‘What’s happening, Chris … what is this? Why has the world gone mad … why is this going on?’
Cat had heard the news at ten o’clock. Chris was on call, she was alone with her three sleeping children and suddenly, she had been overcome by both panic and despair. Lucy Angus was missing. Cat sat nursing a mug of coffee, wishing that Mephisto were beside her, another warm living body, but Mephisto was out, prowling the night fields looking for smaller creatures to slaughter.
She thought of the cloud ‘no bigger than a man’s hand’ but which was growing and darkening by the day. They were under it and the sunlight could not break through or any warmth and brightness reassure them.
Chris was on call, at an emergency birth ten miles away. A woman had insisted on having her first child at home, in a water bath, with only a private midwife attending her, but the labour had started early and urgently, the midwife was on holiday, and Chris had managed to tell Cat enough about what was happening for her to worry about that too. The baby was a breech and the labour fast. He was on his own until the paramedics arrived with a hospital midwife. What they all needed, and soon, was a holiday, Cat thought, a week or ten days abroad together, far away from Lafferton and the evil that seemed to be stalking it, away from the sadness of Martha’s death and the worries about the practice and the sudden encounter with Diana Mason. She and Chris needed one another and their children, sunshine and some warm water, good food and drink and laughter, and nothing and no one else.
The phone rang again. She had it on the sofa beside her.
‘How are things?’
‘Paramedics are here. I’ve come outside for a breath. Bloody stupid woman. There, I’ve said it, I feel better.’
‘Is she all right?’
‘Just. The baby needs to be got to special care urgently … Mother haemorrhaged … God.’
‘Well done.’
‘Why do we do this, Cat?’
‘You know why. Come home.’
‘Just got to see them into the ambulance. Be twenty minutes. Love you.’
It rarely happened like that now. Mothers gave birth in hospital. Occasionally a baby arrived in a hurry before the woman made it to Bevham General, but GPs were no longer the on-call, hands-on obstetricians they used to be. By the time Cat and Chris had trained, those days had gone. It made it more frightening, and a greater risk on the rare occasions those skills were called upon. But Chris had a cool head and he had done two years in obs and gynae.
She went into the den and turned on the television. Politicians jawing. Men propelling home-made robots around a track by remote control. A pair of eagles fighting in mid-air. A man stabbing another in the stomach.
She was flicking through the channels in search of something soothing when Chris came in.
‘You look shot to pieces.’
‘Feel it. I thought I was going to lose them both. The ambulance met a road accident, boy knocked off his bike and killed … they had to stop and call out another …’
He slumped down beside her and leaned his head against her arm.
‘It was one of those New Age nutters from Starly … babies should be born under bushes, or under water, no painkillers, no doctors, everything natural. God knows who this private midwife is – I’ve never heard of her. Glad she wasn’t there. I had enough to cope with … didn’t need white witches burning leaves. The girl hadn’t had any antenatal, no idea the baby was a breech … it’s all come as a very nasty shock.’
‘They going to be all right?’
‘Yes. I stopped the bleeding, got the baby out and breathing … the cord was wrapped round his neck of course.’
‘Of course. Poor you.’
‘Poor her … she was terrified.’
The television news beamed up. They sat together, watching through the wars and politicians.
Then the familiar picture of David Angus flashed on to the screen. After a couple of seconds, another, of Lucy, appeared beside it.
‘I feel sick,’ Cat said.
Sorrel Drive was cordoned off and police vehicles were parked on both sides. They had brought in floodlights.
It was after eleven o’clock. Simon had been into the house but Marilyn had not been able to speak to him coherently. The DC with him had pieced together something from her few hysterical sentences. Lucy had been to school as usual, come home as usual, gone up to her bedroom to do her homework and, as also seemed quite usual, not come out of it again. But when her mother had gone up to say goodnight to her, she had not been there, nor anywhere else in the house. The side door leading to the utility room had been found unbolted.
Within ten minutes of her call to the station, the avenue had been full of police.
‘But how long?’ Simon said, standing under a street lamp near to the house. ‘We need to know exactly. She came home at twenty minutes to five. Her mother found her gone at ten to nine. What happened between? We don’t know. Has she been missing for twenty minutes or four hours? It’s light until after seven now … someone would have seen her.’
DCS Chapman had been walking slowly up one side of Sorrel Drive and down the other, looking carefully around him. Now he came up to Simon again.
‘Anything strike you?’
‘This is different.’
‘From the boy? I think so too.’
‘She’s gone off. Of her own accord.’
‘Yes, no one has been into the house, gone upstairs, found her, dragged her down.’
‘We’ll comb the area but I want to check out the homes of all her friends. Though if she’d been with them openly they’d have rung in by now.’
‘School?’
‘The caretaker reports everything as usual.’
‘What’s your plan?’
Simon looked round. It was like the film set for a police drama. Nathan Coates came scooting towards them on his bike.
‘Guv. We was out. I came when I heard. Anything?’
‘Not yet.’
‘We could put out a call, asking everyone to search their own premises.’
‘They never do though. We still have to go over it. Might as well leave it all to uniform.’
‘You got the river boys out?’
‘Too soon.’
‘OK, where do you want me, guv?’
Simon looked at him. He had pulled off his cycle helmet and his red hair stuck up like the bristles on a broom. He looked hopelessly young, and eager as a Boy Scout.
‘I want a list of all Lucy’s friends … from her school and any others. You won’t get it out of the mother. Find the class teacher, try and get it from her … The chances are she’s gone to someone and it’s likely to be a friend.’
‘Guv.’
Jim Chapman smiled, watching Nathan replace his helmet and cycle off fast.
‘He reminds me of the advertisements you used to see in shop windows … “Smart Lad Wanted” …’
‘He’s the best.’
A couple of uniformed officers went past on their way from one house to the next. ‘Drives half a bloody mile long,’ one said. ‘Who needs them?’
‘Look, Jim, why don’t you get off to your hotel? One of the cars can drop you down there. You’ve done your share of hanging about the streets at night.’
‘You could be right. Besides, it’s the boy’s case I’m here to look into.’
They walked up the road to where a patrol car was blocking off an entrance.
‘Can you drop DCS Chapman back to his hotel? The Stratfield Inn. Someone can cover for you here for ten minutes.’
‘Goodnight, Simon. I’ll be in the station first thing. By then I’m betting you’ll have found her safe and well.’
‘I hope to God you’re right.’
Simon closed the door of the car and headed back towards the Angus house. It had been crawling with forensics in white suits but they were emptying out as he reached the gateway.
‘Anything?’
Simon had worked with Phil Gadsby on a number of cases and rated him as the force’s best. If there was anything for forensics to find, Phil found it.
‘She was in her room. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. She took her mac. I think she went through the kitchen into the pantry. She took some food. She’s gone off on her own. There are no traces of a struggle, no blood, no one else’s fingerprints. The house is clean as a whistle.’
‘Thought it would be. Can you get anything from the garden?’
‘We’ll be back in the morning, go into all the gardens on the neighbouring houses. For now, that’s it.’
Simon went towards the front door of the house. The lights were on in every room, the rest of the forensic team leaving. He waited until they had gone and the vans had driven away. It went quiet then, though uniform were still going from house to house. He thought how different it would be if this was happening on the Dulcie estate – everyone would be out on the street, or at doors and windows, kids would be following the officers, women shouting at them; someone would probably even bring out mugs of tea. Here, curtains and blinds stayed drawn. One or two had glanced out when the cars had arrived, but they stayed firmly, privately within. Nothing might have been happening at all. Now, lights were going off. No one stood at their doorway looking out and it would not have crossed any of their minds to produce trays of tea.
But at the door of the Angus house, he hesitated. If Marilyn Angus was reported as ‘incoherent’, seeing him, the one person perhaps more than any other she associated so closely with David’s continuing disappearance, might well not help her. He had no news, nothing to offer. Others had asked enough questions for tonight.
He turned away again.
It was a soft, mild night and the gardens smelled of fresh grass and turned earth. Of spring. He tried to picture the two children, one certainly dead, one still possibly alive. How did a woman cope with the weeks-long disappearance of her son, the suicide of her husband, and now the fact that her second child was missing? This was one of the times when he found police work agonising.