Just Keep Breathing, GS Rhodes [best book club books for discussion TXT] 📗

Zoe watched him as he took a sip of his tea. “You don’t think he is though, do you?” she asked. “You think he’s done a runner?”

“If he’s guilty, then maybe he knew we were onto him or something,” he said. “Or maybe he just thought it’d be better to get away from here before we did end up getting onto him.”

“You think the anger is enough of a motive?” Zoe asked.

Kidd shrugged. “It might be,” he said. “You saw how quickly he saw red at the school reunion the other night. And everything that Alexandra Kaye said, how much of a maniac he was from Chris Harper. So maybe…”

But maybe not, he thought. He couldn’t stand the waiting around. He walked over to the Evidence Board and dialled Caleb’s number. The phone was switched off. That was the last thing he needed. He tapped in Alexandra Kaye’s number and dialled that instead.

It only managed to ring for a second or two before Alexandra picked up.

“Hello? Caleb?” she squeaked down the phone.

“No, it’s DI Benjamin Kidd,” Kidd replied. “I tried phoning Caleb but his phone was switched off. I take it he isn’t home?”

“No, he isn’t,” she replied. Her voice was so high pitched, it ripped right through Kidd. “He hasn’t been home since yesterday.”

“Yesterday?”

“Yes,” she said, frustrated now, angry even that he wasn’t hearing what she was saying. “He was supposed to be at his grandparents’ house but he never got there.”

“We spoke to him last night,” DI Kidd said. “He came to the station, gave us some information, then DS Sanchez dropped him home.”

“His stuff isn’t here,” she said. “I looked in his room, he’s taken his bag, he’s taken everything. But he didn’t make it to my parents’ house last night.”

“Have you already reported him missing?”

“No, I’ve been working!” she snapped. “I didn’t know. I had no idea. I think…” She trailed off, her voice catching on a sob.

Kidd looked up to see Zoe staring at him.

“What?” she mouthed at him.

He grabbed a Post-it Note from her desk and wrote down CALEB MISSING in block capitals. She hurried to the other side of the room and grabbed the phone.

“Owen? It’s Zoe,” she said into the receiver. “No, wait, shut up. Shut up a second.” He obviously did. “Caleb is missing. Norman Kaye’s son is missing. We need to…” She looked up at Kidd. He nodded. “We need to treat Norman Kaye as a suspect in this. Go back to the house, we’ll get a warrant, break the fucking door down, and see if he’s in there.”

She hung up the phone and walked out of the room. Seconds later DCI Weaver was in the room with them. He looked confused. He also had a napkin stuffed into the top of his shirt, probably from where he’d been recently eating his lunch. When he realised, he tore it out and threw it in the bin.

“What on earth is—?”

Kidd shushed him. “Ms Kaye, I need you to calm down,” he said. “What are you trying to tell me here?”

“I think it’s Norman,” she said. “I’ve got messages from him.”

“Is he saying he has Caleb?”

“No, nothing like that,” she said. “When your DS was here the other day, the woman.” DS Sanchez would love that. “She asked if I wanted to report him for what he was saying, the threats he was making, and I said no, and now…now I don’t know if…if I’ve…” She trailed off. DI Kidd knew what she was getting at. She didn’t know if her not wanting to cause problems with her ex-husband had ended up costing her son his life. He didn’t want that to be the case either.

“We’ll get on it, Ms Kaye,” he said, turning back to the Evidence Board, to the mugshot of Norman Kaye staring back at him. Could they really have read him so wrong?

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

There were few things DI Kidd hated more than waiting around. He liked to be out there, doing things, finding the bad guys, picking up the evidence, solving cases, but right now he was at a loss. DC Campbell and DC Powell were heading back to Norman’s flat to find out if he was keeping Caleb there after all. DS Sanchez had gone to his place of work to see if he had shown up there. DC Ravel was tracking every credit card number that Alexandra Kaye could give them, trying to get a signal on his phone which was, like Caleb’s, switched off.

None of it looked good. And DCI Weaver wasn’t impressed.

“We bloody had him!” he barked. His breath stank of the curry ready-meal he’d had for lunch, the stench enough to make Kidd want to hold his breath. “We bloody had him and you let him go!”

“We had him, yes, but he’d not done anything yet.”

“He had the girl, if we’d kept him here—”

“We had no reason to suspect him,” Kidd barked. “He’d gotten into a fight with Chris Harper who had pretty much given us no reason to think it was him.”

“Well, how about you look at this then?” DCI Weaver grabbed his computer screen and swivelled it around so violently he nearly threw the thing off the desk. It was the Laura’s Facebook page. She was talking about something, nearly two hundred thousand people watching her.

The title of the video was chilling: Another child missing. Are the police doing anything?

The comments that were flying in below the video all agreed with her, condemning the police, people saying that something must be done.

“After what happened with Sarah, I feel the need to speak up for parents whose children are missing,” she said. “Alexandra Kaye is a dear friend of mine and after everything that’s happened to me, it only seems right that I use my platform for good and get the word out that her poor son Caleb is missing.”

She picked up her iPad, a picture from Caleb’s Instagram on it. The heart button went crazy, hundreds of