Local Gone Missing(86)

“What? What happened?”

“She was seen by the girl in the house. I heard her shouting. That’s when it all went to hell.”

“Did she see what you did? When you killed the boyfriend? And put the bag over Sofia Nightingale’s head?”

“I was off my face. I didn’t know what I was doing.” He broke down in dry sobs. “I can’t remember all of what happened.”

“That poor child,” Caro said. “Let’s hope she can’t either. How would you ever get over that?”

“Did you come to Ebbing to have it out with Charles Williams?” Elise asked when Bennett had finished blowing his nose.

“Williams? No, I didn’t know he was here. I went and asked around his old place in Kensington but he was long gone and no one had an address.”

“That’s not true, is it? You had an arrangement to meet him here on Sunday evening. You and Charlie had been e-mailing.”

“What are you talking about? I didn’t have any arrangement.”

“You used the e-mail [email protected],” Elise pushed on. She was so sure it was him. Who else would have chosen that incendiary address?

“That isn’t me. You can check on my phone.”

“We are. So why did you come?”

“Phil Golding’s sister.”

“The girl you took to the burglary?”

“Yes, she lives here. She told me when she came to see me.”

The young woman at the hostel.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I just wanted to say sorry for taking her that night, for getting her mixed up in it. She was really upset when she left my place the other day and I wanted to tell her we had to let it go. Get on with our lives. But I couldn’t find her. And then I thought I saw Williams in the street going into the festival. He was an old man, but I’d looked him up online. Seen his photos from when he was the big businessman. I couldn’t believe it. Just couldn’t believe it. But I had to be sure—I told myself this was my chance to confront him and tell him what he did to me, to his daughter, Phil, and to everyone who was involved. I slipped over a fence at the side of the venue and he was there, a few yards away, in the crowd. I think he saw me but I didn’t get to speak to him. He just disappeared.”

“Did you go looking for him? To confront him away from the crowds?”

Bennett shook his head. “No. It really upset me, seeing him. I just stood there. It brought it all back, you see. And I couldn’t even move. I went and got wasted—this girl had some coke she’d found in her old man’s wardrobe.”

“Was that Celeste Diamond?”

“Celeste, yeah. She’s lovely. It turned into a bit of a big night, really. The thing was I knew I’d be banged up again if I went back to the hostel. They do drugs testing and I wasn’t going to pass that. A lad at the statics said I could stay with him if I gave him some money. I was working things out. What I should do. And Celeste kept coming back with food and stuff.”

“So you never saw Phil’s sister again?”

“No, I wish I had.”





Sixty-seven


MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019





Elise


Elise packed up her bag slowly. There’d been no sign of the Addison1999 e-mail exchange on Bennett’s phone. And they had nothing to hold him.

It was a sideshow like Caro had said. Charlie’s criminal past had been catching up with him but it’d been his new con trick that had brought death to the basement. Bennett was out of the frame and on his way back to prison. And Phil Golding was dead.

They’d got the right people in the cells. There was a heady buzz in the incident room—the sound of people who knew it was done and dusted. They had the men who had held Charlie prisoner, bound like a joint of meat in Tesco’s, and left him in that stinking basement, knowing his reckoning was coming.

“No wonder he had a heart attack,” Elise had said to Caro. “I probably would have had one too.”

And the cast of Breaking Bad had been charged with the drugs conspiracy.

And everyone was happy with the outcome. Aoife the pathologist had been quietly pleased with the cling film angle. “Clever,” she’d said. “Leaves no marks but it’s a very effective binding material. You try it—it’s impossible to get off.”

“Well done, Elise,” DCI McBride had said. “Straight out of the traps and two cases sorted. Great police work.”

She’d smiled and said it was the team who’d cracked it. And she should have been happy too—it was all neat and squared away. Just as she liked it. But she’d known—her waters had told her—there was unfinished business here. In Ebbing. The little sister. Someone who lived through a terrible thing and didn’t tell a soul.

Elise had run through her yoga class and all the women she knew in the town in her head, looking for her.

But in the end she’d gone into the corridor and rung Ronnie. “What time is it now in Sydney? Can you give your daughter another call and ask her if Phil had a sister?”

Fifteen minutes later, she had her answer. “She was a lot younger, Meggie thinks. Not at school,” her other second-in-command bellowed down the phone. “Sorry to shout but Ted’s playing Bill Hayley at full volume upstairs.”