‘Nerja.’ Sellers wrote it down. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve still-’
‘No, but I do remember the e-mail address.’ Mrs Fitzgerald beamed. ‘It was amysgonetospain@hotmail.com. No apostrophe. My secretary and I had a long discussion about it. Not Jenny-my previous secretary, Sheila. The missing apostrophe annoyed me. Sheila said she’d never seen an e-mail address with an apostrophe in it, and I said that if one couldn’t use apostrophes in Hotmail addresses, then why not avoid the problem altogether by coming up with an address that doesn’t require an apostrophe?’
‘Is there a computer here that I can use?’ asked Gibbs. Jenny Naismith nodded and led him to her desk. ‘Worth a try,’ he said to Sellers.
‘What about Amy’s old address?’ Sellers asked the headmistress. ‘The people who live there now might have a forwarding address for the Olivas.’
‘They might,’ Mrs Fitzgerald agreed. ‘Good idea. I can root that out for you, certainly.’
Sellers was relieved that she didn’t know it by heart. He’d been starting to wonder if she had special powers.
When the head turned to face him again, armed with a sheet of A4 paper, she had a more reserved expression on her face. ‘Is Amy… all right?’
Sellers was about to say something reassuring when Gibbs said, ‘That’s what we’re trying to find out.’ He didn’t look up from the keyboard.
‘We have to work on the assumption that she’s fine unless we find out that she isn’t. Which hopefully we won’t.’ Sellers smiled.
‘Will you let me know the very second there’s any news?’ asked Mrs Fitzgerald.
‘Of course.’
‘I liked Amy. I worried about her too. She was extremely bright, very passionate, very creative, but like many sensitive, creative children, she tended to overreact. Hysterically, sometimes. I think she did it to make life more interesting, actually. As an adult, I’m sure she’ll be one of those women who creates drama wherever she goes. She once said to me, “Mrs Fitzgerald, my life’s like a story, isn’t it, and I’m the main person in the story.” I said, “Yes, I suppose so, Amy,” and she said, “That means I can make up what happens.” ’
‘Number 2, Belcher Close, Spilling,’ Jenny Naismith read from the piece of paper in her boss’s hand. ‘Amy’s old address.’
‘Do you want to look at our A-Z or have you got sat nav?’
Sellers covered his mouth with his hand to hide a grin. Barbara Fitzgerald had pronounced it as if it were the name of an Eastern deity: his venerable holiness, Sat Nav. ‘We’ll find it,’ he said.
Was a trip to Spain likely to fall into his lap? Why couldn’t it be France? He could take Stace; she could practise her French-there was no doubt she needed the practice. Sellers had done French O level, got a B, and he reckoned Stace was the sort of person who’d never be able to learn a language. She just didn’t get it. She was rubbish. If he could have taken her to France, it might have helped. Maybe Spanish was easier. Maybe he could persuade her to switch. Better still, he could take Suki to Spain…
Barbara Fitzgerald handed Sellers a list of names. He counted them. Twenty-seven. Great. Would Kombothekra want him to collect twenty-seven accounts of a visit to an owl sanctuary in the hope that someone would remember who took which photographs? That’d be fun. Sellers was halfway out of the school office when he remembered he’d left Gibbs behind. He turned, doubled back on himself.
Jenny Naismith was walking up and down behind her desk, too polite to ask when she might once again have the use of her computer. Gibbs had stopped typing and was staring at his Yahoo inbox, blowing spit bubbles. ‘Are you ready?’ Sellers asked him. How to be charming and graceful, by Christopher Gibbs. ‘You’re not waiting for Amy Oliva to reply, are you? She’ll be at school.’
‘So? That’s all schools do these days, isn’t it? Buy kids computers to play with?’
‘In this country, sadly, things are going in that direction,’ said Barbara Fitzgerald from the doorway. ‘If you’re talking about the state sector, that is. In Spain, I’m not sure. But, you know, there’s no point sitting there and waiting.’ She smiled fondly at Gibbs; Sellers found himself feeling quite impressed. ‘Forget about it for the time being and try again later.’
Gibbs grunted, abandoned the keyboard and mouse.
As he and Sellers walked back to the car, Sellers said, ‘Wise words indeed, mate. Is that what Debbie says when you can’t get it up? Forget about it for the time being and try again later.’
‘Not a problem I have.’ Gibbs sounded bored. ‘Right, what now?’
‘Better check in with Kombothekra.’ Sellers pulled his phone out of his pocket.
‘Is he Asian?’ Gibbs asked. ‘Stepford?’
‘Of course not, pillock. He’s half Greek, half upper-crust English.’
‘Greek? He looks Asian.’
‘Sarge, it’s me.’ Sellers gave Gibbs a look that Barbara Fitzgerald would no doubt have thought too discouraging, bad for morale. ‘The photos are of Amy Oliva and her mother, confirmed. That’s Oliva spelled O-L-I-V-A. They were brought in by a woman who called herself Esther Taylor… sorry? What?’
‘What?’ Gibbs mouthed, when the silent nodding had gone on for too long.
‘All right, Sarge. Will do.’
‘What, for fuck’s sake?’
Sellers rubbed the screen of his mobile phone with his thumb. He thought about the helium balloons his children were given at parties and in restaurants. They tried so hard to clutch on to the strings, but they could never maintain their grip and eventually the balloons drifted up and out of reach. There was nothing you could do but watch as they escaped at speed. That was how Sellers was starting to feel about this case.
Double or nothing. He would have preferred nothing.
‘Corn Mill House, in the garden,’ he said. ‘They’ve found two more bodies. One’s a child.’
‘Boy or girl?’ asked Simon, aware that this question was normally asked in happier circumstances. He, Kombothekra and Tim Cook, the pathologist, stood by the door to the greenhouse, away from the rest of the men. Kombothekra hadn’t worked with Cook before. Simon had, many times. He, Sellers and Gibbs knew him as Cookie and sometimes drank with him in the Brown Cow, but Simon was embarrassed to make this obvious to Kombothekra; he hated the nickname anyway, regarded it as unsuitable for a grown man.
‘Not sure.’ Cook was at least five years younger than Simon, tall and thin with dark, spiky hair. Simon knew that he had a girlfriend who was fifty-two, that they’d met at a local badminton club. Cook could be unbelievably boring on the subject of badminton, but would say little, even when urged by Sellers and Gibbs-especially then-about his older partner.
Simon couldn’t believe the age gap didn’t bother Cook. He, Simon, could never have a relationship with anyone twenty years older than himself. Or twenty years younger, for that matter. Or with anyone. He pushed away the unwelcome thought. Half the time he prayed Charlie would change her mind, the other half he was grateful she’d had the good sense to turn him down. ‘ “Not sure”?’ he said impatiently. ‘That’s the sort of expert opinion I could have come up with myself.’
‘It’s a girl.’ Sam Kombothekra sighed heavily. ‘Amy Oliva. And the woman’s her mother, Encarna Oliva.’ He turned, glanced at the makeshift grave behind him, then turned back. ‘It’s got to be them. Family annihilation mark two. Keeping the media at bay’s going to be a nightmare.’
‘We know nothing,’ Simon pointed out. Sometimes he heard a phrase that he knew would be impossible to dislodge from his mind. Family annihilation mark two. ‘Whoever they are, this can’t be a family annihilation.’ He resented having to use Professor Harbard’s crass definition. ‘Mrs Oliva can’t have buried her own body, can she? Laid a lawn over herself? Or are you saying her husband killed them? Mr Oliva? What’s his first name?’