by LJ Ross
Her solicitor gave him another pitying look.
“Detective, do you have any relevant questions to ask or are you planning on telling these fairy tales for the remainder of the interview?”
But Lowerson didn’t look away.
“It isn’t a fairy tale—is it, Elaine? You fell in love with Keir Edwards.”
She said nothing, but he caught the sheen of tears in her eyes.
“Listen to me, Elaine.” He leaned forward to try to convey the importance of what he was about to say and took out a photograph of MacKenzie. “This is Denise. She’s forty-three and a good person. She has people who love her and who desperately want her to come home. Please help us to bring her home.”Elaine looked resolutely at the wall but, after a few humming seconds, her eyes strayed to the photograph.
A woman not dissimilar to herself, she thought.
“You think he took her,” she said, huskily. “What if she ran away with him?”
At first, Lowerson thought he had misheard. Was this woman so deluded? But, looking closely, he could see the tell-tale signs of jealousy.
Unbelievable.
He took a sip of water to give himself a few precious moments to consider his next words. Handled correctly, he might be able to use her emotions to their advantage.
“What makes you think that?”
Her solicitor interjected.
“I need a moment with my client—”
“Why do you think she would have run away with him, Elaine?” Lowerson overrode the interruption.
The woman ran shaking hands through her hair and, under the grey, energy-saving light bulbs, her face was haggard.
“Elaine—” the solicitor tried again to warn her, but she had reached tipping point.
“It was all in those love notes!” she burst out, and spittle flew from her mouth in a perfect arch to land on the desk between them. “To think I believed him. I delivered them to that bitch.”
Her hands were shaking now and she clasped them together in her lap. Lowerson frowned at her choice of words, thinking back to the sinister notes MacKenzie had found stuffed inside her letterbox and beneath the doormat.
“What makes you think they were love notes, Elaine?”
She bristled.
“I don’t know for sure, but it’s obvious that’s what they must have been.”
“You didn’t read them?”
She shook her head.
“They…I…”
Her solicitor watched their defence go flying out of the window, set his pen to one side and resigned himself to professional embarrassment.
“Keir…Mr Edwards wrote the notes while I was visiting him in prison. I brought the stationery with me and I took the notes away when I left. I never read them because he told me they contained details of someone the police should investigate, something he’d heard inside prison about the man you were looking for in connection to the Graveyard Killer. He said that, if he helped the police, they might agree to look at his case again.”
“And you believed that?”
“I…”
Tears began to fall.
“You never reported it.”
“I trusted him,” she said, as if that explained everything.
Lowerson ran his tongue along his lower lip.
“What else did he ask you to do for him, apart from delivering these harassing notes?”
“I wouldn’t give him another thing!” she shouted. “No more phones, no more money! Nothing!”
Then Elaine was completely lost, crying loud, snivelling tears that ran through her mascara and smeared black tracks across her puffy face.
* * *
At precisely eleven o’clock, Lowerson concluded the interview and re-joined his chief inspector in the observation room next door. Ryan said nothing at first but held out a cup of lukewarm coffee and waited until the man had taken a long gulp to quench his thirst.
“I’ll make it a pint, after all of this is over.”
Lowerson nodded and rolled his shoulders.
“Was it alright? I could have pushed her harder at the end.”
Ryan took a swig of his own coffee and remembered Jack Lowerson on his first, stumbling days in CID, compared with the self-assured detective standing before him today. Pride welled and he wondered fleetingly if he would feel a similar emotion one day as a father.
He took another hasty slug of coffee, coughed as it promptly went down the wrong way, and dragged himself away from that worrying line of thought.
“Your handling of the interview was spot on. If you’d pushed any harder, she would have clammed up. I might have appealed to her better nature,” he mused, tipping his head towards the woman being ushered from the interview room next door by her irate solicitor. “But I would have been wrong. You were exactly right to prod her jealousy, because Edwards is her weakness. It sounds like she was completely taken in by him.”
Lowerson was relieved.
“I appreciate that, sir. I only wish I’d been able to get more out of her.”
Ryan gave him a keen look.
“We’ve got plenty,” he said. “For starters, we know who wrote those threatening notes, where they were written, and how they got to MacKenzie’s door. That was a confession of guilt on her part, and it’ll do her court case no good.”
“That’s true,” Lowerson acknowledged.
“Then there’s the small matter of providing Edwards with contraband while he was inside,” Ryan gestured with his coffee cup. “She brought him mobile phones and money, which helped him to escape and do God knows what else. What did you think about her claim that she wouldn’t help him anymore, once she found out that he had ‘run off’ with an attractive redhead?”
Lowerson stuck a hand in his pocket, unconsciously mirroring Ryan.
“I think that it still wouldn’t rule out the possibility that she provided Edwards with a vehicle for him to pick up at the Styford Roundabout. He might have told her it was a getaway car for himself, in which case she was happy to provide it. Once she found out he’d used it to transport another woman—she doesn’t see it as a kidnapping, no matter what we say—it would have been too late.”
Ryan crumpled his plastic cup and lobbed it into the bin in the corner of the room.
“I agree. There’s still every possibility that Elaine Hoffman-Smith drove a car up to that roundabout. There’s only one vehicle registered under her name and that’s the one she’s still using. But she could easily have picked up some old banger and left it up there for him to find.”
“If only we knew the model,” Lowerson replied.
* * *
“Toyota Rav 4, late 2008 model in dark blue, registration number SX08 0DW,” Phillips pronounced, as Ryan and Lowerson entered the Incident Room.
“How the hell did you find it?”
Phillips leaned back in his chair and winked at Anna, who had her nose stuck in an enormous history textbook.
“Solid police work,” he said, casually.
Ryan wasn’t fooled but he decided to overlook any minor contraventions of strict police procedure in favour of calling an urgent briefing.
“Alright everybody, stop what you’re doing and listen up!”
Anna had to admire the speed at which conversation died.
“We’ve had a breakthrough. I want you to focus all attention on locating a Toyota Rav 4,” he rattled off the registration and particulars. “Last seen crossing Prebends Bridge in Durham—”
Ryan paused mid-sentence as one of the traffic analysts raised his hand.
“Well?” he demanded.
“Sorry to interrupt, sir, but I think I’ve located the vehicle in question.”
Ryan’s eyebrows flew into his hairline.
“And?”
“A dark blue Toyota Rav 4 with that registration plate was reported on the system after being impounded, sir. It was found parked obstructively across the entrance to the Copthorne Hotel late last night.”
Ryan’s ey
es flew to the map on the wall of the Incident Room and pinpointed the Copthorne, which stood on the bank of the River Tyne, on its bustling Quayside. There were countless bars, clubs and restaurants in that area, but it was also within easy reach of the city centre. He should know, since he used to live there.
“Did they locate the driver?”
The analyst shook his head.
“That’s just it, sir. The registered owner is listed as a Mr Reginald Farley, but he died more than two years ago and there’s no record of any new owner.”
Ryan considered the information and felt his heart begin to pound. There was only one reason why Edwards would risk exposure by returning to the city, and that was to kill. He turned quickly to Phillips, who was already running a check on the missing persons database.
A sickly feeling began to creep through his body, a foreboding of things to come.
“If we assume the driver of this Toyota was Keir Edwards, we know that he drove from Durham to Newcastle late last night. He dumped the Toyota across the entrance to a major hotel in what must have been a deliberate and calculated move to draw attention.”
“He’s peacocking again,” Lowerson put in.
“Yes. What I want to know is where he went after dumping the car. Get me footage from every CCTV camera in the area. Frank?”
Phillips looked up from his computer screen and Ryan knew the answer before he had even asked the question.
“Tell me,” he said shortly.
“Girl reported missing this morning,” Phillips said softly. “Bethany Finnegan, goes by ‘Beth’. Five feet seven inches tall, long black hair.”
Ryan looked away and into Anna’s dark eyes, which were full of understanding as she listened to the description of a woman who sounded remarkably like her.
They both turned with crestfallen faces to hear the next part of the missing persons report, which Phillips read out in a low, monotonous voice.
“Beth is due to have a birthday next week. She’ll be sixteen.”
CHAPTER 8
“I’ll never forgive myself.”
Those stark words hung in the air while Bethany Finnegan’s mother continued to rock in the armchair of her sitting room, on the twelfth floor of a high-rise block of flats overlooking St James’ Park football stadium.
Ryan and Phillips perched on a small sofa opposite, hands clasped between their knees. Long experience had taught them that there was no ‘better’ way of speaking to the parents of children who were missing. It didn’t help to sit or to stand; to accept a cup of tea or to use a certain tone of voice.
It simply hurt to do it, and each time was as painful as the first.
“Ms Finnegan,” Ryan began gently. “The most helpful thing you can do is tell us exactly what happened yesterday, in the hours leading up to when you reported Beth missing this morning.”
Kelly Finnegan scrubbed the top of her hand beneath her nose, then dabbed at her eyes with the sleeve of her navy cardigan. She was still wearing yesterday’s clothes and they could see the logo of a cleaning company on her crumpled polo shirt. Mid-length black hair was drawn away from her face in a neat ponytail, which had unravelled so that wisps of hair fell across her forehead. Her face was pale and devoid of make-up, except for the remnants of mascara which had long since been washed away by tears shed throughout the course of the morning.
She sniffed loudly and Ryan reached inside his jacket pocket to offer her a small packet of tissues, which she accepted with shaking hands.
“Beth was a good baby,” she said, staring off into the distance. “I was seventeen when I had her.”
She raised her chin, ready to fend off any judgmental comment that might follow, but Ryan and Phillips continued to listen with attentive, compassionate faces.
“Her father was just a lad from school. I knew it was stupid and he wouldn’t stick around, but I didn’t want to get rid of her. I wanted to keep her, right from the start.”
Her voice wobbled and she raised one of the tissues to her eyes to stem a fresh flow of tears.
“Like I said, she was a good baby.”
They nodded, letting her talk it out. Ryan had already skim-read the file and he knew that life had been hard for Kelly Finnegan. Long before she’d become a mother, she’d spent a childhood in care and had no family to speak of. Her juvenile history read like a textbook on shoplifting and petty crime but, since the birth of her baby, he’d seen nothing but a solid track record of full-time, low-paid work that must have been back-breaking. Almost sixteen years later, she’d worked her way up to the position of supervisor for a corporate cleaning company and she kept a tidy, polished home, even if it did belong to the state.
On the main wall above the sofa there was a blown-up, framed image of Kelly and her daughter and Ryan assumed it had been taken in the soft-focus light of a local photography studio. He was struck by how much older Beth looked than her sixteen years and, taken together, mother and daughter could easily have been mistaken for sisters.
“We’re really close,” Kelly sniffled, almost reading his thoughts. “We were always close, right from the start, and she told me everything. All about her friends at school, boyfriends, all the gossip—you know?”
She appealed to them and, dutifully, both men nodded.
“Did Beth tell you where she was going last night?”
Her mother drew in a shaky breath and looked down at the tissue twisted in her hands.
“She said that one of her friends, Emily Mallen, was having a party at her house. I know the family, so I said she could go. They live down in the rough end of Walker but”—Kelly lifted her chin once again—“you can’t judge people on where they live. They’re a nice family.”
“We understand,” Ryan murmured. “You felt confident about letting her go.”
She nodded.
“It’s the Easter holidays, and to be honest she was starting to climb the walls,” Kelly confided. “They’re back to college on Monday but with a whole week to fill and me working most days, I worry about what they all get up to when they’re bored.”
“Aye, that’s kids for you,” Phillips put in, and she smiled.
“Beth is responsible.” She wanted to make that clear from the start. “She has one hundred per cent attendance at school and good grades. She doesn’t get into trouble.”
She stopped and looked pointedly at both of them.
“I s’pose you know I was a bit of a tearaway?”
Diplomatically, they remained silent.
“Aye, well, things changed after Beth was born. Some people probably thought I was too strict but I swore Beth would have a better life than me. She wouldn’t have to worry about where the next meal was coming from or whether I would be coming home at night. I want her to finish school and get her A-levels. I don’t care what she wants to be, so long as she works hard and gets her schooling.”
Phillips listened to her proud words and was transported back in time to thirty-five years ago, when his own mother had made a similar speech.
“Frank,” she’d said. “Your father doesn’t work six days a week at the factory for you to throw your life away. Now, you just think about it, my lad.”
“I trusted her,” Kelly was saying. “I trusted Beth to tell me the truth about where she was going last night. I had a late shift at work but she texted me all the way until about ten o’clock. She told me the party was great and that she was planning to stay over at Emily’s house.”
She fumbled around to find her mobile phone and hurriedly found the text exchanges.
“Look, it’s right here,” she offered the phone to Ryan, with a look of appeal. “Maybe her phone is still working and you can find her that way.”
Ryan took a cursory glance down at the messages and saw that things were exactly as the woman had described.
“That’s what we’re doing right now,” he assured her. “We’re liaising with the telephone company and they’ll come back to us, very soon.”
Kelly
clutched the phone, clearly hoping it would ring.
“And you’ll tell me?”
“Of course. You’ll be the first to know, Ms Finnegan. But to return to events last night,” Ryan steered her gently back to the facts. “You were telling us that Beth was supposed to be staying with her friend, Emily. She wasn’t there, after all?”
The woman drew in a shuddering breath and looked across at the tall, good-looking man with the sad, serious grey eyes. She wondered what he thought of a woman like her; she wondered whether he heard the same old story every day, or whether he really cared.
He seemed genuine, but you could never tell.
“I couldn’t get hold of her after ten o’clock and I started to worry,” she said dully. “I went straight to Emily’s house after work and knocked on the door—”
“What time was that?” Ryan interjected.
“About ten-thirty. I thought that I could always use an excuse if it turned out everything was fine. But when I got there, Emily’s mum told me she thought the girls were all here for the night,” she gestured to the living room, “so we knew straight away something was up and we rang around all the girls’ houses. Turns out they were planning to stay at their other friend’s house—Hayley, she’s called—after a night on the town.”
“On the town?”
She rubbed at her eyes and felt her heart break.
“Fake ID,” she said. “Apparently, they all have it, but I never knew. I never thought that Beth—”
“Kids,” Phillips said again. “They’re like moths to a flame. Tell ‘em they can’t do something, and that’s exactly what they want to do.”
“I thought that,” she said. “And that’s why I let her have the odd glass of wine, at home. I know they’re only fifteen or sixteen,” she said defensively, “but I felt better knowing that if they experimented with drink, they did it under my roof where I knew about it.”
“A lot of parents feel the same,” Ryan offered, as if he knew what he was talking about. “What happened after that?”
“I wasn’t too worried,” she said, voice muffled by the sodden tissue she held to her face. “I thought Beth had snuck out for the night to have a bit of fun and she would come home with a hangover the next day. I knew she was with a group of friends and I know my daughter, detective. She’s normally so sensible. I was angrier about the fact she’d lied to me.”