The Secret Child (DI Amy Winter #2)(19)

‘And Sally-Ann,’ Flora added.

It had not been easy telling Flora about Sally-Ann. Her mother had looked at her with a mixture of surprise and concern at the time. ‘But she’s dead,’ Flora had said.

‘That’s what everybody thinks,’ was Amy’s reply. ‘But Sally-Ann came to after Jack dumped her body that night. He thought she was dead. So did Lillian. They never spoke about her again.’

Once Flora had got over the initial shock, she had insisted on meeting Amy’s biological sister. At first, Sally-Ann was nervous and, suspicious of Sally-Ann’s motives, Flora was a little cold. But after a heartfelt chat the two most important women in Amy’s life were soon acting like old friends.

After depositing their glasses in the dishwasher, Amy lightly patted Flora on the back. With Amy, hugs were in short supply. With long-buried memories of her childhood working their way to the forefront of her mind, it was easy to see why – but she still loved her mum with all her heart. ‘Night night,’ was all she could think of to say.

Waggling her rear end, Dotty followed Amy out of the door. Had he been alive, Robert would have been wary of Adam’s presence in their home. Right now, Amy missed her adoptive father so much it felt like a physical pain in her chest. Hoisting Dotty on to the bed, she stripped off her clothes and snuggled under the duvet, the faint tap of rain against her window lulling her to sleep. But her slumber provided little respite as her mind processed the day’s events in the form of a disjointed nightmare. Nicole Curtis, her blue-painted toenails poking out from behind the sofa. Ellen Curtis being dragged through a derelict house. Moaning in her sleep, Amy could hear the echoes of Ellen’s screams. At the end of a long, narrow corridor, her captor’s laughter was dark as they forced the child down basement steps. But the face of Ellen’s kidnapper was not that of Luka Volkov. It was Lillian Grimes.





CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Since moving in with her mother, Amy had already established her favourite haunts. The Hummingbird Bakery, where she met her sister once a week, as well as the Notting Hill Bookshop and the Ladbroke Arms pub, to name but a few. Then there were her mid-week trips to Portobello Market to stock up on fresh fruit. Her routine and her job underpinned her daily existence and kept her sane.

‘Don’t say I never give you anything.’ She gently laid a tray of freshly baked cupcakes on a table near the office door. The sugary snacks brought a much-needed morale boost; she had picked them up from the bakery on her way to work. Nicole Curtis’s poisoning had added an extra layer of intensity to the investigation and everybody was feeling the effects.

‘Red velvet, my favourite.’ Molly’s eyes were lit up as she plucked one from the tray. Her desk was awash with paperwork, as she preferred printing off investigation updates to reading them on-screen.

‘You deserve them.’ Amy took one for herself. ‘If anyone would like to make a round of coffees to go with these, I won’t say no.’ She handed a cupcake to Paddy, casting an eye over the crossword-puzzle tie hung loosely around his neck. ‘How’s it going? Have you got five minutes to fill me in?’ It was quicker than reading through the vast number of updates uploaded to the system.

‘How are you doing? Lillian still hounding you?’ Paddy bit into his cupcake as he followed her. He was one of the few people she allowed an insight into her personal life. Given he was living with her sister, it was not something she could avoid.

‘Oh, you know, some people are just beautifully wrapped boxes of shit.’ Amy’s tone suggested that they should leave it there.

Within a couple of minutes they were ensconced in her office, cups of coffee in hand. Her head was still spinning from last night’s nightmare. Mentally, she shut the door on her past and homed in on Paddy’s words.

His update was as expected. Extra officers were being drafted in to assist with the groundwork, such as viewing CCTV and reviewing automatic number-plate recognition data. As for Luka . . . they may as well have been looking for a ghost. If he was alive, they had no evidence of it. It wasn’t as if they could exhume his body. Amy had printed off copies of the paperwork obtained and pinned them to the board in the briefing room. Luka and his mother had died in the fire and then been cremated before officials had the opportunity to examine their remains. And with little family to fight Luka and Sasha’s corner, their deaths had been quickly swept aside. The early cremation had been put down to a mix-up in paperwork at the time, but Amy was sceptical. Assuming Luka had escaped the fire, how had a six-year-old boy been able to fend for himself in a strange country after his mother’s death?

‘Where are we situated with the data on the seized phones?’ Amy asked, remembering how shifty Dr Curtis’s wife had been when she’d spoken to her at the house.

‘The iPhone was wiped clean. Nicole’s mobile is still with the tech department. If we’re lucky, we’ll have it back later today.’ He paused to finish his coffee. ‘Do you really think Curtis set all this up? Ellen, Nicole – it’s got to be connected. But why do it like this? It makes no sense.’

Above them, the wall clock brought with it a sense of impending doom as the minutes since Ellen’s kidnapping ticked away. The first twenty-four hours were crucial in any investigation and they were still playing catch-up, thanks to her parents’ failure to make the call. In the case of missing children, hope slipped away like sand in an egg timer the longer they were gone.