“I understand.”
“Let’s see what we can dig up on Peter Flack and his grandmother. I feel like we’re getting somewhere.” I tap the roof of the VW. “Thanks for the lift.”
She tucks a strand of dark-brown hair behind her ear. “It’s me that should be thankingyou, Adam.”
“For what?”
“For asking questions. For getting in touch in the first place.” She indicates the Ziploc bag in my hand. “Most people would have chucked that stuff out and never given it a second thought. Butyoudidn’t, and it’s the first time in so long that anyone haseven been bothered to try finding out what happened to Adrian. It’s been so long since anyone really cared, apart from me and Charlie.”
We say our goodbyes and she climbs back into the car beside her son. I watch the white Volkswagen pull away, toward the junction at the end of Regency Place, waiting until it turns left and disappears around the corner.
Back in the house, Dom greets me in the hall where he’s busy unloading paint, rollers, and dust sheets from his car. He gives me an inquisitive glance.
“So who isshe?”
“Who?”
My brother-in-law shoots me a disappointed look, as if I’m insulting his intelligence, his sister, and the universe in general.
“The mystery woman and her driver,” he says quietly, “who just dropped you home.”
It’s pointless trying to spin him a line. Instead, I hold up the clear plastic bag that Maxine has just given me.
“The address on this ID tag,” I say, “is her house in Kimberley. Her dog, trained by her husband—who’s been missing for more than twenty years.”
I give him a quick summary of my connection to Maxine and the progress we’ve made so far, leading up to the visit to the city’s General Cemetery today.
And yet even as I’m explaining it to Dom, something niggles at me like a stone in my shoe. It’s only now, as I’m sayingit out loud, that I try to give it a shape, a name. Not the fact that Charlie had known exactly where I lived. Something else is bothering me about the last few hours. Something about Maxine. Dom’s darkening expression is a mirror for my own thoughts, as I show him the texts she and I have exchanged over recent days.
It’s taken me a week of digging into the history of this house, of nosing around, inquiring about the contents of the hidden room. A week of finding my way, like a blind man in a strange new place, finding his bearings by touch alone.
But it had taken Maxine less than an hour to come back to me this morning.
In fact, it was a grand total of forty-two minutes between me texting the information about Elizabeth Makepeace, and Maxine’s response with a request to meet at the cemetery. It wasveryquick, a very fast turnaround to find out the information, track down a death certificate and a cemetery, and physically locate a family plot in a place with tens of thousands of headstones. Unless…
“Unless,” my brother-in-law says, “she already knew all about it.”
45
Dom keeps his voice low.
“Look, all I’m saying is that you only just met her. You don’t know anything about her; she could be a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic for all we know.”
“But why would she already know about it?”
He raises an eyebrow. “Like you said, she seemed to find that cemetery plot awfully fast.”
“Her son is some kind of computer whiz,” I say. “I suppose he can track things down.”
“If you say so, Adam.”
“Maybe I’m overthinking this.”
“Maybe you’re right to be careful around strangers.” He’s always doted on his nieces and nephew, and I can tell he’s still particularly bothered by the story of the car that had followed Leah home from school on Thursday. “Especially at the moment.”
Unfortunately, what I thought might be a straightforward internet search turns into a long, frustrating hour.
I already know there’s virtually nothing online about Elizabeth Makepeace apart from a listing on an obscure website recordingher date and place of death, and the date of her burial. I’d hoped there might be something more on Peter Flack, if only for the reason that he had died at a younger age and might have had slightly more of a digital footprint. But searches under his name prove equally futile.
