Thirty minutes later they were on the motorway, another thirty and they would be pulling into the yard of the police station. Ever the practical one, the clothes Cori had hurriedly grabbed for Isobel had turned out to be a sturdy pair of jeans and a rustic chunky-knit sweater, which, combined with her unstyled hair and scrubbed, make-up free face, gave her the wholesome air of a hill walker or young farmer’s wife, albeit one with a nasty cut on the head.
Cori, relaxed behind the wheel amid the rush hour traffic – that though it filled the lanes never quite clogged them – hardly looked like a woman running on a few hours’ sleep in a strange bed. As presentable as ever, Grey could not remember ever having seen her dishevelled.
For his own part, looking at his pallid, stubbled visage in the mirror of the pulled down sun-visor, he wondered which looked worse: the suit he had been wearing for twenty-four hours or the man inside it? He decided neither answer was any better than the other, and so retired from asking the question.
‘I don’t know how you feel about coming back to town,’ he asked their passenger sat in the middle of the backseat. ‘We can put you up in a hotel or something if you’d prefer. I’m sure we could clear the expense.’
‘I can hardly keep hidden now can I,’ she answered. ‘I have to come home sometime.’
‘Well, it would be better to interview you back at the station. And it’s not like the whole town will know you’re back right away.’
‘And how long do you think it will be until they do?’ she offered, more with humour than resignation.
Isobel seemed clear eyed and bright minded already, had done so while still in bed. Any fears of Carman addling her mind with the stuff he was selling seemed unfounded, and Grey began to wonder if the state she was in last night had been nothing more than dog tiredness? Perhaps though, given the circumstances of the last few days, he began to wonder if he might have felt more at ease had she seemed a little more shaken by things, a little less able to manage?
‘So,’ she continued, ‘you haven’t told me why it’s you doing this, and not Nottingham? I guess the local police called you, and asked you to take me back?’
‘Well, it’s a funny business,’ he almost laughed, but not quite. ‘I’m not at all sure how to explain it to you. The thing is, we are looking for an entirely different person, a man who’s gone missing this week; and by a fluke we turned you up. It’s what you might call a happy accident.’
‘So who is he,’ she asked, ‘the man who’s gone missing?’
‘His name is Thomas Long. He works at the Aubrey plant, like your father.’
‘Wow,’ she said with wide-eyed innocence. ‘And is he okay?’
‘We’ve no idea yet.’
‘That’s a shame.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘So,’ she continued, ‘what was the fluke?’
Grey wasn’t sure that he had wanted to begin probing before they had got back to town; however he now saw no way out of it. He would tread as gently as he knew how,
‘Well, it is a funny thing, as I say. But the place where Thomas Long was last seen was outside a hotel. It’s quite near to town, you might remember it. Anyway, it is the most tenuous of links I grant you, but subsequent investigations reveal a phone call had been made earlier in the day, from one of the hotel rooms to your mobile.’
‘So you had our number?’ asked Isobel, suddenly on full alert.
‘Yes we did,’ answered Cori, choosing to offer no further information.
‘We will have to ask you about it later,’ continued Grey, ‘once we have a proper interview arranged.’
‘No, I’m quite happy to talk now.’
Grey, less so, advised, ‘Bear in mind, anything you say now you may have to repeat later for the tape.’
‘When was this call?’
‘It would have been around ten a.m.,’ he offered reluctantly, he favouring the controlled environment of an interview room for such an exchange.
‘Well, if you know Stephen’s business, then you must know he was getting odd calls all day and all night.’
‘Well, that’s the thing,’ Grey couldn’t help but retort, years of interviews having trained him in spotting the psychological moment in a conversation, ‘according to our colleagues, Stephen did most of his business on pay-as-you-go’s, a new one each week.’
‘Who was it calling?’ asked Isobel, in a manner Cori, eyes on the road, genuinely couldn’t pinpoint.
‘We don’t know,’ answered Grey.
‘Then what an odd question to ask me, Inspector!’ declared the woman.
Knowing an outright query at this point could have brought an outright lie in response, Grey refrained from asking who had called and if had been she who answered. Further ruminations though were cut short, as the backseat passenger said,
‘I’m sorry Inspector, I really have no idea who called or how they had our number. Is that a sign for a services coming up? Could we? I’m bursting.’
A minute later the car was pulling up on the bustling carpark of the last services before those at the Southney turnoff, Cori picking a spot very near the shop and facilities, which, unlike those of the services nearer home, were about all that this smaller complex consisted of. The detectives let their charge bound up and out, before talking very quickly.
‘As good a spot as any,’ supposed Grey, scanning the surrounds. ‘No town or turnoffs, there's nowhere for her to run to from here. But still...’
‘A pretty girl like her wouldn’t find it hard to hitch a lift,’ added Cori pessimistically.
‘True,’ concurred Grey. ‘There’ll be a dozen lonely truck drivers here this minute just dreaming of a pick-up like her. They’d have her away in two seconds’
‘She hadn’t guessed the phone was being monitored,’ noted Cori.
‘No, not for all her canniness. Have you heard the way she’s bluffing, claiming not to know who was calling?’
‘I saw her eyes flicker for a moment, in the driver’s mirror, when you were asking her...’
‘And in those seconds she judged for certain how much we knew. You know, when I was her age,’ he mused, ‘or younger maybe, before I joined the force; well, you might laugh at this, but I would never have even thought of lying to a policeman. It would have just seemed wrong, like...’ he struggled for a simile, ‘like when you see footballers not singing the national anthem.’
‘You do make me laugh.’ Cori chuckled, ‘But I should go in now. I don’t want to leave her too much longer.’
Grey, left alone for maybe only three or four minutes, nevertheless made some startling assumptions. His mind worked best on what he termed his ‘cardinal points’: facts and theories that though perhaps unprovable, could not to his mind be reasonably disputed. And there seemed several here: firstly, that Isobel felt no love for Stephen Carman, indeed was more concerned for her own skin than wishing to remain to find her missing boyfriend or offer him any support if arrested.
Whatever manner of relationship – and of three years’ standing no less – Isobel had had with Carman; whether she had ever, even at the start perhaps, imagined she had loved him; and taking into account whatever material benefits being with him bought her – the nice flat, the sense of power that comes of being with a man who strides about controlling other people’s lives... Whatever all that meant to her, and whatever she was prepared to put up with from him when his combustible mixture bubbled over; the moment that they hit a rock in the road, the second that her accurate and calculating mind decided the game was all up, she was now leaving him and all of it behind without a backward glance.
No, not for all the luxury of their lifestyle and the power such a couple presumably held in their world, did she seem to suffer any sentiment for the life she was leaving this morning with no more than a holdall full of clothes. And this seemed to bode a deeper truth: that the story of her life, revised in light of new evidence, seemed to be – that she had ran away from her parents and friends, and couldn’t give a damn; that
(as they now knew) she had seen the town she had left crying out for news of her, and couldn’t give a damn; that the man she ran away with had endangered lives as his stock in trade, and she sat down to watch her flatscreen television with him and couldn’t give a damn; and now she seemed to have cut him loose also... and seemed again not to be giving a damn.
‘Who is this woman we’re driving home?’ he wondered aloud. What startled him also was how easily this cynicism sat alongside both the simple joy of having found her, and the idealised image of Southney’s Snowdrop the townsfolk held and to which he had to some degree shared.
And there was a further feeling; not a cardinal point as such for it was moving, changing, unprovable in his mind. But it was clearly understood by Grey that Isobel reeked of guilt, though of what he was unable at present to say.
Cori jogged briskly between the slow-moving cars toward the main door of the services complex, slowing to assume as casual an air as possible as she entered. She had already seen Isobel come this way from the car. The door to the Ladies was not far from the shop, and so, past the shelves of confectioneries, she moved to the stand nearest the checkouts, from where she could glance at the covers of the lifestyle magazines while keeping one eye on the door beyond the foyer.
‘Keeping tabs on me?’ asked Isobel, appearing from nowhere.
‘Chocolate,’ answered Cori, holding up the bar she had yet to pay for. ‘Want anything?’
‘Cherry Coke. Thanks.’
Keeping up the little girl act, Cori considered, as she fetched the drink and paid for the items, thankfully able from the windows by the till to have a view of the carpark, and of that head of blonde hair bobbing back over to their vehicle.
The conversation once travel resumed was thin stuff, Grey zoning out and leaving Cori to offer Isobel an edited account of local developments, of how town had may have changed at all these three years, and the troubles expected at the plant.
‘I hope my dad’s job is safe,’ she replied, with an honesty Cori credited as genuine.
Chapter 23 – Southney