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I wanted to deny it. I wanted to say I was old enough not to fall apart over this and sensible enough to deal with whatever had happened. Except that perhaps I wasn’t.
Hannah had switched tactics then. ‘Who was it who plucked that sting out of my bum after I sat on a bee in my bikini? Or drove like a maniac to the airport to deliver my passport after I discovered I’d left it at home? Or cried along with me when I had that miscarriage, the year before I had Milly?’
‘This quiz is too easy. You need to find some harder questions,’ I replied, touched by her words, and also momentarily distracted. Something she’d said had tripped a silent alarm in my head, but as hard as I tried to catch hold of the elusive thought, it kept slipping away from me.
‘You’ve been there for me, Gemma, whenever I’ve needed you,’ Hannah continued, sounding more emotional than I could cope with that early in the morning. ‘So now I’m here for you’ – she shook her arms, for her hands had once again disappeared inside the sleeves of the pyjamas she’d borrowed – ‘although I may have to go home and get some of my own clothes before we venture anywhere today. Yours are far too big for me.’
‘Well, now you’re just being cruel,’ I said, surprised to find that this time the humour came a little more naturally.
*
‘My fiancé is missing.’ My voice was a panicked ricochet, echoing off the walls of the police station reception. Even though I’d rehearsed how to deliver the information in a clear, non-hysterical way, I’d fallen at the first hurdle in response to a simple ‘Can I help you?’
‘Take a breath,’ advised the station duty officer calmly, ‘and start from the beginning. Firstly, how long has he been missing?’
‘Since yesterday afternoon. When he didn’t turn up at our wedding.’
*
The room I’d been led to was silent now, except for the sound of a pen scratching on a notepad. A different officer sat before me, his bowed head revealing a bald patch that I’d been staring at for the last ten minutes as he filled an entire A4 sheet with indecipherable notes and annotations. It didn’t look particularly official, and that worried me. A lot.
Finally, the officer looked up, snapping the cap back on his pen in an ‘I think we’re done here’ kind of way.
‘Okay, Miss Fletcher, I think I’ve got all the details I need. But before we escalate this to anofficialmissing person’s report, there are a couple of things that I believe might have been overlooked along the way.’
I sat up straighter on the interview room’s uncomfortable plastic chair. Despite the receding hairline, the officer could only have been ten years older than me, and yet I felt like a bewildered child in front of him.
‘What things?’
‘Well, you said you visited Mr Douglas’s flat late yesterday afternoon but that you didn’t notice if anything of importance was missing.’
‘Finnwas missing. He was the only thing I was looking for.’
Inspector Graham – according to his ID pass – nodded in an avuncular way that he was far too young to pull off effectively. ‘Of course. Quite right. But I want to make sure that we don’t take any missteps here, given the slightlyunusualcircumstances of your fiancé’s… disappearance.’ It was impossible not to notice his slight hesitation.
‘Isn’t every disappearance unusual?’ I challenged, already fearing I knew exactly where this conversation was going.
‘I’ve been a police officer for twenty years,’ Inspector Graham said, leaning back in his chair. ‘And in that time I’ve dealt with countless missing person reports. But I’m going to be completely honest with you, Miss Fletcher. What you’ve described doesn’t fit a classic scenario of someone who’s gone missing. Can you think of any reason at all why Mr Douglas might havechosento leave?’
Suddenly I wasn’t sure I liked Inspector Graham after all. ‘You mean like deciding he didn’t want to get married to me?’
The policeman had the grace to look uncomfortable at the directness of my response.
‘Have the two of you argued about anything recently? Perhaps you’ve had a falling-out?’
‘We were supposed to be getting married yesterday,’ I said fiercely, as though my answer blew his question out of the water. ‘So that’s a hard no.’
‘I don’t want you to think we’re not taking your concerns seriously. Contacting the hospitals was definitely an excellent place to start. So well done for initiating that.Myteam’s first task will be to reach out to all local police stations to see if your fiancé might have spent last night in one of our custody suites.’
‘You think Finn might have been arrested?’
‘He wouldn’t be the first groom to end up there, sleeping it off after his stag night.’
‘But Finn wasn’t drunk. You can ask any of his friends.’
‘Or he might have been involved in a brawl,’ the policeman suggested calmly. ‘These things can get a bit lairy at times.’ I shook my head because he was talking about someone who bore absolutely no resemblance to the Finn I knew.
‘What I’d like to suggest is that you return to Mr Douglas’s flat and see if there’s anything there that might offer a clue as to his current whereabouts. People are creatures of habit; they do things they’ve done before, return to places that are familiar. Sometimes it’s the things that are missing that are the most informative. So it’s worth checking his clothes, personal possessions, passport, that kind of thing.’
