Clare Mackintosh - I Let You Go

‘About one, I think,’ Ray said. There had been an armed robbery at a petrol station on the outskirts of Bristol. Uniform had managed to bring in all four men involved within a few hours of the incident, and Ray had stayed in the office more as a gesture of solidarity to his team than out of any real necessity.

The coffee was too hot to drink but he took a sip anyway, and burned his tongue. His BlackBerry buzzed and he glanced at the screen. Stumpy had emailed to say that the four offenders had been charged and put before Saturday-morning court, where the magistrates had remanded them. Ray tapped out a quick email to the superintendent.

‘Ray!’ Mags said. ‘No work! You promised.’

‘Sorry, I was catching up on last night’s job.’

‘It’s only two days, Ray – they’ll have to manage without you.’ She put a pan of eggs on the table and sat down.

‘Careful,’ she said to Lucy, ‘it’s hot.’ She looked up at Ray. ‘Do you want some breakfast?’

‘No thanks, I’ll grab something later. I’m going to have a shower.’ He leaned against the doorframe for a moment, watching the three of them eat.

‘We need to leave the gate open for the window-cleaner on Monday,’ Mags said, ‘so can you remember to unlock it when you take the bins out tomorrow night? Oh, and I went round to see next door about the trees, and they’re going to get them cut back in the next couple of weeks, although I’ll believe that when I see it.’

Ray wondered if the Post would run a story on last night’s job. They were quick enough to pick up on the ones the police didn’t solve, after all.

‘That sounds great,’ he said.

Mags put down her fork and looked at him.

‘What?’ Ray said. He went upstairs to shower, pulling out his BlackBerry to drop a line to the on-call press officer. It would be a shame not to capitalise on a job well done.

‘Thank you for today,’ Mags said. They were sitting on the sofa, but neither of them had so far bothered to turn on the television.

‘What for?’

‘For putting work aside for once.’ Mags tipped her head back and closed her eyes. The lines at the corners of her eyes relaxed and she looked instantly younger: Ray realised how often she seemed to be frowning, nowadays, and he wondered if he did the same.

Mags had the sort of smile Ray’s mother used to call ‘generous’. ‘That just means I’ve got a big mouth,’ Mags laughed, the first time she heard it.

Ray’s own mouth twitched at the memory. Maybe she did smile a little less nowadays, but she was still the same Mags she’d been all those years ago. She frequently moaned about the weight she had put on since the kids were born, but Ray rather liked the way she was now; her stomach round and soft, her breasts low and full. His compliments fell on deaf ears, and he had long since given up on them.

‘It was great,’ Ray said. ‘We should do it more often.’ They had spent the day at home, pottering about and playing cricket in the garden, making the most of the sunshine. Ray had got out the old Swingball set from the shed, and both kids had messed around with it for the rest of the afternoon, despite Tom saying loudly how ‘lame’ it was.

‘It was nice to see Tom laughing,’ Mags said.

‘He’s not done a lot of that lately, has he?’

‘I’m worried about him.’

‘Do you want to speak to the school again?’

‘I don’t think there’s any point,’ Mags said. ‘It’s nearly the end of the school year. I’m hoping a change of teacher will make a difference, plus he won’t be one of the youngest any more – maybe that’ll give him a bit of confidence.’

Ray was trying to sympathise with his son, who had drifted through the last term at school with the same lack of enthusiasm that had concerned his teacher at the start of the year.

‘I just wish he’d talk to us,’ Mags said.

‘He swears blind nothing’s wrong,’ Ray said. ‘He’s a typical adolescent boy, that’s all, but he’s going to have to snap out of it, because if he still has the same attitude to school when he gets to GCSE year, he’s buggered.’

‘You two seemed to get on better today,’ Mags said.

It was true, they had survived the whole day without arguing. Ray had bitten his tongue at Tom’s occasional back-chat, and Tom had cut down on the eye-rolling. It had been a good day.

‘And it wasn’t that bad, switching off the BlackBerry, was it?’ Mags said. ‘No palpitations? Cold sweats? DTs?’

‘Ha ha. No, it wasn’t that bad.’ He hadn’t switched it off, of course, and it had vibrated constantly in his pocket throughout the day. Eventually he had retired to the loo to sift through his emails and make sure he wasn’t missing anything urgent. He had replied to one from the chief about Op Break, and glanced at a message from Kate about the hit-and-run, that he was itching to go and read properly. What Mags didn’t understand was that ignoring the BlackBerry for a weekend would leave him with so much to do on Monday that he would spend the rest of the week catching up with it, unable to deal with anything else that came in.

He stood up. ‘I’m going to go into the study and do an hour or so now, though.’

‘What? Ray, you said no work!’

Ray was confused. ‘But the kids are in bed.’

‘Yes, but I’m—’ Mags stopped and gave a tiny shake of her head, as though she had something in her ear.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. It’s fine. Do what you have to do.’

‘I’ll be down in an hour, I promise.’

It was closer to two hours later when Mags pushed open the door to the study. ‘I thought you might like a cup of tea.’

‘Thank you.’ Ray stretched, groaning as he felt something click in his back.

Mags put the mug down on his desk and peered over Ray’s shoulder at the thick sheaf of papers he was reading. ‘Is this the nightclub job?’ She scanned the uppermost sheet. ‘Jacob Jordan? Wasn’t that the boy who was killed in the hit-and-run last year?’

‘That’s the one.’

Mags looked puzzled. ‘I thought that had been filed.’

‘It has.’

Mags sat on the arm of the easy chair they kept in the study because it clashed with the sitting-room carpet. It didn’t really fit in Ray’s office, but it was the most comfortable armchair he had ever sat in, and he refused to part with it. ‘So why is CID still working on it?’

Ray sighed. ‘They’re not,’ he said. ‘The case is closed, but I never filed the paperwork. We’re just taking a look through with a fresh pair of eyes, to see if we missed anything.’

‘ We? ’

Ray paused. ‘The team.’ He didn’t know why he didn’t mention Kate, but it would be strange to make a point of it now. Better to keep her out of it, in case the chief did ever get wind of it. No need for Kate’s copybook to be blotted so early in her career.

‘Oh, Ray,’ Mags’s voice was soft, ‘haven’t you got enough on your plate with live jobs, without doing cold case reviews?’

‘This one’s still warm,’ Ray said. ‘And I can’t help feeling we were pulled off it too soon. If we could take another pass at it, we might find something.’

There was a pause before Mags spoke. ‘It’s not like Annabelle, you know.’

Ray tightened his grip on the handle of his mug.

‘Don’t.’

‘You can’t torture yourself like this over every job you don’t solve.’ Mags leaned forward and squeezed his knee. ‘You’ll drive yourself mad.’

Ray took a sip of tea. Annabelle Snowden had been the first job he had dealt with when he took over as DI. She had gone missing after school and her mum and dad had been frantic. At least, they had seemed frantic. Two weeks later, Ray had charged her father with murder, after Annabelle’s body was found hidden in the divan base of a bed at his flat; she had been kept alive there for more than a week.