I didn’t say anything, I just stared at her.
This time she didn’t look away. ‘Her name was Craine … Stacy Craine …’
Inside the house, I drop my keys on the hall table and call out, ‘Stacy! It’s me … Stacy?’
There’s no reply.
I look at my watch. It’s 5.35.
‘Stacy!’ I call out again, going into the kitchen, then on into the sitting room. ‘Where are you, Stace?’
I shouldn’t be worried. She’ll be upstairs taking a nap, that’s all. It’s a sweltering hot day, she’s five months pregnant … she’s been feeling really tired recently. That’s it. That’s where she’ll be. Upstairs, in bed.
Asleep.
No, I shouldn’t be worried …
But I am.
Something doesn’t feel right. Me, the air, the house … this moment. It’s all wrong. There’s a terrible coldness in my belly. A deadness in my mind. This, right now … this feels like a moment that I’m never going to forget.
And now I’m half-remembering something, something I’d seen but not registered when I’d entered the house just a minute ago, and with an awful sense of dread in my heart I go back out into the hallway and stare intently at the hall table … and my half-memory is right. The table is slightly askew … not quite flush to the wall … as if someone has knocked against it in passing and not put it back where it belongs. And when I look down at the floor to the right of the table, I can see what I didn’t see before … the antelope’s head. It’s on the floor. Our carved wooden antelope’s head, six inches long, that we bought at a junk shop for 50p … the carving that we use as a paperweight for anything that needs posting …
It’s on the floor.
It shouldn’t be on the floor.
It belongs on the hall table. And if either of us ever knocks it off, we always pick it up and put it back where it belongs.
Always.
Without fail.
It’s one of our stupid little things …
And now I’m running up the stairs as fast as I can, and my heart is pounding, and I’m shouting at the top of my voice, ‘Stacy! Stacy! STACY!’
‘Mr Craine …?’
I looked up.
Helen Gerrish was staring at me with a slightly puzzled look on her face. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes … yes, I’m sorry. What were you saying?’
‘Stacy Craine … I was just wondering, you know, as it’s quite an unusual name … if she was related to you in any way.’
‘She was my wife,’ I said.
‘Oh … oh, I’m terribly sorry. I hope you didn’t mind me asking … it’s just … well, I remember it, that’s all. It was such an awful thing.’
‘Yes, it was.’
‘I’m sorry to bring it up. It must be … well, it must be very hard. I’m sorry.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘Did the police ever find him? The man who did it, I mean. Did they catch him?’
‘No …’ I said quietly. ‘No, the police never caught him.’
3
While Ada was sorting out the paperwork for Helen Gerrish in the main office, I opened up my laptop, logged on to the Internet, and Googled ‘Anna Gerrish’. There weren’t that many results: three entries from the Hey Gazette, one from the Guardian, and one from the Daily Mail. The first article in the Hey Gazette was dated Wednesday 8 September, two days after Anna was last seen. It was the lead story on the front page, accompanied by the same photograph that her mother had just given to me. The other two articles appeared on the following days — Thursday’s was on page three, Friday’s was relegated to page seven. After that, there was nothing. The stories in the Guardian and the Daily Mail were both no more than a paragraph or two, and neither of them added anything to the reports in the Gazette.
According to the report, Anna had been a barmaid at The Wyvern for about eighteen months. On the night of Monday 6 September she’d worked a late shift, finishing at one o’clock in the morning, and that was the last time anyone had seen her. No one knew where she’d gone after work, whether she was planning to meet someone, or go somewhere, or simply go home. And if she was planning to go home, no one seemed to know how she usually got back after a late shift, whether she walked, or took a taxi, or if anyone ever picked her up. No one, it seemed, knew very much about Anna at all. There were even conflicting reports as to what she’d been wearing when she left. Most of the staff at The Wyvern were fairly sure that she hadn’t got changed out of the jeans and white vest she’d been wearing all night, she’d just thrown on a black leather coat and left. But a barmaid called Genna Raven was convinced that she’d seen Anna getting changed in the toilets. ‘She was definitely wearing heels and a skirt when she left,’ Genna was quoted as saying. ‘And I think she might have put on a black top too.’
In terms of what actually happened that night, that was about all the newspaper reports had to offer. The rest of it was all padding: speculation, quotes from Mrs Gerrish and DCI Bishop, biographical information about Anna — where she’d gone to school, her modelling hopes, that kind of thing.
Reading between the lines, and judging by the way the newspapers had quickly lost interest in the story, I got the impression that apart from Helen Gerrish, who I guessed was the driving force behind getting the story printed in the first place, no one really believed that Anna had come to any harm.
And they were probably right.
But, unlike the media, I don’t get paid to speculate.
So I went through the newspaper reports again, noting down any relevant information, and I put all that together with the photograph and the details that Helen Gerrish had given me, and I was just about to start making a few preliminary phone calls when I heard the outer office door open and close, followed by Helen Gerrish’s tiny footsteps shuffling down the stairs, and a few moments later my door swung open and Ada came in.
‘Phew,’ she said, blowing out her cheeks and shaking her head. ‘She’s hard work, that one.’
‘Yeah, I know. Any problems with the contract or anything?’
Ada shrugged. ‘I don’t think she even read it, to be honest. Just signed it and gave me the cheque.’ Ada took a packet of cigarettes from her pocket and threw one over to me, and we both went over to the battered old settee beneath the window. I opened the window, and we sat down and lit our cigarettes.
Ada looked at me. ‘You know Mick Bishop is the SIO on the Anna Gerrish case, don’t you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Are you going to be all right with that?’
‘I don’t see why not.’
She held my gaze for a moment or two, giving me her ‘are you sure about that?’ look, then she just nodded slowly and took a long drag on her cigarette. ‘So,’ she said, blowing out smoke. ‘What’s next?’
‘I don’t know … I’m going to look round Anna’s flat this evening, and then I’ll just take it from there, I suppose. Go and see Bishop, talk to Anna’s work colleagues … see if anything turns up.’
‘Do you think it will?’
I shrugged. ‘Probably not.’
Ada tapped ash from her cigarette. ‘If I had a mother like Helen Gerrish, I think I’d have run away years ago.’
I smiled. ‘Me too.’
She took another puff on her cigarette. ‘Do you want me to call Bishop and set up a meeting?’
‘Yeah, please. Tomorrow if possible.’
‘OK. Anything else?’
‘Did you get a chance to try that memory card yet?’
‘Yeah, but I couldn’t get anything from it. It might be worth asking Cal to have a look.’