‘I imagine by then I’ll need something stronger. A shot of cyanide should do it.’
Nicky smiled. ‘I’ll see what I can pillage from the evidence locker.’
They parted, and Fleet headed towards the room that had been cleared for him to use as his office. In reality it wasn’t much more than a storeroom. It had a window, but it was paned with security glass, and it was positioned too high for anyone less than eight feet tall to be able to see out. Otherwise the room was no more comfortable than any of the interview rooms he’d lately become so familiar with. Grey walls, grey furniture, grey floor. To think people these days were painting the walls in their homes a similar colour. Or so Nicky had told him. Interview-room chic, she’d called it. ‘We should go into business, boss,’ she’d said to him. ‘No one knows shades of grey like an ex-copper.’ Which was true enough, Fleet thought – the irony being that the law itself was so black and white. True or false. Innocent or guilty. Alive or dead.
Fleet knocked before he entered. He’d gone for polite, courteous, but the noise his knuckles generated sounded weak to his ear, almost cowardly. It was a nothing sound, when the news he bore warranted a warning siren.
When he stepped inside, the first thing that struck him was the hope. He could see it in their faces, in their eyes, in the way they rose the instant he walked in. It came off them in waves, like a force field driving him back.
Yet he stepped through it, and at the same time punctured it completely.
‘You’ve found her. Oh God. Oh God. Oh please God, no.’
Alison Saunders, Sadie’s mother, collapsed backwards into her chair. She was a thin woman, lost in the dripping shell of her raincoat, yet the chair scraped on the concrete floor from the momentum of her weight. The noise carried all the way up Fleet’s spine and into his teeth, which he realised were already clamped tight.
He raised a hand consolingly. ‘Sadie is still missing, Mrs Saunders. The search is ongoing.’ Gently, he closed the door behind him.
‘You’ve found something though, haven’t you?’ Ray Saunders, Sadie’s father, was a tall man bent short by his grief. He was using the chair back to hold himself upright. Seeing him up close for the first time in several days, Fleet found himself questioning why he didn’t feel more sympathy for the man. He and his wife had just lost their son. The daughter they cherished had been missing for a week. If Fleet had been standing in their shoes, he had his doubts he would be capable of standing at all.
So he respected them, there was no question about that, and he couldn’t begin to comprehend their heartbreak. Even so, he couldn’t warm to them. And although there was no direct evidence linking them to Sadie’s disappearance – nothing, at least, that Fleet and his team had been able to find – Fleet couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d played a role in their daughter’s disappearance somehow.
And of course there was the question of their responsibility for what had happened out there in the woods …
‘Take a seat, Mr Saunders. Please.’ Fleet gestured to the chair Sadie’s father was clutching. Like a blind man feeling his way, Ray Saunders lowered himself into it.
Fleet moved a third chair to the same side of the table, careful not to drag it on the floor. He sat down himself, so that the three of them formed an awkward triangle.
‘First of all, I’d like to express my deepest condolences,’ Fleet began. ‘I know you’ve spoken to Superintendent Burton, but I haven’t personally had a chance to –’
‘Please,’ said Sadie’s father. ‘Just tell us. What’s happened? Why did you ask us here?’
For a moment Fleet held Ray Saunders’s eyes. The only thing he saw in them was desperation.
‘We found Sadie’s jacket,’ Fleet said.
He noticed Alison Saunders’s hands tighten around the seat of her chair.
‘We’ll need you to confirm it was hers, naturally,’ Fleet went on. ‘But it matches the photograph you gave us. And I should warn you …’ He looked at the father. ‘There is blood.’
Sadie’s mother let out a keening sound, so inhuman that Fleet’s first instinct was to think something had found its way into the room. Sadie’s father slumped forwards, so the back of his head was level with his shoulders. Fleet thought of the man as being black-haired, but in just the past few days he seemed to have turned predominantly grey.
Fleet waited.
Ian Saunders said something he didn’t catch.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Saunders. Could you repeat that?’
Sadie’s father looked up. ‘How much blood?’ he said, his voice broken.
Fleet’s gaze flicked briefly to Sadie’s mother. She had a hand over her mouth and her eyes screwed shut. She sat so still, Fleet couldn’t even be certain she was breathing.
‘The jacket was found in the river,’ Fleet said, ‘a considerable way downstream from where we found her rucksack. Forensically speaking, therefore, it presents something of a challenge.’
Ray Saunders was looking at him as though he were speaking a foreign language. ‘How much blood?’ he repeated. It was like he was stuck. Like he couldn’t move on until his question was answered. Perhaps he was feigning his reaction, but if so, he was doing it well.
‘Some,’ Fleet said. ‘That’s all I can tell you. What I can’t say is how much would have been washed away by the water.’
‘And is it … it’s definitely Sadie’s?’
‘It is her type,’ Fleet answered. ‘We’re sure of that much, at least.’
Sadie’s mother made a movement with her right hand, as though she were describing something in the air. Her husband interpreted the gesture before Fleet could, and folded his wife’s hand between his. Alison Saunders was forced to stretch, and she teetered on the edge of her seat.
Sadie’s father cleared his throat. It
