Chapter Sixty
‘She’s not answering.’
Dan exhaled loudly and put his mobile on the desk. Alex wondered whether he was overthinking things. Tyler and Keeley went to the same school as Rebecca; they were in the same year group. Tyler probably had the names of countless other students stored in his contacts list. It didn’t have to mean anything. It didn’t mean Rebecca was in any danger.
Yet she could only imagine how she would be feeling if she had found her own child’s number stored in the mobile phone of a boy they suspected was a murderer; or, at the very least, an accomplice to one.
Dan snatched his phone back from the table when it began to ring, its vibrations shaking Alex back from her veering train of thought.
‘Steph.’
Dan’s wife. He had been ringing her for the past half an hour, his anxiety increasing with every call that had gone unanswered.
‘Is Rebecca with you? What … when? Okay … where is it?’ His voice was becoming increasingly frantic. If Steph hadn’t been worried about their daughter, it wouldn’t be long before that changed. Alex wanted to intervene, to tell Dan to calm down, but it wasn’t appropriate; particularly not with his wife at the other end of the call.
At his side, Dan’s left hand had balled into a fist. His right was clutching the phone to his ear, his knuckles white.
‘What do you mean, you don’t know? You dropped her off, didn’t you? No, just …’ He reached for a pen from Alex’s desk and waved his hand at her, motioning for some paper. Alex grabbed a sheet from the printer and passed it to him. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, scrawling down an address. ‘No. Just stay where you are, okay?’
He cut the call. ‘Steph says she took her to a party.’
‘A house party? She dropped her off there?’
Dan laughed, but there was no humour in the sound. ‘No, she dropped her off “nearby”. Apparently Rebecca didn’t want her mother showing her up in front of her friends.’
He pressed a hand to his forehead. ‘Put this in there for me,’ he said, pushing the paper towards Alex and gesturing to her computer. ‘She told her mother the party was here, but said she was getting a lift home with a friend’s mum.’
Alex pulled up an internet search engine and typed out the address Dan had noted. ‘There’s nothing coming up,’ she told him.
‘Of course there’s not. Did you always tell your mother the truth when you were thirteen?’ Dan’s voice was fraught, laced with a mixture of frustration and panic. ‘You think I’m overreacting, don’t you?’
Alex shook her head. ‘Under the circumstances, no. Look, get yourself home and get on the phone to anyone you can think of – friends, family … anyone who might have seen Rebecca. I’m sure she’s fine. You’ve tried her number again?’
‘Still no answer.’
‘Go on,’ Alex prompted, nodding to the office door. ‘I’ll get a trace on her phone and let you know as soon as anything comes in. I’m sure she’s fine, Dan,’ she said again, trying to reassure him. ‘This is probably just an unfortunate coincidence.’
She didn’t believe her own words. Tyler had already attacked a fellow teenager – a boy who was known to him – and there was nothing to say the next victim wouldn’t be another child. There was no doubt that Keeley and Tyler had chosen their victims well in advance. With this pair, nothing happened by chance.
‘You’ll let me know straight away if you hear anything?’
‘Of course. You’ll do the same?’
Dan nodded and hurried from the office. Alex knew him well enough to know the first thing he would do was drive to the place where Steph had dropped Rebecca off. He wasn’t thinking straight. If Rebecca was with Tyler or Keeley, there was no knowing what Dan would do or what he might be capable of, knowing everything the young couple were guilty of.