Missing Believed Dead Read online

  Removing her spectacles and laying them on the desk, she massaged her eyelids with her fingers. It had been a long day. She shouldn’t have been in the office, because this was supposed to be her Sunday off. But there had been so much to sort out and tidy up before she left. Her brow wrinkled into a frown and she worried whether all the loose ends of her team’s many cases had been tied up. But everything had been allocated and her team was a good one, well able to work on their own. She shouldn’t have any need to worry.

  ‘Seeing you’re still here . . . ’ Jan came in and laid a folder on her desk. ‘I thought you might want a look at this before you go.’

  Kate replaced her spectacles, leaned back in her chair, and sighed. ‘What is it?’

  ‘The surveillance report on the Asian guys we were watching. We may have a lead on the location of their cannabis factory.’

  ‘Are we ready to raid it?’

  ‘Just about, but we want to make sure first because it’s a bungalow in a fairly classy residential area. Don’t want to make a mistake and upset the neighbours.’

  Kate combed her fingers through her short fair hair. ‘These guys always seem to pick the expensive private housing estates to set up their factories. Maybe they think we won’t catch them there.’

  Jan laughed. ‘They should be so lucky.’

  ‘Anything else on the go?’

  ‘Not really, I think you’ve tied most things up.’

  ‘Let me know when the raid is arranged,’ Kate said, closing the folder and handing it back to Jan. ‘I want to be in on it.’

  ‘Won’t you have your hands full in Dundee?’

  ‘Probably.’ Kate shrugged. ‘But I don’t want to miss this, we’ve been waiting long enough to catch them.’ She stood up, tucked her white shirt into the top of her trousers, buttoned her cardigan, and pulled her jacket on. ‘Well, I’d better make tracks if I want to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when I meet my Dundee team tomorrow.’

  ‘Time for a last cuppa before you go? The kettle’s on in the staff room.’

  ‘Sure, why not?’ Kate was finding it increasingly difficult to leave the Forfar office where she had been happy, and this would put her departure off by a few more minutes.

  Jan pushed the door of the staff room open and Kate was greeted by a resounding cheer.

  Detective Sergeant Adam Strachan stepped forward. ‘Just wanted you to know we wish you every success in this new undertaking, and let you know how much you’re appreciated here, ma’am.’

  ‘But it’s temporary and I’ll still have a foot in this camp.’ Kate blinked back tears. At least half the people here had been off duty and must have made an effort to come in. It was at times like this she felt appreciated.

  ‘Yes, but it’s a great career opportunity and we wanted you to know how we felt.’ He smiled at her. ‘We think you’re the best DI we’ve ever had.’

  ‘I hope they think the same in Dundee,’ Kate said, thinking she didn’t want to go and head up the Dundee team.

  * * * *

  ‘You again!’ Mad May Fraser stood in the doorway of her flat. She was a large woman with an ample chest and wild red hair. ‘You found the little bitch?’

  Bill Murphy shook his head. ‘Not yet Mrs Fraser, but I’ve brought Detective Constable Cartwright to have a look at your daughter’s computer. You said she was always on it.’

  Mad May glared at Jenny. ‘She’s nowt but a wee bit lass,’ she said. ‘What’s she know about computers?’

  ‘More than I do, that’s why I’ve brought her.’

  Mad May grunted and folded her arms.

  The wind, gusting down the walkways in front of the flats, was vicious three floors up. Bill reckoned it must be blowing straight in from the River Tay.

  ‘You going to let us in,’ Bill said. ‘It’s freezing out here.’

  May grunted again and reluctantly stood aside.

  Bill strode up the hallway into the living room. The dog on the sofa growled, showing yellow teeth.

  ‘Don’t mind him,’ May said. ‘He wouldn’t harm a fly.’

  The teeth, the growl and the red flecked eyes didn’t seem to go with that statement, and Bill gave the dog a wide berth.

  The small man, lounging in one of the armchairs and watching television on a massive flat screen telly, lowered his beer can to the floor. ‘You found her then?’

  Bill shook his head. ‘Afraid not, Mr Fraser.’

  ‘Fuck’n useless,’ the man snorted, ‘couldnae find yer ain arse if ye were lookin for it.’

  He reached for his beer can and turned back to watching the television.

  ‘Where do you have the computer, Mrs Fraser?’ Jenny Cartwright was staying safely behind Bill. He didn’t blame her, she probably didn’t like the look of the dog either.

  ‘Oh, you’ve got a tongue, have you? Well, I hope you’re more civil than him.’ May jerked her head in Bill’s direction. ‘He’s a waste of space. A proper detective would have found my lassie by now. But not him. All he can say is that she’s gone out on the randan, and her only fourteen. What the fuck would he know about it?’

  ‘The computer?’ Jenny reminded her.

  ‘Here lass, in the bedroom.’

  Bill followed Jenny into a bedroom even more dishevelled than the living room. The bed looked as if it had never been made, clothes everywhere, and Bill could swear his shoes were sticking to the floor.

  Jenny crossed the room to the computer desk which was the only comparatively tidy thing in the room. She switched it on, waited for it to power up and then clicked on the internet icon. A page unavailable came up. She frowned. Turning to Mrs Fraser, she said, ‘You did say Megan was always on the internet, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ May folded her arms across her chest.

  ‘There is no access to the internet on this computer. How does she connect?’

  ‘Oh, that. She has one of those wee dongle things she sticks into it.’

  Jenny sighed and looked at Bill. ‘I think we’ll have to take it in. I need to get access to the sites she’s been using.’

  ‘You’re no taking that thing out of here.’ Mad May’s eyes flared and she stood with arms folded in the doorway.

  ‘I’m afraid we have to,’ Bill said in the most soothing voice he could manage. ‘We’ll give you a receipt for it and make sure you get it back.’

  ‘So you say. I know you polis, the biggest set of thieves around.’

  Jenny crossed the room and laid her hand on May’s arm. ‘I’ll take good care of it, and it would help us to find Megan. You do want her found, don’t you?’

  ‘Damned sure I do.’

  ‘It’ll only be for a few days.’

  ‘Aye. OK. But just a few days, mind. And make sure you find my Megan.’

  ‘I’ll carry the tower,’ Bill said, ‘you take the monitor.’

  ‘I won’t need the monitor, just the processing unit, and I’m used to humping them around.’

  Bill looked at her. Jenny was small and thin with a cap of short brown hair and oversized glasses that gave her an owlish look. She looked more like a schoolgirl than a police officer.

  ‘And what kind of a man would I be if I let you carry it?’

  Bill hoisted the tower into his arms. ‘Lead on Cartwright. The sooner we get this back to headquarters the sooner we’ll have some idea what has happened to Megan.’

  Chapter Four

  Monday, 12 March

  Diane Carnegie closed her eyes. She wanted to go back to sleep and return to the dream world where Jade was still part of the family. Without a return to sleep, Jade would slip back into the abyss, with only fragments of the dream left to torture her. But no matter how hard she pressed her eyelids shut, sleep wouldn’t come.

  Diane couldn’t remember a time when she’d slept a whole night. Always she woke in the early hours of the morning. And always she felt compelled to get up and do something. That was the only way to get relief from the pain that never left her. The pain that had
been with her since Jade walked out the door and never returned.

  She opened her eyes again, letting them grow accustomed to the darkness of her bedroom. When the vague outline of shapes appeared, she slipped out of bed and moved her feet over the carpet until she located her shoes. Her skirt and sweater were draped over the back of a chair and she pulled them on in the dark, on top of her nightgown.

  The house was silent, and she was careful to make no noise when she opened the door and slipped out into the corridor at the top of the stairs. Emma and Ryan would be sound asleep, but she crept silently past their bedroom doors, just in case. She paused for a moment outside Emma’s door, her remaining daughter, and mourned for the missing one, Jade.

  Sighing, and with wet cheeks, she crept down the stairs and into the kitchen where she filled a bucket with scalding water and headed to the front door. She would give the doorstep a good scrub before Emma and Ryan awoke.

  Water slopped from the bucket when Diane set it down to pick up the green envelope from the hall carpet. She turned it over and saw it bore no stamp. It was probably a birthday card. Who could have gone out of their way to hand deliver it? Shrugging, she tore it open, wincing when the paper caught the edge of a hack on her reddened fingers.

  She pulled the card from the envelope and stared at the picture of red roses on the front. Happy Birthday to a Special Mother, it said. But she already had cards from Ryan and Emma. Her breath caught in the back of her throat. It couldn’t be. Not after all this time. She was afraid to open it and read the signature. But she had to. She had to know.

  Diane opened the card with shaking fingers, and read the inscription. A low moan gathered in her throat. The signature she wanted to see was there. She stopped breathing, her chest tightened and a wave of dizziness engulfed her.

  She hugged the card to her chest, gasping until her breath returned. Maybe she was imagining it. Maybe she was hallucinating. But they had changed her pills when she started seeing things. So it couldn’t be that.

  She opened the card again, to read the words written inside through eyes blurred with tears. She dashed them away with the back of her hand and looked at the name again to make sure she was not imagining it. But there it was in a clear upright script – Jade.

  She took a deep breath that was half sob. She had always known Jade would come back, that she was not gone forever. When everyone else said she shouldn’t hope, she knew what they were thinking. They were thinking Jade was dead. But Diane had never believed that, and now she had proof. Jade was alive, and she had sent her mum a birthday card.

  It had been over five years since her daughter disappeared. Diane remembered it as if it were yesterday.

  On that nightmarish day in February Diane came home late, delayed at the university by one of her students. The girl was struggling to locate a problem in the source code of the computer programme she needed to complete in order to pass the module, and Diane, always reluctant to fail someone with promise, stayed behind to help her.

  Jade came rushing down the stairs as Diane dumped her briefcase on the hall table.

  ‘What’s the hurry?’ Diane said, blocking the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘Aw, Mum, let me past. I’m meeting Julie, and I’m late.’

  ‘Homework done?’

  ‘Course it is.’ Jade jiggled her feet. ‘C’mon, Mum, let me past, I’m late.’

  ‘Home by nine, mind. You’ve school tomorrow.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah!’ Jade waved a hand and ran down the front path.

  And that was the last time Diane ever saw her daughter.

  * * * *

  Emma wasn’t sure what had wakened her. She turned her head and peered at the illuminated face of her alarm clock – ten-past-five – too early to get up. She closed her eyes, but it was no use, something had wakened her and she had to find out what it was.

  She tried not to look at the empty bed next to her own. It was too much of a reminder of her twin sister, but Mum wouldn’t hear of her getting rid of it. ‘Jade will need it when she comes back,’ she always said, and no matter how much Emma and Ryan tried to convince her Jade was not going to come back, Mum just blanked them and refused to believe. It was as if she were living in a time warp and it was yesterday Jade had left, not five years ago.

  The cold wind hit her when she opened the bedroom door. The hall light was on and the front door wide open. Mum was probably outside scrubbing the step. Emma sighed and passed a worried hand through her fair hair, her mum’s fetish for scrubbing and cleaning seemed to have grown worse over the past few weeks.

  She grabbed her dressing gown and shrugged it on, although she was tempted to return to her room and slide under the duvet. But the vision of her mum, down on her knees, scrubbing the step, seared into her mind. Her mum would catch her death out in that wind. She had to do something. Persuade her to stop scrubbing? Hopeless! But maybe she could persuade her the kitchen floor was more in need than the front doorstep.

  The stair carpet shifted under her bare feet and the stair-rod on the step below loosened and bounced to the bottom, clanging against the bucket before coming to rest. Emma stopped and grasped the banister. Mum couldn’t be scrubbing the step if her bucket of water was sitting in the hall. Where was she?

  ‘Please! Don’t let her have done something stupid.’ Emma’s throat tightened with fear.

  Mum had started acting even more strangely than usual after reading a news item, a few weeks ago, in the Dundee Courier about a missing schoolgirl from the Greenfield estate. Her obsessions had intensified, and her anxiety had gone through the roof.

  She hadn’t needed to remind Emma and Ryan the girl was not much older than Jade when she disappeared, but it was obvious to them what was in her thoughts.

  Emma had breathed a sigh of relief when the girl was found a few days later at a friend’s house. But that relief had been short-lived because it intensified her mother’s belief that Jade would be found.

  She was barely conscious of leaping down the last few steps, nor running out the front door until the coldness of the stone chilled her feet.

  The street was dark, but there, under a streetlight, was her mum. A slight figure with rumpled hair, wearing a skirt, and sweater with the sleeves rolled up. Emma breathed a deep sigh of relief and ran down the path, through the gate and over to her. Grasping her arm, she said, ‘What are you doing out here, Mum?’

  ‘Jade?’

  ‘No, Mum, it’s Emma, not Jade. Jade’s gone, remember?’

  A confused look passed over Diane’s face. ‘Yes, yes, of course I know it’s you, Emma.’ She held something out to her daughter. ‘But Jade’s sent me a birthday card.’

  Emma caught her breath. ‘That’s not possible. You’re imagining things again.’

  ‘I am not!’ Diane’s voice was taut with anger. ‘Have a look at it. You’ll see.’

  Emma took the card, opening it at an angle so the streetlight shone on it. ‘It’s someone having a sick joke,’ she said. ‘Let me see the envelope.’

  Diane handed it over.

  ‘There’s something inside.’ Emma shook the envelope, a small object fell into her hand. She stared at it. ‘It’s . . . it’s a green bead. A jade bead.’ Her heart thumped. ‘But it can’t be.’

  ‘Let me see.’ Diane snatched it from her hand. ‘It’s Jade’s. It’s part of the necklace she got on her eleventh birthday. D’you remember? I gave her a jade one and you a coral one.’

  ‘Of course, I remember.’ After Jade disappeared Emma could not bring herself to wear her coral necklace. It reminded her too much of her sister, and now it had been years since she’d last seen it. ‘It doesn’t mean anything though. Anyone could have got hold of it.’

  ‘But don’t you see? She always wore it. She was wearing it when she left.’ Diane never used the word ‘disappeared’.

  Emma’s heart stopped thumping. Jade was gone and there was only one person who could have her necklace.

  ‘Mum, it has to be a sick joke. I
t can’t be Jade. I’d know if it was.’

  Diane stared at her blankly, and didn’t answer.

  ‘But Mum, don’t you remember how we used to feel each other’s pain even when we were apart. When she broke her arm I couldn’t use mine either, and nothing was wrong with it. When she fell and bruised her knee, I felt the pain. When she was in trouble I always knew it. We were always two halves of the same coin.’ Emma paused, thinking of the times they had changed places. It was fun when they fooled their teachers.

  Diane nodded.

  ‘Well, I haven’t felt anything for five years.’ Emma was careful not to mention the intense sensation of suffocation she had felt the day after her twin sister’s disappearance. ‘There’s nothing there. It’s just a big void. Believe me, Mum, I’ve told you so many times, I would know if she were still alive. Now let’s go back in the house and get you warm.’

  * * * *

  Diane sensed Emma did not believe her, but that wasn’t important. As long as she, Diane, believed Jade had sent the card that was all that mattered. Tightening her fingers on the jade bead and pressing the card to her breast, she followed her daughter into the house.

  ‘You’re shivering,’ Emma said. ‘You shouldn’t have gone outside without a coat, and I’ll bet you haven’t eaten anything yet.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘No you’re not. I’ll make porridge. Oatmeal’s great for building up warmth.’

  Diane opened her mouth to protest and closed it again. Emma meant well, and she knew she had this awful habit of putting her daughter down. Emma never said anything but Diane could always tell by her expression she was hurt.

  Emma took a clean pot from the cupboard and scoured it, then washed all the utensils before she started to make the porridge. ‘See, I know how you like things spotless,’ she said, before ladling some into a plate for her mother.

  ‘You were always the thoughtful one.’ Diane forced herself to pick up the spoon and eat.

  Three hours later, the house had been cleaned, scrubbed and disinfected. Emma had left for university, and Ryan was slopping about in the bathroom.