Behind Closed Doors Read Free Page A

there.’
    Andee picked up her bag. ‘I’ll come with you.’
    He hesitated.
    Knowing what was on his mind, she said, ‘I’m coming.’
    ‘But Andee, with your history . . .’
    ‘Why don’t you let me worry about that? All you have to do is talk me through it again as we walk down to the car.’
    Twenty minutes later Andee was at the wheel of her Ford Focus following Barry’s patrol car through the Waverley housing estate, heading for the caravan parks that cluttered the sandy coastline like an unruly crowd with nowhere to go. As she often did when progress was slow, she surveyed her surroundings and reflected to herself how like a library the world was. Each house, office, shop, trailer, car, just about everything, had a door, and behind that door, much like inside the covers of a book, lay a story or indeed, many stories. They could be sad or joyful; embarrassing, shameful, shocking or downright scary. There were weird ones, tall ones, short ones, incredible, full-on intriguing, silly, horrific, heartbreaking and sometimes desperately tragic.
    More often than not she found herself involved in the latter few.
    Flipping down the sun visor as they turned on to Wermers Road, home to Kesterly-on-Sea’s edge-of-town retail superstores, she ignored the fact that she was supposed to be investigating a series of robberies here, and turned her thoughts to Sophie Monroe instead. She began painting a happy picture for herself of how this chapter of Sophie’s story was going to end. Wherever she was hiding she’d soon get lonely, hungry, cold, frightened, and make contact with her parents. They’d then go to pick her up from wherever she was and all would be forgiven and if not forgotten, then at least put aside for the time being as they all tried again.
    This was the denouement Andee and her colleagues most frequently encountered when it came to teenage runaways, though Andee was personally and painfully aware that not all families were quite so lucky when a child disappeared.
    Hers was amongst those who’d not been blessed.
    Perryman’s Cove, known locally as Paradise Cove, or simply the Cove, was an area of Kesterly-on-Sea she hadn’t visited since she was a child, and by the look of it, as they approached through Waverley, it hadn’t changed all that much. Perhaps a few dozen more houses on the surrounding estate, most sprouting satellite dishes like some sort of fungal outbreak, or signs proclaiming themselves B & Bs, or Guest Houses, or Family Run Hotels with Sea Views.
    Sea views, from here? Give her a break! OK if you happened to be a seagull, or a pilot, or zoning in via Google Earth, but in these parts you were lucky to spot the sea from the beach, never mind from a mile inland.
    Taking a right turn at Giddings roundabout she kept behind Barry as they inched with the traffic through a tangle of scrubland and copses, past the Fisherman’s Arms and Albert’s donkey retreat, until they were plunging into the coast’s glittering, flashing, throbbing mayhem of a holiday resort.
    Kesterly’s answer to Vegas.
    She smiled inwardly as a wave of nostalgia swept her straight back to her childhood. Though she hadn’t come here often, four or five times maybe, and never to stay in one of the caravan parks (worse luck), the sudden thrust back in time to those heady, hot summer days was having quite an effect on her. It was suddenly all too easy to remember how she, her sister Penny and cousin Frank used to steal out of their grandparents’ house, up on the headland, and cycle full speed down to the grassy sand dunes of the Cove where they’d abandon their bikes, never thinking for a minute they might be stolen (and they never were). Once in the Cove they hardly knew what to do first, they were so excited, hit the funfair to ride the Octopus, or shoot ducks, or bump round the dodgems, or stay on the beach to trot up and down on donkeys called Fred or Floss or Frank, which they’d found totally hilarious. An ass named