‘Come on, Mase,’ I said. ‘You know that’s not true. You know we care. And you know none of us are giving up on Sadie either.’
‘So prove it,’ said Mason.
I glanced around at the others, and it was obvious no one knew what to say. Abi was looking like she was about to be sick. Fash was staring into space. And Luke … Luke looked about as lost as I’d ever seen him. I mean, I could only imagine what he was going through. What he was imagining the phone might mean.
And not just the phone.
The blood.
‘So what are you suggesting we should do?’ I asked Mason. ‘I mean, if we did stay out here.’
‘We search the area, obviously,’ he answered. ‘And we follow the stream deeper inland.’
‘Inland?’ said Fash. ‘But we just came from that way.’
‘We did,’ said Mason. ‘But was anyone actually looking? Or thinking about anything other than a drink of water since we left the clearing? You and Cora walked past that phone without even batting an eyelid.’
I felt myself flush. Fash looked the way he would have had his mum just caught him searching for porn on his computer.
‘And anyway,’ Mason went on, ‘there’s no point carrying on the way we were going. The police already came this far, before they decided to concentrate on the river.’ He shook his head. ‘I knew they were looking in the wrong place.’
‘And the water situation?’ I said, when no one else spoke. ‘If we stay out here – if we do as you say – what exactly are we supposed to drink?’ I looked at the sky, which at some point had turned from white to grey. ‘I mean, sun or no sun, it’s got to be thirty degrees. And the air’s so thick I can barely breathe.’
Abi nodded vigorously. ‘Right,’ she said, and she held her throat. ‘I’m not kidding, guys. I’m seriously about to die here.’
But I swear, it was as though Mason had an answer prepared for that, too. Or someone did, anyway. Because right then, right on cue, that’s when it started to rain.
DI Robin Fleet
This time Fleet didn’t bother with the satnav. The longer he spent in this place, the more the lie of the land came back to him. And not just that: other memories had come bubbling back, too. Memories of growing up here, of school – of a prevailing boredom, and the stupidity he and his friends had resorted to in order to keep themselves entertained. Drink, drugs, fucking, fighting. He looked back on the person he had been and shuddered at the thought of who he might have become. If he hadn’t left. If his sister hadn’t died.
Jeannie.
His beautiful, broken little sister. Who had probably saved Fleet’s life, just as he had failed to save hers.
He rolled the Insignia to a halt in the same spot he’d parked the last time he’d been out here, past the news vans and just short of the cluster of police vehicles. Nicky was in the passenger seat beside him, a finger to one ear and her mobile to the other, straining to hear the voice at the other end of the line. Fleet had been lost in his thoughts, hypnotised by the sound of the rain and the steady sweep of the wiper blades, and he tuned back in to what was being said.
‘Sorry, Liv, can you repeat that? I lost you when we left the main road. Liv? Are you –’
Nicky pulled the handset from her ear and frowned at the screen. Fleet could hear the beeps signalling a disconnect sounding faintly from the earpiece.
‘Who’s Liv?’ he said.
‘Olivia. PC Brightman. She’s the one who was following up on the phone the kids say they found in the woods. The one they decided must have been Sadie’s.’
‘And? Any joy?’
‘We’ve got confirmation that the emergency call Cora made at the start of all of this came from a number that was registered to a Pay As You Go. All the search party kids had contracts, so we know it almost certainly wasn’t one of theirs. And given that their phones all apparently went missing …’
‘But is there anything definitively linking it to Sadie?’
‘Well, for starters, the number was assigned three days before she disappeared.’
Fleet felt a tightening in his stomach, a sense of something clicking into place.
‘And we found the shop the Pay As You Go was bought from,’ Nicky went on. ‘The bad news is that the CCTV footage has already been deleted. Plus, the phone was paid for in cash, so there’s no record there either. But Liv has been down there talking to the employees. Apparently the kid who sold the phone near shat himself when Liv showed him Sadie’s picture. He’d seen her on the news, obviously, and he was terrified he was going to end up in handcuffs.’
‘For what exactly?’ said Fleet.
‘Obstruction of justice, I suppose. Failing to respond to our requests for information. Although Liv said the kid also stank of weed. Hence the memory loss, perhaps.’
‘So he ID’d her? He confirmed he sold the phone to Sadie?’
‘He gave a tentative ID. He said it might have been Sadie who bought the phone. That was as far as he was prepared to go. But if it was her, he said, she didn’t look anything like she does in the picture we’ve been circulating to the press.’
‘Meaning she disguised herself?’
‘Possibly,’ agreed Nicky. ‘Or possibly he was just trying to cover his back.’
Fleet considered for a moment. He reached to open the car door. ‘Either way,’ he said, ‘and given what Sadie’s friends have told us, we need
