by Danny Miller
‘When did it end?’
‘Three years ago.’
‘I’ll ask again: when did it end?’
Gail Hanson’s head drooped and she squeezed her eyes shut, as if to block out the reality of her situation. It didn’t work. She raised her head again and her eyes sprang open.
‘It hasn’t. Not really. I tried to end it … But he wouldn’t listen, and I couldn’t …’
‘When was the last time you saw him?’
‘We arranged to meet up … Thursday morning. The day Ruby was taken. I’d arranged to meet Jamie at a hotel, in London. That’s where he lives now. I told him it was over, that I couldn’t do it any more. We’d been meeting up once, twice a month. We’d book a room. It sounds seedy, I know that. But sometimes, sometimes we’d just lie on the bed and cuddle, and talk. And when we talked I never wanted to leave him. But when I got home, with Ruby and Richard, I always knew I would never leave them, especially Ruby. Richard has always said he’d fight me tooth and nail for custody.’
‘Did you tell Jamie Bucknell this?’
‘Yes. That morning. He went mad, I’ve never seen him like that before. It was the most angry I’ve ever seen him. He said he’d lost everything for me, his wife, his job … everything. Then he stormed out. Of course, we haven’t spoken since.’
‘How angry, Gail, angry enough to abduct Ruby? After all, she’s the reason you can’t be with him. Did he know this?’
She squeezed her eyes closed again, and raised her hands to her face, for good measure. Clarke didn’t have the patience, and Ruby didn’t have the time. She grabbed Gail’s wrists and firmly yanked her hands away from her face.
‘You said he stormed out, what time did he storm out?’
‘You don’t think he could have—?’
‘Are you telling me you haven’t thought about this possibility?’
The answer, like a child’s guileless guilt, was etched all over her face. ‘About eleven … twelve at the latest. We always met in the morning, it gave me plenty of time to get back to Denton to pick Ruby up.’
‘Midday?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can I use your phone?’
‘Does Richard have to know?’
Clarke heard a car skid to a messy halt outside. It was Frost in his yellow Metro – he didn’t believe in using the brakes sensibly, preferred a sort of emergency stop that inflicted whiplash on any unlucky and unsuspecting passenger. Sue had got used to grabbing the dash whenever they arrived at their destination – there were the crescent-moon indents of her nails in the moulded plastic to prove it.
Richard Hanson let himself and Frost in. His wife didn’t close her eyes now. What good would it do? There was nowhere to escape to.
Saturday (3)
Frost was sitting on a chair in his office the wrong way round, with his arms perched on the backrest and his aching back pressed against the radiator. Heat. That was the thing, that and lying on the floor, and popping ibuprofen like Smarties, to give him relief and help stave off the pain.
John Waters was pacing Frost’s office, energized by facts and possible leads on Ruby’s abductors.
‘Chamley’s was the only shop in Denton that stocked these limited-edition Cabbage Patch dolls—’
‘Not even Aster’s department store?’
‘Nope. Three bought for cash, one bought on an Access card, the last one bought on a Bennington Bank credit card.’
‘That’s not that great, means you can’t trace three of them.’
‘Yes, we can, and we have. You see, these Cabbage Patch dolls come with a “Birth Certificate”, with the kid who owns it being the mum.’
‘Or dad?’
‘Fair point, or dad.’
Frost shook his head, ‘Jesus wept, I don’t remember toys being this elaborate in my day. Bloomin’ ridiculous.’
Waters handed him a list of names and addresses. ‘As you can see, Ruby’s name is there.’
Frost’s phone rang. He winced as he made some geriatric attempts to dismount from his chair, but Waters saved him further humiliation by picking up the receiver and handing it to him. It was a DI from the Met, telling Frost they’d made a call to an address they had for Jamie Bucknell, a bedsit in Tooting Bec. Bucknell wasn’t there and his landlord hadn’t seen him in a couple of days. Frost explained that Bucknell was now a priority suspect in the Ruby Hanson abduction.
The DI from the Met assured Frost they’d treat Bucknell as such, and would put an unmarked car on surveillance at his address. Frost thanked him, put the phone down and told Waters the score.
‘What do you want to do about the other names on the list?’
Frost, still thinking about Jamie Bucknell, and with other little thought worms burrowing around his grey matter, looked blank. ‘The list? What list? Help me, John, I’m confused, un-confuse me.’
‘The idea was to find out who else had the same doll as Ruby, and might have a connection to her, to eliminate potential hoaxers.’
‘Of course. Yes, we’re on it.’
‘You want me and Clarke to go, so you can rest your back?’
He looked affronted at the very suggestion. ‘No, I bloody well don’t.’ Frost this time levered himself off the chair with a determined look on his face, pulled out his box of ibuprofen, popped a pill from the blister pack, and necked it with the dregs of his now cold and bitter Mellow Bird’s coffee. A thought struck him: ‘How about Longthorn, any joy?’
‘Didn’t you get my message? I left a note on your …’
Frost and Waters glanced down at the mess; needles and haystacks came to mind as they both realized the futility of trying to find anything on the DI’s desk.
‘Spoke to Dr Edmunds,’ said Waters. ‘Nice guy, very helpful. He’s going to fax over a list of ex-employees from the last six months. Said he’d try and make it as comprehensive as possible, but they’ve had a huge turnover of staff the last few years. Something he’s trying to put a stop to.’
‘That’s what he told me,’ said Frost, biting down on the butt of the Rothmans he’d just put in his mouth to help disguise the pain as he straightened up.
Waters looked concerned. ‘You sure about coming along?’
‘It’s barely a twinge. And anyway, Susan’s at the Hansons’ waiting for a call from the potential kidnapper. And probably stopping the two of them killing each other. I knew it was too good to be true.’
‘What was?’
‘People being happily married.’
‘Tell me about it.’ Waters shook his head ruefully.
‘It’s just awful, our prayers are with Ruby and her family. Sorry I couldn’t have been of more help.’
‘You have, Mr Bridges,’ said Waters, ‘you’ve taken your name off the list.’
‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ said Tony Bridges, holding up the doll with its accompanying certificate and, most importantly, its head still intact. ‘This doll cost an arm and a leg and my daughter doesn’t even play with it any more – now it’s all about My Little Pony.’
Tony Bridges closed the door of 13 Arcadia Avenue, home of Little Miss Lucy Number 67, the ‘daughter’ of Debbie Bridges, aged seven and three quarters. In the three homes Frost and Waters had visited thus far, all of the Cabbage Patch dolls still had their heads attached, and lived in middle-class comfort with families who would no more abduct a child than rip the head off their kid’s dolly. Still, the detectives lived in hope – three down, two to go.
Frost and Waters were on the doorstep of 52 Montpelier Road, not far from the university. The buzzer had sounded, and there were some yelps of excitement and screams of pure joy from inside. They came, the detectives saw through the frosted-glass door, from the figure of a young woman in a lilac dressing gown. When the door was opened, she didn’t disappoint – she was in her early twenties, with a scramble of long, just-got-out-of-bed blonde hair, bright blue eyes with just a hint of a heavy night fraying their edges, and lips that looked set in a permanent pout.
‘Bit early for pizza, I would have thought?’ said Frost.
‘Not if you’d had the night we’ve had, sweetie.’
The two detectives showed their warrant cards.
‘Oh, Lordy Lord, what did we do last night? Nothing that bad, I’m sure.’
John Waters gave her his best, relax-it’s-nothing-to-worry-about smile, and backed it up with, ‘Probably broke a few hearts, I imagine, but it’s not last night we’ve come to talk about.’
‘Will you be needing to come in?’
‘I think so,’ said Frost.
She then turned her head and called out, ‘Ladies, make yourselves decent, we have company – it’s the police. And I’m not bloody joking!’
Frost and Waters were led into the living room to be greeted by two other girls, also in jim-jams and dressing gowns. Both at various stages of glowering hangovers, and drinking some rough-and-ready Bloody Marys, as indicated by the bottle of supermarket vodka and the cans of V8 juice on the coffee table. It was very much a student house, with worn mismatched decor, made cosy and feminine by fairy lights around the fireplace; and colourful cushions and fluffy throws over the dull rental three-piece suite.
They were Katy, Abbie and Harriet, and they were all twenty-one. But no Louisa Hamilton, who was the ‘mother’ of Little Miss Lucy Number 654.
‘She’s moved out,’ said Abbie, cross-legged on the floor.
‘She didn’t move out, we threw her out,’ clarified Katy, the one who had answered the door and was now propped on the arm of the sofa, playing with Harriet’s long red corkscrew curls.
‘That sounds worse than it is,’ said Harriet, who was laid out on the sofa, obviously suffering the most, swatting Katy’s hand away from her hair. ‘Louisa was a nice girl, just not our kind of nice girl. She was … a bit too prim and proper.’
‘And weird,’ added Abbie, studying the split ends of her black crimped hair.
‘What was weird about her?’ asked Frost.
On hearing this, they all sort of perked up and paid attention, as if realizing for the first time they were in the company of police officers, and not overgrown nosy pizza-delivery boys.
‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.’
‘It’s OK, Abbie, we’re just trying to find out where she is. Has she left town?’
They all looked at Katy, as if she had become the designated adult in the room. Katy said, ‘We three were all at uni together, she wasn’t, so it must have been hard for her coming in to the house. But she just wasn’t our type. Very … intense?’ The others nodded. ‘She left two weeks ago, she may have gone back to her parents’, I think they live locally, maybe Bamford or Rimmington. She wanted to be in Denton for work, you know, because Denton’s where it’s at.’
‘So they tell me,’ said Frost, unable to tell if she was being ironic or not. That was the usual assumption when it came to the town he loved and served.
‘I know she lost her job, she was pretty upset about that.’
‘Yeah, really upset, intensely upset,’ opined Harriet, sitting up, as if forced from her prostrate position on the couch by the sheer strength of the thought. The other girls agreed and echoed the word intense, obviously Louisa’s defining feature. Harriet added, ‘It was only a temp job anyway, but she said she got plenty of overtime, and the money was turning out to be very good with lots of perks.’
‘Where was this job?’
The girls all looked at each other. There was some umming and ahhing and scratching of heads, then they all started giggling. Frost and Waters glanced at each other. The girls just carried on giggling as if they weren’t there. Then the giggling completely took them over, and soon all three of them were on the floor, practically beating the carpet, doubled up in hysterics.
The two detectives pulled stern-looking faces, cleared their throats, muttered warnings about this being a serious matter, and then tried their damnedest not to start giggling themselves, such was the infectiousness of it. Waters was almost crying with laughter when he caught sight of something and nudged Frost to get his attention. Tucked under an armchair was Culture Club’s Colour by Numbers LP. On the record cover were various items: a packet of ten Bensons, with the top of the gold box shredded where it had been used to make a roach; three torn-open fags; a pack of green Rizla papers; a small lump of rocky Lebanese and an even smaller one of Moroccan black; and a recently extinguished, expertly rolled, six-paper conical joint of epic proportions.
That explained why Katy had shouted over her shoulder to warn the girls to make sure they were decent before she let the detectives in; why the window was flung open to the January cold, yet the electric fire’s faux-coal fascia was glowing hellishly and all three bars were throwing out a fierce heat; and why the air in the room was eye-wateringly thick with pungent hastily sprayed Honeysuckle Glade.
Busted.
Waters crouched down and retrieved the Culture Club waccy-baccy platter and rested it on the coffee table, alongside the arbitrarily more legal high of supermarket vodka.
On seeing this, the girls stopped giggling, sat back up in their respective positions, and looked completely crestfallen.
Again Katy, the designated adult, spoke: ‘Oh God, I’m so sorry, we had guests last night, some guys, and they must have … have … have left it here?’
Waters raised some unbelieving eyebrows at this. ‘Lying to a policeman, Katy, that’s … that’s really bad karma.’
The girls flicked looks at each other, as if to ask, is he being serious, he looks like he’s joking?
‘What do you think, Jack, shall we ask again – where did Louisa Hamilton work? – or come back when the giggles have worn off?’
But Jack Frost wasn’t paying attention, he was looking at the discarded footwear on the floor by the armchair.
There were three pairs altogether: some cowboy boots, some knee-high grey suede boots and a pair of black shoes with a thick corrugated platform sole. Frost bent down and picked one of them up.
‘Whose are these?’
Harriet raised her hand, like a schoolgirl in class.
‘Comme des Garçons,’ said Jack Frost without needing to peer inside at the label. ‘Spring ’85 collection.’
Yet again, the girls flicked questioning looks at each other – was this fuzz for real? And Waters joined them in incredulity. How the hell would Frost know that? In their brief amount of time together, it was already clear to the girls that the DI was obviously the most unfashionable, untrendy man in all of Denton, if not the whole county. The black detective obviously had some style, in so much as what he was wearing didn’t look slept in.
Frost held up the shoe again. ‘Tell me about them, Harriet.’
‘Well, they’re very uncomfortable, I tripped and almost broke my ankle going into the club. But still kind of worth the discomfort cos they look so bloody amazing and—’
‘Tell me something I don’t know. Like: where did you get them?’
‘Oh … oh … shit. Sorry, they belonged to Louisa. She left them here, said she didn’t want them any more.’
Abbie spoke. ‘Oh, yeah, I remember, they were a gift from her boss.’
Katy said, ‘That’s right, now I think of it, she fell out with him, big time, think that’s why she left the job, or got sacked.’
A memory struck Harriet. ‘I asked if she was shagging him, and that’s when she got all prim and proper. She said he was married, and huffed off to her room to play with her cuddly toys.’
‘Cuddly toys?’ asked Frost.
‘Yes, I mean, ridiculous. I’ve got a Paddington, but that’s cool.’
‘I’ve got my Snoopy,’ said Katy.
Harriet and Katy looked at Abbie, but she shrugged. She had nothing similar, and couldn’t care less.
Katy winked at Abbie and mouthed cattily, So mature, then addressed them all. ‘But Louisa, she had Peter Rabbit, Winnie the Pooh, Babar the Elephant, and—
’
‘A Cabbage Patch doll?’
Katy shrugged and sneered at the thought. ‘Yeah, probably, they were all on her bed, like tucked in. I mean, you bring a guy back and he sees all that … weird. Plus it takes about twenty minutes to get them off the bed!’
They all laughed, but stopped when they saw that the two detectives were engaging in some serious looks.
‘Louisa didn’t work at an architect’s, did she?’
‘Yes!’ they all called out in unison, beaming big smiles. Then Harriet stopped smiling and looked deadly serious too.
‘The shoes … I swear, she did give them to me, I didn’t steal them.’
‘God no, she left them here and Harry got first dibs.’
‘Yes, absolutely, it’s not like we killed her or anything, and stole her clothes!’
‘Shut up, Abbie, that’s not even funny!’
‘I’m not being funny! Am I? I don’t know … Oh God …’
‘I swear, we didn’t kill her or anything, you can search the house!’
‘And the garden … we didn’t bury her, or anything really bad and bitchy like that, I swear—’
Waters raised his hand to calm them. ‘Girls, you’ve had the munchies stage, but no pizza. You’ve had the giggles stage. Now, unfortunately for you with two coppers in the room, you’re having the paranoia stage. Relax, we don’t think you’ve killed her.’
‘Where’s the phone?’ asked Frost.
Katy pointed to the kitchen and Frost went out and made a call to Clarke at the Hansons’.
‘How are they both doing?’ he asked.
Sue’s voice was hushed; she was obviously taking the call in the hall, but was not fully out of earshot of the Hansons. ‘Once Richard found out the truth that she was still seeing Bucknell, he looked like he was about to cry his eyes out, or go ballistic. Thankfully he did neither, and held it together, stayed calm. She explained what had happened, how she tried to end it that day with Bucknell, but Bucknell stormed out. Then she started crying and Richard hugged her. They’ve been sat on the sofa in silence, holding hands, waiting for the kidnapper’s call. Tell you what, Jack, after what he’s been through, I’m impressed. Hope I meet someone like him, sensitive, understanding, forgiv—’