Finding Grace(39)

‘I don’t give a shit whether it’s helpful or not.’ The tears are clogging up my throat and threatening to choke me. ‘Why would Mike even do that? Why would he leave our daughter at a crucial moment when a few more seconds would have seen her well past the bend and safely in your care?’

Silence.

I asked Mike that very same thing and his only answer was, ‘Bev called me inside.’

But Bev knew he was watching Grace halfway home. Why would she call him back into the house at such an important time when she knew he’d only be a couple of minutes at the most?

‘What was so important that you needed him back inside, Bev?’ I asked her.

‘I… I can’t recall now. I didn’t think he’d come back until he’d watched Grace as far as he could.’ That had earned her a withering glare from Mike.

‘We need to speak to the police.’ I drive my feet into the mud, desperate to cover ground quickly. ‘They need to know about the crucial time lapse and we need to tell them about the money upstairs before they find it for themselves. It can only be a matter of time before they do a more thorough search.’

‘Lucie, please. Let me deal with the cash issue. I can explain everything to you, but let’s not get involved in that discussion while Grace is still missing. Please.’

‘For all I know, you might be in trouble. You’ve kept a massive amount of cash from me; what if you’re keeping other secrets? What if you’ve double-crossed someone who’s out for revenge and has abducted Grace?’

‘Lucie, you’re being ridiculous. This isn’t a TV crime drama.’

‘Oh, I’m painfully aware of that,’ I say acidly. ‘But it follows that if nothing is amiss, then you shouldn’t mind the police knowing.’

And then something repeats in my head and it feels like a light bulb pinging on.

Why would Mike leave our daughter at a crucial moment when a few more seconds would have seen her well past the bend and safely in your care?

But Blake wasn’t watching at the gate because his phone distracted him and he slipped on the mossy path.

‘Why did you check your phone, just before you slipped?’ I ask him.

‘A text came through,’ he says in a tone that indicates he’s tiring of me going over old ground. ‘I thought it might be council business.’

‘And was it? Was it council business?’

‘No, as it happens, it wasn’t,’ he retorts. ‘Give it a rest, can’t you? I’m tired, you’re tired. There’s no point blaming—’

‘So who was it from, this message?’

He waits just a beat too long before he answers. ‘Oh, just a colleague about a meeting. Nothing important. Look, I’ve been thinking. You really need to take the tablets Dr Mahmoud prescribed; there’s only so long you can run on adrenalin, and when she’s back home, Grace will need our support twenty-four-seven.’

Very clever. Using the prospect of Grace’s return to keep me drugged up and out of his hair.

He carries on listing reasons why I need to stop my ‘crazy theories’, as he puts it, but I just fade him out. I wouldn’t admit it to him, but I do feel exhausted. I feel ill.

The more I poke around, the more I feel like there’s a lot of stuff going on I’m unaware of. Have I really become so detached from everything outside of the children and the house that I haven’t registered what’s happening right under my nose?

And now… what if Blake is in some kind of trouble he’s tried to keep from me? He might have got into something well over his head and not know what to do about it.

I like to think he’d confide in me about anything, but I know he worries about my state of mind. Although he doesn’t know what happened in Newcastle all those years ago, he knows about the anxiety that has plagued me, the panic attacks, the agoraphobia.

He’s never pressured me to talk about possible reasons; has always just accepted that’s the way I am and tried to support me.

He might not feel he can burden me with the truth.

As I run through possible scenarios explaining why he has got so much cash in the house, cash he has kept a secret, the irony is not lost on me.

I’m enraged at the thought of him keeping secrets, and yet what about my own past, my mistakes, my buried truths?

What if… what if Grace going missing is nothing to do with Bev, or Mike, or Blake’s secret stash of money? What if her disappearance is some kind of karma – to make me pay for what I did?





Twenty-Eight





Sixteen years earlier





On arrival at the university, Lucie was allocated a very small, very basic room that overlooked a scrap of ill-maintained garden with a scratched, graffiti-marked wooden bench.

All first-year students were entitled to live on the university campus, and Lucie didn’t mind that the room was shoddy, but she did mind the single bed, which not only resembled what she imagined you’d get in a prison cell, but also felt like a bad camping mattress. It was incredibly uncomfortable, not helped by the polythene cover that the list of rules pinned to the door instructed her not to remove before adding her own bedding.

The house manager showed Lucie and a small group of other students around. Next to Lucie’s room, there was a large communal kitchen with a wooden table and eight plastic chairs.