Free Precious Thing by Colette McBeth

reason I couldn’t cry when I needed to, when DCI Gunn expected me to collapse in a puddle.
    ‘What was the trigger?’ he asked, the policeman in him searching for a cause and effect. But not everything happens like that. Some things just are.
    ‘It’s hard to say. My mum died and she took it badly.’
    ‘
Your
mum?’
    ‘They’d become close. Clara took her death badly.’ That was true wasn’t it, Clara? You didn’t cope with Niamh dying. You crumbled under the weight of your grief. ‘She was away for seven years. I mean she wasn’t having treatment all that time. Her dad paid for her to study in Madrid and then she taught English and went travelling. She came back about a year and a half ago because her dad was dying.’
    ‘And did she seem different?’
    Does anyone stay the same after seven years?
    ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘she was different.’
    He made a face and motioned with his hand for me to elaborate.
    There were so many ways in which you’d changed, Clara. The things you said, how you behaved. You seemed angry, aloof, distant. But most strikingly the spark in you seemed to have been extinguished. I worried about you, God knows I tried to help, to make it better, but it was never enough.
    ‘It was as if something was eating away at her,’ I said, aware that the DCI would have wanted a more solid explanation.
    I told him how I went to check on you in your flat on that Friday night of your disappearance but you didn’t answer. I described how I walked along and booked myself into a hotel afterwards. And after two hours of explaining and talking I ran out of words, but still I waited, like a schoolchild who needed to be excused before I could get up and go.
    ‘If I can be of any more help, just call me.’ I said, inviting him to dismiss me.
    ‘Why didn’t you report her missing, Rachel?’ he said, smiling at me in the way a shark might before it swallows you whole.
    It was a legitimate question. I can see that now, but at the time I was taken aback. The truth is it didn’t occur to me that something might have happened to you. I was angry with you. I was being stubborn. I thought you should call me first and apologise for your no-show.
    ‘Clara has been …’ I searched for the right word. ‘Flaky since she got back. You said yesterday her disappearance is out of character and it is. I mean I don’t think she has ever gone missing for days before. But sometimes she’ll make arrangements and not turn up, or she’ll turn up without warning you. Her moods are unpredictable—’ A knock on the door stopped my flow. DCI Gunn shouted for whoever it was to wait and walked across the room to open it. I turned to see the petite blond officer from earlier. There was a conversation, too hushed to hear. Then DCI Gunn came back in with a brown file.
    ‘Look, if there’s anything I can do, just call me, OK.’ I stood up to leave but he raised his hand to stop me.
    ‘There is one thing you can do before you go.’ He put the file on the table and took out three pictures. Images, grainy and blurred. Captured on CCTV.
    It was you. I could see that much.
    And someone else.
    Next to you.
    You’d pulled the collars of your coat up against the wind and your body was close to his, like you were holding on to him, holding him up. You weren’t smiling. Neither was he, I took some comfort from that. His eyes looked like they were closed but that could have just been the shot, the moment the image was taken.
    ‘Do you know who that is?’ The DCI pointed to the male figure.
    I nodded; my head was heavy on my neck. A fist clenched in my stomach.
    ‘Yes,’ I whispered, barely audible.
    What else could I say? I’d woken up to his face every morning for almost two years.

Chapter Six
    T HERE WAS A hole, deep and black and bottomless, in that office and I was hurtling through it. My body was stiff with terror. I wanted to grab hold of something to stop my fall but nothing. There was nothing.
    I shook my head. I