Into the Water(73)

‘Hospitals?’

‘Nothing so far, no sign of either of them.’ Her phone rang and she went outside to take the call.

I remained stock-still in the kitchen while two scene-of-crime officers worked quietly around me. I watched one of them pluck with tweezers a strand of long blonde hair which had snagged on the edge of the table. I felt a sudden wave of nausea, saliva flooding my mouth. I couldn’t credit it: I’ve seen worse scenes than this – far worse – and remained impassive. Haven’t I? Have I not walked through bloodier kitchens than this?

I touched my palm to my wrist and realized that Callie was speaking to me again, her head poked around the door frame. ‘Can I have a word, Sir?’ I followed her outside and while I removed the plastic covers from my shoes, she filled me in on the latest. ‘Traffic have picked up Henderson’s car,’ she said. ‘I mean, not picked up, but they’ve got his red Vauxhall on camera twice.’ She looked down at her notebook. ‘Thing is, it’s a bit confusing because the first capture, just after three this morning, has him on the A68 going north towards Edinburgh, but then a couple of hours later, at five fifteen, he’s driving south on the A1 just outside Eyemouth. So maybe he … dropped something off?’ Got rid of something, she means. Something or someone. ‘Or he’s trying to confuse us?’

‘Or he changed his mind about the best place to run to,’ I said. ‘Or he’s panicking.’

She nodded. ‘Running around like a headless chicken.’

I didn’t like that idea, I didn’t want him – or anyone else – headless. I wanted him calm. ‘Was it possible to see if there was anyone else in the car, anyone in the passenger seat?’ I asked her.

She shook her head, lips pursed. ‘No. Of course …’ she tailed off. Of course, that doesn’t mean there isn’t another person in the car. It just means that the other person isn’t upright.

Again, that odd sense of having been here before, a scrap of memory which didn’t feel like my own. How could it be anyone else’s? It must have been part of a story, told to me by someone I don’t remember. A woman lying slumped in a car seat, a sick woman, convulsing, drooling. Not much of a story – I couldn’t remember the rest of it, I only knew that thinking about it turned my stomach. I pushed it aside.

‘Newcastle would seem the obvious place,’ Callie said. ‘I mean, if he’s running. Planes, trains, ferries – world’s his oyster. But the odd thing is that since that five a.m. sighting, they’ve got nothing, so either he’s stopped or he’s got off the main road. He might be taking smaller roads, the coastal road even—’

‘Isn’t there a girlfriend?’ I asked, interrupting her flow. ‘A woman in Edinburgh?’

‘The famous fiancée,’ Callie said, eyebrows raised. ‘Well, way ahead of you there. She – Tracey McBride, her name is – was picked up this morning. Uniform are bringing her down to Beckford for a chat. But, just to warn you, our Tracey claims she hasn’t seen Mark Henderson for a good while. Almost a year, in fact.’

‘What? I thought they’d just been on holiday together?’

‘That’s what Henderson said when he spoke to DS Morgan, but according to Tracey, she’s not seen hide nor hair of him since he called the whole thing off last autumn. She says he dumped her out of the blue, telling her he’d fallen head over heels for some other woman.’

Tracey didn’t know who the woman was or what she did. ‘Nor did I want to,’ she told me abruptly. She was sitting in the back office of the police station, an hour later, sipping her tea. ‘I was … I was pretty devastated, actually. One minute I’m shopping for wedding dresses and the next he’s telling me he can’t go through with it ’cos he’s met the love of his life.’ She smiled at me sadly, pushing her fingers through cropped dark hair. ‘After that, I just cut him off. Deleted his number, unfriended him, the full monty. Could you please tell me, has something happened to him? No one will tell me what the hell’s going on.’

I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry about that, but there’s not a lot I can tell you at the moment. We don’t believe he’s been harmed, though. We just need to find him, we need to talk to him about something. You don’t know where he might go, do you? If he needed to get away? Parents, friends in the area …?’

She frowned. ‘This is not about that dead woman, is it? I read in the papers that there was another one a week or two back. I mean … he wasn’t … that wasn’t the woman he was seeing, was it?’

‘No, no. It’s nothing to do with that.’

‘Oh, OK.’ She looked relieved. ‘I mean, she would have been a bit old for him, wouldn’t she?’

‘Why do you say that? Did he like younger women?’

Tracey looked confused. ‘No, I mean … how do you mean, younger? That woman was, like, about forty, wasn’t she? Mark’s not yet thirty, so …’

‘Right.’

‘You really can’t tell me what’s going on?’ she asked.

‘Was Mark ever violent to you, did he ever lose his temper, anything like that?’

‘What? God, no. Never.’ She leaned back in her chair, frowning. ‘Has someone accused him of something? Because he’s not like that. He’s selfish, no doubt about that, but he’s not a bad person, not in that way.’