“Thank you.”
Derek picked up his tool bag, and they walked back down the sloping hill through the caravan site to the road. There were eight static caravans, neatly spaced apart, in a hotchpotch of styles from modern white UPVC to the oldest, a Romani caravan with faded red and green paint. The caravans were rented out to people who came for walking or surfing holidays. Each caravan had a couple of bedrooms and a small kitchen, and some of the newer ones had bathrooms. The caravan site was on the lower end of the hospitality scale, but it was particularly popular with surfers because it was an inexpensive place to stay and a short walk down to the beach, which had some of the best surf in Devon and Cornwall. The holiday season would be starting in one week, and it felt like spring had finally arrived. The surrounding trees were bursting into leaf, and the sky was a clear blue.
When they reached the short set of concrete steps down to the road, Kate offered Derek her arm for support, but he ignored her, wincing as they slowly descended to where his car was parked. He opened the boot and heaved in his tool bag. He looked up at her; his watery blue eyes were piercing.
“I bet it was a shock when Myra left you her house and her business in her will.”
“Yes.”
“An’ she left nothing to her son . . .” Derek tutted and shook his head. “I know they weren’t close, but as I always say, blood is thicker than water.”
It had been a surprise to Kate that Myra had left everything to her. It had caused a lot of anger from Myra’s son and his wife, and it had generated a lot of local gossip and snide remarks.
“You’ve got my number. Let me know when the glass is ready,” said Kate, not wanting to continue the conversation.
Derek looked annoyed that Kate wasn’t going to give him any more.
He nodded curtly, got into his car, and drove away, leaving her in a wake of black smoke.
She coughed and wiped her eyes and then heard the faint tone of her mobile phone ringing. She hurried across the road to a squat, square building. On the ground floor was the campsite shop, still boarded up from the winter. Kate climbed a set of steps on the side of the building to the second floor and let herself into the small flat where Myra had lived, which Kate now used as an office.
A row of windows ran the length of the back of the building with a view out over the beach. The tide was out, exposing the black seaweed-covered rocks. To the right, a row of cliffs jutted out, forming the edge of the bay, and beyond was the university town of Ashdean, which she could see clearly on this bright, sunny day. Her phone stopped ringing when she reached her desk.
The missed call was from a landline number with an area code she didn’t recognize. She was about to phone back when a voice mail message popped up. Kate listened; it was from an older woman with a Cornish accent who spoke in a halting, nervous staccato.
“Hello . . . I got yer number online . . . I’ve seen that you’ve just started your own private detective agency . . . My name’s Bev Ellis, and I’m calling about my daughter, Joanna Duncan. She was a journalist, and she went missing, almost thirteen years ago . . . She just vanished. The police never found out what happened to her, but she did vanish. She didn’t run away or nothing like that . . . She had everything going for her. I want to hire a private detective who can find out what happened to her. What happened to her body . . .” At this point her voice broke, and she took a deep breath and swallowed loudly. “Please, call me back.”
Kate listened to the message again. From the sound of the woman’s voice, it had obviously taken a lot of courage to make the call. Kate opened her laptop to google the case and hesitated. She should call this woman back right away. There were two other long-established detective agencies nearby in Exeter, with slick websites and offices, and she could be phoning them too.
Bev’s voice was still shaky when she answered the phone. Kate apologized for missing her call and gave her condolences for the loss of her daughter.
“Thank you,” said Bev.
“Do you live locally?” asked Kate as she googled “Joanna Duncan missing.”
“We’re in Salcombe. About an hour away.”
“Salcombe’s very nice,” said Kate, scanning the search results that had appeared on her screen. Two articles from September 2002 in the West Country News said:
DEVASTATED MOTHER OF LOCAL JOURNALIST JOANNA DUNCAN APPEALS FOR WITNESSES TO HER DAUGHTER’S DISAPPEARANCE NEAR EXETER TOWN CENTRE.
WHERE DID JO GO?
PHONE FOUND ABANDONED WITH CAR
IN DEANSGATE CAR PARK
Another from the Sun newspaper said:
WEST COUNTRY LOCAL JOURNALIST VANISHES
“I live with my partner, Bill,” said Bev. “We’ve been together for years, but I recently moved in with him. I used to live on the Moor Side council estate on the outskirts of Exeter . . . Quite different.”
Another headline, dated December 1, 2002, which acknowledged that Joanna had been missing for almost three months, caught Kate’s eye.
Nearly all the articles used the same photo of Joanna Duncan, on a beach against blue sky and perfect white sand. She had bright-blue eyes, high cheekbones, a strong nose, and slightly bucked front teeth. She was smiling in the photo. There was a large red carnation tucked behind her left ear, and she held a halved coconut containing a cocktail umbrella.
“You said that Joanna was a journalist?” asked Kate.
“Yes. For the West Country News. She was going places. She wanted to move to London and work on one of the tabloids. She loved her job. She’d just got married. Jo and her husband, Fred, wanted kids . . . She went missing on Saturday, the seventh of September. She’d been at work in Exeter and then left around five thirty. One of her colleagues saw her go. It was less than a quarter of a mile walk from the newspaper offices to the multistory car park, but somewhere along the way, something happened. She just vanished into thin air . . . We found her car in the multistory; her phone was underneath. The police had nothing. They had no suspects. They spent nearly thirteen years doing God knows what, and then I got a phone call from them last week, telling me that after twelve years, the case is now inactive. They’ve given up on finding Jo. I have to find out what happened to her. I know she’s probably dead; I want to find her and put her properly to rest. I saw an article about you in the National Geographic, how you found the body of that young woman who’d been missing for twenty years . . . Then I googled you and saw you’ve just started your own detective agency. Is that right?”
“Yes,” said Kate.