Saturday 9th December 2023
Chrissy
‘What’s happening?’ Chrissy asks, as she and Kiri walk back into her living room. She wants to reassert herself, claw back some control, but she hears the catch in her voice. DC Wright is sitting on her sofa, leaning close to a laptop screen, a radio in her hand.
Wright stands up, not taking her eyes off the laptop until the last possible moment, when she picks up a tablet from the coffee table and walks up to Chrissy.
‘Our unmarked car has caught up with the stolen vehicle. They’re following it north at the moment. Destination still unclear. In the meantime …’ She tucks her silver hair behind her ear and taps the screen of the tablet several times. ‘This is a list of everyone who visited Leo in prison …’ She holds it out towards Chrissy. ‘Can you tell us if anything strikes you as unusual?’
For a second, Chrissy can’t take in a single name; the list is just a series of fuzzy dots. She blinks and the dots become letters, but the list is still overwhelming: two years’ worth of regular visits. She sees her own name, over and over, until it becomes alien, like a word used too many times. Interspersed is her sister’s. She visited Leo more often than Chrissy gave her credit for, and the realisation makes her eyes fill. She blinks again and scrolls to the end, looking for the anomaly, the name that doesn’t belong.
Finally, she sees it.
‘Marianne,’ she says out loud, unable to contain her surprise. ‘Marianne … visited Leo?’
It makes no sense. Or does it? Chrissy’s head whirls, her heart beating painfully.
DC Wright is gazing at her. ‘Who is Marianne?’
‘She’s … Peter’s ex-wife.’
‘As in, Alice’s brother?’
‘Yes.’
‘And …’ Wright throws a glance towards Kiri, who has taken her place on the sofa, monitoring the laptop, ‘you didn’t know she’d been visiting him?’
‘No. Not at all. It was … just the once by the looks of it …’ Chrissy scrolls back frantically, double-checking. ‘Yes, just the once, about six weeks before the end of his sentence …’ Izzy’s words echo in her head, about Leo being on edge, not sleeping, towards the end.
A chill washes through her. She can feel DC Wright still watching her, but she can’t speak anymore; her mind has gone into overdrive.
‘Why might she have visited?’ Wright asks.
‘I … I don’t know.’
She needs to say more, ask more, but she’s got that feeling again, that if she starts to speak she might be sick instead.
Wright turns back towards Kiri and the laptop. ‘What’s the latest on the car?’ she asks, raising her voice. ‘Are they still on its tail?’
‘Yes,’ Kiri says. ‘And it’s still driving north. Through countryside, currently close to the border between Derbyshire and Yorkshire.’
DC Wright swivels back to Chrissy. ‘Are there any places of significance to Leo around there?’
Chrissy is still in a daze. ‘Sorry?’
‘The stolen car …’ Wright raises her voice even further, over-enunciating. ‘It’s near the border between Derbyshire and Yorkshire. Is there anywhere in that area that might be relevant?’
Her words register, at last, and Chrissy turns even colder. She moves her eyes from Marianne’s name on the list, drags them slowly up to meet Wright’s. ‘Well, it depends … exactly where you …’ She walks around so she can see the laptop screen, feeling as if she’s moving through water.
‘We still don’t know if the car is relevant,’ Kiri points out, hesitantly.
‘Either way, it’s a stolen vehicle,’ Wright says, sounding impatient. ‘And it’s driving suspiciously fast. And it was near this village only a few hours ago. We need to—’
‘His dad’s buried close to there,’ Chrissy blurts, pointing at the laptop. As they both turn towards her, she tries to steady her breath.
‘Whereabouts?’ Wright asks.
‘Shirebrook.’
‘The car is just south of there.’
Chrissy’s pulse is in every part of her. Why would a stolen vehicle be at the prison on the day of Leo’s release, then near the village on the day of Robbie’s memorial, and now driving, it seems, towards her ex-husband’s grave?
There is silence for a while, as if they are all hypnotised by the progress of the blue dot on the screen. Chrissy can hear her own breathing, her own heart. Can feel DC Wright shifting beside her and see Kiri glancing over. Nobody has asked the question she expected them to. Nobody seems to think it strange, at least not yet, that Ethan is buried so far away.
Chrissy has fended off this question before, always using the excuse that his grandfather was from Shirebrook. The truth is, she didn’t want his grave in the village churchyard. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of being buried in the place where he did his phoney worship and his pillar-of-the-community act; didn’t want to walk past it every day and remember. It was bad enough hearing all the tributes to him at the time, all the speculation that an impending Ofsted inspection had put him under so much pressure he’d taken his own life. There was outrage in the village that the strains of the job had robbed them of their local hero. But there was kindness towards Chrissy, too, and so she’d wanted to stay there, with Leo, free of him.
Why she continued to stay, after the kindness disappeared, she has never been sure. Wilfulness? Fear?
She leans over the sofa to see the screen more closely. The blue dot is travelling quickly along a winding road. North, north, north, following a route Chrissy hasn’t taken for years. But she can picture it. The craggy hillsides and the blustery churchyard. She saw him lowered into the earth there but hasn’t been back since.
‘They’ve turned off,’ DC Colella says, pointing. ‘Look, they’re not heading for Shirebrook anymore.’
Chrissy holds her stomach. She feels as if she’s in the car, feels the lurch of the nauseating bends. It makes her remember how travel-sick Leo used to get. She’s not a good passenger, either – Ethan used to drive deliberately fast, laughing at her queasiness – but soothing Leo was her distraction, his little head against her chest.
If he’s in that car, he’ll be grey now. He’ll be begging them to pull over.
The thought of him trapped and sick makes her feel wretched.
‘Where are they going?’ Wright asks, but it isn’t clear who she’s talking to.
Kiri zooms the picture outwards. ‘More towards Bakewell, now.’
‘Anything of significance there?’ Wright turns to Chrissy. Chrissy shakes her head.
There is silence for a few more moments, and Chrissy digs her nails into her own palms.
Where is it going? Could Leo really be in there?
She jumps as a radio buzzes to life right beside her. It’s DC Wright’s. The detective stirs, looking almost annoyed to have to move her attention from the blue dot.
‘This is car 1164 with eyes on the target,’ says a disembodied voice from the radio, and Wright switches from annoyance to attentiveness.
‘What can you see?’
‘The car is still travelling at speed. It’s just turned off down a much smaller road, basically a dirt track, so we’re having to stay back so as not to arouse suspicion. There’s someone in the front passenger seat as well as the driver. Both appear to be Caucasian males. Wearing hats, partial face coverings, too.’
‘What about the area – anything of note around you?’
‘Barely anything, just fields. But there is a large barn up ahead.’
‘Do you think the car’s heading there?’
‘Given the turn-off, it seems likely.’ There is a pause, then the voice in the radio says: ‘We’ve requested a helicopter, and some backup. It’s hard to be sure from here, but …’ The voice gets louder, and slightly higher. ‘There’s possible smoke.’
Chrissy grips the back of the sofa.
‘Smoke?’ she says, with no idea whether the person on the other end can hear her.
‘Confirm what you mean by possible smoke,’ DC Wright urges.
There’s another pause, and a crackle as if the signal is faltering.
Then, finally: ‘It looks like the barn might be on fire.’