SEVENTEEN
Traffic was moving on the M25, which was about the best you could expect even on a Saturday. Thorne's passenger was keen to chat – about her flatmate, her flatmate's thick boyfriend, people she'd known when she worked at the bank who had been high-fliers and lost everything when the economy had gone belly up – but he was happy to let her do most of the talking.
To watch the road and think about other things.
He had been unable to shake the image of the woman crying in the blue Peugeot; wondering who she was and what had happened to make her world so unbearable, for those few minutes at least. It had been on his mind since waking, and he and Louise had barely spoken during a snatched breakfast.
'Will you be late?'
'See how it pans out.'
'Fine. I've got a lot on myself, so…'
The truth was that aside from the lovemaking two nights before – slight and unexpected – there had not been a great deal of closeness between them in recent days. Weeks, even. There were fewer calls made or texts sent and seemingly no real desire to connect. There was less interest.
As Louise had said, though, they were both busy…
He had called Russell Brigstocke on his way to pick up Anna, to tell him he would not be coming into the office. To let him know about the visit he would be making instead.
'Not much worth coming in for anyway,' Brigstocke had said. 'Like I thought, as far as this boat business goes, getting any joy out of Madrid on a Saturday morning is like pulling teeth. I mean, it might have helped if I'd been able to find a bloody translator.'
Thorne had told him he would check in again later, and had listened to Brigstocke rant for another minute or two.
'Do you know how many Albanian speakers there are on the Home Office books? Or Turkish? Or Urdu? Dozens, mate. But could I find one who spoke Spanish? I would've done it myself, but beyond knowing the names of a few Barcelona players and being able to ask for a beer, I'm a bit stuffed…'
Seeing the exit they needed coming up, Thorne swiped at the indicator stalk and swung the BMW into the middle lane.
'So, it looks like walking away from the bank might not have been such a stupid move after all,' Anna said. 'I mean, at least I 've got a job.'
'Right,' Thorne said.
'Some of those flash bastards I used to work with are living on benefits now.' She grinned, looking out at the fields that stretched away from the motorway. 'Cheers me right up sometimes.'
Thorne indicated again and drifted into the inside lane. Anna said something else, but he was still thinking about the woman in the blue Peugeot as he pulled on to the slip road and began to slow for the roundabout.
Twenty miles south-west of central London, in the well-heeled heart of the Surrey countryside, Cobham is the archetypal commuter town. Its exclusive private estates are home to a number of Chelsea footballers whose training ground is nearby, but Maggie and Julian Munro were rather more typical inhabitants. He worked at an architectural practice in Clerkenwell and she taught at the local independent secondary school. They lived in a detached house opposite Cobham Mill and drove his and hers Volvos. They had a nine-year-old son who played rugby for the county, they kept a flat-coated retriever, and for ten years, until she had suddenly gone missing six months before, they had been foster parents to Ellie Langford.
Maggie Munro showed Thorne and Anna into a large sitting room. She offered them tea, but Thorne said they did not want to take up too much of their time.
The dog was barking in another part of the house.
'I was probably somewhat… manic when you called,' Maggie said. The fixed smile and the way her hands moved in her lap told Thorne that she was still far from calm. 'Only, as soon as you said who you were, I thought maybe you'd found her.'
'I'm sorry for the misunderstanding,' Thorne said.
Julian Munro came in and Thorne and Anna stood to shake his hand before everyone sat down again. It was all rather formal, despite the invitation that Thorne and Anna should make themselves at home and the Munros' Saturday casuals: jeans and rugby shirt for him; powder-blue tracksuit for her.
'I must admit, I thought you'd be older,' Thorne said. He had been genuinely shocked to find that the Munros were in their late thirties, having got it into his head that fostering was only ever done by fifty-something women whose own kids had flown the nest.
'We'd been trying for a baby for a while,' Julian said, 'but for one reason or another it hadn't worked out. So then we thought of adoption, but the process was incredibly long and drawn out.'
His wife had been nodding along and now she took up the story. 'We thought we'd try fostering just to see if bringing up someone else's child was something we were cut out to do. And we got Ellie.' She smiled. 'As it happened, a few months later, I fell pregnant.'
It was Thorne's turn to smile. 'Falling' pregnant only ever seemed to be something the middle classes said. 'Fell' rather than 'got'. Despite this, he thought he had heard the trace of a northern accent from both of them and for no very good reason had quickly formed an impression of a couple who had not been given anything on a plate. Who had worked hard for everything they had.
'Ellie was thrilled to be getting a little brother,' Maggie said. 'And when Samuel came along, we were a family.'
'He's training,' Julian said, explaining their son's absence. 'Every Saturday morning.'
Anna hunched her shoulders and shivered theatrically. They had been talking about snow on the radio as she and Thorne had driven up. 'Poor little lad'll be freezing,' she said.
Julian shook his head. 'He's pretty tough.'
The husband and wife were sitting a few feet apart on a large sofa, while Anna and Thorne sat in matching armchairs, facing them across a low table strewn with glossy magazines.
Maggie leaned forward and cleared her throat, as if she were about to deliver a prepared speech. 'The fact is, we're very glad to see you,' she said. 'Nobody ever took Ellie's disappearance seriously, not really. She was eighteen, so legally she was responsible for herself, and they just kept telling us she must have run off with some boyfriend or other. Kept saying that she'd show up when she got bored or ran out of money. It was so frustrating.'
'Was there one?' Anna asked. 'A boyfriend?'
Maggie shook her head. 'Nobody we knew about. Nobody special, at any rate.'
'The police did keep in touch fairly regularly,' Julian said. 'At the beginning anyway. But only to tell us there was nothing to tell us, if you see what I mean.' His jaw tightened and he breathed out noisily through his nose. 'Some family liaison officer or other would sit where you are now, scoffing our bloody biscuits and bleating on about counselling, but singularly failing to tell us what anybody was actually doing to find our daughter.' He looked at his feet, one of which was tapping angrily against the carpet. Maggie leaned across and took his hand.
'Tell us about the day Ellie went missing,' Thorne said.
Maggie glanced at her husband. He nodded. You tell it.
'She'd been out celebrating her A-level results. She'd done really well. She and some of her friends went to one of the pubs in the centre of town.' Maggie shrugged. 'That's it. Just a bunch of teenagers having a drink and letting their hair down. All her friends told us she was fine when she left to get the bus. She never came home
…'
Thorne thanked her and said he understood how difficult it must be, going over it all again. She told him it had become second nature; one or other of them had told the story a thousand times by now.
'What were the results?' Anna asked. 'You said she did well.'
Maggie looked slightly taken aback before her face broke into a beam. It was clear that nobody had ever bothered to ask. 'Two Bs and a C,' she said. 'Bs in English and History, C in French.'
Thorne knew that the Munros were exaggerating somewhat in claiming that the police had done nothing,
