Ready or Not by Rachel Thomas Read Free Book Online Page A

much, so the fact that Nathan’s sly little eyes had followed hers when she’d scanned the kitchen hadn’t escaped her. He knew what she’d seen and he’d had enough time to get rid of it before officers had turned up with a search warrant only hours later. The smug little shit wouldn’t admit it, but then she’d have been a fool to have expected him to just hand her a confession so easily.
                  ‘It’s not like that,’ Kate said. ‘When Dawn Reed was interviewed at the beginning of the investigation she told us that on the day she went missing, Stacey was carrying her favourite bag – the green frog rucksack. Weeks later she retracted that and said she wasn’t sure – that she couldn’t remember for a fact if Stacey had the bag or not, but she couldn’t find it in the house.’
                  ‘Does it matter?’ Chris asked. ‘Maybe she’s not sure whether she had it or not. How is the bag relevant?’
                  Nathan had done something infuriating: looked Kate up and down and let a smug, self-satisfied grin slowly creep across his face; the same smirk that he’d greeted her with the previous evening. The look made Kate want to slap him. He knew she was onto him, but he also knew that she had nothing concrete or tangible to go on and the bastard was relishing the fact. It would be her word against his.
                  ‘I don’t know that it is,’ Kate confessed. ‘But I know one thing: the bag proves Dawn Reed is a liar. When I was at her house last night that rucksack was lying on her kitchen floor.’
                 
     
     
    Six
     
    Yesterday Kate believed she may have – almost – found a missing child. If she could just nail Dawn Reed and Nathan Williams, she was sure that she would find Stacey. Today, however, she had lost another. A twelve year old boy, Ben Davies, had been missing for three days and his foster parents had just been to the station and spoken with Kate. They had contacted the station on Sunday evening after Ben had failed to return home, and had been told by the officer on duty to ring around friends’ houses and get back to them if he hadn’t returned by the following day.
    Very helpful, Kate thought.
                  The woman and her husband sat opposite Kate in the least intimidating and lifeless of the station’s interview rooms. Kate had been pressing the need for a family liaison room for what seemed forever but, as with everything these days it seemed, her requests had simply been ignored.
    Caroline Jennings, a stocky woman in her late forties with streaky grey hair and a slight balding patch by her left temple, clutched the hot paper cup in which her tea remained untouched. She stared with a creased expression at the surface of her drink like a fortune teller studying a crystal ball. Her husband, older – mid fifties, Kate guessed – held his wife’s hand beneath the table, squeezing the fingers around her wedding band.
                  Kate studied the boy in the photograph on the table in front of her.
                  ‘Looks older than his years,’ she commented.
                  Caroline sighed sadly. ‘Acts it as well,’ she said. ‘Thinks he’s seventeen. Comes and goes as he pleases.’
                  Kate wondered what had made Robert and Caroline Jennings choose to foster. In her eleven years since joining the police she had met a number of couples who fostered, all of varying ages and from a range of different backgrounds, and she was aware of a whole host of reasons behind the decision to foster. Many couples were unable to have children of their own; some wanted to help young people less fortunate than their own. Too many did it for the money.
                  Kate made a mental note of the face looking up from the photo. Light brown hair; brown eyes. A cheeky grin for the camera; good teeth. In