Blood on the Marsh (DI Susan Holden 3)

‘No baked beans, and no camping gear.’

‘You mean he’s gone camping?’

‘It looks like it. He loves camping.’

‘Well that must be a relief for you. That he’s only gone camping.’

Maureen looked at Holden, but there was no sign of relief in her face. ‘You don’t understand. He always tells me if he’s going off anywhere. Always. And it’s us he goes camping with. Twice he’s been camping with my friend Jaz. But never on his own. And anyway, why would he go camping at this time of year? Don’t you understand? Something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong.’

It took them several minutes to calm Maureen Wright down. The two female detectives sat on the bed either side of her, trying to reassure her. It was the younger woman, Lawson, who put her arm round her, consoling her, while Holden sat slightly further away, maintaining a distance physically and emotionally. Meanwhile Fox and Wilson tried to conduct a search as quickly and discreetly as the circumstances allowed.

Wilson found something almost immediately. Fox had started to make a more thorough search of the wardrobe, whereas he had gone straight to the chest of drawers by the bed, and there in the second drawer, under a collection of rolled-up pairs of socks, he located a diary. He sat down on the side of the bed, his back facing the backs of the three women, and opened it. David Wright had filled in his personal details on the page for them near the front: name, address and mobile number. There was no email address, Wilson noted, and the name of his employer was Frame It, which Wilson knew to be just off the Cowley Road – Princes Street, he thought.

He leaned forward, into January. It wasn’t exactly, Wilson reckoned, stream of consciousness stuff. He wasn’t sure quite what stream of consciousness was, but he remembered the expression from school – as far as he could recall, it was when someone writes long and rather tedious, badly punctuated, self-centred sentences that ramble all over the place without ever getting anywhere much. Anyway, whatever it was, David Wright didn’t do it. What he did write was arguably duller, but from Wilson’s point of view it was no less useful for that. For example, the week beginning 5 January 2009: on the Monday there was the single word, ‘Work’; on Tuesday, ‘Work’; on Wednesday, ‘Work’; and underneath that ‘Dinner at Mum’s’ (not ‘Mum’s and Dad’s’ Wilson noticed); on Thursday, ‘Work’ again, and on Friday, ‘10.00 a.m. Dentist – no work’; on the Saturday, ‘No Oxford game’; and on the Sunday ‘Roast lunch at Mum’s’. It was a similar pattern the following weeks – work, meals on Wednesdays and Sundays at his mum’s, and on Saturdays and other days Oxford United games to which he’d normally ‘listen on radio’ or ‘go to’. Occasionally he would record another activity.

Wilson took a wedge of pages in his right hand, and began to flick quickly through them, allowing himself the opportunity to check for any obvious change of pattern. He knew that the most interesting and probably most useful material would be at the back of the diary, in the month of December, but he was methodical and thorough by nature. There was nothing, however, that caught his eye. ‘Camping with Mum and Dad and Vickie in the New Forest’ was the longest entry, repeated eight times, for a whole week at the end of May. He paused briefly over that – Vickie’s half term, he told himself – and then moved steadily on through the summer and autumn until he got to the beginning of December.

The first week of that month (and including the Monday 30 November) had five days of ‘Work’, two Oxford games, a ‘Dinner at Mum’s’ and a ‘Roast lunch at Mum’s’. Wilson had kept a diary once, though not for that long. Every night for several weeks he had sat in bed and laboriously recorded the events of that day, and sometimes his own reactions to those events, until the entries had got so short he gave up. Other people, like his mum, had kept a diary to organize her and her son’s life. Those, he reckoned, were the two types of diary, one looking back, one forward. David’s however, was a mixture of the two. He used his diary as a planner – work, visits to his mum’s, the dentist, and Oxford United – and yet he also used it to record what had happened. Against each Oxford game, for example, he recorded the results and the Oxford players who had scored.

Wilson turned to the following week. The general pattern was the same – work, meals at his mum’s, and two more Oxford United games – but there was more than that. ‘Fish and chips – Vickie’ on Tuesday; that was clear enough. But it was the entry for Saturday that caught and held his attention: underneath the expected reference to Oxford’s games against Hayes and Yeading (a rather dull 1–0 win – Wilson hadn’t gone, but he had read the reports), were two words: ‘Mother’s flat!’ Wilson stopped reading. Now that was odd. David’s mother didn’t have a flat, did she? He looked again, and noticed the exclamation mark. That was odd too. He flicked back through the last few pages to check he hadn’t missed something. No. The fact was that David Wright didn’t really use punctuation at all except for dashes. No full stops, no commas, no semi-colons or colons, and certainly no exclamation marks. So why this? And then he spotted it. The most obvious thing. ‘Mother’s flat!’ Not ‘Mum’s flat!’ but ‘Mother’s flat!’

‘How’s it going, Constable?’

He stood and turned round. Holden was clearly talking to him, because Lawson was guiding Maureen Wright out of the flat. He paused, waiting for them to leave. It wasn’t something to raise in front of Maureen, without first sharing it with his DI.

‘It’s David’s diary, Guv,’ he said quietly, as if afraid his words might pursue Maureen down the stairs. ‘And there’s something very odd about it.’

Lawson drove Maureen Wright back to Lytton Road in silence. It was a short trip and the woman was in a fragile enough state, and Lawson didn’t want to risk any more emotional storms until they were both sitting down with a soothing cup of tea. The others would be following in due course, but she reckoned that would take a while.

Maureen insisted on making the tea herself, and even dug out some chocolate digestives. Then they sat at the kitchen table, sipping and chewing, until Maureen suddenly looked up and broke the silence.

‘I really don’t know what to think.’

Lawson couldn’t come up with an immediate response. If she’d had a husband who had been hit by a train and a son who’d gone missing, she doubted she’d have known what to think either.

‘Maybe you should just try and think about where David might have gone camping. Does he have a favourite place, for example?’

‘He came wherever we went. The New Forest, Devon, Cornwall and the Forest of Dean. I don’t know that any of them were his favourite. He liked them all.’

‘And he never goes camping on his own? Not even for the weekend?’

‘No.’

Lawson frowned. She needed to come at it from a different angle. ‘Does David have a car?’

‘A car? How could he afford a car? He’s not even attempted his driving test either.’

‘So how does he get around?’

‘How does anyone get around? He walks when he comes to see us, and he catches the bus to work. Occasionally he’ll get a taxi.’

‘Has he ever been camping in Oxfordshire?’

Maureen opened her mouth, but didn’t immediately say anything. But a thought had occurred, and Lawson could almost see it circling her brain. ‘When he was a scout,’ she said eventually, this time in a much less irritable tone. ‘He was in the scouts for two or three years, but he found relating to all the other boys tricky. In the end the scout master told us that David just didn’t fit in, and that it was bad for general discipline …’ She never quite finished the sentence. Her eyes, Lawson couldn’t help noticing, had gone all damp again. Oh shit, she said to herself, with sudden insight; that poet who said that parents fuck up their children, didn’t he realize that children fuck up parents too?

‘They used to camp up at Boars Hill. He loved it there.

He used to say it was like being lost in a forest miles from anywhere, but he always knew he was only a few miles from home.’