style="font-size:15px;"> I shrugged. I really was at a loss. I’d spoken to everyone in Ciara’s life. She was a happy sixteen-year-old girl growing up in the suburbs of south London. Her teachers had no concerns. Her parents were normal. Her friends were sweet. There was nothing suspicious about the family whatsoever. Her mother didn’t sleep well but apart from that she was ordinary and her father – well, stepfather actually though he’d brought her up since she’d been tiny – was an all-round nice chap. But her parents being to blame was the only thing that made sense. Wasn’t it? I had no idea any more.
‘Focus,’ DI Blair said. ‘And let me know when you’re ready to decide on a next step. I might even come with you.’
He marched off towards his office and I sighed. He’d never been this bolshie or unpleasant to work with before, but I understood the strain he was under. Ciara’s picture had been on the front of every newspaper today. She smiled out at me on every news website, her drab school uniform unable to dull her youthful prettiness.
The rest of the team were looking at me, waiting for a decision, so I forced myself to focus.
‘Right,’ I said to two uniformed PCs who were helping with the door-to-door inquiries. ‘Benny and Joe, can you go through the information from the neighbours and friends?’ They nodded and I turned to another colleague. ‘Stacey, you double-check the reports from her school, and I’ll reread the parents’ statements. We must be missing something.’
There was a bustle of activity. Stacey – DC Maxwell – squeezed my arm as she walked past me to her desk, letting me know she had my back. I gave her a grateful smile. Eventually everyone settled down and silence fell as we all read through every bit of information we had about the girl’s disappearance.
Ciara’s mother, Molly, was a nursery school teacher, and the stepdad, Steve, had his own business doing accounts. He rented a desk in an office near the station and everyone there said he was always pleasant. As I already knew, they were both fairly religious – regular churchgoers. Upright. Moral, even. Steve, I’d heard, had turned down the contract to do the accounts for a local betting shop because he didn’t approve of gambling. Molly was sweet-natured and kind. No criminal records. Not so much as a speeding ticket. Nothing.
Ciara had been messaging a boy online – someone from a nearby school – and we’d originally thought she might have gone to meet him. But he’d been playing football the evening she disappeared, and he admitted – slightly sheepishly – that he’d never met her.
I put aside the statements from Ciara’s parents. This was getting me nowhere.
‘Phoebe, I spoke to the dad’s mates at his golf club,’ Benny said, appearing at the side of my desk. ‘I just uploaded the statements.’
‘Anything worthwhile?’
He shrugged. ‘Just what a nice bloke he is.’
‘I’ll have a look,’ I said half-heartedly.
I scanned the statements. This was so hard. There was just nothing to go on at all. Gut instinct went a long way in police investigations, even though lots of my fellow officers would deny it and claim it was all legwork and asking the right questions. But just now, my gut instinct was switched right off. I had unfounded doubts about the dad and that was it. All I could see was that Ciara was a nice, normal sixteen-year-old. In fact, I thought, she was even nicer than her parents made her sound – but that wasn’t unusual. I had friends who claimed their babies were absolute nightmares while smothering them with kisses. Maybe parents of teens did the same?
I sighed, looking at the statement from Steve’s friend. ‘Steve’s one of the nicest blokes I know,’ he’d said. ‘We all thought he was really good to take on Ciara as his own.’ Yawn. I rested my head on my hand, and scrolled on. ‘Considering,’ the friend had added. I sat up straighter. ‘Considering,’ I murmured to myself. What did that mean?
I pulled my phone to me and dialled the number on the bottom of the statement. The friend answered straightaway.
‘Sorry to bother you,’ I said. ‘This is DS Bellingham from Lewisham police station. I just wanted to double-check something in your statement.’
‘Right,’ the man said, sounding nervous.
‘When you said Steve was good to take Ciara on as his own child, considering … What did you mean? Considering what?’
The man laughed. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘You probably know more than me. But she sounds like a right handful. Always in trouble. Last I heard, she was messaging some lad. Steve was worried about it. Sounded like she was sending him all sorts, if you know what I mean?’
I had no idea. We’d found Ciara’s phone in her very tidy room – another odd thing about her disappearance. What teenager went anywhere without their phone? There had been the messages to the football-playing boy, and to her friends, and that was it. Nothing dodgy. No sexting, or inappropriate photos. Just a few sweet words saying how much she wanted to see the lad she’d been getting to know.
‘Is Steve a strict father?’ I asked.
‘He has to be, by the sound of it,’ the friend said. ‘That girl would be on the streets if it wasn’t for him.’
I thanked him for his time, and hung up the phone, shouting for Stacey as I pulled on my coat. We had to go and see the parents again.
From there on, it all unravelled. It turned out, Steve was more than just strict. He regularly punished poor Ciara for any perceived misdemeanour, from not stacking the dishwasher properly, to a poor mark on a test. And the messages from her new friend had tipped him over into disgust.
‘She was messaging some filthy little turd,’ he hissed at Stacey and me, his lip curled. ‘I check her phone, of course, and she didn’t even try to hide it.’
I thought about how innocent the messages were, and how I’d been mildly surprised by their chaste tone, and winced. ‘What did you do then?’
He lifted his chin up, looking pleased with himself. ‘I said to Molly that she needed to be punished and Molly agreed.’
Molly, sitting next to him, looked alarmed. ‘We hadn’t agreed on that,’ she said. ‘I felt a bit of a hypocrite. I had boyfriends at her age.’
‘And look where you ended up,’ Steve spat at her. ‘Pregnant.’
Molly stayed quiet after that, as Steve explained how he wanted to teach Ciara a lesson, so he’d taken her to his allotment on Saturday afternoon and left her in the shed.
‘It’s freezing,’ Stacey said. ‘And her coat is still here. She must have been so cold.’
The thought of poor Ciara in the icy shed made me shiver. I shook my head. ‘But we searched the shed,’ I said. ‘And the allotments. She’s not there.’
‘I just wanted to give her a scare,’ Steve said. ‘But when I got back to the allotment after church, she wasn’t there.’ He shrugged, not looking remotely worried. ‘She’ll be with that lad,’ he said. ‘Getting up to all sorts.’
‘She’s not with him.’ My voice was cold. ‘They never met up.’
Molly gave a little gasp and he patted her hand. ‘She’ll be
