Trawling through every pub, club and restaurant in Cardiff was going to take hours the team just didn’t have. A check with National Insurance documented that Lola Evans’s last paid employment was six months earlier, at a beauty salon in Tongwynlais, a small village on the outskirts of Cardiff. A phone call to the salon revealed that Lola had left after a disagreement about money missing from the till: money the manager of the salon still seemed convinced Lola had taken. She hadn’t pursued the matter any further on the grounds that she knew Lola was having personal problems at the time. Alex wondered to what extent those personal problems had really been.
It seemed that whatever other work Lola had undertaken in order to earn money – as a beautician or as a waitress – had been purely on a cash in hand basis. If she was self-employed, she hadn’t bothered to register officially. The only other way that they could find out quickly where else Lola might have been working was to go public with her image, but details of her murder hadn’t yet gone to the press, and Alex had been hoping to keep it that way for a little longer. The press loved this kind of victim – young, female, attractive – and the publicity the case would no doubt attract in the search for Lola’s killer would inevitably lead to time-wasters.
‘Any footage of them elsewhere in the shopping centre?’ Alex asked Dan. ‘Or of Lola, at least?’
Dan moved back towards the desktop computer he’d been working at and clicked another still of Lola and Ethan: this one of them leaving through the doors which led out on to the main shopping street at The Hayes. ‘Last sighting of them together. He goes one way, she goes the other. The bar where he works has confirmed he turned up for work that evening at just gone eight o’clock. He was there until gone three.’
‘Shit,’ Alex mumbled. She sat in the chair beside Dan and studied the image, focusing on Lola Evans. She was a slight girl, her body clearly ravaged by her eating disorder. It wouldn’t have been difficult for any man of average strength to have carried her for some distance. But on a Saturday evening in the middle of a city centre? Or perhaps she hadn’t stayed in town after leaving Ethan. Where had she gone?
They didn’t even know whether or not it was on the Saturday that she had gone missing.
‘Any updates your end?’ Dan swivelled his chair towards her, his knee nearly meeting hers. She moved away instinctively.
‘No.’ Alex pressed her fingertips against her forehead. ‘Until we find out where she was working, it’s going to be difficult to work out her social network. No social media profiles?’
Dan shook his head. ‘Seems unusual for someone her age.’
Lola had clearly been a complicated character, a young woman plagued by mental health issues. Checks with her doctor had shown a history of counselling and several prescriptions for varying dosages of antidepressants. By her grandmother’s own admission, Lola was rarely fixed to one place, although that didn’t necessarily mean she was the party girl that many of the rest of the team had taken this comment to suggest.
‘Is everything OK with DC Lane?’
Alex was snapped from her thoughts of Lola Evans. ‘Yes, as far as I know. Why do you ask?’ The question came a little too hurriedly, she realised.
Dan shrugged. He had a nice face, Alex thought; not conventionally handsome, but kind. Of what she knew of him, DC Mason seemed a hard-working family man. He kept a photograph of his wife and kids on the corner of his desk: an attractive woman aged around forty and two dark-haired girls who both looked under the age of ten. Alex tended to notice family photographs. She had once looked upon them with a hope for her own future, but as time had passed she had come to realise this kind of photograph would never adorn her own desk or the walls of her home. For a while, she couldn’t bring herself to look at that kind of photograph at all.
She was getting better. Acceptance came in many forms. This had been one of them.
‘She mentioned an email address; she seemed a bit agitated.’
Alex raised an eyebrow. Chloe hadn’t said anything about talking to Dan and she wasn’t sure how much he knew. ‘To do with?’
He shrugged. ‘Just said she’d been getting some weird emails.’
‘I’ve not noticed anything unusual.’ She gave him a smile and returned her attention to the footage that was paused on the screen in front of them, as though Ethan Thompson might in some way incriminate himself. The smile she had forced evaporated. She was going to have to warn Chloe. If other members of the team were already noticing the fact that her attention seemed diverted elsewhere then it was only a matter of time before the superintendent caught grasp of it.
Chapter Nineteen
Chloe’s lasting impression of Patrick Sibley was of a boy no one noticed until he became noticeable for all the wrong reasons. In the weeks leading up to Emily’s death, Patrick had made a couple of awkward advances towards her. Nobody knew about the first – no one other than Luke, and later Chloe – but unfortunately for Patrick, most of the town where they’d lived had come to know about the second.
Luke had been at college and there seemed to be a party every other weekend – most at people’s houses and the occasional few in the local rugby club – and they each attracted the same faces. Patrick Sibley hadn’t been one of them. Not until Amy Patten’s eighteenth, when he’d turned up at her house uninvited and drunker than anyone else there. The party was low on numbers. It was the Easter holidays and a lot of the students were away with their families or just couldn’t be bothered to venture out into what had been a fortnight of incessant rain. Later, Chloe would ask Amy Patten why she had let Patrick Sibley stay: he didn’t belong to their friendship group – he didn’t seem to belong to any friendship group – and he’d been so drunk by the time it reached eleven o’clock that he had thrown up in Amy’s parents’ kitchen sink. Amy had given a surprisingly honest answer. Why not? It was funny watching the class loser make an even bigger tit of himself.
He had left not long after, but not soon enough to spare himself the embarrassment of declaring lifelong and undying love for Emily. Everyone in the room was witness to his humiliation. Everyone laughed when he threw up for a second time, this time across the pale carpet of Amy Patten’s parents’ living room.
Emily had laughed too.
Chloe knew all this because Luke had told her.
It hadn’t taken Chloe long to find out where Patrick Sibley worked. His Facebook profile stated his employment as full-time and his timeline was filled with complaints and ramblings about his job as an administrative assistant at the tax office. The same tax office that was a short distance from the leisure centre where Chloe had met Scott, just a couple of months ago. Was Scott there now, that afternoon, and how would he react if she turned up there today, armed with her apologies and her explanations?
She didn’t blame him for losing interest. Everyone else had, sooner or later.