Chapters (95)

‘I won’t be long, then we’ll go home and make sure she’s OK.’ He plants a kiss on my hair and throws out a light-hearted comment to his three friends. They all roar with laughter and Mum is forgotten.

I sink back into his warmth again and Dad’s belly moves up and down as he chuckles and breathes. The movement is comforting, but as I soak up the sun on my face and arms, I realise that Dad doesn’t want to go home at all. He prefers being here with Mr Feldman, Mr Atyeno and Mr Merrick. And I feel separate and strange and wonder if it’s Mum he doesn’t want to go home to or all of us. Perhaps I should go home without him?

MONDAY

8 a.m.

She opened her eyes and he was there again, a face above hers and a horrible smell. Her head was swimming and she couldn’t move.

‘A bit more,’ the man shouted. ‘She’s nearly there.’

She was in a tunnel, with whooshing water, trying to crawl.

‘One more dose,’ said another voice. ‘That’ll do it.’

And right there, she knew.

She was going to die.

Maya, 8.30 a.m.

By the time briefing kicked off, my head was pounding from lack of sleep and the pace of events in the last three days. Dougie and I had been out looking for Ali until just before eleven last night, and we finally collapsed into bed around midnight. Six in the morning saw me back in the alleys where supermarkets and restaurants dumped their waste food – all to no avail. Dozens of people recognised my description of Ali, but no-one had seen him for several days.

I was finding it hard to suppress my growing unease, but right now, we had three murders to solve and adrenaline was my ally. ‘Morning, everyone,’ I said. ‘We now have Ryan’s murder to investigate alongside the refocussed arson investigation. Shen, I gather we’ve finally got news on our UnSub.’ The intel had just come through, and Shen had picked it up.

Everyone’s eyes fell on the youngest member of the team.

‘No-one fitting her description has been reported missing in Essex,’ she said. ‘The lab still can’t identify her individual DNA because none of the samples provided enough strands. However, there is a close enough match to a sample already on the database to suggest a family connection. A man called Barry Turner, currently in HMP Berwyn. He has a wife called Sharon, who lives in Romford.’ Shen wrote Sharon and Barry’s addresses on the board.

‘So, where are we now?’ I asked Shen.

‘Still trying to contact the mum. There’s a uniformed officer on his way to Wales to request an interview with the father. The daughter’s name is Kelly, and she hasn’t married or changed her surname.’