‘Sip this, the cold will help.’
It did, soothing his throat and spreading a welcome chill down through his stomach. ‘Thank you. That was very kind.’
She folded herself back onto the sofa. ‘You really ought to see a doctor about that cough, you know, you don’t look well at all.’
‘I know. Can’t seem to shift it. But thank you, this has helped.’
Ferreira waited for Boer to get comfortable and then continued. ‘Can you tell us anything more about this Ali?’
‘Not much. You’d know him if you saw him in the street, the sort that blocks the sun. Nigerian parents I think. From what I hear he has a finger in just about every pie.’
‘What does that mean, every pie?’
‘Well you hear all sorts of stories. And like I said he’s almost a father figure to Brian, so it’s difficult seeing the wood from the trees. Popular thought is he made his money in internet porn and prostitution.’
‘How did you hear about that?’
‘Friends of friends. I still talk to people back home. The regiment is a close community even after you move on, word gets around.’
‘It certainly does.’ Ferreira glanced around the room. ‘At least now you seem to have built a good life here.’
‘Yes, although there’s always more to be achieved of course.’ She followed Ferreira’s gaze and appraised with a measure of satisfaction, ‘Kevin is a wonderful husband. Our faith and hard work has taken us a long way. But that’s not to say life is easy.’
‘It never is, Mrs Smith. Your husband is something to do with IT?’
‘He runs his own company with twenty men working for him.’ The mother’s answer was heavy with pride. ‘It’s mostly networks and cabling, media systems and the like. With so many jumping on the bandwagon it’s twice as competitive. He has to work all hours.’
‘Your husband is working away this weekend? When will he be back? We would like to talk with him.’
Uncertainty briefly shifted across her face. ‘I told him to stay put.’
‘But his stepdaughter is missing?’
‘I know, but it has taken him a long time to get this contract. It would be jeopardised if he left now. I have faith, Detective. My daughter will come back to me, she has got to.’
Ferreira tried to contain her shock. ‘Mrs Smith, your husband might be able to help, tell us of conversations with Andrea, things he might know about her.’
‘Detective, nobody can tell me anything about my child I do not already know, certainly not Kevin. He loves her like he does his own two but I run this house and those girls’ lives. Anyway, if there was something important he would have told me himself, he tells me everything.’
Ferreira searched for the right words. ‘My intention is not to be accusing and there is no obligation for Mr Smith to be here now, but we will need to talk to him, sooner rather than later.’
The mother gave a short nod. ‘He should be home later tonight. We can re-evaluate tomorrow.’
Ferreira’s pen moved rapidly across and down the page.
‘OK, maybe we should move on to Andrea herself and what she is like…’ A loud crash above was followed, after a short hush, by a child screaming.
‘Right on cue,’ the mother said. ‘Why don’t you come up and take a look at Andrea’s room while I tend to the wounded.’ With that she unfurled from the sofa and left the room.
THIRTY-SIX
The gentle movement down the side of her face felt safe so she opened her eyes, to a natural light that filled the room from above and behind. In front of her Simon was crouched, looking intently not at her but at her cheek. He was using a damp cloth to wipe away blood, the wet material in short strokes attentive to her face and neck. His other hand easily rebutted her attempt to push him away, supporting her as she swayed, unbalanced from the effort.
She slumped back against the cistern, hard against her spine, suddenly aware of being in a bathroom. She thought about screaming but the effort required meant the intent never passed from thought. Her eyes wandered. His T-shirt lay crumpled on the floor, his bare skin smooth and tanned, gleaming with a soft radiance that pulled her along the contours of muscles moving thickly across his shoulders.
‘Where’s he?’ The effort of forming each word was a difficult journey in itself.
‘Gone.’
‘Coming back?’
‘Not for a few days.’
It took her a while to put the span of a day into context. A day seemed some distant definition of time, a few days an eternity she could no longer comprehend.
‘My… Adam. What about him?’
‘You’ve caused us problems, Sarah, but you’re not the threat we thought you were. Hakan will not waste time on your husband.’
‘Why’d he go?’
‘That’s none of your business.’
‘No, I thought…’
A faint smile pulled his mouth wider and the focus of his eyes shifted to hers. ‘You thought you were going to die. So did I.’
‘I am…here.’
‘You are.’ He reached across to the sink and ran cold water onto the flannel, rinsing it and pressing it against the side of her face.
‘You…stopped him?’
‘Hakan?’ He shook his head.
‘I…imagined…’
Simon did not answer, resuming his study of her face. He cupped her chin in his palm, carefully turning her head from side to side. ‘You have a small cut on your cheek. It’s going to bruise and swell a little, although most of the blood has come from cuts in your mouth and you have bitten your tongue. Considering the alternatives, not a bad return.’
He reached around, picked up his T-shirt and stood, a physical motion complemented by a ballet of muscle that made the movement majestic. He turned on the tap and dropped the flannel and T-shirt into the sink, kneading them in the water, using a hand to steady Sarah as she toppled sideways. He gently pushed her against the wall, poured bleach into the sink and wiped his hands on a towel.
‘Guess that’s you about done, Sarah Sawacki. Need a hand?’
She opened her eyes and stared at his offered hand, ignoring it. She shuffled to the edge of the toilet seat, her hair falling around her face as she moved her weight on to legs that immediately buckled. Simon caught her as she crumpled and effortlessly lifted her body into his arms.
They swept along a white balconied landing, passing closed white doors and down stairs to the familiar. Through the living room past the chair and into the hallway, into the empty garage. He set her on the floor, propped against the wall. She watched as he retrieved a mat. Her eyes closed and then it was just dark.
THIRTY-SEVEN
They both listened to the mother’s footsteps climb the stairs. ‘You go ahead,’ Boer said. ‘I’ll follow you up.’ Ferreira gave him a rough approximation of a scowl. ‘You had better not go stealing any pictures.’
‘Me?’
She looked sternly at him then followed the mother up the stairs. Boer waited for her to reach the landing before pushing himself up. He took another look at the photos on the polished wood. There were none of the stepfather, at least not here.
He walked along the hallway and into the living room, hearing the muffled voices above. This room was much the same as the first, the same sort of opulence except in a bigger space. Varying sized ornaments and sculptures were strategically placed. More photos by the window, this time several of a square-faced man with short dark hair, the stepfather. One picture placed centrally and bigger than the others, showed the man standing proudly atop a hill, a young girl dangling from each arm, the smallest around his neck. Boer looked around the room. Another rectangular canvas featured on one wall, this one entirely comprised of thick strokes in all shades of grey, save for a smooth white circle at the centre. A wide flatscreen television was placed centrally on the room’s largest wall.
He walked in his socks through double doors into a large dining room. A long wooden table ran the length of the room, chairs for at least ten were set around the table, a manicured lawn visible beyond French doors. The only decoration here was a large wooden crucifix fixed high on the wall, a detailed metal Jesus hanging from it. It dominated the room.
The kitchen was functional. Dark worktops contrasted with white cupboard doors and gleaming saucepans hanging over a spotless breakfast bar, a matching utility room with a stack of neatly folded washing. He walked back into the hallway and mounted the bottom step, hearing from above the sniffs of a recovering child and the mother soothing while investigating the semantics of tears.
Boer reached the top step out of breath, his left hand pressed hard into his stomach. The mother, draped in the smallest girl, appeared in a doorway, concern and assessment drawn across her face as she watched him.
‘Andrea’s bedroom is down here, Detective.’
He followed her to a room opposite a large bathroom. The older of the young girls fell in beside him, matching his faltering step, looking up at him with a happy smile on her face, a trace of Andrea in her features.
‘When I grow up I want to be a policeman like you.’
‘Do you?’ He managed a caricature of surprise that triggered a distant memory of laughing children. ‘But I am old and soon I’ll spend all my time gardening.’
She did not seem put off. ‘But you look like a policeman who catches bad people.’
‘In here detective.’ The mother gestured to the bedroom, stopping the girl before she had a chance to follow. ‘Feel free to look around, if you have more questions we’ll be downstairs,’ which caused an outburst of high-pitched pleading that trailed away with the mother.
Boer stepped into Andrea’s bedroom. The floor was covered in raspberry carpet and the walls were painted an off-white pink. The clutter of childhood neatly ordered with a place for everything and everything in its place. Covering a good part of the wall space were pictures and posters featuring fairies and angels, either drawn by the girl or bought for her. He wondered how long it would be before they gave way to spotty boy bands and celebrity faces he would never know.
Ferreira thanked someone on her phone then flipped it closed. ‘Come and look at this.’
He stepped around a shaggy white rug and joined her beside the bed. They both looked at a postcard-sized picture on the bedside cabinet. The picture was of a beaming child wrapped in the arms of green-jacketed man. ‘Seems you have some competition in the unruly moustache stakes.’
‘Funny. Brian Dunstan?’
‘Yes, confirmed by the mother.’
He studied the photo, which showed a man in his early thirties with short brown hair, the moustache partly obscuring a youthful face. Boer tried without success to avoid seeing Sarah Sawacki in the girl’s eyes. ‘Your thoughts, Detective?’
‘I would say your average well educated, sentient, pre-pubescent girl child. Reads a great deal.’ She nodded at two low bookcases either side of a desk. ‘She is trusted to do her homework alone because doing homework is something she has always done. Very creative judging from the artwork.’
‘A diary?’
‘Takes it with her when she visits her father.’
‘What about an address book, or anything she might have written in?’
‘There are notepads in the bookcase she uses for homework and doodles from what I can see, and in those blue-backed folders are the stories she writes.’
Boer stepped over to the bookcase and pulled one of Andrea’s stories at random, scanning through the pages. Each page was full of neatly written text, the occasional doodle in the margins, mostly of wings. He read a few lines. The doodles matched the content, a boy and an angel.
‘I think it’s time to pull in the father,’ he said. ‘The real one. Make sure we pick up the diary and anything else they can at his house.’
Ferreira patted her pocket and the phone. ‘Being done.’
He nodded agreement. ‘Could you have a word with the mother. We need a team to go over every inch of this room.’
‘She’s not going to be happy, she’s still convinced the girl’s going to magically show up.’
‘Despite my best efforts to force the reality home?’
‘Despite your clumsy efforts at forcing the point home.’
He scratched the tip of his nose. ‘I guess that’s the nature of the mother’s faith summed up right there.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘In the face of all evidence she continues to believe the improbable.’
‘Is that faith, Fran, or hope?’
‘I think the first feeds off the later. She should stop wasting our time messing about in church and bleating on about the girl’s father. Faith isn’t going to bring back Sarah Sawacki or the girl. That’s going to need a lot of hard work by a lot of people. And even then it probably won’t be enough. So if you could, let the mother know there will be a team here tomorrow morning to take apart the bedroom. If she resists let her know in no uncertain terms the paths we can follow if we want to.’
‘You’re the boss. I’ll get a picture of the girl, save you stealing one.’
‘That would be good. I’ll be down in ten.’
He waited until her footsteps faded, letting his eyes move from one space to another around the room. When he heard distant voices he stepped over to the first of the bookcases and eased himself down onto his knees, then sat cross legged on the floor. He pulled the first book from the top shelf, flicking through the pages, holding each by the cover and shaking loose anything pushed inside before sliding it back and moving to the next. He worked along and down shelf by shelf, then shuffled across to the next bookcase, repeating the process before moving to the desk, checking the books stacked on top, then in and under the drawers.
By the time he had shaken free the last book he had a collection of five bookmarks designed for child minds and a small pile of scrap paper covered with doodles. More wings – the girl was obsessed. He placed the paper and bookmarks on the top of the bookcase and moved to the white, wooden-framed bed. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but then he never was until he found it. He pushed his hands under the mattress, fingers bumping over the wooden slats. He shone a small torch from his key chain under the bed, from one end to the other, seeing only a few dustballs against the skirting, a lost sock and some tissues. Next he pulled out the drawers of the bedside cabinet, checking beneath both and under the cabinet with the light. There was nothing.