Lauren walks into the intimidating lobby at the Echo offices fifteen minutes later, feeling instantly out of place. This isn’t where she wants to be, no matter how much she’d tried to convince herself that it was. It had felt so glamorous whenever Kate talked about it, but in reality, it feels threatening and highly pressured. Seeing Kate waving from the corner eases her anxiety.
‘What’s going on?’ she says as confidently as she can as she approaches the group of four.
‘Lauren, this is DS Connolly and DC Stephens,’ says Kate. ‘They’re . . .’
‘Thank you . . .’ says Connolly, cutting Kate off. ‘They’re just preliminary inquiries at the moment, Mrs Carter, but we’d like to ask you some questions all the same.’
‘Of course,’ says Lauren, looking at Kate wide-eyed, trying to read her mind.
‘They’re investigating the murder of a woman in Harrogate in 1996,’ says Kate quickly, in answer to her silent questioning.
Lauren’s palms instantly go clammy.
‘The article implies that you uploaded your DNA onto a genealogy site,’ says Stephens. ‘Did you know that you might have another sibling?’
‘N-no,’ stutters Lauren. ‘I was just doing it for a bit of fun, really. I didn’t have any expectations other than perhaps building our family tree.’
‘So you were surprised when Miss Linley showed as a match?’
Not remotely, she wants to say, but instead says, ‘Absolutely.’
‘So it didn’t occur to you that your dad, Mr Harry Alexander, might have fathered another child?’
‘No,’ she says, feeling sick. ‘Not at all.’
The two detectives look at each other, making Lauren feel as if they know everything already and are just seeing how long it takes her to admit it.
‘Did your father have any violent tendencies?’ asks DS Connolly, bringing her back.
‘Now, hang on a minute,’ says Kate, answering on Lauren’s behalf. ‘Whatever’s going on here has got absolutely nothing to do with my father.’
Lauren looks, panic-stricken, between her sister and the officer.
‘I’m sure it hasn’t,’ says DS Connolly. ‘But, as we said, we need to eliminate everyone from our inquiries.’
‘No,’ says Lauren, truthfully. ‘Never.’
Stephens jots down Lauren’s answer in his notebook.
‘I’m sorry, can you tell me more about what this is all about?’ says Lauren, finally finding her voice. She will not allow assumptions to be made about her father. She’s made enough of those for everyone.
‘Back in 1996, a woman was attacked in her own home, sustained serious head injuries and died shortly after,’ says DS Connolly.
‘And you think Jess is her baby?’ Lauren asks, instinctively.
She knows, even before the two detectives look at each other with raised eyebrows, what she’s done.
‘Her baby?’ asks Stephens through narrowed eyes,
‘The woman’s baby,’ she says, feeling an oppressive heat bearing down on her. ‘Didn’t you say she had a baby?’ Kate’s eyes are burning into her.
‘Her baby was found abandoned shortly after the murder,’ says Stephens. ‘May I ask how you knew that the victim had a baby?’
Lauren’s eyes flicker from the detective to Kate and back again. ‘I . . . we . . . Jess and I went up there . . . earlier this week.’
‘What for?’ asks DS Connolly.
‘We just thought it might be a good idea to go back and knock on a few doors to see if anyone remembered my dad or Jess. We just wanted to see if we could find something that might lead us to Jess’s mum.’
‘And did you?’
‘We spoke with someone who told us about the Woods family,’ offers Lauren. ‘They said he’d killed his wife and disappeared.’
DS Connolly raises her eyebrows. ‘That was one theory, but there are other lines of inquiry we need to pursue.’
‘Why?’ says Lauren. ‘It seems everyone knew that he was violent – he had previous, and then he disappeared immediately after his wife’s murder. It couldn’t be any more clear-cut, could it?’
‘Mr Woods has since been cleared of any involvement,’ says Connolly, and Lauren feels like she’s suddenly teetering on a precipice. She tries to stop the internal swaying that’s threatening to knock her off balance.
‘Since when?’ she manages, her tongue feeling as if it’s too big for her mouth.
‘Since he returned to the UK two years after the murder and provided DNA and an alibi,’ says Connolly.
‘So why wait until now to trawl it all up again?’ asks Lauren.
‘Well, we’d always believed the abandoned baby to be that of Mr Woods, but if it comes to pass that it isn’t, then we’ve got a whole new motive on our hands.’
Lauren catches Kate closing her eyes.
‘So, what are you going to do now?’ asks Lauren.
‘We need to talk to Miss Linley to see if she would be willing to have her DNA analysed against that of Julia Woods,’ says Stephens. ‘And then we’ll confirm the match between Miss Linley and your father, just to be sure.’
‘And if it’s proven that Jess is their daughter?’ asks Matt.
‘Then it looks like we might not only have a new motive, but a new suspect,’ says Connolly.
47
Kate
‘Kate! Kate! Can you hear me?’ says Matt.
It sounds like he’s calling her from miles away, yet she can see the outline of his face, the colour of his eyes as he draws in close to her.
‘Do you need to go to the hospital?’ asks a woman’s voice. It doesn’t sound like Lauren’s, but Kate so desperately wants it to be. Otherwise it will mean that she didn’t dream what just happened.
‘Do you want me to call an ambulance?’ asks the same voice, and her heart falls into her stomach. It’s not Lauren. It’s DS Connolly, and any notion of her having imagined their conversation is thwarted.
‘N-no, I’m fine,’ Kate manages. ‘I’m honestly fine.’
‘Okay, maybe we can wrap this up now,’ says Matt, but Kate doesn’t know who he’s saying it to. She just looks around aimlessly at all the faces peering into the bubble that she’s created around herself.
‘Of course,’ says DS Connolly. ‘We’ll be on our way, just as long as Mrs Walker is okay.’
‘She’ll be fine,’ says
