Into the Darkness Read online

  I sat on the now stripped bed and Corinne sat next to me as I flicked through the notepad. On the inside of the rigid cover Toni had written:

  SuperGurrrl991

  psychos101

  IHatePasswords991

  chunkybuttons0809

  MissingYou1118

  ‘They’re her passwords for things. She always wrote them down so she didn’t forget,’ Corinne said.

  In neat handwriting on the pages were written what looked like ideas and questions and notes.

  Psychopath/Sociopath or Psychology of a psychopath? Which one?

  Personal moral dilemma?

  Emotional centre – amygdala

  Master manipulators

  Narcissist

  Charm?

  Never accepts responsibility

  Controlling!

  I’LL COME BACK TO THIS LATER

  I turned a page:

  Female killers

  Rose West (No 1?)

  Tracey Connelly – Baby P

  Carole Fishburn

  Marie Black

  Interspersed throughout the notes were what looked like random thoughts:

  Or should I do serial killers?

  Picking up the Pieces – Paul Britton. Want that one!

  Documentary or book?

  Nature or nurture? How much does a psychological disorder play a part?

  School shooting massacres? Were drugs involved?

  Oh, shit! How did I miss that bit? :O

  TheMindUnleashed: 30 Traits of an Empath – OMG, I get it now! That’s totally me. Everything’s just clicked into place!

  I paused on certain parts as Corinne read over my shoulder. The notebook was half full. The last pages contained notes about her forthcoming criminology and psychology degree course:

  Dissertation (I know, I’m soooo ahead of myself here when I haven’t even started the course, but you know me!)

  CYBERCRIME – sub genre – sexual offences against children

  Sub chapters:

  Intro

  Sexual exploitation/legislation?

  Typical ways to commit online sex offences. Or maybe Internet-facilitated sexual offending – chat rooms and what else?

  Law enforcement – combating online sexual abuse for international and multi-jurisdictional cases?

  Subjects of sex offences – offender/victim

  Interviews?

  Media’s role in uncovering sex offences

  Sexual exploitation of children

  Disturbing trends in commercial online child sexual abuse.

  Summary?

  ‘After her course, she wants to get a job in some kind of child-protection capacity, working with kids who’ve been abused,’ Corinne said.

  At the bottom of the last filled-in page, a date had been scrawled and underlined – two days before Toni had gone missing. Beneath that was the note:

  I’ve got it! Into the darkness . . .

  An uneasy feeling crept up my spine.

  The following page had been torn out of the notebook, leaving a thin margin of paper along the spine.

  I stared at it, picturing Toni sitting on her bed, scribbling the notes down. Why had the page been torn out? Was it significant to her sudden disappearance or not?

  I looked at Corinne. ‘Any idea what this means? Into the darkness?’

  She shook her head, forehead pinched with worry. ‘No. Maybe it means the darkness of human minds? What makes psychopaths tick? Looks like she was working on ideas for her dissertation already. Toni was always obsessed with psychology and criminology. It was her life. She wanted to do something that made a difference to people after they’d gone through traumatic experiences.’

  The doorbell rang then and Corinne jumped up. ‘Toni?’ She rushed out of the room.

  I opened the window and looked down to the front door below, but it wasn’t Toni standing on the doorstep. It was a middle-aged woman.

  I stepped away from the window. ‘Anything?’ I asked Maya, who was still searching the bedside drawers.

  ‘Nothing of interest.’ She picked up balls of socks and underwear, shaking them out.

  I stood up and opened the wardrobe, which was full of clothes – jeans, combat trousers, leggings, blouses, jumpers, Converse. I checked pockets and shoes and came up empty.

  On the floor was a cardboard box with Memory Box written in black marker pen on the lid. I pulled it out and placed it on the floor before climbing inside the wardrobe. I turned on the torch app on my phone and closed the doors behind me, looking for something attached to the interior side of the doors. I ran my hands over the wood to see if any panels were loose. Nothing. I stepped out, kneeled on the carpet and opened the memory box.

  Inside were photos of Corinne and Toni, ranging from when Toni was a baby, through the years to her blossoming into a young woman. There were some photos of a girl with Toni, her friend Laura, perhaps. Cinema ticket stubs, airline boarding passes, an aging packet of sweets, a pressed flower. A girl’s collection of mementos. At the bottom were some photos of Tony that Corinne must’ve given her.

  I picked up the first one, staring at Tony and me when we were both much younger men, both fresh and keen. We had longer hair. Tony had a Pancho Villa moustache. We were working on the UK Counterterrorist Team back then and were dressed in black Nomex coveralls with body armour, gas masks on our heads. We carried sub-machine guns, pistols on leg holsters.

  The breath was snatched from my lungs. A surge of familiar anger and guilt ricocheted through me. Something inside my head tugged me down into a flashback . . .

  Me and Tony in the Chinook, sitting next to each other. The rotor blades chopping through the air, vibrating through our skin. Tony staring straight ahead, jaw clamped tight, eyes focused, getting in the zone so he could deal with what was to come. And then the signal to go, go, go. Our guys fast-roping down to the ground . . .

  Sweat beaded on my forehead, my upper lip. My heartbeat cranked up. Shots boomed in my ears, explosions, lights, frantic footsteps, and—

  ‘Mitchell! Mitchell!’ Maya’s voice pulled me back to the present as she repeated my name over and over again. ‘You’re OK. You’re here with me.’ I blinked up at her, the blurry edges of her face slowly coming into focus as her words penetrated my head. She touched my shoulder. ‘I thought the flashbacks were getting better.’

  I closed my eyes. Forced all the darkness down and felt the photo slipping from my fingers. When I opened my eyes, it was in Maya’s hand.

  ‘This is Tony?’

  I nodded, swallowing down the hard lump in my throat. From the look Maya was giving me it was obvious she wanted me to talk about it but there was no time for that.

  Corinne appeared in the doorway again, her eyes glistening with tears. ‘It was just my neighbour. The one who’s been on holiday. She heard the news and wanted to find out what was happening.’

  The distraction was enough for me to get myself together again. I stood up abruptly, not meeting Maya’s gaze as I asked Corinne to give me a hand with the wardrobe. ‘I’m going to lean it over and I need you to check underneath it.’

  ‘Yeah. Sure,’ Corinne said.

  I could feel Maya’s eyes on me. Knew there’d be a look in them asking are you OK?

  I stood at the side of the wardrobe, reached up to the top, my toes tight against the wood to brace it, then tilted it towards me as Corinne crouched down by the base until the underside was revealed.

  ‘No. Nothing.’

  I pushed the wardrobe back into position and picked up the Supergirl notepad again. ‘I need to speak to her friend, Laura. Can you ring her? Ask her to come here to talk to me? Toni may have confided something in her best friend.’

  ‘Of course. Her number’s in my phone downstairs.’ Corinne rushed along the hallway.

  Maya put the drawers back in the unit and said, ‘I haven’t found anything.’

  We headed back downstairs. I put Toni’s notebook on the kitchen table and took a swig of what was l
eft of the now cold tea.

  While Corinne was calling Laura, my phone rang. It was Lee. He didn’t need to announce himself as the caller, and time was too short to waste on pleasantries. It was straight down to business.

  ‘I’ve been looking at Toni’s mobile phone provider’s data, going through texts and calls. They’re all between Toni and Corinne and a girl called Laura Hammond.’

  ‘Laura’s her best mate.’

  ‘I can email you details if you like but they all seem innocent, everyday teenage chatter. There’s nothing sinister about them, and there are no messages arranging to meet anyone. Her iCloud has only innocuous photos and some coursework essays on it. Also, her phone’s been switched off since 1.12 p.m. on the day she went missing. I’ve pinpointed the area where the last GPS signal was transmitting from. It’s a place locally known as the cutting – a pathway that leads over a disused railway track between some woods a couple of streets away from Toni’s house. From the satellite maps, it looks as if it could be used as a shortcut into town. There’s no CCTV in that area I can tap into, though. The only CCTV in Bournewood is in the High Street.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll check it out.’ I knew military-grade GPS systems could be spot on, but I had no idea how good a smartphone GPS was. ‘How accurate is that GPS data?’

  ‘It’s getting better all the time. It could be anywhere between one to eight metres, depending on the conditions.’

  ‘OK. Good work. Thanks, mate.’

  Lee hung up and Corinne stared at me, her phone in her hand.

  ‘Any news?’ she asked urgently.

  I told her what Lee had said. ‘Do you know of this cutting?’

  ‘Yes. Toni did use it as a shortcut to get to the High Street. Otherwise you have to go the long way round on the main road. I told her not to. It’s in the middle of the woods, and I didn’t like the idea of people lurking around in there.’ She cupped her hands to her mouth, terror in her eyes.

  ‘I’m going to have a look at the place.’

  ‘Do you think she’s still there? Injured somewhere? Maybe she fell and hit her head.’

  Injury was the best we could hope for. The other alternative – that she’d been abducted or raped and left for dead was far worse. ‘How much does the cutting get used by people?’

  ‘Dog walkers use it to get into the woods. Businessmen use it as a shortcut to the station. People going into town.’

  ‘Has anyone ever been attacked there before?’ Maya asked.

  ‘No, not that I’ve heard of.’

  If it had a reasonable amount of foot traffic, it was unlikely Toni hadn’t been discovered already. If she was still there.

  I called up a satellite map on my phone, zoomed into Corinne’s street, found the cutting a couple of streets away, which looked like a tarmac road, wide enough for a single vehicle. Either side of it were the woods that abutted the old railway track, branching off left and right. ‘I’m going to have a look. Maybe it’s best if you stay here.’ I looked at Corinne. ‘Just in case.’

  ‘In case what?’ She swallowed nervously, fearing the very worst.

  ‘In case Toni comes back when we’re gone.’ I put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. ‘There’s still the possibility she has just gone to stay with someone for a few days.’

  Corinne gulped and nodded.

  ‘What did Laura say?’ I asked her.

  ‘She was going to come round now, but I’ll call her back and tell her to come later.’

  I nodded in acknowledgement, then Maya and I got into my pick-up and headed down Corinne’s quiet street. At the end of the road we could either turn right to reach the main road or left, towards a large close that fed into a further cul-de-sac. At one side of the cul-de-sac, the houses backed on to the woods and the old railway line. The properties were maybe a hundred years old, detached, huge. It was a well-to-do location. An affluent area. Professional people. There was a big gap in the woods at the edge of the cul-de-sac where the tarmac path of the cutting began.

  I parked up outside the entrance and glanced around. The street was quiet. The houses nearby were set back from the road. Mature plants and tall walls or fencing edged their properties. From here I couldn’t see into their windows so it was unlikely they’d get a clear view of the comings and goings of people using the cutting.

  We walked beneath the canopy of trees and up an incline, the dense woods either side of us. We looked left, right and straight ahead, eyes scanning for signs of Toni or her rucksack and its contents.

  Maya shuddered. ‘This place gives me the creeps. Someone could’ve been lurking in here, behind the trees, waiting for an opportunity.’

  They could indeed. And I wondered if this was some kind of random attack on a young woman – an opportunist waiting here to rape Toni possibly, or mug her. Or was there another reason for her disappearance?

  At the top of the small hill the old railway line appeared, branching out to our left and right, exactly like the map showed. We stepped off the path on to the track, Maya searching left, me checking right, eyes poring over the debris of leaves and foliage, looking under bushes, kicking the decaying leaves away. But there was no sign of Toni, her mobile phone or her rucksack and laptop.

  Fifteen minutes later we met in the centre again on the tarmac. All we’d found was rubbish – plastic bags, discarded food wrappers, a broken umbrella, a dead fox carcass, golf balls. Nothing that helped us work out what had happened to Toni.

  We took a slow walk down the incline to the other side of the cutting, still searching for signs of Toni or something she’d left behind.

  We emerged beside an old church that had been converted into a house in another well-to-do street. I consulted the satellite map again. If Toni had been going into town she would’ve walked to the end of this road and taken a left turn, then carried on going straight towards the High Street.

  I blew out a frustrated breath.

  ‘We need to check with the owners of the surrounding houses,’ Maya said, glancing around. ‘See if they saw Toni that day. I can do it while you go back and speak to the neighbours in Toni’s street.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I pulled out my phone and emailed Maya a copy of Toni’s photo that Corinne had forwarded from her own phone. Maya’s phone beeped in receipt. ‘I doubt any of them would have a clear view, but it’s worth a try. Even if they didn’t see something, they might have heard something – a shout or a scream. Maybe they didn’t report it to the police. They could’ve thought it was just kids messing around.’

  Maya delved into her bag and pulled out her mobile phone.

  ‘I’ll start with Bert. If he saw Toni leave the house at one p.m., he may have seen something he doesn’t realise is significant.’

  But I wasn’t holding out much hope of that. If Toni’s phone had last transmitted positioning data from the cutting, it was likely that whatever fate had befallen her had happened right here.

  THE DETECTIVE

  Chapter 13

  After I left Bill Graves, I drove along his front field of rapeseed, swung a left on to the road, passed the Jamesons’ farm and carried on until I spotted the turn-off for Simms Livery Stables with a FOR SALE board up outside. I turned into another long, rambling driveway, but this time there were no yellow flowers and long stalks to greet me, just flat fields with tufts of velvety green grass either side.

  I parked in front of the main, uninhabited house, which was an old brick building covered with patches of moss and trails of ivy. The outside looked run-down and neglected, hardly surprising if the owner had been suffering from dementia.

  I cupped my hands to several windows for a look-see inside and spotted some furniture covered in dust cloths. One had slipped a little revealing an antique desk and an ornate chair that must’ve been worth a few quid. Denise and I had been partial to antique furniture. After we’d got married and bought our first house we’d scoured the shops for nice pieces, a few items at a time as and when we could afford them. Over the years we�
�d built up a good collection. They didn’t make them like that any more. All this cheap superstore rubbish was flimsy and didn’t last long. When I’d decided to take DI Nash’s job in London, I’d accepted an offer on the house I’d shared with my wife. The sale would most likely be completed in a few months and I was going to downsize – maybe find a small flat to rent nearer to where I’d be working. But I hadn’t stopped to think what to do with all the furniture we’d accumulated. I’d been too busy thinking about a new start. A new opportunity to move on with my life, away from the memories of Denise that had held me captive in grief. An opportunity to start living again. Now the doubts were creeping in. What if I was wrong, leaving those memories behind? What if I was making a mistake leaving CID? What if I was useless at the new job in the wildlife unit? Was I too old to start over? Should I just give it all up and enjoy the time I had left before I popped my clogs? I was starting to think I was the antique.

  I wandered down a track wide enough for a vehicle that led round to the back of the house and looked to the west, towards the Jamesons’ property, but their house wasn’t visible in the distance, obscured by their fields of rapeseed. To the north, across more fields with six horses grazing on grass, I spotted a wooden post-and-rail fence in the far distance, separating the Simms’s land from the dense wooded area. Behind that, unseen from this viewpoint, was Parker Farm. In the distance to the right of me was a large stable block.

  I looked at the horses again and shuddered. It was probably unmanly to admit that they scared the crap out of me. I’d been bitten by one when I was a kid and I always gave them a wide berth now. Those things were huge. One kick to the head from their powerful hind legs and hard hooves and you’d be a goner. I’d never understood the fascination with horse riding.

  There was a dusty track leading from the house towards the stable block, but I didn’t fancy walking it with the horses let loose, even though there was another post-and-rail fence separating me from their field. It didn’t look that high, and I was pretty sure they’d be able to jump it if they really wanted to. Yes, I was a wimp.

  So I got back in the car and drove down the track, nervously keeping one eye glued to the horses. Luckily, they were at the far end of the field now, munching on grass, and weren’t interested in my arrival.