‘We should interview both Phoebe and Luke,’ Butchers said.
Janine considered it for a moment, she didn’t agree. ‘I know I’m desperate but I’m not that desperate. I’m not pulling juveniles in on the basis of a freaky DVD collection and the fact that they’re in spitting distance. Can you put Luke at the park, or Phoebe?’ she asked him.
Lisa’s phone rang and she answered it.
‘Not yet, but I can try,’ Butchers glanced at his watch.
‘Thought you were otherwise engaged this evening,’ Janine said.
Butchers shrugged. Didn’t seem particularly buoyant about it.
‘Giving her a preview,’ Janine said, ‘life with a cop?’
Butchers didn’t respond, just got a sick look on his face, embarrassed.
‘You need a whole lot more than what you’re giving me to question either of them,’ Janine said.
‘Boss,’ Lisa held up her phone, she looked fed up. She sighed before she spoke, ‘None of the witnesses picked Felicity Wray out of the line-up.’
‘Shit,’ Janine said succinctly.
They were getting nowhere fast. Nothing at the house, barring Butchers’ booty, and now no eyewitness testimony. Janine raised her eyes heavenward and sighed, turned to Lisa and caught sight of Louise Hogg watching from her office. Her old boss Hackett used to do that: snoop and hover, it drove Janine mad. She hoped it wasn’t going to become a habit of Hogg’s too.
‘Release her,’ Janine told Lisa. She felt a wave of frustration, almost wanted to weep. The low point of a bloody lousy day. It felt like they were lurching from one false lead to another. First thinking the child was Sammy and now hitting a brick wall with their most likely suspect. When would their luck change? Would it change? Was this going to be one of those cases that ran aground, the sort of case that broke careers, broke people?
She went back to her office and slammed the door, not caring who heard.
On her way home Janine called to see Claire and Clive Wray. Claire looked empty, her greeting dulled, indifferent. And Clive’s reaction on seeing Janine was almost a snarl. The man hummed with suppressed anger. Janine couldn’t blame him, even though his duplicity had caused the team problems. She simply could not imagine what it must be like to have believed your child dead and then be informed there’d been a cockup and he was still missing.
‘As Sue has told you we’ve reinstated the missing persons investigation,’ Janine said. ‘I also wanted to let you know that we have questioned Felicity and released her-’
‘You’ve let her go,’ he said quickly.
‘We are satisfied that there is no evidence to show she had any involvement.’
‘You see,’ Clive turned to Claire, ‘I told you.’
Claire stared at her husband and gave a short, derisive laugh.
‘The reconstruction is timed for one o’clock tomorrow,’ Janine said.
‘That’s it?’ Clive Wray demanded, his eyes hot with rage. ‘We go through it all for the cameras, so they can plaster it across the news-’
Janine cut him off, ‘Yes, that’s exactly what we want.’ They needed to keep the couple on side, to try and redeem the trust in the police that had been compromised by the mistaken assumptions that Janine and her team had made. The same went for the wider community. If the Wrays made any official complaints or criticised the police to the media the damage would spread.
Momentarily Janine wondered if she should step down, sacrifice herself to try and contain any backlash. Career suicide. But she was not a quitter. She’d be better trying to make things good instead of giving up. ‘The right sort of publicity brings us vital information,’ she said. ‘There are still people we haven’t managed to talk to. I’m hoping they’ll come forward. But we don’t need you to be there, we don’t want to make this any harder-’
‘Oh, we’ll be there,’ Clive Wray vowed, ‘you can count on that.’
Claire Wray began to speak, not looking at Janine but staring unseeing at the window opposite. ‘When you told us that you’d found him, when we believed he was dead, it was so… raw and dark. I couldn’t breathe,’ her voice shook, ‘but this – hour after hour wondering – this is worse.’
‘I am so sorry,’ Janine said. She knew from other cases that the hardest thing for families was often the not knowing, the limbo they were thrust into when people disappeared or when foul play was suspected but no body recovered. Even not knowing how someone had died could haunt those left behind.
‘I don’t know what’s happening to him,’ Claire Wray said. ‘I watch the clock move, I count his hours. But I’m not there, I should be there.’ She began to cry, the tears falling down her cheeks, arms folded across her stomach as she rocked forwards and backwards.
It was Sue who went to comfort her as Clive Wray stood, his fists balled and his face set and Janine forced herself to wait until Claire had stopped weeping to take her leave.
Chapter 16
The newspaper headline that greeted Janine when she got home did not help. Dead Boy Not Sammy. Wray Family Agony. She threw it across the room then retrieved it. She had to read what they were saying about her, about the investigation, swallow it all, every acidic line and barbed reference.
Tom had been playing up, trying to provoke Eleanor into a fight by calling her names, ‘bum face’ and ‘snot features’ among them, snatching more than his share of the apple pie and then refusing to do his homework. Exasperated, Janine had first warned him then banned him from any video games that evening. When he carried on being disruptive she sent him upstairs to cool down for half an hour.
She was on her own in the living room, the telly on, working, when he came back down. She closed her laptop as he wandered into the room.
‘Come here,’ she said and patted the sofa next to her.
He slumped down and grabbed one of Eleanor’s toys, the rag doll which, with a flick of the material, could be changed from Little Red Hiding Hood to Granny to the Wolf.
‘You OK?’ she asked him.
He swung the doll between his hands. ‘I don’t want Dad to have a stupid baby,’ he said.
Me neither.
‘Dad will still love you, just the same,’ she said, ‘like when we had Charlotte. Love doesn’t run out – it just stretches.’
‘Like an elastic band?’ Tom said. He flipped the doll over, bared his teeth at the wolf face.
‘Sort of,’ Janine said.
‘Not for grown-ups, it doesn’t,’ Tom said, ‘like if you get a new wife or a new husband.’
‘Ah, no – not then, really. Dad might need a bigger car, though. That won’t stretch.’
‘Whoa!’ Tom said, excited at the prospect.
‘And you might like the baby when you get to know it.’
‘I won’t,’ he said solemnly, ‘I know I won’t.’ He yawned.
‘Bedtime,’ she told him.
It was after ten when she admitted to herself that she wasn’t going to get any more done tonight. She’d been staring at the pictures on her laptop for long enough. Claire Wray and Sammy. But she was too tense to go to bed. She was fed up with Pete and strung out about the investigation. And life, even with four kids to cope with, was very lonely sometimes. What she needed was some distraction. A bit of R and R. Then she had an idea. She rang Pete and asked him to come over: something had come up at work.
She went to get changed.
His face when he set eyes on her, in her party gear, was a picture.
‘I thought you said work,’ he objected.
‘Work related,’ Janine smiled. ‘Tina OK?’ she said, giving him a chance to tell her about the baby.
‘What? Yeah… fine.’
Coward. Why couldn’t he just have the guts to be straight with her?
The taxi pulled up then and sounded its horn and she could make a smooth exit without saying something nasty that she’d regret. And without giving him chance to argue the toss about her going out and leaving him to babysit under false pretences.