The Moor (DCI Ryan Mysteries, #11)(6)

Everything reminded him of her.

If he allowed himself to think of it, he might remember meeting Esme for the first time, all those years ago. He might think of how she’d looked on their wedding day at the church less than a mile from where he now stood.

But he would not think of it.

It was enough that he saw her likeness every time he looked at his daughter, who grew more like her mother with every passing year.

No, he would not think of it—or of Esmerelda, wherever she was, now.





CHAPTER 4


“Sam?”

When Ryan’s quiet voice interrupted their conversation, three female faces looked up from a lively game of Scrabble. He watched the light drain from the girl’s eyes and was sorry for it.

“She’s really dead, isn’t she?” Sam whispered, and blinked away tears.

She’d known it all along, but still hoped to be wrong. She’d wished it was all a horrible nightmare, some kind of fantasy she’d created in her own mind, but she saw the truth reflected in Ryan’s blue-grey eyes, long before he spoke the words.

“There is a woman who matches the description you gave us,” was all he would say. “Nothing is certain until we’ve done some tests—”

“You mean, like, DNA?”

Beside her, MacKenzie smiled.

“Yes, exactly,” she said.

“In that case, why don’t you take a sample from me now and send it off to the science boffin who does the testing?”

Despite the circumstances, Ryan found himself holding back a smile as he thought of how Tom Faulkner, their senior crime scene investigator, would react to being called a ‘boffin’.

On reflection, he’d probably love it.

“I’m afraid it’s not quite that simple,” he said, taking a seat near to where she sat cross-legged in front of the coffee table. “Legally, you’re a minor, and there are certain rules about that. We’d need a parent or guardian to be present, for starters—”

Once again, she cut Ryan off with the kind of breath-taking ease Phillips could only hope to emulate.

“I’m also a witness, aren’t I?” she said. “Don’t you need to eliminate me from your list of suspects? Here, I’ll volunteer a sample.”

With that, she plucked a chunk of hair from beneath her cap and held it out, roots and all.

“Ah, now, just a minute—”

“Technically speaking, she is a witness,” MacKenzie pointed out.

“She was two years old at the time.” Ryan raised a single, disbelieving eyebrow. “I hardly think she’d be high on our list of suspects, do you?”

“Well, I’m not calling my dad,” Sam told him. “He must be one of your prime suspects and I’ve already said, I don’t want him to know where I am.”

Ryan frowned.

“Now, hang on a minute,” he said. “Even if I agreed to accept a DNA sample from you for the purposes of the investigation, that doesn’t mean your father isn’t entitled to know where you are.”

“Yes, it does,” she argued. “What if he killed her? Or, if it wasn’t him, it could have been anybody else at the circus. We all live in the same place and, when the word gets about that I came to the police, one of them might come and find me. They all know where I live, don’t they?”

Ryan looked around the other faces in the room and was exasperated to find himself outnumbered. After all, the kid had a point.

“Okay, let’s assume there’s a case to investigate.” He held up his hands. “You’d have to go into protective custody, at a safe address—”

“I’m not going into care!”

“Nobody’s saying that,” Anna soothed, and looked meaningfully towards her husband.

“She can’t stay here,” Ryan said, with as much authority as he could muster in the face of rising panic.

“Of course, I can’t stay here,” Sam said, and looked at him as if he were dopey. “I came to you because you’re the one in charge—”

The other three in the room snorted in unison.

“Everybody knows you,” she continued. “That means they’d know where to look, if somebody wanted to find me. I need to stay somewhere no one would think of, with somebody totally average. You know, somebody who wouldn’t stand out in a crowd or attract attention. Not good-looking, just ordinary. A nobody. Like him,” she said, pointing squarely at Phillips, who was perched on the edge of the sofa beside his wife.

He came to attention with an outraged grunt, almost falling off his perch.

“Well, I’ve never—!”

“She does have a point,” Ryan mused, and crossed one leg comfortably over the other. “You do blend in, Frank.”

“I’ll blend you, in a minute—”

“Now, now,” his friend said, mischievously, and looked at the woman seated beside him. “What do you say, Mac?”

All eyes turned to the person who made the final decisions in the MacKenzie-Phillips household. Denise put a gentle hand on her husband’s knee and looked into the girl’s small, expectant face. She wanted to find something there to give her pause, to remind her of why she never became involved in the lives of those she helped, but found nothing except the trusting eyes of a child.