Gaskell stuck his head around the door a minute later, as I was thinking about heading off home. I’d run out of steam for today and had resolved to come back in tomorrow after a good night of sleep, even though it was a Saturday. I couldn’t imagine myself having a restful weekend when there was a missing child out there.
“Mitchell!” Gaskell waved me over, breaking me from my thoughts, and I dragged myself up, feeling painfully stiff from a day of too much sitting.
Gaskell was frowning more than usual when I went into his office, and I hesitated briefly as I came in, before closing the door behind me and sitting down.
“Sir?”
“What’s this about you telling the team you don’t need them anymore?”
Oh crikey, I thought tiredly. I opened my mouth to tell Gaskell what I’d told the team; that I didn’t have any new leads for them to work on right now, but I didn’t want to lie to him.
I was quiet too long, and Gaskell’s frown deepened. “Mitchell, spit it out.”
After another second of thought, I decided that Gaskell had never given me a reason to not trust him. Even when we first met, and I’d boldly accused his officers of doing a sloppy job of investigating that case, he’d taken it on the chin. He’d always proved himself to be a good man and a good officer.
“Alright,” I said. “We’ve got another kidnapping by the same kidnappers as took Lawrence.”
Gaskell sat back in his seat and swore quietly. He looked up at the ceiling for a moment, like he was hoping for divine intervention, before he focused his attention back on me.
“Things are never simple with you, are they?” he sighed. “You better start from the beginning.”
Fourteen
I almost dropped my coffee mug when, at nine o’clock on a Saturday in the empty station, Stephen’s bulky shape stepped into my peripheral.
I spun around to face him, my heart going faster than his nutty driving, and pressed a hand to my chest. “What the hell are you doing here?”
He grinned, seeming amused that he’d almost made me break my favourite mug, which took half of a kettle to fill up.
He helped himself to a cup of tea for himself, his short-cropped hair sticking up all over the place like he’d just rolled out of bed.
“The supe told me you were on a mission, working yourself to the bone, etcetera.”
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “So you’re here to babysit?”
He sent me a disapproving look. “If you need it.”
“Great,” I muttered, taking my coffee back to my desk. It wasn’t that I wasn’t glad to see him, after I’d gotten over my near-heart attack. But he didn’t have to be so bloody patronising about it.
Stephen dropped down into his desk chair beside me. “What’s the job today then, eh? What’s so urgent it couldn’t wait till Monday?”
“What did Gaskell tell you?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “Nothing, other than that you were set on being a lone ranger and wanted to keep things hush-hush.”
I nodded. “Pretty much,” I agreed, before running him through my meeting with the Browns.
“Holy-” he said, wide-eyed.
“Aye.”
He blinked. “Alrighty. I swear, Mitchell, you just like being involved in everything, don’t you? Sticking your fingers in all the pies.”
“Thanks for that,” I said, giving him a slow clap. “Any useful commentary from you today, or are you just here-?”
“To look pretty?” Stephen grinned, before he caught the irritation on my face and sobered up. “Sorry, sorry. What’s the next step then? Have the Browns been in contact yet?”
“Unfortunately not. But they needed to send out some feelers. It might take a couple of days.” I pressed my lips together, hating the delay, but the Browns were cautious and rightly so.
“In the meantime?”
“In the meantime, I’ve got an email from security at the hospital, so I was hoping to find something useful in that.”
“Useful for tracking Mrs Wooding down?” Stephen asked.
“Yeah, hopefully. We still really need to talk to her, and figure out why she ran off.”
Stephen nodded thoughtfully. “You look at that, then, and I’ll catch up on your reports and that.”
I glanced over at him. “Why are you here today? Don’t your family-”
He sighed. “Mitchell, I swear to god- if I’m here, it means my daughter is being looked after by my wife, and that my wife is perfectly happy to do it. Okay? I’m not neglecting her by being here. Annie wanted some alone time with her child after she had to spend all yesterday at the office, and my son’s off at a sleepover. Trust me to look after my kids, okay?”
I winced. “Sorry, mate.”
He cuffed me lightly over the head. “You’ve got to get over your hero complex. It’s okay to have help.”
“Okay, okay, therapy over,” I grumbled. “Get caught up on everything, so you can actually be of some use to me.”
“You’re a mean one, Mr Grinch.”
I snorted, ignoring him in favour of opening up the emails from the hospital, of which there were several, all with clips of CCTV attached. Leaning my chin on my palm, I watched as Ellie Wooding, recorded on the hospital’s cameras, walked into the hospital, down the corridor to Lawrence’s room and back out again. It was difficult to see her expression properly because, though she wasn’t wearing her hood up, she kept her head angled down, but she walked with a purposeful stride that spoke of confidence.
Then there was the outdoor CCTV which had recorded Mrs Wooding’s walk back to her car, which certainly wasn’t the expensive four by four I’d seen her get into when she’d last been on the Wooding estate. Instead, it was a blocky old Volvo, the colour of which I guessed as being silver, though it was hard to tell with the black and white video.
The car was parked so that the number plate was in full view, which was a piece of luck I could really do with. The problem was how far away the car was, and how blurry the number plate was in the camera.
I paused it in the right spot and squinted at it, trying zooming in and zooming out, but neither helped much. It was like trying to decipher the fuzzy letters in an optician’s office, and the effort made my eyes hurt.
“Steph?”
He looked over. “Yeah?”
“Can you read this?” I turned the screen towards him, and he pulled a face when I pointed to the number plate.
“Bleedin’ heck,” he muttered, before leaning closer. “Definitely starts with an ‘a’.”
We muddled through, passing ideas back and forth before we had a couple of different options for what the plate could be. I ran them all through the system, looking for Volvos registered under one of them, and turned up a couple of possibles. Neither of them was registered to names that meant anything to me, but I screenshotted the page to send to Keira anyway, in case she could piece them together with the owner of the house Lawrence had been kept at. Even if there was a false ID that linked both of them, it might help.
“Alright, I’ll put a ping out on that,” I said, pleased that we’d managed to find a match. Stephen checked his watch, and I looked over at him. “You got somewhere to be?”
He looked up with a smile. “It’s time for elevenses.”
I sighed, but we didn’t have anything pressing to do that minute, so we indulged his sudden craving for pastries and walked over to the shops to find him something. I ended up with a cinnamon roll and munched on it as we headed back.
My phone started ringing as we let ourselves back into the station and, with my hands sticky with icing, I handed my pastry off to Stephen.
“Don’t eat that,” I warned, licking my fingers clean before I fished out my phone and answered the call. “DCI Mitchell?”
“It’s Rochelle Brown.” I straightened up, hoping that she’d have good news for me and something for Stephen and me to get our teeth into. “I know it’s a Saturday, but I thought-”
“It
’s fine,” I said, cutting off her explanations. “I’m in the station, anyway. What’ve you got for us?”
She released a heavy breath, and I wondered if she’d expected me to tell her to call again on Monday. “I’ve been talking to a few other parents who lived nearby,” she said.
Stephen and I were heading towards the stairs, and I put the phone on speaker so that he could hear Rochelle too.
“They’re willing to let their children speak to you, and they’ll keep this as quiet as they can. This weekend would be best, so the kids don’t have to miss school.”
“That’s great,” I said, relieved that she’d come round to the idea. “We, me and my partner DI Huxley, can be round this afternoon.”
“Good,” she said. “I’ll invite them over for two.”
“Thank you. Text me the address,” I said, before pausing. “Have any of them said that they might’ve seen something?”
“Not that I know of,” she said. “But I didn’t explicitly ask. There are other children from Lydia’s school who walk the same way, but these are the ones I know. If we don’t find anything-”
“Let’s see how we get on first,” I said soothingly, sensing that she was running ahead of herself. She was definitely a planner, I thought, and always thinking two steps ahead. “We’ll see you then.”
She hung up, and I put my phone down with a sigh.
“We’re off somewhere?”
“Aye, going to talk to some kids.” I sent him a wry look. “Good job you’re here today, actually. You’ve got experience wrangling little ones.”
Stephen snorted. “We’ll be fine, mate. What’re we asking them?”
I pressed my lips together. “We’re asking if they saw anything weird on their way home, on a night two weeks.” My shoulders sunk. “Which doesn’t sound very likely to yield results, I admit, but otherwise, I ran out of ideas for how to track down this girl.”
Stephen looked unconvinced. “It’s a bit of a stretch, yeah.”
I chuckled. “I knew you’d say that.” I shrugged. “What’ve we got to lose?”
I didn’t quite mean my words, though, because we were already losing the most important thing; time.
“If you’ve got a better idea, my ears are open,” I prompted.
Stephen shook his head. “Nah, might as well give it a shot.”
He’d put my pastry down on a napkin on his desk, and I reached over to snag it and finish it off. Checking my watch, I saw that it wasn’t twelve yet, and we had some time to kill until two.
“What’s on the cards for the next couple hours?” Stephen asked. “Apart from lunch, o’course.”
“You literally just ate.”
“I like to plan ahead.”
I huffed a laugh. “We’ve got research in the meantime. I want to look into Ellie Wooding a bit more, see where she came from and her role in the company, that kind of thing. Did you finish reading through the reports?”
He shook his head. “Not quite.”
I snapped my fingers. “There you are then.”
After fetching myself a coffee to wash down the sugary pastry, we both got stuck in, and I amassed a good amount of notes on Lawrence’s mum, even though she’d mostly kept herself out of the press.
We ended up having lunch on the way over to the Browns’ house, with me taking bites of my baguette as I drove us over.
Stephen gave a whistle of appreciation as we pulled into the Browns’ road, which was a stone’s throw away from the school. All the houses down there were enormous, each looking like they could easily contain eight bedrooms, and with manicured front gardens landscaped to perfection.
“Wouldn’t mind moving into one of these, right?”
I wrinkled my nose. “Hardly. They’re all so soulless. Give me an old country house any day.”
Stephen shook his head in dismay. “One of them big old houses, really? Cold drafts, a leaky roof that’ll need replacing every couple years, dodgy plumbing that never works, no nearby shops,” he reeled off his complaints, ticking them off his fingers, “probably some creepy ghost, power outages-”
I elbowed him to shut him up. “You have your sparkly new build, and I’ll have something with actual character, alright?”
“Okay, okay,” he laughed as I pulled up outside the right house. “I’m just saying, old houses cost a bloody fortune to heat.”
I looked up at the Brown’s house. “If I could afford to consider something like this,” I said, “I don’t think I’d mind the heating bill.”
“Yeah, you got me there,” Stephen said, coming to stand by my side. “Let’s go talk to a bunch of little monsters.”
“They might not actually be that little,” I said as we walked up the drive. There wasn’t a stray dandelion in sight. “Lydia’s thirteen.”
“Dammit, I was looking forward to setting a group of sticky toddlers on you.”
“What did I do to deserve this kind of treatment?” I groused, smiling all the same. At the door, I gave the bell-pull a tug and heard it ring through the house.
“Something terrible, no doubt,” Stephen said cheerily.
The door was opened a moment later by a neatly dressed woman who looked completely different from Rebecca, the Woodings’ housekeeper, and yet managed to have the exact same air.
“Please come in,” she said primly. “Mr and Mrs Brown are in the front sitting room.”
She closed the door behind Stephen and led the way into the house. The carpets were deep and a pale cream that made me cringe and check behind me to see if I was leaving mucky footprints. The house itself was about how I’d imagined it from the outside, in that it was almost aggressively modern and all decked out in a monochrome colour scheme. The art on the walls was abstract, and the whole place gave the impression of repeating itself as we went down a mirror-lined hall.
I glanced over at Stephen and found him looking around with his eyebrows raised as we trailed after the quick-walking housekeeper, who’d not introduced herself.
She came to a halt in front of a half-ajar door at the end and waited for us to catch up. Giving a smart double tap on the door with her knuckles, she stepped inside, and Stephen and I followed after her. I felt pretty out of place, but tried to keep it from my face. We could hear chattering coming from beyond the door, but as we entered, I was surprised both by the number of people inside, and the sheer size of the sitting room.
“Blimey,” Stephen muttered under his breath.
The housekeeper gestured towards us. “Sir, madam, the police officers are here.”
I only spotted Rochelle and Oliver when the former stood up from a pristine white sofa and came over to greet us. She carried herself proudly and seemed vastly more composed than she had down at the station. She was wearing an elegant but simple pink dress and came over to shake our hands again.
“Vivi, get us some refreshments, will you?” she asked the housekeeper who inclined her head in a nod and silently slipped out.
“Quite the place you’ve got here, Mrs Brown,” Stephen said as I looked around at the people in the room. The children and adults had split themselves off into two separate groups, and there were perhaps fifteen people in total, though no more than five of them were kids. I estimated the children’s ages to be anywhere from eight to fifteen and tried to think of how I’d approach them. I’d had years of practice talking to adults, but very little experience with dealing with kids. I hadn’t been lying when I’d said that I was glad Stephen was here to back me up.
An elbow to the ribs made me jump, and I turned to shoot Stephen a sharp look. “What?”
He nodded towards Rochelle. “Mrs Brown was asking you a question, Mitchell,” he said, using that tone of his that made it clear he would have added ‘you idiot’ onto the end, if Rochelle hadn’t been there.
“Please call me Rochelle,” Mrs Brown said, giving Stephen a weak smile.
“I’m sorry I didn’t hear what you asked,” I said, pulling my focus back to her.
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br /> She waved a hand. “It’s alright. I only asked who you’d like to talk to first.”
I glanced back over to the kids and gave a shrug. “Are any of them nervous, or especially keen to chat to us?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think.” She leaned slightly closer. “It’s the parents that tend to worry, really.”
“They’re welcome to sit with us,” I offered. “I’d just ask them not to interrupt.”
“Of course. Well, you might as well start with Millie. She’s the little one with the adorable pigtails. She’s the youngest, in year three.”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
Rochelle went to fetch Millie and her parents whilst I moved over towards a quieter corner and dropped myself into a sofa that looked comfier than it actually was. Stephen sat down beside me, so that the sofa opposite was free for the children and their parents, and the coffee table between the two.
“How do you want to start this off?”
I hummed. “We could do with something for them to do with their hands, really. Distract them a bit.”
“Colouring?” Stephen offered. “Though the older ones will be past that.”
“Yeah, wouldn’t hurt.” I glanced over at him. “And try and look friendly, will you?”
He sent me an unimpressed look. “Dammit, Darren, and here I was planning to scare a bunch of children. You ruin all my fun.”
I laughed, holding up my hands. “Alright, sorry, sorry. Be your usual charming self, then.”
“Always,” he grinned.
Millie and her parents came to stand by us, and I stood up. We introduced ourselves and asked if there were any colouring books or toys that Millie could mess with while we were talking.
Once everyone was settled, we got started. Millie was shy, but opened up slowly under Stephen’s friendly teasing, and I happily let him lead. I’d not seen this side of him before, but he had a way of talking to the kids without patronising them that made them open up.
But despite his coaxing questions, none of the children we’d talked to so far could remember seeing anything out of the ordinary in the last two weeks, nor on that specific day, which they found hard to remember.
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