Just What Kind of Mother Are You? Read Online Free PDF

detectives don’t find themselves in many car chases, it mostly being traffic who deal with the druggies on the run, the stolen vehicles. Which was a shame, because Joanne liked a good chase.
    At the station they said Joanne had two speeds: stop, and gone.
    Sometimes she wondered if she’d made a mistake joining CID. Slow cars. And she’d certainly be making more money by now as a uniform; she’d be a sergeant. It was harder to rise up through the ranks as detective. That’s why the force was short of them. It put the younger officers off, especially if they had families to support.
    Joanne glances back up to the house and considers the scene she’s just left. Naturally, her first instinct is to suspect the family. The statistics don’t lie. Children are almost always abducted by someone they know.
    It’s one of the trickiest approaches to pull off as a detective – gathering the necessary information from the family, simultaneouslykeeping a demeanour of total empathy and clocking the parents for anything out of the ordinary.
    Of course Joanne’s been trained never to make assumptions. Not in this job: it wastes time. It clouds judgement and leaves avenues unexplored. The words of Joanne’s old chemistry teacher pop into her mind each time she thinks of this: ‘Never assume,’ he used to say, during experiments, ‘because to assume makes an ASS out of U and ME.’
    Joanne smiles briefly as she takes out her notepad. She observes the list in front of her and, without really understanding why, she underlines the name Guy Riverty. The missing girl’s father. She sees she’s already written it bolder than the others. Already gone over the ‘G’ a few times without realizing, when she was questioning the couple.
    What was it about him? There was no previous; he was all very above board and proper. But even so something didn’t sit quite right with her. Joanne looks around at the snow-covered valley as she thinks. Guy Riverty had an awkward, uncomfortable air about him. Babbling, but not really saying anything. Richard Madeley sprang to mind.
    Babbling per se was fine with Joanne. After an incident, particularly something unsettling, people tend either to talk continuously or to go silent; there was no in between. They either needed to tell Joanne absolutely everything , beginning at the moment they were born and leading up to whatever had put them in the particular time and place of the incident, or else they said nothing, they became mute.
    Joanne was good with the mutes. Especially the guilty ones. She didn’t use tricks. No good cop, bad cop. No ‘Trust in Me’ routine, like Kaa, the hypnotic snake from The Jungle Book who had frightened Joanne to death when she was a kid. No, Joanne was methodical and conscientious. She started at the beginning and worked her way through to the end until she got what she needed.
    If this made her boring, she didn’t care. If it got up her colleagues’ noses, she didn’t care about that either. She worked this way because it was the only way to work. You get cavalier-cocky during an investigation and there’s only one outcome: you end up looking like a complete tosser. And Joanne had worked with enough fools over the past few years to know that swinging your dick about didn’t guarantee results. Quite the contrary.
    Joanne taps her pen on the steering wheel and thinks about the missing girl.
    Lucinda Riverty.
    Thirteen years old, slight, small, with her mousy-brown hair cut just below her chin. She likes school, she’s doing grade-five piano, she’s not keen on sport, not what you’d call outgoing. But neither would you say she was introverted. Just an ordinary girl.
    But, to her parents, an extraordinary girl . An extraordinary girl who’s now gone.
    ‘Who took this one?’ Joanne wonders out loud.

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    A LWAYS , SAYS J OE .
    Me and Joe together, always.
    It’s what he said to me when I pushed his babies out. What he says when I’m vomiting hard over the toilet