The Missing and the Dead by EM Scott

Author:EM Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: No Exit Press
Published: 2024-07-30T12:34:20+00:00

John sat back in the chair with a sarcastic grunt.

According to Alice, at this point Maitland knew Helen McAllister a damned sight better than he was letting on. And his treatment of her had not been kindly or fatherly. He’d dumped her. If you believed Alice. But there he sat, everyone deferring to him, in control. Somebody in the audience asked him if the police had any theories.

‘We’re pursuing several lines of enquiry,’ he said.

John switched off the film. He went back to the search and found another item. It was Maitland giving out prizes at a school. Not St George’s. And other cases. Some murder or other, a drowning on a beach. And another on a pebbly stretch of coast with a greyish cliff above him. ‘Police warn of cliff falls.’ A man walking his dog had been caught in a sudden downslide of ashy-coloured rock.

John chewed on his thumb distractedly. Helen McAllister couldn’t have had an accident like that, could she? No, he decided. They would have known straightaway. Was there stuff like old mineshafts or anything round there? He knew that there were some in Cornwall. Where did someone come by an accident? Had she jumped? Thrown herself into the sea? Had she just walked away into the countryside and lay down exhausted somewhere, and died? Had she been ill?

He rubbed at the frown that now seemed to be a permanent feature of his face. He could feel the furrow lines in his forehead. The answer to all those questions was the same. She would have been found. Even country areas aren’t unpopulated. And a body would wash up somewhere from the sea, wouldn’t it? There would have been something fairly quickly, certainly within ten years.

She had taken her bag, keys and phone. The newspaper article said so. Had they ever found her phone or the bag? And what did her phone records say? Had she phoned Maitland, had he phoned her? Was there evidence of them meeting in the weeks before she went?

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