Free Bedlam by B.A. Morton Page B

assumed the bracelet had snapped as a result of some kind of struggle, that someone had grabbed Kit by the wrist and the bracelet had come apart. McNeil held the two ends together and it was immediately apparent that something was missing; it couldn’t have spanned Kit’s wrist in its current length. He counted the charms slowly: a silver heart for Valentine’s Day, a miniature violin, a mortar board to celebrate her graduation and a hedgehog. There were others, a total of nine. The tenth, the one he particularly wanted to find, was missing. It had not been found at the scene or returned in the evidence bag. McNeil suddenly realised how important it was to find out why.
    He pulled himself up off the floor and slowly scanned the room. It was a mess, and had been before he’d decided to turn everything upside down searching. He was meant to be taking things easy, not making things worse. He pushed the headache and nausea to the back of his mind and glanced down at the broken bracelet in his hand. He’d been waiting twelve long months for a break and yet it had been here all along. It was time to get a grip and let go of the paranoia.
    It was time to find Kit.
     
    *  *  *
     
    It was a desolate spot, the place where Kit had stepped away from his life. An overgrown mineral track hugged the shoulder of a forgotten waterway. Both canal and train line had once been vital to commerce in the days when heavy industry fed and housed the populous. The tracks had long since gone to smelter. The water lay heavy and stagnant, thick with pollution and neglect. McNeil hadn’t been back since the operation to dredge the water. He’d known they wouldn’t find her, knew it as surely as if she had stood next to him and placed her hand in his, but even so he had been in torment as he’d awaited the diver’s verdict. Dennis had dragged him away. Mather had pulled rank, insisted that he go home and leave it to the rest of the team. He couldn’t be part of the investigation, he’d realised that, particularly as he’d been listed as a suspect from the outset. Protocol and procedure - necessary evils. But he hadn’t gone home. He had stood in the exact spot where he stood now and looked on impotently as his world collapsed around him. Now he stood in silence and relived it all.
    Where had she gone? Why had she gone? Twelve months later and he was still asking the same questions.
    The afternoon was drawing to an early close. The sky had that heavy feel, pressing down on everything below it. Perhaps the rain would turn to snow and disguise the ugly landscape beneath a pristine white blanket. McNeil sighed, not entirely convinced at the logic of deceit, however well-intentioned. The truth would always out, eventually. The light was fading, due more to the season than the hour, shorter days the drawback to all winter investigations. Although it made his search more difficult, it was somehow fitting. This fleeting time between day and night was how he visualised Kit, trapped somehow between one place and another, just waiting for a new dawn. First, though, he had the night to get through, and it seemed he had been struggling in the dark for far too long.
    He couldn’t understand what had brought Kit down to this desolate place, and yet this was where her car was found. The investigating team had theorised and decided she must have picked up her killer, given a lift to the person who would ultimately take her life. McNeil didn’t buy that. Kit wouldn’t have picked up a stranger, and she wasn’t dead. She was just waiting somewhere to be found.
    The team had tried to link her disappearance to others spanning several years. In some cases a body had been found, in others the families had been left in limbo, their daughter, mother, wife or lover lost forever. McNeil didn’t buy that either. In his mind he couldn’t accept that Kit was just one in a list of many. She was far too precious for that. He had subsequently discounted every theory