By the time Rose is reluctantly leaving the office, Adam has discovered that the ‘camper van’ mentioned is a 1999 Peugeot Boxer Way Finder motorhome, still registered in the name of Jeanette Peters.
‘So she lied to her daughter about selling it then,’ says Rose. ‘I wonder who she might possibly have gifted it to?’
‘Yep,’ says Adam, already lifting the phone to tell the Cobalt Square team. This van is now a priority for ANPR.
Rose gives in to the exhaustion at 11 p.m. and drives home on autopilot.
She thumbs a food delivery app as she comes in the door, knowing she needs a decent hot meal but too tired to cook anything for herself.
The house is freezing and she swears under her breath before going to the ancient boiler and seeing the pilot light is out again. With everything going on, she hasn’t had a moment to think about the eviction notice that’s still lying on the kitchen table.
But maybe it’s a good thing, she reminds herself. Being forced to move on from a house of so many unhappy memories, not least being attacked in her bed by a serial killer. Surely that’s a positive move?
She has run out of wine, which is disappointing, so she makes a cup of tea and then, while waiting for her chicken bhuna and naan bread to arrive, walks around the house to do a cautious check for whether Adele is lurking about anywhere.
But it’s all clear.
Not that this means anything, because the old witch might appear at any moment. Rose goes back to the kitchen and sits at the table, sipping her tea and tentatively touching her swollen cheek. She takes two of the strong painkillers prescribed by the hospital and waits for the pleasant blurring sensation to take effect.
Something occurs to her then and she hesitates, before picking up her phone to send a text.
The reply comes quickly. ‘Yes. Ring me.’
‘Rose?’ says Scarlett when she calls. ‘What’s wrong? Are you all right?’
‘Yes!’ says Rose with a laugh. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to give you a shock then. Sorry to bother you so late.’
‘You’re not bothering me at all. I’m just watching some incredibly depressing Scandi drama the wife has roped me into.’ There’s a sound of another voice, gently scolding, and then Scarlett gives a peal of laughter. ‘She hates it when I call her that but I can’t seem to stop doing it.’
Rose pictures the two women enjoying a comfortable evening together and a wave of tender longing washes over her. But it reminds her why she called.
‘Yeah, look, it’s nothing urgent but I have a question,’ she says. ‘I feel like you understand these things a bit better than me. But what would you say was the main reason for, well, hauntings of any kind? I’m not sure I’ve ever asked you that.’
Scarlett is silent for a moment. ‘Are you talking about Wyndham Terrace?’ she says gently.
Rose swallows, then gives a bright laugh. ‘Yeah, of course. Hard to think about anything else.’
‘Right,’ says Scarlett. ‘I can’t possibly “know” the answer to this, not least because there are probably myriad reasons that relate to that person’s period alive. But …’ she pauses ‘… I can’t help feeling that some sort of unfinished business has to be one of the biggies, don’t you? That something has to be understood by those of us still here, you know?’
‘What kind of thing though?’ Rose hadn’t meant her tone to be so pressing and Scarlett’s pause seems loaded.
‘Well,’ says Scarlett, more carefully now, ‘something about that person’s death perhaps. Or maybe something they regret and need to make right. Something important the living person has to understand.’
The doorbell signals that Rose’s food delivery has arrived so she hurriedly thanks Scarlett and hangs up.
But Scarlett’s words stay in her mind as she eats her curry, slowly. She hasn’t thought through the fact that chicken and naan bread require quite a lot of chewing, which tests her sore face. She only manages to eat half before putting it optimistically into the fridge for another time.
With a sigh, she looks around the bleak little kitchen, wondering what manner of unfinished business her mother is trying to convey. Something about the house itself? Something Rose must know before she moves out? Because why else did Adele appear just as that letter arrived? She can’t know for certain that Adele was money-laundering here. But she strongly suspects so. Maybe there’s a big bag of dirty money sitting at the back of the attic. The thought makes Rose laugh; it would be exactly the kind of compromising thing she can imagine happening to her when all she has done is try to be straight up. But then a serious thought douses this moment of humour. If Adele was breaking the law like that, might she have been breaking it in other, more sinister ways? Could she have killed someone?
The trouble is, whichever way she looks at it, Rose can’t imagine she’s going to like the answers to any of these questions.
Shivering a little with tiredness and the sluggish efforts of the boiler, she decides she’s had enough of today.
As she brushes her teeth, she regards her appearance in the mirror. The swelling across her nose is going down a little, but her black eye is shaping up nicely. And the effects of the painkillers are already wearing off so her ribs have begun to complain if she takes anything other than a shallow sip of breath.
It’s all a bit much.
Rose begins to cry then, tears dripping piteously down her bruised cheeks and mixing with the froth from her toothpaste.
But if she is hoping to get a break from her own mind that night, she’s disabused of this by a series of nightmares, starting with Gregory being buried in a shallow grave in the back garden of her own house by a grim-faced Anton Fuller, and ending with her drowning in quicksand as she tries to reach him, her mouth filling with suffocating grit that feels so real, she would swear it has a taste when she comes to, with a gasp of shock.
She gets up early and is at Cobalt Square by 8 a.m., where she finds DCI Mortimer and a few of the CCTV team, looking as though they have been there all night, which they probably have. Rose takes over on CCTV from a grateful middle-aged officer called Neil, who is going for a sleep. It’s a job that’s mind-numbing but requires constant vigilance and she forces herself to focus.
Unfortunately, the mobile home hasn’t pinged on any ANPR at all in recent times, which suggests Doyle has moved it somewhere in advance.
Back to square one.
At three in the afternoon there’s a development. A seventy-eight-year-old woman called Dorothy Blake rings in to report a stolen car. Her Volvo station wagon, which she last saw parked on a nearby road a week ago, has gone. That road happens to be the next one along from Heather’s address. Mrs Blake told officers that she only uses it once a week to turn the engine over and visit the supermarket. Heather Doyle could easily have watched her and worked this out, before breaking into the car.
Heather Doyle could have driven this car to wherever that mobile home has been parked.
It doesn’t take long to find the car and they are back in the briefing room within the hour.
‘Right,’ says Mortimer. ‘What have we got?’
Jamie speaks. ‘We were able to track the car travelling north from Tottenham Hale on the evening Gregory disappeared, around midnight,’ he says. ‘Cross-checking with CCTV shows what seems to be a lone driver – an elderly woman – but that would be easy enough to do with a wig. The kid could be lying down in the back seat.’
There’s a brief moment when Rose imagines everyone’s thinking the same thing. Hopefully, he is lying down because he has been told to and not because he is incapacitated.
‘We were able to follow its progress all the way to the A1 and then the M1,’ Neil continues. ‘It looks as though they travelled all night in that direction. They got petrol, using cash, at a service station near Birmingham but she manages to hide her face from all cameras. We lost them for a bit north of Leeds and she was obviously driving carefully enough that she wasn’t caught on any speed cameras along the way. The current situation is that we’re following the trail from Durham but need as many bodies on this as we can get.’
‘Okay,’ says Mortimer. ‘We need to find that car. They seem to be travelling further away from the highest density areas and that’s going to make ANPR really difficult. They could end up anywhere. I think it’s time for a public appeal and for the parents to do a press conference. The rest of you, I want you to question everyone again about any possible connections for Heather Doyle in the North of England or Scotland. Speak to the dead friend’s daughter again. Speak to the Fullers to find out whether the location has any relevance to them, however tangential it may seem at first. This isn’t good enough, people. We have to find out where they’re going and we have to do it as soon as possible. As far as we know, that kid is injured. Let’s make sure it doesn’t become anything worse.’