If Melissa had any doubts, they disappeared when they reached the Wright farm, and she saw the mess Oliver had made of the gate, and his VW Golf a short distance away – abandoned rather than parked, the driver's door wide open.
Mitchell brought the patrol car to a stop in front of the house and hurriedly got out, as did Melissa. They had no sooner done so than they heard a scream.
"That didn't sound like Ollie or Kieran," Melissa said as she hurried around the car so she could make for the front door, which stood ajar, and from which came the sounds of a fight.
"I know, it sounded like a girl," Mitchell said, unhappy with the development. "You take the front, I'll go round the back; give me a minute to get there, then we'll both go in."
Melissa could not remember a longer minute as she counted slowly. The moment she reached sixty she burst through the partially open door; she expected to find Oliver on the other side, instead she found an empty passage and had to hurry down it to the kitchen, where the sounds of fighting were coming from.
She threw open the kitchen door the moment she reached it, and heard a sudden cry of pain, high-pitched and obviously female. Melissa guessed that the person she had just hit with the door was one of Kieran's sisters, the other being a short distance away; she didn't have time to worry about her, though, for in the middle of the room, Oliver Ryder was wrestling with someone. She couldn't see the face of the person Oliver was wrestling with, but she assumed it was Kieran, since it was clearly male.
Without waiting for Mitchell, who should have already been there, Melissa moved forward to try and break the fight up. If she didn't, she suspected Kieran was going to be killed, or at least left permanently injured, given the energy and enthusiasm with which Oliver was smashing his head onto the floor. It quickly became clear that it was not a good idea for her to wade in; the moment she got within a foot of the fighting pair, she was caught across the cheek by a wild swing from one of Oliver's fists.
She reeled away from the fight, but the moment she recovered her balance, she threw herself back into the fray. As best she could, she avoided the flailing arms as she sought to separate Oliver and Kieran, with only minimal success. Fortunately, Mitchell arrived before she could receive more than a few painful and annoying bruises; between them they managed to drag Oliver away from Kieran, and hold him long enough for his wrists to be secured with cuffs.
"It might be a good idea if you take the girls into the living room, while I speak to Oliver and Kieran," Mitchell said to Melissa, once he had the two young men on opposite sides of the kitchen.
"Okay." It took Melissa some persuasion to get Amelia and Tara, Kieran's sisters, out of the kitchen and along the passage to the living room. Amelia went willingly, but Tara had to be all but dragged from the kitchen.
Mitchell waited until he was reasonably sure Melissa and the two girls had reached the living room, and then he turned to Kieran. "Are you alright?" he asked.
"What the hell are you asking him for?" Oliver demanded. "He's the sick bastard killed Georgie." He launched himself across the room, catching the sergeant by surprise, and threw himself on Kieran. The fact that his hands were cuffed behind his back didn't stop him, he rammed into Kieran with his shoulder, driving him backwards into the upturned table, which had clearly suffered as a result of the fight between the two, and when Oliver stepped back, Kieran fell to the floor. There was just enough time for Oliver to lash out with a booted foot, burying it in Keiran's stomach, before he was dragged away.
"You okay?" Mitchell asked of Kieran. He shoved Oliver across the room, out of the way, and then bent to help Kieran to his feet.
"Sure. That pussy couldn't hurt a flea," Kieran said dismissively, ignoring the fact that the so-called 'pussy' had just floored him.
Oliver sneered at that. "Who the hell are you trying to kid?" he wanted to know. "If anyone's a pussy here, it's you, and you know it. You couldn't fight your way out of a wet paper bag. If your daddy hadn't been here with his shotgun last week, I'da had you in hospital, and if the pigs hadn't turned up today, I'da finished the job I started the other month. You're a sick sonofabitch and you need to die." As he raged, he struggled against the handcuffs that kept him restrained, even though he had enough experience with handcuffs to know that it was impossible for him to break out of them.
"Shut up, Oliver," Mitchell ordered. He righted one of the upturned chairs that had previously been around the table and pushed him down onto it. "You sure you're okay?" When Kieran nodded, Mitchell got down to his reason for being there. "I'm sorry to have to be the bearer of bad news, Kieran, but..."
"You never said you were sorry when you told me," Oliver butted in angrily as he half rose from the hard, wooden chair he had been put on.
Mitchell pushed Oliver back down onto the chair, glad of the handcuffs that made the violent twenty-year-old easier to deal with. "I would've said sorry, but you never gave me a chance," he said, fixing him with a hard look. "You ran off the moment I told you what's happened, before I could say something else, so you could come here and attack Kieran, for no reason other than you don't like him."
"Don't like him, I fucking hate him," Oliver snarled. "Uncuff me, I wanna kill that sick sonofabitch." He continued to struggle against the cuffs.
"Shut-up and behave yourself," Mitchell told him. He shoved Oliver down again, this time with enough force to rock the chair back on two legs momentarily. "If you don't I'll have Melissa take you out to the car while I talk with Kieran."
"Fuck you." Oliver leaned forwards to stop his chair falling over and then surged to his feet so he could launch himself at Kieran. Before he could cover half the distance, he was dragged to the floor by Mitchell.
"Mel," Mitchell called out as he struggled to keep Kieran on the floor.
Melissa skidded to a halt in the kitchen, having run down the passage to find out what was going on. It didn't surprise her to find that Oliver Ryder had been causing trouble. "What do you need?" It looked to her as though her superior had everything under control.
"Take this pain in the ass out to the car," Mitchell told her. "Shove him in the back and lock him in there, we'll take him to the station once we're finished here."
Melissa nodded and moved to take charge of the prisoner. She got him to his feet, with help from Mitchell, and then led him from the kitchen.
"Okay, now Oliver's out of the way," Mitchell said once he was alone with Kieran. "I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news..."
"It's okay, sergeant, I know why you're here," Kieran said sadly. "You've found Georgie." He didn't look at Mitchell as he said that, instead he focused on righting the table and chairs overturned during his fight with Kieran.
"How do you know that?" Mitchell asked, bending to help with the table.
"I must have been called or text by half the village in the last hour and a half," Kieran said. He gave a short, humourless laugh. "You know how it is around here, nobody can wait to pass on any news they hear, especially if it's bad news."
Mitchell nodded, well aware how much the villagers liked to gossip. "So what has everyone been telling you?" he asked, wondering how accurate the gossip had been – not very, was his guess.
"They all said pretty much the same thing," Kieran said. "That Georgie was found this morning, and that she was – she was killed." He could not bring himself to say murdered.
"That's right," Mitchell said. "I'm sorry, I wish it wasn't necessary to trouble you with this, and I wish you hadn't had to hear about this from the village gossips, I had to tell the family first, though."
"I understand, of course you had to tell Georgie's parents first."
"I hope you also understand that I need to ask you some questions. Some of them might have been asked before, but I need to ask them again, in case you've remembered something you didn't think of before."
"What sort of questions?" Kieran wanted to know.
"Well, first off, where were you on Friday evening, a week ago?"
"You already asked me that, last week."
"I know, but as I said, some of the questions I need to ask, you've already answered, but I need to be sure you didn't forget something that you remember now," Mitchell told him. "So, where were you last Friday?"
"At the cinema."
"What time was that?"
"I got there, musta been about half-eight."
"As I recall, you said you were supposed to meet Georgina."
Kieran nodded. "We were supposed to go to the cinema together. She text me just after six to say she was stopping at her cousin's, and would meet me at the farm after, then we could head into town. She never turned up, though. I hung around for ages, waiting for her, then I went looking, but couldn't find her. In the end, I gave up and went into town on my own. I never saw her."
"Weren't you worried when she didn't show up like she was supposed to?"
Kieran thought about that briefly and then shook his head. "I think I was more annoyed than worried. When she didn't turn up, I figured Georgie had let her bloody cousin talk her into stick around and cleaning up after him, and his two moron friends, like he always does. I thought, if that's what she wanted to do, it was fine with me, I'd just go and see a film I wanted to see, instead of the stupid, sappy romance I was supposed to see with her."
"What time did you get back from the cinema?"
Kieran shrugged. "Half-twelve, one a.m., something like that I'd guess. I don't really remember. It was definitely after midnight, 'cause the film didn't finish 'til about eleven, and it's over an hour's drive to get back here from the cinema."
"Can any of your family confirm what time you got home?"
"No, they were all in bed, so it was definitely after midnight 'cause Amy's usually up 'til 'bout midnight. Wait, yes, Tara can. She might not know exactly what time it was, but she can give you a rough idea," Kieran said as he remembered. "A ninja I'm not, I dropped my phone on the way up the stairs, and it bounced all the way down; the noise woke Tara, she came to see what was going on, had a go at me for waking her, went to the bathroom for a pee, and then went back to bed."
It took another couple of minutes for Mitchell to be sure he had everything Kieran could tell him about the evening Georgina had disappeared. "Just a couple more questions, Kieran, then you can get on with your day."
Kieran sighed but didn't react beyond that.
"Why didn't you pick Georgina up, instead of her coming out here to meet you? You could have met her at Oliver's, it would have been more sensible than her walking up here."
"I was supposed to meet her down in the village," Kieran admitted. "But I was having problems with my car. I've been trying to save up enough to get it fixed for good, but I can't afford it right now, so I'm having to bodge it. Damn thing conked out on me just as I was leaving to pick Georgie up, took me and dad about twenty minutes to get it going again. I text Georgie to let her know what was going on, that's when she said she was gonna stop in at her cousin's, and head up here, if she didn't hear from me first."
"Why didn't you head down to Oliver's to pick her up once you got the car going?"
Kieran snorted. "You've seen what he's like, he hates me, attacks me every time he sees me. Georgie hates it when I fight with her idiot of a cousin, so I avoid him as much as I can."
Mitchell doubted that that was the only reason Kieran avoided Oliver; he suspected it was more because he wasn't as tough as his girlfriend's cousin, and didn't want to get beaten up.
"I didn't want to get into a fight, that's why I stayed away; besides, I figured if Georgie was gonna choose to hang out with her cousin, instead of going to the cinema with me, I was better off going on my own." He shrugged, as if it didn't really matter, but his indifference was quickly replaced by a deep sadness. "When I – when I heard the next morning that Georgie was – that she was missing..." He fell silent for several long moments. "I wished I'd looked for her, wished I'd done more than just text to ask where she was, and then gotten annoyed when she didn't answer.
"Maybe – maybe if I'd been able to make her see how obsessed Oliver, that fucking asshole," he snarled, "is with her, she would – would've been alright."
Mitchell saw the accusation implicit in the teen's words, and knew he would have to ask more questions before he could move on. "What is it, exactly, that makes you think Oliver might have had something to do with Georgina's disappearance, and how she was found?"
"Come on, you can't tell you don't know about his obsession with Georgie," Kieran said. "He acts like she's his girlfriend, not his cousin. He texts and calls her all the time, has her at his house cleaning up after him and his friends, running errands; he always touching her as well, like he wants her; you know what I mean?"
Mitchell didn't need to be a genius to understand what Kieran was trying to say, even if he didn't believe it, so he nodded.
"I think that's what happened," Kieran said. "He forgot Georgie's his cousin, not his girlfriend – I mean, he gets aggro whenever she starts seeing someone – tried it on with her, and then snapped when she threatened to tell her parents what he'd done."
"It's certainly a theory we'll have to look into," Mitchell promised. "There's something else I need to ask you about."
"What?" Kieran didn't even try to conceal his frustration. "Dad'll be home for lunch any time, he'll want his food ready, and he won't want to see this mess."
"I'm sorry, I'll be as quick as I can," Mitchell said. "Did you see Lucy Goulding yesterday afternoon? Specifically, at any point from lunchtime onwards."
Kieran nodded. "Sure, I saw her yesterday," he said without hesitation. "Is she in trouble?"
"No, but we are concerned about her. As far as we've been able to tell, nobody has seen Lucy since she got on the bus in town yesterday lunchtime to come back to the village. She would have made it back here a bit before one; did you see her after that time?"
"Yeah, I saw her, must have been about two, something like that."
"Where?" Mitchell asked, hoping that he was about to hear something that would advance his investigation.
"Just down the road actually," Kieran told him. "I was heading out to get some stuff done after a late lunch when my bloody car conked out again. I didn't make it more than a hundred yards beyond the gate. I was trying to get it going again when I saw Lucy, she was at the old Henshaw cottage, being let in by that new guy, I forget his name, the one Amy's been helping with his gardens."
"Zack Wild?"
"Yeah, that's the guy."
Mitchell could not believe it had been as easy as that to get confirmation of what he and Melissa suspected. "Thank you, Kieran, now I've got just one last question for you, then I'll be out of your hair." He could see that the teen was frustrated to the point of swearing, so he got straight on with it. "Do you know how long Lucy was with Mr Wild for?"
"No." Kieran shook his head. "But it was a while. I was fifteen, twenty minutes fixing my car, and she hadn't come back out by the time I was done. Mind you, I'm not surprised, given what she was wearing."
"What was that?"
"The shortest skirt I've ever seen her wearing. It was so short I didn't think it was a skirt at first – she had a hell of a lot of leg on show." A smile played about his lips at the memory. "If I was that guy, Wild, I'd've wanted to keep her there for as long as possible, if only for the view."
"I'll leave you and the girls to get things ready for your dad," Mitchell said. "Thanks for your help." He left then, collecting Melissa from the living room on the way out of the house.