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One More Chapter
a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2021
Copyright © M. A. Hunter 2021
Cover design by Lucy Bennett © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021
Cover images © Shutterstock.com
M. A. Hunter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008443382
Ebook Edition © May 2021 ISBN: 9780008443375
Version: 2021-04-23
Content notices: domestic violence, paedophilia, sexual assault, drug abuse, child abuse.
Contents
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
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
Acknowledgments
Thank you for reading…
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About the Author
Also by M. A. Hunter
One More Chapter...
About the Publisher
Dedicated to all the scientists,
nurses, doctors, and volunteers
who are vaccinating us back to life.
I will not forget your sacrifices.
When foxes eat the last gold grape,
And the last white antelope is killed,
I shall stop fighting and escape
Into a little house I’ll build.
And you may grope for me in vain
In hollows under the mangrove root,
Or where, in apple-scented rain,
The silver wasp-nests hang like fruit.
— Escape, Elinor Wylie
Chapter One
Then
Ruislip, London
The woman staring back at her from behind the glass looked feeble and exhausted. The skin around her eyes hung almost lifelessly, and the pores of her cheeks were swollen and in need of rejuvenation. But it wasn’t just the face that made Zara Edwards despondent; the flaps of skin leading from her neck down to where the bra struggled to restrain her chest at an acceptable height were also old and flaky. Where had this sad, old woman come from? It seemed like only yesterday that she’d still thought of that reflection as a frivolous twenty-something with the world at her feet.
A shadow crossed the dressing table, and a suited figure suddenly appeared behind her in the mirror. He pressed his warm hands on her shoulders and stooped to kiss the top of her head.
‘I’ve booked the Uber for fifteen minutes; is that okay?’
She patted his left hand with her right. ‘I’ll be ready.’
He stooped lower, one knee pushing into the pile of the carpet, so that his head was now in line with her shoulder. ‘You have nothing to worry about,’ he said reassuringly, pressing his lips to the top of her arm.
‘I’m not worried,’ she replied uncertainly.
‘Remember, it’s just dinner with a few chums from university. They’re all very friendly, and I haven’t seen most of them for years. We’ll have dinner and a few drinks, and then we’ll be back here. Remember what the counsellor said about us taking it slowly. It’s about one step at a time. We go from here to the Uber, then from the Uber to her house. And I’ll be with you the whole time.’
She stared at his reflected eyes, and it was almost enough to flood hers with tears. Her rock, for all these years.
‘Promise you won’t abandon me tonight?’
He kissed her arm again. ‘I promise, with the caveat that you let me use the bathroom alone.’ He smiled quickly to show he was only teasing. ‘If it all gets too much, you only have to say and I’ll make our excuses and we can leave. Okay?’
This was a big night for him, she knew, and that was why she’d spent the entire week psyching herself into the position where she’d at least made it to the dressing table to slap on her war paint. There was a time when her voice would have refused point-blank to even consider dinner at a friend’s house, especially when she’d never met the host.
She tilted her head so it pressed into the hand still on her shoulder. ‘I’m sorry for being such a drag. I don’t know why you put up with me.’ She sighed gently.
‘I don’t put up with you,’ he reinforced. ‘I love you, Zara, and I understand you struggle with new places, especially when you’re unfamiliar with the people there. I understand it, and I’m happy to support you as you work towards finding resolution.’
He paused and looked away for the briefest of moments, but she spotted it, quickly returning her eyes to the makeup bag before her so he wouldn’t see that she’d seen. If he knew the real reason why she was dreading tonight’s dinner, he probably wouldn’t press for her to go with him. She’d thought about suggesting he go alone – he was sure to have more fun without her hanging on his arm – but she’d bailed on too many nights out before, and even though he hadn’t said as much, she sensed he was starting to grow frustrated by the routine.
‘I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ she said, moving her hand to his cheek where the long scar ran from his eye socket down to his chin.
When they’d first met, he’d been shy of his scar, keeping it partially obscured by high scarves and low hats, but she’d managed to show him that the scar wasn’t something to be ashamed of. His standing up to his abusive father was precisely what had saved his mother and younger sister. The pink line where the skin had healed over the bottle slash was evidence of his resilience in the face of adversity. It was her favourite part of his face, even if it was his least.
‘I’m the lucky one,’ he whispered, just loudly enough for her to hear.
‘Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to go alone?’ The words were out before she had time to hold them in, and she instantly regretted them as disappointment filled his eyes.
‘That would be like Robin taking on Gotham’s underworld without Batman, or Penfold without Danger Mouse.’
She’d never picked him up on it, but he always framed her as the powerhouse in their relationship, even though they both knew he wore the trousers. They just wouldn’t work if she had any level of real responsibility; she needed him more than he needed her.
‘Besides,’ he continued, ‘some of my friends are beginning to think that you don’t exist. If I don’t drag you out sooner or later, they’re going to think I’m some kind of Norman Bates type character, secretly living out two lives.’
This made her smile, and she craned her neck to kiss him on the lips. ‘I’ll get dressed; why don’t you fix yourself a glass of wine while you wait for the taxi? You deserve it after the week you’ve had.’
He straightened. ‘Can I get you a glass too?’
‘Not just yet,’ she said, with a shake of the head. ‘I’d rather wait until we get there.’
She waited for him to leave before rummaging through the makeup bag, extracting lip gloss, foundation, and mascara, and systematically applying each until the woman staring back at her was virtually unrecognisable. She pulled her cheeks into a smile, and brushed her long, brittle auburn hair, until it resembled something less like a bird’s nest. Finally, she stood and moved across to the built-in wardrobe in the wall behind her, and slipped the navy dress from the wire hanger. She pushed her arms in, fiddling with the zip at the side until her tired and less-than-poised body was covered. Taking one final look in the full-length mirror on the wardrobe door, she sighed in remorseful satisfaction. It was the best she could do with what she had.
‘And when Professor Sweeten entered his office and saw that the engineers had reassembled that bloody MG inside, well I could have wet myself!’
Most of the rest of the guests sitting around the table laughed at Tom’s anecdote from their time at university together, as he reached for his glass and took a long swig of wine. He’d always been able to make Zara laugh, but he wasn’t the sort of man constantly looking to keep others entertained. She’d wondered whether he’d been a bit of a class clown at school, but according to his younger sister Mable, he had been very shy until university had helped coax him from his shell. In another life he probably could have pursued a career in comedy, such was his ability to find the humour in almost any situation, but then again, in another life she too could have been someone different.
‘You’re lucky none of you got arrested!’ Harriet cautioned. ‘How would that have looked on your applications to the bar? Criminal charges on a future barrister’s record would not do.’
Harriet was Will’s wife – they were hosting tonight’s dinner party – and whilst it had been pitched as a party of six, there were now twelve of them squashed in around the large dining table in the cramped room. For etiquette’s sake, the men had agreed to use the selection of emergency chairs that had been drafted in to ensure everyone had a place. As soon as Zara had seen the number of guests she’d desperately wanted to turn around and chase after the Uber, but she hadn’t mentioned her fear when Tom had checked if she was okay. He deserved better than to have his evening out ruined. He’d been working such long hours recently that it was important he have a break from chambers, and from their two-bedroom house.
Despite his earlier promise not to leave her side, he hadn’t challenged Harriet’s suggestion that the friends from university sit together, while their partners gathered at the opposite end of the table.
‘They’ll just be talking about times that none of us experienced,’ Harriet had said. ‘Far better to leave them to it.’
That meant Zara was now seated between a secondary school teacher and a literary agent, with whom she doubted she shared many interests. She’d spent most of the evening just watching Tom as he regaled those nearest to him with anecdote after anecdote.
‘So what do you do for a living, Zara?’ the literary agent asked now, dabbing her lips with a cotton napkin.
She felt the heat rise to her cheeks. ‘I work in an independent bookshop.’
‘Oh really? I’m in the publishing industry too. You’ve probably got some of my clients’ books in your store.’
‘We mainly sell specialist reference books, rather than fiction,’ Zara corrected. In truth it had been years since she’d worked in her godfather’s shop, but it was an easier lie than admitting she’d been made redundant from her role as a legal secretary before Christmas.
‘Ah, okay, fair enough. Do you enjoy working there?’
Zara reached for her glass of chilled wine. ‘We never get too busy, and most of the customers who come in usually know what they’re looking for; in fact, a lot of the time they come in to collect a book they’ve pre-ordered. I get on really well with the owner who trusts me to lock up at night, and yeah, I enjoy reading up on subjects I know nothing about.’
‘Sounds wonderful! Passion for reading is what attracted me to publishing too. I love finding a submission from a prospective client that just grabs me by the shirttails and drags me on their journey. It’s hard work sorting the wheat from the chaff, but so worth it when I see a manuscript I’ve sweated over reach the top of a chart.’
Zara sipped the wine, but it did nothing to cool her cheeks.
‘Do you and Tom have children?’
The inevitable question that always seemed to come up at such engagements, and another reason Zara dreaded attending them. ‘No we don’t,’ she replied evenly. ‘Neither Tom nor I want them, to be honest. Don’t get me wrong, we love spending time with Tom’s niece – his sister’s daughter – but I’m just not very maternal. You?’
‘I did, but my son died.’
Zara quickly covered her hand with her mouth. ‘Oh gosh, I’m so sorry. I had no idea.’
‘It’s okay. It was a number of years ago. A shock at the time – no parent ever expects to bury their child – but I’ve come to terms with it now. That’s not to say I don’t miss him like crazy.’
Zara fixed her with a sincere look. ‘I am so sorry. If I’d known I wouldn’t have asked.’
The agent smiled back. ‘Don’t worry about it. Really, I’m fine.’
‘Maddie, Maddie,’ Harriet was calling from the foot of the table, ‘you’ll be able to help us settle this debate. Deborah was just saying that she’d read a statistic that claimed over a hundred thousand children are reported missing every year in the UK, but we don’t get to hear about even one per cent of them. One of your clients writes about missing children, doesn’t she?’
Zara felt her chest constrict as the breath caught in her throat, but she remained perfectly still.
‘That’s right. Emma Hunter is my number one client at the moment. I’ve heard that statistic too, but you have to bear in mind that a large proportion of those reported cases relate to children who’ve run away but who do eventually turn up. A prime example is that Jo-Jo Neville who was reported missing from Weymouth last month, but then turned up at her aunt’s house.’
‘Yes, and there was that other girl, wasn’t there…?’ Harriet continued. ‘Went missing from Brighton… ooh, must be thirty-odd years ago now… Do you remember who I mean?’
The hairs on Zara’s arms rose as her body temperature instantly dropped.
‘The press gave her that nickname,’ Harriet persisted. ‘What did they call her? Rock Girl? Yes, that was it: the Brighton Rock Girl, on account of the last photograph her parents had taken of her, sucking on a piece of pink rock on Brighton pier. Do you remember?’
Zara looked to her left for an exit to the bathroom, but the teacher’s chair was pulled out, blocking her escape.
‘Can’t say it rings any bells,’ Maddie replied.
Harriet’s eyes were now glued to her phone as she searched for the story that Zara knew inside and out.
‘Here we go,’ Harriet proudly announced, as the conversation at the other end of the table quietened. ‘She was nine years old, and the family were staying in Brighton for the weekend. They snapped the picture on the pier, and turned to watch the fireworks, and when they looked back she was gone. I remember my parents really freaked out about it, and my brother and I were essentially put on house arrest for months whilst the press kept running stories about the girl.’
Zara leaned towards the teacher and tried to ask her to tuck her chair in without drawing attention to herself. She could feel Tom’s eyes on her, but didn’t dare look up.
‘She was eventually found almost two years later. Some dirty pervert had kept her locked in a room in his house only a stone’s throw from the pier. I remember it was all over the press for weeks and weeks. The whole nation seemed to celebrate her return like she was some celebrity or something.’
‘Could I just get out? I need to use the bathroom,’ Zara whispered again, but the teacher’s attention was focused on the speaker.
Harriet turned her phone around so everyone could see the screen. ‘This was the image I was talking about.’
Zara didn’t need to look into the excited eyes of the girl with straggly orange hair, innocently sucking the end of the piece of mint-flavoured rock.
Harriet turned the phone back and continued reading. ‘The girl wasn’t able to tell the police much about what had happened to her, but they arrested and imprisoned the man whose house they found her in. Presumably he’s dead now, but just think what a traumatic experience that must have been for the poor girl. Can you imagine being torn from your parents and held prisoner for years? God knows what kind of twisted abuse she experienced. I mean, that kind of thing would totally screw up your psyche, wouldn’t it?’
Zara stood and leaned closer to the teacher. ‘Would you excuse me, please?’
‘According to this,’ Harriet continued, ‘she received counselling, but was never able to fully open up about what had happened. Psychologists concluded that she must have repressed the memories. Don’t blame her, really!’
She paused as she continued to read her screen, evidently enjoying being the centre of the party’s attention.
‘Oh, here we go, it says the girl – Zara Edwards – and her family ended up moving to Brighton to try and escape the intense media speculation surrounding…’ Her words trailed off and her eyes moved slowly up to where Zara continued to hover.
Zara would have given anything for a hole to open up in the floor and swallow her completely, but she remained utterly trapped as eleven pairs of eyes fell on her. With no other choice, she shoved the teacher’s chair out of the way and tore through to the bathroom, locking it behind her, before lifting the seat and expelling her starter.
Chapter Two
Now
Bournemouth, Dorset
I resist the urge to rub my eyes, conscious that I don’t want to smudge my eyeliner and leave myself looking like a panda, even though the skin beneath them is swollen and bag-like and probably already doing a good job of it. When the French lawyer said he was going to fetch his client, I didn’t think he’d take this long.
It’s after eight on a Saturday night, and I’ve been sitting in this boardroom for almost half an hour already. It’s an enormous room, but so cold in atmosphere. The long oval-shaped table is large enough to comfortably seat sixteen, based on the number of chairs I can count, and there is a large projector screen pulled down at the end to my left. Above my head a projection box hangs idly from the cream-coloured ceiling tiles. I am facing a wall of glass, though it is difficult to see any signs of life beyond the darkness of the evening March sky. In fact, given the strength of the lights in the room, all I can really see is a hovering ghostly reflection of myself at the table.
I check my watch again, even though it’s barely a minute since I last looked. I guess there’s a part of me that hopes Aurélie Lebrun and her solicitor can see how frustrated I am growing with the wait for them. It was they who requested I travel to these offices to meet with them, so the delay is maddening. It feels like I’ve been doing nothing but sitting and waiting for the last month. That’s how long it’s been since an anonymous stranger sent me an image of Arthur Turgood and Reverend Peter Saltzing sharing a joke with the Met Police’s former commissioner Sir Anthony Tomlinson. I know for a fact that Turgood and Saltzing were part of a trafficking ring exploiting children, but I have nothing to tie Tomlinson to it, save for this photograph.
My long-term associate and friend, PC Jack Serrovitz is actively looking for connections between the men, but he’s been so busy with it that he hasn’t been able to provide any kind of update. I’ve left messages for him, but I know we have to be so careful not to let on what we’re involved in that I don’t blame him for not replying. I know he will tell me as soon as he has something concrete. But then that leaves me twiddling my thumbs. I’ve tried undertaking my own online research, but there’s very little about Tomlinson in the public eye. He doesn’t have any social media presence as far as I can see, and there have been no new articles about him since he retired from his post more than a decade ago.
There’s also been no new photographs sent by my anonymous source. The image of Tomlinson and the others was one of three sent to my agent’s office on consecutive business days, and I’d half expected to receive further information, but nothing has been forthcoming. Jack arranged for the postal envelopes to be forensically examined, but no DNA samples were recovered, and all I’ve learned is that the first photograph was sent from Dover, the second from Reading, and the third from Chichester by someone called Kylie. There’s nothing else anybody can tell me, and there isn’t security camera footage at all of the possible post box locations to instigate a search of footage on the off-chance I spot a face from elsewhere in our investigation. I don’t recall meeting anybody called Kylie, and for all I know it was a false name given to the woman at the village post office who happened to have noted the name on the sender’s lanyard.
Jack has asked me not to release any information about the other two photographs I received, as they are part of the investigation he is undertaking while seconded to the National Crime Agency. For now, the identities of Faye McKenna and Cormack Fitzpatrick are off-limits to future books. I want to find some way of linking their disappearances with that of my sister, Anna, but any such connection eludes me for now. The trail has gone cold. I don’t know what the sender was expecting me to do with the images, but I feel like I’m facing a dead end, and I hate that I’m allowing myself to give up so easily, but I have exhausted all avenues.
What’s worse is that I haven’t heard from Freddie Mitchell since Freddie told me what he witnessed at the Pendark film studios. When I phone, it goes to voicemail, and whenever I head to the homeless shelter where he volunteers, it’s always as if I’ve just missed him. I can understand why he would want to avoid me, I just wish I could tell him how sorry I am for making him relive such a painful time in his life.
Hence my willingness to meet with Aurélie Lebrun so late on a Saturday evening. She was abducted and held prisoner for eighteen years before she escaped the clutches of her captor last year, and I have reason to believe the people who took and sold her are linked to the ring Turgood and Saltzing were involved with.