I Let You Go
Clare Mackintosh
About the Author
Clare Mackintosh spent twelve years in the police force, including time on CID and as a public order commander. She left the police in 2011 to work as a freelance journalist and social media consultant, and now writes full time. She is the founder of Chipping Norton Literary Festival and lives in the Cotswolds with her husband and their three children.
COPYRIGHT
Published by Sphere
ISBN: 9780751554175
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © Clare Mackintosh 2014
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
Sphere
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www.hachette.co.uk
Contents
About the Author
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Part Two
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Epilogue
Author’s Note
For Alex.
Acknowledgements
I always used to read the acknowledgements pages of books and wonder how on earth so many people could be involved in the creation of a single piece of work. Now I understand. I am hugely grateful to the early readers of I Let You Go – Julie Cohen, AJ Pearce, Merilyn Davies and others, who helped me see what was working and what wasn’t, and to Peta Nightingale and Araminta Whitley, for believing in me. I am fortunate to have the wonderful Sheila Crowley as my literary agent, but I would never have met her had it not been for a chance conversation with Vivienne Wordley, who liked my manuscript enough to pass it on. Thank you Vivienne, Sheila, Rebecca and the rest of the Curtis Brown team, for everything that you do. You could not have found a better home for me than Little, Brown. I loved the brilliant Lucy Malagoni the moment I met her, and couldn’t wish for a more insightful and enthusiastic editor. Thank you Lucy, Thalia, Anne, Sarah, Kirsteen, and the rest of Little, Brown, including the wonderful foreign rights team, all of whom are terribly busy, but manage to make me feel as though this is the only book they’re working on.
Thank you to former colleagues Mary Langford and Kelly Hobson: Mary for reading an early draft, and Kelly for some last-minute help with procedure. Finally, thank you to the friends and family who always believed in me; who supported me when I decided to jack in a good career and write books instead, and who never once suggested I should go and get a proper job. I couldn’t – and wouldn’t – have done it without the support of my husband Rob, and our three children, Josh, Evie and Georgie, who have cheered me on from the sidelines, brought me cups of tea, and looked after themselves while I ‘just finish this chapter’. Thank you all so much.
Prologue
The wind flicks wet hair across her face, and she screws up her eyes against the rain. Weather like this makes everyone hurry; scurrying past on slippery pavements with chins buried into collars. Passing cars send spray over their shoes; the noise from the traffic making it impossible for her to hear more than a few words of the chattering update that began the moment the school gates opened. The words burst from him without a break, mixed up and back to front in the excitement of this new world into which he is growing. She makes out something about a best friend; a project on space; a new teacher, and she looks down and smiles at his excitement, ignoring the cold that weaves its way through her scarf. The boy grins back and tips up his head to taste the rain; wet eyelashes forming dark clumps around his eyes.
‘And I can write my name, Mummy!’
‘You clever boy,’ she says, stopping to kiss him fiercely on his damp forehead. ‘Will you show me when we get home?’
They walk as quickly as five-year-old legs will allow, her free hand holding his bag, which bangs against her knees.
Nearly home.
Headlights glint on wet tarmac, the dazzle blinding them every few seconds. Waiting for a break in the traffic they duck across the busy road, and she tightens her grip on the small hand inside the soft woollen glove, so he has to run to keep up. Sodden leaves cling to the railings, their bright colours darkening to a dull brown.
They reach the quiet street where home lies just around the corner, its seductive warmth a welcome thought. Secure in the environs of her own neighbourhood she lets go of his hand to push away the strands of wet hair from her eyes, laughing at the cascade of droplets it causes.
‘There,’ she says, as they make the final turn. ‘I left the light on for us.’
Across the street, a red-brick house. Two bedrooms, the tiniest kitchen, and a garden crammed with pots she always means to fill with flowers. Just the two of them.
‘I’ll race you, Mummy…’
He never stops moving; full of energy from the second he wakes until the moment his head hits the pillow. Always jumping, always running.
‘Come on!’
It happens in a heartbeat; the feeling of space by her side as he runs towards home, seeking out the warmth of the hall, with its porch-light glow. Milk; biscuit; twenty minutes of television; fish-fingers for tea. The routine they have fallen into so quickly, barely halfway through that first term at school.
The car comes from nowhere. The squeal of wet brakes, the thud of a five-year-old boy hitting the windscreen and the spin of his body before it slams on to the road. Running after him, in front of the still-moving car. Slipping and falling heavily on to outstretched hands, the impact taking her breath away.
It’s over in a heartbeat.
She crouches beside him, searching frantically for a pulse. Watches her breath form a solitary white cloud in the air. Sees the dark shadow form beneath his head and hears her own wail as though it comes from someone else. She looks up at the blurred windscreen, its wipers sending arcs of water into the darkening night, and she screams at the unseen driver to help her.
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sp; Leaning forward to warm the boy with her body, she holds her coat open over them both, its hem drinking surface water from the road. And as she kisses him and begs him to wake, the pool of yellow light that envelops them shrinks to a narrow beam; the car backs up the street. Engine whining in admonishment, the car makes two, three, four attempts to turn in the narrow street, scraping in its haste against one of the huge sycamore sentries lining the road.
And then it is dark.
PART ONE
1
Detective Inspector Ray Stevens stood next to the window and contemplated his office chair, on which an arm had been broken for at least a year. Until now he had simply taken the pragmatic approach of not leaning on the left side, but while he was at lunch someone had scrawled ‘defective’ in black marker pen across the back of it. Ray wondered if Business Support’s newfound enthusiasm for equipment audits would extend to a replacement, or whether he was destined to run Bristol CID from a chair that cast serious doubts over his credibility.
Leaning forward to find a marker pen in his chaotic top drawer, Ray crouched down and changed the label to ‘detective’. The door to his office opened and he hastily stood up, replacing the lid on the pen.
‘Ah, Kate, I was just…’ He stopped, recognising the look on her face almost before he saw the Command and Control printout in her hand. ‘What have you got?’
‘A hit-and-run in Fishponds, guv. Five-year-old boy killed.’
Ray stretched out a hand for the piece of paper and scanned it, while Kate stood awkwardly in the doorway. Fresh from shift, she had only been on CID for a couple of months and was still finding her feet. She was good though: better than she knew.
‘No registration number?’
‘Not as far as we know. Shift have got the scene contained and the skipper’s taking a statement from the child’s mother as we speak. She’s badly in shock, as you can imagine.’
‘Are you all right to stay late?’ Ray asked, but Kate was nodding before he’d even finished the question. They exchanged half-smiles in mutual acknowledgement of the adrenalin rush it always felt so wrong to enjoy when something so horrific had happened.
‘Right then, let’s go.’
They nodded a greeting to the throng of smokers clustered under cover by the back door.
‘All right, Stumpy?’ Ray said. ‘I’m taking Kate out to the Fishponds hit-and-run. Can you get on to Area Intelligence and see if anything’s come in yet?’
‘Will do.’ The older man took a final drag of his roll-up. Detective Sergeant Jake Owen had been called Stumpy for so much of his career that it was always a surprise to hear his full name read out in court. A man of few words, Stumpy had more war stories than he chose to share, and was without a shadow of a doubt Ray’s best DS. The two men had been on shift together for several years, and with a strength that belied his small stature, Stumpy was a handy crewmate to have on your side.
In addition to Kate, Stumpy’s team included the steady Malcolm Johnson and young Dave Hillsdon, an enthusiastic but maverick DC, whose determined efforts to secure convictions sailed a little too close to the wind for Ray’s liking. Together they made a good team, and Kate was learning fast from them. She had a fiery passion that made Ray nostalgic for his days as a hungry DC, before seventeen years of bureaucracy had ground him down.
Kate drove the unmarked Corsa through mounting rush-hour traffic to Fishponds. She was an impatient driver; tutting when a red light held them back, and craning her neck to see past a hold-up. She was perpetually in motion: tapping fingers on the steering wheel, screwing up her nose, shifting in her seat. As the traffic started moving again, she leaned forward as though the action would propel them along faster.
‘Missing blues and twos?’ Ray said.
Kate grinned. ‘Maybe a bit.’ There was eye-liner smudged around her eyes, but otherwise her face was clean of make-up. Dark brown curls fell messily about her face, despite the tortoiseshell clip presumably intended to hold them back.
Ray fished for his mobile to make the necessary calls, confirming that the Collision Investigation Unit was en route, the duty superintendent had been informed, and that someone had called out the Ops wagon – a lumbering vehicle stuffed to the gunnels with tenting, emergency lights and hot drinks. Everything had been done. In all honesty, he thought, it always had been, but as duty DI the buck stopped with him. There was usually a bit of hackle-rising from shift when CID turned up and started going over old ground, but that was just the way it had to be. They’d all been through it; even Ray, who had spent as little time in uniform as possible before moving on.
He spoke to Control Room to let them know they were five minutes away, but didn’t call home. Ray had taken to phoning Mags instead on the rare occasion when he was going to be on time, which seemed a much more practical approach to the long hours the job demanded of him.
As they rounded the corner Kate slowed the car to a crawl. Half a dozen police cars were strewn haphazardly down the street; lights throwing a blue glow across the scene every other second. Floodlights were mounted on metal tripods, their strong beams picking out the fine mist of rain, which had thankfully abated in the last hour.
Kate had stopped on their way out of the station to grab a coat and exchange her heels for wellies. ‘Practicality before style,’ she had laughed, throwing the shoes into her locker and pulling on the boots. Ray rarely gave much thought to either principle, but he wished now he’d at least brought a coat.
They parked the car a hundred metres away from a large white tent, erected in an attempt to protect from the rain whatever evidence might have been left. One side of the tent was open, and inside they could see a Crime Scene Investigator on her hands and knees, swabbing at something unseen. Further up the street a second paper-suited figure was examining one of the huge trees that lined the road.
As Ray and Kate drew near to the scene they were stopped by a young PC, his fluorescent jacket zipped so high Ray could barely make out a face between the peak of his hat and his collar.
‘Evening, sir. Do you need to see the scene? I’ll have to sign you in.’
‘No thank you,’ said Ray. ‘Can you tell me where your sergeant is?’
‘He’s at the mother’s house,’ the PC said. He pointed down the street to a row of small terraced houses, before retreating into his collar. ‘Number four,’ came the muffled afterthought.
‘God, that’s a miserable job,’ said Ray, as he and Kate walked away. ‘I remember doing a twelve-hour scene watch in the pouring rain when I was a probationer, then getting told off by the DCI for not smiling when he turned up at eight o’clock the next morning.’
Kate laughed. ‘Is that why you specialised?’
‘Not entirely,’ Ray said, ‘but it was certainly part of the appeal. No, it was mainly because I was sick of passing all the big jobs over to the specialists and never seeing anything through to the end. How about you?’
‘Sort of similar.’
They reached the row of houses the PC had pointed towards. Kate carried on talking as they looked for number four.
‘I like dealing with the more serious jobs. But mainly it’s because I get bored easily. I like complicated investigations that make my head hurt to figure them out. Cryptic crosswords rather than simple ones. Does that make sense?’
‘Perfect sense,’ said Ray. ‘Although I’ve always been useless at cryptic crosswords.’
‘There’s a knack,’ said Kate, ‘I’ll teach you sometime. Here we are, number four.’
The front door was smartly painted and slightly ajar. Ray pushed it open and called inside. ‘CID. All right if we come in?’
‘In the sitting room,’ came the response.
They wiped their feet and walked up the narrow hallway, pushing past an over-loaded coat rack, beneath which sat a pair of child’s red wellies, neatly placed beside an adult pair.
The child’s mother was sitting on a small sofa, her eyes fixed on the blue drawstring school bag clutched
on her lap.
‘I’m Detective Inspector Ray Stevens. I’m so sorry to hear about your son.’
She looked up at him, twisting the drawstring so tightly around her hands the cord gouged red grooves in her skin. ‘Jacob,’ she said, dry-eyed. ‘His name is Jacob.’
Perched on a kitchen chair next to the sofa, a uniformed sergeant was balancing paperwork on his lap. Ray had seen him around the nick but didn’t know his name. He glanced at his badge.
‘Brian, would you mind taking Kate into the kitchen and filling her in on what you’ve got so far? I’d like to ask the witness a few questions, if that’s okay? It won’t take long. Perhaps you could make her a cup of tea at the same time.’
From the reaction on Brian’s face, it was clear this was the last thing he wanted to do, but he stood up and left the room with Kate, no doubt to moan to her about CID pulling rank. Ray didn’t dwell on it.
‘I’m sorry to ask you even more questions, but it’s vital we get as much information as we can, as early as possible.’
Jacob’s mother nodded, but didn’t look up.
‘I understand you couldn’t see the car’s number plate?’
‘It happened so quickly,’ she said, the words triggering a release of emotion. ‘He was talking about school, and then … I only let go for a second.’ She pulled the drawstring cord tighter round her hand, and Ray watched the colour drain from her fingers. ‘It was so fast. The car came so fast.’
She answered his questions quietly, giving no sign of the frustration she must surely be feeling. Ray hated causing such intrusion, but he had no choice.
‘What did the driver look like?’
‘I couldn’t see inside,’ she said.
‘Were there passengers?’
‘I couldn’t see inside the car,’ she repeated, her voice dull and wooden.
