No Going Back by Casey Kelleher (black male authors TXT) 📗

‘He’s there in his crib,’ she said, looking at the midwife as if she’d suddenly gone mad.

What was wrong with the woman? Why was she acting so strange and saying such stupid things?

Only as Shelby moved off the bed, panicked now too, she recoiled in horror when the midwife lifted the blanket to reveal nothing but the thin little cot mattress and sheet. It was empty.

Rushing to the wall, the midwife pressed the alarm. The noise filled the room, only to be drowned out by Shelby Cooke’s hysterical screams.

29

Dragging herself from the warmth of her bed at the sound of loud banging at her front door, Lucy wrapped her dressing gown around herself before grabbing up her mobile phone from the bedside cabinet.

She frowned as she noted it was only five thirty and registered a flash of relief, realising that she hadn’t overslept. So why was there a long list of missed calls from Holder on her phone? He’d rung her six times in the past ten minutes. Shit! She’d drunk so much last night, she must have slept through them. The strain of yesterday’s revelation had finally got to her.

‘I’m coming!’ she shouted as the banging continued and she made her way down the stairs, guessing by the calls that it was Holder at the door. The urgency in his knocking, and the fact that he was here at the crack of dawn, meant that something had obviously happened. There must have been a development on the case.

Which made her instantly regret the copious amounts of vodka she’d knocked back the previous night, now she rationally thought about the volume of work they still had to do, if they were going to catch Shelby Cooke’s attacker.

‘Jesus, Lucy,’ Holder said, noting the state of the woman as she pulled open the door. A trail of black mascara smudged down both of her cheeks from where she’d clearly been crying at some point during the night. Her hair a matted mess. ‘No offence, but you look like a bag of shite,’ he said playfully, not waiting for his invite as he stepped into the hallway and made his way into the lounge.

‘None taken. Please, do come in,’ Lucy muttered sarcastically, staring at her dishevelled reflection in the mirror and noting how Holder had a point. She looked awful.

‘Bloody hell, do you want me to get scene of crime officers out here? You been burgled or something?’ Holder called out.

Shit! Too late, Lucy remembered the mess she’d left the room in before she drank so much that she’d passed out. She quickly followed Holder through, doing her best to try and ignore her thumping head and the overwhelming urge to be sick now that she was upright.

‘I was just sorting through some of my nan’s stuff,’ she said, following Holder’s gaze as he stared around the chaos of the room, his eyes going to the piles of open photo albums that she’d left spread out all across the living room floor, before finally resting on the E-fit photo on the table. A bottle of vodka, almost empty, stood beside it.

‘I had a few drinks last night,’ Lucy said, nodding at the vodka bottle, hoping to take his attention away from the E-fit. She cursed herself for leaving it out on the table. She’d been so drunk last night that she hadn’t realised just how much mess she’d made. She wished that she’d cleared up before she’d passed out in bed; though in fairness, the last thing she’d been expecting when she opened her eyes this morning was an uninvited visitor at this ungodly hour.

But Holder was right. The house was a tip. Lucy had pulled out every photo album that her nan possessed and had pored over each and every one, twice. Not really sure what she’d been searching for. Part of her thought that she might find the man in the E-fit staring back at her from one of the photos. This Kevin or Bodge, or whoever he really was. If only it could have been as simply solved as that.

‘It turned into a bit of a late one,’ she said, recalling the sense of panic that had filled her last night. Because as much as her nan got confused these days and came out with all her funny little stories, Lucy had seen the recognition in her nan’s eyes when she’d looked at the E-fit photo and recognised the man staring back at her as Lucy’s father.

And there had been something in the way that her nan had acted that made Lucy believe that this wasn’t just her nan being confused. She really did think that it was him. And that there was more to her mother than she’d been told growing up. And that thought terrified her.

So much so that she’d craved the numbness from the vodka. She’d wanted everything that she felt to stop. How scared she was. How angry she felt. How alone she was.

She remembered downing the first drink, how it had burned her throat and the welcome warmth had spread through her. Immediately she’d poured herself another. And another. After that everything had become a blur. The only good thing from last night was that the vodka had managed to do the trick and knock her out. She’d slept through the entire night without a single nightmare. Small mercies and all that.

‘You been working on the case?’ Holder said, picking up the E-fit image and examining it closely. He guessed that the case must have really got to her; only on closer inspection, he noticed that although the date printed in the corner was from two days ago, this wasn’t the E-fit belonging to Shelby Cooke’s attacker. This was someone else completely.

‘Who’s this?’

‘Oh, no one. It’s nothing. I must have accidentally picked up some paperwork from the sarge’s desk by mistake when I grabbed a folder or something,’ Lucy said unconvincingly. She took the paper from Holder and shoved it back