Ready or Not by Rachel Thomas Read Free Book Online

your daughter was missing would you refer to her in the past tense?’
    Chris stood from his chair and distractedly crossed the office to the window. ‘No,’ he admitted calmly, placing a hand on the glass and looking down at the car park below. ‘I can’t imagine I would do any of those things.’ He thought of the few hours he’d had with Holly the previous evening. She was taller every time he saw her, and each time they met she knew a word or a fact she hadn’t known before. She was changing, growing, and he wasn’t there to see any of it. Though they still lived in the same town if often felt to Chris as though the distance between them may as well have been a hundred times more.
    Inevitably, his phone seemed to ring during the two minute window of time in which Lydia was either dropping off or collecting their daughter. The same had happened yesterday: Chris had had just a few hours with Holly before she was whisked away again by her mother, and the call about Michael Morris had come just as Lydia was dragging their daughter out into the hallway. Chris hadn’t missed the way in which his wife had rolled her eyes when his mobile started ringing. It was an expression he knew well. His wife didn’t need to speak to vent her opinions or frustrations; she had a plethora of intricate facial expressions, all of which Chris had learned to read expertly.
    Lydia had been impossible to please. She loved the money his job brought into the house – and her wardrobe – yet his job had been the cause of a long line of disagreements between them, and not just because of Chris’ anti-social hours and heavily burdened workload.
    In fact, t he work itself had been the least of Lydia’s concerns.
    The call had meant there wasn’t time to talk to Lydia, or get embroiled in another bitter dispute, so another argument had been successfully avoided. He was sure she would keep it safely wrapped up warm, ready to open at their next encounter and use as ammunition against him.
                  Kate was silent. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said eventually. She could almost feel his disappointment through the phone line. She pushed her head back against the seat and watched a group of schoolboys who should have been in class idly passing a cigarette between them as they sat waiting at the bus stop across the road.
    ‘I don’t mean to take it out on you. I just know that something’s not right, Chris. They’re liars, the pair of them.’
                  ‘Who?’
                  ‘Dawn Reed and Nathan Williams.’
                  ‘Kate,’ Chris tried to reason calmly, running a hand through his light brown hair. ‘Don’t go making any accusations. You’ve got no proof. I don’t want to see you repeat mistakes.’
                  Five years earlier Kate had been immersed in the case of a missing three year old boy. She had become so deeply involved in the investigation that it had become a kind of obsession. She had suspected the boy’s mother of concealing evidence and, rather than going about things ‘by the book’ she had taken matters into her own hands. She had been wrong and it had almost cost Kate her career.
    Since then it had felt as though no one trusted her. Sometimes not even Chris. Kate always felt as though she was being watched; as if every decision she made was questioned and needed to be run past a whole string of superiors before she was allowed to act on it. No wonder she sometimes went against the rules. Her professionalism was constantly under doubt and her creativity – the ability to read situations sideways and see things that others were blind to – was gradually being drained from her. She was being suffocated. 
                  Perhaps now wasn’t the time to confess to Chris that she had waited outside Dawn Reed’s house that morning and accosted Nathan Williams in a lane at the back of the housing estate. She didn’t miss