Trust Me Once: Morecambe Bay Trilogy 2 (Book 1) Page 2

  ‘OK, that’s an interesting news story, but what does it have to do with that family – the Irwins, isn’t that what you said?’

  ‘This is all conjecture at the moment. DC Metcalfe shouldn’t have tipped me off, but we know each other through our kids, so he drips information to me from time to time. You have to stay tight-lipped on this one, Charlotte; we can’t report it officially until we can confirm the facts. But if what DC Metcalfe says is correct, this could be a sensational news story for the paper.’

  Charlotte’s right hand was already reaching for her notebook and pen. When Nigel got excited about a news story, she knew she was in for a treat. It was a chance to escape the dullness of the distance learning course and get her hands dirty with some proper reporting.

  ‘Remember, they thought the Irwin kids and the husband were dead,’ said Nigel. ‘And that was twenty years ago. Well, the woman who turned up this morning is the same age as one of the Irwin children would be now.’

  ‘That’s a stretch, isn’t it?’ Charlotte asked, her hopes of it being a great news story fading fast.

  ‘Under normal circumstances, yes. But she was found with an old news cutting in her pocket from the year 2000. It told the full story of their disappearance.’

  ‘That’s still not much to go on, is it?’

  ‘No, but here’s the thing. Police records show that Callie Irwin had a pronounced birthmark above her right eye. Guess what this woman has?’

  ‘You’re kidding?’

  ‘No, and it gets better. Callie Irwin would be twenty-three years old now, and she had auburn hair as a toddler. Guess what DC Metcalfe told me about this woman? As well as the birthmark, her estimated age is 22-26, and she has auburn hair. Oh, and she was wearing the wedding ring reported missing when the mother was found over twenty years ago.’

  Chapter Two

  Charlotte felt a stirring of excitement as she walked along the street towards the resort’s library. She would never have admitted it to Will or the kids, but she missed the adrenaline rush of being in the heat of the fire. She didn’t crave the terrible danger they’d been exposed to last year; it was just that life in the guest house had quickly become routine and she’d grown frustrated by the restrictions on her movement while her body recovered. The weekend’s charity event would finally put all those concerns about her physical wellbeing behind her.

  Will thought she was crazy, but the specialist at the hospital had pronounced her leg to be up to it at long last, so when Abi suggested making the tandem parachute jump at a local airfield, she’d jumped at the chance. She craved the rush of fear and excitement as much as her wish to support Abi’s Down’s Syndrome work. Life had felt flat for her and she’d been happy when Piper and Agnieszka had finally taken up her offer of regular employment.

  She could sense that they might uncover a remarkable scoop. Although she’d never considered herself potential journalist material before, it turned out she had a good nose for it. She was grateful Will had indulged her by letting her follow her dream.

  ‘As long as you sort out the day-to-day management of the business, it’s up to you how you arrange the staffing.’

  ‘The team at The Bay View Weekly doesn’t start the day until ten o’clock,’ Charlotte had replied, elated at such a warm response. ‘I can make sure we’re clear for breakfast then head up to the office. I promise, it’ll all run like clockwork.’

  And so it had, even though Will was constantly fishing to find out what she was up to. She had to allow him that. The lives of all four of them had been in jeopardy, so he was entitled to be jittery. Nigel’s view that events like they’d experienced only ever happened once in a blue moon had helped to settle the matter for good. She was a trainee journalist, with her husband’s blessing.

  The library was a familiar fixture in Charlotte’s life now, although it had been some time since she’d come across Jon Rogers, the local history expert who worked there. She’d begun to build a rapport with him; he had certainly helped her on more than one occasion in the past. She stopped in the entrance area, wondering if he might have retired. He was one of those gnarled, grey-haired men who appeared to have been born middle-aged yet never seemed to retire. On a previous occasion when they’d chatted, he’d alluded to retirement, unsure as to who would replace him when he left. The man was a walking encyclopedia, his mind packed with every bit of knowledge that existed about Morecambe’s past.

  She asked a library assistant about Jon, and they went to find him. Even the staff didn’t seem to know where he lived; it was almost as if he’d made his home in some den among the archive documents and dusty artefacts.

  He surprised her by approaching from behind.

  ‘Charlotte Grayson!’ he said, causing her to jump and drop her notebook.

  ‘Hello Jon, it’s good to see you again. I’m delighted you haven’t retired yet.’

  She bent down to pick up her pad and could feel her face flushing at the embarrassment of being so jumpy.

  Jon lowered his voice. ‘I was worried about you. I read what happened in the newspaper, but I’m delighted to see you here again. You were the talk of the town for a while. And there was me thinking you and your family came to Morecambe to enjoy the quiet life.’

  Charlotte laughed.

  ‘We did come for a slower pace of life, but it appears to have eluded us so far.’

  ‘So how can I help you this time? I must admit, whenever you turn up at the library, it’s always with something a little out of the ordinary. I hope you’re not going to ask me about a local building or anything as humdrum as that.’

  ‘As if I would ask the library’s local history expert anything about local history,’ she said with a grin. ‘I’m working at the newspaper now, training to be a journalist—’

  ‘Well, you do seem to have a knack for ending up in the middle of breaking news stories,’ Jon teased her.

  ‘This one doesn’t involve me, you’ll be happy to hear. But it is remarkably interesting. What do you know about the Irwin family? This goes back to the turn of the century, by the way.’

  ‘Eighteenth or nineteenth century?’ Jon replied.

  Charlotte was about to answer when she realised he was teasing her again.

  ‘I remember those events very well, Charlotte. I was there. Not actually where it happened, but at an event close to The Midland, just along the promenade. I was questioned briefly by the police, as were all the attendees at the event, but our minds were elsewhere. Imagine how thrilling it was for me as a local historian to live a life that’s spanned two centuries; I was beside myself with excitement.’

  ‘It’s the sort of event you remember all your life,’ Charlotte agreed. ‘Like what you were doing when the Twin Towers collapsed and where you were when Challenger exploded. Some things stay with you.’

  ‘I take it you know what happened?’ Jon asked, suddenly serious. ‘It was a terrible case. I felt so sorry for the mother, even though she was a suspect for some time afterwards. The police couldn’t prove anything; it was a series of bizarre events. Three children and a husband vanished, just like that. No trace of them anywhere, no sign of a fight or a struggle. And the mother – what was her name? I can’t recall it now…’

  ‘Tiffany Irwin,’ Charlotte offered.

  ‘That’s right; she was known as Tiff locally. There was a lot of intrigue around the land owned by her deceased parents and a fallout with her brother. It was a bit of a mess, I recall. But nothing ever stuck; four of them disappeared from the face of the earth and poor old Tiff had a complete mental breakdown. It was all incredibly sad. Why are you asking about it so many years after? Is it an anniversary or something?’

  Charlotte was tempted to reveal all the details of the police tip-off, but she contained herself and gave Jon a non-committal reply.

  ‘Can I use the microfiche machines and copy some newspaper cuttings from around that time? We’re interested in digging a little deeper and running a background feature on what happened.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Jon. He started to turn away, then paused and looked at her.

  ‘There’s something I need to mention, because I know you haven’t been living here for very long. You can’t report on the Irwin family without mentioning the other people who went missing around then. At least one of the families still lives locally, and I’m sure they’d be upset if you didn’t mention them.’

  ‘You mean more people disappeared like the Irwins? On the same night?’

  ‘Not the same night, but within a short space of time. Fortunately, events like that don’t happen often. The police put it down to the start of a brand new century and all the anxiety and worry surrounding it. But it was strange, that’s for sure. They weren’t thought to be linked. But one of them always struck me as being very unusual.’

  Chapter Three

  Charlotte cursed the microfiche as she struggled to manoeuvre the plastic sheets. They held a tremendous number of scanned newspaper pages, and it was as much as she could do to resist being diverted by the other news stories that had dominated in Morecambe in the first week of a new millennium.

  The big frustration of the day appeared to be that many local businesses had paid considerable sums of money to consultants to protect their equipment from the so-called Millennium Bug, yet come the big day, the expected Armageddon had not arrived. Charlotte remembered it well; she’d steered clear of most of it, thanks to her maternity leave.

  It took no time at all to locate the news story about the Irwin family; The Bay View Weekly had gone to town with it for the first four weeks of the year.

  Vanished! Three Children, One Husband, One Live-In Nanny … And A Wife Who Remembers Nothing.

  The headline was accusatory, and the following week’s was ju
st as bad:

  Tragedy In The Bay. Local Mother Makes Memory Loss Claim.

  Charlotte read how the police had searched the area several times. Some soft toys belonging to the children were found in the mouth of the bay, but there’d been no sign of the father, David, nor any eyewitness accounts, sightings or leads.

  The second week of news coverage saved a small space on the front page for another headline.

  Second Person Goes Missing In Bay Area.

  This was a lady called Morgan Utworth, who’d disappeared from the resort. The article explained how police were not linking the two cases, but they had still investigated to check for similarities.

  The third week’s news softened the angle on Tiffany Irwin.

  Tragic Family Mourned As Bay Area Unites In Sympathy.

  Tiffany Irwin had taken part in a TV reconstruction, making a plea for anybody who knew anything about her family to reach out and speak in confidence to the police. It must have been a convincing performance, because the paper suggested the father might have been responsible for taking the children in some misguided suicide. By the time of the fourth week of coverage at the end of January 2000, the newspaper had an exclusive.

  Revealed! Two More Missing In Millennium Week. Tragic Family Links Investigated.

  By now, Charlotte was completely absorbed. As ever, Jon Rogers had proved his local knowledge was unassailable. The article explained how the details of the other disappearances had been suppressed because of the ongoing investigation surrounding the Irwin family. There was another woman called Joanne Taylor, and a young man, Brett Allan. Brett’s car had been found abandoned at nearby Sunderland Point, and Joanne Taylor never returned home one night.

  It was an extraordinary number of people to go missing in such a short time, but as Charlotte scanned the more feature-based content from the inside pages of the newspaper, a psychologist from the university revealed that it was not entirely unexpected, given the timing of the new millennium.

  Charlotte worked through the microfiche film strips methodically, printing any pages which she thought might be useful. If this person who the police had found on the sea front was an Irwin, it would make national news and the newspaper would be right at the heart of it, supplying information to the broadsheets and possibly even at an international level. This was the perfect story for a trainee reporter keen to make an early impact in the profession. Hopefully it wouldn’t require Charlotte to use any shorthand.

  She leaned back in her chair and stretched out her arms and legs. One drawback of helping with the guests in the mornings was that she still had to get up early to join Isla, Agnieszka or Piper, whoever was on shift, to get the busy breakfast sittings out of the way. She found herself flagging by midday, but always rallied after a lunch break, a short walk along the sea front and a drink of black coffee. It was fast becoming her hot drink of choice since working with Nigel in the newsroom. She decided to take an early lunch and texted Lucia to see if she was in the mood to join her for a bite to eat. She tapped out her text message.

  Are you around? Fancy lunch? I’m buying.

  To her surprise, Lucia got straight back to her.

  I’m in the library doing some studying. Are you at the office?

  Since the events of the previous year, Lucia had struggled to settle down at school. Who could blame her, after being abducted twice then nearly losing her life at Heysham Port? She’d had difficulty adjusting to the normality of school, finding most of her friends’ trivial conversations infuriating. When she’d asked to be home schooled, Will and Charlotte agreed.

  It had been simple enough to deregister her from school and sign up to an organisation called Education Otherwise. They’d purchased four distance learning packages from reputable providers online, and the rest was up to Lucia. She managed her own timetable, worked when she felt like it, used the library and internet as her primary resources, and every now and then would jump on a train and visit some museum or art gallery as part of her learning.

  She’d matured immensely since leaving school, met some other local home schooled kids who seemed to have much more about them than her previous school friends, and appeared to have got her life back on track. It was like gaining an adult daughter, and their relationship had improved radically of late. If Lucia emerged from it with four ‘A’ levels and a university place, then all the better.

  Charlotte collected her printed papers, thanked Jon for his help and jotted down his telephone number in case she had any further questions. It didn’t take long to find Lucia at a quiet desk at the rear of the library. She was typing away furiously on her laptop as she made notes from a textbook, which looked like it would cost a small fortune to buy.

  ‘Surprise!’ she said, delighted to see her daughter so engrossed. Lucia had never settled in school after the move to Morecambe.

  Within ten minutes, they were at a nearby café, tucking into hot drinks and well-filled paninis dripping with melted cheese.

  ‘How’s your day been?’ Charlotte asked. There was a time, not that long ago, when she’d have feared the answer.

  ‘Great, thanks Mum. I love this arrangement. I got 94% in my latest psychology assignment. It’s been so good getting to know Jenna. I’m glad they gave me permission to speak to her.’

  ‘Well, you know what I thought about that at the time. I’m not sure you’ll ever appreciate how hard it was to let you visit someone who schemed to abduct you—’

  Lucia cut her short.

  ‘Yes, but her relationships with men have been terrible. It was just the latest in a pattern of poor choices. She sees that now; when they finally release her properly from prison, she’ll be able to make a good stab at getting her life back on track. She’s so grateful to you for helping Piper. Despite everything that happened, she still thinks you did the right thing.’

  Charlotte wasn’t so sure. But the ties of her old friendship with Jenna hadn’t been completely severed by the trauma of the incident, and she was grateful that life was getting better for her at last. She was in an open prison now and would be free again soon. Then she and Piper could begin to repair their own damaged relationship. If she’d played a small part in that healing process, it had to be a good thing.

  ‘I’m pleased things are going so well. You know how proud I am of you.’

  ‘What are these, Mum? They look interesting.’

  Lucia was examining the printouts which Charlotte had left on the far side of the table.

  Charlotte explained the broad outline of the story, omitting the information passed on by Nigel’s contact earlier that day.

  ‘It says they were found at the slipway by the RNLI. I walked up that way this morning, on my way to the library. Something was going on, because a couple of police cars were parked there. It was taped off, as if they were searching the area.’

  Charlotte knew she was a useless liar. Even while claiming ignorance, she could tell Lucia had seen straight through her.

  ‘It wasn’t a murder, was it? Wasn’t that where you and Olli were rescued last year?’

  Charlotte wondered if Lucia should be the one considering a career in journalism. She kept it vague, remembering Nigel had specifically asked her not to share the tip-off.

  ‘Nobody died,’ she said in as reassuring a voice as she could muster. ‘I can’t discuss it right now, but it’ll be all over the paper this week.’

  Lucia didn’t appear to be listening. She was studying a photograph on one of the printouts.

  ‘What is it?’ Charlotte asked. ‘Have you spotted something?’

  ‘Yes, this photo,’ Lucia replied. ‘I recognised this police officer straight away. You can’t miss her, but the name threw me.’

  Charlotte leaned over to look.

  ‘What a small world it is,’ Lucia continued. ‘She’s referred to as PC Kate Allan in the newspaper article, but of course she’s married now. The first officer on the scene when the family vanished was DCI Kate Summers. That was two decades ago; she looks a lot younger.’

  Charlotte checked the photograph and the name. It made sense that DCI Summers had risen through the ranks of the local police force. Yet there she was, a rookie police constable, first on the scene in one of Morecambe’s biggest missing persons investigations. Talk about bad pennies.