Just Keep Breathing by GS Rhodes (any book recommendations txt) 📗

DI Kidd turned back to Caleb.

“Is your mum home?” he asked.

Caleb shook his head.

“Right,” he said. “Then you’re coming with us.”

◆◆◆

When they made it back to the station, the rest of the team had gone home. DI Kidd had told them to. DS Sanchez had volunteered to stay on with him to help deal with Caleb. She wanted this finished with as much as he did, and maybe the anticipation of waiting until tomorrow was too much for her. Keeping the rest of the team around for the night wasn’t necessary.

Before they went into the interview room, Kidd slipped into the Incident Room and quickly dialled John’s number. He picked up on the second ring.

“Hey,” John said down the phone, a little out of breath. He was moving around as he spoke. “I’m not late, am I? I was just getting my things together to come and meet you.”

“You’re not late,” Kidd said. “I’m glad I caught you. Look, something’s come up.” They were words that he’d said to Craig a thousand times before, words that he didn’t want to be saying to someone as kind and sweet as John, at least not at such an early stage of their relationship, if he could even call it that. “I wouldn’t do this unless I had to, I promise.”

John let out a breath that distorted into Kidd’s ear.

“Ben,” he said. “It’s fine.”

“It is?”

John sighed. Kidd could hear him sitting down. “Sure,” he replied. “You’ve got a whole investigation thing going on. It was only a drink, right?”

He sounded disappointed. Ben could hear it in his voice, and he hated that. He hated so much that he was making someone else feel that way.

“No, no, it wasn’t just a drink,” he said, perching on the edge of DC Campbell’s desk. “This was supposed to be me making it up to you that we didn’t get to see one another last night. And then…” he trailed off. He didn’t want to get John too involved in it. The world was hard enough without knowing about all the darker things that happened in it. “Like I said, something came up in the investigation. We’re about to interview someone, it shouldn’t take long.”

“Ben, honestly, we can reschedule for tomorrow if—”

“No,” Kidd interrupted. “Give me an hour, an hour and a half and I’ll call you. I want to see you.”

Kidd could hear John smiling down the phone. “I want to see you too.”

“Good.”

“Okay,” John said. “I await your call.”

“I’ll be as quick as I can.”

“Be quicker,” John replied.

They hung up the phone and Kidd found himself staring at it, the backlight illuminating his face in the darkened Incident Room.

“Everything okay?”

Kidd practically jumped out of his skin, nearly dropping his phone in the process. “Christ, Sanchez, you nearly gave me a heart attack.”

“Alright, skittish,” she said. “Caleb is ready, if you are.”

Kidd nodded. He needed to get his head back on the case.

He followed DS Sanchez out of the Incident Room and down the corridor to one of the interview rooms. Caleb was sat at the table, a disposable cup steaming in his hands, the phone face-up on the table. There were notifications popping through on the screen, hundreds of them at a time.

“How long has that been happening?” Kidd asked.

“Pretty much since I turned it on,” Caleb said. “People were worried about her, I’m not surprised she switched it off.”

“If it had been switched on, we would have found her,” DS Sanchez said as she took a seat across from Caleb.

“She didn’t want to be found,” Caleb said.

“What makes you say that?” Kidd asked.

“She told me,” he said. “At first, I think she was just out to punish her parents a little bit. After that, I think she just didn’t want to deal with everything anymore, all the pressures of her life.”

“The popularity?” Zoe asked.

Caleb nodded. “She didn’t really want it, I don’t think. It happened because she is… was pretty sociable, fell in with the right crowd. Or the wrong crowd, depending on how you looked at it. But it meant that, with everything happening for her mum too, everybody was always looking at her. She had nowhere to escape to.”

“Which is why you think she escaped to you?” Kidd asked.

Caleb shrugged. “Maybe. We were friends, like I told you, but I wasn’t part of her group.”

“There were no pictures anywhere of the two of you together,” Kidd said. “Doesn’t that seem odd?”

“No,” Caleb said bluntly. “Just because it’s not been obsessively documented online doesn’t make it any less real. She was my friend. We’d hang out in the library sometimes when we both had work to do. She’d come over occasionally and…maybe it’s stupid.”

“What’s stupid, Caleb?” Zoe asked.

“She told me that she felt like she could be herself,” he said. “Like, she didn’t have to perform for anyone if it was just the two of us.”

Kidd eyed the boy carefully. “Did you like her?”

“She was my friend,” Caleb said again.

“Did you like her more than a friend?”

“I don’t know about you but not every single boy is after getting his end away,” Caleb snapped. “She was just my friend.”

Kidd sat back in his chair and took a breath, watching Caleb as his eyes darted from the cup to DS Sanchez, to DI Kidd, to the phone, and back again. He didn’t know where to look, didn’t really know what to do with himself. It had to be pretty intimidating being in a police station all by yourself at sixteen.

“Caleb,” Kidd said. “Would you mind taking us through everything that happened with you and Sarah since last Friday?”

“All of it?”

Kidd nodded. “Every last bit.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Caleb was very thorough. He took them through everything that had happened since he met Sarah on Friday afternoon after school. They had gone back to his house—his mother had been working late—and spent the afternoon and evening together. The later it got, the more