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‘I’m still not sure why you didn’t mention it,’ Kim pushed.
‘You wanted to ask me about Sandy and the events of Thursday night. I don’t find a way to insert the most painful part of my life into every conversation I have. Do you?’
Kim took her point.
‘What happened to your son?’
Rose sighed heavily. ‘It was a normal morning. He was riding to school with his friend. Brad, my son, was ahead. They often raced through the woods. By the time Josh caught up to where Brad should have been waiting, a white transit van was pulling away at speed. Poor Josh had no clue what had happened and thought Brad had just carried on racing. He didn’t raise the alarm until he went into first class and realised Brad had never made it to school. He remembered the white van and told his teacher, almost half an hour after Brad had been taken.’
Kim remembered hearing about it now. She’d been stationed in Digbeth, Birmingham at the time. She remembered the photo that had been passed around for observations.
‘I kept the hope alive for a year, until they found most of his clothing in a secluded area on Cannock Chase. Police dug up a couple of mounds but they never found him.’
Kim noticed that Rose’s voice had grown quieter.
‘I was told by the detective chief inspector that they had concluded that Brad was no longer alive, and that he was likely buried somewhere on Cannock Chase, but obviously…’
Kim understood. She knew that the Chase was famous for the bodies of three young girls found in the late sixties. She also knew it covered 26 square miles, making it impossible to search for a body.
‘It took a while but I finally accepted that he was dead. Of course there’s no closure without his body.’
‘Of course,’ Kim said, feeling sorry for stirring up her pain. It was as though they were speaking to a different woman than the one who had answered the door. She had fallen back against the cushion, and her hands were rubbing her upper arms in what Kim knew to be a self-comforting gesture.
‘We’re sorry for your loss, and we appreciate you being honest with us.’
‘Not sure it’ll help Sandy, but it is what it is.’
Kim headed for the door and sighed heavily when it closed softly behind them.
‘Jesus, Bryant, can you even imagine not having the remains…’
‘Don’t do it, guv,’ he said, unlocking the car.
‘What?’ she asked innocently.
‘It’s not our case. It was never our case and we’ve got no business meddling. You can’t solve everything. You’ve already got Penn following up on some John Doe that Keats got you riled up about. We have our own murder to solve and now you want to give this woman her son’s body to bury.’
‘You’re right,’ she said, putting on her seat belt.
‘I am?’
‘Absolutely,’ she said as her phone began to ring. ‘Go ahead, Stace.’
‘Father Markinson, boss – he’s a bigoted, judgemental, authoritarian scumbag excuse for a human.’
‘Okay, thanks for that,’ Kim said, putting her on loudspeaker.
‘And I think he’s worth a visit.’
‘Go on,’ Kim said. The constable’s task had been to rule him out of the investigation.
She listened with a growing sense of outrage as Stacey listed his placements and what appeared to be the reasons for his many transfers.
‘Okay, so he’s also intolerant but why does that make him interesting to us?’
‘He and Sandy had words a couple of times. He’d actually banned Sandy from the church.’
‘What?’ Kim asked. She didn’t know they could do that. Wasn’t God’s house always open?
