Written In Blood

10-2

MELISSA TURNED HER attention from the bookcase to the housekeeper. “What should be here?” she asked, indicating the large gap on the second shelf from the bottom.

Anna left her post by the doorway and bent to examine the gap. It was a few moments before she straightened up. “Six or seven books,” she said, without seeming to be aware that her answer was all but useless since it was obvious that it was books that were missing.

“Who are they by?” Mitchell asked, guessing at the thinking behind Melissa’s query as he joined the two women.

Anna’s brow furrowed. “They’re all by the same person, I remember that, a man, but I can’t remember his name.” She bent again to run her eyes over the other books on the shelf. “It begins with a W. They’re big books, heavy, hardbacks; Lucy won’t take them from the room, they’re so heavy, she only reads them here. You’d think, given how many times I’ve seen Lucy reading them, I’d remember who they’re by, and what they’re called.”

Melissa frowned. “If they’re too heavy for Lucy to take them out of the room,” she said slowly, “why would she have taken them all off the shelf at the same time? You haven’t seen them anywhere around the house, have you? They’re not anywhere in the room as far as I can see.”

“No. If I had, I would have brought them back up here.”

“Do you remember when you last saw the books, and where they were?”

“Yesterday morn...” Anna started to say, before stopping so she could cast her mind back. After several moments, she nodded. “Yes, they were there yesterday morning. I did my dusting, and I remember the only gap was here.” After a brief search for the right spot, she put her finger on a book on the third shelf. “This one wasn’t here when I dusted yesterday.”

“You’re certain that that book was missing, and the other books were here, when you dusted yesterday?” Mitchell asked. When Anna nodded, he went on, “What time did you do the dusting?”

“Between half-past eight and nine o’clock; after Lucy left for school, and before I went into town with Mrs Goulding.”

“Is it possible that someone other than Lucy could have taken the books?” Mitchell asked. It didn’t surprise him when Anna shook her head. “Okay, so if Lucy is the only one who would have taken the books, and they were here when Lucy left for school yesterday, she must have come home at some point.”

“Could the books have been by someone called Zack Wild?” Melissa asked.

Anna’s face brightened and she nodded quickly. “Yes, that was it; I can’t think how I could have forgotten it, it’s such a simple name to remember.”

Melissa looked significantly at Mitchell, though her gaze quickly moved from him to the desk. “Do you want me to check it?” she asked, indicating the laptop that sat on it.

“You’ll have to,” Mitchell told her. “I wouldn’t have a clue what to do. While you do that, I’ll check the rest of the room.”

Immediately, Melissa crossed to the desk and settled into the luxurious, padded swivel chair. It was only when the Windows logo appeared on the screen that she thought to worry that the system might be password-protected – fortunately, it wasn’t.

Melissa sat and stared at the desktop screen for more than a minute, unsure how to proceed. Finally, she decided that the place to start was Lucy’s email and social media accounts; sixteen was recent enough for her to remember how keen teens were on social media, and how often they used it. The moment she accessed her email account, she saw that Lucy got more emails in a week than she got in a month. Most of the emails were notifications, of one sort or another, from social media, indicating that it was a good idea for her to check Lucy’s f*******:, Twitter and other accounts.

It took a while to go through the emails, and when she was done Melissa moved on to the social media accounts themselves. She didn’t expect to find anything on any that she hadn’t already seen in the notifications, which had had nothing to do with Lucy’s disappearance, but she had to check anyway.

“What do you make of this, Mel?”

The distraction was a welcome one and Melissa spun the chair away from the desk to get to her feet. When she reached the bed she saw that the small pile of clothes Mitchell had dumped out from the laundry basket was made up of a school uniform and some underwear.

“When did you last empty this basket, Mrs Becker?” Mitchell asked.

“Yesterday morning,” Anna answered straight away. “I put a load of laundry on before going into town with Mrs Goulding.”

“It definitely looks as though Lucy came home yesterday afternoon,” Mitchell observed.

Melissa nodded her agreement as she reached out to pick up the underwear, saying, “This is odd, though.”

“Why d’you say that?” Mitchell wanted to know. Looking extremely uncomfortable, he stared at the items in Melissa’s hand.

“Well, I can understand Lucy changing out of her uniform, if she was planning on meeting someone, especially someone like Mr Wild, she would have wanted to wear something better, but why would she change her underwear.” The look on her face conveyed her confusion. “I imagine she already put on clean underwear before going to school.”

“Yes,” Anna confirmed that.

“Then why change, unless...” Melissa’s voice trailed off as a thought occurred to her.

“Unless what?” Mitchell asked.

“Unless...unless she was planning something more than just meeting Mr Wild, or whoever it is she was going to see,” Melissa finished.

“What do you mean?” He realised what she meant before she could answer. “Surely you don’t think she could have been intending to...to have s*x with Mr Wild.”

“Or whoever she was planning to meet,” Melissa said. “I can’t think why else she would have changed her underwear. Speaking as a woman, the only reason I’d change my underwear, if I already had fresh on, was to put on something sexy for whoever I was meeting. How well do you know the clothes in Lucy’s wardrobe?” she asked of Anna.

“Pretty well,” Anna said. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve washed everything, so I should know it.”

“Can you tell us what’s missing, what she might have changed into?”

“I think so.” Anna’s voice betrayed a touch of doubt, nonetheless she moved away from the bed and over to the wardrobe so she could look inside.

“Did you find anything on the computer?” Mitchell asked of Melissa while the wardrobe was being checked. “Anything that shows if it was Wild she was planning on meeting, or someone else?”

“Not so far. I’ve checked her emails and her social media accounts, but there’s nothing there; if she was talking to someone about meeting up with them, or about meeting up with someone else, she wasn’t doing it through any of them.”

“Could she have done it in code or something?”

“It’s possible I suppose,” Melissa said doubtfully. “But I can’t see why she’d have done so; she didn’t even have a password on the laptop, so she obviously didn’t worry about anyone looking at her stuff. If she did have a code she used, it’ll be almost impossible for us to figure out what she was saying; we don’t even know who she might have been saying it to, since she apparently didn’t talk to Kelly about it.

“I’ll have a look at her internet history, maybe there will be something there to help us.”

Mitchell left Melissa to work on the computer and joined Anna at the wardrobe. “Can you tell us what Lucy changed into?”

Anna nodded, her eyes on the colourful array of clothes in the wardrobe. “A mini-skirt, a red micro thing that’s positively indecent - her parents don’t normally worry themselves about what she wears, but if they’d seen this skirt, they’d have had plenty to say about it - and a low-cut top, red, like the skirt.”

“If that’s what she was wearing, I don’t think there’s any doubt she wanted to get attention,” Mitchell observed unhappily as he wrote down the details of the outfit Lucy was most likely wearing when she left the house the last time.

Melissa listened with half an ear to the housekeeper, but she was more interested in her search of Lucy’s internet history. It didn’t take her long to discover that there was only one thing on there of interest, and it was the site Lucy had visited before leaving the house to see whoever it was she came back to the village to meet.

“It seems pretty certain now, doesn’t it; Lucy was planning on seeing Zack Wild,” she said, showing the author’s website to Mitchell.

“Yes. We’ll have to go back later and find out what he knows.”

“You don’t want to go now?” Melissa asked.

“No.” Mitchell shook his head. “We’ll speak to Oliver first, see what he knows, if anything, then try and speak to Mr Wild. He might, genuinely, not have been home when we tried earlier, so we should give him some time to return from wherever he’s gone. If he’s not home later, we’ll have to think about how we’re going to find him.”

Melissa shut the computer down once she had determined there was nothing more to see, and went with Mitchell as he returned to Theresa Goulding’s office.

**