‘This is our operations centre,’ said Mr Hewitt, who asked them to call him Luke and his wife Maureen. ‘Please, sit down.’
In addition to the office-style chairs in front of the desks, there were a couple of small armchairs in the centre of the room, no doubt kept for interviewers and visitors just like Annie and Winsome.
‘You said on the phone you had some news,’ said Maureen Hewitt, hovering over them keenly.
‘Well, it’s not really news,’ said Annie. ‘But we do have a few questions for you. First of all, have you heard about Bill Quinn?’
‘Inspector Quinn,’ said Maureen. ‘Oh, yes. Isn’t it terrible? And he was so good to us.’
‘You knew him well?’
‘I wouldn’t say well, would you, Luke? But we knew him.’
‘Even after the investigation?’
‘We sent him bulletins, let him know what we were doing to keep Rachel’s name in the public eye. That’s all.’
‘When did you last see him?’
‘Let me think. It was shortly after his wife died, wasn’t it, Luke?’
Luke agreed. ‘About a month ago,’ he said. ‘Late March.’
‘What did he come to see you about?’
‘Nothing in particular,’ said Luke. ‘It was a bit of a puzzle really. Why he came. We hadn’t actually seen him for years. Not since he got back from Tallinn six years ago, in fact. He told us what had happened to his wife, of course, and we offered him our condolences, naturally. He was very upset. He said he envied us our strength and belief.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Well, I told him it hadn’t been easy. My wife and I are regular churchgoers, and we’ve had a lot of support from the parish, of course, but sometimes even faith...’ He shook his head. ‘There’ve been times when... Anyway, you don’t want to know about that. You know, a lot of people think we’re just keeping up a front, putting on some sort of a show, that we should long ago have let go and moved on.’
‘What do you think?’ Annie asked.
‘As long as there’s a chance that our darling Rachel is still alive, then we’ll carry on trying to find her,’ said Maureen. She picked up one of the flyers and handed it to Annie. ‘Look at this. Latvian. We had a sighting near Riga just last week.’
‘There must be a lot of sightings.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ said Maureen.
‘Fewer and fewer as time goes by,’ said Luke. ‘The hardest thing is to get anyone to take them seriously and follow up. That’s why it’s so important to keep her face out there, keep her name on peoples’ lips. We have to keep up the pressure, make sure nobody forgets. No offence, but we can’t depend on the police. You have other cases, other things to occupy your time. Rachel is all we have. It’s up to us to try to keep the investigation going at some level. People think we’re publicity seekers. Well, we are. But the publicity is for Rachel, not for us.’
‘We try to stay on good terms with the media,’ said Maureen, ‘but it’s difficult sometimes. They can be very intrusive, as you know, if you’ve been reading the papers and watching TV lately. They’re your best friend and helper one minute, then they turn on you the next. We’ve tried being as polite and informative as we can, but then they turned on us for being too cool and unemotional, not being passionate and anguished enough, for not crying all the time. Honestly, sometimes you just can’t win.’
Annie had read the stories in the papers about their recent testimony in the hacking inquiry, about how an unscrupulous reporter had hacked into their private telephones and hounded their remaining daughter, Heather, stealing her diary. At one point, this same reporter had even ‘borrowed’ Maureen’s journal and reproduced sections of it in the newspaper, her deepest fears about her missing daughter, a breakdown of communication with her other daughter, her feelings of despair and thoughts of suicide. It had been headline news — MOTHER OF MISSING GIRL ON SUICIDE WATCH — but then so had their evidence against the reporter and his editor later, at the official inquiry.
Heather Hewitt, Annie knew, had gone off the rails at some point during the six years her sister had been missing. Excerpts from her diary showed a troubled teen upset and worried about her big sister, but feeling increasingly neglected, sidelined and unloved because all her parents’ energy went into the Rachel Foundation, and all their time into finding Rachel. It seemed to her that they didn’t care that they had a living, breathing, troubled daughter right there who needed them. Heather felt that they wished she had been abducted instead of Rachel, and in her worse moments, she even believed she had heard them saying that, whispering it at night when she was lying in bed trying to get to sleep. She had turned to drugs, become publicly addicted to heroin. From what Annie knew of heroin, it was hardly a surprising choice. Heroin offers a deluxe escape, takes away all your problems, all your worries, all your fears, and wraps you in a warm cocoon of well-being until it’s time for the next fix. Hallucinatory drugs throw all your perceptions into disorder and all your fears and worries back at you in the form of nightmares and rising paranoia, and amphetamines and Ecstasy keep you on the move, keep you running, dancing, sweating, feeling good. But only heroin takes all the pain away. The closest Annie had come to truly understanding that feeling was with some of the morphine-derived painkillers they had given her in hospital when she was at her worst.
‘How is Heather?’ she asked.
Maureen’s face clouded. ‘She’s progressing,’ she said. ‘I know people said we were being cold and cruel having her put away like that, especially after they leaked her diary in the papers, but the institution was a good idea, for a while at least.’
‘Until she’s ready to face the world again,’ added Luke.
‘Yes,’ agreed his wife, nodding. ‘Do you know, she’s just the age Rachel was when she went missing.’
Annie let the silence stretch for a respectful moment, then she took a photograph of Mihkel from her briefcase. ‘Have you ever seen this man?’ she asked the Hewitts.
They both studied the photo closely, then Luke said, ‘I think so. Can you tell us his name?’
‘Mihkel,’ said Annie. ‘Mihkel Lepikson.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Luke glanced at his wife. ‘Don’t you remember, love? He’s that nice Estonian journalist who came to see us with Inspector Quinn six years ago.’
‘That’s right,’ Maureen said. ‘He was writing about the case back in Tallinn. We’ve kept him up to date, too, over the years. He’s written updates on the story, tried to help as best he can. They’re not all rotten. Reporters.’
‘He was nice, you say?’
‘Yes,’ said Luke. ‘Not like the others. At least he was straight with us, and he didn’t write about our private grief, or apparent lack of it. It was the case that interested him, the search for Rachel, what might have become of her.’