The Missing Read Free

yes. It was around eleven o’clock. We opened the door and there he was.’
    ‘Did he still have his lead on?’ I could tell that both of them thought I had taken leave of my senses, but I wanted to know if Jenny had let the dog off the lead and then lost sight of it. She might have stayed out late looking for it, and could have had an accident. On the other hand, she might have lost hold of the lead – perhaps if someone had made her let go of it. No dog lover would choose to let a dog run around unsupervised with a trailing lead; it would be too easy for it to get tangled up in something and hurt itself.
    ‘I don’t remember,’ he said eventually, rubbing his forehead in bewilderment.
    Elaine took over the story. ‘Michael – Mr Shepherd – went to the police station in person and asked them to investigate, and they finally got started on filling out the correct forms around midnight.’
    ‘By which time she’d been gone for six hours,’ Shepherd interjected.
    ‘That’s ridiculous. Don’t they know how important it is to find missing children quickly?’ I couldn’t believe they had been so slow; I couldn’t believe they had waited to take his statement. ‘The first twenty-four hours are critical, absolutely key, and they threw away a quarter of them.’
    ‘I didn’t realise you were so knowledgeable, Sarah,’ Elaine said, smiling thinly, and I read the expression on her face all too easily. Shut up and listen, you stupid girl .
    ‘The police helicopter went up around two,’ Michael Shepherd went on. ‘They used their infrared camera to search the woods where she usually walked Archie. They said she’d glow, even in undergrowth, from her body heat, and they’d see her. But they didn’t find anything.’
    So either she wasn’t there or her body was no longer emitting heat. You didn’t have to be an expert to work out where this was going.
    ‘They keep saying it takes time to trace a runaway. I told them, she’s not a runaway. When they didn’t find her in the woods, they started looking at CCTV from the stations around here, to see if she went to London. She wouldn’t do that; she found it scary, any time we went there with her. She wouldn’t let go of my hand the whole time when we went Christmas shopping last year. The crowds were so dense, and she was afraid she’d get lost.’ He looked from me to Elaine and back again, helplessly. ‘She’s out there somewhere and they haven’t found her, and she’s all alone.’
    My heart twisted with sympathy for him and his wife and for what they were going through, but my mind was still turning over what he had said and there was a question I had to ask. ‘Why hasn’t there been an appeal? Shouldn’t they be asking people if they’ve seen her?’
    ‘They wanted to wait. They told us that it was best to have a look themselves first, before they had to deal with false sightings and members of the public starting their own search, getting in the way. We wanted to go out looking ourselves, but they told us to wait at home in case she came back. At this stage, I just don’t think she’s going to walk through the door under her own steam.’ He ran his hands through his hair, digging his fingers into his scalp. ‘Yesterday, they searched along the river, by the railway line near our house, the reservoir up near the A3 and the woods, and they still haven’t found her.’
    I wondered if he could miss the awful significance of the places they were focusing on. Whatever her parents thought, the police seemed to have made up their minds that what they were searching for was a body.
    Without noticing, I’d reached the edge of the woods. I put on a turn of speed and slipped in between two oaks, following a sketchy path that forked almost immediately. On the right side, I saw a chocolate-brown Labrador barrelling towards me, towing a slender, elderly woman in pristine slacks and full make-up. It didn’t look like the kind of dog that spooked