Page 3 of Worse Than Murder
‘Lucas Brierley was drunk, he’d taken goodness knows what, and he has a history of violent behaviour. If you hadn’t intervened, and he’d managed to get home to his wife, who knows what could have happened? Well done.’
It isn’t often Gill Forsyth gives out praise and it’s clear she isn’t comfortable doing so. However, the words were meant, Alison can see that. Gill turns and walks quickly out of the incident room, sensible shoes clacking on the tiles.
‘Wow,’ Claire says, astonished. ‘I thought she was going to hug you, for a moment.’
‘Now, that would have been awkward.’
‘While it’s just the two of us,’ Claire says, a dirty grin on her face and lowering her voice. ‘When you were walking Lucas to your car on Tuesday night and you had your hand around his whatsits, did you cop a feel?’
‘Claire!’
‘I’m only asking. Was it a handful, or… you know.’
‘I’m not talking about this with you,’ Alison says, picking up her hat and heading for the door.
‘Looking at that picture, your hand does look pretty full,’ Claire says, following her.
‘Aren’t you supposed to be engaged?’
‘Yes. I’m engaged, not dead.’
‘And also two months pregnant.’
‘It doesn’t stop me looking.’
‘Claire, the guy is a drunk.’
‘He’s also very fit.’
‘You disgust me. Come on.’
On 25 March 2015, two men broke into the detached house of Philip and Sally Meagan in an affluent area of Sheffield, South Yorkshire. Philip and Sally were away for the evening, attending an award ceremony in Leeds. Seven-year-old Carl was being looked after by Philip’s mother, Annabel. The two men bludgeoned Annabel to death and kidnapped Carl. Days later, a ransom demand for a quarter of a million pounds was made for Carl’s safe return. The exchange was to be made on 28 March at Graves Park at nine o’clock at night.
The investigation was led by Detective Chief Inspector Matilda Darke. On the day of the ransom drop, Matilda’s husband died. He’d been suffering with an aggressive brain tumour. She had kept his illness private, and told nobody about his death. She returned to work as if everything was normal, clearly in denial.
Nine o’clock came and went. There was no sign of the kidnappers. Matilda’s phone rang, piercing the silence of the night with its shrill call. She answered and the kidnappers asked, angrily, where she was.
Suffering with a grief she couldn’t comprehend, Matilda’s mind was not on the task at hand. There were two main car parks to Graves Park. One was at the Meadowhead entrance close to the tennis courts and bowling green; the other was at Hemsworth Road near the animal farm. The kidnappers were waiting next to the animal farm while Matilda was parked close to the tennis courts. Believing it to be a set-up, the kidnappers fled, taking Carl with them. Matilda was ordered to take time away from work and Carl disappeared without trace.
In 2019, a neighbour saw a child playing in the garden of a house in Gothenburg, Sweden. Knowing his neighbours had no children, and therefore no grandchildren, he made discreet enquiries only to be told there was no child at the house. When he saw the child again, he contacted police. The couple, unable to have children, had bought the young Carl from illegal traffickers and were raising him as their own. Carl was taken by the police to be reunited with his parents.
Finally, in October 2019, after four years and seven months, Carl returned home to Sheffield.
The Meagan family decided to leave the Steel City for a fresh start. Less than a year later, they sold the family home and the chain of restaurants that had consumed their time, and moved to the Lake Distract to start life afresh. Instead of building a large empire, they decided to scale back their business and bought a single restaurant in a picturesque part of the country. Philip and Sally’s aim was to give Carl the best upbringing they could provide.
Now, it seems someone has a vendetta against the Meagans, as their lakeside restaurant, which they live above, has been targeted four times in as many weeks. Whoever is doing this has not managed to gain entry to the restaurant, nothing has been stolen and no damage has been done, as such. If it wasn’t for who the owners of the restaurant are, police might not be taking as much interest in the case. However, despite six years passing since Carl was taken, his kidnappers, the murderers of his grandmother, are still out there, and Carl, despite not being able to give much of a description of the two men, is the only witness.
* * *
Claire and Alison are often paired together, which they love. They’ve been best friends since the dawn of time and joined the police together. Claire is itching to climb the promotional ladder. She has dreams of becoming a chief constable, wearing power suits and being a complete bitch, whereas Alison has allowed her past to absorb her and is trailing behind her friend.
Claire is in her mid-thirties and petrified of turning forty, despite it being five years away. She’s engaged to Geraint Turner who is a government official overseeing the decommissioning of the Sellafield nuclear site on the coast of Cumbria. Their wedding is planned for next summer, when, hopefully, she will have her figure back from having their unplanned baby. When she isn’t working, she and Geraint can often be found in the hills of Cumbria walking miles and posting disgustingly happy selfies on Instagram. Despite the sometimes grim nature of the job, Claire nearly always has a cheerful smile on her face.
Alison, at thirty-four, is single and lives alone in the house she’s grown up in. Her mother and stepfather live just around the corner on their farm. Alison had wanted to be a police officer since she was young. The urge to discover what happened to her sisters, and her dad, was too much to ignore, and it had bled into her soul and consumed her. The job isn’t about promotion for Alison. She doesn’t want to break the glass ceiling, scale new heights and be the youngest police commissioner in the country. All she wants to do is use the skills she has learned to find out the secret that has been plaguing her family for thirty years. It’s what keeps her awake every night and gives her the constant air of darkness shrouding her.
They pull up in the marked police car outside Nature’s Diner. It’s an old building, dating back to the 1930s when it was originally a schoolhouse, later a convalescent home for injured soldiers during the Second World War, then a schoolhouse again, before it closed down in the 1960s. A property developer bought it in the 1970s and made it a family home. Unfortunately, the high price demanded made it virtually unsellable and it was left empty until the early 1980s when it was turned into a restaurant. Under the guise of various themes, it didn’t last long and eventually closed, seemingly for good, in 1990. Then, the Meagan family came along in 2019 and saw the potential to turn it into an exclusive organic restaurant to tap into the tourist market.
Their timing hadn’t been great. As they were due to open, the world was plunged into lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. They turned their restaurant into a takeaway business until they were able to open their doors to an eager public desperate to return to some degree of normality, sample food not cooked by themselves and see what the latest incarnation of the restaurant had to offer.
