Late of the Payroll

  *****

  ‘I suppose you wouldn’t believe me if I told you we met for a coffee and a catch-up?’

  It was a glib line from Isobel, and one that jarred with the rest of the conversation. Thankfully though for Cori she didn’t persist in this vein,

  ‘I’d dug a hole for myself, Sergeant. I didn’t realise the fall-out that my leaving would cause, all the posters and searches and news campaigns; and I couldn’t bear to go back then and be this minor celebrity... and I didn’t want to go back, I’d longed to leave for years. I hoped it might die down, but it went on for months.’

  ‘And you had your new life.’

  ‘We did, and we were loving it, I did love it then, no matter how it ended up. And there was also Stephen’s business...’

  ‘His business?’

  ‘You can see how he rather relied on anonymity...’

  The Sergeant conceded the point. ‘But you were saying, how it ended up... Isobel, was it Stephen who gave you those cuts and bruises?’

  Cori had tip-toed into this area as gently as possible, yet Isobel looked suddenly embarrassed, saying without answering,

  ‘I’m not a crybaby when it comes to these things, Sergeant. I know men get angry, passionate. I’ve seen it... in others too, not just Stephen. I mean, you want a man with a bit of fire in him, don’t you?’ Isobel looked suddenly at Cori as if for the confirmation of this point that only a woman could give, ‘and sometimes they bubble over. It’s just the way it goes.’

  Cori though could only inwardly groan at the thought of the awful men this girl must have known.

  ‘So you decided to get away?’

  ‘Yes, I wanted to see a bit of the world. I’d gone from being stuck in Southney to stuck with Stephen. And I missed Anthony, so I called him and we talked about it. I couldn’t call my parents you see: I thought they’d want to come and get me and everyone would know where I was.

  ‘I was trapped there. Twenty-one with no passport or driver’s licence or money of my own; and no way of getting them. I couldn’t move for Stephen’s fear of giving ourselves away to the police or me flashing up on some missing persons register, or however it works. I don’t even have a credit card, I couldn’t even buy my own phone.

  ‘You won’t believe this, but I was so relieved when you came to take me away.’

  She could believe it, yet even as Isobel said this Cori thought she looked so sad.

  ‘So Anthony planned to help spirit you away?’

  ‘We discussed it.’

  ‘Was this in Britain, overseas?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘But where were you hoping for?

  ‘I thought somewhere like Spain, I’d always wanted to go there; and it had to be somewhere where Anthony could come and visit me.’

  ‘But, your passport?’

  ‘Well at first I didn’t know if I needed one. I mean, aren’t we a part of Europe now? All those Ukrainian people working on farms that you see on the news? They don’t have passports.’

  ‘If you see them on the news that means they’ve been caught.’

  ‘Well it didn’t matter anyway, we never got that far. He said I could stay at his place for a while while I figured out what was best.’

  Cori had never heard a more hapless scheme, and planned to drill a bit further down into what Anthony Aubrey hoped to achieve by bringing her back. But there was a knock on the door, and the message that the Inspector wanted to compare notes.

  Chapter 37 – Release