Dead Man's Grip

intact. He hit it again, harder, and this time the glass broke. He smashed away some of the jagged edges with the baton, then slipped his arm in, found the handle and tugged it. He pulled the door open, leaned in and released the handbrake.
    ‘Give me a hand,’ he said to the officers, and began trying to push the car.
    For an instant it resisted, then slowly, silently, it inched forward. Grace kept going until it was a few feet out from the wall, then jerked the brake back on. He leaned in, staring at the unfamiliar controls, saw the driver’s ID on the windscreen, which showed a photograph of a burly-looking man in his forties with thinning brown hair and a startled expression. The name Mike Howard was printed beneath. Grace looked around hard, wondering if there was an internal boot release. Moments later he found it and the boot lid popped open.
    Glenn Branson reached the rear of the car first.
    Then, as he stared in, his face dropped.
    ‘Oh shit,’ he said.

91
    Carly, seated in the busy waiting area by boarding gate 47, looked at her watch. Then she stared for a moment at the two British Airways women standing and chatting behind the desk. Occasionally there was a bong , then a brief announcement. Final call for boarding for some other flight. She looked at her watch again. Twenty-two minutes past eight. The flight was due to depart in less than twenty minutes and they hadn’t even started boarding yet. What was going on?
    She gripped her handbag and kept her holdall right in front of her. No checked luggage, she did not want any risk of delay at the other end. Her legs kept knocking together. She badly needed a cup of tea and something to eat, but she did not feel able to swallow anything.
    She called her mother. She was almost in a worse state than Carly was, blaming herself for having her medical appointment and not picking Tyler up. Then Carly just sat, shaking, raw-eyed, staring around the room at her fellow passengers, and occasionally looking through the emails that were pouring into her iPhone. Mostly work stuff. Questions or information she had requested from clients. Emails from her colleagues. Jokes from a couple of friends who hadn’t yet heard about Tyler. She did not read any of them. All she was interested in was looking to see if, by chance, an email had come in from her son.
    Two middle-aged couples sat near her, Americans in a jovial mood, heading to the UK for a golfing holiday. They were talking about golf courses. Hotels. Restaurants. The normality was irritating her. These people were in earnest discussion. Her son had been kidnapped and they were chatting away about long carries and fast greens and some water hazard they’d all had a problem with on their visit last year.
    She stood up and moved away, walked up to the desk and asked
if the flight was going to be leaving on time. She was told they would be starting boarding in a couple of minutes.
    That gave her some small relief. But not much.
    She checked Friend Mapper on her phone for the hundredth time since leaving the hotel. But Tyler’s purple dot remained stubbornly in that same place, close to the entrance to Regency Square car park.
    Why there? Why are you there?
    The screen blurred with her tears. It had been over an hour since she’d spoken to DS Branson. She wondered if she should call him one more time before she got on the plane.
    But he had already promised to call the moment he had any news and she was sure he would; he seemed a good communicator. But what if he had been calling and was unable to get through? The flight was about seven hours long. How the hell was she going to be able to sit there for seven hours without news?
    She dialled to check her messages, but there were no new ones. Nothing from DS Branson. So she called his mobile number and, to her relief, he answered almost immediately.
    ‘It’s Carly,’ she said. ‘I’m at Kennedy Airport, about to board. Just thought I’d check in with you.’
    ‘Right, yeah. You OK?’
    ‘Just about.’
    ‘We’ve got your flight times and one of us will be at the gate to meet you when you land.’
    His voice sounded strange, as if he was hiding something from her. And he sounded in a hurry.
    ‘So – no – no news?’
    ‘Not yet, but we hope to have some for you later. We have just about every police officer in the county looking for Tyler. We’re going to find him.’
    ‘I had a thought – if there is – you know – any news while I’m up in the