No second chances, p.3
No Second Chances, page 3
‘Hello?’
‘Is that Daniel Whelan?’ The voice was female but not Lorna.
‘It is.’
‘Oh. Hi. It’s um … Zoe Myers. We met yesterday.’
‘Oh, hello, Zoe.’ Daniel raised his eyebrows at Fred, who looked back intently. ‘What’s happened? Is your mum OK?’
‘Yes, fine – I mean, as far as I know. I’ve been at school all day but it wasn’t about Mum, anyway.’
‘Oh.’ Daniel was a little taken aback. ‘How can I help you, then?’
‘Um … Mum says you used to be a policeman …’
‘I was,’ he confirmed, wondering a little uneasily where the conversation was leading.
‘Um … could I talk to you? In confidence, I mean. You wouldn’t tell Mum?’
‘That depends …’
‘No! You mustn’t tell her. Please. She’s got enough to worry about, with not being able to get hold of Dad and everything.’
Daniel couldn’t argue with that, but he was wary of making promises he might later regret.
‘She told you about that, did she?’
‘Not exactly,’ Zoe admitted. ‘I overheard her leaving a message on his answerphone and she sounded upset. What’s going on?’
‘You should ask your mum about that, not me. I thought you said it wasn’t about your mum …’
‘It’s not. So, please can I talk to you? Please? I need help and I don’t know who else I can ask, but Mum can’t know, it’s important.’
Considering that she had met him for the first and only time just the day before and had then shown every sign of disliking him intensely, Daniel thought she must indeed be desperate.
‘OK. I won’t promise but if I can help you without telling her, I will. That’s the best I can say – take it or leave it.’
There came a low groan from the other end of the phone. ‘Oh, God! I don’t know …’
‘Well, take some time to think about it, if you like, and get back to me,’ Daniel said helpfully.
‘No!’ Her sharp reply surprised him. ‘I haven’t got time. I need to talk to you, now.’
‘OK. Well, the choice is yours.’
‘I haven’t got any choice,’ Zoe said with a touch of bitterness. ‘When can you come? Now?’
‘Come where? Are you at home?’
‘No. I’ve just finished school. I’m in Tavistock. Can you meet me in the town centre? There’s a coffee shop near the abbey that stays open late, do you know it?’
‘I expect I can find it,’ Daniel said. ‘Won’t your mum wonder where you are?’
‘She thinks I’m at an after-school club,’ Zoe said, with a lack of shame that suggested to Daniel that it might be an alibi she often used.
He arranged to meet her in twenty minutes and disconnected, looking thoughtful.
Fred Bowden raised his eyebrows. ‘Trouble?’
‘I don’t know. Very possibly,’ Daniel said, stowing the phone in his pocket once more. ‘No, scratch that. Almost certainly.’
He outlined the conversation and Fred shook his head.
‘Rather you than me, mate,’ he said with feeling.
‘I know but she sounded pretty desperate. I couldn’t just turn my back, could I?’
Fred, who knew a little of Daniel’s history, shook his head. ‘Knowing you, I suppose not. But you need to stop beating yourself up about that girl, my friend. It was a long time ago and it wasn’t your fault, whatever you choose to think.’
‘Yeah well, maybe I’ll stop when the nightmares do,’ Daniel said bleakly. The incident, involving a drug addict and his teenage hostage, had effectively ended his career in the police force, and had haunted his nights ever since.
Fred shook his head again and walked towards the door, putting a hand briefly on Daniel’s shoulder in passing.
Daniel found the coffee shop with no trouble and once inside, quickly located Lorna’s daughter sitting at a table against the side wall. The premises were small, with perhaps a dozen tables, about three-quarters of which were occupied. It didn’t seem a natural choice for a youngster, but perhaps that was the reason for its choosing, Daniel thought. Maybe she didn’t want to run the risk of being seen or heard by her school friends.
Zoe waved a hand when she saw him and he weaved his way between the close-packed tables to sit opposite her.
‘Hi,’ she said, a little shyly. ‘Thank you for coming.’
Once again, she was wearing a sloppy jumper, which today exposed one shoulder and the strap of a red vest top beneath. Her hair hung in a long silvery-gold plait over the other shoulder and her hands were partly hidden by lacy black fingerless gloves. Her collarbone stood out in a sharply defined ridge and Daniel wondered if she was anorexic.
A waitress materialized beside them and he ordered coffee and a slice of chocolate cake. Zoe’s coffee cup was empty and she accepted the offer of a refill with a slightly abstracted air. Daniel added a second slice of cake to the order and sat back to wait for the youngster to unburden herself.
This, after the apparent urgency of the phone call, she seemed reluctant to do, and Daniel wondered if she’d had second thoughts.
‘Have you changed your mind?’ he asked, after a couple of minutes during which she seemed absorbed in fiddling with the lace of her mitts. Her hands were small and the nails a shiny black. He half-hoped she had changed her mind, but for Lorna’s sake, it would not have felt right to just walk away, at this stage.
‘No!’ she looked up. ‘It’s just … It’s difficult.’
‘I gathered that much.’
‘I’m seeing this guy …’
‘And your mum doesn’t approve?’ Daniel hazarded a guess. His first thought was that she had got herself pregnant, but he swiftly discounted that. Eminently possible, it was nevertheless something a fifteen-year-old girl might disclose to a member of her peer group but emphatically not to a male stranger twice her age – besides which, her interest in him had been as an ex-policeman.
‘Mum’s never even met him!’ Zoe exclaimed. ‘So what gives her the right to judge him? It’s totally unfair!’
Daniel didn’t think it would help to point out that as Zoe was underage, her mother had every right to be concerned about her relationships.
‘Is he older than you?’ he asked, backing a hunch.
‘A little,’ she conceded.
He raised an eyebrow.
‘He’s not old old. He’s only nineteen! It’s not like he’s thirty or something,’ she protested.
Ouch, Daniel thought ruefully. Still, four years could make all the difference when they bridged the age of consent.
‘So why don’t you invite her to meet him?’ he suggested, smiling a brief thank you to the waitress, who had arrived with their order.
Zoe waited until they were alone once more, then said, ‘I have. She refuses. But that’s not the problem, anyway.’
‘OK. So why don’t you tell me what is – or do I have to keep guessing?’ He pushed the second slice of cake in her direction and was pleased to see that after a quick glance of enquiry she had no hesitation in taking a mouthful.
‘I know what you’re thinking but it’s not just a teenage crush,’ she said then, around a mouthful of chocolate sponge. ‘It really isn’t. This is the real thing. We want to be together – to get married and do the whole settling-down thing.’
‘You can’t get married, you’re only fifteen,’ Daniel pointed out, beginning to sympathize with Lorna’s objections but no nearer to discovering where he came into the equation.
‘Sixteen in January,’ Zoe stated, brushing that technicality aside as of little importance. ‘The trouble is that we’ll need somewhere to live and Shane can’t afford a van, so he needed some money to buy his horse back and enter this race – but it was only going to be for a week or two …’
‘Whoa! Wait a minute!’ Daniel said, sifting the sudden rush of information. ‘You’re planning on living in a caravan?’
‘They’re not, like, any old caravan, they’re beautiful,’ she said defensively. ‘Shane showed me his sister’s van one time and it was lovely – nicer than my room at home.’
Daniel was conscious of a sinking feeling of inevitability.
‘Shane …?’
‘Brennan.’
‘He wouldn’t by any chance be a Traveller, would he?’
‘So what if he is?’ she demanded, her voice rising. ‘He’s all right. He’s really nice. The discrimination against them is totally unfair! Anyway, he’s an Irish Traveller, not a New Age or a Gypsy!’
Oh well, that’s all right then, Daniel thought, but he kept his tongue between his teeth. He sensed Zoe was within an inch of walking out on him and in spite of his misgivings, from what he’d heard so far he didn’t want to risk that.
‘OK, calm down,’ he said. ‘People are looking.’
Zoe glanced round briefly, then returned her accusatory gaze to Daniel, who attempted to sort out the facts from the hysteria.
‘You mentioned him wanting money to buy a horse for a race. He wants to buy a racehorse?’
‘Not a thoroughbred racehorse!’ Zoe exclaimed impatiently. ‘Trotting – you know, in harness. Anyway, there’s this trotting race – a really big one they have every year – and the prize is this really amazing caravan. So Shane has been helping train this horse that was really, really fast but then the man who owned her put her up for sale, so Shane thought if he could buy her, he could enter the race and win the caravan, but the trouble is, he hasn’t got enough money.’
‘What about his dad? Wouldn’t he lend him the money?’
‘But if he did, Shane wouldn’t win the van, would he? It would be his dad’s.’
‘As a plan it has one glaring weakness,’ he pointed out. ‘Has it ever occurred to either of you that this horse might just not win the race?’
‘Well, of course, it’s not a hundred per cent certain but Shane says she’s the best he’s ever seen.’
Daniel suspected there might be more to the story than Shane was letting on even to Zoe, but he let it go. ‘OK. So where do you come in?’
Zoe’s gaze dropped and she began to push bits of cake round her plate with her fork.
‘Well, obviously, I haven’t got much money, myself, and I couldn’t ask Mum without telling her what it was for …’
‘And your father? Harvey, I mean.’
Zoe looked guarded. ‘I did kind of ask him, but he said he hadn’t got that kind of money in cash.’
‘Didn’t he want to know what it was for?’ Daniel was surprised if Harvey had even considered it, unless he was trying to win brownie points with his stepdaughter. He wasn’t sure what kind of a relationship they had.
‘Well, yeah, kind of …’
‘And he was OK with it? Has he actually met your boyfriend?’
‘Once. By accident, really. I was out with Shane and we bumped into him.’
Daniel was finding it difficult to imagine a social situation where a Traveller lad and a high-flying businessman might have ‘bumped into’ one another. ‘And he approved?’ he asked sceptically.
Zoe gave a sulky shrug. ‘He seemed cool with it. Anyway, he couldn’t say a lot.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Oh, nothing. Forget it.’
‘Was he with someone?’
‘Someone …?’
‘A woman?’
‘Oh, no, nothing like that.’
Daniel took a long sip of his coffee and regarded Zoe over the rim of the cup. She looked uncomfortable.
‘Just out of interest,’ he said, putting the cup down. ‘What sort of money are we talking about?’
After a moment’s hesitation, Zoe mentioned a sum in the mid four-figures, and seeing Daniel’s eyes open wide, hurried to justify it.
‘It’s not a lot, really – compared with what some people spend. Some of my mum’s horses cost three times that much.’
Daniel didn’t feel that the comparison was a fair one. He knew that two at least of Lorna’s stable had the potential to be Grand Prix dressage horses.
‘It may be a silly question, but wouldn’t it be better just to spend the money on a caravan in the first place?’ he asked. ‘Not that I think it’s a good idea at your age, but you’re clearly very determined and it would cut out the chance element.’
‘I think the really nice vans cost a lot more than that, besides, Shane wouldn’t let me pay. Traveller men are very proud, you know. Personally, I wouldn’t mind what the van was like but Shane says he wants the best for me and he wants to pay for it. He calls me his princess.’
‘But he’s happy for you to buy this horse he wants?’
‘But that’s just borrowing,’ she explained as to one who was being slow on the uptake. ‘Until he wins the race, and then the horse will be worth loads more and he can sell it again.’
‘All right. I’m assuming you’re not about to ask me to lend you the money, because even if I wanted to, I haven’t got that kind of money lying around. So why did you want to talk to me? I hope you’re not expecting me to plead with your mum for you. Even if I knew her well enough to interfere – and I don’t – I wouldn’t do it.’
‘No, I know that. Anyway, I’ve got the money, now – at least, I did have …’ She toyed with the last bits of her cake, her long dark lashes hiding her eyes.
‘So where did you get it, in the end?’
‘It was left to me by my gran.’
Daniel looked at her through narrowed eyes.
‘Is that the truth?’
Zoe took refuge in her coffee cup, but under Daniel’s continuing scrutiny she all but squirmed.
‘Yes, it’s the truth! Well, in a manner of speaking. My granny left me her jewellery.’
‘Jewellery isn’t cash,’ Daniel pointed out. ‘Please tell me you haven’t sold it.’
‘No! I wouldn’t do that. I pawned it. It’s still mine. I mean, it’s just like borrowing. I can get it back any time.’
Daniel gave her a hard look.
‘You didn’t pawn it with any reputable broker. You’re too young.’
‘Shane did it for me.’
Daniel suppressed a groan, but she saw the look on his face and hurried to her boyfriend’s defence.
‘I trust him. The Travellers are very honourable people.’
Among their own kind, maybe, Daniel thought, but said, instead, ‘OK. So if everything’s good, what’s the problem?’
‘He’s gone missing,’ Zoe admitted in a small voice. ‘Shane has. I don’t know where he is.’
THREE
‘It’s not what you think!’ was Zoe’s predictable response to Daniel’s silently raised eyebrow. ‘Something must have happened to him. He would never just go off without telling me.’
‘So if you’re so sure he’ll be back, why are you enlisting my help to find him?’ Daniel asked. ‘That was what you were going to do, wasn’t it?’
Zoe nodded miserably.
‘It’s the pawnbroker. We only borrowed the money for a month because it was cheaper, and if we’re late, he’ll sell the rings.’
‘How long have you got left?’
‘Two weeks. Well – ten days,’ Zoe amended. ‘Please, can you help me? If Mum finds out she’ll go absolutely crazy! Especially now, on top of this stuff with Dad.’
Daniel favoured her with a long look, under which she coloured a little and took a sip of her cappuccino.
‘When did you last see Shane?’
‘Last week. He has Monday off work, so we spent the day together.’
‘When you should have been at school.’
‘It’s just one day,’ Zoe protested. ‘Didn’t you ever bunk off school as a kid? You won’t tell Mum, will you?’
‘I ought to,’ Daniel said, dodging the question. ‘So you haven’t heard from him since then?’
‘He messaged me on Tuesday but that was the last time.’
‘So, it’s not been that long.’
‘For us it is,’ she said. ‘Normally we’re in touch all the time, messaging and that. Now he won’t even answer his phone and his sister hasn’t been at school, either.’
‘You think she’s gone too? You don’t think it’s possible the family have just moved on somewhere for a bit?’
Zoe shook her head.
‘No! Well, I don’t know, do I? They’re Travellers … Leila’s often off school for no reason. But Shane wouldn’t go without telling me, especially not with my money; he knows how important it is for me to get the rings back.’
Daniel regarded her for a long moment, trying to decide how much of what he was hearing was the truth.
‘Give me one good reason why I should help,’ he said at length. ‘You’re the daughter of someone I deliver animal feed to. I only met you yesterday. You could be lying through your teeth.’
‘I thought … I mean, you were hugging my mum, so I thought you were friends,’ Zoe said helplessly.
‘She was upset,’ Daniel said. ‘What was I supposed to do? Drive off? And come to that, how do you know you can trust me? You know nothing about me.’
‘Mum obviously trusts you,’ Zoe said. ‘And you were in the police.’
Daniel uttered a short, humourless laugh. ‘Some of the biggest villains uncaught are in the police force, I can tell you that for nothing,’ he said. ‘OK. Say I did agree to help you – just what exactly do you expect me to do?’
‘Well, help me find out what’s happened to Shane,’ she said as if she was asking him to get something from the shops for her. ‘I’d do it myself but I can’t because I haven’t any transport and, well, I don’t much like going into the Traveller village on my own.’
‘Well, thank God you’ve got that much sense, at least,’ Daniel commented with feeling. ‘So Shane lives in a settlement, does he? That’s one thing to be grateful for. I don’t fancy chasing a bunch of caravans all over England!’
Zoe, who’d flushed darkly at Daniel’s first words, now looked up at him with guarded hope in her eyes.
‘So you’ll do it? You’ll help me?’
‘Against my better judgement; I’ll see what I can do but I’m making no promises. I still think you’d be better making a clean breast of it to your mum but I agree the timing could be better. I take it she hasn’t been in touch with Harvey yet.’
