“Newcastle would seem the obvious place,” Callie said. “I mean, if he’s running. Planes, trains, ferries—world’s his oyster. But the odd thing is that since that five a.m. sighting, they’ve got nothing, so either he’s stopped or he’s got off the main road. He might be taking smaller roads, the coastal road even—”
“Isn’t there a girlfriend?” I asked, interrupting her flow. “A woman in Edinburgh?”
“The famous fiancée,” Callie said, eyebrows raised.
“Well, way ahead of you there. She—Tracey McBride, her name is—was picked up this morning. Uniform are bringing her down to Beckford for a chat. But, just to warn you, our Tracey claims she hasn’t seen Mark Henderson for a good while. Almost a year, in fact.”
“What? I thought they’d just been on holiday together?”
“That’s what Henderson said when he spoke to DS Morgan, but according to Tracey, she’s not seen hide nor hair of him since he called the whole thing off last autumn. She says he dumped her out of the blue, telling her he’d fallen head over heels for some other woman.”
• • •
TRACEY DIDN’T KNOW who the woman was or what she did. “Nor did I want to,” she told me abruptly. She was sitting in the back office of the police station, an hour later, sipping her tea. “I was . . . I was pretty devastated, actually. One minute I’m shopping for wedding dresses and the next he’s telling me he can’t go through with it ’cos he’s met the love of his life.” She smiled at me sadly, pushing her fingers through cropped dark hair. “After that, I just cut him off. Deleted his number, unfriended him, the full monty. Could you please tell me, has something happened to him? No one will tell me what the hell’s going on.”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry about that, but there’s not a lot I can tell you at the moment. We don’t believe he’s been harmed, though. We just need to find him, we need to talk to him about something. You don’t know where he might go, do you? If he needed to get away? Parents, friends in the area?”
She frowned. “This is not about that dead woman, is it? I read in the papers that there was another one a week or two back. I mean . . . he wasn’t . . . that wasn’t the woman he was seeing, was it?”
“No, no. It’s nothing to do with that.”
“Oh, OK.” She looked relieved. “I mean, she would have been a bit old for him, wouldn’t she?”
“Why do you say that? Did he like younger women?”
Tracey looked confused. “No, I mean . . . how do you mean, younger? That woman was, like, about forty, wasn’t she? Mark’s not yet thirty, so . . .”
“Right.”
“You really can’t tell me what’s going on?” she asked.
“Was Mark ever violent to you, did he ever lose his temper, anything like that?”
“What? God, no. Never.” She leaned back in her chair, frowning. “Has someone accused him of something? Because he’s not like that. He’s selfish, no doubt about that, but he’s not a bad person, not in that way.”
I walked her out to the car, where uniform were waiting to drive her home, wondering about the ways in which Mark Henderson was bad, wondering whether he’d managed to convince himself that being in love absolved him.
“You asked about where he might go,” Tracey said to me when we got to the car. “It’s difficult to say, without knowing the context, but there’s one place I can think of. We—well, my dad—has a place out on the coast. Mark and I went there at weekends quite a bit. It’s quite isolated, there’s no one else around. Mark always said it was the perfect escape.”
“It’s unoccupied, this place?”
“It’s not used much. We used to leave a key out the back under a pot, but earlier this year we discovered that someone had been using it without our permission—there would be mugs left out or rubbish in the bins or whatever—so we stopped doing that.”
“When was the last time that happened? The last time someone used it without asking?”
She frowned. “Oh, God. A while back. April, I think? Yeah, April. The Easter holidays.”
“And where exactly is this place?”
“Howick,” she said. “It’s a tiny little village, nothing much there at all. Just up the coast from Craster.”
LENA
He apologized when he let me out of the boot. “I’m sorry, Lena, but what would you have had me do?” I started laughing, but he told me to shut up, his fist clenched, and I thought he was going to smack me again, so I did.
We were at a house by the sea—just one house, all by itself, right on the cliff, with a garden and a wall and one of those outdoor pub tables. The house looked like it was all locked up, there was no one around. From where I was standing I couldn’t see another building anywhere near us, just a track running past, not even a proper road. I couldn’t hear anything either—no traffic noise, nothing like that, just the gulls and the waves on the rocks.
“No point screaming,” he said, like he’d read my mind. Then he took me by the arm and led me over to the table, and handed me a tissue to wipe my mouth.