‘So? These are real people here. With real lives. Not everyone gets all their ideas from books.’
A strange smile playing on her lips as if she was filing away his words, mentally storing them for use in some future thesis. That just made him even angrier.
‘I think it’s best if you leave. Right now.’
She blinked. Twice. ‘Why?’
‘Because I don’t want you with me any more.’
‘But Ben said-’
‘I don’t give a stuff what Ben said. I’m running this investigation and I don’t want you here. OK?’ He gestured towards the door. ‘Go. Now.’
She gave him one last look of blazing defiance and opened her mouth as if to say something then closed it again, thinking better of it. She turned and left.
‘Sorry about that,’ Phil said, putting a mug of tea down before Paula. The mug was big and looked well used. On the side it had a cartoon of a smiling woman holding a baby in one hand and a vacuum cleaner in the other and underneath was written: World’s Best Mum.
‘Is that your mug?’ said Phil.
‘Adele’s,’ said Paula, sipping from it. ‘Got it on Nadine’s first birthday. Told Adele it was from the baby.’ She choked back a sob.
‘OK,’ said Phil, putting his mug down and leaning forwards, keeping Paula focused long enough to talk to him. ‘Questions.’
She took a deep breath. Waited for him to start.
‘Tell me about Adele.’
‘Like what?’
‘What she’s like… how she seemed before she went missing, that kind of thing.’
Another deep breath. ‘She was… before she disappeared she was lovely. Best I’d seen her in years.’
Phil frowned. ‘Why? What happened before that?’
‘Well, she was… wild. You know what kids are like. Her dad ran off, left us. Just me, Adele and her brother.’
Phil glanced at the photos on the wall of the young soldier. ‘That’s him? Adele’s brother?’
Paula nodded, head down. ‘Was.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘He died. Just over a year ago. Helmand Province. Afghanistan.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Paula kept her head down, nodded. ‘Roadside bomb. IED, they call them now.’ She sighed. ‘Got my letter from the Prime Minister. That was somethin’.’
Her tone of voice told him it wasn’t.
‘What was his name?’
‘Wayne.’ Still looking into her lap.
‘How did Adele take it?’
Paula looked up, thought for a while before answering. ‘It hit her. Hard. She’d been runnin’ round before then, ever since her dad…’ She sighed. ‘… her dad left, she’d be off with boys, sometimes for days on end. Then she got pregnant and that was like a wake-up call, you know? Like an, an intervention.’
Too much Jeremy Kyle, thought Phil. He nodded.
‘She settled down. Got a job.’ Paula looked directly at Phil. ‘I know what you think. What DS Farrell said.’
‘What?’
‘That Adele was a prostitute. A whore. Well, she wasn’t. Maybe she liked her boyfriends to give her something, presents, and that, but she wasn’t a whore. Definitely not.’
Phil nodded. ‘She was a barmaid, wasn’t she?’
Paula nodded.
‘Whereabouts?’
‘The Freemason’s Arms, Military Road.’
‘I know it.’
Paula gave a small smile. ‘I bet you do. It’s not as bad as people think, though. And, anyway, that was just temporary for Adele. She was savin’ up, goin’ back to college. Get some A levels first. Then…’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Somethin’.’
‘And there was nothing to show that she was going to run away again?’
Paula leaned forward. ‘Nothin’. At all. Nothin’.’
Phil talked with her a while longer, asking more questions. Adele had left the Freemason’s Arms after a shift to walk the couple of streets to her home. She never arrived. Between Paula reporting the disappearance and DS Farrell’s investigation starting, any possible forensic evidence had been lost.
Adele had no boyfriend. Studying too hard for that, Paula said.
Phil had a look in her room but felt like there was nothing he could find there. Farrell had already done it and it was clear Paula had tidied things away.
He came back downstairs, ready to go. He looked at the photos on the wall. There was one of Paula’s two children together. Taken at a barbecue, the young man wearing an apron and holding up a speared sausage. The young woman at the side of him holding a bottle of some violently coloured alcopop, both smiling for the camera, laughing as if they would stay that way forever. Life would always be as good as that moment.
‘That’s her,’ said Paula. ‘With Wayne. Just before he went back to Afghanistan. Just before…’ She sighed.
Phil kept looking at them. Adele had long dark hair. Just like Julie Miller. Just like Suzanne Perry. Just like the unrecognisable corpse on the lightship.
‘It’s always us that gets hit worse, isn’t it?’ said Paula. ‘The poor people. The ones who live round here. Never them in the posh houses, is it?’
Phil thought of the body he had found the previous morning, the trip to Julie Miller’s parents house.
‘Not always,’ he said. ‘Sometimes grief is grief, whatever or whoever.’
He left.
46
Mickey Philips was bored. There were people who probably enjoyed this kind of thing, scrolling through lists on screens, working their way down printouts and sheets of numbers and details. But he wasn’t one of them.
He would watch TV shows like
How he wished real life could be like that.
Instead he sat at his desk in the incident room at Southway, cup of something dark and brown masquerading as coffee at his side, pen in his mouth, while he scrolled down a screen and cross-referenced the numbers he saw there with the list in front of him.
The incident room was in the bar. He had found that a little strange at first, but Phil had assured him it was always the way with a major case. Tables had become desks, upholstered seats, stools and banquettes office chairs. The pool table had been covered over and was now home to a scale-model cityscape made out of files and papers. The whiteboard had been placed in front of the shuttered bar itself, photos of the two dead girls and two missing ones linked by spider-web felt-tip lines and circled names. A constant reminder, should anyone look up from their desks, of what they were engaged in, what was at stake.
Couldn’t have been more obvious, thought Mickey, if someone had put a ticking clock next to it.
