Cages by David Mark (reading fiction TXT) 📗

headlines splashed across articles written in a first-person, conversational style. Crosswords, competitions, recipes, a little celeb gossip. He can’t help thinking that the reader gets a lot of content for sixty pence.

He stops turning the pages when he sees the fluorescent page marker stuck to the top right-hand corner of a seemingly random article. Flips the folder and spots several more little place-markers: yellow, pink, blue. Glances at the article she has considered worthy of re-reading. GROOMED FOR SEX BY ONLINE PAEDO. White letters on a red background. A picture of a teenage girl looking dejected and a mugshot of a plump, unattractive man. He flips on to the next story marked out by the thin, fluorescent Post-it. HELP ME NAIL DAD’S KILLER BEFORE MUM LOSES CANCER BATTLE. The accompanying picture shows a mother and daughter: Stacey and Louisa Defreitas. Both small, thin-framed, hard-faced, sitting side by side in a floral armchair with a photo album in their laps. Inset, a picture of a plump, jowly man: a hint of Mediterranean to his skin tone. Rufus makes a face. Chews his lip. He should probably put the folder back. He’s a guest in somebody else’s house. He shouldn’t be rummaging around. What business is it of his if she has a folder full of junk articles? Maybe she’s studied certain cases for a course, or has an interest in different styles of print journalism. None of his business, really.

He can’t help himself. He walks through to the kitchen and locates the whisky bottle in the cupboard under the sink. Pours a quadruple measure into a half-pint glass. Settles back in the kitchen chair that allows him to see through the open door to where Annabeth dozes, and dreams. Starts to read.

There were tears in her eyes as she told me. She wouldn’t let herself cry, but I knew she wanted to. I’d seen that look before, back when I was eight years old. Then, she had to tell me that Daddy wasn’t coming home. Now, she was telling me that the cancer had spread and that she wasn’t going to be around much longer.

I’m not somebody who wants sympathy. All of my friends know me as somebody who deals with whatever life throws at me. I’m one of those people who everybody thinks of as the ‘life and soul’ of the party.

But even when I’m laughing on the outside there’s a hollowness within me. You see, I’m the daughter of a murder victim!

I was just a child when it happened. My dad, Walter, was a kind man. A big man. He gave the best cuddles and treated me like a real princess. I was a proper Daddy’s girl. He’d always bring me presents back when he went away to work and my favourite memory is of us sitting on the floor in my bedroom having little tea parties with my toys.

Of course, Dad was no angel. Mum always said he could be a difficult man to live with and I do remember he could get very cross if things weren’t done just right, but he was a good provider and we lived in a nice house near Penrith in Cumbria.

Dad owned some properties and had a few different businesses in nearby Carlisle. One night in May 2006, he went out to go and look at an empty property he was thinking of investing in. I remember saying goodbye to him, getting a kiss on the cheek, then hearing him drive away like he had so many times. The next morning, I could tell something wasn’t right. Mum was really jittery and nervous and kept running to the window every time a car went past. She started ringing people who Dad did business with. By the next day I had realized that Daddy hadn’t come back. People were out looking for him.

I cried myself to sleep every night for weeks.

It was more than a year until Daddy’s body was found. Somebody had slit his throat then buried him beneath the floorboards of a house where he owned a flat.

Life was very difficult for Mum and me after Daddy went away. He’d always been quite secretive about his business interests and suddenly we didn’t have any money. We had to move in with my mum’s sister and when Daddy’s body was found we were suddenly getting calls from reporters and people were quizzing me at school and I became the daughter of the murdered man.

All these years later, the police are no closer to finding out who did it. We know he was seen in the company of a tall man the day that we saw him last, and that somebody had been squatting in the flat in the months prior to his disappearance. But we’re no closer to finding out who did it.

I’m 22 now and am working as a nail technician. I’m pregnant with my first child and am hoping to marry my boyfriend this summer.

But Mum’s cancer diagnosis has stirred everything up and we don’t know how long she has left. I want to at least get her some answers before she goes to her grave not knowing what happened. All I can do is ask people to come forward with information and to pray, every night, that we finally get some answers. I’ll be an orphan soon. Surely I deserve at least one bit of good fortune.

Rufus breathes out through pursed lips. Takes a slug of whisky. He can’t say he feels any clearer about why Annabeth may have kept the article. Could she have been friends with Walter’s daughter, Stacey? There’s nothing to suggest so. An interest in the case? He doesn’t know Annabeth well enough to say. He rummages in his pocket and finds his phone. There are a couple of new voicemails and an email alert but he ignores them and brings up a search engine. Double-checks the details and types in a string of keywords from the article. Walter. Stacey. Louisa. Defreitas. Murder. Carlisle.