One pair of jeans, a backup pair of UGGs, and a generous squirt of perfume later, I was in the kitchen, devouring a ham and cheese toasted sandwich, silently praising whoever invented the toasted sandwich maker.
I pulled out the lists Hacker had given me for Chantal and Liza's phone records and studied them as hot, melted cheese dribbled down my chin.
In the last few months, Chantal had phoned the number for the Second Chance Clinic twice. Liza had also called them. They'd also both called the Holbrook Clinic. I looked closer at Liza's calls. A couple of months before Liza vanished, she'd phoned someone called Emily Jacobs.
I finished the sandwich, fed Marmalade some scraps of ham, and wondered why that name was sending alarm signals in my brain. Emily Jacobs. I hadn't come across it before.
Then I had a mental head-slap moment.
I pulled out the list of initials and dates that Brad had found in Chantal's apartment:
MP - 28/01
DL - 15/02
CT - 01/03
EJ - 27/03
LS - 0787 5567893
Questions buzzed around in my head. Could the EJ on the list be Emily Jacobs? And if so, what did she have to do with all this? Was the big story Liza was working on to do with the Second Chance Clinic and the Holbrook Clinic? What had the two girls discovered? Where were Liza and Chantal? Were they dead? Was this anything to do with voodoo sacrifices?
I reached for my mobile and dialed Hacker as Marmalade jumped onto my lap and licked the crumbs off my plate. "Yo," I said when he picked up.
"Yo."
"Any luck in cracking the code from that list?"
"Not yet."
"I think the initials EJ might relate to an Emily Jacobs. Can you see what you can dig up on her?"
"I'm on it." He paused. "I heard you had fun at Marie's house earlier."
"Uh-huh. I'm pretty sure she knew what we were doing there."
"I hate to say I told you so, but…"
"Yeah, yeah. We're going to poke around inside her house when she's out to see if there's any trace of Chantal or Liza."
"Rather you than me."
"I'd rather swim with sharks or spend the weekend at Guantanamo Bay than go back there again." Next time I went I'd make sure I was wearing my Wonder Woman knickers. Not sure if they held the same kind of powers as the original ones, but I wasn't taking any chances. "You come up with anything on the Holbrook Clinic yet?"
"Still working on it."
"Okay."
"Yo."
"Yo back atcha!" I hung up and glanced at a blob of cheese that had fallen onto my plate and gone hard. It was in the shape of a ring. A wedding ring, in fact. Maybe it was a sign? Was my toastie trying to give me a message?
I shook my head to myself. A sign from a toastie about whether to get married or not? I was going nuts. Well, more nuts than I already was.
* * *
Next stop, Langton Developments. The imposing glass building was announced by a new, undamaged silver sign that was so big and shiny it was hard to miss. The place gave off an air of success and wealth, hiding the fact that the business was in trouble. I wondered just how far James Langton would go to save his company. Would he kill his daughter?
Langton's secretary, Oliver, met me at reception and we rode the glass lift to James's office. Oliver was a tall, skinny guy, mid-thirties, with thick glasses that magnified his eyes about a squillion times. In fact, he was so skinny his Adam's apple looked the size of a melon in his scrawny little throat. He had a habit of squinting his right eye after he answered a question.
"How well did you know Chantal?" I asked him.
"Oh, just through work. We didn't socialize or anything—apart from work parties, of course." Squint. "It's terrible that she's disappeared. She was a lovely girl." Squint, squint. His voice was high-pitched and, like Steven Shaw, he was very effeminate in his mannerisms. I was pretty sure Oliver was batting for the other side.
"How did she seem to you before she disappeared? Was she depressed? Worried? Anxious?" I squinted back at him. Damn, he had me doing it now.
"Well." He rested a hand on his hip and leaned toward me, as if letting me in on a big secret. "In the last few months she wasn't here much. She only came in to work on getting the planning permission completed for the City Park Complex, which we finally got two weeks ago. Mr. Langton thought she could do with some time off to…" He paused, searching for how to put it. "Well, to get her head together again. Of course, you know about her friend, Liza, disappearing as well?" He carried on without waiting for me to answer. "Poor Chantal was devastated about that. Devastated." Big squint.
"Did Chantal ever mention that she knew what happened to Liza?" I said as the lift doors pinged open and we walked down a long corridor with large potted palms.
He shook his head. "No. She never said anything to me."
"Do you know if she was seeing anyone?"
"I'm sorry, I can't help you there. We didn't share our private lives with each other." He paused. "But now that I think about it, she did get a delivery of flowers here a few weeks back, so she obviously had some kind of admirer."
"What about people who didn't admire her? Is it possible someone she worked with had a grudge against her?"
He paused for a moment. "Not against Chantal, no. She was a sweet girl. But…" He glanced around to make sure no one was looking and lowered his voice. "James had to make some redundancies recently. What with the global recession going on, Langton Developments is suffering just like everybody else. One of the other architects, Philip Gates, was made redundant and he didn't go quietly."
"What do you mean he didn't go quietly? What happened?"
"Well, Philip kind of threatened James."
"In what way?"
"Philip had just had a little baby girl and he was obviously worried about being able to provide for her and his wife if he was made redundant and couldn't get another job. He told James that he'd 'show him what it felt like.'"
"Are those the exact words he used?"
Oliver nodded and squinted at the same time.
I let that sink in, wondering what he could've meant.
I'll show you how it feels to worry about your daughter
?
I'll show you how it feels to be so useless that you can't help your daughter
?
I'll kidnap Chantal to prove a point
?
Oliver knocked on James's door.
"Come in," James's voice filtered through from the other side.
"I'll leave you to it." The secretary left me with a final squint and disappeared back up the corridor.
I walked into James's modern office. It was flanked on two sides by glass windows, giving it a great view, but it would become a sweaty suntrap in the summer. A leather sofa was arranged against one wall, with an identical one opposite it. Above the sofa on the wall were framed awards that their developments had won. In the center of the room was a large-scale model of a building.
James put his pen down and walked around his huge wooden desk, which was inlaid with a glass top. It was littered with papers and rolls of plans. I bet the cleaners had their work cut out every night trying to remove fingerprints from all that glass.
"Hello, Amber. Do you have any news about Chantal? Nicole and I are worried sick." He ran a hand through his immaculate hair.
"Not yet, but I've got some more questions for you."
He let out a soft sigh, and I couldn't tell if it was because he was relieved I had no news, or relieved that I didn't have bad news.
"Have a seat." James indicated the sofas opposite the model. "Would you like tea or coffee?"
"No, thanks." A vision of Marie's foul liquid sprang to mind. I'd had enough encounters of the tea kind to last for one day, thank you very much.
I nodded at the model building. "Is that the City Park Complex?"
"Yes." He smiled proudly, as if talking about his own child.
"I heard there were problems in getting the planning permission and site for it. You paid over the odds for the land, didn't you?"
"In this kind of business, you win some and you lose some. I wasn't going to lose out on this project, so I had to increase my offer for the site to stop Sage Developments obtaining it." He crossed his legs and wiped away an imaginary piece of fluff. "We'll still be able to make a significant amount of profit, even though we paid more than we anticipated." He waved a dismissive hand. "That's just business."
"But it was touch and go whether you'd get planning permission for it, wasn't it? After you'd sunk all your money into it, didn't that cause you a lot of worry?"
"We always consult the planning department before we invest in a plot of land. They gave us the initial go-ahead for our City Park project, but, of course, when people begin to complain, like Alfie Cross and his friends, the council has to do an in-depth enquiry and things take longer than anticipated. But I have a habit of getting what I want, Ms. Fox." He gave me an arrogant smile.
"Is that why you stole from Chantal's trust fund? Because you just wanted it?" I sat back and waited for his reaction. I didn't have to wait long. The smile dropped off his face quicker that you could say
busted!
At least he had the good grace to look ashamed as his cheeks flushed and sweat broke out on his upper lip.
He took a deep breath before speaking. "That was only a temporary thing. We had some big backers pull out because of all the problems and delays surrounding the City Park Complex, so I did what I had to do to save the company. If I hadn't used Chantal's money, we'd be heading toward bankruptcy by now." He rubbed at his forehead. "Since we got the planning permission two weeks ago, we've managed to win back a lot of the investors. With their substantial cash injection, I would've been able to pay the money back into Chantal's trust fund before anyone found out." He leaned forward on his elbows, eyes pleading. "This has got nothing to do with Chantal's disappearance, I swear to you. You have to believe me. I love my daughter. I've never done anything to hurt her."
I took in his now slumped shoulders and watery eyes. He looked like he'd aged ten years in about two minutes. I thought about what he'd said. Did I believe this had nothing to do with Chantal going missing? If she hadn't disappeared no one would've been investigating James Langton and his company, so no one would've been any the wiser that he'd been dipping into the trust fund. No, it didn't make sense for him to be involved. In fact, it was very inconvenient for James that Chantal had gone missing and his little indiscretion with her trust fund had been discovered. He must've known when she disappeared that people would start looking into his finances and the theft would've been discovered. It was actually in his best interests that the whole matter stayed hidden, so any possible motive to get rid of Chantal had taken a nosedive straight out the nearest window. Plus, I was convinced the key to this case was more about the story Liza had been working on, and in turn, what Chantal had also discovered. I just didn't have a clue what that was yet.
"Actually, I do believe you," I said.
He closed his eyes for a moment and exhaled a deep sigh. "Thank you."
"What about Sage Developments? Do you think they could be holding a grudge against you because of the City Park Complex?"
He shook his head. "They weren't happy when I finally managed to acquire the City Park site, but they're not likely to do anything to Chantal. They're respectable businessmen, not the mafia."
"You've had to lay some people off recently. I heard that Philip Gates threatened you. Do you think he could've had something to do with Chantal's disappearance?"
"I think Philip was just distraught about losing his job. The pressure of having a new baby and no job got to him, and he just snapped and lost his temper. I didn't take his threats seriously. And, anyway, a few weeks ago he was offered a better job in Ireland and he moved his family out there. He left the country before Chantal went missing."
"How about Alfie Cross, who ran the campaign to try and get it stopped? Did you ever receive any personal threats from him?"
Another headshake. "No. And I understand he has an alibi for the time Chantal went missing."
While that was true, it didn't rule out Alfie getting a friend or associate to help him. "I think Chantal had a brief relationship with someone after she split up with Steven Shaw. Do you know who this man could be?"
"No. As I said before, I didn't know she was seeing anyone. The way she'd been acting lately, she wasn't in a fit state to have a relationship. She never spoke about a new boyfriend."
"Apparently she received a delivery of flowers here a few weeks ago. Do you know who sent them?"
He pursed his lips together, thinking. "No. I don't remember any flower deliveries—but, of course, I'm out of the office a lot of the time. She certainly didn't bring any flowers back to the house with her."
I pulled out the list Brad had found in Chantal's apartment. "Does this mean anything to you? I think they're initials and dates."
He studied the list, eyebrows knitted together. "I'm sorry, it doesn't mean a thing to me."
I gave him the list of phone numbers and names Liza and Chantal had called. "How about this? Do you recognize any of these names?"
More concentration before he finally shook his head. "No. I wish I could help. I just want to find her."
"Have you ever heard of the Second Chance Clinic or the Holbrook Clinic?"
"No. Do you think Chantal might've gone there?"
"That's what I have to find out. The Second Chance Clinic deals with family planning. It's a free clinic, providing contraception, checkups, and terminations. I'm not sure yet what the Holbrook Clinic does."
"She…" He paused. "Chantal was depressed, but she wasn't physically ill. And she couldn't have been pregnant." He stared off into the distance. "Could she?"
"It's possible. We found a pregnancy test in her bedroom."
James gasped. "And this could be why she went missing?"