Page 9

It became increasingly obvious to Seaton that he needed the police. Step by step, he was exhausting every avenue he could think of.

While at Anna’s house, he messaged to ask James if he knew where she was.

James was the one member of that group who he knew independently, and whose number he had.

Of course, as far as James knew, Anna was his god-daughter rather than his daughter, but it wasn’t unreasonable to be concerned about a no-show for lunch.

James replied quickly, but with a message that made Seaton’s heart twist.

She left the ball pretty early with some friend of hers. Kit’s been trying to call her too, but she’s not replying. We haven’t seen her since eleven last night. Hopefully she’s just crashed out, hung-over.

A few seconds later, he messaged again to ask if Seaton needed help tracking her down. Seaton was already messaging back to ask who the friend she’d left with was. But James’s reply was more than disappointing.

Sorry, I don’t know him. Saw the two of them at a distance and honestly couldn’t tell you. Are things ok?

Seaton tried to still his anxiety while he thought for a minute, and then messaged:

Thank you. Could you ask around? A bit worried for her. Call me if you hear anything, please.

He stepped outside the house, and paused. Should he be saying more? Should he be insisting that he needed a description of this friend, and an exact account of where Anna had been and how she’d seemed?

Perhaps he should call Philip Sedgewick, too. Ask him to step in. He was the sort of person who always, always knew what to do in a crisis.

But he stopped short with his phone in his hand, too afraid of bringing Anna’s whole house of cards crashing down. Something that would be terrible for him, and possibly dangerous for her.

What should he be doing? He was standing on her doorstep now, immobile, and he had to act.

He wanted to try calling that temporary phone of hers again but he was worried about that, too. If she’d ended up stuck somewhere, he might just drain her battery. And if she was hiding, he’d only bring attention to her.

Just as he lifted his head from his phone with a sigh, he caught sight of a retreating figure striding away towards town. It looked, he thought, like Kit Frankland, dressed in a polo shirt and jeans.

He tried to make out the young man’s profile as he turned the corner of the terrace, but he still wasn’t sure. All he’d seen of Kit was a series of photographs on Anna’s laptop, and the figure wasn’t close enough for his features to be clear.

And surely if it was Kit, he’d be here trying to track Anna down. He would have knocked on the door. Wouldn’t he?

Seaton hesitated and then decided it was time to make all this official. He had an old university acquaintance who was an assistant chief constable at Cambridgeshire Constabulary. He was the man for this.

Gerry and he hadn’t exactly been close, but when your daughter was missing, a high-ranking officer was exactly the kind of man you wanted on your side.

Seaton’s call was answered by some admin clerk who told him they couldn’t put him through to specific officers if Seaton didn’t know their extension. They were then particularly obtuse about passing on a message.

So Seaton decided to go to the station in person. He’d file a missing persons report, he decided, then ask to see Gerry and have it prioritised.

The first thing that went wrong was the wait. By the time he’d sat for thirty-five minutes in a stifling-hot reception area at the police station, with the dehydrating effects of the lunchtime champagne kicking in and increasing levels of real hunger, his anxiety had morphed into anger.

When he was then faced with a slow-moving constable who took almost ten minutes just to take down basic details, he found himself snapping.

‘Look, is there someone more senior I can talk to?’ he’d said, his voice tight. Irritable. ‘This really is quite urgent.’

The constable, a man probably in his late twenties, had raised an eyebrow at him. ‘This will obviously go to someone more senior, and if your daughter is deemed high risk, it’ll be treated urgently.’

‘Well, of course she’s high risk,’ he snapped. ‘As I said, she was undercover, in the middle of investigating a murder. She was last seen with the people who killed a young woman last year.’

‘So you said,’ the constable replied. ‘I just need to go through the process…’

‘Look, I’m sure there are faster ways,’ Seaton said, before the constable could go on. ‘I’m a Cambridge fellow and a friend of Gerry Siegland’s. You just ring him, and I’ll explain this to him. I’m sure he’ll understand the urgency.’

For Seaton’s entire life, his position in the university had opened doors. It had gained him respect. But for some reason, as the constable looked up from his iPad, Seaton felt a shiver of uncertainty. Because the PC wasn’t looking at him with respect. Instead there was… something else.

‘Sorry,’ the officer said with a very forced-sounding politeness, ‘do you mean the former assistant chief constable?’

‘What?’

‘Former Assistant Chief Constable Siegland?’ the PC asked flatly.

‘I… I had no idea he’d retired,’ Seaton said, feeling his uncertainty growing.

There was a flicker around the PC’s eyes, and Seaton was suddenly certain that Gerry Siegland had not, in fact, retired. That there had been some kind of scandal.

‘Perhaps there’s someone else…?’ he tried.

He saw the way the PC’s mouth tightened and he knew he’d played this wrong.

You’ve messed this up , he thought. Why couldn’t you actually keep in touch with these people? You would have known about Gerry.

But he hadn’t kept in touch with Gerry because Gerry was an obnoxious, bullying ass. With a sinking sensation, Seaton imagined the kind of trouble Gerry might have got himself into in a position of authority. The kind of trouble Seaton now appeared to be associated with.

After a brief pause, the PC said– in a very measured voice that Seaton suspected was an attempt to hide disgust– ‘Everyone who comes into the station will be listened to with respect, no matter who they know. Your daughter’s case will be taken as seriously as it needs to be.’

But it became clear that it wasn’t being taken seriously. That Seaton had lost credibility with the PC, and that he’d lost it further when the PC presumably caught a whiff of the champagne on his breath and asked him if he’d been drinking, to which Seaton stiffly admitted that he had.

It only got worse when the constable tried to ask him where Anna might have gone.

Who she might have contacted. And Seaton had to admit, with a miserable sense of shame, that he didn’t know.

That he only had one contact number for someone she’d been investigating– James’s number– and her editor’s phone number. That was it.

‘With the two of you being… not all that close,’ the PC said after a pause, ‘is it possible that she just decided she didn’t want to see you? She is twenty-six.’

‘But we are close now,’ Seaton objected angrily. ‘I keep explaining. She’s been updating me with all this, and that ball– she was in danger!’

‘ The college May Ball ,’ the PC had read back to him. ‘A social event she went to with this group of friends? The ones you want us to pretend she’s called Aria to?’

And Seaton could tell that he’d lost.

He was ejected from the station shortly afterwards with a very clear idea of what was going to be done to find his daughter: nothing. Nothing at all. A form filled in somewhere and no action taken.

He’d failed her. That was what he now realised with a terrible, heavy certainty. He’d failed her both by not keeping up with the right kind of people and by not being close enough to her.

He’d failed her before that, really. From the moment he’d admitted to her mother that he didn’t love her, and was sure he never could. Failed her again when he’d let her mother walk away instead of asking what she intended on doing.

He’d probably failed Anna again a hundred times since.

All the times he’d considered flying over to visit on a whim but been too afraid of a hostile reception.

Over the money her mother and stepfather had refused to take, leading to Anna growing up too proud to take anything from him unless he hid it somehow.

And by his inability to really talk to her as an adult now that she’d chosen to come back to England.

And he’d failed her last night, when he’d let her walk into that ball without backup or protection.

He was now standing beside the great, open expanse of Parker’s Piece, facing full into the bright June sun, with no memory of having crossed over the road from the police station. He closed his eyes against the glare.

This is your fault , he thought. Now what are you going to do to fix it?

By the time he opened his eyes again he’d remembered that he still had Anna’s phone. The phone he’d meant to tell the police about but had lost track of in the mess of the questions he’d had no answer to.

If he could just unlock the thing it would probably track her other device.

The one she’d used as Aria. Knowing how useless she was at keeping track of objects, he was confident she’d have risked adding them both to her Apple account and would have assumed nobody would find out.

If he could just get into the phone, he might be able to find her– assuming, that was, that the phone was still on her.

He had a sudden, horrifying image of her lifeless body being bundled into the river. Weighted down this time so nobody could find her. Killed because she’d found out too much and had never known when to back off.

Stop it , he thought, squeezing his eyes shut. You can find her. You can find her.

He remembered, in a vivid rush, Anna sitting at her laptop in his kitchen on one of the nights when she’d stayed over. He remembered asking her, ‘What are you doing?’

And then her half-focused reply, eyes still on the screen, ‘I’m writing to Reid.’

It had startled him, that response. ‘Why?’

‘Because I was right about everything, and he was wrong.’

Seaton had stood watching over her shoulder. He’d read a little of what she’d been pouring out into the email and it had made his heart ache.

In the end he’d said gently, ‘Listen. Break-ups are… they’re hard. Sometimes the hardest things. Like grieving, really. But… nobody owes you being in a relationship with them. And they don’t owe you any of their time once they’ve broken it off, either.’

He remembered how she’d stopped typing and had given a long sigh. ‘I’m not asking him to change his mind, Dad. I’m telling him about all of this. The Holly stuff. All the other things… I’ll edit them out. It’s just cathartic.’

Seaton had nodded, hoping she was being honest with him. ‘Why are you telling him about Holly?’

‘Because I know he’d do something about it if everything went wrong,’ she’d said, and looked up at him with an unusually vulnerable expression. ‘And it’s good to have a backup, in case. You know.’

Seaton had sat himself next to her. ‘You do realise I’m… you know. Happy to be your backup.’

Anna had half smiled. ‘I know. But it’s also good to have someone who can start a full-scale manhunt if they need to.’

Remembering the phrase felt like a punch in the stomach. She’d known, on some level, hadn’t she? She’d understood what she’d stirred up. And a full-scale manhunt was what he now needed.

But Reid Murray? he thought with a surge of anger. The man who broke her heart over nothing?

Anna hadn’t told him everything about their break-up– their relationship didn’t have the kind of easy openness for that.

But Seaton had been the one to pick up the pieces when Reid had dumped her without warning, and what little she had told him had made him want to drive round to Reid’s house and lay the man out.

Of course he was biased towards his daughter, but how had Reid believed all those things? How had he decided that Anna had betrayed him, and cared only about her career?

Reid hadn’t been the man she’d thought. That was clear. He’d let her down, badly, at a time when she’d already been fragile. He wouldn’t have blamed her for hating him.

So why did she write to him?

It made him feel angry on her behalf, that she’d still chosen Reid when he’d let her down so completely. And perhaps angry on his own, that she’d picked Reid over him. But on some level he knew why: she’d written because she still trusted him. Even after everything he’d done.

He found himself pulling his phone out once again, poised on the verge of doing something that might be exactly what Anna had wanted… or might be a huge betrayal of her trust.

If she hadn’t sent the email to him, and she hadn’t spoken to him in a year and a half, did he really have the right to call Reid in?

But if she never had the chance to send it I might be the only one who can do the right thing , he thought.

And with a sigh he unlocked his phone.

‘You’d better not let her down again,’ he muttered to himself, as he searched for Reid’s number.