He gets up and leaves the room, returning a couple of minutes later with a Post-it note and a hastily written street name. He passes it to her, then places his hand on her shoulder, giving it a squeeze. She looks up, and he looks away. ‘Say hello to your dad from me. I’ll try and make it across there very soon.’
They thank him and leave, walking down the long gravel drive and back to the car. It has started to rain heavily now and they both make a show of wanting to get out of it, picking their pace up, aware that they’re being watched from the living room window.
* * *
Back in the car they’re forced to endure a seemingly endless drive out of the estate, passing over the speed bumps and sticking to the twenty-mile-an-hour limit. Once clear of that, Katie hammers her foot to the floor.
‘I’m sure she’ll be fine,’ she says over the scream of the engine.
‘Markham can’t have known we’d get Tracy’s address,’ says Nathan, his body shifting backwards and forwards in the seat, as if that might help the old car to go faster. ‘Or make the possible connection.’
‘No,’ says Katie, then again for reassurance. ‘No.’ Her driving is reckless, but they’re making good time. Then, suddenly, she takes her foot off the pedal. ‘What if the address was what Markham needed? What if he’s using us to find out where Tracy lives?’
‘I don’t think he needs us to help him with any information,’ says Nathan, gesturing for her to pick up speed again. ‘That bastard already knows everything.’
‘This is going to be like Mark Brooks all over again,’ says Katie quietly, remembering the little girl’s face as she clung onto the doll. ‘Markham’s found a whole new way to torture.’
* * *
They reach the outskirts of High Wycombe in just over an hour and a half, and five minutes later, thanks to directions from her mobile, pull up outside the address Malcolm Barclay had written down. The house is a small semi with a neat front lawn and a people carrier in the drive.
They rush up the pathway, passing a row of roses, and hammer on the door. Katie had thought about asking Nathan to stay in the car to avoid being seen, worried about how Tracy might react, but he was out of the car before she even had the chance to speak. Instead, she pulls out her warrant card, holding it up ahead of her so that Tracy might know from the outset that there isn’t a threat. There’s no response. She tries again and reaches forward to try to grab the handle, finding it locked. She presses her face up to the frosted glass, then steps out onto the front lawn to peer through the living room window, spotting no movement inside.
‘She might be out,’ says Nathan.
They both look back at the car in the drive, then hear a key in the lock. Katie moves in front of Nathan and lifts her card again. She’s so tired she’s struggling to hold it there, almost as much as she’s struggling to hold her smile.
The door opens and a petite blonde woman of around forty-five peers past the edge of the door. Katie can’t help but stare, carried back all those years to the time she’d seen her dad with this same person, then just a girl. She remains silent, only vaguely aware of Tracy’s eyes flicking from her to Nathan and back again. It’s only when Tracy takes in the warrant card that her face drops.
‘What’s happened?’ she says, lifting a hand to her mouth. ‘Not the children!’
‘No,’ says Katie, snapping out of her daydream. ‘It’s nothing like that. And I’m so sorry if we startled you. As you can see I am DI Rhodes, and this is my colleague, Nathan—’ She cuts herself off before it emerges. ‘My dad was a policeman, DS Simon Rhodes. You perhaps know him from a few years back?’
The door has swung open further, revealing dirty knees, a pair of gardening gloves and a mud-encrusted gardening fork which Tracy is holding out like a weapon.
‘What’s this about?’
‘My dad’s not very well. He hasn’t been for a while. We can no longer… communicate. One thing he did say was that he wanted to know how you are doing.’ Any guilt she might feel at yet another lie is soon eased by the relaxation on Tracy’s face.
‘You’d better come in.’
Katie checks over her shoulder. It’s the middle of the day now and there’s nobody around apart from an elderly woman in the distance and a teenage boy being dragged along by a German shepherd. It’s not enough to let herself relax, even when she sees the interior and feels the warmth of the family photos lining the brightly coloured walls. Even when she sinks into the comfortable sofa and hears the soft purring of a cat sleeping in the corner. Why have they been led here? What interest is this to Markham after all these years? She finds herself searching the photos again, desperate for an answer to present itself. Out of the corner of her eye she can see Nathan is doing the same, sucking up the details, absorbing the life and no doubt processing all that information at a frightening speed. She hopes he’s going to be the first one to talk, that he’ll spot something that will send them racing off elsewhere, as far away from all this as they can possibly get. But it’s Tracy who speaks first, returning from the kitchen with a pot of tea and three mugs decorated with roughly painted animals.
‘I should have gone to visit him,’ she says. ‘But he told me not to. He said I should focus on…’ She lifts her arms and offers a broad sweep of the room. ‘Still, I wish I had done. I wanted to, and I definitely would have if I’d known he was ill.’
‘He would have understood,’ says Katie, instantly regretting her choice of tense. ‘When was the last time you saw him?’
‘At least a decade ago. I remember you’d just got a promotion. He always talked about you when I saw him. He was so proud.’
She smiles, and Katie tries to match it, but these are things about her dad that she didn’t know and will never hear about from him. She only vaguely remembers the promotion, and her dad had never expressed anything other than disappointment at her ignoring his advice and joining the force.
‘He was like a dad to me,’ Tracy continues, before holding a hand up to her mouth. ‘I mean, not like… he only dropped in every month or so.’
More frequently than he did for me, thinks Katie, looking away to try and hide her distress. Her attention falls again on the photos in the corner, and she finds herself unable to shake off the sense that she’s close to something important. Climbing to her feet, she heads for a photo of a young girl that Katie had originally taken to be one of Tracy’s daughters. The closer she gets, the tighter the cold grip on her heart squeezes. It’s actually a photo of Tracy, she can see that now, and she can also see that hanging round the then teenager’s neck is a chain she suspects had a twisted fastening at the back. Worse still, there’s a resemblance she hadn’t noticed before.
‘I’m glad my dad was able to help,’ Katie says, fighting to keep her voice flat and calm. ‘Is yours not around anymore?’
‘No,’ says Tracy, failing to hide the shift in her own emotions. ‘He left when I was young.’
‘Went back up North?’
‘How did you know…?’
‘I thought I heard a trace of an accent in you,’ says Katie, forcing a smile.
‘That’s impossible. We moved down when I was a baby.’
‘My mistake.’ Katie moves across to a table full of photos, leaning forward and carefully making her way through each one. ‘Is he anywhere here?’
‘Mum wouldn’t allow it.’
Katie doesn’t want to push too hard. She knows she’s already making Tracy suspicious of her. This woman is a survivor, has built a life far more stable and, she’s certain, more rewarding than her own. She could very easily, and selfishly, damage it by being too reckless and too desperate for answers. She knows now that this is what Markham will have so carefully worked out: the next stage of his plan. But perhaps she can resist.
‘There are no photos of him at all?’ It’s Nathan that’s broken the silence, leaning in close.