The Missing Hours (11 page)

I look back to the shelves. You wouldn’t notice the dust if you were sitting. Isn’t that interesting? The cleanliness not for cleanliness’ sake, rather to create an image. There is a framed photo sitting beside the computer. Dominic and Isaac, in ski gear, cheek to cheek. It is angled outwards, so that you would see it if you were a visitor.

I ease myself into the visitor’s chair, study the picture. They are good-looking men, both of them. They look happy.

But then it’s about what you want to portray, isn’t it. No one takes a photo of an argument.

I study the men’s wide smiles and wonder what came next for them. Did someone end up crying after they’d said cheese?

I stand up, move around the desk. This is the thing. I need to know who Dominic was, not who he was showing himself to be. And if you want to know who someone is, you need to see what they hide.

I pull open the top drawer.

There is the usual detritus of office life. Pens, paperclips, Post-it notes. And sheaves of paper, slick beneath my fingers. I pull them free. A leaflet for a drug intervention charity. One for a rehabilitation centre. A list of numbers, drug hostels. I leaf through them. A good man indeed.

I hear footsteps, a knock on the door, soft enough that for a moment I wonder if I was mistaken. Then again, louder but only just.

‘Come in?’ My voice sounds guilty, like I have been caught rifling through women’s underwear, and I cough, try it again. ‘Come in.’

Fae is carrying a mug. She has stopped crying now, but still looks pale enough that I am waiting for her to faint. Her pixie-cut hair sticks up at odd angles, looks like she has slept on it. Then I think of the bags beneath my own eyes, my unshaven jaw. I’m really not one who should be judging. She offers me a quick smile. ‘Bronwyn asked me to make you a coffee. I didn’t know … sugar … I didn’t know if you did, so I didn’t because … well, you can’t take it out. Can you?’

She is looking at me expectantly, and I suddenly realise it is an actual question.

‘Oh. No. Thank you. No, I don’t take it. Um …’ I have no idea what we’re talking about.

I see her eyes flick away from mine, think that I can’t really blame her, see them land on the paperwork in my hands. Feel a flush begin to creep up my neck.

Fae nods towards the papers. ‘Bronwyn told you?’

‘Told me …?’

She sets the coffee down carefully on a coaster. Smiles a small smile. ‘It’s okay. I don’t mind. I think it can be good for people to know that lots of us have things in our past we’re ashamed of. That you can overcome them.’

I wave her to a chair, and she perches on the edge of it, knees clasped tight together, feet wide apart.

‘Would you mind …?’

She shrugs. ‘I was in uni. Law. I met a guy. He introduced me to some stuff.’

‘Some stuff?’

‘E’s to begin with. Then we began to branch out. It was … I’d try anything. It was just dabbling. That was what I told myself. I was a student, away from home, having fun. Everyone did it. Then dabbling became …’

‘Addiction?’

Fae nods. ‘Addiction,’ she agrees quietly. ‘You don’t see it coming, you know. The way it creeps up on you. One day it’s fun, just a little something to take the edge off. The next …’ She sighs heavily. ‘The next you’d climb over your grandmother to get it.’

‘And Dominic?’ I ask. ‘Where did he come in?’

‘I’d dropped out of uni. Was living in a bedsit with my scumbag boyfriend. Neil. He got picked up on shoplifting charges and Dom ended up representing him. Neil, he, he had a temper. Could be difficult. Dom could see that and he kind of took pity on me. Encouraged me to get away from the drug scene. It didn’t hurt that Neil ended up inside. I got clean, went back and finished my degree. Then Dom offered me a job here. I don’t think Bronwyn was keen, not in the beginning, but she’s okay. She came round.’

‘She speaks very highly of you now.’

Another small smile. ‘That’s Bronwyn. Barks to your face, praises you behind your back.’

‘You and Dominic, you must have been close.’ I try and soften my voice. ‘After what you had been through.’

Tears bubble up, overspilling, and she wipes at them with a sleeve. She nods, makes a noise of assent.

‘Can I ask, when did you see him last?’

She scrubs at her nose with her sleeve.

‘Monday. He left before I did. I worked late, me and Bronwyn. I went home, I don’t know, eight, I guess.’

I remember what Bronwyn told me. Dominic needed to see Beck Chambers.

She sat at her desk, in her altogether grander office, watching me, allowing me time to align my thoughts, waiting for the inevitable.

‘Tell me about Beck Chambers,’ I said.

She nodded, slowly, gave an unconvincing smile. ‘These things,’ she said, ‘they unfold with a certain inevitability, don’t you find? The lover, the criminal. You always have to get them out of the way first.’

I gave her a flat look. ‘You’re not the first person to mention the name of Beck Chambers. According to Isaac, Dominic was having problems with him. Dominic was in the nick representing him on the day he died. Now you sit here and tell me that he was heading for Beck’s the last time you saw him alive. Yes, there is definitely an inevitability to this.’

Bronwyn sighed. ‘I know. It’s just …’ Shook herself, sat up straighter. ‘It’s nothing. Let’s just get on with it. Beck Chambers. We have worked with Beck for years. He’s had some problems, mostly alcohol-related. He’s a useless drunk. Has never done anything too heinous. He’s ex-military. Served in Afghanistan. Musa Qala. Big military operation against the Taliban. Beck got shot a couple of months after that. They say he was incredibly brave, that he put himself in harm’s way to save Afghan children in crossfire.’

I was getting warmer, could hear the sound of tread on gravel. Struggled to focus on Bronwyn.

‘But he’d threatened Dominic?’

‘Psh.’ She waved her yellow nails and I watched them, mesmerised. ‘They argued sometimes. They go way back. Have known each other for years now. They disagree. Beck would never hurt him. Dominic knew that. Look, I’m not saying Beck hasn’t got a temper. He has. Keeps getting himself into trouble with it. He drinks. In short, the man is a fool. But this? No. No way would he have done this.’

A man with a temper, with a drinking problem. Dominic with a single stab wound to the neck. The way you might die if someone you were with simply lost control, lashed out before they realised what they were doing.

We needed to find Beck Chambers. Quickly.

I set the papers down on the cleared desk, sparing a moment to think what Dominic would have said.

‘Fae,’ I say. ‘Do you know Beck Chambers?’

Fae looks at me, seems to be sorting through my words. ‘Vaguely. He’s back and forth here a lot.’ Waves to the rehabilitation leaflets in front of me. ‘You could call him one of Dom’s projects.’

‘What is your impression of him?’

She thinks for a moment. ‘He’s always been nice to me. Very polite. I know he’s got issues, I know he gets himself into trouble a lot, but with me … he’s nice.’ She studies me. ‘You think he did this? You think he killed Dom?’

I look questioningly. ‘What do you think?’

She is biting her nails, chin cupped in her hand. Won’t look at me now. There are tears budding in her eyes.

‘I don’t know,’ she says, quietly.

Somewhere in the outer office a phone rings, the sound muted here in this quiet room with its lining of books. I feel like a child in the womb, sound filtered through my mother’s stomach.

Fae glances over her shoulder. ‘Excuse me. I have to get that.’

I look down at Dominic’s formerly immaculate desk, at the papers I have left strewn, feel unaccountably guilty. I gather them up again, placing them back where I found them.

I push the drawer shut, allowing my fingers to slip downwards towards the lower drawer. Spare a moment to wonder where Beck Chambers is. Uniform are searching for him. Have been to his house, the few locales we know he frequents. And yet it seems that he has dropped off the face of the earth. This drawer is heavier, clinks when I open it. There at the bottom is a small bottle of gin, two-thirds full, a packet of Marlboro cigarettes. I grin. You keep your secrets out of view, hidden in a bottom drawer, so that you can look as you want the world to see you. I lift out the bottle, the cigarette packet. There is another sheaf of paper underneath and I pull it free.

It is a brochure, glossy, a picture of an eagle bold on its front. The Cole Group.

Going rogue

DC Leah Mackay: Wednesday, 11.27 a.m.

I CAN STILL
smell the tip. It hangs about my clothes, stuffing the air in the car so that I can barely breathe. I took the statement, listening to the heavy tones of the man who found Dominic Newell’s body slumped at the side of the road. Paying attention to every word and yet somehow not hearing what he had to say at all.

He shuffled in his seat, seemed like he couldn’t keep still, the words spilling out, one after the other after the other. ‘And I mean, I couldn’t believe it. ’Cos you see it on the telly, and you think oh, right, bit far-fetched, like, but when it happens to you … Look at my hands.’ He held out hands as big as spades. ‘Still shaking.’

I take a left at the roundabout.

I made it into the office this morning in spite of all my brother’s fears, arrived a little after 9.15, fuelled by the righteous virtue of a dawn start, a missing person now found.

‘Leah …’

I winced, a schoolgirl caught sneaking into her room in the small hours, high heels in hand. Tried to arrange my features. Look confident. That’s half the battle.

The DI leaned against the office door, eyebrow raised. ‘Any explanation you’d care to give? You were supposed to be in at eight.’

‘I was just closing down a case, sir. A missing person. We found her,’ I add, as if this will in some way atone for my sin. As if I had actually done the finding.

He stared at me, eyes tinged yellow, skin pallid. ‘I thought my instructions were clear? All cases were to be handed over?’

‘Yes, sir, but …’ My face began to burn, heads turning to watch the show. I opened my mouth, ready to point out that here in this room was eighty, let’s call it eighty-five per cent of the force’s investigative capacity. That there was no one left for me to hand over to, and that the missing woman was a mother, a single parent, whose children were waiting for her. But he stared at me, and under the useless force of his vapid gaze I backed down, snapped my mouth tight shut.

‘Well you’d better turn back around. I need you to go out to the tip. Someone needs to interview the guy who found the body.’

I put my foot down, wind the window down so that the whipping air tears at the tip smell, pulling it away, tossing it into the passing trees. The traffic is easy now; most people have already arrived where they want to go. I pull past a Citroën Picasso, its driver twisted around in her seat so that she is almost facing backwards. The pitfalls of driving with children.

I think about Selena Cole in her hospital bed.

‘Is that blood?’

She stared at me, her mouth opening, closing. Then, ‘No. I’m not hurt. Well, just a few scrapes.’ Held out her arms so that I could see the scratches, the fingermarks of branches. ‘No, it’s mud. From the bank, I think. I’m not sure, but I think I must have fallen.’

I stood by her bed, studying the dark stain, and then the light shifted again. No. Of course. It was mud, dark and oozing.

What had happened to her?

Was it the grief, the pressure of her loss? Did it become too much for her on that grey morning, and did she simply walk away, intending to give in to the urge for it all to end?

Of course, if that is what happened, then one thing is clear. Selena Cole is lying. So now the question is, is it a forgetting or a deception?

Twenty hours. She was gone for twenty hours. What the hell happened in that time?

I bite my lip, know that I am on thin ice, that the DI is already watching me from this morning’s tardiness, that my timely return to the nick, to the murder, is critical. Then I indicate, pulling across two lanes of traffic, taking a hard right that I had no intention of taking. Heading straight for the Cole house.

When I knock, it is Orla who answers the door, her face a thundercloud. ‘Oh.’ She sees me, takes a step back, and I have a fleeting moment when I flinch, can picture her squaring up for a fight. ‘Oh, I didn’t think … Sorry. I … I thought you were moving on to something else, you said? A big case?’

‘I did. I am.’ I shift, wrong-footed. ‘I just wanted to see … Is everyone all right?’

Orla frowns, and for the most absurd moment I want to tell her everything, explain why I am here, again, standing on Selena’s doorstep, where I am absolutely positively not supposed to be. ‘Okay,’ she says, doubtful. ‘Come in.’

She looks haggard, years older than she looked yesterday. I wonder if she has slept at all yet. I watch her as she closes the door behind me, slipping the chain across, and it occurs to me to question, is she trying to keep someone out or someone in? The house smells … efficient. Floor polish mingling with the crisp smell of burning wood.

I smile. ‘How are they all?’

‘Fine.’ The word comes out hard, all sharp edges, defensive corners. She is watching me, a guard dog wondering if it will get petted or kicked.

I nod. ‘And you? Are you okay?’

She stares some more, then I see her shoulders sink, the air let out of the balloon. ‘I’m tired.’ She smiles, shrugs. ‘I’ll be fine. Come on. Selena is in the kitchen.’

I hear the girls’ voices first, the tone all wrong, off for two small girls. It is hesitant, seems staged for a church rather than a playroom. Orla pushes open the kitchen door, and I see an array of dolls, a cacophony in pink, scattered across the floor so that they almost hide the sheepskin rug beneath them. Heather sits, her legs crossed in front of her. She brushes her doll’s hair with such ferocity that it seems inevitable that the head will come off in her hands, and her eyes flick from the doll to where her mother sits at the kitchen table, back again.

Selena sits on the blocky chair, long fingers curled around a red china mug. Her hair has been washed and dried, is neatly pulled back into a stubby ponytail. Her clothes are fresh. Her fingernails no longer bear the traces of mud on them. She looks up at me as I enter, and it seems that I can hear her heartbeat rise.