The Colour Of Shadows

The Pit - Part 4

I awoke, hardly five hours later and despite my obvious fatigue found myself too restless to sleep.

With it still the early hours of the morning I decided to double-check my packed case and review the information we had at hand so far.

A few brief phone calls the day before had confirmed that our client had returned to his place of work on the date we were informed, this was further proven by the punched train tickets the client had provided.

The second call confirmed that both the clients daughter and wife had spent the night at the hotel marked as their last known location and that our client had turned up at the reception lobby later that day in some distress and confusion.

When pressed a little more on the wife and child, the receptionist on the line stated that nothing truly seemed amiss between the pair, they had been courteous in handing over the room key and complimentary of the services on hand.

Although, she did recall that the child had seemed oddly distracted, quiet and sullen, spending much of her time standing near and staring out of the lobby window, twice ignoring her mother's call in favor of watching the woods outside.

Whereas it isn't uncommon for a child's attention to be easily caught, I thought it best to run it by the father before we left that morning.

I then called the train station and as luck would have it managed to talk to the same attendant that had been on duty that morning, I asked if he had seen anyone of the description our client had given me but he couldn't be sure, he'd worked several shifts since then and had seen so many faces it would have been nigh on impossible to pick out one face from all the others. I also asked if a rented car of the description given by the father had ever turned up at the station, or had been towed away from unpaid fee's, and after checking the records for that week he told me that no, no vehicle had ever turned up or been towed.

After a final brief phone call to our client I went over what the clerk on duty had told me, and the father in turn told me that it wasn't at all unusual for his daughter to wander off from time to time, she had quite an adventurous streak in her.

What concerned him more was that she had been quiet as in his own words "I ain't never known 'er to be quiet for long. She's such a chatty kid, y'know?"

I thought that this may just be a child's behavior, which could mean just about anything, so I left it there and thought no more of it.