The Book of Souls (Inspector McLean #2)(93)

McLean paused, unsure quite how to proceed. He wanted to say: ‘He took my fiancée last time,’ but somehow that wasn’t going to make as much sense to anyone else as it did to him. DS MacBride would do as he was told, and Grumpy Bob had worked with him long enough to understand when not to ask those kind of questions. Ritchie, though, was perfectly right.

‘At the moment it’s a mixture of hunch and guesswork. She fits the profile of the other three victims closely enough and there’s no other obvious reason for her disappearance. If I’m right then this is our best chance yet to catch whoever’s doing this. If not and she turns up in an hour or two looking a bit sheepish, well I’ll take whatever flak necessary.’ He reached for a mug of coffee and bacon buttie to try and cover the shudder that ran through him.

‘OK, so what do we need to eliminate? You’ve been to her flat, I take it?’

‘Yup. And she’s not out on call – that’s how I found out she was missing. She could have gone up to Aberdeen, I guess. If there was a family emergency.’

‘I’ll make a couple of calls.’ Ritchie turned to her desk and picked up her phone.

‘What do you want me to do, sir?’ MacBride asked.

‘Go round the station, ask if anyone remembers seeing her. Speak to Needy. Last I saw her, Emma was taking some evidence down to the store. If we can get a time off the paperwork, that gives us a starting point. She might even have told him where she was going next.’

‘Needy’s off sick, sir. He went home early yesterday. Flu apparently.’

‘Bloody marvellous. Who’s in archives today then?’

‘PC Jones, I think. What about her car, sir?’

McLean was momentarily puzzled. ‘What about it?’

‘Should I get onto traffic, see if they can find it?’

‘Good thinking. You know the registration?’

‘SOC should have it, if she claims mileage.’ He hurried off to his desk and started making calls.

‘You sure you know what you’re doing, sir?’

McLean turned to see Grumpy Bob standing in the doorway, his eyes on the picture taped to the whiteboard.

‘Nope.’

‘You know what Dagwood’s going to say about this.’

‘Let’s worry about that when it happens, eh?’

Grumpy Bob shrugged. ‘You’re the boss. Where do we go next?’

DS Ritchie dropped her phone handset back into its cradle. ‘That was Emma’s mother. She’s not spoken to her all week. As far as she knows there’s nothing unusual going on.’

‘OK. So I think we can pretty much rule out an innocent explanation for Emma’s disappearance. Anyone contacted the hospitals? Stuart, anything from traffic on the car?’

MacBride was still talking on the phone and held up his hand for a moment’s peace. McLean stifled the urge to shout; everything was taking too long. Emma was out there somewhere and the longer it took to find her ... He didn’t want to think about it.

‘Sorry, sir. Traffic’s not got any record of the car being in any accidents in the last twenty-four hours. They’ve put out a call to all units to keep an eye out for it. They’ll call me the moment they find it.’

No sooner were the words out than the phone rang on his desk. All eyes were on the young detective constable as he took the call.

‘Hello,?...?yes ... Are you sure?’ He hung up. ‘It’s Emma’s car, sir. They’ve found it.’

‘Where?’ McLean pushed himself up from the desk like he was on springs.

‘Out the back, sir. In the car park.’





59





The little blue Peugeot sat in a narrow space between two battered riot vans. His own car was parked almost directly opposite. How the hell had he missed it when he’d come in that morning?

McLean peered in through the window, rubbing away at the grime of accumulated road salt and other unidentifiable muck to get a better view. On the other side of the vehicle, DS Ritchie tried the door handle.

‘It’s not locked, sir,’ she said as the door popped open.

Inside it was just as messy as it had been the last time he had ridden in it. McLean breathed in the familiar damp smell from the carpets, casting his eyes over the back seat. There was a SOC-issue fleece, a pair of heavy walking boots and a moth-eaten old cardboard box filled with latex gloves, dead batteries and other detritus of work. The foot wells were a repository of empty sweet wrappers and crisp packets; a place where the unwanted crawled to die.

He dropped the driver’s seat back into position, noticing as he did that the keys still hung in the ignition. House keys dangled from the ring, along with a beaten-up rubber gnome with a tiny tuft of bright pink synthetic hair on the top of its head. Pulling them out, he went round to the back of the car and opened the boot. Inside, a collection of coats and overalls were squashed up to either side, leaving a space just about the same size as the box he had seen Emma carrying the day before. In the middle of it sat a soft, squashy leather handbag.

‘I guess she didn’t mean to be gone long,’ Ritchie said as she picked up the bag. McLean felt an instant of irrational jealousy, dispersing it with a quick shake of the head.

‘Where the hell did she go then? Off to the shops to get some lunch?’