Then She Vanishes(30)



‘You don’t think she ran away?’ It was always her fear that the police wouldn’t take Flora’s case seriously, believing she was just a teenage runaway, even after the blouse was found.

‘You know I don’t,’ he says shortly. ‘And I haven’t changed my mind about that. We took the case very seriously. You have my word on it.’

‘How can somebody just vanish?’ She can hear the desperation in her voice. It was the same question she’d asked herself every day for eighteen years.

‘You’d be surprised by how many people go missing in the UK each year.’

She shakes her head. ‘Sometimes I don’t think I can bear it …’ Then she, too, sits up straighter, her jaw jutting out. She can’t fall apart now. She’s been strong all these years. And she has to remain so, for Heather. For Ethan.

He assesses her with his calm expression. ‘I’m sorry, Margot.’ His pale eyes are sad, his mouth set.

She assesses him with a cold, hard stare. ‘I’m assuming there’s no development with Flora and that you’re here about Heather.’

He has the good grace to look regretful. ‘I know you’ve been asked this before, when you were first interviewed after Heather was taken into hospital, but have you thought more about the victims, Deirdre and Clive Wilson? Are you sure you don’t know them?’

‘No. I’ve never heard of them. Neither has Adam – Heather’s husband. We can’t think of any link between Heather and those people.’

‘Have they ever stayed at the caravan park?’

‘Not that I know of, but I haven’t checked the register. And I don’t recognize them from the photos that have been in the paper. We’ve not been very busy, really, since about October. It’s too cold for camping.’

He reaches inside his coat and takes out a little notepad. He flicks through it and Margot’s unease intensifies. Eventually he says, ‘Your husband, Keith Powell.’

‘Yes.’

He consults his notes. ‘He was killed on the twenty-first of April 1990 on the farm you used to own in Kent. Is that correct?’

Margot suddenly understands why Ruthgow has come all this way. ‘That’s right.’ Her mouth is so dry she has to get up to pour herself a glass of water. They’d once bonded over the death of their spouses. He hadn’t known then, of course, exactly how Keith had died. It was a secret she’d hoped she would take to the grave.

Ruthgow waits until she’s returned to her seat before continuing. ‘He was killed with a shotgun. Similar model used by Heather to shoot Deirdre and Clive Wilson.’

Margot blinks back tears. ‘It was an unfortunate accident, that’s all. No charges were brought.’

Ruthgow doesn’t say anything, he just surveys her with those calm, unreadable eyes, and she realizes it’s not just his appearance that has changed in the intervening years: back then he was more emotional, warmer. She’d felt she could tell him anything after Flora had gone missing. He was on her side, more than any other officer working on the case at the time. She’d sensed some of them saw Flora Powell as a typical teenage girl who’d lied and kept secrets from her family, including a boyfriend. Not Gary Ruthgow.

And now here he is with his thinly veiled accusations.

‘I’m sorry, Margot, I really am, but this doesn’t look good. A dead father, a missing sister. And now two more dead.’

Margot stands up, pushing her chair back. She knows exactly what he’s insinuating. Hasn’t she thought the same thing herself in her darker moments? ‘I want you to leave. Please, just go!’

Ruthgow stands up, too, looking pained. ‘I don’t want to upset you. We have to look into every possibility. You know Flora’s case isn’t closed. It’s cold, that’s all. Margot, please …’ He holds out a hand and in his expression she sees the man he used to be, the man she cried and got drunk with, opened up to – about Keith and how much she missed him even though he hadn’t always been the perfect husband or father. And, in turn, he’d confided in her about coping with his wife’s sudden death in a car crash. But now she was on the other side: no longer the innocent victim whose precious daughter had been snatched away so cruelly. Now she was the mother of a killer.

‘She was just a kid,’ she says hotly, as she walks him to the front door. But Ruthgow leaves without saying anything further.

Heather was only ten years old when Keith died. She was only ten years old when she pulled the trigger on the gun that killed her father.





17




Margot


Margot watches from the living-room window as Ruthgow gets into his unmarked police car and drives away. How did he find out about Keith’s accident? When Flora went missing it never came out – the police force in Kent had handled it, and back then Margot hadn’t thought of the implications. Heather had been fourteen when Flora had disappeared. And it had never once occurred to her that Heather was responsible. Why would it? But now … No. She refuses to believe it. Heather loved Flora more than anyone in the world: she would never have hurt her. If anything, what had happened to Keith, then to Flora, has obviously destabilized Heather to such an extent that she’d flipped. Maybe Deirdre and Clive Wilson were targeted completely at random. Heather probably didn’t even know what she was doing. Surely it was temporary insanity.

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