This Dark Town I: When You're Gone

By Marguerite O'Callaghan

***** "There's no messing around with this book, it jumps straight into the action and keeps that pace up throughout. I love that it's set in my favourite parts of North London and there are some truly dark edges to the book."

The first book from 'This Dark Town' mystery thriller trilogy.

Eighteen-year-old Lydia Stone wakes up one morning in the north London gothic mansion she shares with her family, to find that her twin sister Kate has disappeared off the face of the earth.

CCTV footage shows Kate entering a night club in south London on the night she went missing, but there is no evidence that she ever came out of the club, and police are considering the idea that she was sex-trafficked.

In the days and weeks that follow, Lydia takes a closer look at her twin sister's life; her modelling career, penchant for fetish clubs and interesting array of older friends. It seems like Kate was definitely hiding something. But she isn't the only one...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marguerite O'Callaghan
• Release date: Mar 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463014042

Book preview

Prologue

No-one has seen or heard from eighteen-year-old Kate Stone in almost five days. She just went out one night and never came home. No texts. No calls. Nothing.

Kate is extremely popular and well-liked, a successful model with a wide circle of friends and a large extended family.

At first, police assume it will be a classic runaway situation and the teenager will be home as soon as she gets lonely, bored or runs out of money, but new information just received means things have escalated and a full team is now on the case.

CCTV cameras place Kate at a night-club in south London on the night she went missing: Friday 6th May.

The strange thing is the footage shows Kate going into the night-club, but there is no evidence she ever came back out.

It’s like the ground just opened up and swallowed her whole.

1

Detective Tom McCarthy parks just off East Heath Road in Hampstead, North London. He’s outside Hepburn House and about to meet the people who live there; the distraught family of missing teenager, Kate Stone.

This gothic mansion has been in the Stone family for almost a century and it’s the last place Kate was seen by her family on Friday night.

McCarthy is sure that someone, or something inside its giant walls will help him to figure out where she is.

The detective rolls his eyes when he spots his partner, Phil Davies smoking and staring at his phone outside the front gates of Hepburn House. McCarthy slams the car door behind him, nods at Davies, and walks the short distance to where he’s standing.

‘Are you undercover, mate? What’s with the denim, and that stain on your shirt? Have you been up all night or something?’

Davies didn’t make it in for the morning meeting, and it isn’t the first time he’s looked so disheveled at work, either. McCarthy lets him know it’s not going unnoticed and Davies shakes his head dramatically in apology.

‘Sorry, boss. I had another fight with Caroline and ended up driving off in a hurry. I stayed at a friend’s place in Chalk Farm.’

McCarthy responds with an unimpressed look and opens the small gate in front of them leading to the Stone’s driveway.

Davies, quickly drops his cigarette to the ground and as he follows McCarthy through the gate and across the graveled driveway, he changes the subject to Kate Stone.

‘Hey, I googled this missing girl and all I can say is ‘wow’. You never said she was a model. She looks like Cheryl Cole, man!’

McCarthy silences his partner with a solemn look.

‘When are you going to grow up, Davies? She’s a missing person, not a potential Tinder date. You know, I can actually have a more mature conversation with my four-year-old daughter. Get a grip!’

McCarthy rings the doorbell and rolls his eyes. His patience is wearing thin.

But, Davies can’t help himself, and after a few brief moments of silence, starts again.

‘You know what the best thing is?’

McCarthy turns and glares at him, wide-eyed.

‘What?’ he almost spits.

Davies leans in closer and with a slight smile and a distinct twinkle in his eye, whispers:

‘There’s two of them. She’s got a twin!’

Before McCarthy can tell his idiotic partner to shut up and take things a little bit more seriously, the door opens and a pale and disturbed-looking Mrs Stone appears before them.

‘Gentlemen. Good morning. I’m Barbara. Come in please. I’ll make us some tea.’

Barbara delivers her words gracefully and manages a weak smile before making her way down the long hall towards the kitchen.

The men step inside and close the heavy door behind them. McCarthy gives his partner a look of warning, but Davies is blissfully unaware and stares around, open-mouthed.

Hepburn House is huge. The hallway alone is about two-hundred square feet and its walls are covered in sculptures, abstract landscapes, portraits and old maps.

Some of the traditional pieces look like they’ve come straight out of The National Gallery and the ceilings are the highest Davies has ever seen in a domestic residence.

But there’s not enough time to look as hard as he would like to and he follows McCarthy and Barbara down the hall to the large well-lit kitchen at the back of the house.

Barbara Stone is often mistaken for her twin daughters’ older sister. She’s undeniably beautiful, with olive skin, hazel eyes and long dark hair that hovers just above her narrow waist.

She had Kate and Lydia when she was twenty-three and felt like the three of them grew up together.

Due to a medical complication during the birth, Barbara wasn’t able to have any more children after the twins were born, but she and her husband, Brian are perfectly content with their family exactly the way it is.

It was only when the twins got to thirteen or fourteen that Barbara felt a bit left out, like she’d lost her best friends. The spa days and late-night cinema outings came to a sudden halt and the girls - especially Kate - wanted privacy above all else and didn’t even like Barbara coming into their bedrooms.

Everyone kept saying that’s just what teenagers were like, but Barbara had felt tossed aside.

That being said, she knew she was lucky to have Brian and the girls. Her life could have taken a very different turn if it wasn’t for them and in the eighteen years since the twins were born she has been asking herself what she did to deserve this happy, comfortable life.

Nothing could ever have prepared her for what was happening now.

‘Mrs Stone, will your husband be joining us, as planned?’

McCarthy’s voice is gentle. He waits patiently for Barbara’s response and watches as she pours tea into three large green mugs.

‘Yes. Sorry. He’s upstairs with Lydia at the moment. She’s had a bad night. Give them a minute. They know you’re here… and please, Detective, call me Barbara.’

Even in the middle of this, Barbara is the perfect hostess, bringing fruit cake and biscuits to the table and doing her best to make the men feel welcome.

But, she looks up at the ceiling, hoping her husband will appear soon.

She doesn’t want to do this alone.

Sure enough, a few minutes later, Brian appears at the kitchen door.

He’s a tall slim man with sparkling blue eyes, thin lips, receding grey hair and a short beard. At fifty-eight, he’s seventeen years older than his wife.

He introduces himself, shakes hands with McCarthy and Davies and thanks them for coming before giving Barbara a kiss on the cheek.

Brian was the one to call 999 on Saturday, but because of Kate’s age and the fact that she hadn’t been missing for more than twenty-four hours, police could do very little besides writing up a report at that stage.

The lady he’d spoken to had been very helpful and given him some comfort in the statistics she was aware of, as she explained how lots of teenage girls did this sort of thing after a fight with a boyfriend or experimenting with alcohol.

She also said that as upsetting as it is, the vast majority of missing teenagers turn up after a few days and she asked if Kate had done anything like this before.

Brian snapped back at her in response, saying that of course she hadn’t. Then, he remembered her sixteenth birthday.

Kate had wanted to go to Brighton for the weekend with a couple of school friends and he and Barbara had said she was too young to go away for that length of time.

She’d had a huge tantrum, stormed out of the house and didn’t call or text for the whole weekend.

They were furious and grounded her for two months when she came back. Even Lydia had stopped talking to her for a few days and those two were usually joined at the hip.

Kate had always been loud and a bit of a risk-taker, but this blatant betrayal of trust had left the whole family in a state of shock. None of them could believe that she would do something so rebellious.

Brian had hung up the phone and turned to his wife, smiling weakly as he reminded her about the Brighton weekend.

Since that first call to police, another day had passed. And another.

When Barbara called them again on Monday she was completely frantic and literally begging for their help.

The family had already contacted all of Kate’s friends and nobody had any idea where she might be, and it didn’t look like she ran off somewhere for fun either.

Barbara had felt in her gut that something awful had happened to her daughter.

Now, McCarthy and Davies sit at one side of the table and the Stones sit at the other.

Brian tells them to ask anything at all they think might help, but McCarthy wants to leave the questions until Lydia joins them.

Lydia’s been lurking out in the hallway for a few minutes and when she hears her name, she meekly enters the room, walks to the large kitchen table and slides onto the bench next to her dad, without catching anyone’s eye or acknowledging the detectives’ presence.

She is naturally slim like her sister and extraordinarily beautiful, with the same dark eyes, exquisite bone structure and long dark hair.

But, today she also looks frail and ill. Her blue cardigan falls off to one side and the exposed bare shoulder looks skeletal.

Lydia’s usually perfect skin is pale and blotchy too and her eyes are bloodshot from crying.

Barbara instinctively reaches out to fix Lydia’s cardigan and gently moves her long hair out of her face.

‘Tea, my love?’

Lydia says yes to tea, smiles weakly at the strangers sitting opposite and fiddles with the bracelets on her wrist.

It doesn’t take long for McCarthy to get down to business and over the next hour the family answer question after question about Kate’s life.

They hand over her laptop, phone, some personal photographs and make a list of anyone they can think of that she may have been in touch with.

McCarthy asks about her modelling career and how she got into that line of work in the first place, so Lydia carefully tells him about the night they both met Hugh Thomas at a cabaret show at Proud in Camden.

Hugh had given Kate his business card and told her he owned a modelling agency, but neither she nor Lydia believed he was the real deal until they googled him the next day.

Then, Kate had been delirious with excitement. She’d dreamed about getting into modelling since she was twelve or thirteen, and immediately started talking about flying all over the world, meeting celebrities and getting into acting one day.

Kate was thrilled at the idea of being famous and Hugh Thomas was offering just that.

But, Kate was only sixteen at that point and Hugh wanted her parents’ permission before she did any work for him.

‘My husband and I weren’t sure about all this modelling business at first, but to be honest it didn’t come as a huge shock when she was scouted. Did it, Brian?’

Brian nods to his wife in agreement and takes over when she stops speaking.

‘Kate wanted to do lots of things… acting, art, fashion blogging. But this modelling thing just lit her whole face up, you know? And she had what it took to make it, so… how could we say no?’

Brian looks at Lydia and explains to McCarthy and Davies that his daughters are very different from each other.

Hugh had asked Lydia to consider modelling too, but she wasn’t interested.

Brian explains that Lydia is shy, quite introverted compared to her sister and isn’t really into fashion or make-up or being the centre of attention.

Lydia looks self-conscious and irritated at the way her father is describing her and she almost squirms uncomfortably in her seat.

She continues to play with the bracelets on her wrist as her parents explain that since signing with Hugh’s agency, Kate has done really well, travelled lots and was planning to defer her journalism degree for a couple of years.

She wanted to model first, see the world. She’d also won some big campaigns in the past two years, earning large amounts of money.

On hearing this, McCarthy asks what Kate does with her earnings and Barbara and Brian look at one another, as if trying to figure out if the other one knows how to answer his question.

Lydia rolls her eyes and sighs at their reaction.

‘Kate spends her modelling money.’

Her tone is matter of fact and her voice is louder than before.

‘I’m sure she’s got some in the bank and she’s bought a new car and things like that, but she spends a lot on partying, holidays, clothes…’

‘How much money are we talking?’ McCarthy asks.

‘It’s important we know how much she can get her hands on.’

Before exchanging a look and nod with her husband, Barbara tells the detectives that she doesn’t know the exact amount, but she could see that the balance on Kate’s current account was £175,000 recently when Kate was accessing her online bank account on her laptop.

‘…and that doesn’t include her investment plan or savings account.’

Davies whistles under his breath and McCarthy shoots him a look.

‘That’s a lot of cash for a teenager to have access to. Does your daughter have an accountant?’ McCarthy asks, calmly.

‘…and can we get a breakdown of her earnings? Has anyone been able to see if she’s accessed any money since Friday? That’s really the most important thing to know.’

Barbara and Brian look at one another for reassurance.

It’s obvious that neither of them have a clue about Kate’s finances.

‘Mr and Mrs Stone, I need one of you to call the bank immediately to escalate this. Give them my name, the reference number on this card and tell them they can call the police station directly to verify this is real. As of today, this is a missing person case and we need to move fast.’

Barbara leaves the room to call the bank and McCarthy continues to flick through Kate’s modelling portfolio.

It’s obvious that the twins are identical, but in the modelling shots Kate looks so much older than her sister and some of the images are extremely provocative.

In one, for a well-known lingerie brand, she’s lying on a bed, wearing high heels and the smallest piece of black lace imaginable, her hair barely covering her breasts.

Lydia hovers next to him as he slowly turns the pages.

‘She’s almost unrecognisable with all that make-up, isn’t she? Glamour shots they call those.’

As she comments on the images, McCarthy notices the smell of cigarette smoke on Lydia’s clothes and the chipped nail varnish on her bitten, unkempt fingernails.

He has a feeling that she isn’t the shy wall-flower her parents think she is.

Maybe, compared to her twin sister she seems quiet, but Lydia Stone certainly has all the typical teenage girl traits he’s seen in his nieces.

McCarthy has grown to believe that there is a certain contradiction in the way teenagers want to be perceived.

They want to blend in with their peers but they also long to stand out, to be original and special.

It seems like they’re in constant turmoil about who they are; one of the crowd or totally unique.

McCarthy imagines eighteen must be a pretty tricky age, not quite an adult but not a child anymore, either.

He’s also getting the impression that Lydia doesn’t love the fact that Kate is such a successful model and he wonders if she’s jealous of all the attention and money her sister gets.

He notices the way Lydia looks at him as he flicks through Kate’s modelling photographs and thinks she definitely seems irritated.

He leans in to take a closer look at the lingerie shot.

‘This doesn’t leave much to the imagination. Does it?’

Lydia responds immediately, her voice a little louder than his.

‘Quite slutty I think, but Kate doesn’t care. She loves it, actually.’

Brian gives his daughter a stern look when he hears what she’s said.

McCarthy changes the subject.

‘I need to ask about the club Kate went to on Friday night.’

McCarthy looks at Brian first, then Lydia. He wants to make sure they’re paying attention before he continues.

‘Haven, as you may or