Chapter Seventeen

Perry drove back to his own home, unable to defer the inevitable any longer. Mel wasn’t in, but had sent him a rather terse text message asking if he’d heard from their daughter. Vanessa was a law unto herself, often staying a night or two at her boyfriend’s place on the other side of Woking, or with female friends. He looked through his phone and saw that the last message from her was three days ago, on Wednesday, in reply to his request to know if she was actually going to honour them with a visit over the weekend. It simply said: Stop hassling me, ok?

He parked on the front drive, leaving room for Mel’s Audi. He let himself in, and hunted through the fridge for some food that might be ready to eat. There were some leftovers, and in the freezer a couple of ready meals. He pulled one out. Thai vegetarian, as it turned out. He was surprised that Vanessa hadn’t nabbed that one, it was just the kind of food she enjoyed. He was microwaving it when the landline rang. The caller ID identified Becky, Vanessa’s best friend. Perry decided to let it go to the answer machine rather than end up involved in the thankless task of ferrying meaningless messages between teenagers.

‘Hi Van? Where are you babe? You were going to come over this afternoon remember? Can’t get you on your mobile, nothing on Facebook or WhatsApp. Hope you’re not freezing me out because—’

He snatched up the phone. ‘Hi Becky, it’s John, Vanessa’s dad.’

‘Oh hi.’ Becky’s tone indicated she would rather undergo root canal surgery than continue the conversation with him.

‘Wasn’t she at your place two nights ago?’ he asked.

‘Supposed to be.’

‘And?’

‘She never showed. I messaged Steve, but he’s up in Scotland and she’s not with him. I’ve not seen her at college either.’

Steve was Vanessa’s boyfriend. A big outdoors type, all biceps and brooding silence, he was often camping and hiking in Scotland or Wales in all weathers. It wasn’t Vanessa’s thing at all. Perry was suddenly concerned. ‘Becky, she’s not been here for days. Her mother has been looking for her. If you see her can you ask her to ring home ASAP?’

Becky agreed, then rang off.

Perry shook his head. It was probably nothing. After all, he’d been through this before, when at fifteen Vanessa announced she was ‘divorcing’ her family and going to live in a tepee in Wales. He had only just started at Surrey Police, but using their resources to trace her phone had quickly managed to establish that Vanessa was in Brighton, not Wales. When he found her, she was indeed living in a tent, one erected inside the second floor of a historic building. She and a dozen other squatters had taken over the place and were, she told him, ‘Going to start a world revolution.’ This was when she had first illegally acquired tattoos, and according to Mel, some kind of intimate piercing. When he went to fetch her, she had grudgingly agreed to come back home, on condition that she did not have to apologise, and that her father agreed to read the manifesto that she and her friends had cooked up. He had been so relieved to find her alive that he would have agreed to anything.