“Who the hell is this man?” My dad’s voice was deadweight.
We sat side-by-side on my sofa, the coffee table with two mugs and my laptop in front of us. I was purple with embarrassment. My father had every right to disapprove of me starting a sexual relationship in the wake of Scarlet’s death.
I’d never seen him look so furious and we hadn’t started on the heavy stuff I’d downloaded to my computer.
I gave him a verbal account of how I’d met Rocco and when; his fixation on some random woman’s death and forced connections to our family, including Scarlet. The warning signs were plain to see. Dad’s skin drained to the colour of sour milk. Thin blue veins in his neck pulsed, but it was his eyes that did me in. They were narrow and sharp and accusing. I felt condemned.
“Did he hurt you?”
I was insistent that he hadn’t.
“Where does he live?”
“In Worcester but his grandmother left him a house here in Malvern, up on the Wyche.”
Something unknowable passed behind his eyes and his jaw tensed. I guess he felt threatened. His patch. His daughter. His family. My eyes widened as a creepy thought took shape in my head. Dad caught the vibe. “We’ve found the culprit responsible for breaking into your house.”
I pressed a hand to my mouth. Oh my God.
“Write down both addresses – and where this creep works.” It wasn’t an ask, but an order. I wrote on a notepad, ripped out the page, handed it to him. Without a glance, he shoved it in the back pocket of his jeans. “The stuff you found in his flat,” he said quietly, slipping out his spectacles. “Let’s see it.”
I took a breath, leaned across, opened one attachment, and got up, walked off a little, gave him space. He sat, fused to the screen, without a flicker of visible emotion in his expression.
“Next,” he said. Deadpan.
I closed one attachment, opened the second, and when he’d read that, the third. I studied his face, waiting and primed for a strong reaction at seeing his old colleague’s name there in black and white. Not a flicker. When he finished, he took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes and leaned back, staring ahead. Silence, as suffocating as a bonfire on a hot summer’s day, enveloped us.
“Dad?”
He leant forward, steepling his fingers over his nose and mouth, and briefly closed his eyes. Confusion rampaged through me. My insides curdled, blood thickened. Eventually, he let his hands fall.
“Right.” He spoke as if he’d come to a massive decision, like he was about to tell me something that would explain absolutely everything, including the reason for Scarlet’s death. I realised I was holding my breath.
“This is all my fault,” he said.
No, no, no. A fresh current of fear jolted through me. I couldn’t comprehend and, in that moment,, I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
“Drea Temple, the missing woman. She was my case. My last case, as it turned out, the one that broke me.”
Okay, I thought shakily. That’s not so bad. “But how does Rocco Noble fit?”
“Noble is her half-brother.”
I was glad to be sitting down. So that explained his obsession – sort of. “And is this how your path crossed with your old colleague, Clive Mallis?”
He nodded. “I picked up the first half of the investigation, Clive, sadly, the second.”
“Is Clive still with the police?”
Dad shook his head. “Got out, like me. Works in the antiques trade in Gloucestershire. I never imagined that, ten years later, he’d be offering me his condolences.” His eyes were no less hard but this time there were tears in them.
“So, Rocco bore a grudge?”
Dad took his time answering. “Nothing excuses his behaviour.”
“But?”
He let out a long sigh. “I didn’t take Drea’s missing status as seriously as I should have.”
Hence Rocco’s phrase: disinterested bastard. “Doesn’t sound like you.” My dad was assiduous in all that he did. Ask him to give a hundred per cent and he would, body and soul.
He smiled sadly. “I’d been under a lot of pressure, heading up a number of serious investigations. Ironically, that Christmas—”
“The one before Drea disappeared?”
“Uh-huh, I was given leave, first time in I don’t know how long.”
I sipped my coffee. “And New Year?”
He flicked a wry smile. “Your mum likened my behaviour at the time to diver’s decompression.”
I thought back. I had still been travelling through Eastern Europe.
“Anyway,” he said, serious again, “I went back to work on 3 January and no sooner than I’m at my desk when I get wind of a missing status report. I didn’t exactly jump on it.”
“Surely, it wouldn’t be unusual to suppose Drea was still enjoying the festivities? I mean if she’d gone to Scotland, New Year there is taken a lot more seriously.”
“The thought had crossed my mind.”
“But?”
“Even as the days passed and turned into weeks, I’m ashamed to say that I regarded her as a woman who could have gone anywhere with anyone at any time.”
“Presumably, based on evidence.”
“Based on what I’d established – yes.”
“So you made a judgement.” Was that such a crime? Isn’t that what you were paid to do? As a police officer’s daughter, I understood better than most the pressures and fine distinctions that came with running major investigations.
“I did. And I was wrong.”
“And if you’d taken it seriously, would she be alive today?”
“Maybe not,” he conceded. “I don’t know. I’ll never know. Put it this way, the family blamed me and so did others.”
So that’s what had led to his breakdown and retirement. It all dropped snugly into place and I was aghast. This was the first time I’d heard the precise reason why my dad had left the job he loved. I was so wrapped up in my own little world it had passed me by.
“Drea was found on 23 June. I handed in my resignation the week after.”
He stared ahead, numb and unreachable and detached. As uncomfortable as I found it, I had more questions.
“Why would Rocco suggest that Zach knew Drea?”
Dad hitched a shoulder. “Drea was a drug-user.”
“Could their paths have crossed?”
“Theoretically, but it’s tenuous. Zach wasn’t the only young man off his face on drugs in Gloucestershire.”
It sounded to me as if Rocco was cobbling together evidence to fit his own narrative. I put this to Dad.
“It’s not uncommon for a victim’s relatives to fixate on a particular line of enquiry or, indeed, on someone they regard as a potential perpetrator.” I pinched inside. Wasn’t this exactly what I was doing since Scarlet’s death? Strain tugged my father’s face into a mask.
“What about Rocco’s suggestion that Zach was the last person to see her alive?”
“Where’s his evidence? Zach was at home with us.”
Thank God. “I’m so sorry, Dad, that I wasn’t more supportive with Zach.”
“You had your own life.”
“It must have been hard.”
“If I’d been in any other job, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but as a copper —” He shook his head in dismay. “There were all sorts of rumours flying around.”
“Like what?”
“That I’d turned a blind eye. The best one,” he said with a short laugh, “I’d helped myself to confiscated drug supplies and handed them to Zach.”
Was this what Heather had alluded to when she talked about digging up the dirt? “God, Dad, how didn’t I know this? You never breathed a word.”
“About rumours that were lies? What was the point? Anyway, I had your mum to lean on. She was my rock.” I’d heard that expression so many times it seemed a phrase devoid of meaning. Out of my dad’s mouth, it assumed its original status. I realised what my mother had been forced to put up with. In a flash, I saw her with fresh eyes. Again, I lurched inside for getting things so wrong.
“Should we talk to Zach?”
“About what?”
“About this,” I said, gesturing at my laptop.
“No. Zach is still fragile. Always will be.”
I hadn’t forgotten the way Zach had got antsy with me when I’d pushed him about the reason Scarlet took her own life.
“You don’t look happy, Molly.”
I wasn’t. I wanted to have a grown-up conversation with my brother, but Dad was probably right.
He rested his hand on my knee. “There’s nothing more for you to worry about. I’ll handle Rocco Noble.”
“How?” I said anxiously.
“I’ll speak to Stanton again.”
“Right,” I said, unsettled.
“Promise you won’t have anything else to do with Noble?”
“You have my word.” The thought of running into him made me queasy.
“And delete those files.”
I wasn’t at all happy about this. It felt too much like getting rid of the evidence. How else could I confront Rocco if I didn’t have the files? I nodded emptily.
“Now.” Again, his tone demanded total obedience.
Reluctantly, I did as he said. Neither of us spoke. A thought still tugged at the back of my mind. “Why would Rocco be interested in Scarlet?”
“He wasn’t. His interest was simply a means to get to me.”
I tiptoed up to my next question as if walking a high wire strung across a canyon. “About Drea.”
“Yes?” His eyes were steady.
“Were there any sightings of her between the time she went missing and when she was found?”
“Two. One in Birmingham and another in London.”
“Not exactly helpful.”
“We followed up but there was no trace of her.”
“The newspaper report stated that she’d drowned.”
“That’s true.”
“Wouldn’t her lungs have decomposed?”
“Obviously, but the pathologist found the presence of diatoms, or micro-algae in her bone marrow. The only way these could enter would be via the respiratory system.”
“Is there water in the mine?”
“No.”
“So she’d drowned some place and her body moved?”
“That’s the working theory.”
“She was murdered then?”
“Not necessarily.”
“What about the cranial injuries?”
“Abrasions on the skeleton were identified. Obviously, variables in such cases are immense, but the pathologist concluded that cause of death was drowning.”
“Someone drowned her?”
“No evidence to suggest it.”
I let out a frustrated sigh. Was he driven solely by what he could prove? I guess, as a former policeman, he was.
“What’s inescapable,” Dad conceded, “is that someone moved her body, a crime in itself.”
“Why would they do that if not for the obvious reason that they’d also killed her?”
Dad broke into a smile at my tenacity. “There was a full investigation, Molly, if that’s what’s troubling you. We never really got very far and, with the coroner declaring it an open verdict, a decision was made to call it a day.” The stress of that dark time was, without doubt still etched upon his face. I knew what he was thinking. My dad, a perfectionist in all things, believed he’d failed Drea’s family.
I put my hand over his. “If I hadn’t chanced upon Rocco Noble, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
My dad looked at me straight. “Nothing chance about it. That little bastard targeted you deliberately.”