was alone they hovered at the edge of her consciousness like black vultures, ready to swoop.
She may not have thought much of him as a man, or at least any love she may have felt for him had been violently suppressed after she had been offloaded onto Ellie’s mother. As she had grown older and begun to understand what he’d done to her own mum, the last remaining fragments of affection had turned to contempt. But who wanted to live with the knowledge that they had been fathered by a monster? How could she come to terms with the fact that the man her mother had loved had such a dark side? The thought made her feel physically sick, and she was terrified of what it would do to Ellie.
It was strange, but since Tom had told her about him she could now vividly recall details of her father that had eluded her only a couple of short days ago. He would have been just over fifty when he disappeared for the last time, but he dressed like a much younger man. Or at least, he tried to. She remembered smart suits on work days, and brightly coloured ties. But when he went out in the evening - which she seemed to think he did practically every night - his jeans were that bit too tight in an era where others were wearing looser clothes, and his leather bomber jacket always made her think that he was trying that bit too hard. But maybe all teenage girls feel like that about their fathers. She did remember some girls at school saying her dad was cool, but she wasn’t impressed. She had felt vaguely embarrassed by him.
Now, she was ashamed, although shame had already played a huge part in her life so it was nothing new. Ever since arriving in this village, she had been viewed as something of a dirty secret, but she had learned to hold her head high and ignore what other people thought. If all of this ever came out, she would just have to do the same again.
The silence in the car was broken by the ringing of a phone. She knew it wasn’t hers and realised that Tom must have left his in the side pocket of the Jeep. She leaned across, but couldn’t reach it.
‘Bugger.’ She shuffled onto her knees, and managed to scuttle across the wide central console and squeeze down behind the steering wheel. After all that, when she picked the phone up it stopped ringing. Looking at the display to see if it was Max, she noticed that it said Steve. Wasn’t he the detective that Tom had been talking to? If it was important, no doubt he would phone back.
Deciding that she would stay on this side of the Jeep until Tom had finished with Pat, she switched the ignition on to get power, and started to fiddle with the radio. She needed something to drown out her thoughts. Her uninformed twiddling resulted in a burst of loud music, and she couldn’t for the life of her find where to switch the volume down. She felt a brief draught on her neck from somewhere just as she found the right button and managed to take the level down to something tolerable.
And then she felt it. She knew, without looking, that somebody was in the car behind her. She could feel their breath changing the atmosphere, and every inch of her flesh tingled with fear. For a second, she didn’t move. She felt a shifting of the air behind her as she groped blindly for the door handle.
* * *
Pat opened the folder, and Tom could see a number of image files.
‘There’s a whole folder of pictures of girls at around the same age here - but it was the name Chloe that made me think. Of course, it could be a coincidence, but I thought I should ask you before wasting anybody else’s time.’
‘Can I grab your chair for a moment, Pat?’
Sitting down quickly and leaning towards the computer, Tom checked out all the files that Pat had found and confirmed that he was right. They were all pictures of girls around fourteen or fifteen years old. All the photos were low resolution, so it was unlikely that they were original. Tom guessed that they had been grabbed from social network sites.
He checked the browser history, but couldn’t find what he was looking for. That wasn’t much of a surprise.