Seb shakes his head; his eyes fill up with tears. He blinks hard.
“Well, here is my card. It has my telephone number on it. Be sure to tell me if your mum does get in touch, won’t you? Don’t feel you need to have secrets from me.”
Oli is more concerned when the policewoman knocks on his bedroom door and asks if she can come in. “Hide the skunk,” she jokes. Oli blushes. Both boys inherited the habit of blushing from Mark. They all three turn pink if they are angry, embarrassed or even sometimes simply happy. Mark thinks it’s frustrating. It isn’t a very manly habit.
Oli isn’t blushing because he smokes joints, it’s just he finds adults embarrassing.
Clements takes a different approach with Oli than the one she used with Seb. She doesn’t chatter about e-games or try to ingratiate herself. She gets straight to the point; she knows how to talk to teens with limited concentration levels or interest. “Have you seen your mum since Monday? Heard from her at all?”
“Leigh’s not my mum,” mutters Oli sulkily.
“Oli, stop it,” Mark warns. DC Clements looks quizzical. “Technically, Leigh is Oli and Seb’s stepmother but she’s the only mother they’ve ever known,” Mark explains.
“That’s not true. I remember my real mum,” mutters Oli. There is a darkness in the room. You can almost taste it.
“My first wife died of cancer when Oli was five years old. I suppose he remembers Frances a bit. But Leigh has been his mother since he was not quite seven.” Mark hated this conversation. It made him feel awkward and disloyal, to his first wife, to his second, to his son. Oli and Seb belonged to Frances but they belong to Leigh too. Also, he never knew how old to say Oli was when he and Leigh married. Today he has gone for “nearly seven” because then the mourning period sounded a little more respectful. Other times he’s admitted to six to show that Leigh had picked up the reins a long time ago. It’s complicated.
Initially Oli and Seb had known Leigh as Aunty Leigh. Then she became Mummy. She didn’t push the title on them. They elected for it soon after the wedding. And for years Oli had referred to Leigh as Mummy, then Mum, but recently he’d started to call her Leigh and insist she wasn’t his real mum. It had come up when they were rowing on Sunday. Mark knew this was just a phase his eldest son was going through—he was simply testing boundaries, like teens do. And yes, boundary testing could seem cruel, wounding.
“You should just ignore it. He’s doing it for attention,” Mark had said to Leigh.
“I give him a lot of attention,” she pointed out.
“I know you do. Look, it’s just a stage.”
Leigh—in a rare moment of showing her emotional vulnerability—had turned to Mark and said, “It’s not fair, though, is it? Because being a mum isn’t a stage. It’s a constant. I’m not allowed to throw my toys out of the cot and say I’ve had enough.”
Had she? Had she had enough?
Mark is brought back to the here and now as Clements asks, “Have you heard anything from your stepmum over the past few days, since Monday?” She is precise, persistent. Oli shakes his head. Mark sighs and thinks you would have to know the boy well to see his sadness, to the untrained eye he just looks bolshie, inaccessible. The detective leaves her card with him too.
The officers nose around the house a bit. Clements asks to see Leigh’s laptop. “She has it with her.”
“And phone.”
“The same.”
“We’ll need to see Leigh’s social media accounts.”
“She doesn’t do that stuff.”
“She’s not on Facebook or Insta? Twitter? None of them?”
“No.” Mark looks proud. “Old-fashioned, huh? But also, really admirable. She always says if anyone wants to reach her, they can pick up the phone. She really values a chat.”
“Have you got a photo?”
Mark shows her one on his phone. “It was only taken on Saturday night.” Less than a week ago but also a time that is firmly in their history. Gone. The family were heading out for a meal. Nothing fancy, just the four of them going out for burgers. Seb had said his mum looked pretty. He insisted on taking the shot. Five days ago, a lifetime ago. Clements uses her phone to take a photo of the photo.
“Can we see the messages you sent Leigh over these past few days?”
Mark willingly gives up his phone. The messages are there, just as he described. There are no blue ticks indicating that they have been read. Just gray ones, saying they have been sent and delivered.
Sweetheart, I’m sorry about the other night. If you call me, I promise I’ll be suitably contrite
Then…
Actually, it was seriously cool twerking
Mark had added that because he was trying to lighten the mood. He didn’t mean it. His wife really can’t dance.
It doesn’t matter anyway because she hasn’t read them. The messages are lingering in the ether somewhere. That black hole of miscommunications, broken promises and lies. The messages are languishing where betrayal can hide.
7
DC Clements
The minute the door to the Fletcher home bangs behind the police officers, Tanner asks, “So, what do you think? Has she done a runner?”
“Maybe.”
“Or is she already dead?”
Clements shoots Tanner a filthy look. He doesn’t notice or if he does, he doesn’t care. “Let’s hope not,” she replies stiffly.
“Yeah, but it’s always the husband that’s done it. Isn’t it? Statistically.”
“You are getting ahead of yourself, Tanner. Let’s keep an open mind, shall we? At the moment we just need to file a missing persons report. And statistically it isn’t always the husband—that would make our jobs too easy.”
Someone is reported missing every ninety seconds in the UK; 180,000 people are reported missing every year. A whole lot more go unreported. Clements knows the statistics. Around 97 percent of missing people either come home, or are found dead, within a week. And around 99 percent have come home or been found dead within a year. The numbers sound okay. You’d bet on them, maybe. Except that a year is a long time. Found dead is a bad result.
And then there is the 1 percent who remain unaccounted for, sometimes forever. Clements lies awake at night thinking about the ones that don’t come home. Their faces haunt her; immortalized in holiday snaps, school photos or dressed in out-of-fashion wedding dresses. The image of Leigh Fletcher is already scorched onto her brain. She glances about, as she and Tanner walk down the street, automatically scanning women’s faces; hoping to spot the Fletcher woman. It surprises and frustrates Clements that despite over a million CCTV cameras tracking movements, PIN numbers, databases, credit ratings, bank records, phone records, registration plate recognition, social media, tracking apps, emails, GPS and even bloody nosey neighbors, people can slip away unnoticed.
Or are dragged away?
Clements doesn’t let her mind go there yet. It’s not rational. Statistically, a missing adult has left of their own volition, although admittedly with varying levels of intentional planning and often more than one cause. She mentally runs through the checklist of why a person disappears and holds it up for inspection against what she knows about Leigh Fletcher. Mental health issues, diagnosed or not, account for up to eight in ten missing adults. Possible. Relationship breakdown is the reason for three in ten to do a runner. Mark Fletcher admitted to an argument, so not the Garden of Eden, but one row is not usually enough to make a person leave home. In this case, dementia can be ruled out—four in every ten people with dementia will go missing at some point, often unintentionally. Homelessness can also be ruled out. Leigh has a lovely home. Financial issues? They were not apparent, but Clements will look into it. Abuse or domestic violence? You never know. She’d need to do a bit of digging.