Girl Number One: A Gripping Psychological Thriller by Jane Holland Read Free Book Online Page A

wrong.
    Detective
Inspector Powell. Tall, white-haired now, easily in his sixties. I thought he
would have retired by now. He was one of the officers who investigated the unsolved
murder of Angela Blackwood eighteen years ago.
    This would be a bad moment to throw up again.
    ‘Dad, were you looking for me?’ My palms are
sweating; I wipe them on the back pockets of my jeans, trying for a calm tone.
‘You should have come straight in. I was in the shower, but Hannah’s around
somewhere.’
    Asleep,
most probably. But I’m not thinking straight.
    My father does not answer.
    DI Powell steps away from the group. His gaze
is cool but sympathetic as he assesses my face, my hair, my appearance. No
doubt he remembers me as an hysterical six-year-old, sobbing her heart out and
barely coherent enough to give a description of the man who had attacked her
mummy. We had met a few times since that investigation, but the events of today
seem to have left my head stranded in the past.
    ‘Hello again, Ellie,’ he says, holding out his
hand.
    The voice tugs at me. I remember the strong
West Country twang to his accent, a slow drawl that makes him sound like he’s
only one or two generations away from ancestors who were farmers and tin
miners. Far from parochial though, he had always seemed open to new approaches,
especially the idea of hypnotherapy.
    There
is a faint smile on his face. A senior policeman attempting to be friendly, but
vaguely regretful at the same time, aware of an unbridgeable gap between us.
There’s no warmth there. Only a hint of the same suspicion I saw on my father’s
face. It leaves me uncomfortable.
    We shake hands. ‘It’s been a long time,’ he
remarks calmly. ‘How have you been?’
    ‘Okay up until today.’
    ‘So your dad has been telling me. It sounds
like you’ve had a tough morning.’ He hesitates. ‘Do you mind if I call you Ellie?
Or would you prefer Eleanor?’
    My throat is clogged up. ‘I’m Eleanor now.
Ellie was … a long time ago.’
    Except
for my close friends. This man is not a friend.
    ‘Of
course.’
    My
head is buzzing, but I force myself to smile and behave normally. It’s what
they expect. ‘Come into the kitchen, please. I’ll make coffee.’
    ‘Not
for me, thanks. But feel free to make one for yourself.’
    We
walk through to the kitchen, my father following behind the police officers
without a word.
    I
can’t wait any longer, impatient to hear their news. ‘So, did you find the body?’
I ask Carrick straight out. ‘Did you find her?’
    ‘No,’ Carrick says bluntly.
    I
stare. ‘What?’
    DI
Powell is shaking his head. There’s that regretful smile again. The smile I
remember. The smile that used to leave me feeling sick.
    ‘I’m
sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, Eleanor. We looked where you told us to
look. We looked everywhere. We scoured the woods, in fact, from the stream
right up to the top car park. We even had the dogs out,’ he says. ‘But we
didn’t find a body.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

 
    I think about my dead mother. The long
investigation, the false leads, the unsolved murder. The newspaper cuttings I managed
to salvage after the house fire and still keep in a box under my bed. There’s a
powerful sense of déja-vu . I look from
the white-haired policeman to my father, who is still saying nothing, and then
back again.
    ‘But did you look exactly where I told DS
Carrick?’ I ask. ‘Down near the stream, next to the little footbridge?’
    ‘We
looked beside the stream like you told us,’ Carrick jumps in before Powell can
reply. ‘We didn’t find anything.’
    There is no sympathy in Carrick’s face. His
voice is sharp. I can tell what he thinks about all this. He thinks he has
spent the morning on a fool’s errand.
    ‘As I was just telling your father, we searched
the whole wood,’ he continues coldly. ‘Combed the undergrowth, searched up and
down the banks.There was nothing there.
Just your footprints in the mud on both sides of