Behind Closed Doors (7 page)

My first house call was Gina Redding's.

I gave her what we had, which was mainly that we'd confirmed that Jean Slater was lying about her daughter's supposed illness. The girl had dropped out of sight for some other reason.

I described Larry Slater's mysterious stakeout of the previous evening. I'd no evidence to say it was related but I gave Gina my experience which was that in the investigation business there's no such thing as coincidence. When you're looking at one funny going-on and stumble across another there tends to be a correlation between the two.

‘Larry may be searching for Rebecca,' I postulated. ‘Maybe she's eloped with some rich guy.'

Gina shook her head. ‘Rebecca didn't run off, Mr Flynn,' she said. ‘She wouldn't mislead her friends like that.'

‘Intentions change,' I suggested.

Another emphatic shake. ‘She'd have called Sadie at least.' Gina thought of something else. ‘If she'd run off, why are the Slaters keeping it a secret?'

I gave her a grim smile. That was my own question, the one which made me doubt the elopement theory. Would a family hide the fact that their daughter has run away out of sheer embarrassment? Sure they would. But there was a factor that argued against it.

‘If Rebecca had run off,' I said, ‘the Slaters would be talking to Sadie. She's the one person who might know something.'

Gina nodded. We were on the same track. ‘They've done the opposite,' she said. ‘They've cut Sadie out, just like me.'

‘Which means that they know Sadie knows nothing,' I said. ‘Therefore they know that Rebecca hasn't run away.'

The old lady unsealed a new pack and lit up. ‘So someone really has taken her?' She looked at me like I'd let her down.

‘It's beginning to look that way,' I said. ‘We just need to figure a reason that would explain why the Slaters haven't gone to the police. Kidnap for ransom might keep them quiet, but the Slaters don't stand out from the crowd as an obvious target. There are far richer pickings around town. Unless financial extortion wasn't the purpose.'

Gina sucked at her cigarette and watched a couple of swifts squabbling in the garden.

‘The Slaters may have something the abductors need,' I said. ‘Slater's line of work suggests possibilities. But we may be wide of the mark with abduction. It's still possible that the thing is to do with the family itself.'

‘You think Larry and Jean might have harmed her?' Gina was right back with her first supposition.

I held up my hands. ‘The question is,' I said, ‘do we take this further? If we dig then we'll find out what's going on. But my feeling is that we'll be fighting the family all the way. I'll need to put in the hours, ask my partner to help, maybe grease a few palms. It's going to be expensive, Gina.'

Gina shook her head, blew smoke.

‘Do whatever you need,' she said. ‘Let's get Rebecca back safe. I'll handle the bill.'

‘Fine,' I said. ‘We'll step things up a gear. Give us three or four days. We'll find her.'

Gina nodded but her expression told me that she was thinking the same as me. Three or four days was a long time if the girl was in trouble; something bad may already have happened. I was confident we could find her, but that didn't mean she'd be okay.

I headed to the Slater house. If Larry was out then I wanted to take a look at Jean Slater's day.

The early morning drink I'd spotted yesterday didn't point to anything particularly productive in her schedule. If Jean just stayed cooped up inside the house I'd waste another half day. But it was the best shot I had before bringing Shaughnessy in and starting the heavy digging.

In the event Lady Luck presented a better option. As I turned into the lane I had to pull the Frogeye hard into the verge to avoid becoming roadkill under the wheels of a four-by-four coming out. My mind was on avoiding the agricultural-size Michelins, but I caught a peripheral glance of Jean Slater's face up behind the windscreen. Going somewhere fast. Looked like she'd not started so early on the lubrication today. Unless I was luckier than I knew.

Decision time. It would be good to see where Jean was going but the opportunity of an empty house was too good to pass. Empty if Larry Slater or Rebecca were not there, of course. I got back onto the tarmac and continued up the lane. I turned into the Slaters' driveway and parked outside their front door. Slater's Lexus was missing and Jean hadn't looked like she was popping out for the paper. I might have an hour or two.

I rang the door bell. Better safe, et cetera.

No answer.

I reached into the Frogeye's boot and grabbed a couple of tools that help with house calls. I slipped them under my jacket and walked along the front of the building. The villa was abutted by white stuccoed walls hiding the gardens but I found an access gate unlocked beside the garage and went through.

The grounds were a half acre of impeccable gardens that suggested regular staff. I hoped that today was their day off. I went round the back and found a conservatory that added nothing to the Spanish architecture. An add-on at the stage of needing either major refurbishment or demolition. Its main feature was a door that didn't need any tools other than hand pressure to ease the lock's tongue out of the frame. I went inside and walked along the back of the main house. Three doors opened into the building. Two were secure. The third was the kitchen door and was unlocked. If they'd put an ENTRANCE sign up they'd save a burglar's time. The house was alarmed but something told me that Jean Slater hadn't stopped to set the panel. I took a chance and stepped into the kitchen.

The place stayed silent. I walked through to an alcove at the back of the hall and confirmed that the alarm was disabled. I listened again. Still silence. I took the nearer staircase onto the gallery. The gallery served two doors on each side of the house. I started clockwise from the east. The first two doors opened onto lifeless guest rooms. I moved on to the front of the house. Both front rooms had been knocked into one master bedroom the size of a tennis court with walk-in dressers and a double-sized ensuite. Jean and Larry's room. The room was just-vacated untidy. Bed unmade. Walk-in closets open. Lid askew on a laundry basket. It looked like Jean was not a neat freak. I guessed that she had a domestic, although there had been no sign of work going on when I was here on Tuesday. I did a skim search, pulled drawers on the off chance that there might be something significant. Found nothing. If the Slaters had anything to hide it would not be here. I continued my walk, checked two more guest rooms on the west side and finally arrived at the rear of the house. The first door opened into a bright and untidy bedroom crowded with soft furnishings and wall posters. Rebecca's room.

Two rooms knocked into one again. The ultimate teenage den. Six full-height windows looked out over the gardens and illuminated walls decorated in cheerful pastels that matched the curtains and bedspread. The bed was made up but in a half-hearted way. Clothes and shoes were scattered about the room but I didn't get the impression that the girl had been around in the last few days. If Rebecca had been gone a week then the domestic was moving slow.

A teak desk had a clutter of student stuff: notebooks, scrap paper, card files with work assignments. No computer – Rebecca probably carried her laptop around. I looked through the loose stuff and found nothing.

I checked out shelves loaded with more clutter – books, boxes of tissues, cuddly toys, a rack of CDs already made obsolescent by the iPod on the desk. I sifted through a teak chest of drawers full of girl's designer stuff, turned everything, corner to corner, in forty-five minutes. Nothing amongst her paperwork or clothes, nothing under the mattress, no love-letters hidden in her underwear. I went through the clothes in a walk-in closet and found what mattered by chance when my foot caught a piece of loose flooring while I was riffling jacket pockets. I coaxed up a short floorboard that had been fitted around heating pipes. Saw things hidden beneath it. Three slim exercise books, spiral bound. I pulled out Rebecca's diaries.

I sat in a chair and opened the books. The pages held a mass of tiny handwriting packaged into short cryptic entries going back three years. I started with the current year. The entries were a teenaged girl's standard concoction of drama and daydreams but it didn't take long to get to something that seemed significant.

What caught my attention was Rebecca's reaction to the split with the boyfriend, Marcus. The separation looked to have cut deep. Deep enough to explain what might have triggered her association with Sadie's “creepy guy” Russell Cohen.

Three months back things were fine. Rebecca and her boyfriend were solid. The diary entries were a mixture of one-liners and short paragraphs scattered cryptically with Marcus' name. Sweetheart stuff. Rebecca's shorthand might have protected her secrets a generation back but nowadays everyone texts the same code a dozen times a day.

I turned the pages, found the moment eight weeks back where the entries changed in tone and length. Rebecca and Marcus had had a fall-out. The storm had closed in fast. The diary skipped specifics, went blank for a couple of days. Avoiding stuff that was too painful. When it took up again there was a page and a half of barely-coded pain that skittered between guilt and blame. Rebecca got it all into three short sentences:

He dsnt lv me.

Hate him. All my fault!!

The subsequent pages counted Marcus' phone calls. Rebecca recorded the number of times he called her without saying whether the two of them ever talked but I got a feeling she wasn't answering. Preferred to wallow in the misery of logging the missed calls. The importance of Marcus trying was clear in her counting fixation, but I got the sense that reconciliation was locked in a bear hug with something destructive inside Rebecca. I turned a page and two halves of a photo dropped out. I held the pieces together. A chest and head view of a good-looking boy in a black t-shirt, college buildings behind him, squinting into the sun with a loopy grin. Marcus, I guessed.

The photo was large enough to be shreddable twenty ways. The single rip screamed restraint. Said that Rebecca's heart wasn't in it. I slipped the photo back and read another week's worth of half-pagers, Rebecca pouring out her misery in a mixture of self-castigation and stubbornness. I sensed the two of them entrenched behind their defences. Did Rebecca show any of these emotions outside her room? Something told me this wasn't a house for sharing problems.

A couple of weeks later the entries reverted to one-liners. It looked like the split was permanent. Then the first hint of Rebecca's new attachment. The code would have been tricky if I didn't already know the characters:

Kiks club. Rsl got me in. Pssd. Nyt @ his.

and

Skipped class. Pm w Rsl, smoked, let him.

Smoked what? Let Russell what?

Whatever it was it seemed that Rebecca was doing more than just hanging out with the guy. The entries stayed short and cryptic, but what was there was clear enough. Stuff like
2e's
and

R + J + me!! – crazy – J's sxe but shes a bij

and another day

R on stuff, wntd me – no wy – got nasty, ran out –

Bstd. Calld me latr, 4gottn!!

Pikn me up 2mor. Bstd!

I was getting the picture.

R
stayed in the picture right till the end. If you were looking for signs of a slide it was there. But nothing that pointed to the reason Rebecca had vanished that afternoon. Unless she simply didn't come back from one of
R
's little parties. Ten days ago the diary just stopped.

I skipped back a couple of years for anything that might give me a picture of how things were inside the Slater household. Spotted stuff that didn't look good. In amongst Marcus and teenaged angst Rebecca poured out her feelings about her mother and Larry. The stuff on her mother was just odd cryptic comments, complaints about her interferences, her indecisiveness. Her unwillingness to stand up for her daughter. But Rebecca's hostility towards Larry Slater needed no interpretation. Things were not good between the two of them. The girl's thoughts on her step father didn't take much decoding.

What did Jean ever c in this prik?

(Money!)

and

I just want 2 get out. Bstd yelled @me ryt in front of Jean & she said nothin. So I said it 4 her!! Letch almst hit me. But he knows thers a line. He only has 2 cross it once & his littl secrets out – then its goodbye Happy Familys

Happy families. How do they get like that?

The diaries took me an hour. I kept an ear open for the sound of anyone returning. Finally decided that I was living on borrowed time.

I slotted the books back under the floorboard and made a fast search of Rebecca's bathroom, digging through the clutter of cosmetics and girl stuff for anything that shouldn't be there – maybe an indiscreet cache of “e” or “stuff” brought back from one of her evenings with Russell. Nothing. The place was clean.

The phone rang downstairs.

I froze like a guilty schoolboy. Heard voicemail kick in. I closed Rebecca's door and went down.

I had what I'd been looking for. The picture was pretty much what Sadie and Gina had hinted – the unhappy home, Rebecca's break-up with her boyfriend, the thing with the new guy Russell. The diaries gave me an explanation for the tension at home. And it didn't take much to figure what the thing was between Rebecca and her stepfather. It looked like Rebecca had been holding the guy at bay for a long time. Despite my previous assumptions the thing made me wonder again whether her disappearance might not be self-imposed. A home where you're not safe is no home at all.