Peggy looked as though she wanted to close her door and leave, but she couldn’t do it with Cooper blocking the way in the little porch. He stepped back over the threshold into his own flat.
She smiled again. ‘See you around, I guess, Ben/
‘You must come in and have a coffee some time.’
‘Love to. Just let me know. Catch you later.’
Cooper watched her head off down the street towards the market square, walking with a brisk confidence. She might be a
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stranger here, but she would be all right in Edendale. There was no doubt about that.
And he felt sure of one other thing. If she did lake up his invitation to come in for a coffee one day, Peggy Check wouldn’t sit in his flat and tell him lies all evening.
Ben Cooper found Diane Fry standing in front of his desk when he arrived at West Street. She had an armful of files and something that looked like a photo album. She seemed a bit subdued, but that wasn’t what Cooper noticed most when he looked up at her. He found himself automatically looking for the similarities to her sister. The slim shoulders and straight fair hair were recognizable. But there was something else, too - something about the look in the eyes that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
Fry brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. Another familiar gesture.
‘Is there something wrong?’ she said. ‘What are you staring at me for?’
‘Oh … nothing.’
‘If you say so. Ben, I want you to take a look at this. Tell me what you think.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s Sarah Renshaw’s cuttings album. She let me borrow it because she’s just started a new one.’
Mrs Renshaw had collected a thick album of cuttings from newspapers. They were mostly reports of missing children who had been reunited with their families, some of them after several years. There were also stories about young people living rough on the streets of various cities, or in squats, or even in the temporary camps of New Age travellers and environmental protesters.
There were scores of them, and Cooper was astonished at the range of newspapers represented. All of the nationals were there, both tabloid and broadsheet. There were Scottish papers, and local weeklies from Yorkshire and the Midlands, in fact from all over Britain. Some of the stories, he realized, were print-outs of pages from the websites of foreign newspapers, mostly American. Cooper turned to one from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, featuring a girl injured in a car accident on Highway 54 and left unconscious in hospital. The police in a place called Oneida were trying to identify the victim, and were appealing for help from the public. The phone number had been circled in blue ink. He guessed the Oneida
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cops would have had a call from Sarah Renshaw. He hoped they had dealt with her sympathetically.
Cooper checked the dates of the cuttings. The earlier ones began almost immediately after Emma’s disappearance, but were mainly local stories, and they were weeks apart. But as the album filled up, the dates got closer together, their sources more far-flung and international, until the most recent pages were packed with stories culled from the internet day after day.
It gave Cooper a dizzying glimpse of the world as seen by Sarah Renshaw. In this world, it was as if Emma had started off as just a single missing person in North Derbyshire two years ago, but had steadily multiplied herself over the months. In her various incarnations, she had spread out and scattered all over the globe, invading the world like an army of clones, or a virus proliferating at an unmanageable rate.
These multiple Emmas had ended up in all kinds of places, some of them lost and anonymous, some hungry or injured, alone or finally reunited. And Sarah Renshaw had spent hours at the computer tracking them down. Perhaps she had become increasingly desperate in her efforts as she realized the numbers involved, and discovered the speed of the virus that she was trying to keep up with. There were more young people going missing every day than anyone could imagine.
Cooper closed the album with a sigh. They were far from being clones, but the young women featured in these cuttings did have a few things in common, and one big difference from Emma Renshaw. Each of them was someone’s daughter, of course. Many of them would have parents worrying about them at home.
But most of all, every one of them was still alive.
‘It’s sad,’ said Cooper.
Fry nodded. ‘The most worrying thing is the guilt factor.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Sarah Renshaw keeps talking about this “belief” business. I think if Emma turns up dead, she’s going to interpret that to mean she didn’t believe hard enough. She’ll think Emma is dead because she failed her.’
That isn’t rational at all.’
There’s nothing rational about guilt. There’s nothing rational about the Renshaws at the moment.’
That bad, eh? I’ve heard a lot about them, but never actually met them.’
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‘It would be interesting to see what you think of them, Ben.’
‘Yes.’ Cooper wondered if Fry had actually told the Renshaws that anyone who had been missing for years was unlikely to turn up again some day. He didn’t feel like supporting her in that opinion just now. He knew only too well that it could really happen.
Fry straightened her shoulders and her manner changed.
‘And how are you getting on with the Oxleys, Ben?’ she said. ‘Are you one of the family yet?’
‘Oh, yeah. An in-law that nobody speaks to.’
‘Well, you’ll have to keep trying/ said Fry. ‘Use a different approach or something.’
‘A different approach. Right/
DCI Kessen didn’t have to wait as long for the room to
