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

He didn’t know where to start. He didn’t know whether to brief her on the case or tell her about what Andrea had sent him last night. Given how things had been going with John, he didn’t know how impressed she would be with him dredging up the past. But he hadn’t expected Andrea to be in touch. It had been over a month since he’d messaged her after all.

“I—” But Kidd didn’t get a chance to finish, the door to the Incident Room flew open and DCI Weaver barrelled in like a charging bull. The door crashed against the desk behind the door and all eyes suddenly moved to him, a well-built man in a pristine blue suit, his temper as fiery red as his hair. He looked around at each of them, probably trying to land on DI Kidd. When they did, he pointed a meaty finger at him.

“You ready?”

Kidd got to his feet. “Not briefed them yet, sir,” he said. “Was waiting for Campbell, and yourself, of course, to show up.”

“Fine, fine, fine,” Weaver grumbled, looking around the room again. “And where is Campbell?”

“Went to get breakfast,” DC Powell said through a mouthful of croissant. “Think he was heading to Pret, sir, he shouldn’t long.”

“He should already be here,” DCI Weaver growled.

“No harm starting without him, sir,” DI Kidd said. “He’s a few steps behind the rest of us at the best of times, might as well start as we mean to go on.”

DCI Weaver clearly didn’t know whether DI Kidd was joking or not, his mouth twitching at the corners like he was unsure whether or not to smile, laugh, or verbally smack Kidd in the face. He shook it off and turned to address the whole room.

“I had a case file land on my desk last night,” he said, holding a thin, yellowing folder in his beefy hand. “It’s a bit of a doozy and requires your full attention immediately. I briefed DI Kidd last night, but there have been more details since, so gather around please.”

They did as they were told, following DCI Weaver to the front of the room and the empty Evidence Board. They perched on the edges of desks, sat on wayward chairs, their eyes fixed on him as he addressed them like a general would his troops.

“We have a teenage girl missing on the borough,” he said.

“Oh,” DC Powell said, involuntarily because he quickly clapped a hand over his mouth. “Sorry, sir.”

“Oh?” Weaver asked. “What do you mean oh?”

“Nothing, sir, I just thought it was going to be more…serious…” DC Powell looked like he wanted the ground to swallow him up. Kidd wanted it to as well.

“Well,” Weaver said through gritted teeth, his face getting redder by the second. “It might not sound like a lot, but the parents are known in the community, Dad works for a local building firm, lots of houses around the place, Mum is some kind of Instagram influencer, something to do with cleaning I think.”

“Cleaning?” DS Sanchez echoed, incredulous. “Really?”

Weaver waved the folder. “I’ve got pictures of her feed to prove it. It’s…harrowing,” he said. “They post everything about their lives online, and that includes the disappearance of their daughter Sarah Harper. She went missing four days ago, no one has seen her, no one has heard from her, apparently her phone has been switched off all this time so the parents are losing their minds. Understandably, of course, but it means they’re breathing down my neck and so are a lot of their followers.”

“How do you mean, sir?” DC Ravel asked.

“Social media,” he said. “It’s a scourge on our society, means everyone is in everyone’s business. So we’ve got all of their followers bombarding Twitter and Facebook with posts wanting to know where she is, wondering why we haven’t done anything yet.”

“And why haven’t we?” Simon asked.

Big mistake. Weaver rounded on him.

Has he been taking notes from Campbell? Jesus, Kidd thought.

“They reported her missing yesterday,” Weaver snapped. “She has a boyfriend, they thought she might have been staying with him, an awful lot of friends that she could have been staying with too, so when she didn’t show up all weekend, they just assumed she was with them.”

“Hardly seems responsible,” DS Sanchez remarked.

“I did think that,” Weaver said. “But they obviously trust her enough to go off and do her own thing most of the time, give her that freedom. Just so happens that this time it’s backfired majorly, because they can’t get a hold of her. No one can. Her phone is off and everything.”

He handed the folder to DI Kidd, who took it gingerly and opened it up, looking at the photographs of Sarah. She was sixteen years old, blonde, beautiful, filtered to high heaven in the selfies that they’d tracked down of her. She had a lot of friends too, or at least the pictures made it seem that way. She was popular. Perfect. That didn’t sit right. Kidd feared the worst.

“She didn’t show up to school on Monday and the school rang her mum to find out what was going on,” Weaver said. “She had no idea where she was and started ringing around the parents of the friends, of the boyfriend, and they hadn’t seen her since the previous week.”

“Jesus Christ,” Kidd muttered, looking through more of the pictures. There were more photos of her with friends, a lot of friends. All of them looked somewhat similar, striking the same poses, faces fully made up, fingers in a peace sign, legs bent. Not one of them had any contact with her? He found it hard to believe that she’d just disappeared off the face of the earth.

“There are a lot of people looking at us for this one,” Weaver said. “She’s high profile. Media is already breathing down our necks and want a press conference arranged ASAP. Superintendent Charles wants one as soon as this afternoon, if we can manage it.”

“This afternoon?”