Without a Trace Read online

  Praise for Mari Hannah

  ‘Nobody understands the many faces of cops better than Mari Hannah’

  Val McDermid

  ‘Mari Hannah writes with a sharp eye and a dark heart’

  Peter James

  ‘Truly absorbing’

  Peter Robinson

  ‘Thrilling, exciting and kept me on the edge of my seat. Expertly written and paced, pulling me from one chapter to the next, I couldn’t put it down!’

  Angela Marsons

  ‘Mari Hannah is a consummate storyteller and her books are genuine must reads for any serious crime fan’

  Eva Dolan

  ‘Emotionally captivating’

  The Times

  ‘If you read only one police procedural this year, make it The Insider. It deserves it’

  Daily Mail

  ‘Original and modern, rooted in the fast-changing relationships between men and women’

  Sunday Times

  ‘A pacy, gritty and authentic read’

  Heat

  For Mo

  With love, always …

  Contents

  Praise for Mari Hannah

  Dedication

  Title Page

  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

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Acknowledgements

  Credits

  About the Author

  Also by Mari Hannah

  Copyright

  1

  Autumn, 2014

  Kate needed to be calm but was struggling to process the scene facing her. In a major incident suite unfamiliar to her, the names of passengers and crew of a missing transatlantic aircraft were being uploaded in real time onto an enormous electronic screen, the plane disappearing from the radar around a hundred and fifty nautical miles short of New York’s JFK. Having driven through the night at breakneck speed – almost three hundred miles from her Northumbria base – she was in no fit state to take it in. Dripping wet in the doorway of the Metropolitan Police’s Casualty Bureau (Aviation Security Command), Kate was counting down the seconds until it was time to sell a pack of lies that would give her access to an investigation that was well outside her jurisdiction.

  DS Hank Gormley glanced sideways. His SIO’s face was ashen as she took in the mayhem, physical and audible. Phone lines were hot, personnel jammed into every available space, traumatised by their task. On the journey south, he’d been constantly on the phone, checking the net for updates, consulting press colleagues, an information-gathering exercise he fed to Kate as the miles flew by. The missing flight was breaking news. Predetermined emergency telephone numbers had gone live on TV and radio within fifteen minutes of notification that a plane had been lost. A designated contact centre had been set up, manned round the clock by trained call-handlers from Met Police and other forces – all this replicated in New York.

  Kate checked her watch: almost ten a.m. Nine hours earlier, when Hank told her that Jo Soulsby’s flight was missing, the glass she was holding fell from her hand, shattering as it hit the deck. Symbolic. She was in bits, her breath coming in short, sharp bursts. She stumbled into his arms, the only prop she could cling onto. With her father’s coronary and life-threatening, emergency surgery a matter of hours old, she’d half-expected a death today – if that was what this was – but not Jo. Never Jo. Jo was vibrant and full of life, a skilled professional and loving mum. A survivor. Maybe she hadn’t travelled after all – maybe it was all a mistake.

  Hank remained silent. Kate hadn’t cried, not when he’d shared the news, nor on the drive south. She was too numb. He knew her well enough to see beyond her professional persona. She was deeply distressed, trying to keep a lid on it for his sake. Jo was more than a colleague to both of them. Kate was in denial, unable or unwilling to accept that she was missing. There was a deep affection between the three, a camaraderie that was hard to come by, even by MIT’s standards. Hank couldn’t reject the notion that Jo might have changed her plans. Detectives didn’t write people off on the balance of probabilities. He’d attended enough accidents to know that people who were deemed to be aboard a bus, a train or travelling in a car were sometimes not among the casualties. That improbable hope died in his head but stayed alive in his heart.

  What was taking so long? Fifteen minutes ago, Kate had asked to speak to the Gold Commander. He hadn’t appeared. On the other side of the room, two men were deep in conversation, one of them making his mouth go, an arrogant stance. He glanced her way, deeply suspicious of the stranger who’d blagged her way into the Casualty Bureau, in no hurry to hook her up with the man she’d come to see. Locking eyes with him, Kate held her bottle, the enormity of what she was about to do feeling like a heavy weight in her chest. In her head, she replayed Hank’s attempt to comfort her in that grim hospital corridor back home. She’d never forget the panic that flashed across the face of her second-in-command. Hank was in shock, too, battling hard to keep his composure so that she could fall apart. She was damned if she would.

  Hank eyed the Met detectives. The cocky bastards turned their backs, making the Northumbria officers wait. If they took any longer, Kate would lose her cool. He wouldn’t put it past her to march over there and intervene – and it wouldn’t be pretty. She looked smaller somehow. Grief did that to people. She appeared to have her shit together but you never knew in situations like these. Had he been able to summon words of support, they would have been woefully inadequate. She was on leave with no authority to
pull this off and no hope in hell of doing so. She needed her mettle now. He could only hope that she knew what she was doing and why she was doing it.

  It hit Kate then, the enormity of a situation she wouldn’t have thought possible a few hours ago settling in her gut. She focused on the man approaching, a detective with a confident presence, an arrogant swagger. He was late forties. Tall. Fit. Unfriendly eyes. A brave face was required. The cause of the lost flight – deliberate or accidental – would be determined by others in due course. So traumatised was she by either scenario, she didn’t answer when Hank asked what her plans were. She didn’t look at him either, though she expected his condemnation for going off-book. Kate had one focus. She had to find out for sure if Jo was on that flight.

  2

  ‘DS Blue. Can I help you?’ An aggressive stance.

  Instinctively, Kate knew he wasn’t the Gold Commander she’d asked to speak to. Proffering ID, she said: ‘Detective Chief Inspector Kate Daniels, Northumbria Police, Murder Investigation Team.’ She thumbed in Hank’s direction. ‘This is my 2ic, Detective Sergeant Hank Gormley. We’d like to offer you any assistance we can.’

  ‘Northumberland is a long way off, ma’am.’ The Met detective glanced at the wall clock – 09.59 – then at her. ‘You must’ve been motoring.’

  Kate sidestepped the comment as if it were of no consequence. She didn’t have time for small talk. He needed a nudge, a credible reason why she was sticking her oar into business that was outside her remit as a murder investigation SIO. ‘We have reason to believe that our force profiler, Josephine Soulsby, was on board Flight 0113. My guv’nor has been in touch.’

  ‘Really? That’s news to me.’

  No wonder. It was a downright lie.

  Kate’s frustration grew. Blue was clearly suspicious of her motives. ‘DS Blue …’ She fixed him with a steely gaze. ‘Are you questioning my authority?’

  ‘No, ma’am. I’m just making the point that we’ve had no word from your force—’

  ‘You take all calls personally?’ A pause. ‘No, I didn’t think so. Has it occurred to you that his offer hasn’t filtered through yet?’

  ‘That’s entirely possible.’ Blue gestured to the mayhem going on around them, a resigned shrug. ‘As you can see, we have our hands full. In the last few hours, we’ve received thousands of calls from concerned friends and relatives. In the wake of Hillsborough, BT recorded half a million via the Sheffield exchange. Only a small percentage of which got through to the Casualty Bureau—’

  ‘Yeah, we’re from the sticks, not outer space,’ Hank said. ‘You’re busy. We get that. Do us all a favour and save the history lesson.’

  ‘Leave it, Hank. I’m sure DS Blue didn’t mean to insult us. We don’t want to fall out before we get our feet under the table.’ Kate refocused on the Met detective. ‘Excuse the northern bluntness. Hank meant no offence by it. In his cack-handed way, he’s making the point that we’re up to speed on HOLMES 2.’ HOLMES was the acronym for the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System on which the enquiry would be run, the number signifying the fact that it was second-generation.

  ‘None taken,’ Blue lied. ‘But in case you didn’t know, we normally put out a formal request for help, if we need it—’

  Kate’s tone hardened. ‘Up north, we’re proactive, Sergeant. I suggest you check your call log. As I said, we’ve come a long way. We’re here to help for the foreseeable future.’

  Hank’s eyes were on Blue, his expression inscrutable. He didn’t need telling that the police had learned by their mistakes, nor that forces nationwide could now pool resources to assist at peak times in cases like these. Blue met his gaze, hinting that the Northumbria detective duo had had a wasted journey, considering that calls could be input from all points in the UK, transferred electronically to the home force via an updated computer system.

  A momentary stand-off.

  The two detective sergeants were about to lock horns. Kate kept her composure, allowing them a moment to finish their game of blink first. Tuning them out, she thought about the high level of calls the Casualty Bureau had already received. There would be more. Many would be duplicates. Experience had proven that to be the case. Among the callers listed, Jo’s sons from a former marriage would figure there somewhere: Thomas and James Soulsby.

  In the early hours of the morning, prior to leaving Newcastle, Kate had grabbed some clothes from home and woken Tom, the oldest, before he heard the news on TV, then called on James in Sheffield to repeat the process. She made the South Yorkshire city in ninety minutes, topping a hundred miles an hour for most of the way on dry, empty roads, Hank urging her to stick to the speed limit, not because she might get pulled over, but because she was in shock, a situation guaranteed to slow her reactions.

  She wouldn’t listen.

  Bad news was best conveyed face-to-face, not over the phone. Kate didn’t offer any likelihood to either lad that they would see or speak to their mother again. Although she chose to keep the faith on that subject, it would be cruel to give them false hope. They were both shattered, James taking the news much worse than his older brother. The exchange unnerved her, made worse by the fact that, for them, this was déjà vu.

  Kate had been the lead detective in their father’s violent death.

  Hank had interviewed James in the course of the enquiry into the shooting that ended his father’s life. The lad Kate had since come to know as laid-back – much like his mum – had a very different temperament then. Belligerent was how she’d describe him. He made no secret of the fact that he didn’t rate his father, before or after death. Consequently, he was high on the list of suspects, a murder his mother had later been wrongly accused of. Kate had worked tirelessly to prove her innocence, putting her job on the line in order to do so, and now she was digging her own grave at the Casualty Bureau, risking her career all over again. All that distressing history came flooding back, though it seemed a lifetime ago. And now, this …

  How much more could one family take?

  How much could she?

  Kate wondered if James remembered the day she’d broken the news of his father’s murder or if it was all a blur, a jumbled recollection that he hadn’t properly taken in at the time, an event he’d blocked out since. Even now, hours from receiving reports of the plane’s disappearance, Kate was struggling to recall the exact words Hank had used in the hospital corridor with her own father hanging on by his fingernails in a ward not far away.

  Cowardly, Kate had let the breakdown in communication between herself and Jo go without a mention to either Tom or James. If they had questions to ask, she’d answer them truthfully, but not today. She’d already handed them enough grief to cope with without adding to it. It was James’s likeness to his mother she found particularly difficult. Emotional: open and honest. Physical: ashen hair, identical pale blue eyes.

  That image made her want to weep.

  3

  Having taken care of the distressing revelation to Jo’s sons – almost, but not quite, a death message – Kate abandoned all thoughts of her leave period. She was state zero, off duty, with no authority in London, but she wanted in on the action so she could investigate Jo’s whereabouts, exhausting all the possibilities before she gave up hope, unwilling to accept anyone else’s word for it. Hank was staring at her, wondering what the hell she was playing at. In order to support her, he’d gone AWOL without permission. No doubt he’d be looking to dissuade her from getting involved.

  He could think again.

  Kate hadn’t ordered him to accompany her to London. He’d volunteered, as he always did when she was about to commit professional suicide. It wasn’t the first time she’d gone over to the dark side, but it may very well be her last. She was thinking on her feet – moment to moment – one step at a time. She hadn’t consulted him on the drive south, but she needed him onside. If anyone could get her through this, he could. Left alone, she’d go into meltdown. Hank was so much more than a competent and
loyal 2ic; he was her best friend, in and out of the job. He might have to be dragged kicking and screaming to see her point of view now and then, but he’d never let her down, unlike the Met detective facing her.

  Blue was stalling. ‘Thank you for the generous offer, ma’am, but I need confirmation from your guv’nor before I take it to mine. When I get it, I’ll speak to my commander and call you.’

  Handing him her business card, Kate withdrew.

  She knew a knock-back when she saw one.

  Her eyes swept the Casualty Bureau as he moved away. Met personnel were going about their business with professional detachment, something she’d always prided herself on, except things were different now. Today, no officer held the same status as yesterday. Today, like Blue, they appeared hard-arsed, unable or unwilling to offer her instant answers – precisely what she was after. She took it on the chin. There was no comfort for law enforcement nor for the families of victims at times like these. Despite her extensive training, Kate was dying inside, ill-equipped to deal with the urgency of a major incident due to her close connection with someone on board that fateful plane.

  As she made for the door, she pulled out her mobile, pressing the speed dial number of Detective Chief Superintendent Philip Bright, head of the Criminal Investigations Department, Northumbria’s most senior detective. She needed his help.

  If she had to beg for retrospective authorisation, then so be it.

  His new PA picked up. Kate asked to be put straight through. The woman was intuitive; the fact that there wasn’t time for niceties didn’t faze her. She wasn’t affronted by it. What some saw as unfriendliness, the woman who kept Bright’s motor running recognised as Kate’s preoccupation with her job.

  Seconds later, the line clicked.

  ‘Morning, Kate. How’s your old man?’

  It was a good question. One Kate had no answer to. Pushing open the door, leaving the Casualty Bureau, she took shelter from the relentless rain beneath the portico, sucking in a lungful of much-needed fresh air. Her mouth was dry, head pounding. How she handled the next few minutes was crucial.

  ‘He’s fine,’ she said. ‘I’m not.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ He knew it was serious.