First One Missing by Tammy Cohen Page B

cars, its wrought-iron railings topped with black spikes in an effort to deter jumpers. Sally fought off a momentary flashback to a hospital ward and a burning pain in the back of her throat where they’d rammed in the tube to pump her stomach. She was glad when the taxi turned off to the left, cutting the bridge off from view.
    The Glovers lived in a ground-floor flat in an unassuming road full of modest terraced Victorian houses. By the time she’d paid the taxi driver, making sure to ask for a receipt, there was already a knot of reporters outside number 17, with its neglected front garden and the printed ‘No junk mail’ notice taped to the utilitarian front door. She clocked a few familiar faces. That young guy with the trousers halfway down his hips revealing electric-blue underpants with BENCH emblazoned across the waistband, who looked like he should still be at school, was from one of the local news agencies.
    ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’
    She started at the voice, which was close enough to her ear to send a spray of spittle across the lobe. But when she turned round and recognized the man behind her, she relaxed. Ken Forbes was a creep, but he’d been a fixture on the Sunday tabloids since long before Sally cut her journalistic teeth. She felt a kind of affection for him.
    ‘Oh you know how it is, Ken. Thought I’d step over to the dark side for a bit.’
    ‘Yeah, well, this is dark all right.’
    ‘Awful,’ said Sally distractedly, trying to peer in through the ground-floor windows from their vantage point on the pavement.
    ‘No. I mean, this one is even worse than the others,’ he clarified.
    Now Ken Forbes had her attention. She turned her eyes to him, taking in his florid nose, threaded with broken capillaries, and the thinning sandy hair through which his scalp shone lobster pink.
    ‘What do you mean, worse?’
    Ken smiled. His teeth were custard yellow and his breath pungently over-ripe; Sally had to stop herself from stepping back from him.
    ‘Now why would I tell you that? Come on, darling. I’ve got to leave you a bit of legwork to do. Can’t have your lovely arse getting fat from sitting on it all day.’
    Sally knew no one was supposed to put up with being spoken to like that any more, but she couldn’t be bothered to make a fuss. There was something a bit pathetic about Ken Forbes. She was just old enough to feel nostalgic for the Fleet Street days of three-hour liquid lunches and news stories bashed out on desks littered with overflowing ashtrays. Ken still had the contacts, and he didn’t lose any sleep over what was and wasn’t ethical. None of that Leveson crap for him. He’d obviously found something out. But from whom? No one had been briefed beyond that farce of a press conference, as far as she knew. She made a mental list of the police officers on the case she knew – Leanne Miller, Jo Barber. Not those two. By-the-book worthy sorts, both of them. The Botsfords’ FLO then. The good-looking one. What was his name now. Pat? No, Pete. Or someone from the Murder Squad, perhaps?
    ‘What are they like?’ she asked Ken, nodding towards the flat with the cheap white canvas blinds in the windows. ‘The new family?’
    ‘They’re like people who’ve had a ruddy great bomb dropped on their lives. What do you expect?’
    Sally resented the way Ken was looking at her as if she’d said something crass.
    She was about to say something sensitive, just to put him right, but as she opened her mouth a scream pierced the air – shocking and animalistic, like a sound dragged up from a person’s guts and ripped out through their throat. As one, the gathered reporters and photographers turned to look at the house from where the harrowing noise was emanating. On Sally’s right a TV camera crew scrabbled for their equipment, wanting to be prepared. And still it went on, a raw howl of pain that set Sally’s nerves jangling. The young news-agency guy with