The Long Call (Two Rivers #1) - Ann Cleeves Page 0,120

the living room and was looking at the cardigan. She showed Matthew the label of the cheap high street chain where Susan had said they’d been shopping in Plymouth. ‘I’m sure this is Lucy’s.’

On the hall table there was a phone, a landline. Matthew pressed the redial button and got through to emergency services. ‘That confirms that she made the call from here.’ He shouted up the stairs: ‘Hello, Lucy.’ Silence.

Matthew went up. He told the others to stay where they were; he’d already be contaminating any possible scene. There was a narrow landing, with a bathroom ahead. A stained enamel bath. Surely a man who’d been a lawyer would be able to afford better accommodation than this. Perhaps Marston had conned them all, including the Woodyard board, and lied about his qualifications and experience. Or had the pull of the wildlife on the marsh really been the big draw?

Every muscle felt tense, and his heart was racing. He wondered if this was the onset of an anxiety attack. He’d suffered from them when he first went to Bristol as a student but hadn’t had one for years. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting to find in the upstairs rooms. Another stabbing perhaps. Blood. He thought he wouldn’t know how to tell Maurice if anything had happened to his daughter, found himself groping already for the words to explain. For a story. The bathroom was empty. A search team would come in later, but now he just wanted to find Lucy, to get her back to her father.

He pushed open one of the bedroom doors. A spare room, barely furnished with a single bed and clothes rail. Still no sign of the woman. Nowhere to hide a body. The last bedroom obviously belonged to the Marstons – Colin’s clothes were neatly folded on a chair, Hilary’s thrown on the floor. He pulled back the duvet, but there was no blood-soaked mattress, no Lucy. He was hit by relief and an overwhelming sense of anticlimax. In the ceiling of the landing, there was a small plyboard hatch that would lead into the loft, but Matthew could tell that Lucy was too big and too physically unfit to get through it. He shouted down to the others:

‘She’s not here.’

They gathered in the cramped hall.

‘What do we think?’ This was Jen. ‘That they caught her ringing out to the emergency services and realized they had to get her out of the house? They’d know we’d be on our way. Their car’s here, so how did they move her? Taxi? Did they get someone to come and give them a lift?’

‘Maybe.’ But Matthew wasn’t sure the Marstons would have waited for someone to drive from the town. They were city people and they’d expect an immediate police response. ‘Or maybe they just walked her out. They hoped we’d find nobody at home. They might not have realized she’d given her name or the call-handler would be bright enough to pass the message on to us. They could be hiding, waiting for us to go away again, so they can bring her back. Marston knows the marsh and the shore. He’d be aware of the places to hide her.’

* * *

They separated. Jen and Ross went inland, following the road that ran along the marsh. That was the more likely place for the couple to have taken Lucy. She would find it hard to walk quickly over soft sand, and they’d want her to move quickly. Matthew headed to the shore towards Crow Point. That was his territory. He thought he’d know it as well as Marston. It was where Simon Walden had been found dead.

There was a half-moon, covered most of the time by cloud, misty, hardly giving any light. Matthew climbed the bank of dunes. Home lay to his right, brightly lit. He thought he could smell woodsmoke. Jonathan would have lit the log burner, would be waiting, restless and anxious. On the far bank of the river, a string of lights marked Instow, and beyond the mouth of the Torridge more lights: Bideford and Appledore. The map of his patch.

The tide had been low when they’d left Barnstaple but it had turned now and was on its way in, the water inching its way up the shore. He could make out the thin line of foam, white against a grey beach, where the waves were breaking, but little else. He checked his phone to make sure he had signal, that Jen