Lying Beside You, page 28
“We don’t believe so.”
“Did he have an accomplice?”
“That is one line of inquiry.”
“Did Daniela and Maya know each other?”
Hoyle would make a lousy poker player. “I’m not going to conduct a running commentary on the investigation.” He raises his hands. “Please. We have Daniela’s mother here today, who is going to make a statement.”
I hadn’t noticed Mrs. Linares sitting beside the stage, flanked by Edgar and Monroe. Some people grow smaller in the spotlight, overawed by the attention, but she seems stronger and more determined when she steps to the podium, raising her chin as the camera shutters click in rapid fire. She speaks without notes, but I know she’s rehearsed what she’s going to say.
“My daughter’s disappearance is my worst nightmare and there are no words to describe my anguish. I know in my heart that Daniela is alive and desperately wants to come home. If you’re the person who took her or if you know who’s responsible, please call the police.” She pauses and looks directly down the lens of the nearest TV camera. “And this is a message for my daughter, my dearest, my only child. On my last birthday, you asked me if the happiest day of my life was the day you were born. I said it was the happiest day ever. And the second happiest day will be the day that you come home.”
Her voice breaks, but she manages to get the last words out. Hoyle puts his arm around her and escorts her from the stage. The emotion of the moment seems to infect the entire room and the reporters have fallen silent. They have their story. Hoyle takes a few more questions before the news crews begin packing up gear, toting cameras and recording equipment.
As he steps off the stage, Hoyle is approached by a uniformed officer, who hands him an envelope. He tears it open and reads. The blood drains from his face. He looks up, searching the room. His eyes come to rest on Lenny, full of disgust and undisguised loathing.
“What is it? What’s happened?” I whisper.
“Hoyle is off the case.”
“Why?”
“The chief constable believes the death of Paulie Brennan could have been avoided and has ordered an internal investigation.”
“Who made the complaint?” I ask.
“I expressed my reservations.”
There is no sense of triumph or valediction in the admission.
Upstairs, detectives have gathered in the incident room, talking in whispers, as the news begins to filter through. Lenny summons them to gather around her. Soon they’re two and three abreast, standing room only.
“DCI Hoyle is meeting with the chief constable,” she says. “I’ll be taking over the investigation. The focus is changing.”
Lenny pins a photograph of Daniela Linares alongside that of Maya Kirk on the whiteboard.
“Eight years ago, these women were nurses working in a neonatal intensive care unit at St. Jude’s Medical Centre. Two babies were given the wrong medication. Jolene and Patrice Rennie lost baby Oliver after three days. Mark and Orla Thompson had a daughter, Daisy, who suffered brain damage and severe medical complications. She died in March of this year.
“A third nurse, Lilah Hooper, was also working in the neonatal ICU. She was charged with manslaughter, but the case against her collapsed. I want her interviewed and put somewhere safe.”
“She’s with Evie,” I say.
“Bring her in.” She turns to DS Edgar. “We need to find the pharmacy technician who put the wrong medication in the ICU cabinet. The hospital has given us a name.”
Edgar nods.
Lenny looks at Dave Curran. “What do we know about the families?”
“Mark and Orla Thompson separated in July, four months after their daughter died. Thompson has been staying with friends or living in Airbnbs and serviced apartments. He’s an estate agent, who works out of an office in Hucknall. He handles the property management department, which means he has access to vacant houses and businesses.”
“I want a list,” says Lenny. “Look for historic buildings, or places that are off the grid.”
Prime Time takes over.
“Patrice and Jolene Rennie sold their house in Nottingham last January and flew to America in March for some sort of medical treatment. Rennie is a former soldier who did two tours in Afghanistan, working as a medical support officer. He resigned his commission and retrained as a chef, before setting up a catering business that went under during the pandemic. The company still has a website which hasn’t been updated in almost a year.”
Lenny nods. “Find out where they are now. The rest of you, focus on Mark Thompson. Talk to his friends, family, colleagues—anyone who might know his whereabouts. I also want searches of his social media accounts, credit card receipts, and phone records.”
“Waiting for the warrant,” says Edgar.
I have stepped away to call Evie’s number. She doesn’t answer. I leave a message:
“The police want to see Lilah. Stay with her and call me.”
63 Evie
The cardboard boxes and bin bags have multiplied and are partially blocking the front hallway and the landing. I hear furniture being moved above our heads.
I shout up the stairs, “Hey! What are you doing?”
Nobody answers.
I climb, leaving Lilah to put the dogs in the garden. The attic door is open.
“You’re not supposed to go up there,” I say.
A head appears. Elias. Grinning. He has cobwebs in his hair.
“What are you doing?”
“I thought I might make this my bedroom.”
My throat begins to close. “No! You can’t! It’s mine!”
“You already have a bedroom.”
“Put everything back. No! Don’t touch anything. Get out!”
I push past him into the attic. The furniture has been moved—the wooden chests and boxes and old rugs and moth-eaten curtains. My cardboard walls have gone. My hiding place. He has forced the window open and swept at the dust, which is floating in the air as though suspended in water.
“A coat of paint and a bed and it’s going to be nice,” says Elias, who has no idea what he’s done. “I even get a view,” he says. “Across the park. I was watching you and Lilah walking the dogs.”
I look at the windowsill, searching for the collection of colored glass, marbles, polished pebbles, and the button from my mother’s coat.
“Where are they?” I ask, my voice shaking.
“What?”
“There was a button and pieces of colored glass.”
“I thought they were rubbish.”
“Where are they?”
“I threw them away.”
“Which bag?”
“I don’t know. One of them.” He laughs nervously.
“They were my things. They belonged to me.”
He gawks moronically.
“Show me where,” I yell.
“I can’t remember. One of the bags.”
“In the hallway? On the landing? Where?”
I shove him aside and go down the stairs, tearing open the first plastic bin bag, which is full of bank statements, electricity bills, and receipts. I rip open the next bag and find yellowing copies of National Geographic and crumbling school exercise books. I kick at a box. It topples over, spilling out old clothes, including a moldy army uniform and a box of military medals.
I only care about finding the button. It’s all I have left of my mother—a small piece of something she wore. When I hold it in my fist, I can remember the sound of her voice and picture her face and feel her arms wrapped around me.
“What are you looking for?” asks Elias.
I’m so angry, I can’t answer him.
Moving down the stairs to the hallway, I tip over more boxes and rip open bags, scattering the contents. I’m kneeling on the floor, using both hands to search. My phone is ringing. I ignore it and keep looking.
Elias has followed me. “You’re making a mess.”
I topple another box and scrabble through the innards, my eyes blurred by anger and tears.
“Where is it? The button. Which bag?” I scream.
He shrugs, grinning or grimacing.
“Fuck you!” I scream, thumping him in the chest. I want to rip out his eyes. I keep hitting him, but the blows bounce off. I aim at his face, connecting with his nose, and feel something break. He shoves me backwards with no effort at all and I slam into the wall, shaking the framed mirror.
He wipes his nose and licks blood off his top lip. I swing again, but he grips my wrist and his other hand closes around my throat and pins me against the wall. I keep trying to hit him, or kick him, but his fingers tighten, and my feet are no longer touching the rug.
His eyes are empty. Hollow. Unknowable. I can’t see anger or pity or sorrow or empathy. My toes are scrabbling to reach the floor, searching for solid ground. My left hand is pulling at his wrist. I croak his name. I want to breathe. Just one breath. One mouthful. Air.
Elias’s face is going out of focus. Blood runs from his nose, across his lips, staining his teeth. In that moment, I see the teenager who carried the knife. The one who heard the voice. The one who followed instructions. I am clawing at his wrist, trying to open his fingers. Losing strength. Slowing down. Light-headed. Dizzy. The last thing I hear is Lilah scream.
64 Cyrus
Unlike most people her age, Evie doesn’t treat her mobile phone like an appendage. She doesn’t spend hours glued to the screen watching TikTok videos, playing games, and DMing her friends. “Because I don’t have any,” she’d say, if I were talking to her now. I would if I could. She’s not answering her phone.
A small doubt has begun to gnaw inside my chest, like a burrowing animal searching for safety. I tell myself that Evie would have stayed with Lilah. They probably slept in, or they’ve gone out for breakfast or to walk the dogs.
Edgar yells across the incident room.
“Thompson showed up for work last Monday with cuts on his face, smelling of booze. The boss sent him home. He hasn’t been seen since.”
“Where’s he been staying?” asks Lenny.
“Until two weeks ago, he was sleeping in a mate’s spare room in Carrington but packed his bags after he almost set fire to the place. A towel fell onto a bar heater. I’m checking local Airbnbs.”
Dave Curran is pulling a page from the printer. “Thompson manages a three-bedroom cottage near Newstead Abbey. Grade Two listed. It’s been empty for six weeks.”
“That’s good enough for me,” says Lenny, grabbing her jacket. “We leave in five.” She turns to me. “Where is Lilah Hooper?”
“I’m trying to find her.”
“Should we be worried?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Call me.”
* * *
Making my way downstairs, I pass through the custody suite and control room before reaching the holding cells. I deposit my phone in a plastic bag, along with my keys and credit cards. A sergeant unlocks the cell door. Mitch gets to his feet, with his hands against the wall, legs braced apart. He knows the routine.
“I’ll be fine,” I tell the sergeant, who leaves us alone.
Mitch returns to the bench, without looking at me. Lying down, he covers his eyes with his forearm.
“You know what’s funny,” he says. “How you reach a point when you say the same thing over and over and nobody believes you and eventually you start to wonder if maybe you’re the one who’s crazy.”
“You’re not crazy. I’ve talked to Lilah. She’s not sure anymore.”
“Not sure?” He laughs, bitterly. “How does that help?”
He’s right. Even if Lilah changed her statement, it wouldn’t be enough for a judge to overturn the conviction. And any appeal would take years, by which time Mitch would have served the rest of his sentence.
“Facts don’t matter anymore,” he says. “I think they’re like runners in a horse race. Some are favorites, others are even money or rank outsiders, but all of them can be beaten if someone manipulates the information or convinces the audience that everything is fake news.”
I can understand his pessimism. Mitch is living proof that luck doesn’t even itself out, any more than it can be forced or predicted. It’s like the old joke: How do you make God laugh? Tell Him you have a plan.
Mitch sits up, offering me half of the bench.
“So why are you here?” he asks.
“Checking up on you.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
I lean my head against the bricks. “On the night that Lilah was attacked, did you notice anything unusual?”
“I was asleep.”
“What about earlier?”
“Lilah went to work mid-afternoon. I took Trevor for a walk before it got dark. He was still a puppy back then.”
“Where did you walk?”
“The Arboretum—at the end of the road. On the way home, I bought a taco from a food truck and gave half to Trevor. He didn’t like the jalapeños.”
The information vibrates inside me. It’s like someone has hit a tuning fork and held it close to my ear.
“This food truck—had you seen it there before?”
“No.”
My mind reaches back, searching for other details. A neighbor saw a food truck parked on Beaconsfield Street on the night Maya disappeared. Patrice Rennie is a chef who set up a catering business that went bust during the pandemic.
“What’s wrong?” asks Mitch.
I hammer on the cell door, yelling to be let out. As the door opens, I push past the sergeant and grab my phone from the counter before jogging up the internal stairs to the incident room. Many of the task force are with Lenny or knocking on doors, but a dozen detectives remain, searching databases and studying footage from traffic cameras and private CCTV.
“Who is looking for the Rennie family?” I shout.
Prime Time raises his hand without looking up from his computer.
“Their home was sold in January.” He points to the screen. “This is the last information I can find.”
It’s an online news story from the Daily Mail.
The family of a desperately ill young woman hopes to raise £200,000 to help get her alternative treatment abroad. Jolene Rennie, from Nottingham, was just thirty-three when she was diagnosed with advanced bowel cancer.
Doctors advised her to start palliative care, but Jolene underwent twenty cycles of chemotherapy over the next four years. The disease went into remission but last October she received the devastating news that her cancer had returned and spread to the lining of her abdomen, her pelvis, and her ovaries.
Specialist surgeons at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London decided that Jolene was unsuitable for surgery, but the family say there are multiple different treatment options abroad, which are not covered by the NHS.
Jolene’s husband, Patrice, a chef, has already sold the family’s home in Lenton and hopes to raise the rest of the money by donations.
“In America, they are twenty years ahead when it comes to stopping this cancer,” he said. “We’re going to make every penny count and make Jolene well again.”
I look at the date on the article. It was published on February 8.
“When did they leave the country?” I ask.
“In April.”
“Look for a death notice.”
Prime Time taps in a search. The single result is dated three weeks ago.
Jolene Phillipa Rennie (née Wright), the much-loved wife of Patrice, daughter of Noel and Elizabeth, sister of Cassandra, sadly left us on Monday, October 25, aged thirty-eight. She battled in every possible way, but now her suffering is over.
I call Lenny, but her line is busy. I’m about to try again when I get an incoming call from Dr. Baillie at Rampton Secure Hospital.
“Is Elias with you?” he asks.
“No. Why?”
“The electronic monitoring service just sent me an alert. The GPS tracker shows that Elias left your address more than an hour ago. Can you confirm his whereabouts?”
“No.”
65 Cyrus
There should be a Murphy’s Law or some corollary that relates to traffic—the more urgently you need to be somewhere, the slower the journey. The more roadworks, stop signs, and red lights. The more little old lady drivers and men wearing lawn-bowling hats and Sunday school teachers, or any of those hackneyed clichés that nowadays seem to cause offense.
Evie still isn’t answering her phone. I try Lenny. This time I get through, but she tells me to hold. I hear voices behind her—officers are being briefed. They have reached the cottage and found Thompson’s car parked outside. An armed response unit is twelve minutes away.
Lenny comes back with me. “Make it quick.”
“Patrice Rennie has a food truck. There was one spotted outside Maya Kirk’s house on the night she disappeared. And Mitchell Coates remembers seeing a food truck on the evening that Lilah Hooper was attacked.”
“I thought Rennie took his wife to America?”
“Jolene Rennie died of cancer four weeks ago. It could have tipped him over the edge.”
“Where is he?”
“Prime Time has the task force looking, but I think I know someone who can find him.”
In the background, I hear a shout, “Suspect identified.”
“That’s him,” says Lenny, who is moving. Thompson must have emerged from the cottage. Someone else yells, “Police! Hands in the air. Get down! Get down! On your knees.”
Lenny to me, “Wait for me at Radford Road.”
“I can’t. Elias has gone AWOL. His ankle monitor triggered an alarm an hour ago.”
“Where would he go?”
“I don’t know, but I’m almost home now.”
“What about Lilah Hooper?”
“She’s in the wind.”
Lenny curses and hangs up.
I’ve reached Parkside. The front door is wide open. I sprint up the path, yelling for Evie rather than Elias. What does that say? There are spilled boxes and ripped bin bags in the hallway. The contents are spread across the floor. Old clothes. Magazines. Schoolbooks. Trophies. Sun-faded curtains. Aging bedspreads. I can’t work out if someone was robbing me or moving me out.
“Did he have an accomplice?”
“That is one line of inquiry.”
“Did Daniela and Maya know each other?”
Hoyle would make a lousy poker player. “I’m not going to conduct a running commentary on the investigation.” He raises his hands. “Please. We have Daniela’s mother here today, who is going to make a statement.”
I hadn’t noticed Mrs. Linares sitting beside the stage, flanked by Edgar and Monroe. Some people grow smaller in the spotlight, overawed by the attention, but she seems stronger and more determined when she steps to the podium, raising her chin as the camera shutters click in rapid fire. She speaks without notes, but I know she’s rehearsed what she’s going to say.
“My daughter’s disappearance is my worst nightmare and there are no words to describe my anguish. I know in my heart that Daniela is alive and desperately wants to come home. If you’re the person who took her or if you know who’s responsible, please call the police.” She pauses and looks directly down the lens of the nearest TV camera. “And this is a message for my daughter, my dearest, my only child. On my last birthday, you asked me if the happiest day of my life was the day you were born. I said it was the happiest day ever. And the second happiest day will be the day that you come home.”
Her voice breaks, but she manages to get the last words out. Hoyle puts his arm around her and escorts her from the stage. The emotion of the moment seems to infect the entire room and the reporters have fallen silent. They have their story. Hoyle takes a few more questions before the news crews begin packing up gear, toting cameras and recording equipment.
As he steps off the stage, Hoyle is approached by a uniformed officer, who hands him an envelope. He tears it open and reads. The blood drains from his face. He looks up, searching the room. His eyes come to rest on Lenny, full of disgust and undisguised loathing.
“What is it? What’s happened?” I whisper.
“Hoyle is off the case.”
“Why?”
“The chief constable believes the death of Paulie Brennan could have been avoided and has ordered an internal investigation.”
“Who made the complaint?” I ask.
“I expressed my reservations.”
There is no sense of triumph or valediction in the admission.
Upstairs, detectives have gathered in the incident room, talking in whispers, as the news begins to filter through. Lenny summons them to gather around her. Soon they’re two and three abreast, standing room only.
“DCI Hoyle is meeting with the chief constable,” she says. “I’ll be taking over the investigation. The focus is changing.”
Lenny pins a photograph of Daniela Linares alongside that of Maya Kirk on the whiteboard.
“Eight years ago, these women were nurses working in a neonatal intensive care unit at St. Jude’s Medical Centre. Two babies were given the wrong medication. Jolene and Patrice Rennie lost baby Oliver after three days. Mark and Orla Thompson had a daughter, Daisy, who suffered brain damage and severe medical complications. She died in March of this year.
“A third nurse, Lilah Hooper, was also working in the neonatal ICU. She was charged with manslaughter, but the case against her collapsed. I want her interviewed and put somewhere safe.”
“She’s with Evie,” I say.
“Bring her in.” She turns to DS Edgar. “We need to find the pharmacy technician who put the wrong medication in the ICU cabinet. The hospital has given us a name.”
Edgar nods.
Lenny looks at Dave Curran. “What do we know about the families?”
“Mark and Orla Thompson separated in July, four months after their daughter died. Thompson has been staying with friends or living in Airbnbs and serviced apartments. He’s an estate agent, who works out of an office in Hucknall. He handles the property management department, which means he has access to vacant houses and businesses.”
“I want a list,” says Lenny. “Look for historic buildings, or places that are off the grid.”
Prime Time takes over.
“Patrice and Jolene Rennie sold their house in Nottingham last January and flew to America in March for some sort of medical treatment. Rennie is a former soldier who did two tours in Afghanistan, working as a medical support officer. He resigned his commission and retrained as a chef, before setting up a catering business that went under during the pandemic. The company still has a website which hasn’t been updated in almost a year.”
Lenny nods. “Find out where they are now. The rest of you, focus on Mark Thompson. Talk to his friends, family, colleagues—anyone who might know his whereabouts. I also want searches of his social media accounts, credit card receipts, and phone records.”
“Waiting for the warrant,” says Edgar.
I have stepped away to call Evie’s number. She doesn’t answer. I leave a message:
“The police want to see Lilah. Stay with her and call me.”
63 Evie
The cardboard boxes and bin bags have multiplied and are partially blocking the front hallway and the landing. I hear furniture being moved above our heads.
I shout up the stairs, “Hey! What are you doing?”
Nobody answers.
I climb, leaving Lilah to put the dogs in the garden. The attic door is open.
“You’re not supposed to go up there,” I say.
A head appears. Elias. Grinning. He has cobwebs in his hair.
“What are you doing?”
“I thought I might make this my bedroom.”
My throat begins to close. “No! You can’t! It’s mine!”
“You already have a bedroom.”
“Put everything back. No! Don’t touch anything. Get out!”
I push past him into the attic. The furniture has been moved—the wooden chests and boxes and old rugs and moth-eaten curtains. My cardboard walls have gone. My hiding place. He has forced the window open and swept at the dust, which is floating in the air as though suspended in water.
“A coat of paint and a bed and it’s going to be nice,” says Elias, who has no idea what he’s done. “I even get a view,” he says. “Across the park. I was watching you and Lilah walking the dogs.”
I look at the windowsill, searching for the collection of colored glass, marbles, polished pebbles, and the button from my mother’s coat.
“Where are they?” I ask, my voice shaking.
“What?”
“There was a button and pieces of colored glass.”
“I thought they were rubbish.”
“Where are they?”
“I threw them away.”
“Which bag?”
“I don’t know. One of them.” He laughs nervously.
“They were my things. They belonged to me.”
He gawks moronically.
“Show me where,” I yell.
“I can’t remember. One of the bags.”
“In the hallway? On the landing? Where?”
I shove him aside and go down the stairs, tearing open the first plastic bin bag, which is full of bank statements, electricity bills, and receipts. I rip open the next bag and find yellowing copies of National Geographic and crumbling school exercise books. I kick at a box. It topples over, spilling out old clothes, including a moldy army uniform and a box of military medals.
I only care about finding the button. It’s all I have left of my mother—a small piece of something she wore. When I hold it in my fist, I can remember the sound of her voice and picture her face and feel her arms wrapped around me.
“What are you looking for?” asks Elias.
I’m so angry, I can’t answer him.
Moving down the stairs to the hallway, I tip over more boxes and rip open bags, scattering the contents. I’m kneeling on the floor, using both hands to search. My phone is ringing. I ignore it and keep looking.
Elias has followed me. “You’re making a mess.”
I topple another box and scrabble through the innards, my eyes blurred by anger and tears.
“Where is it? The button. Which bag?” I scream.
He shrugs, grinning or grimacing.
“Fuck you!” I scream, thumping him in the chest. I want to rip out his eyes. I keep hitting him, but the blows bounce off. I aim at his face, connecting with his nose, and feel something break. He shoves me backwards with no effort at all and I slam into the wall, shaking the framed mirror.
He wipes his nose and licks blood off his top lip. I swing again, but he grips my wrist and his other hand closes around my throat and pins me against the wall. I keep trying to hit him, or kick him, but his fingers tighten, and my feet are no longer touching the rug.
His eyes are empty. Hollow. Unknowable. I can’t see anger or pity or sorrow or empathy. My toes are scrabbling to reach the floor, searching for solid ground. My left hand is pulling at his wrist. I croak his name. I want to breathe. Just one breath. One mouthful. Air.
Elias’s face is going out of focus. Blood runs from his nose, across his lips, staining his teeth. In that moment, I see the teenager who carried the knife. The one who heard the voice. The one who followed instructions. I am clawing at his wrist, trying to open his fingers. Losing strength. Slowing down. Light-headed. Dizzy. The last thing I hear is Lilah scream.
64 Cyrus
Unlike most people her age, Evie doesn’t treat her mobile phone like an appendage. She doesn’t spend hours glued to the screen watching TikTok videos, playing games, and DMing her friends. “Because I don’t have any,” she’d say, if I were talking to her now. I would if I could. She’s not answering her phone.
A small doubt has begun to gnaw inside my chest, like a burrowing animal searching for safety. I tell myself that Evie would have stayed with Lilah. They probably slept in, or they’ve gone out for breakfast or to walk the dogs.
Edgar yells across the incident room.
“Thompson showed up for work last Monday with cuts on his face, smelling of booze. The boss sent him home. He hasn’t been seen since.”
“Where’s he been staying?” asks Lenny.
“Until two weeks ago, he was sleeping in a mate’s spare room in Carrington but packed his bags after he almost set fire to the place. A towel fell onto a bar heater. I’m checking local Airbnbs.”
Dave Curran is pulling a page from the printer. “Thompson manages a three-bedroom cottage near Newstead Abbey. Grade Two listed. It’s been empty for six weeks.”
“That’s good enough for me,” says Lenny, grabbing her jacket. “We leave in five.” She turns to me. “Where is Lilah Hooper?”
“I’m trying to find her.”
“Should we be worried?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Call me.”
* * *
Making my way downstairs, I pass through the custody suite and control room before reaching the holding cells. I deposit my phone in a plastic bag, along with my keys and credit cards. A sergeant unlocks the cell door. Mitch gets to his feet, with his hands against the wall, legs braced apart. He knows the routine.
“I’ll be fine,” I tell the sergeant, who leaves us alone.
Mitch returns to the bench, without looking at me. Lying down, he covers his eyes with his forearm.
“You know what’s funny,” he says. “How you reach a point when you say the same thing over and over and nobody believes you and eventually you start to wonder if maybe you’re the one who’s crazy.”
“You’re not crazy. I’ve talked to Lilah. She’s not sure anymore.”
“Not sure?” He laughs, bitterly. “How does that help?”
He’s right. Even if Lilah changed her statement, it wouldn’t be enough for a judge to overturn the conviction. And any appeal would take years, by which time Mitch would have served the rest of his sentence.
“Facts don’t matter anymore,” he says. “I think they’re like runners in a horse race. Some are favorites, others are even money or rank outsiders, but all of them can be beaten if someone manipulates the information or convinces the audience that everything is fake news.”
I can understand his pessimism. Mitch is living proof that luck doesn’t even itself out, any more than it can be forced or predicted. It’s like the old joke: How do you make God laugh? Tell Him you have a plan.
Mitch sits up, offering me half of the bench.
“So why are you here?” he asks.
“Checking up on you.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
I lean my head against the bricks. “On the night that Lilah was attacked, did you notice anything unusual?”
“I was asleep.”
“What about earlier?”
“Lilah went to work mid-afternoon. I took Trevor for a walk before it got dark. He was still a puppy back then.”
“Where did you walk?”
“The Arboretum—at the end of the road. On the way home, I bought a taco from a food truck and gave half to Trevor. He didn’t like the jalapeños.”
The information vibrates inside me. It’s like someone has hit a tuning fork and held it close to my ear.
“This food truck—had you seen it there before?”
“No.”
My mind reaches back, searching for other details. A neighbor saw a food truck parked on Beaconsfield Street on the night Maya disappeared. Patrice Rennie is a chef who set up a catering business that went bust during the pandemic.
“What’s wrong?” asks Mitch.
I hammer on the cell door, yelling to be let out. As the door opens, I push past the sergeant and grab my phone from the counter before jogging up the internal stairs to the incident room. Many of the task force are with Lenny or knocking on doors, but a dozen detectives remain, searching databases and studying footage from traffic cameras and private CCTV.
“Who is looking for the Rennie family?” I shout.
Prime Time raises his hand without looking up from his computer.
“Their home was sold in January.” He points to the screen. “This is the last information I can find.”
It’s an online news story from the Daily Mail.
The family of a desperately ill young woman hopes to raise £200,000 to help get her alternative treatment abroad. Jolene Rennie, from Nottingham, was just thirty-three when she was diagnosed with advanced bowel cancer.
Doctors advised her to start palliative care, but Jolene underwent twenty cycles of chemotherapy over the next four years. The disease went into remission but last October she received the devastating news that her cancer had returned and spread to the lining of her abdomen, her pelvis, and her ovaries.
Specialist surgeons at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London decided that Jolene was unsuitable for surgery, but the family say there are multiple different treatment options abroad, which are not covered by the NHS.
Jolene’s husband, Patrice, a chef, has already sold the family’s home in Lenton and hopes to raise the rest of the money by donations.
“In America, they are twenty years ahead when it comes to stopping this cancer,” he said. “We’re going to make every penny count and make Jolene well again.”
I look at the date on the article. It was published on February 8.
“When did they leave the country?” I ask.
“In April.”
“Look for a death notice.”
Prime Time taps in a search. The single result is dated three weeks ago.
Jolene Phillipa Rennie (née Wright), the much-loved wife of Patrice, daughter of Noel and Elizabeth, sister of Cassandra, sadly left us on Monday, October 25, aged thirty-eight. She battled in every possible way, but now her suffering is over.
I call Lenny, but her line is busy. I’m about to try again when I get an incoming call from Dr. Baillie at Rampton Secure Hospital.
“Is Elias with you?” he asks.
“No. Why?”
“The electronic monitoring service just sent me an alert. The GPS tracker shows that Elias left your address more than an hour ago. Can you confirm his whereabouts?”
“No.”
65 Cyrus
There should be a Murphy’s Law or some corollary that relates to traffic—the more urgently you need to be somewhere, the slower the journey. The more roadworks, stop signs, and red lights. The more little old lady drivers and men wearing lawn-bowling hats and Sunday school teachers, or any of those hackneyed clichés that nowadays seem to cause offense.
Evie still isn’t answering her phone. I try Lenny. This time I get through, but she tells me to hold. I hear voices behind her—officers are being briefed. They have reached the cottage and found Thompson’s car parked outside. An armed response unit is twelve minutes away.
Lenny comes back with me. “Make it quick.”
“Patrice Rennie has a food truck. There was one spotted outside Maya Kirk’s house on the night she disappeared. And Mitchell Coates remembers seeing a food truck on the evening that Lilah Hooper was attacked.”
“I thought Rennie took his wife to America?”
“Jolene Rennie died of cancer four weeks ago. It could have tipped him over the edge.”
“Where is he?”
“Prime Time has the task force looking, but I think I know someone who can find him.”
In the background, I hear a shout, “Suspect identified.”
“That’s him,” says Lenny, who is moving. Thompson must have emerged from the cottage. Someone else yells, “Police! Hands in the air. Get down! Get down! On your knees.”
Lenny to me, “Wait for me at Radford Road.”
“I can’t. Elias has gone AWOL. His ankle monitor triggered an alarm an hour ago.”
“Where would he go?”
“I don’t know, but I’m almost home now.”
“What about Lilah Hooper?”
“She’s in the wind.”
Lenny curses and hangs up.
I’ve reached Parkside. The front door is wide open. I sprint up the path, yelling for Evie rather than Elias. What does that say? There are spilled boxes and ripped bin bags in the hallway. The contents are spread across the floor. Old clothes. Magazines. Schoolbooks. Trophies. Sun-faded curtains. Aging bedspreads. I can’t work out if someone was robbing me or moving me out.
