Monaghan Wish You Were Here

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-0-85730-809-2
Verlag: Verve Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

Reihe: A Dr Sian Love Mystery

DNA doesn't lie. But what if the truth is dangerous?

DNA expert Dr Sian Love has settled into running her own investigative agency and living with her partner, Kris. She's also started seeing a therapist to work through her traumatic history - a big step for Sian.
Then a teenage girl brings chaos to Sian's office door. She claims to be Courtney Johnson - a child who went missing from a Brighton beach over fifteen years ago - but refuses to let Sian test her DNA.
Wary but intrigued, Sian reluctantly revives the undercover skills she learned during her police force days and begins investigating. But revisiting the past has consequences...

is an intriguing, multi-layered crime thriller, perfect for fans of Kate Atkinson's  and British crime dramas  and .

Autoren/Hrsg.

Monaghan, Nicola

Leseproben

TWO

‘OK,’ Sian said. ‘Let’s start at the beginning.’ She tried to sound calm and collected, professional, as if this wasn’t the most interesting case to cross her threshold since she’d started the agency. The truth was that hearing the young woman voice her suspicions about her identity had felt to Sian like waking up from a long, vaguely unpleasant dream. She pulled a yellow legal pad from the top drawer of her desk and picked up a pen. ‘Your name?’

‘Ana Renaux,’ she said. Then she spelled out the surname in full as Sian wrote it down. She wrinkled up her nose. ‘My mum changed our names two boyfriends ago. They both chose it after the guy in Twin Peaks but they spelled it wrong. It should be like the car, of course.’ There was a level of disdain at the back of this statement. ‘Anyway, my original name is Smith. Like that’s original.’

Sian tried not to smile at the mini rant. ‘And what makes you think you might be Courtney?’ she asked. Apart from all your mum’s boyfriends who you haven’t liked and the world’s lack of originality with your birth surname, she added silently.

Ana let out the smallest shot of laughter. ‘Look at the picture,’ she said, gesturing towards the piece of paper in Sian’s hand.

Sian did, and then studied Ana again. There was no doubt of her resemblance to the image. Aside from the dyed hair and a little more immature chubbiness around the cheeks than the computer projection had estimated, Ana looked as similar as a human could do to those weird, half-formed images. To Sian, the more pressing question was whether the generated image was likely to look like the missing girl. If Courtney were even still alive, which she doubted. Sian had been a police officer and she knew all of the probabilities, which were not in poor little Courtney’s favour at all after so many years missing.

‘I can see what you mean,’ Sian said. ‘But there must be other things. Doubts that you have about your parents that mean you can entertain this idea. Most people would see the resemblance and dismiss it, or even laugh about it, and not really think it could be them. They would know it couldn’t be.’

Ana nodded. ‘My friend Snapchatted me the picture and that was the way she acted. All lol look at this, it’s you, like it was a big joke. But it wasn’t funny.’

Sian kept her gaze level and waited.

‘It’s just my mum,’ Ana said. ‘She has this story about my dad, that he was some biker guy who blew in then out of town. An affair to forget except that he left her with a little souvenir. Me.’ She snorted. ‘But I don’t believe her. I used to, when I was little. But I believed in Santa and all sorts of other crap she told me back then too. I realised as I got older that it was all a load of bollocks.’

Sian didn’t smile. She inclined her head, just slightly, something she had been taught to do in her police interview training. ‘What made you realise?’

‘Little things,’ Ana told her. ‘The man’s name’s changed, what, at least twice? And when I challenged mum on that she told me she still hadn’t told me his real name because she didn’t want to, which is convenient. One time she’ll tell me he was from Coventry, and another time Birmingham, and then she’ll claim she never said the other place. Her story’s full of holes.’ She paused and took a sip of water.

‘My uncle used to say that the thing about the truth was that it doesn’t change.’

Ana nodded, vigorously, in agreement. ‘Exactly!’ she said.

‘So, there are inconsistencies in her story about who your dad is. But there could be other reasons for that. What makes you think you could possibly be Courtney?’ Sian tilted her head again. She knew this subtle bit of body language worked but it always made her feel self-conscious.

‘Like, she has barely any pictures of me as a baby. Only a few, and in those I’m just this pink wrinkled thing she’s holding. It could be any baby. They all look the same. Then nothing till I was about three. She says it’s because that was when she got a phone, but I don’t believe her.’ She paused for breath, glancing at the table. ‘People didn’t have camera phones back then anyway. I checked on the internet.’

Ana was bright, clearly, and she had a point. In Sian’s experience, there was usually a lie hiding behind a story that didn’t add up.

The younger woman scratched at her arm just above the elbow. ‘No one I know knew me or my mum before I was about three. She appeared from nowhere in Nottingham and onto the scene.’

‘The scene?’

‘Hippies.’ It was clear from her tone of voice that she didn’t approve. ‘New Agers, you know. That’s what my mum’s into. All festivals and shit, and she sings in a band, even though she’s over forty. Sitting in a damp field taking shit drugs, eating hippy stew and slagging off the government. Signing petitions about the seagulls and posting crap online from sites called stuff like New Perspectives or Divine Goddess.’

Sian laughed out loud at that.

‘Are you laughing at me?’ Ana sounded offended.

‘No,’ Sian said, shaking her head. ‘Just the website names.’ She looked down at the piece of paper where she was making notes about what Ana was telling her. ‘Your mum and her friends sound like people I’d call “sound system casualties”,’ she told her.

Ana smiled then, and her nerves seemed to lift just for a moment. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s them!’

‘And you don’t fit in with any of them?’ Sian asked. She knew what that felt like from her own experience, how powerful that feeling could be.

‘No.’ Ana’s voice was very definitive. ‘Not even slightly. They’re just…’ She trailed off, searching for the right words. ‘I dunno, random, I guess. Unscientific. All anti-vax and science sceptical because, you know’ – Ana made speech marks in the air with two fingers from each hand – ‘“Big Pharma” pays for all the research. They all love any old conspiracy theory they can find about anything. I mean, I know the government is shit and corrupt and all that, but it doesn’t mean that everything’s about that.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Sometimes it is just paranoia and they’re not all out to get you.’

The Nirvana song Ana might be consciously rejecting came into Sian’s head as an earworm. She felt old. Was old. Quite a bit older than forty. ‘How long have you felt this way?’

‘All my life,’ Ana said. ‘Every single day.’ She sounded very sure but that was the thing about human nature; certainty could grow from some very weedy-looking cuttings. ‘I am completely different to everyone I know. And I couldn’t be more different to my mum. She’ll believe in anything if it’s anti-establishment. If it fits her fucking come-the-revolution narrative.’ Ana sounded like she’d thought about all the things she hated about her mum and the community she grew up in quite a lot. But teenagers were like that. That didn’t mean that there wasn’t more to their doubts and their rebellion, though. Sian remembered being a little younger than Ana when she’d screamed ‘You’re not my dad!’ at her father and her mum had turned white and asked who had told her.

‘So, what are you about?’ Sian asked her. ‘What do you believe in?’

‘Science,’ Ana told her. ‘Real things that I can see and touch. Not stupid stuff.’

Sian figured most people would say they didn’t believe in stupid stuff, but it really depended on whether they had the critical reasoning skills to understand which ideas were stupid. It sounded like Ana might, though. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘There are a few interesting issues coming up here but the main things I’m hearing are that you don’t feel you fit in to your family and community and that you feel like there’s a gap in the photographs from your earliest childhood. Would you say that’s accurate?’

Ana nodded. ‘Not just the pictures,’ she said. ‘The stories. Everything. It’s like we both appeared from thin air in Nottingham when I was a toddler.’

‘Which matches with little Courtney going missing, right?’ Sian was beginning to assemble the same jigsaw that Ana had, although she was less convinced that she had all the pieces.

‘Exactly,’ Ana said. ‘I’d always wondered why she was so cagey about our life before that. She says we lived in London, but she doesn’t keep in touch with anyone from back then. Nobody.’

‘She might have had a massive falling out? These things happen.’

Ana frowned, a tiny V forming between her eyebrows. She would have her first fine lines there, Sian saw, but not for many years yet. ‘With absolutely everyone she knew down there?’

‘Sometimes people want to make a clean break,’ Sian said. She felt old again; the voice of experience.

‘And sometimes they’re just fucking liars.’

The tone of voice and the swearing felt shocking for a moment. Sian quickly got over that and nodded. ‘So, you think your mum’s lying to you?’

‘I’m sure she is.’

Sian was fairly sure too. There was definitely something going on with this weird little family.

‘How long have you thought you might be Courtney?’

‘It had never even crossed my mind until I saw that picture. I knew mum was lying about something. Not this.’

Sian was scribbling away, writing all of it down.

‘And one more...