No Going Back (4 page)

TWO

D
aniel wasn't good with unsolved mysteries. He'd been the kind of copper who would think nothing of putting in hours of unpaid overtime just to follow up a lead or see an investigation through to its conclusion. At such times he'd been far more popular with his superiors than with his wife, but it was this same drive that saw him out of the bath after only a few minutes and reaching for his mobile phone.

A quick search through his call log brought up Reynolds's number, and a few seconds later, a man answered curtly.

‘Patrescu.'

‘Er, can I speak to John Reynolds?'

There was a pause and then the voice said, ‘Who is calling?'

‘Daniel Whelan.'

After another short interval, Reynolds spoke. ‘Mr Whelan. I was going to ring you . . .'

He left the statement hanging, and after waiting a moment or two for him to elaborate, Daniel said, ‘So, any news? Have you found her?'

‘Yes, indeed. Katya is safe and well. She found her own way off the moor and reached us just after you left. She was cold and tired and very sorry for the trouble she'd caused, but we've put it all behind us now and we're just glad to have them both back.'

‘That's excellent news!'

‘Yes, well, I'm sorry I hadn't got round to ringing you. We just wanted to get the girls home and into a hot bath.'

‘That's all right. Just as long as they're both OK.'

‘They're fine. No harm done. Thank you for your help, Mr Whelan. And give your dog a big bone from me, will you?'

Daniel said he would and rang off, wondering why he didn't feel more joy. By the time he'd sorted himself out some supper, he'd decided it was because the instinctive antipathy he'd felt towards Reynolds at the outset just wouldn't go away, and neither would the memory of Elena's desperate face. Reynolds had said all that was proper, but somehow his words lacked the ring of sincerity.

And who was Patrescu? The brother? Another relative? How many men were sharing this holiday with the girls? Daniel didn't like the direction his thoughts were taking.

Waiting for the microwave, he found himself dwelling on certain inconsistencies in the day's events and decided that, if only for his own peace of mind, he needed to clear them up.

The Internet connection at Daniel's flat ran at a snail's pace – due, he supposed, to its rather remote location. These days, he generally only used it to exchange emails with Drew and very infrequently with Amanda, so it didn't bother him unduly, but on the odd occasion that he wanted to surf the net, it invariably reduced him to swearing at the machine in sheer frustration.

This was one of those occasions.

Hair curling damply from his bath, Daniel sat at the table that did duty as a desk, with a bowl of yesterday's bolognese in his lap, and tapped his fingers impatiently as the screen morphed, bit by painfully slow bit, from one webpage to the next. He was dressed in jeans and a thick sweatshirt to make up for the inadequacy of the two-bar electric fire that was the room's only heat source at present. The boiler was on the blink, and although his landlord had promised to get it seen to, as yet no technician had materialized.

From the table beside the laptop he picked up a photograph of Drew, taken last year on his eighth birthday. Daniel had taken him to Longleat Safari Park for the day. A day to remember, one of the last really happy ones before Daniel's life began to disintegrate.

In the picture, Drew was smiling broadly, high on the excitement of seeing lions and wolves in the flesh. Opinion was pretty evenly divided on whether the boy took more after his mother or father. He had inherited Daniel's wideish mouth, hazel-brown eyes and wavy brown hair, but there were definite echoes of his mother's smaller, sharper features about him too. Luckily, he'd shown no signs, so far, of having inherited Amanda's nasty temper, Daniel thought, replacing the photo.

The dog was asleep, lying flat on the rug close to Daniel's chair, blissfully untroubled by the doubts that were disturbing his master. As far as he was concerned, he'd done his job, received his due praise and was content.

Feeling the cold air on the back of his neck, Daniel pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt, recalling a handful of times when he'd worn it that way as a disguise, on duty on the streets of Bristol.

Young enough, when he'd joined the police, to get away with mingling with gangs of teenagers, he'd quickly got a name for himself as one who could keep his cool in sticky situations, a reputation that had made his subsequent career interesting and varied.

Memories of his previous life brought depression pushing like a dark cloud at the edges of his mind. He didn't dislike his job with TFS. With no references or work skills that were relevant outside the force, he'd expected to have to take manual work of some kind and indeed, after watching everything he'd lived and worked for swirling down the pan, he'd been grateful to find anything that would get him away, and the further the better.

In Devon, no one knew him; no one had heard the rumours or asked awkward questions. Tavistock Farm Supplies was a small company; Bowden asked few questions about his police career; and everyone else seemed to accept without curiosity his vague claim of having been a civil servant.

Fred Bowden had proved to be a very fair boss, content to leave his drivers to their own devices, as long as they got the job done, and Daniel had met some friendly and decent people at the farms and stables he delivered to. It wasn't all bad.

Google finished its search and the monitor flickered and triumphantly produced a list of results for the given keywords, ‘Dartmoor' and ‘Search and Rescue'.

Daniel scanned the list, his eyes narrowing. There were no less than four subgroups in the area, all part of Dartmoor Search and Rescue. Considering Reynolds's location at Stack Bridge, it seemed to Daniel highly unlikely that either of the two nearest groups would have been called out to a search near Bovey Tracey, as he had claimed. According to the website, it was usual for two groups to attend an emergency, with two remaining on standby in case they were needed, but Bovey was on the other side of the moor and it seemed logical that the Ashburton and Okehampton branches would have dealt with any such call, leaving Plymouth and Tavistock free to attend to the call to find Reynolds's missing daughters.

It was interesting that Reynolds had used the local pronunciation of the name Bovey. In Daniel's experience, that was fairly unusual for a visitor, but then maybe he'd visited the moor before.

Taking a twisted forkful of the cooling pasta, Daniel tapped in the name of the caravan park where Reynolds had claimed to be staying. Once again the computer began the peculiar ticking noise that meant it was cogitating and once again Daniel could do nothing but tap his fingers and wait. He supposed it would be less stressful to visit a library with Internet access after work the next day, but patience had never been one of his strengths when he was engaged on any kind of investigation. Unlike Taz, he was unable to rest content in the knowledge of a job well done and the more he went back over what had happened, the more he found to disturb him.

Reynolds's insistence that Daniel should stay well back with the dog when the girls were found was not in itself suspicious – many people felt a little threatened by a dog of Taz's size – but the forceful manner in which he had made his wishes known had bordered on threatening. At the time, Daniel had put it down to the natural stress of a worried father, but with hindsight he wasn't so sure. Was it the dog he didn't want close to the child or Daniel himself? Had Reynolds been afraid of what she might say?

The cry he had heard when Reynolds had found Elena had been bitten off short – perhaps by a hand being clamped over the child's mouth to ensure her silence. What if it had been a cry of fear?

The computer coughed up its results for his latest search and Daniel turned his attention to these, pushing aside his empty bowl. Listings for ‘The Pines, Devon, caravan' were numerous, but after half an hour or more trawling through them, Daniel still hadn't found a caravan park of that name anywhere, let alone within a reasonable distance of Stack Bridge.

A search of the online phone directories didn't produce anything more helpful and Daniel gave up, deciding to ask at the local post offices the next day. He wished he'd thought to get the 4x4's number plate.

Sitting staring at the screen, his mind drifted again. Had the older girl really not heard their shouting when the dog had lost her scent, or had she been hiding somewhere, watching fearfully as they hunted for her? And why
had
Taz lost what had seemed to be such a strong trail? Katya might have waded up or down the stream with the intention of confusing the dog, but if that was the case, why had she then returned to her father of her own volition shortly after?

It brought him back to the original question: what was it that the girls feared? Had it really been a case of a family row that had gone too far, or was it something more sinister? Was their father abusive? Was he even their father? Daniel fervently wished that he'd asked more questions when he'd had the chance.

Reynolds had said that the authorities seemed uninterested, but Daniel was beginning to doubt that he'd ever called them. He turned cold as he realized that in helping the two men, it was just possible that he'd unwittingly delivered a young girl back into the hands of her abusers.

He toyed with the idea of calling the police himself, but several minutes passed and he made no move towards the phone. After all, what could he tell them? That two girls had been lost on the moor but had now been found? Case open, case closed, as far as they would be concerned. They were unlikely to be interested in a handful of unproven suspicions.

Quite apart from this, he had his own reasons for avoiding any contact with the police, being well aware that it would set off a chain of questions, starting with ‘May I ask who's calling?' and quite possibly culminating in them running a search and turning up his record, and that was something he could well do without.

With a sigh he turned off the computer, picked up the day's paper and transferred to the sagging leather sofa, where the dog presently joined him.

That night, for the first time in several weeks, the nightmares returned.

With a busy schedule of deliveries the following morning, it was nearly two o'clock when Daniel slammed the door on the empty lorry for the last time and was able to concentrate fully on what had been in the back of his mind all morning. He wasn't going to know any peace of mind until he'd settled one thing: had Reynolds contacted the emergency services the day before or not?

If he had, then – like him or not – Daniel had no real reason to suspect the man of any wrongdoing. If he hadn't, then he'd blatantly lied, and if he'd lied about that, what else might he have lied about?

Just what he could do about it if he found out that Reynolds's story
was
made up, Daniel didn't know. His first problem was how to discover the truth without exposing himself to the curiosity of the local police.

‘How did it go yesterday? Did you find those girls all right?' Fred Bowden came towards Daniel as he washed the lorry down with the pressure hose in the concreted-over farmyard that was the TFS head office and depot. At 5 feet 8, ex-army sergeant Bowden was 4 inches shorter than Daniel but probably a stone heavier, built like a nightclub bouncer. He looked tough, and was, with his receding grey hair cut razor-short and a small earring in his left ear, but the crow's feet around his eyes spoke of a ready humour.

Daniel turned off the water and wiped his hands on the front of his boiler suit. His employer had been at a farm sale that morning and it was the first time they'd spoken.

‘Yeah, they both turned up, eventually,' he said, and explained what had happened.

‘But you're still not happy about it,' Bowden observed, absentmindedly rubbing at a patch of paintwork that had escaped Daniel's cleaning.

‘I just don't trust the man. I'm not convinced he ever called the rescue people. I'd like to check, but I don't know whether the police will tell me.'

‘No need for that,' Bowden said. ‘Figgy's a Search and Rescue volunteer. He'd know if anything was called in last night, for sure.'

‘Figgy? I didn't realize. Is he still here?'

Andy ‘Figgy' Figgis was one of Daniel's fellow drivers at TFS, but such was the nature of the job that in the three months or so that he'd worked there, Daniel had exchanged no more than early-morning platitudes with him, or any of the others, come to that.

‘No, he's gone on, but I can give you his mobile number. I'm sure he won't mind. He's a good lad is Figgy. Come over to the office when you've finished here.'

Ten minutes later, stripped of his overalls and with the lorry safely parked in its bay, Daniel rapped on the half-open door of Bowden's office.

‘Come in, come in.'

Daniel did so, stepping a foot or two inside and waiting.

‘Come right in and shut the door. It's brass monkeys out there! Where's Taz?'

‘Outside.'

‘Well, call him in, man. Have a seat. Coffee?'

‘I'm fine, thanks,' Daniel said, but Bowden poured him one anyway, standing the slightly chipped mug on the corner of his desk.

Taz came eagerly in response to a low whistle, slinking in to sit at Daniel's feet as he sank reluctantly into the chair opposite his boss.

‘He works well for you, considering,' Bowden commented, apparently absorbed in leafing through an address book.

‘Considering . . . ?'

‘Well, Alsatians are pretty much one-man dogs, aren't they? I know some of the army dogs would do anything for their handlers but might just as well've been deaf for all the notice they took of anyone else. Lucky for you he's adapted so well.' He looked up, fixing Daniel with a sharp eye, and Daniel suspected Bowden wasn't fooled by his story of having got the dog from a friend.