The Forgotten Girls by Cate Anderson

Author:Cate Anderson [Anderson, Cate & Woods, Serenity]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-01-06T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

“We’d like to speak to someone about a missing person,” Tori said to the police officer behind the desk.

“Take a seat, please,” the officer replied, and Tori and Cillian sat side by side. There was a rather sorry-looking Christmas tree in the corner, with fairy lights that blinked sadly, and tinsel that had seen better days. A sign on the front desk demanded that they have a Merry Christmas.

Tori’s knee bounced up and down until Cillian looked pointedly at it.

“I’m nervous,” she told him.

“No shit, Sherlock.” He held her hand. “Deep breaths. You’ll be all right.”

After about ten minutes they were shown into a small office that had Detective Inspector Nathan Coombe on the door.

They sat in front of the DI’s desk, Tori sitting stiffly in her chair, Cillian leaning back with an ankle resting on the opposite knee. He was always so relaxed with authority whereas she felt so nervous, as if she was about to be told off by the school principal.

The DI sat in his tatty leather seat and sighed as he looked at the desk that groaned with manilla folders stuffed full of pieces of paper. A small snow globe containing Santa on his sleigh being pulled by reindeer sat on the edge of the desk. Tori wondered who’d bought him that thinking it would cheer him up.

“You’d think we’d have gone completely digital by now,” he grumbled, stacking a few stray folders on top of each other to make room in front of him. He rifled through some sheets of paper, found a printed form, picked out a pen, and sighed again. “Okay, name?”

“Um, Victoria Madison.”

“And what is Victoria’s date of birth?”

“Oh, sorry. I thought you meant my name.”

He pursed his lips, took out a pot of Tippex, painted over her name, and blew on it, his gaze rising to meet hers. “All right,” he said eventually. “Let’s start again. The name of the missing person?”

“Lucy Madison.”

“Lucy’s date of birth?”

“Fifth of November, 2002. Bonfire Night. My dad used to call her his little firecracker.” She stopped and bit her lip again. Why had she told him that? Emotion rose inside her, and her throat tightened. Was she really sitting here at the police station, filing a missing person’s report?

Cillian didn’t look at her, but he held out his hand, and she slid hers into it, glad of the warmth of his fingers. Hers seemed permanently cold lately.

“Okay,” the DI said. “That makes her eighteen, right? So when was Lucy last seen?”

“Well, I saw her the day before her birthday. She’d had an argument with our mother, and she walked out. I didn’t know where she’d gone, but apparently she went to stay with a friend of hers, Evie Collins. I spoke to Evie last night, and she said the last time she saw Lucy was the twenty-fifth of November.”

The DI wrote down the name. “She’s a friend of Lucy’s?”

“Sort of. They went to school together.”

“And to your knowledge, nobody’s seen her since then?”

“No. Her boyfriend broke up with her on Remembrance Day.

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