But if Sadie had run, why hadn’t she taken anything with her? Clothes, photographs, her favorite soft toy? And why hadn’t she been picked up on CCTV anywhere? Why had nobody come forward with any credible information, despite a nationwide appeal? People didn’t just disappear, not in this day and age, and not when the net that had been cast to find them extended so far and so wide—not unless they were already dead.
Suicide, as such, was a plausible explanation as well. There’d been no note, no message, but a couple of the investigators on Fleet’s team had argued strongly that Sadie had thrown herself in the river. But that, to Fleet, did seem out of character. Perhaps teenage suicides often did, but Fleet still didn’t buy it. Didn’t? Or couldn’t? Had he simply refused to face the possibility? The reality was he’d never had to answer that, because on the second day after Sadie had been reported missing, they’d discovered her rucksack.
It had been found by a dog walker on the bank of the river, two miles from the estuary. And right away Fleet had felt certain that something wasn’t right. On the face of it, the discovery of Sadie’s bag—containing her wallet, her mobile, her house keys: everything she would have carried on her person—suggested she may have suffered an accident. Perhaps she’d slipped, fallen, and been caught by the current. The tides in the river here were vicious, something Fleet knew all too well.
Except he didn’t buy that explanation either.
The dog walker who’d found the bag had showed Fleet the exact spot in which it had been located, and to Fleet’s mind it had been too high on the bank, too close to the bridleway, for it to have genuinely been washed up by the water. Perhaps Sadie had dropped the bag before she’d suffered her accident, but if that were the case, why had the contents been soaking wet?
No, Fleet had decided, something about the rucksack was definitely off. Rather than a clue to Sadie’s disappearance, it felt more like a red herring, as though someone had tried to make it look like Sadie had suffered an accident. And the discovery of Sadie’s blood-soaked jacket that very morning all but confirmed his initial instincts had been right. Sadie wasn’t responsible for her disappearance. Someone else was. Someone who, between the hours of midnight and 11 a.m. on Friday 31 August, had managed to either entice Sadie from her house or force her from it, and then taken her to some secret location. There, they’d either killed Sadie or held her captive, and kept her hidden from a search team that at its peak had matched the size of a small army. Further, they’d left behind no evidence, beyond what had turned up in the river. It was no mean feat. In fact, it would have been nigh on impossible without some degree of cooperation from Sadie herself. Which is why, after everything, Fleet had come to the conclusion that Sadie had been murdered by someone she’d known.
* * *
Sitting in his car with his case notes on his lap, Fleet flicked through the transcripts of the interviews he’d conducted with Sadie’s friends.
Abigail Marshall.
Cora Briggs.
Fareed Hussein.
And finally, of course, Mason Payne.
You’ve always liked him for Sadie’s murder, the superintendent had said, and it was true Fleet had been leaning Mason’s way. He’d had his suspicions about the rest of them, too, mainly because he’d been convinced right from the start that Sadie’s friends were hiding something. Collectively or individually, he wasn’t sure. Was that enough, though? Had his focus on Sadie’s boyfriend in particular really been justified?
The only alibi Mason had been able to offer for the period during which Sadie had disappeared—which Fleet and his team had established as being somewhere between the point Sadie’s parents and her oldest brother had gone to bed, and the time the next morning the mother had checked Sadie’s room to find her daughter gone—was that he’d been at home, asleep. Then again, that was the only alibi almost everyone had been able to offer, from the neighbors, to Sadie’s teachers, to Sadie’s parents themselves.
On the other hand, the circumstantial evidence against Mason was more compelling than it was against anyone. The local sex offenders register had been checked and rechecked. Everyone had been checked and rechecked, Sadie’s parents most thoroughly of all. In the end, it was Mason who’d emerged as having both the means to kill Sadie and the most credible motive. Fleet didn’t pay much attention to rumors, not when rumors were all they were. Take the instance of Sadie’s parents, for example, and the inference of sexual abuse. The rumors might have counted for something, if Fleet or anyone else had been able to come up with the slightest evidence that they were true. But what Fleet was interested in was the effect any rumors might have had, and the stories that were flying around about Sadie’s promiscuity could well have tipped Mason over the edge. He had a volatile personality anyway. He had a history of getting into trouble at school, and instances throughout his childhood of low-level violence. If Mason had allowed the rumors to influence him, if he’d come to suspect Sadie really was cheating on him—how might he have reacted?
And there was one other piece of evidence implicating Mason—the thing they’d found in Sadie’s bedroom. Again, it was hardly conclusive, but it certainly didn’t help Mason’s case.
At the end of the day,
