Jacob followed Gina towards the kitchen, passing Howard’s office as they headed through. The man’s thick grey hair flopped a little as he turned his head in an animated way, giving them a smile as he continued talking about servers and hard drives on the phone. Mary closed the door on his conversation and put the kettle on. ‘Coffee?’
They both nodded and smiled.
‘Have you heard anything at all?’ Gina had to ask before they started.
Mary pulled three mugs off the shelf and pierced a new jar of coffee before spooning the granules into the mugs. The kettle began to growl into action, first gently, then aggressively, like an angry toddler building up to a tantrum. Gina inhaled the coffee’s scent. Opening a new jar was one of life’s simple pleasures in her world.
Mary dropped a spoon into one of the cups. ‘No, nothing.’
‘Are you alright?’
The woman wiped a tear away. ‘This is tearing my family apart. Clare is still convinced that Susan has just run off for a while, Howard isn’t really getting involved and just makes me tea all the time. I don’t bloody well want tea, I’m sick of tea and I’m sick of no one doing anything.’
‘I can assure you that we are taking all this very seriously, Mary. I need to ask you something.’
Water spluttered out of the overfilled kettle as it hit full-on tantrum mode. Gina imagined Clare’s little boy boiling over in this manner. He was a lively toddler. As Mary poured, the water sloshed a little. She passed the coffees across the breakfast bar just in time to pull the bitty tissue from up her sleeve and catch the falling tear. ‘There’s no milk.’ A tiny fleck of tissue stuck to Mary’s cheek. Gina’s hand almost twitched, wanting to remove it for her, just like she would have done with her own mother. She clenched her fist, trying to suppress the urge.
‘Thank you.’ Mary forced a smile. Gina almost wanted to cry for her, the woman was heartbroken.
She is not my mother. She is not my mother.Gina repeated those words in her head before pulling her phone from her pocket and opening the photo that Keith had sent her. ‘We have good reason to believe that Susan knew the man who we found dead this morning, Dale Blair. I know this is a shock for you, but I have to show you a photo we found in his house today.’
‘I knew it! Now we all know that something has happened to her and that I’m not just some crazy mother who is fretting over her errant grown-up daughter.’ She bent her head to the side as she looked at the photo. ‘She can’t be more than fourteen here, but that’s definitely our Susan. My little Susie, that’s what we called her back then.’
‘Do you know the other two children?’
The woman took Gina’s phone and held it closer to the window where the sun shone through, showing off the various brown tones in Mary’s dyed hair, from chocolate to chestnut shades. ‘I recognise the boy. The kids used to pick on him because of his weight and Susan brought him home a couple of times before she ran away. I remember him being upset, in tears actually. I did what any parent would do, I let her go upstairs with him and I took them a drink up. She wasn’t up to no good with him. He was upset and she was comforting him, that’s all.’
‘Do you know his name?’ Gina knew he was called Dale but she wondered what Mary knew.
She shook her head. ‘Is that Dale? Is he the man you found by the river?’
‘We believe so. We are doing everything we can to find Susan. She is our absolute priority. Is there anything you think we should know?’
‘No! Why would I not tell you something if I thought it would bring Susan back home?’
Gina didn’t want to lose her cooperation. She backed off slightly and smiled sympathetically. ‘How about the other girl in the photo? Do you know her?’
‘I’ve never seen her before. I’m pretty good with faces.’ The girl with the long black hair and pasty complexion stared back at the camera, the intensity of her worried stare making Gina want to break away. Gina had seen that very same expression in her own face while tending to her wounds after Terry had attacked her. The girl didn’t look bruised but the fear was there, the fear that her secrets would one day surface. She glanced across at Susan and Dale, they too had a distant look about them.
‘Do you know who may have taken this photo?’
‘No. It wasn’t me, that’s for sure. I’d remember the girl if I’d taken the photo.’
‘Do you know where this photo might have been taken?’
Mary scrunched up her nose as her gaze flitted to the background of the photo. A brick wall with a few unruly brambles climbing up the one end. ‘No, I can’t say that I do.’
‘Mary, I need to ask something of you.’
A dried up tear marked its path down Mary’s cheeks, shining like a silvery stretchmark as she turned into the light.
‘May I have access to Susan’s house, to search it? I know you showed us around but we may find something else that leads us to finding Susan. We have found her car too and we will need to search that.’
‘You’ve found her car?’
Gina sipped the black coffee. ‘Yes, on Damson Close. Do you know if Susan knows anyone who lives there?’
‘No, well she’s never mentioned that she does. She knows a lot of people because of her work. She was probably picking some paperwork up.’
