Read Online I Let You Go by Clare Mackintosh - Free Book Online Page B

is.’
    ‘Enough!’ Ray roared.
    Nobody spoke, and by the time they had driven the five minutes to Lucy’s primary school, Ray’s blood pressure had subsided. He parked his Mondeo on yellow zig-zags and marched Lucy round to her classroom, kissing her on the forehead and legging it back just in time to find a woman noting down his registration number.
    ‘Oh, it’s you!’ she said, when he skidded to a halt by the car. She wagged her finger. ‘I would have thought you would have known better, Inspector.’
    ‘Sorry,’ Ray said. ‘Urgent job. You know how it is.’
    He left her tapping her pencil on her notepad. Bloody PTA mafia, he thought. Too much time on their hands, that was the trouble.
    ‘So,’ Ray started, glancing over to the passenger seat. Tom had slid into the front as soon as Lucy had got out, but he was staring resolutely out of the window. ‘How’s school?’
    ‘Fine.’
    Tom’s teacher said that while things hadn’t got worse, they certainly hadn’t got better. He and Mags had gone to the school and heard a report of a boy who had no friends, didn’t do more than the bare minimum in lessons, and never put himself forward.
    ‘Mrs Hickson said there’s a football club starting after school on Wednesdays. Do you fancy it?’
    ‘Not really.’
    ‘I used to be quite the player in my day – maybe some of it has rubbed off on you, eh?’ Even without looking at Tom, Ray knew the boy was rolling his eyes, and he winced at how much like his own father he was sounding.
    Tom pushed his headphones into his ears.
    Ray sighed. Puberty had turned his son into a grunting, uncommunicative teenager, and he was dreading the day the same thing happened to his daughter. You weren’t supposed to have favourites, but he had a soft spot for Lucy, who at nine would still seek him out for a cuddle and insist on a bedtime story. Even before adolescent angst had hit, Tom and Ray had locked horns. Too similar, Mags said, although Ray couldn’t see it.
    ‘You can drop me here,’ Tom said, unbuckling his seat belt while the car was still moving.
    ‘But we’re two streets away from the school.’
    ‘Dad, it’s fine. I’ll walk.’ He reached for the door handle and for a moment Ray thought he was going to open the door and simply hurl himself out.
    ‘All right, I get it!’ Ray pulled over to the side of the road, ignoring the road markings for the second time that morning. ‘You know you’re going to miss registration, don’t you?’
    ‘Laters.’
    And with that, Tom was gone, slamming the car door and slipping between the traffic to cross the road. What on earth had happened to his kind, funny son? Was this terseness a rite of passage for a teenage boy – or something more? Ray shook his head. You’d think having kids would be a walk in the park compared to a complex crime investigation, but he’d take a suspect interview over a chat with Tom any day. And get more of a conversation, he thought wryly. Thank God Mags would be picking the kids up from school.
    By the time Ray reached headquarters he had put Tom to the back of his mind. It didn’t take a genius to work out why the chief constable wanted to see him. The hit-and-run was almost six months old and the investigation had all but ground to a halt. Ray sat on a chair outside the oak-panelled office, and the chief’s PA gave him a sympathetic smile.
    ‘She’s just finishing up a call,’ she said. ‘It won’t be much longer.’
    Chief Constable Olivia Rippon was a brilliant but terrifying woman. Rising rapidly through the ranks, she had been Avon and Somerset’s chief officer for seven years. At one stage tipped to be the next Met Commissioner, Olivia had ‘for personal reasons’ chosen to stay in her home force, where she took pleasure in reducing senior officers to gibbering wrecks at monthly performance meetings. She was one of those women who were born to wear uniform, her dark brown hair pulled into a severe bun, and solid legs