Cold Blood by Jane Heafield (great books to read txt) 📕

and more reporters. Another turned up and his car almost hit Anika as she stumbled to hers; instantly he was out, microphone first, machine-gunning questions.

Anika ignored him, but not the growing crowd. To those living on the street, she yelled, ‘You all knew already, my God, and you stand there watching? You bastards.’

As she got in her car and it screamed away, and reporters turned their own vehicles to follow, Bennet shut down the website. He couldn’t watch any more. Not because of Anika’s distress, but due to the slimy reporters. He hoped the bastards rotted.

Other slimeballs had focused their attention elsewhere. After his daughter’s disappearance, Sally’s errant father had been unable to cope with the scrutiny and had fled to Stuttgart, Germany, where his brother owned three restaurants. Now, Alan managed one of the establishments and had remarried and done a fine job of forgetting the past, but it had reared its ugly head. In no time at all, the story had travelled overseas, been picked up by the media, and a journalist had tracked him down.

Bennet found an audio file of her attempt to engage Alan in interview. She had called his restaurant, claimed to have a complaint for the manager, and when he got on the line she said, ‘Have you seen the news from your home city? Your daughter’s body has been found.’

‘What? Who are you?’

‘You were investigated by the police about her disappearance, weren’t you?’

‘Are you talking about Sally? Sally’s been found? Look, who the hell are you?’

‘Why did you leave the country if you had nothing to do with it?’

Here Alan hung up, as might anyone who desperately needed to verify a piece of information. The reporter announced that she’d give him time to read the news and would call him back. She did that an hour later. She’d recorded their second conversation, again over the phone.

‘You again. Listen, I had nothing to do with my daughter’s disappearance. The police wouldn’t have let me leave the country if they suspected me. Your information is bullshit. I left the country to get away from soulless bastards like you, hassling me every day. Now, please, piss off.’

The reporter didn’t piss off. ‘Are you going to return to England to help the police? To go to the funeral? Will you meet the mother and–’

‘No, okay? No. If Sally was alive, sure I’d go back. But she’s not, and so what’s the point? Just to face idiots like you and go through all that again? If they catch the killer, I’ll go to his damn trial. Don’t call me again.’

Alan hung up. The same story reported that Alan had been living in Germany all these years and nobody knew about a daughter, never mind that she’d gone missing a decade ago. Shades of Lorraine there. There was more: the reporter had then visited his restaurant for another confrontation, and this time there was video. But Bennet had seen and heard enough already.

Lorraine’s husband knew of her death, and doubtless the family and friends of Francis Overeem, Betty Crute and John Crickmer had received a death knock. And now, all these years later, Sally Jenkins’ mother and father knew the truth. Joe was the only one still in the dark, still living in a painless dreamworld, and it was wholly down to his selfish, stupid dad. He punched his own thigh.

When Bennet went back into the bedroom, Joe immediately unpaused the fighting game and, laughing, started pummelling his dad’s character. Bennet turned the Xbox off at the plug.

‘Come on, Dad, it was just a joke.’

He sat by his son. ‘I have to talk to you, Joe.’

Joe looked a little shocked and scared, which gave Bennet the impression he’d done something bad at school and thought his dad had just learned of it.

He would have gladly swapped a telling off for what he was about to do.

48

The murk makes it hard to see even his outstretched hand in front of him, but he pushes onward through the cold water fast, against a clock that will kill him if it wins. His fingers catch something hard, protruding, and in the next moment he is close enough to see it is a shiny silver tap in a sink.

Onwards. Paper and various other buoyant debris waft past him, ahead of him, all around, into the beam of his torch and then gone as he moves past, downward. Three shapes loom ahead, framed neatly in the oblong of the windscreen, somewhat like rounded triangles in a line. His hands latch on to the back of a seat, and he pulls himself closer. He knows the shapes are the upper bodies of people sitting in the cabin seats, trapped by their seat belts. He sees the backs of their heads in his light, as if they’re staring at the lakebed just feet beyond the dark windscreen.

Three shapes, but not four.

The shockwave still pounding through his head now fights against the thump of his airless chest for dominance. But he pulls himself closer still, until his body floats between two heads, and then he sees it. The fourth body.

It is Lorraine. She shimmers before him, sideways, laying across the legs of the others. He sees her face: the obsidian canyon of the open mouth, the jet holes of the open eyes, the dance of her hair. Resting on her stomach is the rock he used to smash the back window and gain entry.

The clock immediately starts to tick down faster as his heart thumps and a portion of his breath detonates in myriad bubbles. But onward he moves, both hands outstretched, and one delves into the rippling cloud of her hair, and clutches, and pulls, and the rock tumbles off her stomach, and Lorraine comes to him, weightless as a ghost.

49

The dream woke him in the early hours. He had expected it. He didn’t doubt it would be back for many nights to come. But he didn’t class it as a nightmare. He had