The Search Party Read online

  “For Christ’s sake, Luke,” I chipped in. “Dylan’s not a baby anymore. Do you think your parents would give leaving him alone a second thought? Besides, what’s he gonna do, overdose on screen time?”

  It’s like I said, Dylan spent half his life playing games on his Xbox. Fortnite, Call of Duty, all that. His parents didn’t care, and Luke had given up trying to stop him. Apart from anything, it gave Luke a break from having to look after him. Because Dylan didn’t really have any friends, and if he wasn’t plugged into something, he spent most of the time getting on our nerves. Sticking his nose in, whining about wanting to join in. Just little brother stuff, really. But it was hard on Luke, is my point.

  So, anyway, Luke shook his head. “Sorry, guys. I can’t do it. How about I talk to my aunt later and see if she can watch Dylan tomorrow? Then we can all go down to the river in the morning, see if the cops’ll let us join in the line search.”

  “But that’s the point,” Fash said. “They won’t let us join in, and anyway, they’re looking in the wrong place.”

  Luke narrowed his eyes. “How do you know?”

  “I . . . I don’t,” Fash said. “But it’s obvious, isn’t it? Otherwise they would have found her by now.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Luke. “The tides, the reeds . . . you know what it’s like down there. And anyway, that’s where they found Sadie’s bag.”

  Which shut everyone up for a second. Because that was the thing. You could tell yourself that Sadie was just lying hurt somewhere, just like Fash had said. Or that maybe she was on a plane to Goa, or diving at the Great Barrier Reef. But then you remembered about her bag, the one you lot found down by the riverbank. Her rucksack, with her phone in, her wallet.

  Everything.

  “Come on, guys,” said Abi. “He’s said he can’t. We shouldn’t force him.” And she gave Fash a little tug.

  “Come on, man,” Fash said, still looking at Luke. “Come with us. Last time I’m gonna ask, I promise.”

  Luke stared back at him, sort of frowning. “You’re really gonna go?”

  Me, Fash and Abi all looked at each other. We shrugged.

  “And you really think . . . I mean, you reckon there’s an actual chance? That we might find her?”

  Fash smiled with one corner of his mouth. “There’s always a chance, mate.”

  Luke looked over his shoulder at Dylan, who was still staring at the TV.

  “Aw, sod it. Wait there.”

  Luke shut the door in our faces. Six minutes later he opened it again, his school rucksack hooked across his shoulder. “I’ve told Dylan I’m going to the shops. And I’m not his babysitter, right?”

  “Right,” said Fash, grinning his grin, which got the rest of us all smiling and that, too. We weren’t happy. It wasn’t that. For me it was mainly relief, I suppose. I felt anxious as well, but in a good way, like we’d finally taken back control. And we were doing it together. You know? After days of never feeling so alone.

  It lasted as far as the footbridge. The buzz or whatever you want to call it. The sense we were setting off on an adventure. Because that’s when Abi said what we were all thinking, even if it was only at the back of our minds.

  “What about Mason?” she said, and that was the point it basically turned to shit.

  “A SEARCH PARTY?”

  “That’s what they’re claiming, sir,” said Fleet. “We started interviewing them at the station first thing.”

  Fleet was with Superintendent Roger Burton on the banks of the river, watching the divers as they surfaced amid the reeds. They were only half a mile or so from the estuary now, already within the ragged fringes of the town. They’d started farther upriver, close to the point Sadie’s rucksack had been discovered, and the going had been slow. As the river emerged from the woods, the undergrowth along its banks was thick and wide, and the tides were among the most treacherous on and around the entire south coast. Initially they’d been lucky with the weather, but now even that had turned against them. The rain was one thing, churning up the water and washing away any clues that might otherwise have been picked up by the line searches. But it was the light that hampered them most of all. It was barely September. Three days ago there had been sunbathers on the beach. Yet with the cloud cover and the fog of rain, it was now perennially 4 p.m. in deep December. Literally, metaphorically, they were floundering in the dark.

  “At the station?” said Burton. “You’re treading carefully, I hope?”

  “The doctors have given the four that made it out the all clear. Abigail Marshall, Cora Briggs, Fareed Hussein and Mason Payne. They had a few cuts, some bruises, in one case a badly damaged knee. Only two of them had to stay in the hospital overnight, but they’re coming in later this morning. And we’ve got appropriate adults lined up.”

  “Not the parents?”

  “We’re trying to discourage it. In light of events . . . Well. There are potential conflicts of interest.”

  They’d interviewed Sadie’s friends before, of course, several times over, but since their excursion into the woods, the situation in terms of Sadie’s disappearance had moved on. Quite how, Fleet was yet to decide. The stories the kids had so far told about what had happened out there were garbled, just as Nicky had said. Though when Fleet had spoken to them in the woods, it was entirely probable they’d been in shock.

  “A search party,” Burton muttered, shaking his head. “Did they not stop to think about how it would look?”

  Burton was a tall man, prim, wearing pristine Wellingtons and waterproofs. He was a politician policeman, with a wife he was probably fond of, but kids Fleet had a feeling his boss would struggle to identify in a lineup. Maybe that was unfair, and it wasn’t as though Fleet was one to judge. But it was family men who went furthest in the force these days, and everything with Burton was about how things might look.

  “With respect, sir, they’re teenagers. I don’t imagine they cared. And anyway, it turned out to be something else entirely.”

  Burton sniffed. “You’re not kidding. A funeral procession, is what it turned into. How the hell does one of them end up dead?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out. But they’re all claiming they either didn’t see or they can’t remember.”

  “Can’t remember?”

  “I know how it sounds. But when it happened, it would have happened fast. And if there was a tussle, it’s entirely possible there was a lot of confusion. Maybe no one actually meant for it to happen.”

  “You mean it was an accident?” said the superintendent.

  “I didn’t say that. All I’m really saying is, it doesn’t look to be as straightforward as we first thought.”

  “Christ, Rob. The last thing I need right now is complications.”

  Fleet bit his tongue. A missing girl. Her brother dead. The search continuing along the river, and—what? A new search out in the woods? At what point during recent events had the superintendent assumed there wouldn’t be complications?

  “We’ll get to the bottom of it, sir. It will take a bit of time, that’s all. It doesn’t help that they’re minors.”

  The superintendent grimaced in apparent frustration. He shook his head again. “It’s the parents I feel most sorry for. First Sadie, now this. I spoke to them this morning, you know. Mr. and Mrs. Saunders.”

  The parents. It was always the parents that people felt most sorry for. The assumption seemed to be that because the parents were grieving, they could be absolved of all responsibility. Which wasn’t how it worked in Fleet’s book.

  “We haven’t given up on Sadie yet, sir,” Fleet said. “She’s still out there somewhere.” Although he thought of something one of Sadie’s friends had said, about watching a sand timer. And there was no question it had just about run out. After disappearing from her house in the middle of the night, Sadie had now been missing
for seven days. They had no leads, no firm suspects, and no evidence that didn’t complicate the picture further. Christ, they weren’t even sure yet what kind of case they were working.

  Burton looked at him intently. “Have they given you anything to go on in terms of Sadie? Why were they looking for her in the woods, twenty miles from the river?”

  “That’s partly what I was trying to say. I’m not sure they were looking for her. Maybe one or two of them thought they were, but . . .” Now Fleet was the one to shake his head. He was talking in riddles, his own uncertainty undermining the clarity he knew the superintendent prized. “Bottom line is,” Fleet went on, “they’re saying that they still don’t know where Sadie is, or what happened to her.”

  “And do you believe them?” asked Burton.

  “I . . . No,” Fleet said. “I don’t know. To be honest, I’m not sure what to believe. But, as you’re aware, I’ve had a feeling they’ve been holding back on us from the start.”

  The superintendent thought for a minute, then exhaled deeply. He lifted his face toward the rain. “Come on,” he said, turning to Fleet. “Let’s get some coffee. All we’re doing out here is getting wet.”

  It was Burton’s walk that had taken him to the superintendent’s office, Fleet often thought. Wherever he was going, whatever the route, he moved with purpose. He strode, in fact, and Fleet had to exaggerate his own step to keep up. Someone watching would more likely have assumed Burton had been called to a phone call with the prime minister than to an appointment with a pot of coffee. Although coffee, of course, wasn’t really the point. The man was mingling, showing his face—to the troops, to the volunteers, to the cameras. That was why he’d driven down here on such short notice. He couldn’t not, after the debacle in the woods. Already the media attention was more intense than ever, and the brass had to be seen to be in control.

  Fleet might have been resentful at the implied affront—he was the one who was supposed to be running things, after all—but the truth was he didn’t much care. Burton could give the orders if he wanted to, so long as he didn’t stop Fleet from doing his job. In fact, the more Burton flounced about in front of the cameras, the less Fleet was obliged to do it, and the more time he had for proper police work.

  They headed toward the Overlook, a café-cum-visitors’-center that had become the de facto headquarters for the search. Volunteers were being fed and watered in the main restaurant, while the police had been given access to a large back room to allow them to coordinate activities beyond the media’s glare.

  Fleet didn’t want any coffee. For the past week, it had felt like he’d subsisted on nothing but. It was just as well, though, because Burton seemed to have forgotten that’s what they’d come in for. After spending ten minutes pressing flesh with the volunteers, pausing every so often for a camera flash and obliging Fleet to do the same, Burton led the way behind the counter, into the squad’s makeshift command center. TVs, telephones and computers had been set up on foldaway desks, and the floor was a potential lawsuit of power cords. There were three officers seated at the workstations, and when Burton strode in, they stood up.

  “Give us the room, please, ladies and gentlemen.”

  Fleet tried to hide his surprise: that anyone would actually use that phrase outside a Hollywood movie; and that Burton had something to impart that he hadn’t foreseen. Whatever it was, it was unlikely to improve Fleet’s day.

  “How’s Holly?” Burton asked him, once the junior officers had filed outside.

  “Holly? She’s . . .” Clearly Burton hadn’t heard about the split. Not that he should have. Fleet and his wife had kept their troubles to themselves, their separation a yearlong secret. It would all come out when the divorce went through, obviously, but Fleet was happy to delay the inevitable outpouring of bogus sympathy for as long as he could. “She’s well, sir,” he finally answered. “Thank you.”

  “Any potential new recruits on the horizon?” Burton pressed, out of politeness or lack of tact, Fleet could not have said. “Children, I mean,” the superintendent added, unnecessarily.

  “I . . . No, sir. I would say not.”

  Burton looked mildly affronted. “Well, don’t leave it too long. We’re none of us getting any younger.” He seemed to glance at Fleet’s belly—unless that was Fleet imagining things. Jesus, Rob, if your weight’s starting to make you paranoid, maybe it’s time to do something about it. Start running. Take up swimming again. Anything.

  Burton pulled out a chair from under a nearby desk and settled on the seat as though deflating. Fleet hadn’t noticed when Burton had been preening in front of the cameras, but the superintendent—only just past fifty—did look old. Yes, he was slimmer than Fleet, and would have run rings around him on the squash court, but there were lots of different kinds of healthy, as Holly so frequently delighted in reminding him. Maybe Fleet should get more exercise, and maybe he should cut down on the mayo in his BLTs—not to mention laying off the smoking and the caffeine—but Burton was like a high-performance tire that was wearing thin. Sooner or later, the man would burst.

  “Another word of advice, Rob,” the superintendent said, as though reading Fleet’s mind. “Don’t go into politics. It ages a man quicker than cancer.”

  Fleet sat down on a chair opposite him. Screens had been put up to cover the windows, but through a crack he could just make out a group of locals watching the divers from the bank of the river. “I’d say there’s very little chance of that either,” Fleet said.

  Burton’s smile flickered, then went out. “Rob, listen,” he said, leaning forward.

  Fleet braced himself. Here we go.

  “There has been . . . talk,” the superintendent said.

  “Talk, sir?”

  “People are saying—unfairly, I might add—that we messed up.”

  The we being purely figurative, Fleet assumed.

  “This search party,” the superintendent went on. “They’re saying we should have found them sooner.”

  “All I can say, sir, is that we would have found them sooner. If their parents had informed us they were gone. And if—” Fleet stopped himself. It was true that the kids in the search party had only been reported missing almost thirty-six hours after they had apparently started out, but in his opinion that wasn’t the main reason they hadn’t been found. As soon as he’d heard the kids were gone, Fleet had wanted to divert some of the resources that were tied up in the hunt for Sadie, but Burton had wielded his veto. He’d justified it in all sorts of fancy ways, but the message, boiled down, was that it wouldn’t have looked right. There was a significant police presence in the woods now, of course, but to Fleet’s mind it was a clear case of shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted.

  The superintendent had recovered his posture. “It’s easy to be wise in retrospect, Detective Inspector. And it’s unbecoming to crow ‘I told you so.’”

  Once again Fleet was obliged to hold his tongue. The joke among Fleet and some of his peers was that, as a copper, you were forced to hold your tongue so much, you might as well have one hand tied behind your back.

  The superintendent softened his tone. “Look,” he said, “I’m on your side, Rob. I am. That’s why I wanted to have this conversation with you. In private. Before things have a chance to escalate.”

  Fleet waited.

  “All I’m trying to convey,” Burton went on, “is the urgency that now applies to this situation. We need results, and we need them quickly.”

  “A teenage girl has been missing for a week,” Fleet responded. “Nobody’s been sitting on their hands.”

  “I know that. And I know your strengths, Rob. There’s not a doubt in my mind that you’re the best person to lead this investigation. That’s why I appointed you in the first place.”

  But? thought Fleet.

  “But the perception is, things are spiraling out of control. We don
’t even know what we’re really dealing with. Two searches now, rather than one? Two murders, potentially—assuming we ever find Sadie. Added to which, there have been . . . complaints.”

  “Complaints?”

  “From the local community. A feeling has been expressed that you may be using this investigation to settle old scores. To do with that business between the locals and your sister.”

  Fleet shifted, not trusting himself to speak.

  Burton sighed. “We’re caught in the middle here, Rob. Half the town is asking why we didn’t charge these kids when we had the opportunity, if we were really so certain they were involved in Sadie’s disappearance. The rest of the community—not to mention the press—has decided that we put too much pressure on them. That it was our fault they set off in the first place. Which makes it our fault what happened out there in the woods.”

  Fleet opened his mouth to respond, and Burton raised a hand.

  “I know it’s bullshit, Rob. If I’d had any concerns about your history here, I wouldn’t have brought you in. You’re a bloodhound. You pick up a scent and you follow it. All I’m saying is, if it turns out we’ve been on the wrong trail, and there’s no pot of gold at the end of it . . .”

  “The bloodhound will be in for a kicking,” Fleet finished.

  Burton looked at him coldly, as though Fleet were the one making his life difficult. He breathed, and Fleet got a waft of what the superintendent had eaten for breakfast.

  “There are two ways to look at this, you know,” Burton said. “The fiasco in the woods, I mean. We can view it as the failure the press are already saying it was, and allow ourselves to be pilloried by the public. Or, we can see it as an opportunity.”

  “An opportunity, sir?” Really?

  “To move things on. To get a result.”

  “An arrest, you mean. Someone to blame. If not for Sadie, then for everything else.”

  “Or perhaps, in an ideal world, for Sadie as well.”

  Fleet frowned. “I’m not sure I’m following you, sir.”