Devil's Game Read Free

none at all.’
    ‘No hint that she had begun to see anyone else?’
    Bastable glowered at Nasreem, his face beginning to look flushed, and shook his head vehemently.
    ‘Nowt like that,’ he snapped.
    ‘But she said she was on the late shift, when she wasn’t…’
    ‘Summat must have happened to her. Summat bad,’ Bastable said, and Nasreem could see the fear in his eyes. ‘She went off in t’car. I always make her go by car because she comes back late. Maybe she thought she was on shift… Made a mistake like, with the rota, and summat happened on the way there or on the way back. You hear of women getting abducted, don’t you? Women disappear. It’s not just kiddies who get taken.’
    ‘It’s unusual, Mr Bastable,’ Nasreem said gently. ‘Most adults who disappear go of their own free will, you know. Generally we wait for a few days, just post them as missing, and they turn up again. In this case we can also look for the car, if you give me the details. It would also help if you could tell me what she was wearing when she left the house.’
    Bastable looked at her blankly.
    ‘I didn’t notice,’ he muttered. ‘Her coat, I suppose. It were chilly last night, weren’t it? Her coat’s dark…blue. No, green. That’s right, green wool, but dark, almost black. Fits a bit tight, like. I don’t know what she had on under it.’
    ‘Have you looked to see if she’s taken a suitcase or holdall? Whether all her clothes are still here?’ He shook his head dumbly.
    ‘Could you check that for me, d’you think?’ Nasreem asked. Rigid with suppressed emotion, Bastable got to his feet and went thundering upstairs, where Nasreem could hear him opening cupboards and drawers and slamming them shut again. She glanced round the living room of the small house with its large flat-screen TV and PlayStation in one corner, computer games strewn where the children must have left them before they went to school, and she wondered if they had any idea where their mother might have gone. Judging by the school photographs of a blond boy and a red-headed girl on the mantelpiece over the gas fire, they must be ten or eleven, probably still at primary school. Wherever Karen Bastable was, they would no doubt be devastated if she never came back. She sighed and waited until Terry Bastable came back into the room and slammed the door behind him.
    ‘I can’t see owt missing,’ he said. ‘She’s got a lot of stuff up there, stuff I’ve never even seen before, bit saucy, some of it.But if she’d gone off by her own choice she’d have taken some of her new stuff. Stands to reason. She’d been out shopping just last weekend for holiday gear because we’re going to Majorca as soon as t’kids finish school for Easter. Some of the stuff’s still in t’Primark bags, not even taken out yet. And all the suitcases are still in t’cupboard on the landing. I don’t believe she’s run off. It’s not what Karen would do. She loves the kids even if…’ He didn’t finish the sentence although his sudden doubt about his missing wife’s commitment to him was written in his face.
    ‘Even if you have your problems?’
    ‘We don’t have problems,’ Bastable said loudly. ‘What would you know about it with your arranged marriages and all that bollocks, any road? My marriage is grand.’
    But Nasreem did not believe him. She changed tack suddenly.
    ‘Do you have a bank account? Can she draw money out that you can check on?’
    ‘There’s never owt in our account to draw,’ Bastable said bitterly. ‘We’ve paid for us holiday, so there’s even less than nowt.’
    ‘But you’ll check?’
    ‘Aye, I’ll check, but it’s wasting time, isn’t it? I need to know where she is, what’s happened to her, the kids need to know. I need you lot to start bloody looking. She’d never go off like this without a word.’
    ‘But it does look as if she might have had plans last night which she didn’t want to tell you about, if she