No Second Chances: A British police dog-handler mystery (Daniel Whelan #4)(8)

‘Hi,’ she said, a little shyly. ‘Thank you for coming.’

Once again, she was wearing a sloppy jumper, which today exposed one shoulder and the strap of a red vest top beneath. Her hair hung in a long silvery-gold plait over the other shoulder and her hands were partly hidden by lacy black fingerless gloves. Her collarbone stood out in a sharply defined ridge and Daniel wondered if she was anorexic.

A waitress materialized beside them and he ordered coffee and a slice of chocolate cake. Zoe’s coffee cup was empty and she accepted the offer of a refill with a slightly abstracted air. Daniel added a second slice of cake to the order and sat back to wait for the youngster to unburden herself.

This, after the apparent urgency of the phone call, she seemed reluctant to do, and Daniel wondered if she’d had second thoughts.

‘Have you changed your mind?’ he asked, after a couple of minutes during which she seemed absorbed in fiddling with the lace of her mitts. Her hands were small and the nails a shiny black. He half-hoped she had changed her mind, but for Lorna’s sake, it would not have felt right to just walk away, at this stage.

‘No!’ she looked up. ‘It’s just … It’s difficult.’

‘I gathered that much.’

‘I’m seeing this guy …’

‘And your mum doesn’t approve?’ Daniel hazarded a guess. His first thought was that she had got herself pregnant, but he swiftly discounted that. Eminently possible, it was nevertheless something a fifteen-year-old girl might disclose to a member of her peer group but emphatically not to a male stranger twice her age – besides which, her interest in him had been as an ex-policeman.

‘Mum’s never even met him!’ Zoe exclaimed. ‘So what gives her the right to judge him? It’s totally unfair!’

Daniel didn’t think it would help to point out that as Zoe was underage, her mother had every right to be concerned about her relationships.

‘Is he older than you?’ he asked, backing a hunch.

‘A little,’ she conceded.

He raised an eyebrow.

‘He’s not old old. He’s only nineteen! It’s not like he’s thirty or something,’ she protested.

Ouch, Daniel thought ruefully. Still, four years could make all the difference when they bridged the age of consent.

‘So why don’t you invite her to meet him?’ he suggested, smiling a brief thank you to the waitress, who had arrived with their order.

Zoe waited until they were alone once more, then said, ‘I have. She refuses. But that’s not the problem, anyway.’

‘OK. So why don’t you tell me what is – or do I have to keep guessing?’ He pushed the second slice of cake in her direction and was pleased to see that after a quick glance of enquiry she had no hesitation in taking a mouthful.

‘I know what you’re thinking but it’s not just a teenage crush,’ she said then, around a mouthful of chocolate sponge. ‘It really isn’t. This is the real thing. We want to be together – to get married and do the whole settling-down thing.’

‘You can’t get married, you’re only fifteen,’ Daniel pointed out, beginning to sympathize with Lorna’s objections but no nearer to discovering where he came into the equation.

‘Sixteen in January,’ Zoe stated, brushing that technicality aside as of little importance. ‘The trouble is that we’ll need somewhere to live and Shane can’t afford a van, so he needed some money to buy his horse back and enter this race – but it was only going to be for a week or two …’

‘Whoa! Wait a minute!’ Daniel said, sifting the sudden rush of information. ‘You’re planning on living in a caravan?’

‘They’re not, like, any old caravan, they’re beautiful,’ she said defensively. ‘Shane showed me his sister’s van one time and it was lovely – nicer than my room at home.’

Daniel was conscious of a sinking feeling of inevitability.

‘Shane …?’

‘Brennan.’

‘He wouldn’t by any chance be a Traveller, would he?’

‘So what if he is?’ she demanded, her voice rising. ‘He’s all right. He’s really nice. The discrimination against them is totally unfair! Anyway, he’s an Irish Traveller, not a New Age or a Gypsy!’

Oh well, that’s all right then, Daniel thought, but he kept his tongue between his teeth. He sensed Zoe was within an inch of walking out on him and in spite of his misgivings, from what he’d heard so far he didn’t want to risk that.

‘OK, calm down,’ he said. ‘People are looking.’

Zoe glanced round briefly, then returned her accusatory gaze to Daniel, who attempted to sort out the facts from the hysteria.

‘You mentioned him wanting money to buy a horse for a race. He wants to buy a racehorse?’

‘Not a thoroughbred racehorse!’ Zoe exclaimed impatiently. ‘Trotting – you know, in harness. Anyway, there’s this trotting race – a really big one they have every year – and the prize is this really amazing caravan. So Shane has been helping train this horse that was really, really fast but then the man who owned her put her up for sale, so Shane thought if he could buy her, he could enter the race and win the caravan, but the trouble is, he hasn’t got enough money.’