Clare Mackintosh - I Let You Go

‘You’re on,’ said Stumpy, who never had to be persuaded into a pint. ‘Kate?’

‘Why not?’ she said. ‘As long as you’re buying.’

It was closer to an hour before Ray got to the Nag’s Head, and the others were already on their second round. Ray envied them their ability to switch off: his conversation with the superintendent had left an uncomfortable knot in his stomach. The senior officer had been nice enough, but the writing on the wall was clear: this investigation was coming to an end. The pub was warm and quiet, and Ray wished he could put work to one side for an hour and talk about football, or the weather, or anything else that didn’t involve a five-year-old child and a missing car.

‘Trust you to arrive just after I’ve been to the bar,’ Stumpy grumbled.

‘You don’t mean to say you got your wallet out?’ Ray said. He winked at Kate. ‘Wonders will never cease.’ He ordered a pint of bitter and returned, throwing three packets of crisps on to the table.

‘How did it go with the superintendent?’ Kate asked.

He couldn’t ignore her, and he certainly couldn’t lie. Ray took a gulp of his pint to buy some time. Kate watched him, eager to hear if they’d been given more resources, or a bigger budget. He hated to disappoint her, but she had to know sometime. ‘Pretty shit, to be honest. Brian and Pat have been taken back to shift.’

‘What? Why?’ Kate put down her drink with such force that wine sloshed up the inside of the glass.

‘We were lucky to have them for as long as we did,’ Ray said, ‘and they’ve done a great job with the CCTV. But shift can’t carry on back-filling their absence, and the harsh truth is that we can’t justify spending any more money on this investigation. I’m sorry.’ He added the apology as if he were personally responsible for the decision, but it didn’t make any difference to Kate’s reaction.

‘We can’t just give up on it!’ She picked up a beer mat and began digging pieces out of the edges.

Ray sighed. It was so hard, that balance between the cost of an investigation and the cost of a life – the cost of a child’s life. How could you put a value on that?

‘We’re not giving up,’ he said, ‘you’re still working your way through those fog lights, aren’t you?’

Kate nodded. ‘There were seventy-three fitted as replacement parts in the week following the hit-and-run,’ she said. ‘The insurance jobs have all been genuine cases, so far, and I’m tracing the registered keepers for all the ones who paid privately.’

‘You see? Who knows what that will turn up. All we’re doing is scaling things back a bit’ He looked at Stumpy for moral support, but didn’t find it.

‘The bosses are only interested in quick results, Kate,’ Stumpy said. ‘If we can’t solve a job in a couple of weeks – a couple of days, ideally – it drops off the list of priorities and something else takes its place.’

‘I know how it works,’ Kate said, ‘but it doesn’t make it right, does it?’ She pushed the tiny scraps of beer mat into a mound in the centre of the table. Ray noticed her fingernails were unpainted, and bitten angrily to the quick. ‘I have this feeling the last bit of the puzzle is just around the corner, you know?’

‘I do,’ said Ray, ‘and maybe you’re right. But in the meantime, expect to be working on the hit-and-run in between other jobs. The honeymoon period is over.’

‘I was thinking I might make some enquiries at the Royal Infirmary,’ Kate said. ‘It’s possible the driver sustained injuries during the collision: whiplash, something like that. We sent a patrol car to A&E on the night, but we should follow up with more specific slow-time enquiries, in case they didn’t seek treatment straight away.’

‘That’s good thinking,’ Ray said. The suggestion stirred something at the back of his mind, but he couldn’t place it. ‘Don’t forget to check Southmead and the Frenchay, as well.’ His phone, face down on the table in front of him, vibrated with an incoming text message, and Ray picked it up to read it. ‘Shit.’

The others looked up at him, Kate in surprise and Stumpy with a grin.

‘What have you forgotten to do?’ he said.

Ray grimaced but didn’t explain. He drained his pint and pulled a tenner out of his pocket, handing it to Stumpy. ‘Get a drink for the pair of you – I need to get home.’

Mags was loading the dishwasher when he walked in, dropping the plates into the rack with such force Ray winced. Her hair was tied back in a loose plait, and she wore tracksuit bottoms and an old T-shirt of his. He wondered when she had stopped caring about what she wore, and straight away hated himself for the thought. He was hardly one to talk.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I completely forgot.’

Mags opened a bottle of red wine. She had only got out one glass, Ray noticed, but he decided it would be unwise to mention it.

‘It’s very rare,’ she said, ‘that I ask you to be somewhere at a particular time. I know that sometimes the job has to come first. I get that. I really do. But this appointment has been in the diary for two weeks. Two weeks! And you promised, Ray.’

Her voice wobbled, and Ray put a tentative arm around her. ‘I am sorry, Mags. Was it awful?’

‘It was okay.’ She shrugged off Ray’s arm and sat at the kitchen table, taking a deep slug of wine. ‘I mean, they didn’t say anything dreadful, only that Tom doesn’t seem to have settled into school as well as the other kids and they’re a bit worried about him.’

‘So what are the teachers doing about it?’ Ray fetched a wine glass from the cupboard, filled it, and joined Mags at the table. ‘Presumably they’ve spoken to him?’

‘Apparently Tom says everything’s fine.’ Mags shrugged. ‘Mrs Hickson has tried everything she can to motivate him and get him to be more engaged in class, but he won’t say a word. She said she had wondered if he was simply one of the quiet ones.’

Ray snorted. ‘Quiet? Tom?’

‘Well, exactly.’ Mags looked at Ray. ‘I really could have done with you there, you know.’

‘It totally slipped my mind. I’m so sorry, Mags. It was another full-on day, and then I popped to the pub for a quick pint.’

‘With Stumpy?’

Ray nodded. Mags had a soft spot for Stumpy, who was Tom’s godfather, and indulged his and Ray’s after-work pints with the tolerance of a wife who recognises a husband’s need for ‘man time’. He didn’t mention Kate, and he wasn’t entirely sure why.

Mags sighed. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘He’ll be fine. Look, it’s a new school, and it’s a huge deal for kids, moving up to secondary school. He’s been a big fish in a small pond for a long time, and now he’s swimming with the sharks. I’ll speak to him.’

‘Don’t give him one of your lectures—’

‘I’m not going to give him a lecture!’

‘—it’ll only make things worse.’

Ray bit his tongue. He and Mags were a good team, but they had very different approaches when it came to parenting. Mags was much softer with the kids; more inclined to molly-coddle them instead of letting them stand on their own two feet.

‘I won’t give him a lecture,’ he promised.

‘The school has suggested we see how things go for the next couple of months, and have another chat to them a few weeks after half term.’ Mags looked pointedly at Ray.

‘Name the date,’ he said. ‘I’ll be there.’

6

Headlights glint on wet tarmac, the dazzle blinding them every few seconds. People scurry past on slippery pavements; passing cars sending spray over their shoes. Piles of leaves lie in sodden heaps against railings, their bright colours darkening to dull brown.