Chapter 27
Charlie puts an arm around his mother’s shoulders.
“It’s OK, Mum. It’s all right. It was worth a try.”
Maxine is still shaking her head. She picks up the key again, turns it over, puts it back down. A heavy tear falls from her chin onto the grooved wooden table.
“I thought…” She sniffs. “If all this stuff, all these things were his, it might mean something, you know? That he’d gone somewhere, or lived somewhere else after he left me—he’d got tired of me and wanted a clean break, a fresh start or whatever.
We had something special, the two of us, but there was always a tiny part of me that hoped he had left, that he’d got bored of me and wanted to start a new life.
Because it was easier to imagine than the alternative. ”
My sympathy for her is tempered by a powerful sense of anticlimax, of discovering more questions without answers.
The slumping sensation of another dead end, that all my efforts so far have been for nothing.
But I’ve never liked to admit defeat and it makes me even more determined to help her—and her son.
Charlie pats her arm and gently suggests she drink some of her coffee. She gives him a watery smile and takes a sip of the latte, the cup clasped tightly in both hands.
To me, he says: “The collar you found, that belonged to Woody? What if the police could, like, analyze it for forensic evidence or something? Might be a clue to finding my dad.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” I say. “Tried speaking to a detective this morning, but she wasn’t very interested.”
I describe my call with DC Rubin, an overworked detective with too many cases and not enough time.
Maxine snorts, puts her coffee cup down with a clatter.
“You want to know the police theory at the time, about why Woody was found without a collar?” She cuffs another tear angrily away.
“Their brilliant theory was that Adrian had deliberately taken it off because he wanted someone else to take Woody in—that they’d see him wandering without a collar, without an owner, and assume he was a stray in need of a new home.
Which is an absolute load of crap. It was then and it still is now. ”
It’s the most animated she’s been since she arrived, a hint of the fire that still smoldered even though she had lost her husband all those years ago. I study her for a moment over my coffee cup, only the low chatter of other customers and the whirr of the coffee machine to fill the silence.
“So there was never a criminal investigation?”
“Adrian was only ever classified as a missing person, which made a massive difference in terms of how much attention he got. The police never elevated it to anything higher, more urgent—and this was before Facebook and all the rest so I didn’t have many options to get the word out.
” She glances at her son with a sad smile.
“And I was pregnant, of course, then looking after a little one, which made it all the more difficult to keep badgering the police.”
“I’m sure you did all you could,” I say. “Just sorry I couldn’t be more help.”
Charlie has been studying the old Motorola while we’ve been talking, turning it over in his hand. He holds it up to me now, as if to ask my permission.
“Go ahead,” I say. “I charged it up. Think it’s probably older than you are, though.”
He flicks it open, his face a picture of concentration.
“Wow.” He holds down the power button, a small smile as the screen lights up. “This thing is ancient.”
“Not much on it, unfortunately.”
“What about the people who lived there before you?” He says it without looking up at me, still pressing buttons on the old mobile. “They couldn’t tell you anything about this stuff?”
“The dad’s in a care home and the son lives abroad. The estate agent’s passed on my number to the son, but he’s being a bit elusive.”
I pull up the picture of Shaun on my phone but neither of them recognize him. Charlie glances up from the Motorola only long enough to shake his head, before he resumes clicking through the phone’s menus.
“So if he wasn’t the grandson, who was he?”
“No idea.”
“Nothing flagged on a reverse image search?”
“A reverse what?”
He raises an eyebrow.
“You have done that, right?”
“Not… sure I know what one of those is.”
He looks at me the way my eldest daughter sometimes does—a mixture of disbelief, pity, and amusement. He’s a few years older than Leah, but the generational gap still feels like a chasm.
“Really?” he says.
“Really.”
“Well, basically you just upload an image,” he says matter-of-factly, “and it looks for matches. You can do it on Google or there are a ton of different apps that do the same thing. Works better with specific images of things and places but it’s still worth a go with a head-and-shoulders shot.
The comparison algorithms are getting better and better all the time with AI. ”
Before I can ask him to explain further, he holds the little flip phone out to me.
“Speaking of pictures, what’s this?”
The tiny screen shows the picture that Jess had found on the flip phone on Sunday night, the image so blurry and indistinct it might have been a hand, or a thumb, or a face, or nothing at all—probably the photo equivalent of a pocket dial.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” I say. “Impossible to tell on a screen so tiny.”
“There might be something there though, if you have a play with the contrast, the saturation, the colors.”
“Yes, but I assumed there was no way of extracting it.” I point at the phone’s rudimentary connection ports. “The phone’s not on a network anymore so you can’t send it, and there’s no USB, no modern connector for a cable, no Bluetooth.”
He gives me that look again.
“There’s always a way, Adam, if you know how.” He snaps the phone shut. “Do you mind if I borrow this for a few days?”
“Sure,” I say. “Let me know what you find.”
While we’ve been talking, Maxine has been snapping pictures of all the items laid out on the table in front of us.
“I’ve got old photo albums at home,” she says. “From back in the day. Thought I’d go through them and double-check, in case any of these things appear in an old picture somewhere.”
I turn back to her. “Has anything come back to you? Something ringing a bell?”
She touches the key ring again with a small index finger, tracing the jagged ridges of the key’s teeth as if she can tell just by touch whether it belongs in her house.
“I suppose… maybe this? I just don’t remember. Looks a bit like our front door key, but I can’t be sure.”
“Have you changed the locks since it happened?”
“I should have, but it seemed so final.” Her voice is still very small, very low. “Didn’t want him locked out of his own house—it was like admitting to myself that I’d never hear his key in the door again.”
I push the brass key across the table toward her.
“Then you should take it home,” I say. “See if it fits.”