‘That’s your neck of the woods, isn’t it?’ Prav asked.
‘Yes it is. A bit closer to home than the beach.’
‘She could be visiting friends, sitting on their back patio, having a drink and ignoring her boss trying to call her. So, it’s just you and me unless it turns out to be something else. Didn’t you have another misper here a couple of months ago? Older chap?’
He nodded. ‘He was a retired headmaster. Never showed up.’ Him and the rest.
‘Ooh, maybe they’ve run off together.’
‘Four months apart? I don’t think so.’
‘No, but think about it. He leaves first and sets up their secret love nest while she hangs around just long enough to avoid drawing suspicion because their families don’t approve of the age gap. It’s your classic autumn-spring romance.’
David just looked at her.
‘Well, your sense of humour crawled under a rock and died, didn’t it?’
If the search area had been urban the task would have been almost impossible, but here there were only a few country lanes to check – assuming that Lauren hadn’t taken off cross-country and that her phone would be by the roadside – so it was a process of elimination, taking each road slowly and peering closely into verges overgrown with nettles, hogweed and Queen Anne’s Lace. Even so, it was a staggeringly small chance that either of them would actually see anything. As they moved onto the lane that ran past Farrow Farm, David found himself becoming increasingly anxious; he didn’t know whether he desperately wanted to find anything or not. With every glint of sunlight on a glass bottle or crisp packet his heart did a queasy double flip.
Then Prav gave a whoop. ‘There you are, you little sod!’ she crowed.
Two hundred metres up the lane they found a smartphone lying in the long grass, its screen dead. ‘Rubbish batteries on these things nowadays,’ she said, picking it up with an evidence bag. She went back to the car and called it in while he stood and scanned the fields of sugar beet on either side. They couldn’t be more than a hundred metres or so from the gate to Farrow Farm.
‘All right, POLSA’s on it,’ she told him when she was finished. ‘We do a house-to-house in the immediate neighbourhood and see if the locals have heard or seen anything. It’s still possible that she’s been found and is being looked after by a farmer.’
‘But you don’t think that’s likely, do you?’
‘This is where I stop making assumptions and start opening my eyes.’
* * *
‘Dave, good evening!’ said Everett, all smiles, when he opened the door, then saw the uniform and Sergeant Prav. ‘I don’t think I’ve seen you on duty before. This is exciting.’
David was sweating, and not just because it was still the tail end of a warm day. Everett had never called him Dave before. It was a warning. David knew exactly how this was going to look to the Farrow, turning up with a cop the day after they had threatened him, but he couldn’t refuse the Sarge, so he’d done the next best thing and suggested to Prav that he do the actual door-knocking.
‘Hi, Everett,’ he replied, hoping that he was projecting the right kind of neighbourly calm instead of the jittering nerves that were crawling under his skin. ‘We’re following up a call about a missing young woman by the name of Lauren Jeffries.’ He showed Everett a picture on his phone, taken from Lauren’s Instagram account. ‘Her phone was found just a little way down the road and we’re just asking around in case anybody has seen or heard anything.’
‘Her phone?’ Everett said in surprise. ‘Well, that’s a stroke of luck, isn’t it? No, I’m afraid we haven’t seen her. But if we do we’ll be sure to get in touch.’
‘Is there anybody else at home that we can ask, Mr Clifton?’ said Prav.
Everett’s eyes flicked to her and then settled firmly back on David again. ‘No, it’s just me here at the moment. How are the wife and kid, Dave?’
‘They’re good, thanks, good. Well, cheers for your help all the same.’ He felt an absurd urge to laugh; this was ridiculous, a pantomime played out for the benefit of an audience of one.
‘Pleasure. Looking forward to seeing you next weekend.’
‘Likewise.’ Like fuck, he wanted to say, but he stepped back as Everett closed the door, turned to Prav and shrugged.
‘Friend of yours?’ she asked.
‘We’re allotment neighbours.’
‘Huh. Small world.’ She shrugged, looking at the list of nearby residences on her own phone. ‘Right, who’s next?’
As they walked back to the car, he thought of the outbuildings around and behind the farm, and especially the abattoir shrine, wondering if the Farrow had Lauren locked up in one of them. It was still an if, he told himself. He had no definite, actual proof that they were kidnapping people. All the same, as Prav drove them away he opened his window fully to get some fresh air, sickened by his own cowardice and fear for his family.
* * *
Halfway through the house-to-house they got a call to assist other units dealing with a fight outside a pub in Lichfield, and from that point on the shift was absolutely rammed with no way for him to concoct any sort of reason for getting away early, and it was four o’clock on Sunday morning and dawn was just lightening the sky by the time he got home.
He didn’t even bother to shower – just went straight into the bedroom, switched the light on and shook Becky awake. ‘Honey. Honey, come on, wake up.’
She lurched out of sleep in the hardwired reflex of a parent with a sick child. ‘Is it Alice?’ she mumbled.
‘No. Yes. Sort of. Get yourself
