‘I don’t …’ Kim draws in her breath. ‘I don’t know what I think. But it is justpossible’, she says, ‘that they got into a row on their way home from Scarlett’s house and Zach lost his temper and … something happened and now he’s hiding somewhere. It’s possible, that’s all.’
But even as the words leave her mouth she knows it’s not just possible, it’s likely. What’s the aphorism?It’s always the husband.
‘Right,’ says DI McCoy, ‘well, I think we now have enough to go on to launch a search party. Leave it with me, Mrs Knox.’
‘Ms.’
‘Sorry. Ms. Leave it with me. And I will be in touch with exact timings. Et cetera.’
‘We searched a bit already,’ she says. ‘On Saturday. A few of us. In the woods.’
‘Oh.’
‘I mean, we didn’t find anything, we didn’t, at least I think we didn’t touch anything or disturb anything. I think it’s—’
‘It’s fine,’ he cuts in. ‘I’m sure it’s fine. Anyway. I’ll be in touch with details as soon as I have them. And, just before I go, I’d like to talk to Zach’s family. Do you happen to have a phone number, or an address?’
‘Yes, of course.’ She reels off Megs’s address and then says, ‘You won’t say anything to them, will you? About what I said, about Zach? I mean, we have a grandchild in common, I can’t have something like that between us. It would be incredibly difficult. It would—’
He cuts in again. ‘Absolutely not,’ he says. ‘Please don’t worry about that. We’ll be very discreet.’
‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’
She looks at Noah as she ends the call. He’s in his high chair eating dry Cheerios off the tray top. He looks back at her and he smiles.
‘Seeyos,’ he says, his eyes blazing with pride, his finger pointing at the cereal hoops. ‘Seeyos.’
Kim closes her eyes.
‘Yes!’ she says, mustering some spirit. ‘Yes! Cheerios! Well done! Clever boy! You are such a clever boy!’
Her voices catches and she turns away.
Noah’s second word. And Tallulah has missed them both.
The search of the woods begins in Upley Fold that lunchtime. It’s what Kim wanted but it’s also terrifying. The sudden burst of energy and people, when for so many hours it’s just been her alone, rattles her.
She sees Megs and Simon standing at the edge of the woods as she approaches. Megs turns and looks at her and Kim sees something like fear pass across her implacable face. She says something to Simon and Simon glances up.
‘This is mad,’ Megs says to Kim as she nears her. ‘I mean, I know it’s odd that they’ve not been home, I get that, but still, this …’ She spreads her hand out in an arc to describe the squad of police officers in high-vis attire, the sniffer dogs. ‘It’s all a bit OTT, isn’t it?’
Kim doesn’t reply immediately, she’s not sure what to say.
‘Did they come and talk to you?’ she asks, finally. ‘The police?’
‘Yeah. Bloody ridiculous. They were there for ages. Asking all these questions about Zach, about what sort of boy he was, about how he got on at school, about his job. I was just, like, what on earth are you asking me all this for? It’s almost like they think he’s done something wrong.’
She says this glibly, but Kim catches a glint of something hard in her eye as she glances up at her.
Ryan is at home with Noah and the police have asked family not to join in the search yet. So for now it is just Kim, Megs and Simon standing together, while the detectives loiter in a huddle afew metres away and the search team and their dogs arrange themselves to head into the woods.
It’s warm again today and Kim feels clammy and anxious.
‘How long do you think this will take?’ Megs calls out starkly to the group of plain-clothes detectives. DI McCoy turns at the question, gives his colleagues a look before walking over to join them.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘there’s no way of knowing. Luckily at this time of year we have daylight on our side, so we can just keep going until it gets dark. And then it depends what we find. We’re sending one party through from the back of the Jacques property, assuming that’s the way they went, and another party through from this entrance’ – he gestures towards the wooden stile that forms the public entrance to the woods – ‘in case they’d already left the Jacques property before deciding to head back through the woods. So we’ll have two teams in there and they’ll splinter as they get deeper into the woods to cover as much territory as possible.’
‘And what are you looking for exactly?’ Megs asks chippily.