Page 26 of Worse Than Murder

Tania’s personality is infectious. I find myself wanting to open up a detective agency with her and for both of us to bring down the government. As she opens the Bourbons, I tell her about my visit from Alison Pemberton and the research I’ve done online.

‘I know I shouldn’t say this,’ she begins with a mouthful of biscuit. ‘But I milked that story for all it was worth. Not much happens around here. I knew at the time it was going to have a massive impact on the community, so I interviewed anyone and everyone I could get my hands on for their POV.’

‘What do you think happened to Celia and Jennifer?’

‘I think the father did it,’ she says straight away.

‘Jack? Why?’

‘It’s nearly always the father. Don’t get me wrong, he put on a good act for the police and the media, but that whole getting swept away in the storm business, I didn’t buy that for a minute.’

‘You think he faked his death?’

Tania turns to her laptop and begins scrolling through as she talks. ‘Back in the day, we were an important institution in the community, and we had a bigger staff number than we have now, though that’s not difficult. We had someone covering sport, news, weather, events and features, the lot. We even had three full-time photographers. Anyway, the day after the storm, when we found out Jack Pemberton was missing, I was first out there. I had a shitty little camera with me, and I took a few snaps. They were useless. I can’t take a good pic to save my life. Even now, with everything going on in an iPhone, I can’t get the focus right. Thank goodness for Photoshop– something else I’ve had to pay for myself. Here they are,’ she says, finding what she’s looking for. She angles the laptop so I can see the screen. ‘These are the photos I took of Jack’s car the morning after the storm. They’re blurred so they were no good to print, but you can see what’s there. Now, the water was nowhere near the car. If Jack had got out during the storm and it blew him about, there’s no way it would have thrown him out into the lake. And why did he have to get out? The water wasn’t anywhere close to the car. You can’t tell on the photos, but you could see the tideline where the water was at its highest.’

‘So, Jack’s car didn’t get into difficulty?’

‘I’m no mechanic, but if it did, there’s no reason for Jack to have gone near the water’s edge.’

I frown as I glare at the three photographs on the screen. ‘Do you have a magnifying glass?’

Tania produces one from her top drawer and hands it to me. ‘It won’t do you any good apart from give you a headache. Trust me, I speak from experience.’

She’s right. I blink hard a few times but all I’m looking at is enlarged blurred pixels. ‘Was the car locked or unlocked?’

‘Unlocked. The driver’s door wasn’t fully closed either, I remember that.’

‘Keys?’

‘Still in the ignition.’

I shake my head.

‘What are you thinking?’ Tania asks.

‘No parent, no matter how depressed, would leave their daughter in the back of the car with the door open and the key in the ignition, especially during a storm, especially when goodness knows what could happen to her. Given Jack’s mental state at the time, he would go one of two ways. He’d either protect her at all costs, or he’d take her with him.’

‘And the fact that he did neither?’

I sigh. ‘The six sightings of Jack?—’

‘There have been more than six,’ Tania interrupts.

‘Really?’

She turns back to her laptop. ‘I used to put them in the paper at one point, but with no photographic evidence, there wasn’t much to write about. Eventually, I stopped. Here we go.’ She angles the laptop to me again to show a table she has made of the sightings. ‘I stopped saving them after a while. I’ve got fourteen known sightings, but speak to Alison: she’s got them all. She created a Facebook page where people could post their sightings.’

‘Fourteen?’

‘Mostly local. Though I think Alison had someone message her from Belfast once.’

‘What do they say?’

‘What you expect them to say. They’ve seen a bloke who stands out from the crowd, seems a bit nervy, that’s what draws their attention to him, and he has a familiar look about him. By the time they’ve googled who he might be, he’s disappeared.’

‘And no photographic evidence?’

‘No.’