Close to Home (DI Adam Fawley #1)(39)

Anyone who has information about Daisy, or saw her at any time on Tuesday, should contact Thames Valley CID incident room at once on 01865 0966552.

*

Interview Two is, if anything, even ranker than Interview One. But looking at Sharon Mason’s face, ‘rancour’ might be the better description right now. She can scarcely contain her fury. Woman scorned doesn’t even come close.

I pull out the chair. She looks at Quinn and then at me. ‘I said I wanted to speak to you. Not him.’

‘DS Quinn is just here to satisfy procedure, Mrs Mason. It’s in your interests as well as ours.’

She makes a little huffy movement, and I gesture to Quinn to wait by the door.

‘So, Mrs Mason, how can I help you?’

‘You said my husband had been on a dating site. But that he hadn’t actually met that woman, what’s-her-name.’

‘Amy Cathcart. No, he hadn’t met her.’

‘But she wasn’t the only one.’

‘We’re still waiting for full records from FindMeAHotDate – ’

She winces as the knife twists, but I don’t care.

‘ – though it looks like he’s been using it for months. He tried to delete his profile on Wednesday morning. The day after Daisy disappeared.’

I wanted to see how she took that, but she has other things on her mind.

‘So he’s been seeing other women all that time – seeing them and – and – sleeping with them?’

I shrug. ‘I have no proof of that, Mrs Mason. But I suppose we must assume so. It’s possible more of them will come forward. Then we’ll know more.’

Her face is so red I can almost feel the heat off her. ‘And what does she look like, this Amy Cathcart?’

This, I confess, does wrong-foot me. But as soon as she’s said it, I know why. I turn round to Quinn. ‘I haven’t seen a picture of her. Have you, Sergeant?’

He twigs what I’m doing straight away. ‘Only her profile pic, boss. Blonde hair. On the slender side, but very nice curves, if you get what I mean. Very nice-looking, actually.’

Sharon is struggling to contain herself now. Her shoulders are trembling with the effort.

‘I brought you something,’ she says eventually. ‘Two things.’

She reaches down and puts a Morrisons carrier bag on the table. The thing inside glints lazily in the low light. Blue and green. Overlapping like the scales on a fish tail –

I feel my heart jerk. ‘Where did you find that, Mrs Mason?’

‘In his wardrobe. When I was packing up his crap so he can bloody well move out. It was hidden under his dirty gym kit.’

I hear Quinn’s intake of breath, and then the sound of the door opening, and a few moments later he’s back in the room wearing plastic gloves. He takes the carrier bag and puts the whole thing carefully into an evidence bag.

‘You do know,’ I continue, ‘that we will now have to take a DNA sample from you, Mrs Mason?’

‘Why?’ she bridles. ‘What have I done? It’s not me you should be looking at – ’

‘It’s purely for elimination,’ I say, placatory. ‘I assume you weren’t wearing gloves when you found this costume in the wardrobe?’

She hesitates, then shakes her head. ‘No.’

‘Then your DNA will inevitably be on it. And we’ll need to eliminate that from the investigation.’

I’m not sure she’d thought that all the way through, but it’s too late now.

‘There was something else?’

She says nothing, and I try again. ‘Mrs Mason? You said you had two things?’

‘Oh. Yes. There’s this. It was in the wardrobe as well.’

She opens her handbag – the fake one – and takes out a piece of paper. A4 originally but folded in two, like a birthday card. There are creases where someone has screwed it up and then flattened it out again. She pushes it towards me, and I see it is, in fact, an actual birthday card. A handmade one, from Daisy to her father. She’s written the words on the front so that they form the outline of a birthday cake with a candle. Something as precise as that, for an eight-year-old, it must have taken her hours. I find myself seeing her – the real child, the living laughing child – more vividly than I ever have. And I am more than ever convinced that she is dead.





H


A


P


P


Y


Birthday Daddy

You are the best Daddy in the world. You always look after me and kiss it better when I fall over.We have fun when I swing in your lap and in the swimming pool. When I am big and I am rich I will buy you all your favrite things

I’m feeling slightly sick. The lap, the swimming – it could all have a perfectly innocent explanation. But if it did, Sharon wouldn’t be sitting here right now. I look up and meet her eye and I don’t like what I see. She’s been wronged, I know that, but Christ, the woman is hard even to pity.

‘Turn the page,’ she says.

And so I do.

The inside is stuck thick with pictures. Mostly colour, one or two from newspapers. All her father’s favourite things. Fish and chips and mushy peas. A can of lager. A bodybuilder with dumb-bells. A sports car. But these are dwarfed by the image in the centre, and not just in terms of size. It’s a pair of breasts with huge red nipples. They’re cut out in close-up so they look disembodied, almost anatomical. But there’s nothing scientific about the impact this picture has.