“OK,” said Jennifer, “we’ll take a look.”
She turned to Derek and Doug Coulson and frowned. “Where’s Brooke?”
They all looked back towards the road. Gus Brooke was still in the driver’s seat of his car.
Jennifer’s scowl had PC Stone taking a step to one side, just in case he was in the firing line.
“Doug,” snarled Jennifer. “Ask DC Brooke if he’d be good enough to join us. And make sure he’s got the covers on his shoes and is wearing gloves. Derek, let’s go.”
The factory comprised four connected two-storey buildings arranged in a rectangle around a central open yard large enough for lorries to turn once they had loaded or unloaded at one of the many bays facing onto the space. Access to the enclosed area was through a wide passage in the centre of the building facing onto the concrete road that led from the gates. The passage was about five metres high, with the building’s upper floor crossing it. Two metal sliding doors designed to add extra security to the central area were wide open.
“Those doors were open like that when we were watching this place,” said Derek, as they walked towards them. “From what I remember, the yard inside is concrete and in better nick than the buildings. Probably not much chance of tyre prints, given the ones from the gates stopped soon after the puddle.”
They hurried through the passage and into the yard where they immediately saw the red Golf parked in the centre.
Jennifer stopped, her heart racing with worry as she tried to maintain an objective, professional approach. She shuddered as she looked at the car, trying to work out how it had approached from the passage.
“Looks as if it drove through, turned to the left and stopped,” she said. “Let’s walk towards it from the side so there’s less chance of disturbing anything.”
They bent down to look along the concrete surface of the yard, but apart from the loose stones, scattered debris and leaves, nothing appeared to have been disturbed.
As they made their way closer to the car, Jennifer felt her stomach tighten in anticipation. She had become increasingly anxious about Trisha with every new piece of information. She could think of no innocent explanation for why her friend’s car should be parked in this yard; it made no sense.
Derek was equally tense as he peered through the windows.
“There’s no sign of her, Jen. There’s a jacket on the front passenger seat, and some shoes on the floor, but that’s about it. Shall I try one of the doors?”
Jennifer nodded and waited.
“It’s unlocked,” announced Derek as he opened a rear door. “She’s not in here, but I need to open the tailgate door to be sure.”
He walked to the rear of the car and pulled up the door, shaking his head as he looked inside.
“There’s an overnight bag in here, but that’s it,” he said, “I think I should look in the front, check for …” Reluctant to say what they were both thinking, his sentence petered out.
Jennifer nodded. “Yes. Signs of disturbance. Blood. Anything.”
She looked back as she heard footsteps.
“DC Brooke!” she yelled, taking Derek by surprise. She waved her arms to stop Gus Brooke in his tracks and pointed towards Doug Coulson, who had worked out the best approach route to the car. “Follow DC Coulson. Don’t continue straight towards us, you could disturb tracks on the ground.”
She glared at him before turning back to Derek.
“Christ!” she muttered, “That idiot seems to have completely lost the plot. He’s not normally this incompetent.”
Derek shook his head. “No, he isn’t. That must be some hangover.”
After checking the car, Jennifer called the SCF to inform Crawford and Hawkins of progress and to arrange for a forensic team to examine it in situ before transporting it back to the laboratory. The laboratory contracted to undertake most of the SCF’s forensic work, Forefront Forensics, was located on the Nottingham ring road no more than fifteen minutes’ drive away.
However, with the thought that Trisha might be lying injured either in the factory buildings or nearby, Jennifer wasn’t prepared to delay the search while she waited for forensics. She instructed Derek to team up with Gus Brooke — “I’m sick of the sight of him today. Just keep kicking him, Derek, you’re the lead officer for the pair of you, don’t let him drift off to wherever he keeps going in his head. He needs to focus.” — while she paired with Doug Coulson.
They hadn’t got too far in their search when the forensic teams arrived. Jennifer immediately requested extra pairs of hands to assist them. As she saw it, every second could count and finding Trisha now rather than later could make the difference between life and death. Another fifteen minutes into the search, four vans carrying uniformed police officers arrived at the gates. Hawkins also didn’t want to take chances with Trisha’s life and as soon as he had heard that Trisha wasn’t in the car, he had commandeered thirty officers to join the search in the factory buildings themselves and the land comprising the factory site, and then for half a mile outside the fence perimeter.
Jennifer’s phone pinged. It was Hawkins.
“Who’s arrived so far?”
“Forensics and uniforms, sir.”
“Right. DCI Crawford mentioned a jacket on the front seat of the car. Can we assume it’s McVie’s?”
“Definitely, sir. I’ve been with her on a number of occasions when she’s worn it. The shoes are hers, too.”
“Good. Then I’ll get a dog team out. I’ve also been looking at the map. There are several streams and irrigation channels in that area, and the Trent isn’t far away. There’s what looks like an irrigation channel to the rear of the site, with a footpath running alongside it. I’m getting divers in to search all the waterways. There are also a few wooded areas, one quite near the factory site, and farmland. I’ve contacted the force helicopter services and they are going to search the area with a thermal imaging camera. Anything they spot will be immediately followed up by one of the search teams on the ground. We have to cover all the possibilities, Jennifer.”
“Yes, sir,” said Jennifer, her words catching as she spoke.
Hawkins heard her falter. “We’ll find her, lass. There’ll be some sensible explanation for this. I have a good feeling about it.”
I don’t, thought Jennifer, not for one moment.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Since arriving in Nottingham, Cosimo Graziano Rosselli had been slowly gathering valuable information about his target, Jennifer Cotton. Over the past few days he had discovered that she drove a Mediterranean Blue BMW 1 Series Sports Hatch, another confirmation that she had more than a detective sergeant’s pay supporting her. She was obsessed with fitness, taking every opportunity to run or cycle around the smart residential area where she lived. Normally she would be joined by her boyfriend, the tall and powerfully built black police officer, Derek Thyme, who worked with her. Rosselli had spotted the buzz between them when he first saw them in the Horse and Hounds pub. Thyme appeared to be one of those athletes who could cruise with effortless ease for hours running or on a bike at a pace that most people would regard as punishing. Rosselli himself was no slouch when it came to fitness, but he had to admit that Derek Thyme had a distinct edge.
Thyme’s car, which he parked in the street outside Jennifer’s apartment, was a quirky scarlet Mini Cooper that he clearly loved in spite of the challenge of folding his tall frame into it.
Rosselli had watched and listened when Derek locked it in the street. The locking beep sounded ominous and a scan using a pair of binoculars revealed the telltale dark blip in the upper door frame of a tiny webcam. In Rosselli’s estimation, it was probably one of several. The car was clearly protected with a sophisticated alarm system and anyone foolish enough to try to break into it would be recorded in the act. Although breaking into cars was one of Rosselli’s many skills, he knew which ones to avoid and Thyme’s was such a car. Since Jennifer’s car was normally garaged, he hadn’t had the opport
unity to scrutinise it, but he was sure her security system would be equally sophisticated. Tampering with either car was out of the question.
Jennifer and Derek normally left for work at about the same time every morning, but in the days Rosselli had been watching, they went in separate cars. Rosselli followed them in his inconspicuous rental to the multi-storey car park next to the SCF HQ. Over a few days, Rosselli learned the identities of many of the other police officers in the SCF, together with several of the more senior civilian staff. He also made a note of the cars they drove and the registration numbers. He was always cautious, never parking in the same place in the car park and never staying there for too long. There was a good alternative of on-street parking nearby that gave him a view of the SCF building, parking that conveniently was not covered by any of the otherwise abundant CCTV cameras in the city.
From the lack of any obvious urgent activity, Rosselli assumed that much of the work of the SCF was conducted in front of computers. This left him wondering if he would be forced to resort to a straightforward shooting; he was only prepared to spend so much time on the assignment, even though right now he was enjoying himself.
On the Wednesday morning, a week after his arrival in Nottingham, Rosselli was parked in the street near the SCF building when Derek Thyme’s Mini screeched onto the street, a magnetic blue light attached to its roof flashing with authority. Was this what he had been waiting for?
On the rear seat in her basket, Goccia looked up with a questioning whine.
Rosselli reached over and rubbed her head. “It’s all right, little lady, after all these days of dozing in the car, we might be getting some action. But you’ll have to be quiet.”
He watched the car roar up the street and was about to follow when he saw Jennifer run from the SCF building entrance towards the exit from the car park. Seconds later, a rather scruffy dark-blue Ford driven by one of the detectives Rosselli recognised from his earlier surveillance squealed to a halt beside Jennifer. She jumped in and the car accelerated away in the same direction as Thyme’s car, a blue light also flashing on its roof.
Rosselli started his car, U-turned in the street and followed them, their blue flashing lights beacons that allowed him to keep his distance.
With half an eye on the car’s large satnav screen, Rosselli followed the two cars south of Nottingham towards the village of Rappington. About half a mile short of the village, the cars turned right onto a lane that led towards some distant woods. Somewhat closer than the woods were flashing police vehicle lights that appeared to be stationary. Whatever the urgency, Jennifer Cotton’s destination was clearly somewhere along the lane.
Rosselli drove past the end of the lane and continued towards Rappington until there was a convenient place to pull over and consult Google Maps. The satellite view showed him that the police must have stopped outside a fenced area containing what looked like a series of buildings. On zooming in, he could see it was an industrial premises, but in poor condition, derelict probably if several holes in the roof were anything to go by. There were four buildings surrounding a central yard, while wasteland extended beyond on three sides and a small wood bordered the side closest to the main road. On the opposite side from the lane, a narrow waterway bordered the plot about a hundred metres from the buildings, a footpath running alongside it.
As Rosselli continued to study the waterway features, he was suddenly distracted by the high-pitched whine of another patrol car heading past him at high speed towards the lane. Deciding it would be unwise to remain in an exposed position for too long, he slipped the car into gear and drove on into Rappington where he parked outside a village shop. After locking the car, he followed his phone map and made his way to where a stream flowed past the rear of the village.
He was casually dressed in jeans and a light jacket over a checked shirt. A large baseball cap concealed much of his head and with his sunglasses, a small backpack, strong walking boots and a stout walking stick, he gave the impression of a man out for a pleasant day’s walk with his dog.
But the façade stopped there. Cosimo Graziano Rosselli went about his surveillance in deadly earnest. Something important had happened at the derelict industrial site and he wanted to know what.
He could only walk the footpath so many times before he was noticed. Initially, all the activity was hidden behind the tired walls of the buildings, but within half an hour several more vehicles arrived and Rosselli saw groups of uniformed police officers searching the scrub at either end of the site.
However, with their attention focussed on the ground as they looked for signs of flattening or disturbance of the grass, weeds and bramble, a solitary walker striding away from them along the footpath was of no interest.
Beyond the industrial plot, the waterway turned to the left while the land on Rosselli’s right rose gently through a field towards a small wood. From there, concealed by bushes, he used binoculars to observe the activities in and around the site, watching closely as squads of uniformed police officers, plain-clothes officers and people wearing scene-of-crime coveralls meticulously combed the area for whatever it was they were looking for.
After about three hours, a low-loader arrived and disappeared into the heart of the buildings. Twenty minutes later, it left carrying a red, five-door Volkswagen Golf. Rosselli pulled a compact, 60x magnification telescope from his backpack and focussed it on the car’s registration number. An hour later, the squads of searchers began spreading beyond the site’s perimeter, among them officers with dogs. Rosselli decided he should go. Rather than retrace his steps back across the field, where he would be seen by any of the searchers who happened to look up, he turned into the woods and found a different path back to the waterway. Since none of the searchers would have seen him earlier that morning, he decided he could risk returning along the footpath to Rappington, especially as the police dogs seemed to have gone the other way. A team of police divers with their support crews were occupied in the water, but no one paid any attention to Rosselli as he walked briskly by.
Returning to Rappington, Rosselli decided to wait until at least the late afternoon to check on developments, but he didn’t want to risk being too close to all the activity too often. A pub in the village advertised snacks and lunches, so he settled down there with a sandwich, a pot of tea and a bottle of sparkling water, using his time to search the Internet on his phone. Goccia dozed on the floor beside him.
After logging on via a series of secure VPN proxies, he accessed a site that would give him registration details of all UK cars. When he entered the number of the red Golf, he was rewarded with the registered owner’s name: Patricia Claire McVie, with a home address in London.
With the street address, Rosselli quickly established that McVie was the sole occupant of the listed premises, her age given as thirty-nine.
He sat back in his chair, tapping his teeth with his pencil. “Who are you, Patricia Claire McVie?” he whispered quietly to himself.
Still operating through the same proxies, Rosselli searched for McVie’s name using various spelling and diminutives of the given names. And when he tried Trisha McVie, he came up trumps. A series of newspaper articles over the last eight years recorded several high-profile case investigations led by a Trisha McVie in various ranks from Inspector to Chief Inspector and then Superintendent. In the latest article, dated a year ago, her age was given as thirty-eight.
So, Trisha McVie, he thought, as he stared at his phone screen, you are a police officer and your people have found your car abandoned in a disused industrial site, but you, clearly, aren’t there. From all the activity, you must be missing. Was this anything to do with last night’s storm? Did you get lost? And if so, where are you now?
Before continuing his research, he ordered more tea and a slice of cake, both of which he considered safe enough in this culinary desert of a country.
As he bit into the cake, he flipped back through the newspaper articles. The more recent ones referred to cases in L
ondon while for earlier ones, the cases were in Manchester. So what was she doing in Nottingham?
Shortly after seven o’clock, Rosselli made his way back to his car, wondering whether to risk another stroll in the evening light along the footpath. He could go a short distance, see if the divers were still there, and if they were, turn back and try another approach.
He was about to head off when he heard a vehicle approaching quite fast, given it was driving through a village. He looked up and saw a scruffy dark-blue Ford that was definitely exceeding the speed limit. He checked the number plate and immediately recognised it. The car belonged to one of the SCF detectives, the one that had brought Jennifer Cotton to the area that morning. Definitely worth following, especially as the detective was now on his own and, in the split second Rosselli saw him as the car passed, had the appearance of someone facing execution.
Rosselli jumped into his car, quickly settled Goccia and followed the blue Ford. About a mile from the village, the car slowed and the driver pulled onto an area of compacted mud near a farm gateway. Rosselli slowed as he drove past, stealing a look. He was surprised to see the detective leaning forward with his arms wrapped round himself as he banged his head on the steering wheel.
Has a body been found? thought Rosselli. Is he one of those wimpish types who faints at the sight of blood or a body? Or does his behaviour indicate something more significant? He pulled up at the next opportunity and waited as he watched the Ford in his rear-view mirror.
After several minutes, the dark-blue Ford pulled away from the side of the road and made its way past him. Rosselli gave it a distance of about two hundred metres before he started to follow. He didn’t have to go far. About half a mile farther on, the car slowed and turned into the short drive of a large cottage. Rosselli drove straight past with hardly a glance, but in his mirror he saw the driver’s door open and the occupant stagger towards a door at the side of the house.
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