Cross and Burn (7 page)

B
ev felt as if she was swimming upwards through something thick and heavy. Not heavy like mud. More like milkshake or emulsion paint. Her limbs felt weighted down, the world impenetrably black. It slowly dawned on her that her eyes were closed. But when she opened them, nothing changed. Her head throbbed when she moved it, but she forced herself to turn it back and forth, yet still there was absolutely nothing to be seen. The thought drifted through her muzzy brain that this must be what a black hole was like. Black, black and more black beyond that.

Slowly the wooziness lifted, enough for her to understand that this darkness was something to fear, not simply wonder at. As the fog of unconsciousness dispersed Bev tried to make sense of where she was and what had happened to her. Her head hurt and there was a sickly sweet taste at the back of her throat. The last thing she remembered was opening the boot of her hatchback to stow a couple of bags of groceries she’d picked up on the way home. After that, nothing. A blank. A terrifying blank.

She had no way of knowing how long she’d been unconscious. Minutes? No, surely more than minutes. Wherever she was, it wasn’t the car park at Freshco. Hours, then? How many hours? What was Torin thinking? Was he afraid? Was he angry with her? Did he think she’d abandoned him and gone off to have fun without letting him know? What would he do without her? Would he raise the alarm or would he be too scared of what might happen to him without her? The thoughts scampered in her head like a hamster on a wheel. Christ, she had to get a grip.

‘OK. Don’t think about Torin. Put it behind you and move on.’ She said the words aloud then wished she hadn’t. Wherever she was, the acoustic was dead, her voice flat and muffled. Still determined to keep her fear at arm’s length, Bev decided it would make sense to discover the limits of her location. She was sitting down, on a smooth surface. That realisation led to another. She wasn’t wearing her trousers, socks or shoes any more. Her hand crept down her body. She was wearing her own bra, but the lower underwear definitely wasn’t hers. Skimpy lacy panties were not her style. Lace made her itch, and she liked loose-fitting cotton against her skin. She refused to think about what that meant.

It was just flesh, when you got right down to it. She’d had no knowledge, no emotional engagement with anything that had happened while she was unconscious. In a sense, she told herself, it was no more a violation than any surgical procedure carried out under general anaesthetic. Most people would freak out if they had to witness what was done to their bodies on the operating table. Ignorance wasn’t only bliss, it was what allowed them to be grateful for the surgeon’s knife. Bev could manage ignorance, she was pretty sure of that.

She explored the surface she was sitting on. Smooth, cool but not cold. When she moved her leg, it was warm from where her flesh had been resting. She extended her arms slowly, but couldn’t straighten them. Then she slid down till her feet hit the far end of her prison. She moved one foot around and realised there was a sort of step there. Finally, she returned to a sitting position. There were a few inches between her head and the immovable top of what she had to admit to herself was a box. A metre wide, a metre and a half long and a little over a metre high. Plastic lined. A softer plastic seam round the top that made it light-tight, and presumably airtight too. With what felt like a step at one end. The only thing she could think of that fitted the description was a chest freezer.

She was locked inside a chest freezer.

Bev wasn’t someone who panicked easily, but realising where she was set her heart pounding in terror. If the person who had put her here wanted to kill her, all they had to do was flick a switch and let hypothermia do the job for them.

Or just wait till the air ran out.

T
he middle of the afternoon wasn’t the best time to get the undivided attention of anyone in the pharmacy at Bradfield Cross Hospital. Especially on a day when they were short a member of staff. But then, from what Paula had gathered from Dr Elinor Blessing and from Bev herself, there wasn’t a spell during the working day when the pharmacists and their assistants weren’t run off their feet. The accurate filling of hospital prescriptions was a process that never let up. Sometimes Paula thought the advancement of human learning came down to nothing except more sophisticated ways not to feel the pain.

Bev’s deputy, Dan Birchall, looked like a member of a minor boy band run to seed. The lineaments of a handsome young man lurked beneath the slack fleshiness of his face, the neatly trimmed beard unable to disguise the jowls forming along his jawline. He still moved with a certain grace, almost dancing between the shelves and cabinets. But it was a dance whose tempo was starting to slip and whose steps looked a little more desperate with every passing year. ‘You’re Dr Blessing’s lady, aren’t you?’ was his response when Paula introduced herself. It wasn’t a line that endeared him to her.

‘I’m looking into the whereabouts of your chief pharmacist, Ms McAndrew.’ Paula smiled. There was no mileage in anything other than working the witness for whatever he might know. ‘Her son has reported her missing.’

Dan rolled his eyes. ‘Right,’ he said, stretching the word as far as it would go. ‘Well, suddenly, something makes sense. We’ve been at sixes and sevens all day, wondering what was up with Bev. Because Bev would never just not show. Totally not her style.’

Paula pulled up a lab stool and sat down, indicating he should do the same. But he remained on his feet, leaning against the counter with ankles crossed and arms folded. It made her wonder what he had to hide. If she’d been Tony Hill, no doubt she’d have worked it out already. But her gift was for interrogation; she was accustomed to taking the long way round. ‘So you’ve had no communication from her?’

He shook his head. ‘Not a word. Not a text, not an email, not a message. At first, I assumed she’d been caught up in traffic. Except Bev somehow always manages not to get caught up in traffic.’ He rolled his eyes again. ‘That’s Bev. So organised she listens to the travel news with breakfast. But once it got to half past nine, I thought there was no way Bev would be an hour late without calling in. So I tried her home number and her mobile. I got the answering machine and the voicemail.’ He spread his hands. ‘What else could I do?’

‘Did it occur to you to go round and check she was OK?’

He gave her a peevish look. ‘Why would I do that? It’s not like she lives alone. If anything had happened to her, Torin the Wonder Boy could have called for help. Besides —’ He waved impatiently at the bustle in the dispensary. ‘Look at this place. We were already one down. I couldn’t walk away from the rest of the team. We only took half an hour each for lunch as it was.’ He seemed more irritated than worried. Paula hoped that whatever had happened to Bev wasn’t the kind of thing that would make his annoyance come back to haunt him.

‘I appreciate that. You’ve got patients to consider.’

Dan pounced on the get-out. ‘Exactly. People rely on us.’

‘So, when did you last see Bev?’

‘Yesterday. A bit after half past five. She was through in the office.’ He pointed to a cubicle tucked away in the far corner. ‘I was going for a birthday drink with Bob Symes, one of the porters. I asked her if she fancied joining us, but she said she had some paperwork to wrap up and then she had to go to Freshco on the way home. So I left her to it.’

‘Was there anybody else still working?’

‘Well, the duty pharmacist, obviously. She comes in at five and she’s on till half past midnight. The night-duty dispenser does midnight till eight thirty.’ He flapped a hand dismissively. ‘But you won’t be interested in the hell that is our staffing roster.’

Paula made a note on her pad. ‘I’ll need the details of the duty pharmacist.’

Dan nodded. ‘No problem. Vahni Bhat, that’s her name. I’ll give you her numbers when we’re done. She’ll be in tonight, if you want to see her.’

‘Thanks.’ She looked around. Two young women and an older man were focused on what they were doing, paying no attention to her and Dan. Paula didn’t often find herself in a workplace where the staff were so overwhelmed with their own tasks that they ignored a police inquiry in their midst. ‘Was Bev particularly close to anyone here at work?’

Dan scratched his beard and frowned, his eyes sliding away from hers. ‘I wouldn’t have said so. Don’t get me wrong, we’re good enough mates here. And heaven knows, I’ve worked with Bev for a million years. But we don’t live in each other’s pockets.’ Still he wasn’t meeting her eyes, using the pretext of keeping an eye on his colleagues to avoid her. ‘Come the end of the working day, we all do our own thing. Bev was very family orientated. Torin came first with her.’ A little edge there, she noted. Had Dan wanted Bev to be more interested in him? Or had there once been something more than friendship between them? It was hard to tell. Paula thought she might run that one past Elinor and see whether there had been any gossip.

‘You called him Torin the Wonder Boy. What’s that about, Dan?’ Paula kept her tone light, almost teasing.

One corner of his mouth twisted downwards in a rueful grimace. ‘I tease her because she’s always going on about how great he is. I’ve got a kid of my own, Becky, but I don’t make out she’s the smartest, the prettiest, the most talented. The way Bev speaks about Torin, you’d think nobody ever had a kid before. That’s all.’ He shrugged and smiled, sharing a look of complicity with her. ‘No big deal.’

‘He knew enough to report her missing.’ Paula looked around the room. ‘So as far as you’re aware, Bev had no plans for yesterday evening?’

‘What she said to me was, Freshco and then home.’

‘Would she have said if she’d had plans?’

Another shrug. ‘She’d sometimes say if she was going to a movie or the football with Torin or something like that. Or if there was something on the telly she was looking forward to. But it wasn’t like she’d routinely tell me what she was planning on doing. To be perfectly honest, it’s always full on in here. You have to concentrate. It’s not like being on a factory production line, where you can chat about all sorts while you work. Here, if we screw up, people get more sick. Sometimes they can die. So we don’t go in for much casual chit-chat.’

‘Do you know if she was seeing anybody?’

‘If she was, none of us knew anything about it. Look, you live with Dr Blessing. You must know what it’s like. A hospital is a rumour factory. And this place is gossip central.’

‘I thought you didn’t have time for chit-chat?’ Paula took the sting out of the barb with a teasing tone and a knowing smile.

‘Not when we’re dispensing. But at the counter, when they drop off and pick up, that’s where all the info passes back and forth. And I haven’t heard a whisper about Bev seeing anyone. After the divorce, she went out with a couple of blokes, but both times she felt like it was going nowhere so she knocked it on the head. She’s been on her own for a couple of years now, as far as anybody here knows.’ All at once it seemed he was protesting too much.

‘And you? You went for a drink with Bob the porter? Did you see Bev later?’

Dan became very interested in the contents of the shelves next to him. ‘Actually, in the end I didn’t go. I wasn’t in the mood. I went for a drink on my own on the way home.’

‘Do you remember where?’

‘The Bertie.’

‘You mean the Prince Albert?’ Paula knew the place. It was a busy barn of a pub on the edge of the city centre, always packed because of its cheap beer.

He nodded. ‘That’s the one.’

‘Not exactly a place for a quiet drink.’

He made a face. ‘Nobody bothers you, it’s too rammed for people to strike up casual conversations. I like it when I want to be alone in a crowd.’

And nobody remembers whether you were there or not.
Another avenue closed off. ‘Had Bev fallen out with anybody that you know of? Any colleagues? Other staff? Patients? Somebody outside of work.’

Dan looked blank. ‘She never said anything. I mean, we all get into a bit of a ruck at the counter from time to time. The punters aren’t always sweet reason on a stick. But Bev’s generally pretty good at calming things down. She doesn’t provoke people.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘Not like me. I’m not good at taking their crap. Sometimes I just walk away, and that’s when Bev steps up to the plate and pours oil on the troubled waters.’

‘So, no boyfriend, no enemies. Did she seem at all uneasy lately? Rattled, frightened?’

Again he scratched his beard. ‘Not her style. Bev’s not a scaredy cat. I’d say the only thing she’d be scared of would be something happening to Torin. And nothing’s happened to him, has it? Not from what you were saying.’

Apart from mislaying his mother
. ‘If I’d said to you last night that Bev would go missing, is there any part of you that would have thought, “Yeah, that makes sense”.’

Without hesitation, Dan shook his head. ‘No. Bev’s totally reliable, totally organised. If she was going to do a runner, she’d do it in such a way that nobody would notice it was a runner until she was history.’

Paula could think of nothing more to ask Dan. Though she had a feeling there might be more later. She stood up and fished her card out of her pocket. ‘Text me Vahni Bhat’s number, would you? And let me know if anything occurs to you. Anything unusual, or anything Bev said. We’re treating this seriously, Dan.’

‘OK. Tell Torin we’re thinking of him.’

That would be the easy part, Paula thought, checking her watch. She’d sent a pair of DCs to Nadia Wilkowa’s flat, promising to join them there. Unless Nadia had lived in a monastic cell with no possessions, they’d still be there, poking through her underwear drawer and kitchen cupboards. Which gave her a small window of opportunity to conclude some more unorthodox arrangements.

She sent a quick text to Elinor, asking for five minutes in the fifth-floor coffee shop that she knew was near the wards where her partner would be dealing with post-op patients from the morning. Paula was halfway through a mug of hot chocolate when Elinor appeared, businesslike in white coat and stethoscope. Time had done nothing to diminish the physical jolt of pleasure Paula still felt whenever they were reunited. Even if only a few hours had passed. It was crazy, it was adolescent, but she didn’t care. When she’d met Elinor, her life hadn’t held much joy. Now, the reason for getting up in the morning overwhelmed any argument on that score.

Elinor made straight for Paula’s table, missing out a visit to the coffee counter. She leaned over and kissed her on the lips as she sat down. ‘Not that it isn’t always a delight to see you, but I genuinely only have five minutes,’ she said.

Paula held up both hands in a gesture of apology. ‘Sorry. I’m tight for time too. But it’s important.’

‘Give me the ten second version.’ Elinor reached for the mug and took a swig, shivering with pleasure. ‘Sugar rush, I love it.’

‘Torin McAndrew reported his mother missing this morning. She’s not in work, nobody’s heard from her and —’

‘Bev’s missing?’ Elinor interrupted.

‘Apparently.’

‘But she wouldn’t leave Torin. Paula, something serious must have happened. Have you checked the hospitals?’

‘First thing I did. And the custody records. She’s not been in an accident and she’s not been arrested. Believe me, I’m taking an interest.’

Elinor clapped her hand over her mouth. She knew only too well the sort of cases Paula generally ended up dealing with. Anyone would be horrified at the thought of a friend ending up at the heart of one of those. ‘What can I do?’

‘Who’s her best mate?’

‘Probably Dan.’ Elinor answered without hesitation. ‘He’s straight, but he’s so camp he might as well be a gay man. There was a moment a couple of years ago where it nearly spilled over into more than just good friends. But they both backed off. She didn’t want to risk his marriage and really, neither did he.’

‘Was it mutual, the backing off?’

Elinor paused, thinking. ‘To the best of my recollection. I’ve been in their company a few times since and I didn’t sense any awkwardness between them.’ She gave Paula a sceptical look. ‘You’re not thinking Dan’s got anything to do with Bev going missing, are you?’

‘I’m not going to apologise for covering all the bases, Elinor. But there’s something a lot more pressing than what kind of guy Dan is. Here’s the thing. I can’t leave Torin home alone. I know he stayed there last night without Bev, but he didn’t really believe she’d be out all night. He doesn’t have any family near at hand. And I don’t want social services taking him into emergency care.’

‘You want him to come and stay at ours?’

Paula couldn’t help smiling. ‘This is why I love you,’ she said. ‘You have such a generous heart.’

‘Obviously. I chose you.’ Elinor tapped Paula’s hand with a finger. ‘How do we do this?’

‘He’s going to text me after school. Can I send him over here? Can you find him a quiet corner where he can do his homework till you’re ready to leave? I don’t want him going to a friend’s house and letting slip that his mum’s disappeared and he’s staying with a couple of big old lezzas he hardly knows.’

Elinor thought for a moment. ‘Sure, I’ll come up with something. And you? What about you? When will you be home?’

Paula sighed and shook her head. ‘I’m not sure. We caught a murder this morning. We’ve barely got started.’

‘Just as well I’m an easy-going soul,’ Elinor said.

‘I know. Sometimes I think I behave like the worst of my male colleagues. I’m sorry.’

‘The difference is, you know you’re doing it. And I get to stake out the moral high ground.’ Elinor grinned. ‘It’s OK, Paula. We both pay the price of caring about what we do. I’d love you less if you took your job less seriously. What’s the new boss like?’