Dan Waddell: Blood Atonement

'But there was no one recently?'

'Not that I'm aware of. Why, do you think someone she knew did this?' Her voice betrayed her disbelief.

Foster nodded. 'We do. Can you think of anyone, absolutely anyone who would wish Katie or her daughter harm?'

'No one whatsoever,' she said without thinking. 'She was a very passionate woman, quick to anger and quite tempestuous, but she was also kind, decent and loyal.

Everyone who knew her absolutely adored her. I can't think of anyone who would do something like this.' She picked up an empty wine glass and walked towards the kitchen. 'Can I interest either of you, or is all that stuff about being on duty true?'

'I'm afraid it is,' Foster replied.

'Tea? Coffee? Water?'

Heather asked for water, Foster said he was OK.

A few seconds later their hostess re-emerged with a brimming glass of white wine and a tumbler of water.

'You'd known Katie for some time,' Foster continued.

'Did she ever speak to you about her past, her upbringing maybe?'

'Never,' she said emphatically. 'She was adopted, I know that. She once mentioned both her parents died. But she made it very clear it was a part of her life that she wanted to forget. You find a lot of people in this business are trying to escape their backgrounds - or transcend them, at least -- and she was one.'

'Did you get an indication that it was the result of some event or incident in her past?' Foster asked.

'You mean abuse?'

Foster was somewhat startled by her frankness. "I suppose I do, yes.'

Again, the scramble for a cigarette and a pause while she gave it some thought.

'No. And I don't think it was anything like that. I'm not basing it on fact, but simply because I truly think she would have told me. I just got the sense that she and whoever it was who brought her up didn't get on. She was quite wild; at least, she was back then. I sensed they, whoever they were, were quite conservative.'

'Do you know who "they" were?'

'They lived in Kent somewhere, some shithole seaside town. The bloody name escapes me. But she hated it.'

'Kent?' Heather said. 'Not Shoeburyness in Essex?'

'No, she definitely said Kent. I think it might have been Deal.'

Heather scribbled a few more notes. 'She never mentioned who the people were that raised her?'

Darlinghurst drew on her cigarette and looked away.

Then she shook her head. 'Not specifically, no. I always thought it was an aunt or something, but I don't remember her actually saying that.'

'So presumably they weren't invited to her wedding to Stephen Buckingham?'

'God, no. Few people were. Just a small group of friends at a registry office in Chelsea then a gigantic piss-up afterwards.

His parents were not amused at being frozen out.

Don't think they ever forgave him.'

'What sort of relationship did she and Stephen have?'

'Quite a good one until he started shagging everything that moved. Egregious little shit. He broke her heart. I'm not sure she ever really got over it. After he left she turned down several jobs because of Naomi. She had friends who would take her -- and I did a few times, too, when she was a bit older -- but Naomi remained the priority. Stephen did more than just break Katie's heart. He screwed up her career. Yet despite all that, she tolerated him for Naomi's sake. Actually, for the past few years her attitude towards him had softened somewhat. I remember her telling me it was difficult to stay angry for all that time. She still hated the miserable little prick, though, and with good reason.'

Foster thanked her and handed her his card in case anything else came to mind. As she showed them to the door, she remembered something.

'Last time we met Katie, two months ago, said she'd lost her belief

'Her belief in what?' Foster asked.

'That's what I asked her. She didn't really answer, so I assumed she meant in her ability.'

What exactly did she say?'

'She said, "There's just an empty hole where my belief used to be." That's all. Then she switched the subject.'

As she closed the door behind them, Foster saw the tears well in Sally Darlinghurst's eyes.

It was almost midnight when Foster returned to his terraced home in Acton, swallowed two painkillers and washed them down with a hearty slug of red wine. It was at least a day or two past its best and no way to treat a bottle of Haut-Brion so prized by his father, but the old man wasn't around to berate him for it and the nearest off-licence had long since closed. He refused to drink water except in times of extreme thirst. Grown men and women walking around clutching little bottles of water like a child with its milk because they were told it was good for them. When did people start asking to be treated like big babies?

He sat at the kitchen table where his laptop sat idle, and took the weight off his aching leg by pulling out another chair to rest it on. It was a familiar position. Much of the last six months had been spent in the same seat, staring at the same screen, drinking from the same glass, often until dawn seeped through the window. He avoided bed and the dread that accompanied the silence and the dark. On the nights he did try to sleep, he would wake up sweating after reliving those hours of agonizing torture at the hands of Karl Hogg: his 'payment' for the sins of his ancestor, a Victorian detective who helped speed an innocent man to the gallows, thus allowing a demented serial killer free to butcher his family, and leaving a stain on the bloodline that Hogg sought to expunge. Foster's jaw, his collarbone, wrist and shin bones had all been shattered, and his life would have been taken had it not been for Nigel Barnes's intervention. The wounds would always be with him but his spirit remained intact. Just about.

He fired the machine up and as it rumbled into life he took another gulp of wine. After visiting Darlinghurst, he and Heather had gathered together the team working on Katie Drake's murder at their Kensington headquarters to sift through what information they had, while the team scouring London for her daughter continued their search.

Each hour was vital. Leave was cancelled, overtime a necessity, accepted without question. The likelihood that she had been meeting a lover, or prospective lover, at her home had given them a renewed sense of purpose. They were in touch with every dating agency they could find to see if Katie Drake was on their books. Foster kept coming back to the entry in her daughter's diary: 'Can't have met a man cos she not been out in years. . .'

The computer was ready. He joined the Internet, a home from home for the six months of his recovery. But he bypassed the motoring sites, the poker sites and the message boards where he debated the modern world with anonymous Internet warriors, and headed straight for the Internet Movie Database. There he entered Katie Drake's name into the search field. In return he was met with her entire TV output and a picture, showing dark hair that fell alluringly over hooded eyes, full lips and a look of youth that bore little similarity to the mutilated corpse he had seen earlier that day. She had been, as her ex-husband said, a real beauty.

There was a short biog that mentioned her training at RAD A. Foster made a note to check their records in the morning. Her CV appeared to list every popular TV show of the last two decades of British television, among them a long-running police drama so inauthentic that simply the sound of the theme tune raised Foster's hackles. She appeared in two different bit parts more than a decade apart, the makers presumably assuming their viewers had short memories.

He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. He was aiming to get back to work for 6 a.m. the next morning, well before the search for Naomi resumed at first light. In his mind he reviewed all that he knew about Katie Drake. An actress who took the first opportunity to leave her smalltown upbringing and head for London, where she quickly got work. The dream appeared to be going well, regular theatre and television work, until she had her daughter. But even then, she was soon back at work, though when her husband left her it dried up. From that point it had never recovered. Her daughter had become her life but at the back of her mind her missed opportunity must have gnawed away at her. She started to drink, heavily it seemed, and retreated from the world. Foster glanced at his glass of wine. He wondered what a fourteenyear-old's diary might make of his habits.