Missing (6 page)

‘So what did you make of all that, Detective Constable?’ he asked, accelerating carefully over a humpback bridge to start heading down the tree-lined arc of the drive.

Pleased to be asked, Joy inhaled thoughtfully. ‘Well, if we’re to believe all we were told,’ she began, ‘I’d say Mrs Avery sounds like a pretty mixed-up sort of woman. Kind of sad though, I think, rather than mad. I can’t make up my mind whether he cares about her or not. On the one hand he seems quite defensive where she’s concerned, but three weeks is a long time for someone you love to be missing and not report it, even if she does have a history of taking off on her own.’

Sadler was nodding.

‘Also,’ Joy continued, ‘did you notice how he spoke about her in the past tense when he said, “She didn’t have a wide circle of friends”?’

Impressed, Sadler said, ‘Yes, I did. A slip of the tongue? Or something more sinister?’

Joy glanced at him.

‘The daughter’s bothering me,’ he said, hooting the horn to send a family of pheasants scuttling out of the way. ‘I think she’s probably even more mixed up than the mother. And lonely.’

Joy’s eyes widened in surprise. Sadler didn’t have much of a reputation for being the touchy-feely type, but on the other hand, he did have three girls of his own.

‘I don’t think being a part of that family has been
easy,’
he expanded, as they juddered over a cattle grid before turning out of the gates into the country lane.

In complete agreement with that, Joy remarked, ‘It’ll be interesting to hear what the psychiatrist has to say.’

‘Mmm, won’t it just.’

Joy turned to rub a circle in the steamy passenger window. ‘I definitely got the impression he was holding something back,’ she went on.

‘I don’t think there’s any doubt of it. In fact the daughter told us as much.’

‘You mean when she said about what made her mother all screwed up?’

He nodded. ‘And the fact that no one’s allowed to mention it. It’s going to be interesting to find out what our trusty team has dug up on the Averys while we’ve been away.’

Joy took out her mobile to check if there were any messages from the officers they’d left trawling old records, but finding none she tucked it away again and stayed thoughtfully silent as she gazed out at the passing hedgerows and small glimpses of rolling fields beyond. They were travelling away from the moor now, but having been born and brought up in these parts she never failed to feel its presence whether it was visible or not. ‘So what next, sir?’ she finally asked.

‘That depends on the CCTV. If it’s not showing Jacqueline Avery getting onto a train I’ll recommend contacting the local media. Maybe someone will remember seeing her at the station either getting into a taxi, or being picked up by someone else after her husband drove away.’

‘And if it does show her getting on a train?’

‘We’ll liaise with the transport police, and the Met at Kensington and Chelsea.’ He made a soft tutting sound
as
he thought. ‘What time did the housekeeper tell the response team Mr and Mrs Avery left the house?’ he asked.

‘Twenty past nine, and he was back an hour and a half later. That could work, even with the stop-off at Sainsbury’s she mentioned.’

‘Mmm,’ was all Sadler said.

‘Are you going to recommend a search?’

‘Not immediately. We can’t just go blundering in without any solid reason to.’

‘But three weeks, sir. No one lets their wife go missing for that long without reporting it.’

Sadler cast her a glance. ‘And there was me thinking he had you all suckered in and eating out of his hand,’ he teased.

Joy flushed. ‘I’m not going to deny he’s attractive,’ she retorted, ‘and powerful and charming and seriously rich … Which reminds me, do you think we should check out his finances?’

‘I most certainly do.’

‘And this Vivienne woman? It might be interesting to get an idea of what she knows about her ex-lover’s wife.’

‘If he is an ex.’

Joy turned to look at him.

‘If the relationship was serious enough to cause Mrs Avery to stage a suicide and murder attempt,’ he said, ‘then we need to look into it. We also need to find out what reports were written up at the time of the incident with the daughter, because something must have been. Do we know how long the Averys have been married?’

Without consulting her notes, Joy said, ‘Seventeen years.’

‘So if he’s forty-five now, that would make him
twenty-eight
when he got hitched and her …?’

‘Twenty-three.’

‘And the delightful Kelsey came along three years later, give or take.’ He slowed up behind a straw-bundled tractor and began tapping his fingers on the wheel. ‘Give me your first hunch on this, Detective Constable,’ he said after a while. ‘Are we going to see Mrs Avery again, or aren’t we?’

Knowing how Sadler liked hunches Joy sat with the question, trying to get a feel for what she was thinking. In the end all she said was, ‘I don’t know, sir. I really don’t know.’

After showing the police out and going to check that Mrs Davies hadn’t been unduly upset by their visit, Miles returned to the sitting room to find Kelsey slumped in one of the armchairs, staring into the fire.

‘So what happens now?’ she asked, as he flopped down on the sofa the detectives had vacated.

‘I’m not sure,’ he answered, looking and sounding extremely tired. ‘I didn’t ask.’

There was a paleness around her mouth as she said, ‘I reckon you should have told them everything.’

With a short sigh he began to massage his brow. ‘They’ll find out on their own,’ he said.

Her eyes were clouded with misgiving as she sat watching him, but with his head back he wasn’t able to see her expression. ‘What about the row you had with Mum the night before she left?’ she asked.

His hand stopped. ‘What row?’

‘She told me about it.’

Lifting his head, he looked at her closely. ‘So you have seen her – or at least spoken to her?’ he said.

She shrugged. ‘Not since that night. I called to find
out
who was picking me up from school and she told me she’d have to call back because you were in the middle of a row.’

His face was starting to darken. ‘Why have you never mentioned this before?’ he asked.

She coloured slightly. ‘I don’t really know. I mean … So how come you didn’t tell the police?’

‘Because there was no row,’ he answered. ‘We had a discussion which led to her starting again about Vivienne, so I went to bed. We even slept in separate rooms.’

‘So nothing new there,’ Kelsey said acidly.

Sighing, Miles let his head fall back again and stared up at the ceiling.

After a while Kelsey went to sit with him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, moving into the circle of his arm.

‘It’s OK,’ he said, stroking her hair.

‘It’s going to get into the papers, about Mum, isn’t it?’

‘I expect so.’ He sighed again, knowing how eager his enemies would be to make a circus out of this.

Reaching for his hand, she wound her fingers around his. ‘You don’t like the police, do you?’ she said. ‘I could tell. I think they could too.’

‘It’s not about liking. It’s about what happened in the past.’

They sat quietly then, listening to the wind hurtling about the chimney, and feeling the presence of the police in the room as though their curiosity was lingering.

In the end Kelsey said, ‘What are we going to do if she doesn’t turn up?’

Without hesitation he said, ‘She will.’

‘But if she …’

‘She’ll be fine.’

She lifted her head and waited for his eyes to come to hers. ‘Maybe we’d be better off without her,’ she said bleakly.

‘You know you don’t mean that.’

She looked away, staring at nothing, until, in a voice he could barely hear, she said, ‘No, but you do.’

Chapter Three

GARETH CRITCHLEY LOOKED
like a man whose relationship with personal hygiene was in need of therapy. His crumpled shirts were clearly unable to get past old issues, his jutting chin seemed to be bearing a grudge against his razor, and as for his gummy whorls of greying hair, word had it that the closest contact they made with shampoo was when he passed it by in Boots. Despite this, none of his reporters could claim ever to have caught a seriously malodorous whiff drifting from his revoltingly flabby frame, or from his loosely hinged lips when he was spraying about his instructions. What plenty of them had caught, however, was the sharp end of his caustic wit when they’d failed to deliver, or a playful thump in the gut when someone managed to pull off an exclusive.

Today, so far, things seemed to be going well for the Critch, as he was more generally known. Confirmation had just come down from upstairs that circulation was up again on last quarter, thus securing his contract for another twelve months, plus a handsome bonus. No sooner had those happy little nuggets been served up with an invitation to lunch in the boardroom, than one of his spry little army of stringers had called to really make his day …

‘Ah, if it isn’t my favourite fluffball,’ he said, looking up as Justine James, a reporter who’d always considered herself a cut above the rest until he’d introduced her to the error of her judgement, appeared in his doorway. ‘Come in, sit down. I’ve got something for you I think you’re going to like.’

With her close-cropped silvery hair, doe-like brown eyes and sumptuously red mouth, Justine James created a winning cocktail of sternness and seduction that carried right through to the lacy push-up bra visible behind the open buttons of her maidenly white shirt. Her skirt was long and woollen, covering slightly plump thighs, which, to her dismay, had begun accumulating dimples at an alarming rate over recent years. However, they were hardly an issue where this poisonous little oik was concerned, for she’d rather cut her legs off at the hips than ever let him anywhere near them.

Fortunately, turning to close the door allowed her a moment to curl her lips with all the contempt she really felt, before she was forced to conjure a look of polite interest from the extensive repertoire of false expressions she’d acquired over a decade and a half of journalism. As she went to sit in front of his desk she could only hope that none of the nervousness she was really feeling, and knew he’d want her to feel, was showing, for she’d rather kiss his arse than give him the satisfaction. On second thoughts … Anyway, whatever he had to say, at least it didn’t seem as though he was going to yell it across the newsroom this time, the way he had when he’d stripped her of her column.

‘You’re fucking losing it, Justine!’ he’d yelled in his vulgar, loud-mouthed way. ‘You’re writing for the
middle-aged
hausfrau and we don’t do middle-aged hausfrau here any more, that was in Avery’s day. So I’m giving your page to Eleanora until you manage to get yourself a granny by-pass.’ Eleanora, Justine’s twenty-three-year-old, mini-skirted, plummy-mouthed assistant whose gift for gossip was equal to Beckham’s for soccer. Justine should have seen it coming, and perhaps she had, but like a lot of women her age, she tried to ignore the freight train of youth that was coming up so fast from behind that sooner, rather than later, it was bound to derail her.

Nevertheless, the ignominy, and the hatred she’d felt for the Critch in those moments, as her colleagues had either turned away or watched her with pity – and relief it wasn’t them in the firing line this time – had outclassed anything she’d ever felt before. This even included the indignity she’d suffered when her adored mentor, Miles Avery, had quit this smutty (though not in Miles’s day) little Sunday tabloid to go and edit a daily broadsheet and hadn’t taken her with him. Everyone had expected him to, and when he’d started poaching various other members of his team, she’d felt certain it was only a matter of time before he got round to her. But he never had, and the blame for that, Justine knew, lay wholly at Vivienne Kane’s door. There had never been any love lost between the two women, and once Miles had become involved with the PR bitch Justine had known that whatever chance she stood of being rescued from the Critch had died.

‘What’s your relationship like with Miles Avery these days?’ Critchley asked, not bothering to look up from whatever he was writing on one of his lawyerly foolscap pads.

Jolted by the question, Justine peered at him warily,
then
decided to take the safer option by not answering right away. First up, she’d like to know why he was asking before committing herself, and second, instinct was already warning her that he didn’t want to hear that she and Miles had, at least on the surface, made up their differences some time ago, when Miles had explained his reason for not hiring her.

‘I know you think Vivienne’s behind my decision,’ he’d said, ‘but you’re wrong. I have the greatest respect for you and your work – you know that, it’s why I hired you and gave you the breaks that helped make your name. You’ve come a long way, and uncovered some great scandals in your time, but the truth is, your talents are better suited to
The News on Sunday
than to a daily broadsheet. You’re great at all the pithy, gossipy stuff – one of the best, in fact – and you’ve got a natural outlet where you are, as well as a much wider readership.’

‘That might be true,’ she’d responded, ‘but you can’t tell me Vivienne hasn’t influenced you … Be honest, Miles,’ she said, as he made to protest. ‘I know it anyway, so you might as well come clean.’

‘Vivienne does not make the decisions about who I hire and fire,’ he’d retorted sharply, ‘and frankly, knowing me as well as you do, I’m surprised you even think it.’

There hadn’t been much arguing with that, unless she’d wanted to fall out with him completely, and she wasn’t foolish enough to do that, so she’d let the matter drop. However, in spite of his denial, she remained convinced that Vivienne Kane was responsible for blocking her escape from
The News
.

‘Well?’ Critchley prompted, his freckle-flecked fist still sweeping back and forth over the page.

Justine’s eyes went back to him. ‘I haven’t seen Miles for some time,’ she said, still hedging.