Buried (DC Jack Warr #1) - Lynda La Plante Page 0,48

for that. The office is in a sort of compound shared with other units. There’s a warden who can let you in. It was one of the first places I went actually, when Mike stopped texting. The warden hasn’t seen him since last Wednesday. I’ve got a spare key to Mike’s flat if you want to go there as well. Please be careful. I mean . . . I don’t want him to think he’s been burgled.’

Whether or not Susan actually still loved Mike wasn’t clear but, as she bowed her head and turned her back, it was obvious that the possibility of him being dead was very upsetting.

‘Take anything you need,’ Susan muttered.

And then she jogged up the stairs to fetch Mike’s flat keys.

The lounge fell silent. Ridley saw Anik open his mouth at least two or three times to speak, and then think better of it. He was clearly the kind of person who was very uncomfortable with silence; Ridley wanted to train this out of him because police work was more about listening and looking than it was about talking.

‘What do you think of the house?’ Ridley asked.

‘Smart, yeah.’ Ridley turned to Anik, who instantly knew that his answer had missed the point. Then the penny dropped. ‘Mike Withey was a DC. I couldn’t afford this house in a month of Sundays, so how could he?’

Ridley’s slight smile told him that was the right answer.

Susan came back into the lounge carrying a single front door key and two scraps of paper. One was the address of Mike’s flat and the other was a scrappy-looking business card with the unimaginative name ‘Withey Security’.

‘This is Mike’s current mobile number?’

Susan nodded.

Ridley moved and stood in front of a wall of family photos, showing Mike and Susan with two girls at varying ages, from babies to young women.

‘Mrs Withey, in the interest of obtaining a comparative DNA sample for the purpose of identification, the best way would be to get a sample from a child. Would that be possible?’

‘The girls don’t live here any more. They’re grown. I . . . How would I explain what you’re doing? How would I explain why you need it? No, I don’t think that’s . . . What else can we do?’

‘We could use an item, such as a toothbrush . . .’

‘Claire’s got clothes and toiletries here for when she visits.’

Susan left the room slowly, giving herself time to comprehend the magnitude of going to collect an item that would tell the police whether her husband was dead or alive. When she got back, Anik was waiting, evidence bag at the ready, gloves on. Susan dropped the sparkly pink toothbrush into the bag.

‘Thanks, Mrs Withey.’

Ridley nodded to Anik, meaning it was back to him to question her about the house.

‘You have a lovely home,’ he started . . . and the information he needed flowed easily from Susan. She wasn’t thinking about Mike any more; she was thinking about her girls and this made her talk without caution.

‘Thank you. Audrey sold a villa in Spain some years ago and gave the cash to Mike. I said if he gambled it away, I’d leave him. So, he bought this.’ Susan shook her head as she remembered how unreliable Mike actually was. ‘From one extreme to the other. He had no idea what actually mattered to me and the kids. He thought this lovely house would solve all of our problems, but that’s all it turned out be in the end ‒ a lovely house. It wasn’t ever a family home, regardless of the pictures on the wall. Nothing more than a façade.’

‘I’d suggest you don’t tell Audrey that we’ve been to see you. Let’s do the DNA test first,’ Anik suggested.

‘She knows he’s missing, but . . . Well, it’s not unusual for Mike to go off for a while so she’ll not be worried yet. She’s concerned ‒ but not “worried”, you know.’

‘I know you mentioned that the text messages stopped but . . . was that the only reason for you reporting him missing this time?’

Ridley noted how Anik was starting to question intuitively.

‘He’d been distracted. I assumed it was by work, or the lack of work. I don’t know. He’d been . . . off. Mike wasn’t the deepest of people so he was easy to read. Something had been wrong for a while.’

The conversation was rounded off by Ridley asking the harder questions. Questions he knew Anik wouldn’t think of.

‘Mrs Withey, could you tell me if Mike still wore his wedding ring?’ And then came the