No Good Reason (16 page)

Sanne froze, staring at the hand in hers and trying to convince herself that she hadn’t just imagined the movement.

“Can you hear me?” she whispered. Then, louder, “You’re in the hospital. Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.” She gasped as she felt the faint pressure renewed. When she returned it, the woman’s eyes opened a crack.

Sanne’s heart was pounding so hard she felt dizzy. She knew she should go and get a doctor or press something to summon Alice, but she was terrified of doing anything that might disrupt this breakthrough.

“My name’s Sanne,” she said. “I’m a detective with the East Derbyshire Police. Honey, I know you’re scared and hurting, but can you tell me your name?”

The woman’s eyes opened slightly wider, two flashes of hazel against the deep purple. Her throat worked as she swallowed, and Sanne realised it was probably sore from the tube. There was no convenient glass of water on the bedside table; no one had expected the woman to need it. On the monitor, green changed to amber as her heart rate rose.

“I’m going to get a nurse,” Sanne said. She had managed to find the light switch earlier, but she didn’t have a clue which button called for help. “Just try and stay awake for me.”

The grip on her hand tightened.

“Rachel.” The woman barely managed a whisper. Her chest rose and fell rapidly, and her nostrils flared.

“Rachel? Rachel what? What’s your surname?”

The woman’s eyes were already closing, tears leaking down her cheeks. The name she repeated was half-buried in a sob. “Rachel.”

Sanne felt the fingers around hers grow slack and watched the numbers on the monitor climb back down into green. “Fucking hell,” she whispered. The emergency buzzer above the bed was obvious, now that she no longer needed it. She pressed it anyway, and then pulled out her phone. Eleanor answered immediately. Sanne sat down. Her legs were shaking.

“Boss, I think I have her name.”

The patter of rain against her bedroom window and the indignant clucking of wet hens greeted Sanne when she woke. She rolled onto her back and draped her forearm across her face until she grew accustomed to the dull morning light. Her head had hit the pillow at midnight, but she had lain awake for at least another hour, tossing and turning and trying to get Rachel’s voice out of her head. She couldn’t remember her dreams, only a vague sense of claustrophobia that made her grateful to have woken up to daylight, however dismal. Her lack of sleep did nothing to curb her anticipation of the day ahead, though. Now that Rachel was conscious, there was a good possibility they would be able to interview her, and—as she was their only real lead—almost anything she could tell them would propel the investigation forward. Eleanor had already asked Sanne to assist with the interview.

The prospect made her bounce out of bed. After a few stretches to shake off the stiffness of sleep, she opened her window, letting the cool air turn to mist on her face. Drizzly rain and a dip in temperature had chased away the mugginess of the last week, and the hills wore caps of thick cloud. She waved at the bedraggled rooster and closed the window again. She showered and dressed quickly, unplugging her phone from its charger as she headed for the kitchen. Once the kettle was boiling and the bread was in the toaster, she flipped open the phone’s cover and entered her security code.

“Shit.”

The phone had been charging all night, which meant its ring tone had been muted, and four messages and two calls had gone unnoticed. The first message was from her mum, its preview showing an invitation for tea. She bypassed it and opened the thread from Meg.

Are you awake? Call me.

Call me when you get this.

Guess you’re asleep. Call me when you’re up.

One of the missed calls was from Meg, the other Eleanor, so the crisis must be work-related. After a moment’s hesitation—it was still only a quarter past five—Sanne sat at her kitchen table and phoned Meg, who answered on the second ring.

“Hey. I thought you might beat my alarm clock.” Meg sounded tired, but too cogent for the phone to have woken her.

“What happened? What’s wrong?” Sanne blurted out the questions before her courage failed her. She shrank back in the chair, expecting a blow.

Meg duly delivered one. “Max paged me at a quarter to one. Apparently, Rachel’s nurse called him to the ITU because Rachel was becoming increasingly agitated. Just before he got there, she had a seizure. The CT showed a small re-bleed on her brain, so he took her back to theatre to fix it. She’s okay, San, the bleed was minor, but—”

“But we’re back to square one.” Sanne slumped against the table.

“Yeah. He had to intubate her for surgery, and he’s wary about lifting the sedation again until she’s completely out of the woods. He thinks the bleed was connected to a post-traumatic reaction. She was screaming, distressed, and her blood pressure spiked.”

“What was she screaming? Did she say anything?”

“No, just her name over and over. They had to restrain her. She was trying to get up.”

“Jesus.” Sanne ran a hand through her damp hair. A jumble of questions went through her mind, but in the end she asked only one. “Have you been to bed yet?”

The wry humour in Meg’s voice was unmistakeable. “Well, I lay in it for a few hours.”

“You should go back. Try again.”

“I might. Are you okay?”

“Yep, I’m fine,” Sanne said, with more assurance than she felt. “Thanks for letting me know.”

Meg yawned. “Sorry it was such shitty news.”

“Bed,” Sanne told her. “Sleep. I’ll call you later.”

“Okay. Night, love.” Meg hung up.

“Fucking terrific,” Sanne muttered, slapping the phone’s cover back into place. Seconds later, her toast shot out of the toaster. It was burned to a cinder.

*

Waterlogged potholes littered the track leading down to the penultimate address on Sanne’s list. Her teeth snapped together as the car caught the edge of a rut.

“Bloody Nora,” Nelson said. The muscles on his forearms stood out as he tried to keep the car level. “So, who’ve we got at this one?”

Rain had blurred the names on the paper, but Sanne had already committed the details to memory. “Mrs. Edna Clegg, seventy-eight, and her son, Derek, forty-five.”

“Does he work?”

“Only on their land. He was a painter and decorator, but he gave that up when his dad died and his mum was left with the farm.”

A large stone cottage came into view, and Nelson slowed the car to a crawl. “Sounds promising. Elderly mum, lots of time to duck out and get up to no good. Did he ever get married?”

“Not according to this.”

“Maybe he prefers helping himself to hikers off the moors.” Nelson took the keys from the ignition and rubbed his sleeve over the condensed windscreen. Rain and a thin mist were obscuring the surrounding buildings. Sanne pulled her jacket tighter around herself and then wondered why she’d bothered; the material was soaked through.

“Not sure I want to go out in that,” she said.

The look he gave her was little short of incredulous. “You were the one who volunteered us for this. We could’ve spent the day tucked up in the office, tracking down illicit drugs online, or Rachels on the Missing Persons database, or local suppliers of fluorescent rope.”

“I know, I know.” She held up her hands in surrender. “I wanted to be out in the fresh air. Come on. Let’s get this one done, and then I’ll buy you a cuppa.”

He took a moment to consider the deal. “And a pasty,” he added.

“Fine, you can have a pasty. There’s a good bakery in Rowlee. I’ll take you there.”

He smiled, grabbing his umbrella from the back seat. “Last one to the door’s a rotten egg.”

With her own umbrella offering little protection against the wind-driven rain, she ignored the challenge, picking her way carefully instead through the puddle-ridden farmyard, noting its rundown outbuildings and the machinery abandoned to rust. Hens clucked in one of the barns, and somewhere close by a dog began to bark furiously.

“That thing better be on a chain,” Nelson said.

“I’m guessing it’d have its jaws clamped around your ankle by now, if it wasn’t.”

He knocked on a door that bore a sticker warning off
Hawkers, Canvassers, Religious Types, and Politicians
. “
My
ankle? What about your bloody ankle?”

“Yours are meatier.” She rang the bell for good measure, as she felt rain seep beneath her shirt and into her bra.

A few seconds later a man shouted, “Who is it?”

Sanne left Nelson to answer. His deeper voice carried better.

“It’s the police, Mr. Clegg. Would you mind opening the door?”

There was a long pause before a figure appeared behind the dirty glass window. When it did, Nelson sighed and Sanne shook her head in dismay.

“Bollocks,” she said.

Derek Clegg opened the door wide, enabling him to step fully into view. Approximately five feet in height, his grossly obese figure was still clad in grimy pyjamas. He gave them an excited smile and scratched his overhanging belly.

“Is this about that girl found up Laddaw?”

Sanne pocketed her ID badge. “Yes, it is. Could we come in and ask you and your mum a few questions? It shouldn’t take long.”

“Course, no problem. Excuse the mess. We’re in the middle of a clear-out.”

He turned and lumbered down a darkened hallway. Stacks of newspapers and general detritus lined the narrow corridor, and the carpet felt sticky beneath Sanne’s boots. It was apparent from the layers of dust that nothing resembling a clear-out had happened this side of the millennium. The smell of cat piss and boiled vegetables grew stronger as they followed him farther into the house. Sanne tried and failed to get the sound of “Dueling Banjos” out of her head.

“You owe me a really big pasty,” Nelson whispered.

The room Derek took them into looked out over a poorly maintained plot of land, with a pig wallowing in the fresh mud. The pig, at least, looked content to be living in squalor.

“Visitors, Mum! Police officers!” Derek yelled, and then, quieter, “She’s a bit deaf.”

“Just a minute,” his mum shouted, over the sound of a flushing toilet.

He busied himself shifting food wrappers, magazines, and what might have been the remains of a pizza from the sofa.

“Sit down, sit down,” he said, beckoning them forward. When Sanne lifted her boot, it had a piece of pepperoni stuck to its sole. She eyed a suspicious-looking stain on the closest sofa cushion and then gave Derek her best conciliatory smile.

“We’re fine as we are, thanks. This won’t take a minute. And we’re dripping wet—we wouldn’t want to ruin your sofa.”

Derek might have insisted, had his mother not chosen that moment to make her entrance. Her walking frame appeared first, propelled by chubby hands. She stopped dead and gaped when she saw Nelson, but covered her reaction by launching the frame another inch.

“Aren’t you handsome?” she said, regarding him like an exotic zoo exhibit. “Have you offered them a drink, Del? Has he offered you a drink, Officers?”

Nelson stepped backward as the frame almost clipped his shins. “Please don’t go to any trouble. We had a coffee at the last house.”

Edna lowered herself into an armchair and used its remote to adjust the footrest. “We heard about that girl on the news. Terrible thing.”

“Yes, it was,” Sanne said. She waited until Derek had settled on the sofa before continuing. There was no point asking him to account for his recent whereabouts—not when the short walk down the hall had been enough to leave him panting for breath—so she moved directly to the second set of questions, which focused on strangers in the area or locals who had been behaving oddly. Had Derek or his mum spotted anything out of the ordinary, over the past week or so?

It soon became apparent that Edna and Derek didn’t get out much. They had their shopping delivered, and the only other person they saw on a regular basis was Ned, who came to help Derek on the farm. Due to their health problems, they were planning to sell up and buy a bungalow closer to the village.

“What’s Ned’s surname?” Sanne asked, wondering if it was the same man who had discovered the dead sheep on the moors.

“Moseley,” Derek said. “He told us all about the search. Said he’d found something very important.”

“Yep, he certainly did.” She scribbled Ned’s full name into her notebook. “Has he been around much lately? Worked his usual hours?”

Derek crinkled his brow, obviously trying to remember. When nothing was forthcoming, he looked to his mum for help.

“He skipped Tuesday and Thursday last week,” she said. “Went fishing, instead of mucking our chickens out.”

Sanne sensed the shift in Nelson’s stance as the detail caught his interest.

“Is that unusual for him?” he asked. “To leave you shorthanded like that?”

“Depends on where the fancy takes him.” Edna sniffed. “Would’ve liked more notice if he was going to bugger off and leave our hens, though. Them and the pig are all we’ve got left.” She tapped a walking stick on the floor to attract Derek’s attention. “Make us a cuppa, pet. I’m spitting feathers here.”

“Just a second.” Suspecting that Edna’s cooperation was waning, Sanne opened her bag and took out a photograph. “I know this is an upsetting picture, but have either of you seen this woman before? Maybe shopping in the village, or out and about around here? We think her name is Rachel.”

Derek’s double chin quivered as he stared at the image. He quickly passed it to his mum, who placed her glasses on the end of her nose and peered through the fingerprint-smudged lenses.

“Poor little mite,” she said. “I don’t recognise her. Do you, Del?”

“No, Mum.” He turned to Sanne. “Am I okay to make her tea now?”

“Of course. Thank you for your help.” She gave him her card. “If you think of anything, anything at all, give me a ring on this number.”

“Detective Sar-ner Jensen,” he read aloud.

“Aye, that’s close enough.” She zipped up her jacket, longing to be back in the rain. “Thanks again. We’ll let ourselves out.”

She headed into the corridor, forcing herself not to sprint for the front door. Drizzle washed over her as she left the porch, and she drew in deep lungfuls of manure-scented air.