Read Online The Final Minute by Simon Kernick - Free Book Online Page B

Then, just as quickly, they disappeared as we turned a corner.
    It was time to find Tina Boyd.

Eight
    ‘I’m doing everything I can to find your daughter, Mr Donaldson,’ said Tina Boyd, leaning forward in her office chair and looking the man opposite her directly in the eye so he would know she wasn’t trying to avoid any of the difficult questions. It was only nine a.m. but Alan Donaldson had been waiting for her when she’d arrived that morning with her regular takeaway double espresso and blueberry muffin from the coffee shop round the corner. He was half an hour early. Tina had been hoping to enjoy breakfast in peace in her cramped little office, as she did every morning, but she hadn’t kicked up a fuss or told him to come back later, as she might have done if he’d been anyone else (client or not).
    But Alan Donaldson was a broken man. You could see it in the haunted, pained expression in his eyes, in the way the brightness seemed to have left them; in the greying pallor of his skin and the hollowness of his cheeks. He must have been handsome once, Tina was sure of that. There were traces of the easy charmer about him, and Tina had known a few of them in her time. His face was lean and sculpted with the remnants of a strong, well-defined jaw, and he still had the tall, confident bearing that suggested a man used to getting his own way.
    But things hadn’t worked out for him. Exactly one week earlier he’d come in to see her and explained how, fifteen years earlier, his wife, tired of his constant infidelities, had thrown him out of the family home. Donaldson hadn’t wanted to go. In fact he’d begged to stay, but his wife had had enough and so, conceding defeat, he’d moved in with the girl he’d been seeing. This had angered his wife no end and, according to his version of events, she’d turned his two children, Ben and Lauren, against him, and his relationship with them had become steadily more distant.
    Both kids had ended up going off the rails, although Ben had managed to get himself back on track, go to university and get a law degree, before emigrating to Canada. He hadn’t spoken to his father in ten years. Lauren, though, the apple of her father’s eye (his own description), had gone from one bad relationship to another, her good looks meaning she had no shortage of suitors. She’d had affairs with married men, used them until she grew bored; had been used herself by boyfriends whose abuse of her sometimes bordered on the physical; had fallen in with all the wrong sorts of people, and eventually moved to London. Donaldson had tried to keep in touch but he couldn’t bear to see what was happening to his daughter, and her anger towards him was palpable. She’d make arrangements to see him but be out when he turned up at her flat; she’d ignore his calls. Eventually they’d lost touch.
    Donaldson now lived alone, the last of his girlfriends long since gone. His ex-wife – the children’s mother – had died three years ago. Since then, he himself had been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer, and was a man desperate to make amends and find peace with his children. Except there was a major problem. Ben was still refusing to speak to his father and, more worryingly, Lauren had gone missing.
    That was where Tina came in. She was a private detective with a high profile, although not too much in the way of results as yet, but Donaldson clearly had faith because he’d hired her to find Lauren, and told her that money was no object.
    No object or not, Tina wasn’t a miracle worker. She felt sorry for Donaldson. He’d been responsible for his own downfall but, even so, she wanted to do whatever she could to reunite him with his daughter, which was why she’d done the interview in the Mail the other day, insisting that they focus at least part of it on Lauren’s disappearance and publish a photo of her.
    ‘I’m working on a number of leads at the moment,’ she told him, ‘but it’s