‘Ben, I need the keys for the car.’ She’d left the journal inside of it and didn’t want to risk it going missing. He threw them in her direction, and she rushed out to get it.
When she came back up, the inspector had thankfully gone to a meeting, leaving Ben, Cain, Stan and Morgan.
Wendy walked in and looked at their faces. ‘Whose funeral did I miss?’
Ben was shaking his head at her in slow motion.
Cain stared at her. ‘Angela is missing.’
‘Oh, shit. I’m sorry, Cain, how? I mean where?’
‘If I knew that I’d be there right now bringing her home, wouldn’t I, Wendy?’ His tone was acidic, and Wendy rushed to him, throwing her arms around his waist.
‘I’m such an idiot, sorry, Cain. What can I do to help?’
Ben smiled at her. ‘Do you have any news for us?’
‘That partial print hasn’t come back with a hit yet, either that or the system is glitching again because I left it running when I finished last night, so it should have had something back by now.’
Stan looked up from his computer. ‘You got a print? That’s incredible, well done.’
‘Hm, you can thank me when it comes back with an ID for the suspect. At the moment it’s not much help.’
‘You can’t win them all, at least you got something which is better than the nothing we have.’
She nodded and turned her attention back to Cain, then Ben. ‘There must be something I can do?’
Ben spoke. ‘I’m just about to chase up the cell site, if you want to do that it would be a help?’
‘On it, be right back.’
Cain slumped into his chair. ‘What were you not telling me earlier?’
Morgan glanced at Ben who nodded, but she didn’t feel comfortable discussing what she knew with Stan present. It seemed too personal when he was relatively new to the team.
‘Should we go in Ben’s office?’
Ben didn’t follow; he stayed with Stan and left Morgan to speak to Cain in private.
Once they were inside, she passed Cain the Polaroid. He took it from her and studied it.
‘Where did you get this?’
‘Inside the notebook I found in the desk drawer. It slipped out, don’t you think that looks like Angela?’
‘Yeah, but that’s years ago and whose baby is it?’
‘I don’t know, did Angela ever talk to you about her younger days before she became a social worker?’
‘Not really, she said she was married to an arsehole called Jonathan but that was it, said she didn’t dwell on the past because he hurt her and he didn’t deserve her time.’
Morgan felt the cogs begin to slide into place; Lydia Williams had shared a death notice for her uncle Jonathan years ago that had led her to the thoughts she’d had, as uncomfortable as they were.
‘I think that this is Angela’s baby.’
Cain’s head snapped up, his gaze fixed on hers. ‘What are you talking about? She was a social worker, taking babies out of unsafe environments was her job. This could be anyone.’
‘Hear me out, okay. I’ve been going over this again and again since I found it. Look at her face, she looks scared to be holding it. What if it was her baby, maybe she couldn’t cope and gave him up for adoption? If her ex-husband was Jonathan and his sister was the Williams sisters’ mum, maybe they took the baby in and were horrible to him. Maybe Angela didn’t know any of this because they pushed her away and she wasn’t involved in any of their lives. What if she was trying to find him because she felt guilty for letting him go and just maybe she met him at the café yesterday and left with him? She wouldn’t have knownthat he is a dangerous person, or he may not have anything to do with the murders, but we can’t ignore it. We have to consider this could be what happened. She wrote in that pink book about six weeks ago about her hopes for finding her son, but she didn’t write anything recently.’
