he had a soft spot for me?’
‘It’s banter.’
‘It needs to stop. It’s not a joke. Someone like Georgia who doesn’t know any better will take it seriously, and I’ve had enough of it. You know it’s not true and you know there are a lot of people who’d like to believe that it is.’
‘You can’t live your life worrying about what other people think.’
‘Spoken like someone who doesn’t ever have to worry about it.’
‘You don’t have to. That’s my point. You’re choosing to care.’ He shrugged. ‘These people aren’t worth getting upset about. If they want to think the worst of you, they will, whether I say anything or not.’
‘Maybe, but you don’t have to throw fuel on the fire.’ Frustration was a knot in my stomach. It was impossible to explain how I felt to Derwent, and he didn’t have the imagination to put himself in my shoes. The gulf between his life and mine was unbridgeable. ‘You have no idea what it’s like to have to prove yourself over and over again,’ I said at last.
He rolled his eyes. ‘I have a fair idea.’
‘Because I’ve told you before. And yet, here we are, having the same conversation all over again.’ I turned away from him and squashed the teabag against the side of the mug, viciously. When I flicked the teabag at the bin I had the very small satisfaction that it went in first try.
‘I’ll keep it in mind,’ Derwent said at last. He almost sounded sincere. He would never admit he had been wrong, though, and nor would he apologise.
‘Thanks for being so understanding.’ I poured the milk into my tea and watched little white specks bob to the surface. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, who puts gone-off milk back in the fridge?’
‘Poor Kerrigan. It’s not your day,’ Derwent said, and left, whistling as he went.
I leaned against the wall, defeated. I was tired and cold and fed up. All I’d wanted was a hot bath, a good meal and an early night. Instead I had nothing to look forward to but a long evening on my own, reading about someone else’s investigation and some very dead women. Not my day, not my week, not my year.
I had read the files and looked at the photographs until my eyes burned; I had watched the CCTV that the first investigation had painstakingly located and analysed. I knew the circumstances of Sara Grey’s disappearance inside out. Still, as Derwent drove down the Westway, I felt my pulse getting faster. Sara Grey. Victim one, chronologically.
‘Bloemfontein Road is coming up on the left. Not this one, the one after.’
Derwent slowed to make the turn.
‘This was where the tyre gave up.’
‘Puncture?’
I nodded. ‘They never worked out where she picked up the nail. There was nothing forensically interesting about it. Probably bad luck rather than Leo Stone’s planning. We have CCTV of her here, turning into Bloemfontein Road.’
‘Tell me about her.’
‘Sara Grey was twenty-nine at the time of her disappearance. She was engaged to Tom Mitchell, who was the same age as her. She was a primary school teacher; he had his own property development company.’
‘Did they ever check to see if he had employed Leo Stone?’
‘I didn’t see anything about it in the files.’ I scrawled a note to myself to look into it. ‘He was in Latvia on a stag weekend when it happened. Otherwise he’d have been suspect number one.’
‘Being out of the country doesn’t let him off the hook as far as I’m concerned. It’s a bit too convenient.’
‘Poor guy. If he’d been in the UK you’d be even more convinced he was involved.’
‘It’s always the husband. Or the fiancé. Or the boyfriend. Or the ex.’
‘Not this time. The original investigation focused on Tom, though, before her disappearance was linked to the others. They were looking for money worries or secret affairs or any kind of motive. They didn’t find anything.’
Derwent grunted, not convinced.
I leafed through my notes. ‘There was nothing to say Sara was being stalked – no concerns for her safety, no threats. On the day she disappeared no one was following her – at least as far as the investigators could determine.’
Derwent had slowed down to a crawl, creeping down Bloemfontein Road. ‘So what happened then?’
‘She parked just where that Volvo is. It was eleven at night but it was a Saturday, a summer night. There was a lot of traffic on the main road and there were people around. It was a warm evening – there’d been thunderstorms earlier but it was clearing up. When she got out of her car, she was seven hundred and eighty yards away from her home at 37 Haddaway Road.’
Today the light was flat, the clouds brooding over our heads. It was hard to imagine the street wrapped in the dark heat of a humid summer night.
Derwent pulled in a few cars ahead of the Volvo and parked. ‘Then what?’
‘Then she sent a text message to her fiancé telling him what had happened.’ I flipped to the relevant page and read it out. ‘Flat tyre!!! I don’t know what to do.’
‘The poor bloke was in Latvia. How was he supposed to come to the rescue?’
‘She probably just wanted to tell someone what had happened.’
‘No, she wanted to make him feel guilty for being off on a stag weekend instead of here.’
I raised my eyebrows at him. ‘That’s a very jaundiced view, even for you.’
‘She was high maintenance. I have limited patience for that.’
Melissa, Derwent’s girlfriend, was not the sort of person who would be low maintenance. If it had been anyone else I might have said as much, but Derwent had made it clear time and time again that while my personal life was endlessly entertaining, his was not available for discussion. Beside me, Derwent drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, as if he knew what I was thinking. ‘Then what happened?’
‘He replied: “Oh shit. Where r u? How bad is it? Driveable?” Obviously it wasn’t. She checked their AA membership and discovered it had lapsed so she decided to walk home. She sent him a message to that effect at 23.15.’ I showed Derwent the relevant page.
I can’t drive it. Left the car on Bloem Rd and I’m walking home. You can sort it out when you get back tomorrow.
Derwent grimaced. ‘Something for him to look forward to.’
‘He
