‘Most of the time,’ she agreed. ‘But a witness has come forward to tell us that the club left the gates unlocked for a period of about two hours on Sunday afternoon while a work party was clearing the banks of Stour Lake, which is the furthest lake from the angling club’s car park. So, it would be remiss of us not to search the lakes. And the entire area is crisscrossed with culverts, gullies and drainage ditches which all need checking.’
Sam gave a bright smile. ‘On a positive note, we’ve had a phenomenal response to the media appeal. No confirmed sightings of Immy yet, but it’s safe to say that the entire county is keeping an eye out for her. The special incident line has been swamped with calls.’
I licked my lips and asked the question I’d been avoiding. ‘And what about the other possibility, that someone took Immy?’
She closed her notebook and slid it into the voluminous black leather handbag at her feet. ‘DI Jones and his team are still following a number of lines of inquiry, but the most likely scenario is that she fell in the river.’
I imagined Immy’s fingers, all white and wrinkly, like she’d spent too long in the bath. Tendrils of her hair wrapping around woody bulrush stems like the arms of an octopus. I imagined her choking for breath as her little lungs filled with water. Her green eyes, wide with shock, glistening with tears. The river, once a desirable selling point for our Grade II listed home, was no longer a thing of beauty, it was a malevolent force at the bottom of the garden, spiriting my baby away.
My hands began trembling, so I sat on them and took a deep breath. ‘You think she drowned,’ I said.
‘Look, I’m not going to sugar-coat it,’ the officer said. ‘The longer Immy is missing, the higher the probability that something untoward has happened to her. But all the time there’s no evidence to the contrary, you and Stuart have to cling to the hope that she’s alive.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
I replayed Sam Bennett’s words in my head as I went upstairs to check on Nate. ‘Cling to the hope that she’s alive,’ she’d said. And she was right, I realised with sudden clarity. Until the police found a body, we had to assume Immy was alive. Because if we gave up hope, we had nothing.
I found Nate sitting cross-legged on the floor in his sister’s room, his Anakin Skywalker figurine in his hand.
‘Hey, kiddo, everything OK?’ I said, settling on the floor beside him.
‘Immy must be somewhere,’ he said, frowning. ‘She’s not Obi-Wan Kenobi. She can’t just disappear. Why can’t anyone find her?’
‘The police are doing everything they can. We need a bit of luck, that’s all.’
He turned to me with sorrowful eyes. ‘Can’t you look for her? You know her better than anybody, even though she didn’t come out of your tummy like I did.’
‘The police don’t want me getting in the way.’
‘There must be somewhere you can look.’
He was right. There was somewhere. I scrambled to my feet, and, as an afterthought, bent down to kiss his forehead. ‘You’re right. She’s not Obi-Wan Kenobi. She must be somewhere, and I’m going to see if I can find her.’
I was halfway out of the door when he called, ‘Mummy?’
‘What is it, sweetheart?’
He gave me a watery smile. ‘May the Force be with you.’
I drove along the M2 towards Chatham. It was a relief to get out of the house, away from Stuart’s misery and Sam’s professional concern, and to be doing something proactive. I turned the radio up and let the music wash over me as the Porsche chewed up the miles.
Before long, I turned off the motorway and followed the satnav past retail parks and industrial estates into the former dockyard town.
Sam had said Niamh’s last known address was a squat opposite a fish and chip shop in Chatham’s Luton Road. She said it meaningfully, like I should have heard of the place. Curious, I googled it before I set out. Not only was Luton Road the epicentre of the town’s red-light district, it was also infamous for murder, drugs and robbery, according to a local news website. One particularly disparaging critic on a site listing Britain’s worst places to live had described that area of Chatham as “the festering cesspit of Medway”. It didn’t augur well.
I felt the heat of a hundred eyes on the car as I neared the centre of town. Porsches were a rare sight, it seemed. As I stopped at a set of traffic lights, a skinny boy in a hoody and grey tracksuit bottoms leered into the driver’s side window, his face so close I could see the bum fluff on his chin.
‘Nice wheels,’ he said, slamming his hand on the roof of the car. ‘Wanna give me a ride, lady?’
I shook my head and stared at the traffic lights, willing them to turn green. The boy screeched with laughter and thumped the roof again, harder. After an eternity, the lights changed, and I hit the accelerator. The boy gave a grunt of surprise and sprang backwards. When I looked in the rearview mirror, he’d stepped into the middle of the road and was giving me the finger.
My heart was still hammering in my chest when the satnav announced I’d reached my destination a mile or so later. I pulled in behind a bus layby to slow my pulse and get my bearings.
I knew from Google Maps that Luton Road was a long, straight street lined with terraced houses interspersed with the occasional betting or vaping shop, off-licence and takeaway. Hoping there was only one fish and chip shop among them, I checked my mirrors and pulled out, scanning left and right as I crawled along the road.
I wasn’t even halfway along when I saw a blue-painted shop frontage with a red neon sign in the window - Dockers’ Plaice. It had to
