She sat up. ‘Where?’
‘It was abandoned in a car park on the edge of the Kent Downs.’
She could scarcely breathe. ‘And Luke?’
‘The vehicle was empty, Luke and whoever was driving were long gone. However …’ he paused, ‘I have to tell you we found a significant amount of blood on the passenger seat.’
She closed her eyes, the floor seeming to pitch and roll beneath her.
‘It will take us a few days to confirm that it’s Luke’s blood, but—’
‘Oh God, oh my God.’
‘Clara, we—’
‘Is he, do you think he’s …’ she couldn’t bring herself to say the word.
There was a pause. ‘The amount of blood suggests a significant flesh wound, but it’s impossible to tell whether it was a fatal one. We also found blood on the ground within a few feet of the van, which indicates that Luke may have been moved to another vehicle.’
Anderson’s words seemed to be coming from somewhere far away, the room felt entirely airless. ‘I have to tell you, we are assuming the blood to be Luke’s, Clara. The Major Incident Team will be handling the case from now. Which means more officers working on it, a televised appeal, an intensifying of the search …’
‘You think he’s dead, don’t you?’ Clara blurted. ‘You think he’s been murdered.’
‘No. That is not what I’m saying. But we have to consider it a possibility, which is why we’re escalating the search. I will, of course, remain your first point of contact, and if you need to speak to either me or DC Mansfield, please …’
Clara barely listened as Anderson’s voice rumbled on. When she finally put the phone down, Zoe was standing in the doorway, looking at her in dismay. ‘Oh God,’ she said, crossing the room in seconds. ‘Clara, what is it? What’s happened?’
Long after Zoe had reluctantly gone upstairs, unable to fight her exhaustion any longer, Clara sat up on her makeshift bed on the sofa, wide awake as the night rolled slowly past. Though she was desperate to drive straight home, the wine she’d had still sloshed sickeningly in her stomach, and after trying and failing to get some sleep, she grimly drank coffee after coffee, trying to sober herself up. When Oscar woke for a feed at 5 a.m. and Zoe tiptoed down to the kitchen, she found Clara shrugging on her coat.
‘You can’t go yet! It’s not even properly morning,’ she cried. ‘Stay! Please stay, Clara. Did you sleep at all? Let me make you some breakfast. I really don’t think you should be alone …’
But Clara barely heard her. ‘I have to go. I have to speak to the police, see what I can do to help. I can’t just hide out here, while Luke is …’ tears filled her eyes and angrily she swiped them away. ‘I need to help find him.’
She drove home as dawn broke over London, the new morning filling the city with a pale, golden light. She saw barely a soul as she slipped through the silent streets: the occasional homeward-bound reveller, a fox streaking between parked cars; grey puddles of sleeping forms sheltering in shop doorways. The sun was rising as she crossed the Thames, staining the water red and orange, its light catching on the glass and steel of the buildings lining the river. Her body ached from lack of sleep but her nerves were raw and jangling, her mind alert. She would go home and shower, then go to the station to speak to Anderson. She put her foot on the accelerator, her eyes focused grimly on the road ahead.
Parked in her usual spot a short distance from her flat, Clara found she couldn’t move. She sat for some minutes willing herself to get out, but the thought of returning home to sit alone with Anderson’s words running through her brain filled her with despair. Impulsively she turned the key in her ignition and drove on.
Twenty minutes later she sat at Mac’s kitchen table, his face ashen as she described Anderson’s phone call. ‘My God,’ he said, staring at her in disbelief.
‘Do you … do you think he’s dead?’ she asked.
‘No!’ he said sharply and in his agitation got up and began to pace around the room. ‘Of course I don’t.’ He went to the kettle but instead of putting it on, stood for a long time, his back to her, unmoving.
‘Mac …’ she said.
He swung round to look at her, his face white, his eyes wide and frightened.
‘Are you OK?’ she asked. ‘Come and sit down. You look like you’re going to be sick.’
‘It’s just, I wasn’t expecting this,’ he said. ‘I thought … I thought he would be home by now, that he would be OK.’
‘I know,’ she said, ‘I’m so frightened. What if he’s dead, Mac, what if this bloody maniac has killed him?’
‘He’s not dead!’ Mac said, so loudly it was almost a shout. ‘We can’t think like that. If he was dead they’d have … they’d have found a body. We have to keep positive.’ He took a deep breath, then said more calmly, ‘The police will find him, I promise, Clara. You said yourself, they’re putting more people on it. It’s going to be OK.’
She nodded, fresh waves of panic washing over her at Mac’s clear distress.
As he made them both a cup of tea she looked around at the familiar disorder of his flat, somewhere the three of them had spent so many hours together, surrounded by the hundreds of photographs that covered every inch of the walls: the bands and musicians he’d shot over the years; the concerts and gigs and festivals he’d documented. A gang of Mac’s large circle of friends would often end up here after a night out, it being the biggest space and central to where everyone lived. Sometimes Mac’s girlfriend would come along, if he was seeing anyone, but usually, after everyone else had gone home, it would end up just the three of them, talking long into the night, drinking and listening to records.
The flat was situated over two floors, Mac’s photographic studio, dark room and bedroom above the kitchen and large living room that housed his vast collection of books and records. The best bit was the building’s flat roof where they could squeeze out and sit on summer evenings, looking out over their patch of North London, Highbury Fields behind them, the Holloway Road below.
Now, as she sipped her tea, she spotted a picture on the wall she’d not seen before and getting up, went to look at it. It was one Mac must have put up very recently, unusual in that it showed the three of them together. ‘Who took this?’ she asked.
‘What? Oh …’ he came and stood next to her. ‘My friend Pete, at my birthday last year. Do you remember? I found it the other day.’
She nodded. It was a brilliant shot. A close-up black-and-white in which she and Mac were turned to each other, their heads thrown back in laughter, while Luke grinned straight ahead at the camera. ‘What were we laughing at?’ she murmured.
‘Christ knows. Probably taking the piss out of Luke about something.’
She smiled and he put an arm around her. ‘Listen. Why don’t you move in here for a bit? I can’t stand thinking of you in that flat by yourself. Go and get some things and come and stay for a while. If we’re going to lose our minds with worry, we might as well do it together.’
She thought about it. There were other friends she could stay with, but none of them lived as close to her place as Mac did. Staying across the river with Zoe would have felt too cut off from her old life, as though she were abandoning Luke somehow. And she and Mac were the closest people to Luke other than his parents, the two people who cared most about finding him. It made sense. She looked at him gratefully. ‘That would be brilliant,’ she said.
11