Behind Closed Doors (2 page)

Minutes later she was running through the caravans, heading for the beach. She wasn’t sure how long she’d stay there, or if her dad would come to find her. He usually did, sooner or later, but he was going away tonight, so he might not bother. He’d just knock on her bedroom door on his way out, shout cheerio and when she didn’t answer he’d assume she was inside sulking.

‘Give me a ring when you’re in a better mood,’ he’d call out, or something along those lines, and off he would go. He wouldn’t realise she wasn’t there. No one would until morning and by then . . .

‘Hey! Sophie! What’re you doing?’

Her heart suddenly lit up. Was that . . .? It had to be. She was sure she recognised the voice.

She turned round quickly, breaking into a smile. God was on her side after all. He was going to make everything just the way she wanted it . . .

ANDREA LAWRENCE HAD
taken a wrong turn in life. She’d known it for a long time now – it was impossible not to know it when it kept her company like a shadow, or stepped out of nowhere to trip her up with a reminder. It could even make her feel like a stranger when she looked in the mirror, or force her to ask herself what she was doing when right in the middle of something serious. The trouble was, it was too late to turn back. All she could do was keep following the road she’d chosen at a time when she really hadn’t been thinking straight at all, and hope it would all come right in the end.

How was it going to do that when so much had already gone so horribly wrong?
She wasn’t in proper control, was taking decisions that even she didn’t agree with, and pride – yes, she had to admit it –
pride
was making it impossible to back down. And professionalism was playing its part, she mustn’t forget that, since she wasn’t bad at what she did, some even said she was made for it, but she knew that wasn’t true.

This was what was going round in her mind when a tentative voice said, ‘Hi, I don’t suppose you’ve got a minute?’

Looking up from the case notes she was supposed to be reading on her laptop, Andee’s aqua-green eyes, behind the frames of her varifocals, showed impatience, wariness, reserve, until she saw who was asking the favour. Barry Britten, one of her oldest friends and, as of a year ago, a colleague. She liked him, a lot. He was honest, funny, direct when he needed to be, and sensitively discreet. He was also one of the world’s best dads to his adorable year-old twins.

‘As it’s you, I’ll make it two,’ she replied, removing her feet from the chair they were resting on and putting the laptop aside. Though she was a woman who rarely turned heads at first glance, a second look might arrest attention, in spite of her efforts to blend into the world unnoticed for anything beyond her presence. Each morning she strained her shoulder-length ebony hair into a brutal ponytail, unadorned by anything more than a plain elastic, wore thick-rimmed glasses instead of contacts, and, to her teenage daughter’s dismay, almost never used make-up. The way she dressed, at least for work, in a plain white shirt and loose black pants, invited no one to admire her slender legs or to try stealing a glimpse of tempting cleavage. It wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate male attention, in the right place and the right way it was welcome; it was simply that she had no time for those who seemed to think looks counted more than personality.

‘I’ve just been over to Paradise Cove,’ Barry told her, sinking into the easy chair her feet had freed for him. His normally merry brown eyes were showing concern; his mole-dotted cheeks seemed pale. Unusually they were the only ones in the Stress & Mess, aka the old canteen, which these days had no kitchen, merely a microwave, two-ring burner, sink, fridge and temperamental coffee-maker.

‘And?’ Andee prompted, glancing at her watch. The thought of the workload waiting upstairs on her desk, and all it entailed, made her groan inwardly.

‘A girl’s gone missing,’ Barry replied, his eyes coming directly to hers. ‘Stepdaughter of the caravan-park manageress. Aged fourteen.’

Feeling the immediate rise of demons stilling her breath, Andee waited for him to continue.

‘I wanted to tell you before all the fuss kicks off,’ he said. ‘Assuming it does. Obviously it won’t if she turns up.’

Andee nodded, and encouraged him to go on.

‘Her name’s Sophie Monroe,’ he elaborated. ‘On the face of it it’s looking like she’s a runaway. Her computer’s gone, so’s her mobile phone, a few clothes, toiletries, that sort of thing.’

Since taking off into the blue beyond either to punish or to escape parents wasn’t unheard-of behaviour for girls of that age, Andee kept her personal feelings in check as she said, ‘Some kind of upset at home?’

‘Things have been a bit tense lately, according to the stepmother.’

Stepmother
. It was a sad truth that steps always rang alarm bells, in spite of the fact that they could often be the best of all parents. ‘What about the father?’ she asked. ‘Is he around?’

‘Yes. He’s blaming himself, says he should have taken more notice of how unhappy she was.’

Yes, he probably should
. ‘What did you think of him?’

Barry shrugged. ‘He seems a regular sort of bloke, worried out of his mind . . . They both are.’

If the father turned out to be on the level Andee knew she’d have all the time in the world for him. She always had time for fathers who cared. The father of her children cared a lot, about them, if not about her, but that was behind her now, she was moving on. ‘How long’s she been gone?’ she asked.

Clearly expecting the question, he said, ‘They think about a week.’

Andee’s eyebrows rose. ‘So not that worried,’ she commented drily.

‘Apparently the stepmother thought she’d gone with her father – he’s a long-distance lorry driver, and was away most of last week. And he thought she was at home.’

‘Didn’t they speak to one another during that time? It surely didn’t take an entire week for them to realise the girl wasn’t with either of them.’

‘No, but when it did become apparent they assumed she was hiding out at a friend’s house to try and put the wind up them, so the stepmother tried to find her. Then the father received a couple of texts from the girl telling him to stop looking.’

Andee’s eyes narrowed. ‘When was that?’

‘He received the first one last Wednesday, just after the stepmother turned up at the best friend’s house to see if she was there. It seems reasonable to assume this visit prompted the text, although the friend is swearing she doesn’t know where Sophie is.’

No surprise there.

‘The second text,’ Barry continued, ‘was sent the next day. In it she’s claiming to be with friends he doesn’t know, so he might as well stop looking because he’ll never find her.’

Imagining how well that had gone down, Andee said, ‘So what prompted them to get in touch with the police now, rather than straight after receiving that text?’

‘Apparently they kept calling her and sending messages, certain she’d give in eventually and tell them where she was, but she hasn’t. The father got home last night, half expecting her to turn up once she knew he was back, but still no sign of her and no more texts.’

Andee sat with it for a moment. ‘Do they know exactly when she disappeared?’ she asked.

‘They can’t put a precise time on it, but it was last Sunday night.’

Andee checked her watch again. She ought to be back at her desk by now, and as if acting as a reminder her boss, Terence Gould – Terry’s All Gold as most of her colleagues called him – put his head round the door. He was a good-looking man in a severe sort of way, with a gaze that seemed to cut straight through a person’s defences and a bark that could be every bit as fierce as his bite. Though his demotion from a higher rank had happened before Andee’s time she knew all about it, everyone did, and no one considered it deserved.

‘Am I getting an update on these robberies this afternoon?’ he enquired, his flinty eyes fixed on Andee.

‘I’m on it,’ she assured him.

‘Three o’clock, my office.’

As he left Barry murmured, ‘You know he’s got the hots for you, don’t you?’

Pretending not to hear, Andee said, ‘So your girl – Sophie, was it?’

He nodded.

‘I’m guessing the Force Incident Manager isn’t ranking this any higher than medium risk.’

‘Correct. No sign of foul play, no history of abuse in the family – although that’s still being checked.’

‘Has she ever run off before?’

‘Apparently not for more than a few hours.’

‘What did your instincts tell you about the parents?’

He inhaled slowly. ‘They seem pretty much on the level, but I’m still worried. A week’s a long time and if it drags on . . .’

‘If it does it’ll be recategorised as high risk and you’ll get all the backup you need. For the time being I’m guessing you’ve got the door-to-door inquiries under way?’

He nodded. ‘Of course. I’m just about to go back there.’

Andee picked up her bag. ‘I’ll come with you.’

He hesitated.

Knowing what was on his mind, she said, ‘I’m coming.’

‘But Andee, with your history . . .’

‘Why don’t you let me worry about that? All you have to do is talk me through it again as we walk down to the car.’

Twenty minutes later Andee was at the wheel of her Ford Focus following Barry’s patrol car through the Waverley housing estate, heading for the caravan parks that cluttered the sandy coastline like an unruly crowd with nowhere to go. As she often did when progress was slow, she surveyed her surroundings and reflected to herself how like a library the world was. Each house, office, shop, trailer, car, just about everything, had a door, and behind that door, much like inside the covers of a book, lay a story or indeed, many stories. They could be sad or joyful; embarrassing, shameful, shocking or downright scary. There were weird ones, tall ones, short ones, incredible, full-on intriguing, silly, horrific, heartbreaking and sometimes desperately tragic.

More often than not she found herself involved in the latter few.

Flipping down the sun visor as they turned on to Wermers Road, home to Kesterly-on-Sea’s edge-of-town retail superstores, she ignored the fact that she was supposed to be investigating a series of robberies here, and turned her thoughts to Sophie Monroe instead. She began painting a happy picture for herself of how this chapter of Sophie’s story was going to end. Wherever she was hiding she’d soon get lonely, hungry, cold, frightened, and make contact with her parents. They’d then go to pick her up from wherever she was and all would be forgiven and if not forgotten, then at least put aside for the time being as they all tried again.

This was the denouement Andee and her colleagues most frequently encountered when it came to teenage runaways, though Andee was personally and painfully aware that not all families were quite so lucky when a child disappeared.

Hers was amongst those who’d not been blessed.

Perryman’s Cove, known locally as Paradise Cove, or simply the Cove, was an area of Kesterly-on-Sea she hadn’t visited since she was a child, and by the look of it, as they approached through Waverley, it hadn’t changed all that much. Perhaps a few dozen more houses on the surrounding estate, most sprouting satellite dishes like some sort of fungal outbreak, or signs proclaiming themselves B & Bs, or Guest Houses, or Family Run Hotels with Sea Views.

Sea views, from here? Give her a break! OK if you happened to be a seagull, or a pilot, or zoning in via Google Earth, but in these parts you were lucky to spot the sea from the beach, never mind from a mile inland.

Taking a right turn at Giddings roundabout she kept behind Barry as they inched with the traffic through a tangle of scrubland and copses, past the Fisherman’s Arms and Albert’s donkey retreat, until they were plunging into the coast’s glittering, flashing, throbbing mayhem of a holiday resort.

Kesterly’s answer to Vegas.

She smiled inwardly as a wave of nostalgia swept her straight back to her childhood. Though she hadn’t come here often, four or five times maybe, and never to stay in one of the caravan parks (worse luck), the sudden thrust back in time to those heady, hot summer days was having quite an effect on her. It was suddenly all too easy to remember how she, her sister Penny and cousin Frank used to steal out of their grandparents’ house, up on the headland, and cycle full speed down to the grassy sand dunes of the Cove where they’d abandon their bikes, never thinking for a minute they might be stolen (and they never were). Once in the Cove they hardly knew what to do first, they were so excited, hit the funfair to ride the Octopus, or shoot ducks, or bump round the dodgems, or stay on the beach to trot up and down on donkeys called Fred or Floss or Frank, which they’d found totally hilarious. An ass named after Frank! The biggest thrill of all was going in search of new friends in the holiday parks who were visiting from all over the country. How they used to envy those kids being able to spend a whole two weeks
in a caravan
.

As she rounded the first bend past an old shack calling itself Saucy Spicy Ribs, a crazy-golf course and a crowded café, her memories became so clear she could almost taste the candyfloss and toffee apples of bygone years, and hear the squawk of Punch and Judy. Certainly she could smell fish and chips, and the blare of music punctured by shrieks, bells, sirens and laughter seemed almost as thrilling with the memory doors open as it had in reality over twenty-five years ago.

How could she have been back in Kesterly for more than a year without coming here once? She knew her kids had been down, probably more often than they told her, but though she passed the place almost daily, generally out on the ring road on her way to the notorious Temple Fields estate, or to the motorway if she was heading further afield, surprisingly nothing had brought her here.

‘Wouldn’t it be brilliant to live in this place all the time?’ Frank used to gasp during their escapades, when they’d help their new friends struggle huge urns of water back to their caravans for washing or cooking. If it rained they’d play snap or old maid or spoons, all snugged up in the cosy banquettes of someone’s holiday home, or go to watch a magician, or a fire-eater, or a clown with cute dogs at one of the Entertainment Centres. (It turned out their grandparents had always known where they were, and since the world had been a rather different place back then they’d trusted the stallholders, park managers and various other adults to keep a watchful eye on the adventurers.)