Deciding he wasn’t going to wait around, Tomek banged on the front door one last time, and when there was still no response, he knocked on the neighbour’s door. The woman who answered was frightened and cautious of him, but as soon as he’d shown her his ID, she relaxed a little.
‘Don’t suppose you have a key, do you?’ Tomek asked. It was a long shot, but sometimes the simplest options were the ones overlooked.
The neighbour shook her head.
‘What about a hammer of some kind?’
The woman looked at him aghast, eyes beady. He glanced down at her hand, saw a ring, and asked, ‘Married?’
She nodded, eyes still wild, as though she was having an out of body experience. She was experiencing fight or flight, and right now she was doing neither, absolutely fucking nothing.
‘Does your partner have anything we can use?’
‘He… he’s not home.’
Tomek swore. The last thing he wanted to do was spend time tearing through a complete stranger’s house and garden shed.
And then it came to him.
The garden!
Without asking, Tomek shimmied his way past the neighbour, and hurried towards the small set of patio doors at the back of the house. The neighbour, in her bewildered state, was a few seconds behind, the cogs in her brain taking time to adjust and come to terms with what was happening in her home.
‘Key,’ he said to her, agitated. ‘I need a key. I need to get into the garden.’
She pointed to a small pot that was wedged into the corner of another windowsill. Tomek reached for it, grabbed the key, and let himself out. The garden was in its early spring state. The flowers were beginning to blossom, the grass was overgrown, and life was coming back to the trees. And the air was filled with it. It would have been a pleasant experience, sitting out there, had it not been for the hospital round the corner, and the sound of sirens firing off every two seconds.
Tomek turned his attention to Adam Egglington’s house. The two were almost identical: the kitchen door, the patio doors that opened onto the garden, the window above. It was like looking in a mirror. He paused a moment, surveying his options. The way he saw it, there was only one: he was going to have to break in and deal with the consequences later.
Before hopping the fence, he searched the neighbour’s garden, looking for anything heavy enough to shatter the glass. He found it in the form of a brick that had come loose on a small bed of flowers. He bent down to pick it up, and just as he was about to lob it over the fence, the neighbour called out to him, ‘What are you doing? You can’t take that.’
Tomek observed the object in his hand. ‘It’s a brick. You really gonna miss it?’
Then, before she could respond, he lobbed it over the fence in front of him. It wasn’t until he squared up to the fence that he realised he’d thrown it over the wrong one. The neighbour had distracted him, and his body had been facing the opposite direction as he’d chucked it.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake! Sorry!’
Another bend, another brick, using more force to yank it from the ground this time. Now he owed her and her husband two bricks. He threw it over the correct fence and, using a bird bath for support, propelled himself into Adam’s garden. The landing was soft, his body barrel-rolling across the overgrown grass and weeds. After a few seconds of searching, his fingers trawling through the undergrowth, he eventually found the brick. As he charged towards the house, cocking his arm back, ready to throw the object, he stopped when he saw a man appear from the cloud’s reflection in the window. Adam Egglington was lying on his sofa, flat on his back, his face and neck covered in vomit. His chest wasn’t moving, and when Tomek knocked on the glass, there was no response. Tomek cupped his face to the window and peered through. In the fading light, he could see the man’s face, a pasty white beneath the thick splatter of vomit. He was fully dressed and still in the same clothes from the night before. He must have come home, passed out on the sofa, and been so wasted he’d choked on his own vomit. Seeing it reminded Tomek of the time he’d nearly suffered the same fate. He’d been nineteen, gone out for a big night with his mates, and woken up on his side with a pool of vomit beside his head, crusty on the outside, soft and spongy on the inside, like a bodily fluid flapjack. For days afterwards he could still smell the stench of it hot in his nostrils, but what had really stuck with him had been the near-death experience, the unshakeable fact that he could have died if his body had been rotated another ninety degrees. That was it, all that had been between him and death. Something as arbitrary as a ninety-degree angle.
Before he could ponder it anymore, the sound of sirens grew louder, and he realised it was the backup he’d called for, pulling up outside the house. He vaulted the fence, raced back through the neighbour’s kitchen, and found them in the front garden. He was met by a duo of confused faces.
‘No, you’re not in the wrong place,’ he told them. ‘But I’ve found him. He’s in the living room at the back of the property. Have you got an enforcer?’
One of the uniformed officers nodded, then turned towards the vehicle. He returned with a large battering ram in hand.
‘Great,’ Tomek said, then watched as the man proceeded to batter the heavy-duty metal object into the weak, wooden front door. It didn’t stand a chance, and after one hit, it buckled and gave way.
But Tomek couldn’t follow the men in. Something held him firmly rooted to the spot, keeping him outside as the wind began to pick up and wrap itself around him.
He couldn’t bear to look at the man lying in a pool of his own vomit because, before he’d pulled his eyes away from the image a few moments before, all he’d been able to see was himself there, slightly longer and larger, taking up more of the space, covered in his own sick. He couldn’t bear to look and be reminded of what could have been.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The image was still in his head when he entered the major incident room. He’d been unable to shake it the entire time the SOCOs and uniformed staff had processed Adam Egglington’s body and removed it. Ingrained, indelible. Each time seeing his own face instead of Adam’s.
Waiting for him in the MIR were Chey and Rachel. Tomek had told them to ready their information ahead of the meeting. Usually, an inspector would require a written report from each member of staff actively working on an investigation, someone who was out there on the frontline. But Tomek didn’t like reports. They were a constant bugbear of his, and it wasn’t the way he wanted to manage the investigation. If he couldn’t be arsed to write them in the first place, you could sure as hell bet he wouldn’t be arsed to read them either.
‘What you saying, Sarge?’ Chey asked in a spritely tone.
‘I’m saying nothing at all, because for the next ten minutes I want to be doing all the listening.’
‘And maybe have a little nap as well, by the looks of it,’ added Rachel unapologetically. ‘I’ve seen single mums look less tired than you.’
A smile flashed across Tomek’s face. He could always rely on his team – especially those he’d specifically chosen – to raise his spirits. The banter between the three of them was arguably the best in the office (Tomek’s argument, only) and that was part of the reason he’d selected them: some light in what he sensed would be an otherwise dark and depressing investigation.
Tomek pulled a seat out from beneath the table and dropped himself into it. It was only the first day of the investigation, and already he was feeling deflated. Like he had nothing left to give. Was this how Nick felt twenty-four seven? Was that why he always sighed, because he’d had enough twenty years ago and was now just hanging on by a thread?
‘Where would you like us to begin, Sarge?’ Chey asked.
‘From the beginning. Do we have any idea where she is?’
Chey shook his head. ‘Her phone’s still off, and has been since the early hours of the morning. I’ve contacted her service provider for more information, and I should have it by tomorrow morning.’
Tomek spun on the chair and looked at the wall of whiteboards that ran along one side of the room. The notes and images from a previous investigation had been left up there, waiting to be pulled down, and Tomek found a small empty section of the board beside Chey and Rachel. He grabbed a pen and wiped clean a small smudge from the surface.
‘What’s the timeline?’ he asked, writing on the whiteboard. ‘Her and her friends left Memo at one fifteen. According to Elodie Locket’s Uber account, Angelica was dropped off at her flat at precisely one twenty-eight, thirteen minutes later.’ Tomek recalled all of this from memory, while the other two searched through their notes, cross-referencing the information they had versus what he was telling them. ‘She was due at work in Leigh Broadway by nine am.’ He drew a line between the two times, going over it repeatedly, leaving enough space to fill in the gaps. ‘That leaves us a seven-hour window for her to go missing. What can you add to that?’
Chey consulted his notes. ‘The last ping from her phone to a cell tower was at one fifty-two in the morning, which is…’ He paused as he calculated the time difference. ‘Just over twenty minutes after she got home.’
