Don't Come Looking by AJ Campbell (always you kirsty moseley .txt) 📗

sniffling. ‘I know it’s late, but I’ve tried so hard to do it myself. I need your help. I’m so useless. No wonder he left me.’ Her voice is desperate, in stark contrast to the strong bold Sasha, I know.

‘What’s happened?’

‘I want to go to Cambridge to try and find him,’ she manages to say between suppressed sobs. ‘I’ve tried to design this missing person leaflet like one I found online, but I can’t get the text to line up, and it looks crap. Usually, I’d ask the kids, but…’ Tears rob the rest of her words.

My offer of help beats my rationality. It’s late, and I should go home. ‘Calm down. I’m in your area. I’ll be with you soon. But I can’t stay long.’

What am I thinking?

There’s no traffic, so it’s a clear ride to her house. She’s waiting at the studio door when I pull up, her face pale and tear-stained. ‘I’m sorry to mix you up in all of this, but if the police won’t do anything, I need to take control of things myself,’ she says, shoving the leaflet under my nose.

‘What’s your plan?’ I ask as I correct spelling mistakes and fiddle with fonts.

‘I’m driving up to Cambridge on Sunday. I’ve found a map of the town. The bank where he cashed that five grand from is next to the Market Square. I’m going to hand it around the stallholders and the shops in the near vicinity. You never know,’ she says with a smidgen of hope that’s gut-wrenching to hear. ‘I can’t just sit around. I have to do something.’

She’s wasting her energy, but I’ve seen this so many times before. People taking the law into their own hands when they think the police are failing. What they don’t realise is that we sacrifice sleep and skip meals in our inordinate desire to expose the truth. They can’t see behind the scenes. Often things are so tangled up that we have to separate the threads slowly, with patience, so when everything finally gets unravelled, the strands of evidence don’t fray and snap or come back to strangle us. So, often, this takes far longer than people’s forbearance can cope with.

‘Will the same stallholders be there on a Sunday?’ I ask.

‘I can’t go during the week. I’ve got clients.’

I try to reason with her. Is this a good use of her time? But she’s adamant. After proofing our efforts and sending the file to print two hundred copies, she offers me a drink.

I shake my head. I need to get home. I’m wondering if I should tell her about my findings today. Too late. I blurt it out. ‘Do you know if Marc has a criminal record of any kind?’

She turns to me aghast. ‘No, why?’

Every sinew in my body is screaming at me to stop.

‘What are you trying to say?’

‘I need to talk to you about something.’

Sasha gives me a look which suggests she already knows she’s not going to like what I’m going to tell her. ‘Go for it.’ She stands to take the first batch of leaflets from the printer.

I pause.

Her eyes widen. ‘You’re worrying me now. Spill.’

My anxiety spares her a further few seconds from the torture my words are going to inflict. I hate these moments; relaying information that will crush people. But there’s been worse. I’m not exactly going to tell her that her husband is a paedophile or a murderer, but still, this is going to hurt.

Unless she already knows.

‘Marc does have a criminal record.’

Her hand flies to her heart. ‘Oh, God. What’s he done?’

‘Drink-driving. He received an eighteen month ban and a fifteen hundred pound fine.’

‘How do you know?’

‘It doesn’t matter, but you absolutely can’t repeat to a living soul you heard this from me.’

‘You sure you’ve got the right person?’

I nod. No words are going to lighten the load.

Her face pales. She shrinks into the chair and stares at her husband’s face smiling up from the leaflets in her hand. ‘That makes sense.’ She slams the leaflets on the desk. ‘Do you remember me telling you about that sickening pile-up on the M3 we narrowly escaped last Christmas?’

‘I do. You were stuck for four hours watching the emergency services clear it up.’

‘That’s right. Marc was so badly shaken up, I ended up driving us home.’ She pauses, as if she is trying to get the timeline right in her head. ‘Then there was the collision with that car with the toddler. Both incidences terrified him.’

‘Jim’s the same. He’s never got behind the wheel again.’

She gasps. ‘That’s why he sold his car. Oh, God, this is getting worse. He said we didn’t need two cars while he was out of work and, as he was anxious driving anyway, we might as well save the costs of being a two-car family.’ Sasha looks at the leaflet again. ‘You lying bastard!’ she yells at the picture of her husband’s face.

The printer beeps. She reloads it with paper. ‘Now I think about it, I know the day it happened.’ Sasha pauses while her brain recalls the details. ‘He drove down to Croydon for a job interview in the morning. It was around the middle of January. I remember because there was a forecast of snow, and he was debating whether to take the train.’ She snorts. ‘He didn’t even want the job but said the experience would look good on his CV, so he could hack it until something more suitable came up. On the way back, he stopped off in Thornton Heath for lunch with an old friend of his, Oli, from uni. I never thought anything of it. He must have drunk at that lunch and got caught afterwards because he didn’t come home that night. He told me the interviewer got held up, and the lunch with Oli turned into dinner, so he was staying there. I wonder who bailed him out? It must have been Oli. He must have driven his car home the next