She found the man working in a pub in Hopkinstown. The man had once worked in another pub, years earlier, and it was there he had met Adam. It made sense that Adam Edwards might have worked in pubs: he had grown up in one, would be familiar with their running. According to his former workmate, Edwards had trained as an electrician but had never fully qualified, although he still took on cash-in-hand jobs to make an extra bit of money on the side. The man claimed not to have seen Edwards in months, not since he had moved into Simon Watts’s house as a lodger.
As far as Alex could fathom, the part-time sideline in electrical work seemed the main way that he was earning money. There was no formal record of employment for the past nine months. He had been able to live under the radar for months, the nature of his income allowing his bank account activity to remain quiet. Tracing him through a transaction seemed unlikely.
The pub where both men had worked was called The Bar on the Bridge and was situated on a roundabout just off the A470 between Caerphilly and Pontypridd. It had recently been turned into a gastro pub – she remembered the days when they had simply been known as pubs that served food. She had her fingers crossed that someone working there would remember Adam Edwards and might still know him. She spoke with a young woman working behind the bar who looked no older than twenty-one and asked if it would be possible to speak with the manager. When the manager arrived, Alex felt her hopes sink. He also looked too young to have worked there at the same time Adam Edwards might have. She had a brief chat with him, knowing her efforts here were futile.
In the car park, Alex sat in the driver’s seat with the engine running. Where next? Adam Edwards had as good as disappeared. His landlord hadn’t seen him in weeks and he had no colleagues to have missed him or wondered why he hadn’t shown up for work. He had no family that he might have been staying with.
Where the hell had he gone?
She looked again at Edwards’s long list of former employments. Was it possible he was now staying with someone he had met through work? Was someone helping him conceal his whereabouts?
Two young women were dead. With every wasted moment that passed, they might be risking the life of a third. Alex felt herself afflicted by a pressing sense of urgency.
She scanned the employment history. She wasn’t that far from another of the places where Adam had once worked: a garden centre in Morganstown, just outside Cardiff.
It took her less than ten minutes to get there. Thankfully, there were members of staff beyond their twenties, and one of them remembered Adam Edwards.
‘Worked here about seven, eight years ago,’ the woman told her. ‘Nice boy. Helpful. Don’t know where he ended up working after he left here though – I think he might have been one of those types to do a bit of travelling before he settled down. We used to have a lot of students working here around that time, I remember; a lot of them from the school down in Radyr. I think he was a bit older, mind you, probably…’
Alex had stopped listening. A wedge of anxiety lodged in her chest. The conversation she’d had with Chloe at the young woman’s flat just days earlier played back through her mind, the lost details that had seemed so insignificant at the time now sounding through her brain like alarm bells. She had worked at a garden centre as a teenager trying to save enough money so that her brother could go and live with her once he was old enough to leave his parents’ home without their consent. There weren’t that many garden centres in the area any more, not since the big chain DIY stores had taken over. Chloe had mentioned Morganstown, Alex was sure of it. She had gone to school in Radyr.
Seven, eight years ago, the woman had told her. About the same time Chloe might have worked there.
‘Chloe Lane,’ she said, interrupting the woman. ‘Griffiths,’ she corrected herself. ‘Do you know her?’
The woman gave an apologetic shrug. Alex reached into her pocket for her mobile phone and scanned through her photos. There weren’t that many on there, but she hadn’t deleted the selfie Chloe had insisted they take to document the night out they’d had at Christmas. She held out her mobile to the woman.
‘She used to have dark hair. Do you recognise her?’
The woman studied the photograph. ‘I remember her now. Lost a bit of weight since I last saw her, mind.’
Alex felt sick. She left the garden centre hurriedly and tried Chloe’s mobile. It went straight to voicemail. She called Dan. ‘Where are you? Can you get yourself over to Taff’s Well? I’ll explain when I see you.’
Chloe’s image had been splashed over the front of the local papers and it was now public knowledge she had been suspended. An old friend might have contacted her during this time, when she needed a friend the most.
Alex pulled out of the car park and took the roundabout back onto the A470. She needed to reach Chloe before anyone else did.
Chapter Sixty-Two
‘You OK?’
Chloe had lost track of time. After eating the food he had brought over, she and Adam had talked about where their lives had taken them since they had last seen one another. They tried to omit certain details – Chloe’s family, what had happened that week with her job and with the newspapers, Luke – but avoiding these subjects entirely left Chloe with little to talk about. These were the things that had come to characterise her entire existence. She still couldn’t bring herself to consider what she would be without her job and where her life might take her if her suspension was to lead to a permanent dismissal.
They had talked about Adam and what he had been up to in the eight years that had passed. He had travelled for a while, admitting he’d had his own ghosts he’d needed to escape. When he didn’t elaborate, Chloe didn’t push him on the subject. She didn’t want to talk about the things that haunted her; she had no right to force him to do something that she wouldn’t.
‘You OK?’ he repeated. He was sitting in the chair opposite her, the coffee table separating them. He tilted his head, his eyes glazed with concern as he looked at her.
She pressed her fingertips to the side of her head. She felt light-headed. ‘I just feel a bit funny.’ She could hear the slur in her words, although they sounded as though they were being spoken in another room, somewhere distant and remote, from another person’s mouth.
Adam stood. ‘Shall I get you some paracetamol? Are there some in the kitchen?’
She shook her head, though it hurt now to do so. It felt as though something was pulling at the sides of her brain; the same kind of feeling she’d experienced plenty of times, years earlier, when she’d had too much to drink. It had been that very feeling, along with the anxiety and guilt that had all too often inevitably followed, that had prompted Chloe to cut alcohol from her life several years earlier, around the same time she had signed up to join the police.
But she hadn’t been drinking. They had shared the bottle of non-alcoholic fruit cocktail that Adam had brought over to the flat with him. Other than that, she’d had nothing but tea.
‘I’ll be OK in a minute,’ she said, not entirely convinced this was true. The room shifted slightly; she leaned forward and gripped the edges of the coffee table as though keeping herself from falling off the sofa. Her hair fell in front of her face. She left it there.