First One Missing Read Free Page A

bloody doorbell …
    ‘She hates me, you know,’ she told Will, not even bothering to pretend he didn’t know exactly who ‘she’ might be. ‘I’m the Grim Reaper in a skirt as far as she’s concerned.’
    ‘Can you blame her?’
    ‘I suppose not.’ Leanne was grudging, but the truth was, obviously she couldn’t blame Emma Reid for the way she tensed up whenever Leanne came within a foot of her. When Leanne last appeared, it was because another little girl had died. Someone else’s daughter, someone else’s sister/niece/grandchild. Two more dead now since Emma’s Tilly, and of course before Tilly there’d been Megan Purvis, the original ‘angel’, as the tabloids had dubbed them all. And still Leanne kept popping up, the uninvited fairy at the christening – and never with the one thing Emma most wanted to hear. That Tilly’s murderer had been found.
    While Will went off for a shower, Leanne leaned back against the headboard, both hands clasped around her mug. If her eyes had been focused, she might have found herself staring at her own reflection in the mirror propped up against the wall opposite the bed, or at the overflowing laundry basket next to it. (‘Those clothes will get up and walk away of their own accord if you leave them much longer,’ is what Pete would have said if he’d seen it, like the washing was somehow her responsibility alone.) But that morning her surroundings failed to register.
    Instead she was picturing Emma Reid, as she’d first seen her – shiny caramel-coloured hair pulled back into one of those styles certain women can do where the hair is kind of tied up messily, with some strands artlessly coming loose. It was one of those styles that looks really casual, but Leanne had tried it herself often enough on her own wayward light-brown hair (‘beige’, Pete had teased her) to know that it was nowhere near as careless as it appeared.
    The loose strands of hair framed a small, pretty, flawlessly complexioned face. She was the kind of woman who knew how to do make-up so that it looked like she wasn’t wearing any. Leanne remembered she’d been wearing tight faded jeans tucked into knee-length leather boots and Leanne had thought about her own boots that barely fitted around her calves and wondered how many inches she’d have to lose off each leg to get them to slide on over thick denim jeans. And then she’d felt bad for thinking about something so trivial. She didn’t get that so much these days, the guilt. She understood now there were no rules for grief or grieving, no restrictions on how you should or shouldn’t think. One minute you could be facing something so terrible it made you question everything you knew about the world, and the next you’d be reminding yourself to pay the gas bill. It was just how it was.
    When she first met Emma Reid, Tilly was only missing. Guy, Emma’s tall, strong-jawed husband, had been in full motion, striding around the house. There’s lots you can do when a child is missing – people to ring, searches to organize – and Guy Reid was a doer . So he was in full flow, working out strategies, thinking of solutions, of ‘best-case scenarios’. He was some kind of troubleshooter in the City as far as Leanne could make out, one of those people who spend their lives bandying about phrases like ‘best-case scenario’. That was before there stopped being anything for him to do, when all that ‘doing’ energy inside him turned to something else and the best-case scenario turned out to be worse than anything he could have imagined.
    Emma had clearly been used to her husband achieving those best-case scenarios. She didn’t seem to have quite taken in the seriousness of the situation – hadn’t even made that link to the death of the Purvis girl two years before. She’d had that look of someone waiting for a misunderstanding to be cleared up, as if the shop assistant had given her change from a ten instead of a twenty.
    Leanne was the