She never thought she’d be back here again. Knowing that Nick was at Sunnyside, just a few miles away, was giving her goose pimples.
Back when they’d disappeared, Yvonne and Michael had kept them up to speed with the police investigation. The cops had only questioned Nick once, as a witness, not a suspect, and concluded that there was nothing suspicious about the Clydes vanishing. Yvonne had said that one of the officers had let it slip to her that the theory was that Nick was the teenager from hell and Duncan and Maggie had finally flipped and legged it with Isla to get away from him, leaving the hob on in their flustered state. The extra crockery could be explained in any number of ways.
The cops weren’t as daft as folk thought.
They all sat round the wood-burner while Michael poured out everything that had happened, starting with Yvonne’s disappearance and then jumping back and forward in time so it was hard to work out what had happened when. But it seemed Nick and his new wife had come to stay at Sunnyside for a couple of weeks, supposedly so the wife – who sounded like a right silly bitch – could ‘help him heal’. And a few days later, Yvonne had gone missing.
Michael kept running his hands through his hair, making it stand on end. If Yvonne had been here, she’d have tutted and smoothed it down. Maggie swallowed.
‘He’s killed her, hasn’t he?’ went Michael. ‘I know he’s killed her.’
‘Why would he do that?’ Duncan was sitting with his face in shadow in an armchair in the corner.
‘Yvonne was trying to get Lulu to leave him,’ said Michael. ‘That alone would be cause enough, for that psycho.’
‘Nick couldn’t have found out what Yvonne did, could he?’ went Maggie self-centredly. ‘That she helped us get away?’ Worst-case scenario was that he had forced Yvonne to give away their new identities and location.
Michael lifted his shoulders. ‘Aw, Maggie, I don’t know.’
‘Teresa,’ Maggie corrected him automatically. ‘We’re Teresa and Peter now.’ Although they made mistakes so often that they’d had to tell everyone that Maggie and Duncan were their middle names and they sort of chopped and changed. And, when Isla was thirteen, they had told her the truth about everything, having come to a decision that she was safer knowing than not, just in case Nick did ever manage to trace them. They’d impressed on her that it was dead important she tell no one, for the safety of all of them. If Isla had been a different, less mature kind of thirteen-year-old, maybe they’d have waited, but it had been a massive relief, coming clean to her and being able to explain all the odd wee things they did, like why her old fogie parents refused to go anywhere near social media.
‘Sorry,’ went Michael. ‘Teresa. Maybe he has found out she helped you. But he’s always hated Yvonne. That’s why I wouldn’t have him in the house, after he left school. I was scared of what he might do to her. When he came back here, I should have taken Yvonne away, off on holiday, until he’d gone. Why didn’t I do that?’
‘You don’t know that Nick’s done anything to Yvonne,’ Duncan kept on.
Maggie snorted. ‘What, it’s just a coincidence that he comes back here after twenty-odd years, and a few days later Yvonne disappears?’
‘But it doesn’t make sense,’ Duncan insisted. ‘At the time Yvonne disappeared, Michael, you said Lulu had taken the car – without Nick’s knowledge – to visit Carol. So he had no transport.’
Michael grimaced. ‘There are bikes, for the holiday let folk, at Sunnyside.’
‘But how could he have transported Yvonne on a bike?’
Maggie bit back an impatient sigh. ‘You know what an opportunist Nick is. Maybe he saw Lulu leaving, took his chance to lure Yvonne to Sunnyside, did . . . whatever he did to her, took her somewhere in her own car with a bike in the boot, left her there, took her car to Craibstone Wood, cycled back to Sunnyside. Stopping now and then to make trades on his phone to give himself an alibi.’
‘So you think he disposed of her body somewhere else and then left the car at the wood so we’d think she’d gone for a walk and got into difficulties? She’s dead, isn’t she?’ Michael moaned.
‘We don’t know that,’ said Maggie. ‘He might be keeping her somewhere. Trying to make her reveal our location.’ As soon as it was out her mouth, she knew that wasn’t helping.
And sure enough, Michael choked up. ‘Torturing her, you mean?’
Duncan wasn’t liking this one bit. He went, ‘There’s no reason to think that.’
Maggie made herself breathe. ‘What exactly did the police say, Michael, after you told them you thought Nick might be responsible for Yvonne going missing?’
‘They were sceptical. I mean, Nick’s hardly spoken to her for twenty years. They obviously feel he couldn’t have much of a motive, even after I told them about Yvonne helping you disappear. And then he’s got this supposed alibi.’
Maggie got up. ‘You need to put pressure on them to look at tracking data for his phone. If he was on the move while making the trades, the tracking data will show the phone wasn’t at Sunnyside.’
‘Oh, he’ll have got round that too somehow, won’t he?’ Michael was hunched over in his chair.
‘But it’s worth a try. Come on now, Michael. You give them a call, aye?’
Phone in hand, Michael stared stupidly at the screen.
‘You tell them they’ve got to look at the tracking data for Nick’s phone because you’re sure he’s involved in whatever’s happened to Yvonne.’
‘All this is pure speculation!’ went Duncan. ‘We have no idea what’s happened. Nick could be completely innocent!’
‘Well,’ said Maggie dryly, ‘not completely.’