Chapter 30
1st October 2015: 21:47 pm.
“Your car or mine?” I asked Will, knowing that my driver had dropped mine earlier. I wanted to take Emma’s. It was faster and ideal for driving round town. But the police wanted to search it. They said that Emma had said that Barbara was sitting in it earlier. They wanted it for evidence. I wasn’t sure how much evidence could be in a car. And when they asked it scared the crap out of me, as if they were searching for her remains.
We were heading down to the car park. I didn’t know whether he’d parked his car there or somewhere on the street.
He never answered, but then he broke the silence by saying, “You really are an idiot!”
I knew that he was probably the only one that could help me, talk to me; all dad wanted to do was shout. And as for mother, she’d gone back to not speaking to me, which suited me fine.
I didn’t even look at him.
“Still hooking up with your girlfriend in the middle of all this shit. Your daughter’s missing. Your wife is behind bars and…”
“Li did it,” I confessed to him straight away, not beating around the bush. For some reason, even though we hadn’t spoken in years I had no problem telling him the truth. All the time. Apart from that one time, when I knew that I’d broken his heart by moving in on Emma.
He knew what I was talking about, he didn’t ask questions and I carried on looking at the steel walls, thinking about getting down to the Cotswold and shitting myself about what we would find.
“So, why the fuck are you acting as if she’s innocent?”
I ran my hand through my hair thinking that at thirty one years old, my dad was still pulling my strings.
“Because we have no proof.”
“So, how do you know that she did it?”
The magic question that had been on my mind until the evidence was staring me in the face.
“The girl that Emma took and ended up at the police station with is mine.”
“Barbara?”
“Elizabeth,” I shouted as the doors opened and we left the elevator. He grabbed my arm and said, “Your mother?”
I knew that he was confused, and I should have explained it better, but I was so ashamed about the truth coming out. Now I knew that I had no choice.
“The girl that Emma said she thought was Barbara, the one whose hand she was holding from the time that she left the station. She was my little girl. Just not Emma’s. I had a daughter with Li.”
“Christ! Did Emma know?”
I shook my head, “I don’t think so. But she knows now.”
He mumbled, “What a crap way to find out.”
I could have said something reassuring, to make it known that I’d planned on telling Emma one day. But the situation was out of my hands and didn’t feel that important.
“So, why do you think that it’s Li? Apart from the fact that Emma had your daughter? Shit, I can’t believe that you named her after your mom. How did she take that?”
“Not sure if Dad’s told her. Besides, I never named her after my mother. Li did it on her own.”
We continued heading towards my car.
“Anyway, it’s too much of a coincidence. Li’s been pressing for a divorce, she wants to be my wife so fucking badly and I never knew how far she would go to be that. Until now.”
He repeated, “You really are a fucking idiot.”
I could say something smart, like I wished that he’d stop saying that, or even I knew that he was right, but then I stood still as I thought about the interview with the police.
“The police say that Barbara hasn’t been at school all week.”
He sighed. “But I saw Barbara on Wednesday. So, there’s no fucking way that Emma could have hurt her. Besides, she loves Barbara with all her heart.”
We stood facing each other for the first time in years. I wanted to say something to him about the past. About our friendship, the one that I broke. The wedding invitation which had come back with the message, ‘You fucking bastard’. The visits to his home, where he’d slammed the door in my face. I’d tried over the years. His birthday. His mom’s, and still he refused to speak to me. Those days used to get to me. The ones where we’d normally do something together, and accepting that he wasn’t a part of my life wasn’t something that came about easily.
“Are you sure that you’re not sleeping with my wife?” I asked as I held on to his arm. We were standing by my car ready to get in, but it was something that I needed to know.
“Why, because you’re not? I don’t have time for silly questions. Let’s go.”
I walked to the other side and hopped into the car. I thought about the fact that I knew Will liked Emma, may have even loved her back in college. Being the greedy bastard that I was, I’d made sure that I was the first to fuck her. The first to make her mine. He’d probably waited for me to fuck up like he knew I would.
It was a fucking shame that he knew me better then I knew myself.
***
1st October 2015: 22:59 pm.
“You know the one thing I would never understand?” he said as I drove on the M40. It was the first time that we had spoken since we left the car park. I was lost in my thoughts and Will had spent most of the time on his phone.
“What?” I blurted out, knowing that it was going to be another insult.
“Why did you stick with Li? I mean, of all the women. She was fucking dangerous from the start. You must have seen that. You’re an idiot. But you’re not fucking blind.”
“I asked myself that question a long time ago. Maybe, because I didn’t have you to keep me out of mischief.”
He didn’t answer, but instead my phone rang one more time. I saw Dad’s name flashing on the dashboard, and I decided to answer it.
“Dad,” I sighed knowing that he was going to scream at me once again. Shit, I wasn’t a fucking child, yet I’d acted like one.
“Don’t fucking ‘Dad’ me. Where the fuck are you?”
He was getting upset, but his language was getting on my nerves. I was shocked at first, but now it was fucking annoying.
“Mr Rogers, we’re around twenty minutes away,” Will said.
“Who’s that?”
“Will Hale, sir.”
“Good,” I could feel Dad’s relief on the other side of the line.
“As soon as you get here, if you don’t see me, call me!” I knew by his tone that he was talking to me.
I thought he was hanging up, but then he said, “Ted?”
“Yes, Dad.”
“Your mother’s here.”
And then he hung up.
“Shit, back with the Rogers family again,” Will sighed as he put his head back. Shit, I’d missed my friend. He was true to me and I had shit on him. Like I tended to do with everything in my life. I shook my head and took a deep breath increasing the speed of the Audi and wondering what mother had to say or more importantly what the police had found.
***
“I can’t drive down there,” I shouted out to Will who had fallen asleep. I propped him to wake up.
“Shit, did I nod off?” His green eyes slowly crept open as he stretched his arms.
“The road’s blocked. The police must have done it. I need to park the car and we need to walk.”
“Why?”
It felt like such a silly question. “Because there’s no other way to get there.”
He nodded. “Trust you to buy a damn house with only one access.”
“We bought it for the one acre of garden and the five acres paddock with equestrian potential, that we never took advantage of, and besides, Emma loved being near the lake,” I sighed as I looked at Will’s face. The last thing he wanted to hear about was mine and Emma’s plans to do things. I realized that, but I was shit at pretending, crap at acting as if I wasn’t nervous, and I needed to talk about something to calm me the fuck down.
Everything in my life felt like one big fuck up. I had to break it. Especially now, I wanted to be a better man for once in my life.
“You coming or what?” I asked before I shut the door. “Remember why I brought you here in the first place!”
The guy that had been my best friend threatened me, “Ted, you need me a lot more than I need you.”
He was face-to-face with me. The man that used to pat me on the back, the man that should have been my best man at my wedding, was now my enemy.
“Did you have something to do with the hacking?”
He laughed and said, “I’ve been looking for your daughter. Tried looking for evidence for your wife. And you think that I have time to hack your network? I wish I was fucking Superman, but I’m not. You coming, or are you going to stand here and fight with me all day?”
My phone rang, I didn’t even need to look at it to know that it was my dad once again. I knew that he would be the only one calling my phone. Li was probably too busy trying to figure out where the money had gone. Mother was with dad and Emma was behind bars.
What a fucking mess!
I ran behind Will as he took the lead.
“How comes you know what direction to go in?” I said focusing on him and not the police that were lined up in front of us.
“Look!” He paused for a moment and then I felt as if my heart stopped, there were so many police ahead, but there wasn’t just the police, there were other vehicles there too.