Tony Hill u Carol Jordan 08 - Cross and Burn

determined to remain alienated? Would Rob’s obvious desire to flirt cross the line to the point where she’d have to bring HR into the picture? She and Marco loved to play their little game of speculation, sometimes even using their fantasy workplace lives to spice up their own bedroom games.
    It was harmless fun, Marie thought. Completely harmless.

6

    T orin’s adolescent inability to disguise his anxiety was immediately obvious to Paula. Luckily for her, maintaining a cool façade under pressure took more skill and effort than he had at his command. Normally she’d have offered him a drink to settle him down, but Skenfrith Street was alien territory for her and she didn’t know how long it would take her to rustle something up. The last thing she wanted was to keep her new boss waiting any longer than absolutely necessary.
    Technically, she should probably have sorted out a so-called appropriate adult before she questioned Torin. But she reckoned she was more than appropriate enough. And it wasn’t as if he was being interviewed about a crime. Paula gave Torin an expectant look. ‘When did you start to worry there might be something wrong?’
    ‘I don’t know exactly.’ He frowned.
    ‘What time does she usually get in from work?’
    He raised one shoulder in a shrug. ‘About half past five, but sometimes she’ll do the shopping on the way home, so then it’s more like quarter to seven.’
    ‘So it’s fair to say that by seven, you were beginning to worry?’
    ‘Not worry, exactly. More like, wonder. It’s not like she’s not got a life. Sometimes she goes out with one of her mates for a pizza or a movie or whatever. But if she’s doing that, she usually tells me in advance, in the morning. Or she texts me if it’s more, like, spontaneous.’
    Paula wasn’t surprised. Bev McAndrew had struck her as a sensible woman. ‘So did you text her?’
    Torin nodded, chewing the corner of his lower lip. ‘Yeah. Just, you know, what’s for my tea, will you be back soon, kind of thing.’
    Standard teenage-boy stuff. ‘And she didn’t respond?’
    ‘No.’ He fidgeted in his chair, then leaned forward, his forearms on the table, his hands clenched together. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t really worried, more, like, pissed off.’ He gave her a quick up-and-under glance, checking whether he was going to get away with a mild swear word in front of a copper.
    Paula smiled. ‘Pissed off and hungry, I’m guessing.’
    Torin’s shoulders relaxed a degree or two. ‘Yeah. That too. So I looked in the fridge and there was leftover cottage pie from the night before, so I nuked it and ate it. And still nothing from my mum.’
    ‘Did you call any of her friends?’
    His head reared back slightly in a gesture of incomprehension. ‘How would I do that? I don’t know their numbers. They’re all in her phone, not written down anywhere. I mostly don’t even know their names.’ He waved a hand in the air. ‘And there’s no way to look up, like, “Dawn from work”, or “Megan from the gym”, or “Laura that I was at school with”.’ He had a point, she realised. It used to be when someone went missing, you checked their address book, their diary, the list of numbers by the phone. Now everybody carried their whole lives around with them and when they disappeared, so did the means of tracking them.
    ‘No relatives you could call?’
    Torin shook his head. ‘My gran lives in Bristol with my auntie Rachel. Mum hasn’t spoken to my dad this year, and anyway, he’s doing a tour of duty in Afghanistan. He’s an army medic.’ A note of pride, Paula thought.
    ‘What about work? Did you think of ringing there?’
    He glowered. ‘They only answer the outside line during regular opening hours. In the evening, the pharmacy’s just for hospital emergency prescriptions. So even if I’d rung, nobody would have picked up.’
    Paula cast her mind back to her own early teens and wondered how unnerved she’d have felt if her staid and respectable parents had gone inexplicably AWOL. In the circumstances, she thought Torin was doing pretty well not to lose control in the face of what probably felt like pointless questions that only served to slow down the process of finding his mother. It was that understanding of other people’s points of view that had helped Paula develop her skills as an interviewer. Now she needed to keep Torin on side, make him feel someone cared about his plight so she could