Ali Harper - The Disappeared - A gripping crime mystery full of twists and turns!

Jack’s letter, plus the fact that there hadn’t been a ransom demand, at least not one we knew about, suggested he hadn’t been kidnapped, so I was working on the second theory. Jack didn’t know the money was there. Which, of course, begged the questions: who would hide twenty-four grand in someone else’s socks? And why? One thing was certain, Brownie knew something.

‘Hello?’ said Jo. ‘Tea?’

We needed to go back to the beginning, and to me the beginning spells the nuclear. We’d met Jack’s mother, or at least someone who claimed to be his mother. Stood to reason we now needed to meet his dad. See what light he could shed. Was Jack’s mother dead? Was Mrs Wilkins really a stepmother? And if she was, what kind of stepmother? The kind her stepson confided in? I hoped so, for his sake. Because I know better than anyone, if you’ve lost your mother, and your dad’s an arse, you need someone on your side.

Mrs Wilkins said Jack’s dad had washed his hands of his son. I already knew what I thought of Mr Wilkins. ‘We’re going to speak to his dad,’ I said to Jo.

‘Thought you promised we wouldn’t?’

‘That was when Mrs Wilkins promised me she was his mother. And that she was staying at the Queens.’

‘Fair enough.’ I noticed Jo’s pyjama buttons were done up wrong. ‘How?’

‘She wrote down the address on the client contact form.’

‘Like that’s going to be right. Face it, Lee. Everything she’s told us has been a lie.’

‘I’ll google him.’

‘What? Mr Wilkins, Manchester?’

I pushed her in the direction of the door. ‘Get dressed. We need to get to the offices. She’s supposed to ring at nine. If she can’t get through on my mobile, she’ll ring the landline.’

Jo disappeared into the hall and came back a few moments later with a wooden rounders bat that she kept in the understairs cupboard. Not that she’d ever play rounders, but she’d read somewhere that if you beat up a burglar with something that you could reasonably be expected to have in the house, you wouldn’t get arrested. Fortunately, we’d never been called upon to test this theory. She swung it lightly, like she was warming up. ‘What about the dickheads that broke in last night?’

‘We’ll deal with them later.’

The offices were depressing but I didn’t intend to hang around too long. It was almost nine by the time I got there. Jo detoured via Bobats to buy padlocks and more bin liners. I didn’t want to miss Mrs Wilkins’s call. I was fairly certain Mrs Wilkins would ring; she’d been desperate the day before. That kind of desperation doesn’t go away.

Sure enough, at three minutes past nine, the phone the upstairs neighbours had given us trilled. I grabbed the receiver, but Jo got to the hands-free button before me.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi. It’s Susan. Susan Wilkins.’

I exhaled.

‘What news?’ she said. ‘Did you get into the squat?’

‘Where are you?’

‘My hotel.’

‘How is it at the Queens?’ asked Jo. ‘I hear the breakfasts are pretty good.’

‘Never mind that,’ said Mrs Wilkins. ‘How are you getting on?’

‘We’ve run into a couple of problems,’ Jo said, and I hated her for being so blunt, for not shying away from the truth.

‘Nothing serious,’ I lied, as I took a seat on the broken coffee table that was propping up the desk. ‘But there’s a few questions we need to ask.’

‘The main one being—’

I cut Jo off with one of my hard stares. I don’t do them much, so when I do, Jo takes notice. I felt the skin on the back of my neck prickle.

‘What’s happened?’

I guessed what she was thinking. It’s obvious, if you’ve ever lost someone. You think the worst. You think about dead bodies, and possible suicides, cold canals, horrific car smashes. You think about the pictures you thought you’d never have to imagine, the headlines that used to read like fiction, things that would never happen to you. I wanted to reassure her, but I wasn’t sure I had the words.

‘You see, the thing is, Mrs Wilkins, we spoke to his girlfriend and she says—’

‘Carly?’

‘You know her?’

‘No. Not really.’

‘You know her name,’ I said.

‘He mentioned her, the last time I saw him.’

‘At Christmas,’ Jo said, her voice rising like she was checking a fact.

‘I wasn’t sure whether it would develop into anything serious. I assumed they’d split up. Does she know where he is?’

‘No. She hasn’t seen him. He was supposed to meet her, and he didn’t show up.’

‘Meet her where?’

Jo opened her mouth to answer, but I didn’t give her chance. Something about the whole situation was giving me the heebie-jeebies. ‘We can’t give out that kind of information. Not at this stage in the investigation. We’re eliminating people from our enquiries.’

She paused, and I heard her light a cigarette. ‘What did they say at the squat?’

‘Same. He disappeared last Friday – no one’s seen him since. Well, no one we’ve spoken to.’

‘He was good friends with someone in the squat. Brownie, I think he said. Have you spoken to him?’

I didn’t like the way she seemed to know more than she’d let on the day before – yesterday she knew nothing, now it was like she was directing us around our own investigation. I decided to grasp the nettle. ‘I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask you a couple more questions.’

‘Like?’

I inhaled. There was no polite way to put this. ‘His girlfriend, Carly, is under the impression that Jack’s mother, well, that Jack’s mother passed over.’ I know, don’t ask me why – I’ve never said ‘passed over’ in my whole life before. ‘When he was 5.’

Mrs Wilkins muttered something that sounded to my ears like: ‘Never talks about it.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Just, obviously they’re very close.’

‘So,’ I said, when it became obvious she wasn’t going to volunteer any information. ‘Do you know why she might have said that?’

‘I do.’

Another silence that seemed to stretch into the distance. ‘Why did you tell us that you’re—’

‘Jack’s stepmother. I married his father after his mother died.’ She cleared her throat. ‘He was heartbroken. Still is. It’s taken years for him to come to terms with it. She was an amazing woman.’

‘Must be hard. To match up to a dead, amazing woman,’ said Jo, pulling a face at me as she spoke into the phone.

‘I don’t look at it like that,’ came back Mrs Wilkin’s voice. ‘I feel grateful to her.’ Jo stuck two fingers down her throat and pretended to vomit. I don’t know whether Mrs Wilkins had an inkling of what was going on in our offices, but her next sentence seemed pointed and directed at Jo. ‘Women shouldn’t be in competition with each other. If more women—’

‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ interrupted Jo.

‘Didn’t seem relevant,’ she said, and I heard her light another cigarette. ‘To all intents and purposes, I am Jack’s mother. He’s a lost soul, was a lost soul, when I met him. Haunted, really.’

‘You got any other children?’

‘Am I under investigation in my own investigation?’

There was ice in her voice and an awkward pause as Jo and I glanced at each other.

I flinched first. ‘It’s just the more background we have, the better and the quicker we’ll find him. Has Jack got any siblings?’

‘Have you managed to find out anything? Besides he’s got a girlfriend?’

Jo and I had rehearsed this on our way down to the office that morning. How much to tell.

‘He’s moved out of the squat,’ I said. ‘And he didn’t leave a forwarding address.’