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“Do you need a doctor?” Matthew said.
“I’m fine.”
Shit. She needed help, and he had no choice but to charge her. The Jordans weren’t going to let this one go.
Matthew drove her to the station. She was calm when he opened the back door and made no objection when he escorted her inside. He put her in an interview room and had someone bring her a cup of coffee, which she didn’t touch. He read her her rights, took her fingerprints himself, gently, and explained the charges. She sat quietly through all of it. She said nothing at all. In the end, Matthew sat in the chair opposite hers and tried hard to reach her.
“I get that this is an impossible situation. But you need to keep it together. You’ve got to let your brain run this show, not your emotions, if you want to find Nina.”
Her eyes finally met his. She looked broken. Years older than she had just that morning. “No one’s going to find her. Nina’s gone. She’s dead. He killed her, and he buried her body somewhere on that mountain.”
“You don’t know that.”
Anger sparked in her eyes. “Don’t you lie to me. I heard what the forensics guy said to you. Someone cleaned up the house so that you couldn’t find bloodstains.”
“I’m sorry you overheard that. It’s just a theory. There could be any number of explanations. It’s possible that someone just cleaned the floor using a new brand of cleaner. We need to ask and answer these questions before we start trying to draw conclusions.”
She looked at him with obvious disgust. “Julie Bradley told me everything. Would you have told us if she didn’t? I don’t think so. Nina’s our daughter, but you hoard information as if it doesn’t impact us. Like we’re just spectators on the sideline. When your investigation is over you’ll just move on with your life, but this is our life. Why don’t you get that?”
Damn. When Sarah Jane had interviewed Julie, she’d had the sense to ask the girl not to tell Nina’s parents what they’d discussed. Julie had, under pressure, agreed to keep it to herself. It looked like she’d broken that promise.
“We asked Julie not to tell you about the bruises for a lot of reasons. The main one being that her personal theory about what happened isn’t proof. She asked Nina straight out if Simon had hurt her, and Nina denied it, so her theory doesn’t actually move us forward right now.”
Leanne looked confused. Matthew tried again, talking a little slower.
“Proof is everything. If Simon Jordan is responsible for what happened to Nina, whatever that might be, I will do everything possible to prove it. But there may be another explanation here. Leanne, I’m not keeping things from you for any reason other than that I’m trying to do my job, the best way I know how.”
Matthew waited for her to reply. When she did, she spoke slowly and deliberately.
“When I said Julie told me everything, I was talking about the dog.”
“Oh,” Matthew said. Shit. They looked at each other for a long moment. He waited for her to ask him about the bruises, but she didn’t. She just sat there with eyes that looked right through him. He swallowed.
“Leanne, I’m asking you to trust me to do my job.”
Leanne said nothing.
“You need to stay away from the Jordans. When your case is heard and you have to defend yourself for assaulting Simon, the court’s going to have a lot of sympathy for you, under the circumstances, but not if you keep going down this route.”
Still she said nothing.
“Please, I want you to listen to me carefully. You think you know what happened, but you don’t. I’ve been a detective for a long time. I’ve worked a lot of cases. The most dangerous thing you can do is jump to a conclusion. You do that at the beginning of the case and you stop looking for the truth. You start seeing only the evidence that supports your theory. We don’t know for sure that Simon did anything to hurt Nina. We don’t know that he had anything to do with her disappearance. So stay away from him. Trust me. And give me time to get to the truth.”
He arranged for a junior officer to drive her home, though that turned out not to be necessary. When he walked her out, they found Andy and Grace waiting for her. Matthew excused himself quickly and retreated back into the station. Sarah Jane was waiting for him when he came back. She’d watched the interview through the one-way glass.
“Do you think she listened to you?” Sarah Jane asked.
“I don’t think she’s hearing anyone right now.”
“I’m not sure I blame her.”
He shook his head. He didn’t either. “I screwed up. About Julie.” He’d added fuel to an already volatile situation. Sarah Jane obviously knew it too. There was a moment of awkward silence.
“I thought you’d like to know that we had more calls,” she said. “Three more sightings of Nina.”
Three more meant five in total, in response to the press conference and their request for help from the public. The first two had come in within a few hours, but they’d been from regular callers, the kind of people who reported seeing Elvis in their local diner, and easily dismissed.
“Anything worth paying attention to?”
