Cambridge Blue - Alison Bruce [76]
‘Follow me.’
Marks headed towards the stairs, and Goodhew hurried behind, risking a bite of the sandwich. It tasted of . . . bread. He decided to keep eating. Marks led the way down the stairs and across the car park towards his maroon Mazda. He pressed the remote and the doors clicked.
‘Are we going somewhere?’
‘I can now see how you made it to detective,’ Marks replied drily. He slid a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and passed it to Goodhew, who waited until he’d buckled himself into the passenger seat before opening it; the top was inscribed with the name ‘Martin Reed’, followed by a Bedford address. The remainder of the page just listed directions for the journey there from Cambridge.
‘We’re going to Bedford then?’
‘Is it your special day for stating the obvious? I thought I’d bring you along in the hope I’d receive some intelligent input. Is that going to be too much to ask?’
Goodhew assumed the question was rhetorical, and so kept quiet.
Marks reversed out of the parking space and simultaneously waved a hand in the general direction of the piece of paper. ‘That’s one of our possible Emma connections.’
Goodhew was aware that some of the other officers working on the investigation had been dredging archives and various databases for any possible explanation of the words written on Lorna’s palms.
‘So they found something?’
Marks raised one eyebrow slightly, in an are-you-taking-the-piss way, and managed to stop short of saying, ‘No, we’re off to Bedford just for fun.’ ‘DC Charles came across it: a missing girl called Joanne Reed, who called herself by her middle name, Emma.’
‘Doesn’t ring a bell. Was it considered suspicious?’
‘You won’t remember it because it was 1996. Martin Reed is her father. The nationals ran reports early on, but there were no clues and no sightings so it dropped out of the news pretty quickly.’
‘No body?’
‘Absolutely nothing.’
‘So why are we interested?’
‘You’ve spoken to Jackie Moran, and she claims she doesn’t know an Emma, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, Jackie and this Emma girl were in the same year at Northampton University. Jackie Moran was still a student there when Joanne Reed disappeared.’
Within fifteen minutes they were on the slip-road joining the A14, and Goodhew knew they had a good hour’s drive ahead of them. The road was busy and Marks accelerated, then cruised at a steady 65mph. It was fast enough to overtake lorries, but slow enough to be overtaken by almost everyone else. And it gave Goodhew plenty of time to think about Jackie Moran.
Martin Reed’s house was the right-hand door of a pair of ex-council semis. The exterior was cream, and saucer-sized bedding plants lined one side of a short driveway at the edge of a tightly cropped lawn. The front of the house had only three windows, two up and one down, made bright white by a set of matching nets. The front door itself was old-style, aluminium-framed with leaf-patterned frosted glass, and it too glinted with obsessive cleanliness.
In normal circumstances Goodhew hated ringing door bells; you press the button and if you can’t hear the bell from the outside, you’re then left with the dilemma of whether to just wait or whether to knock. If you do knock, it seems almost guaranteed that the door will be opened by someone whose first words are ‘OK, OK, what’s the rush’. Goodhew pressed the bell once and the door was opened within seconds by a grey-haired woman in her early fifties. She somhow managed to look exasperated and welcoming at the same time.
‘Mrs Reed?’ Marks asked.
‘Yep, but not the first one, so I’m no good to you. It’s Martin you really want.’ She spoke slowly, as though reluctant to engage them in conversation. ‘He’s round the back,’ she explained. ‘Whatever you’re here about, I hope it’s worth it. He’s already gone into one of his moods. I’d rather you stayed away than stir everything up, especially if it’s going to be for nothing again.’
They found him standing at the top of a stepladder cleaning the already spotless windows, working a cloth up into