, come to life again.’

‘Tilly Reid?’

Leanne looked up sharply. Then she made a face. The kind of face that says, ‘You know I can’t possibly talk about this.’

It was at times like this she felt like she might actually miss Pete. Not because Pete was so emotionally supportive or anything, but because he was on the force, so at least he had some idea of what she was going through.

‘Something’s happened that means the media are going to be raking everything up again,’ she told Will, as cryptically as she could. ‘So I’ve got to get back in touch with the family. Like, right this minute.’ Still she made no attempt to move.

Will continued to gaze at her levelly. The towelling dressing gown, faded purple with stains that told a hundred stories, was gaping open at the front to reveal his pale, almost hairless chest and she averted her eyes as if it was indecent.

‘And, let me guess, you really, really don’t want to,’ he said softly, stroking her arm.

Leanne almost allowed herself to relax, but then she stopped herself short. Even though it sometimes seemed like Will could read her mind, in this instance he couldn’t possibly know just how much she really didn’t want to make that call.

‘It’s the same every time,’ she blurted out. ‘I let myself believe it’s the last one. And then it happens all over again. And there I am again, ringing on that bloody doorbell …

‘She hates me, you know,’ she told Will, not even bothering to pretend he didn’t know exactly who ‘she’ might be. ‘I’m the Grim Reaper in a skirt as far as she’s concerned.’

‘Can you blame her?’

‘I suppose not.’ Leanne was grudging, but the truth was, obviously she couldn’t blame Emma Reid for the way she tensed up whenever Leanne came within a foot of her. When Leanne last appeared, it was because another little girl had died. Someone else’s daughter, someone else’s sister/niece/grandchild. Two more dead now since Emma’s Tilly, and of course before Tilly there’d been Megan Purvis, the original ‘angel’, as the tabloids had dubbed them all. And still Leanne kept popping up, the uninvited fairy at the christening – and never with the one thing Emma most wanted to hear. That Tilly’s murderer had been found.

While Will went off for a shower, Leanne leaned back against the headboard, both hands clasped around her mug. If her eyes had been focused, she might have found herself staring at her own reflection in the mirror propped up against the wall opposite the bed, or at the overflowing laundry basket next to it. (‘Those clothes will get up and walk away of their own accord if you leave them much longer,’ is what Pete would have said if he’d seen it, like the washing was somehow her responsibility alone.) But that morning her surroundings failed to register.

Instead she was picturing Emma Reid, as she’d first seen her – shiny caramel-coloured hair pulled back into one of those styles certain women can do where the hair is kind of tied up messily, with some strands artlessly coming loose. It was one of those styles that looks really casual, but Leanne had tried it herself often enough on her own wayward light-brown hair (‘beige’, Pete had teased her) to know that it was nowhere near as careless as it appeared.

The loose strands of hair framed a small, pretty, flawlessly complexioned face. She was the kind of woman who knew how to do make-up so that it looked like she wasn’t wearing any. Leanne remembered she’d been wearing tight faded jeans tucked into knee-length leather boots and Leanne had thought about her own boots that barely fitted around her calves and wondered how many inches she’d have to lose off each leg to get them to slide on over thick denim jeans. And then she’d felt bad for thinking about something so trivial. She didn’t get that so much these days, the guilt. She understood now there were no rules for grief or grieving, no restrictions on how you should or shouldn’t think. One minute you could be facing something so terrible it made you question everything you knew about the world, and the next you’d be reminding yourself to pay the gas bill. It was just how it was.

When she first met Emma Reid, Tilly was only missing. Guy, Emma’s tall, strong-jawed husband, had been in full motion, striding around the house. There’s lots you can
do
when a child is missing – people to ring, searches to organize – and Guy Reid was a
doer
. So he was in full flow, working out strategies, thinking of solutions, of ‘best-case scenarios’. He was some kind of troubleshooter in the City as far as Leanne could make out, one of those people who spend their lives bandying about phrases like ‘best-case scenario’. That was before there stopped being anything for him to do, when all that ‘doing’ energy inside him turned to something else and the best-case scenario turned out to be worse than anything he could have imagined.

Emma had clearly been used to her husband achieving those best-case scenarios. She didn’t seem to have quite taken in the seriousness of the situation – hadn’t even made that link to the death of the Purvis girl two years before. She’d had that look of someone waiting for a misunderstanding to be cleared up, as if the shop assistant had given her change from a ten instead of a twenty.

Leanne was the one who’d had to break the news to them when they found the body two days later. It wasn’t something you’d wish on your worst enemy. The SIO had offered to be with her while she did it, but he’d done so in a way that left Leanne in no doubt that he’d rather pull his own toenails out without anaesthetic, as she’d told Pete later on.

So she’d done it on her own, leaning forward on the Reids’ brown leather sofa to touch Emma’s knee across the coffee table. They were taught about body language and comforting gestures. They weren’t taught about how it looks when the life drains out of a person right in front of your very eyes, or how it feels to be looked at as though you yourself were responsible for the very thing you were describing. They weren’t taught how inadequate the word ‘sorry’ can seem.

By 7.45, Leanne still hadn’t called her.

At least she’d started to get dressed by then. Normally she’d just pull on the first things out of the ‘work’ side of her wardrobe but today she chose more carefully. Clearly this was not going to be an ordinary day and she wanted to be armoured up, by which she meant wearing clothes that didn’t look like they’d been scraped out of the bottom of the dirty-laundry basket. One thing about Emma Reid – even in the depths of her grief, she still matched her socks to her outfit. Leanne was lucky if she even matched her socks to each other.