The Night They Vanished, page 11
“Please—call me Hanna,” I say as he shows me into his office. I’m glad it’s not the same cold interview room I was in yesterday.
“Is this about the Bentley sisters?” I blurt it out before he can say anything.
“I’m sorry?”
“Dee found an article that said you knew who’d done the hit-and-run. Is it the same person who killed Katie Bentley? Have you brought them back in? Do they know where my family is?”
“Hold on, slow down,” he says. “Gemma Bentley’s death is still an open investigation, as is Katie Bentley’s. No one has been arrested.”
“But you questioned someone? Who?”
“We talked to a lot of people and no one was charged. We do not currently have any suspects.”
“But…”
He sighs. “I know the article you’re referring to. Katie Bentley was under the mistaken impression that someone deliberately targeted her sister, that it was more than a drunk driver or a joyrider. There was never any evidence…”
“What about now? Now Katie Bentley has been murdered? Now it’s been added to Adam’s website?”
“I can assure you all cases are being thoroughly investigated, but that is not why I’ve asked you to come in this morning.
“Have you been back to your flat yet?” he continues, pausing to thank the officer who comes in with two coffees.
“Not yet. Haven’t been able to face it, to be honest.”
He sighs. “Might be better to take someone with you. There didn’t seem to be any major damage, but it is a bit of a mess. We’ll have someone from Victim Support follow up with you as well.”
“So, what did you find?” I say, not wanting to think anymore about the mess at my flat. “Why am I here?”
He reaches onto a shelf behind him and brings down two clear plastic evidence bags.
The back of my neck prickles and my throat feels tight as he lays the bags on the table in front of me.
“This is from home. Not my flat, my childhood home. It was always on the mantelpiece.” I don’t touch the plastic, I can’t bear the thought of coming anywhere near that picture. It’s a photograph in a silver frame, of my father and Jen with a baby Sasha nestled in Jen’s arms. Dad and Jen are both smiling. Sasha is only a couple of months old, barely visible in the frilly monstrosity of a dress with matching headband they’ve put her in. That photo was always a slap in the face to me. It was the only family photograph on display—none of me anywhere and certainly none of my dead mother, who wasn’t even relegated to dusty albums hidden in cupboards. No, my photos were banished to those, my mother’s photos were just banned as soon as she left us.
The photo used to be in a different frame, but I came in drunk and raging one night and threw it across the room. The glass created a spectacular mess, but the photo itself was unharmed and was back in a brand-new frame by the following day. It wasn’t long after that that I left.
There’s no way this could have ended up in my flat accidentally.
When I turn to look at the second evidence bag, I think I might actually be sick. I can taste the acid burn of vomit in my throat.
It’s another photograph, this one unframed. Unlike the other one, I don’t instantly recognize it. It’s not a photo I’ve taken or seen but it’s familiar all the same, because it’s a photo of me. Me and Jacob and a group of teenagers I’m not sure I could even name anymore, all crowded together, clutching bottles of booze and cigarettes, all obviously drunk out of our heads. Judging by the tragic haircut I remember and the dodgy dye-job, I would have been about fifteen.
“Neither of these are mine. I mean, this is me in this photo—me when I was a kid—but it’s not my photo.” I’m surprised to hear my voice so steady. I look down at them again and frown. Something about this second one is nagging. “Wait… how did you know…? I mean, how did you pick these two out as odd? I’ve got photos all over my flat.”
It’s true. Not family photos—a couple of Sasha, that’s all. Mostly my friends, but there are plenty of framed and unframed photos scattered around my flat.
DC Norton gets an envelope out of a drawer. “Ah yes—these two photographs weren’t displayed like any of the others. They were… it was like the whole break-in—all the mess—was created and arranged around these two photographs.”
He pulls two sheets of paper out of the envelope and I see they’re printouts of photographs. Photographs of my flat. My bedroom, to be exact. In the first, the silver-framed photograph is sitting in the middle of my dressing table, but everything else on the dressing table has been swept off onto the floor. I can see my makeup, hairbrush, perfume bottles scattered on the floor. The photograph, upright in its frame, has been placed to face the bed.
And the bed—that’s what is in the second printout, and there, in the middle, lies the photograph of teenage me. Unlike the chaos of the rest of the room, the bed is neatly made, the quilt smoothly laid over the pillows.
I have to swallow hard to stop the surge of bile rising higher. Because I didn’t make my bed yesterday morning. I saw Adam’s website, saw my home and family listed, and I left the flat in far too much of a hurry to think about making the bed. Frankly, I’m amazed I even managed to get dressed. Which means that whoever broke in to my flat to leave those photos made my bed, put their hands all over my sheets and pillows.
That’s when it hits me, what’s nagging me about this second photo. It’s true I don’t recognize it specifically but it’s so like the photos I found back at the holiday park. Left on the windowsill in my old bedroom, I presumed they’d been forgotten, or even left behind deliberately by my father. I know those photos were mine. I used to keep them hidden when I lived there. I guessed one of my family must have found them when they packed everything up—but what if they didn’t? What if whoever took the silver-framed family photo and left it in my flat also took those teenage snapshots and left them in the empty house for me to find? All of this planned, all of this staged.
“This photo,” I say, picking up the printout with the silver-framed photo in it. “This was in my family’s home the last time I was there.” I don’t mention the other one. Stephen Hayes might have lied when he said he wouldn’t tell about me and Dee being in the house, but just in case he kept it quiet, I don’t want to sit here in a police station, confessing I broke into the holiday camp. I might have had a key, but it was still breaking and entering.
“We’re continuing to work on the presumption that this is someone who knows you—either now or from your past. Do you remember the names of all the people in this photo?” he asks, nodding toward the teenage one.
I shake my head. Some of their first names, yes, but they were Jacob’s friends, really, not mine. I was accepted because I was his girlfriend, that was all.
“It might be a good idea to continue staying with your friends while this investigation is going on,” DC Norton says. “I’ll have a uniformed officer run you back to collect whatever you need.”
I look up at him. “You think I might be in danger?”
“Just as a precaution. Until we can be sure your family is safe and while we have an ongoing murder investigation.”
The nausea is still there as I unlock my front door and step into the flat. The officer DC Norton sent to accompany me waits outside. I know he’s being polite and giving me some privacy, but I actually wish he’d come inside. I know there’s no one else here, but it doesn’t feel like my home anymore.
I thought it might not look as bad in daylight, but it does. Like DC Norton said, there’s no real damage done, just a lot of mess, but it looks awful. It’s not only the mess, but knowing the intruder had their hands all over my stuff. In the bedroom, half my clothes have been pulled out of the drawers and wardrobe and I don’t want to take any of those. I grab a couple of things that don’t look as if they’ve been touched, add toiletries, and close my bag. I’ll borrow anything else from Dee. Right now, all I want to do is leave, put the flat up for sale, and never come back.
I can’t look at the bed, but the image from the printed photo is stuck in my head, the smoothed-down quilt, the plumped-up pillows, the bed made far more neatly than I ever do. DC Norton asked me to look around and confirm that nothing is missing, but my gaze flickers past everything and I can’t stop flinching. It hurts, almost a physical pain, to really look. Nothing valuable is missing, but how can I be sure that someone who’d do this hasn’t taken some tiny tokens, like a serial killer collecting trophies?
I close my eyes and take a deep breath. DC Norton told me they’re going to speak to Liam, but I know this isn’t him. In the months we were together, he didn’t ask a single question about my family, my childhood. I did try, one night. I tried talking to him, telling him about some of the stuff from my past in the hope it would deepen our relationship somehow. I’m not sure if he was even listening. I don’t think he’d have a clue if an officer asked him whether my parents were alive, whether I had any siblings. So those photographs—of my family, from my past—whoever’s doing all this, it’s not Liam. I almost wish it were—would it be so terrifying if I knew who was behind all this?
It’s only as I’m walking back through the flat to leave that I realize there is something missing, something no one else would notice but should have been glaringly obvious to me the moment I walked through the door. It’s the photograph of me and Jacob I used to keep on my wall just inside the front door. I took it down and out of its frame a few months ago, because I needed it for reference when I got my tattoo. I trace the black stars running up the inside of my wrist. I never got around to putting it back on the wall because I wanted to change the frame, but I’d propped the photograph on the shelf in my hallway to remind me. And now it’s gone.
I sink down on the bottom stair and try to put all of it together. Whoever is messing with me… is it someone who knows about Jacob? Who knows how and why he died? Or did they take the photograph because I was in it? The only people currently in my life who do know about Jacob are my father and Dee, and to a lesser extent Seb and possibly Liam, if he did actually listen to any of what I told him. Seb only knows what Dee has told him and Liam what I told him, which isn’t much.
It could be a stranger—I kept the missing photo on display, so it’s clearly important to me. The one left on my bed, I didn’t recognize it, but it could have been among the set I found in the holiday park… If the same person found those photos, then came here and saw the one I had on display, it would be an easy way to spook me—to take that one, and leave a different one featuring me and Jacob in its place. It doesn’t mean they know the significance.
The other teenagers frozen in time in that photograph… I didn’t keep in touch with anyone after I left. Not even Dee for a long time—she was the one who found me. My plan was to go back to the village today to find out if any suspicious strangers had been lurking about, but what if it isn’t a stranger at all? The rest of the gang I used to hang out with—Jacob’s friends, my party crowd—they dumped me. After Jacob died, they closed ranks and shut me out. Are any of them still there? Not in Littledean, none of them were from my tiny village, but they all used to live in the surrounding towns; some of them might still be there. And it occurs to me as all this goes through my mind: there is someone else who knows about Jacob, who was there then and is there still. And although he obviously has nothing to do with what’s going on… he might well know who it could be.
Chapter 15
Thedarktourist.com
Sunday 2 p.m.
“Welcome to the most conservative village in the UK,” Dee says as we drive past the sign welcoming us to the village.
“Where the only newspapers for sale are the Daily Mail or the Telegraph,” I add.
“Not the Sun?” Adam asks.
Dee shakes her head. “Too common. The Express at a push. The Sun readers were all forced out years ago, shunted off to the council estates in town or ‘affordable housing’ not found within ten miles.”
“Shame—it’s really pretty,” Adam says, looking out the window at the village green and the cottages dotted around it.
“Don’t be fooled. It’s a cesspit. This village is made for a horror film.”
“Where you’re killed by tight-lipped disapproval,” Dee says, grinning as we drive past the village shop.
“Slain by tutting pensioners,” I add, smiling sweetly at a woman peering out of her net-curtained window as we pull up.
“It’s why Hanna had to leave,” Dee says as we get out of the car. “She was moments from death, torn apart by laser beams of disgust at her shocking teenage behavior.”
I raise my eyebrows at Dee, not wanting her to go into any kind of detail about the behavior that had me practically hounded out of town.
“I’m not even sure you could call it a separate village anymore,” I say. “The new estates have got bigger and bigger, creeping further away from West Dean. Littledean is really just the tail end of West Dean now.”
“Don’t ever say that to anyone who lives here, though,” Dee says with a shudder.
“So, monsters live in all these pretty cottages, then?” Adam asks, looking around.
“Yep,” I say. “And the cottages are all made of sweets. You could go and take a bite of that blue one, and the old witch who lives there would lure you in, fatten you up, and eat the flesh off your bones.”
“Nice.”
Dee laughs. “Maybe it’s not that bad—just your typical village. After all, Hanna and I came from here, so it can’t be all bad.”
“Really? You say that because you never experienced the real underbelly of this place,” I say. “Plus, we’ve been back here all of five minutes and look—someone’s called the police.”
Sure enough, Stephen Hayes is walking toward us, all shiny in his uniform.
“For God’s sake,” Dee says, rolling her eyes.
“How nice,” I say. “A welcome home party.”
“What are you doing back here, Hanna?” He sounds irritated as he looks at all of us, his gaze pausing on Adam as he obviously tries to place him. It makes me realize that my idea of asking about any strangers hanging around is stupid: West Dean, maybe—it’s big enough that a stranger might be able to sneak around unnoticed—but here? Dee and I didn’t even manage ten minutes up at the holiday park the other night before the police were called.
“Last time I checked, I was free to go anywhere I please, Steve,” I say. “Unless there are special rules for the amazing village of Littledean.”
“Don’t be facetious—and don’t call me Steve. It’s PC Hayes. And if I thought you were here just for a nice visit, it wouldn’t be a problem. But it’s never just a nice anything with you, is it, Hanna Carter?”
I shake my head. “What exactly do you think I’m going to do? I’m thirty now, PC Hayes, not fourteen. I’m not planning to get drunk in the woods and spray-paint tits on the pub walls.”
Adam snorts behind me. “You did that?”
I glance back at him. “I was bored with the badly graffitied dick pics all over town. I thought we were due some equality in our dodgy spray-painted body parts.” I turn back to Stephen. “Also, you weren’t always so hostile toward me.”
It’s the wrong thing to say because he looks even more hostile. And it’s not my graffiti skills he was referring to before. He looks at Adam again and frowns. “Do I know you?”
“No,” Adam says, shaking his head. “I’m a friend of Hanna’s, just here for moral support.”
“A friend? You might want to rethink that.”
“Look, I’m sorry,” I say, before Stephen can lose his shit and say things I don’t want aired in front of Adam. “We are honestly not here to cause any trouble.” I pause and take a deep breath. “We’re just here to visit an old friend.”
Stephen folds his arms. “Which old friend is that? From what I remember, you don’t have any friends left.”
“Mr. Garner.”
I hear Dee gasp behind me. Bugger. I really should have warned her.
“Reverend Garner?” she says.
“Not anymore,” Stephen says. “Thanks to Hanna and her father.”
I roll my eyes, reduced to the behavior of a fourteen-year-old just by being in his presence. “He retired, he wasn’t hounded out of town.”
“He was forced to retire early. Everyone knows why.”
“No, Steve. The vicious gossip monsters in this town took a great deal of pleasure in making shit up. He was always going to retire early. I had nothing to do with it.”
Stephen shakes his head. “You keep telling yourself that, if it helps you sleep at night. I’m sure the past is a right fairy tale in your head. But I don’t think Mr. Garner is even in the country at the moment. He spends a lot of time abroad. He has an apartment in—”
“Spain. I know. We keep in contact occasionally. And I know he is here at the moment because I texted him last night.”
I can feel Dee’s gaze burning into me, but I don’t turn to look at her. Ed Garner, the former Reverend Garner, got caught up in the mess that was my life purely by dint of his concern for me and Jacob. He tried to help and got caught in the maelstrom. Dee doesn’t know all of the details; she only knows that the sudden retirement of Reverend Garner was another crime laid at my door.
I can see, as we walk off toward Mr. Garner’s house, that Stephen is desperately trying to find a reason to stop us. But there’s nothing he can do—none of us are criminals, we’ve parked legally, and much as he’d like to, he can’t rally the troops of Neighborhood Watch to hound us out of town with pitchforks. The collective disapproval of an entire village does seem to make the air thicker so it’s harder to breathe but I know that’s purely my imagination.
