Free No Place to Die by Clare Donoghue

next to four teaspoons. Anne was more like a presence than actually being present. Jane had barely noticed her slip in, put down the tray and serve drinks for everyone, asking about milk and sugar without even interrupting the flow of the conversation. She was out of the room again as if she had never been there. Ninja, Jane thought. It was amazing.
    ‘Mrs Hungerford,’ Penny said, putting her half-drunk tea back on the tray in the centre of the coffee table. Jane hadn’t touched hers. ‘You reported Maggie missing on Monday the twenty-first of April. Can you tell me what led up to you calling the police?’ Before the words had even had chance to settle in the air, Maggie’s parents were back on full alert. Elizabeth Hungerford’s eyes were wide, her pupils like pinpricks, and she was holding her husband’s hand as if she might float away without it. ‘I know this is difficult,’ Penny said. ‘Just take your time, and talk us through what happened.’ The air in the room seemed to have dropped by several degrees.
    ‘Maggie was meant to come for lunch on Easter Sunday,’ Elizabeth Hungerford began. ‘The boys were coming, and Chrissie was driving here straight from her parents’ place in Stratford. I met Maggie for lunch on the Wednesday – the sixteenth, it would have been. She had some coursework to get finished, so she said she couldn’t come on Good Friday, but that she might come on Saturday and stay over, so she was here when her brothers arrived on Sunday morning. I spoke to her on the phone later that day. We speak every day – well, most days. Her printer had packed up again,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders. ‘She said she’d call me in the morning and sort out timings for the weekend, see if I wanted anything picking up from Sainsbury’s – that kind of thing. But she didn’t call. She hasn’t called. Chrissie hasn’t seen her. None of her friends have seen her. No one has spoken to her.’ A tear rolled down her cheek. She released her husband’s hand just long enough to dab at her face with the screwed-up piece of tissue. ‘She always calls. If she says she’s going to call, she calls, doesn’t she, Bill?’
    The look she gave her husband made Jane want to turn away. There was a mixture of fear and longing, which was understandable; but what made Jane’s heart squeeze was the unbridled hope that she could see in Elizabeth Hungerford’s eyes. Despite everything – the week that had passed since she last spoke to her daughter, the police officers in her lounge on a sunny Friday morning – she was still hoping that her daughter was going to call, was going to come home.
    ‘She does,’ Maggie’s father said, looking at Jane and then at Penny. ‘She always calls.’ His wife took a deep breath beside him and blew it out, reaching for her tea before deciding against it, her hands returning to her husband’s. ‘That’s why my wife called the police. That’s why we’ve been so worried.’
    Jane realized that the only thing left linking her and Penny to this distraught couple in front of them was the words that had remained, as yet, unsaid. She couldn’t delay it any longer. She had to put them out of their misery; or rather she had to move their misery on to the next stage. The preliminary questions were over. The paperwork side of things was all but done. She could come back to Maggie’s mental state before her disappearance at another time. She would be speaking to the Hungerfords again, many more times in the coming weeks.
    ‘Mr and Mrs Hungerford,’ she began. ‘On Wednesday the twenty-third of April a body was discovered in the Elmstead Woods area. It was confirmed to be that of a young woman. It has been recovered and taken to the mortuary suite in Lewisham.’ She looked at Maggie’s parents in turn. Neither moved or spoke. Their eyes were fixed on Jane’s mouth. ‘The death has been listed as suspicious. Pending formal identification, I am sorry to tell you that