Steven Dunne - Deity

‘I’m not sure. But at least we now know they’re acting in concert. This was planned. These kids weren’t abducted. They left of their own volition.’

‘Is that good?’ asked Noble.

‘For now.’

‘You’re sure the phone and the leaflet weren’t on the bed?’ said Noble, looking at the two artefacts on a chest of drawers beside the bed.

‘I didn’t find them,’ replied Adele Watson’s mother. She was a shrivelled, prune-faced woman with a leathery complexion and prematurely grey hair which she wore in long knotted strands. Despite the Family Liaison Officer informing her to expect a visit from CID, she was in her nightclothes and a large hooded dressing-gown that completely engulfed her. The contrast with the hard tanned body of her good-looking husband, a builder by trade, was stark.

‘Mr Watson?’ asked Noble.

Brook glanced up at James Watson from his examination of a large wardrobe. He seemed to be in a daydream, like Fred Blake, just staring, saucer-eyed, at the crumpled duvet of his daughter’s bed. With a twenty-year-old daughter of his own, he wasn’t surprised by Watson and Blake’s reaction. Brook had given it a lot of thought — too much. Mothers were important to young girls, but fathers and daughters shared something unfathomable — a dark and mysterious bond that was always delicately balanced and easily contaminated.

‘Jim,’ prompted his wife.

Adele’s father snapped out of his reverie and looked at Brook. ‘That’s how it was.’

‘On the chest of drawers?’

‘I just told you.’

‘And the bed was dishevelled?’

‘If that means was it a mess, yes,’ replied Watson.

‘On or off?’

‘What?’

‘The phone.’

‘Off.’

‘Did you check her calls?’

‘I tried to.’

Brook looked up at him sharply. ‘So you touched the phone.’

‘Obviously. But I put it back exactly as it was.’

‘You never told me that,’ snapped Mrs Watson.

‘That’s because there was nothing to tell you, woman. I thought her last calls might show me where she’d gone, that’s all,’ he explained to Brook.

‘And did they?’

Watson shook his head but didn’t make eye-contact. ‘The SIM card’s gone. She must’ve taken it with her.’

Noble bagged the phone as well as the Deity leaflet, which was identical to the other two they’d collected. ‘But if you tried to check her calls, you must have known your daughter’s SIM Pin.’

‘I told you. The SIM card’s missing.’

‘But you didn’t know that when you tried to turn it on,’ added Brook.

Watson nodded. ‘One-one-nine-two.’

‘My daughter would’ve died under torture before divulging that to me or her mum,’ said Brook, playing Happy Parent for a moment.

‘It’s her date of birth,’ snarled Watson.

‘Did you also check her computer for emails?’

‘Her laptop’s gone.’

‘Gone?’ Brook glanced over at Noble then walked back to the wardrobe he’d looked in earlier. He plucked a laptop case from a hook on the back of the door. It was empty. ‘Without this?’

Watson shrugged. ‘She must have taken it in a rucksack instead.’ Brook fixed his eyes on Adele’s father. There was more than shock in his eyes. There was resentment. He understood it. It was part of the strange connection between fathers and daughters — the teenage girl pushing towards womanhood, the father, her jailer, imposing adolescence. Were Adele Watson and her father fighting this ancient battle? Brook recognised defeat in his face. What else would there be? Only one winner.

‘Have you checked if Adele has her passport with her?’ asked Noble.

‘No,’ replied Mrs Watson.

‘Can you see if it’s still in the house?’

‘I’ll go,’ said Watson. ‘It should still be with our passports. We went to Tenerife last summer.’ He turned away.

‘Go with him, Sergeant,’ said Brook. Noble looked up at his DI. There was an edge to his voice that Noble had learned to detect. Something was wrong. He turned to follow Watson into another bedroom.

Brook smiled to reassure Mrs Watson, but she was oblivious to the sudden undercurrent. He ambled round the room and ran a finger across a shelf of books containing works by Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf and Beryl Bainbridge as well as the anthologies of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath amongst others. He picked up the Plath book and opened it to the first page. In a beautiful hand Adele had written I am, I am, I am .

Brook returned it to its place and gestured at the almost bare desk. ‘Is this where she kept her laptop?’ he asked. Adele’s mother nodded.

A lone book sat there instead. The Collected Poems of Edgar Allan Poe .

Brook smiled. ‘That takes me back.’

‘It’s new,’ said Adele’s mother. ‘She bought that last Friday.’

‘The day of the party? She has her own money then.’

‘Some. Though she isn’t one to spend it on clothes and phones. Jim practically has to drag her out to buy her clothes.’

‘Does he?’ said Brook. ‘I thought that might be more of a job for her mother.’ Mrs Watson shrugged her disinterest. Brook opened the anthology to the bookmarked page. ‘A Dream Within A Dream.’ He closed his eyes, repeating the poem out loud from memory.

‘Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

This much let me avow -

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream:’

Brook hesitated and was forced to look at the text.

‘Yet if hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone?

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.’

‘Yeah,’ Mrs Watson said dismissively. ‘Her head was full of that sort of crap.’

Brook looked at the page. A single word had been written in the margin. Miranda . He closed the book and picked up a photograph in a cockleshell frame. A dark-eyed beauty glowered back at him through intense and mysterious brown eyes. He sensed a pent-up fury in her, an eagerness to be heard, noticed. He thought of his own daughter, Terri — oh, so impatient for the freedoms of adulthood. Adele and Terri weren’t far apart in age or taste. Edgar Allan Poe for Adele Watson — with Terri it had been the poems of Robert Frost and the music of Radiohead, to confer the illusion of depth, suggest a worldliness that was yet to arrive.

Brook pulled open the drawers of the bureau and took out a purple box from one drawer. There were three fountain pens inside. ‘Nice pens.’

‘She loved writing — you know, the old fashioned way,’ said Mrs Watson. ‘Poems, essays. She was very bright. She had a place at Cambridge next year.’

Brook looked at her. Past tense again. ‘Where?’

‘Cambridge,’ she repeated, louder and slower for Brook’s benefit.

‘No, where did she write? I don’t see any papers or writing books here.’

‘She had a notebook for ideas. If it’s not there, she must have taken it with her.’

‘What about a diary?’

‘Not sure. But it’s all online these days, isn’t it?’

Jim Watson returned with Noble. ‘It’s gone. She must have taken it.’

‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it?’ said Mrs Watson. ‘She’s gone abroad somewhere.’

‘It’s a possibility,’ said Noble.

‘ “Live Forever. Question Mark”,’ said Brook.

‘Pardon?’

‘Is that one of her poems?’

‘How did you. .?’

‘It’s written on this blotter here,’ said Brook, peering down at it. He gestured to Noble to add it to the Exhibits Officer’s list then pulled off his latex gloves. ‘Or maybe she copied it from the leaflet.’ He smiled at the Watsons then looked casually at the walls.