The Fifth Girl by Georgia Fancett

Author:Georgia Fancett [Fancett, Georgia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781473569614
Publisher: Random House

Chapter 13

Friday came, as they always do, at the end of a long week that had gone by all too quickly. They were a week into this now and Rawls felt no further forward. He had woken early and left the house before Eileen or Carmen were awake so that he could take a walk along the river. He stood beside it now, his hands in his pockets, his collar pulled up against the south-westerly wind, watching seagulls in the metal-grey sky. His head felt overloaded. There were too many people and places, names and dates: the missing girls, their friends, their teachers, all jostling for position in his mind. He needed some calm, a little space to clear his head and arrange his thoughts, and as he stood there, he did his best to think of nothing. He wanted a revelation to come to him, a missing piece of the puzzle, a tiny detail so insignificant that they had all overlooked it but so huge in its importance that it would blow the case wide open. And so, he waited, watching the clouds moving, dark grey on light grey, drifting, changing shape, coming apart and reassembling themselves, their gloom broken only occasionally by the appearance of a bird.

He wanted to shout, to turn his face up to the drizzle and scream, let the frustration out, free himself of at least some of the burden; instead, he swore under his breath, over and over again, the same four-letter words, letting them mindlessly trip off his tongue. It did nothing really, his mind failing to unlock any secrets, refusing to cooperate, and so he turned, shoulders hunched, and began the half-mile or so walk to the office.

He had woken in the night, wondering what they might be missing, who they should have interviewed and who they already had spoken with. The list was long, overwhelming, unforgiving. He had tried to break it down into lots of little problems instead of one big one. He had seen the parents and that was good, but he wasn’t sure it had made any difference. He wondered about Yvette’s father; he hadn’t managed to speak with him yet, but he could get to that. That brought him to Yvette’s boyfriend, Jacob. He was a mess, and admitted to being violent towards young women, even thought it was funny, but a killer? Rawls didn’t know, not yet anyway. And what about Sebastian, the new owner of Stoney Barrow View – wasn’t he just a little too perfect, too squeaky clean? The place seemed nice enough, but Grace Stokes the librarian had left, hadn’t she? She had managed to avoid telling them why – like a good politician, she had dodged every one of their questions on the subject. Could she have discovered a secret, something so dark and so unpleasant that after all the years of putting her life and soul into the place, she had upped sticks and left?

He paused again, the wind at his back now.

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