Cambridge Blue - Alison Bruce [78]
Marks plugged on. ‘We also have some photographs we’d like to show you. Just let me know if anyone in them looks familiar.’ Marks slid the photos from the file, then laid it on the cushion between himself and Goodhew. He handed the pictures to Mr Reed, one at a time.
The five-by-sevens looked tiny in the man’s huge hands. At each one he shook his head. ‘These are recent?’
‘Fairly.’
‘So I could be trying to recognize people I last knew ten years ago?’
‘Possibly.’
‘No one looks familiar – but if I stare at them long enough, they all could. Do you have any idea how many people I’ve met since Jo vanished?’
Goodhew lifted the front cover of the file. Plenty of sheets of paper inside. Words and more words. But hearing one person’s perceptions always had more resonance for him than a whole file of statements.
He was aware that Marks was now mentioning names, and continuing to probe but getting nowhere. He showed signs of drawing their visit to a close, so Goodhew kept his eyes diverted from Marks, knowing that his next words would derail his boss’ line of questioning. He placed his hand firmly on Joanne’s file, like it was at risk of opening by itself. ‘We have all the details here, but would you be prepared to now tell us what happened – just as you remember it?’
Mr Reed looked at him like he’d just noticed him for the very first time. ‘Why? This isn’t your current case.’
Goodhew didn’t have an answer to that. Morbid curiosity or nosiness? Had he just asked an inappropriate question without thinking it through? So far, Joanne appeared to have zero connection to Lorna, and that made his intervention out of line.
He continued to avoid Marks and simply replied honestly: ‘Just in case.’
Whatever Martin Reed’s reservations, he started talking. ‘I used to fear the progression of old age and I was scared of dying. I imagined turning into first my dad, then my granddad, seeing that as the most depressing descent into oblivion. The thought of watching my children turn into adolescents, then adults, then become middle-aged – watching them peak and then decline – I used to feel repulsed by the idea. Now it seems to me like heaven. Joanne would be thirty this year, but I don’t do what-ifs about anything except her age. Annie, my first wife, did. She what-iffed until it killed her. She didn’t just mourn her daughter; she pined for the wedding Jo might have had, the children and the career, and on and on.’
‘Was she an only child?’ Marks asked.
‘Oh yes.’ The happy-sad nerves at the corners of Martin Reed’s mouth underwent a flutter of involuntary twitches. ‘Imagine having three, four, five kids. You couldn’t watch them all, not all the time, but we only had one and we still didn’t keep her safe. Logically we knew it wasn’t our fault, like logic makes a difference.
‘Somewhere between the first and second anniversaries, I accepted she was dead. Not consciously, but I sensed she wasn’t in any TV crowds, or in front of me in the check-out queue, or on the other end of a ringing phone. My wife felt differently, though, and to Annie I’d now done the unforgivable: abandoned our child.’
Martin Reed picked up the TV remote from the arm of the chair, licked his thumb, then rubbed at a small area on one side of the control. The silence between them lengthened. Goodhew spoke first.
‘Mr Reed?’
Martin Reed snapped back into talk mode. ‘The very night before Jo vanished, Annie and I watched a TV documentary about parents who’d lost children. It said how high the resulting divorce rate was, and I couldn’t understand it. I thought they’d need each other even more, imagined them clinging together to get through their grief. After all, I assumed the parents would be the only ones who could really understand.