by M K Farrar
“Unfortunately, that’s not something we’re sure of just yet,” the sergeant said.
“So, no one saw the daughter with one of the people responsible for the stabbing?”
“No, they didn’t.
At five years old, the girl was only slightly younger than Erica’s daughter, Poppy. She couldn’t help putting Poppy in the girl’s place instead. What would Poppy do if she’d witnessed her mother being attacked?
“How far away does she live?” Erica asked. “Is it possible she saw what happened and got scared and ran home?”
“I’ve had officers check the house and there’s no sign of her there. I’ve put a call out to any officers local to this area to keep an eye out for a child matching her description as well.”
“We need to find her. I can’t imagine how worried her dad must be.”
Actually, she could imagine perfectly well, and maybe that was why her heart ached at the thought of those poor parents’ plight.
“Do we know if the girl has a history of running away, or if she’s got any urgent medical conditions we need to worry about?”
Coggins shook his head. “Not sure, sorry. The husband went with the wife in the ambulance, together with one of our officers, and we haven’t had the chance to question him properly yet.”
“And how’s the mother doing?” Shawn asked.
Coggins glanced over to the DS. “I’m not sure. She was alive when they took her in the ambulance, and I’d imagine they would have taken her straight into surgery.”
Shawn shook his head. “Let’s hope she pulls through.”
“Yes, I hope so. Too many senseless killings happening lately.”
The rise in knife crime in the city had been one of the main reasons their Violent Crimes Task Force had been put together. She wished she could claim that they’d gone some way into making the city safer, but it didn’t seem to feel that way.
“What about witnesses?” she asked. “This happened in the middle of the day, in a busy park, so I assume there were some.”
“Yeah, there are several. Trouble is that they all give the same story and none of them seem to have got a good look at the two attackers. I have officers questioning those who were closest.”
Erica glanced over to where a couple of uniformed police were speaking to people of various ages, both male and female, who she assumed were the witnesses. “I’m going to want to question them as well,” she told Coggins.
It did sound like an unprovoked attack, but surely the victim wasn’t chosen at random. They were going to need to find out if there had been any two-man crews that had stabbed anyone else lately, to see if there was any trend or pattern that would fit this crime. And what about the missing daughter? They couldn’t dismiss the possibility that it had been deliberate, and the missing child was the reason for the stabbing.
“What about the husband and wife? Any reports of any arguments beforehand? Did they appear to be fighting?”
“One of the witnesses said that the woman seemed upset and the husband took her hand right before the attack.”
Erica’s mind whirred. “We’ll need to look into the relationship between the husband and wife. This could be a custody issue.”
Shawn raised an eyebrow. “Seems like a drastic way to get custody, assuming there were even problems in the marriage.”
“The little girl might have just run away,” Coggins pointed out. “We don’t know for sure that this is an abduction.”
“We need to keep both possibilities on the table until she’s found,” Erica said. “Let’s hope she’s simply got frightened and ran away, but, if she hasn’t, time is of the essence. Other than their heights and what they were wearing, do we have any descriptions of the attackers? Someone must have got a look at them.”
Coggins frowned slightly. “You’d have thought so, wouldn’t you, but it seemed both of the males had their hoods pulled up over their faces the whole time, and everyone is so wary about this kind of thing happening these days that they don’t even want to risk making eye contact with somebody who appears suspicious.”
“Everyone is frightened of becoming a victim.” Erica huffed out a breath of frustration. “Surely they caught a glimpse of something, even if it was just a hint of skin tone to give us an idea of what race they might be.”
“Not yet, but it’s still early days. Someone might have seen something.”
Shawn lifted his chin and looked up. “There’s CCTV covering the park.” He pointed at the metal poles with cameras at the top. “Maybe they caught something.”
“Yes, we’ve requested all the footage,” Coggins said, “which I’ll make sure is sent over to you. The good news is that we know exactly when the incident happened, so it’ll narrow down the time.”
Erica exhaled a breath. “Let’s focus on the footage from the crime scene, but also the entrances. The attackers must have arrived and left through one of them, and, if the daughter is no longer in the park, she did, too. One of the cameras could have caught her running off, or at least might give us an idea what direction she went in. She could just be hiding somewhere nearby.”
They each glanced around, as though half expecting to find the girl suddenly popping up from under a bush or behind a tree. The park was large. People often thought of London as being a densely built-up area, but parks like this one covered a huge space. There was a boating lake with swans, geese, and ducks gliding around on it, and a cricket pavilion, tennis courts, and a bowling club. Entire music festivals were held in the grounds.
She turned in the direction of the lake, hoping they were far enough away that the risk of the girl falling in was reduced. The last thing she wanted to do was have to dredge it in the search for a body, but if the child wasn’t found soon, she wouldn’t hesitate to get search and rescue in.
Coggins nodded. “There are eight different entrances to the park. We’re going to have to hope we caught them coming or going from one of them, so at least that’ll give us an idea which direction they came from or were going in.”
“Trouble is,” Shawn said, “if they took off those hoodies somewhere between here and there, we’re not going to be able to identify them.”
“We might get them from their size and build,” Erica suggested, though she knew it was a long shot. There were a lot of people in the park that day. It was going to be near impossible to pick them out just from that.
Shawn read her thoughts. “That’s going to be difficult if they didn’t stay together. Unless we have footage of them removing their hoodies, and perhaps dumping them somewhere, they’re not going to be easy to keep track of.”
She tried not to feel the dip in her stomach. He was right. If they separated, and removed their hoodies, it was going to make it far more difficult for the police to follow their movements. The bastards knew that, of course. It would have all been a part of their plan.
“If they removed their hoodies,” she said, thinking out loud, “they might have dumped them somewhere before leaving the park. We’d be able to get DNA off the material from the perspiration on the clothes. Until we get the prints back from the handle of the knife, let’s also assume the attacker was wearing gloves and would have also disposed of them, so we need to go through all the bins.”
Coggins jerked his chin. “I’ll make sure that happens. I’ve already got a line of officers conducting a grid search of the park for evidence.”
Erica’s thoughts went back to the motivation behind the attack.
“Do we think this was orchestrated then?”
“I find it hard to believe someone would stab another person in broad daylight unless it’s connected to the abduction,” Shawn said. “But we’ll know more once we get the footage from the security cameras that are around the children’s playground.”
Coggins cleared his throat. “One other thing. The victim, Mae Dempsey, is of Chinese descent, though she was born here. Her mother is Chinese, and her father is British.”
Erica understo
od the line he was taking. “You think there’s a possibility that this could be a racially motivated attack?”
“Yes, it’s possible. Her husband is white as well, and they were sitting together, so perhaps someone saw them and took a disliking to the mixed-race couple.”
Erica shook her head, disgusted. She could never understand how a person could hate another simply because of the colour of their skin. She wanted to believe things had got better for equality, but at times it felt as if there was as much segregation as there had ever been. There were parts of London that were so deprived, nothing ever changed. The inner-city schools had terrible budgets, so they couldn’t get teachers to stay, and the students didn’t want to be there. It all became some self-perpetuating cycle—the kids leaving with no education, unable to get a job, turning to crime and spending time in jail, only to come out and have children of their own who only saw the lives their parents had lived, and attended the same schools, for the cycle to start all over again. But the government was into cutting budgets, trying to save money, rather than spend it and try to make lives better. They didn’t seem to care about the mostly black inner-city families living in tiny, high-rise buildings. They preferred to take away the youth centres and shut the sports halls, so what else were the teenagers going to do other than hang out on the streets and cause trouble?
“We’re just speculating at this point,” Coggins added.
She nodded her agreement. “It’s important to keep all possibilities open. Have you got a photograph of Ellie we can use?”
“Yes, we got one from the father before he went in the ambulance.” He took his phone out of his pocket and flicked through it. He pulled up a photograph of a pretty girl with dark-brown eyes and shiny black hair, and a goofy smile that revealed gappy bottom teeth.
“Can you ping that to me?” Erica asked. “What about what she was wearing? Did she have any jewellery on, or other accessories?”
“No jewellery. She was wearing a pair of white trainers with pink stripes down the side, a pair of black leggings, and t-shirt with flowers on the front, and had a grey and pink zip-up jacket.”
“Thanks. Let me know if you hear from the officers who went to the victim’s house to see if the girl shows up there, or if you hear from any close relatives who might have her.” She turned to Shawn. “Let’s talk to these witnesses and see if anyone saw anything.”
They left the inner cordon and approached the small group of witnesses and the officers who were interviewing them. She and Shawn divided up to speak to them, figuring they’d get through them quicker that way. With a missing child, time was of the essence.
Each of the witnesses were standing several feet apart, speaking in earnest to the uniformed officers. Erica approached a woman in her seventies with long white hair that was worn in a plait down her back, who wrung her hands in front of her body.
“I’m DI Swift,” Erica said as she approached. “Is it okay if I ask you a few questions.”
The woman gave a nervous smile. “I was just telling PC Wallace here what I saw.”
Erica nodded at the police constable. “Mind if I take over from here?”
“Not at all. This is Mrs Evelyn Keegan. I’ve already taken all her details.”
“Thanks.” Erica turned her attention to the woman, who appeared understandably distressed. “I appreciate your time, Mrs Keegan.”
The lady shook her head. “Not at all. It’s all so awful. That poor woman.”
“Can you run me through exactly what you saw. Where were you when it happened?”
She pointed to the path. “I was walking towards the playground from over there. The young couple were sitting on the bench together and I saw someone run up behind them. I didn’t really think anything of it—I just thought perhaps they knew each other and the person was running up to say hello—but then the woman fell forwards onto the path, and there was a knife sticking out of her back. That was when the screaming started.”
“Who was screaming?”
“Lots of people, but the woman who’d been stabbed was screaming the loudest.”
“How much did you see of the person who ran up behind her and stabbed her?”
Mrs Keegan shook her head. “Not much, I’m sorry. I didn’t really pay any attention to them. They had a hood pulled up to cover their face.”
“Could you say if they were male or female?”
“Male, I’d say, but I wouldn’t be able to swear on it.”
“What about height and build?”
She screwed up her face. “It was hard to tell from where I was. A slight build, and less than six foot, at a guess.”
“What direction did they run off in?”
Mrs Keegan pointed in the direction away from the park.
“Thank you,” Erica said. “There was a second person, standing farther back. Did you manage to get a look at them?”
“I didn’t even notice there was someone else.” Mrs Keegan let out a sigh. “I’m sorry I can’t be of more help.”
“Not at all. We may need to speak to you again in more detail.”
“Whatever I can do to help.
Shawn was busy talking to a young man in his twenties, but there was also a mother in her thirties and a slightly older man in a white shirt, the top couple of buttons open to reveal greying chest hair.
Erica thanked Mrs Keegan for her time and moved onto the older man. She went through the routine of getting his name—Graham Cannon—and other details.
Graham Cannon launched straight into it. “I saw two men walking around the park, they both looked suspicious, with their hoodies pulled right up over their faces, and their hands in their pockets, so they caught my attention.”
“Where, exactly, were they walking?”
He pointed to the other side of the playground. “Anti-clockwise around the outside of the fence and then behind the bench where the couple were sitting. They did that route a couple of times.”
“Did you manage to see their faces?” Erica was hopeful.
But he shook his head. “No, sorry. Like I said, they had hoods up, and they were walking with their heads down, so it was impossible to tell.”
“But you think they were male?”
“Yeah, they were male.” He hesitated and frowned. “At least, the bigger one definitely was, but I guess the smaller one—the one who did the stabbing—might have been female.”
“What about the couple on the bench, and the woman who was stabbed? Did you notice anything about them?”
“They were talking, and I guess it got a little heated, but not badly, you know. They weren’t shouting or anything.”
Erica ran through the same questions she’d asked Mrs Keegan, but frustratingly, he didn’t seem to be able to tell her anything else.
Shawn had already finished with the other witnesses and had returned to Coggins, so Erica joined Shawn’s side. “Let’s head back to the office and get some eyes on that CCTV footage,” she said.
“What about the husband?” Shawn asked. “Shouldn’t we speak to him first? He might have seen or know something vital.”
She glanced back to Coggins. “The husband went with the wife to the hospital?” she checked.
“That’s right.”
“It’s not far from here,” she said to Shawn. “We’ll swing by on our way back in and have a quick chat, and see how the victim is doing, too. Right now, this is attempted murder, but if she doesn’t pull through, we’re going to find ourselves on another murder case.”
Chapter Three
Erica and Shawn left the crime scene and drove the short distance to the hospital. They found an empty spot in the car park and approached the entrance. People hung around the outside, some smoking in the Perspex box put there for that exact reason. Some of those people were already hooked up to machines, oxygen masks around their necks. Erica tried not to be judgemental. It was an addition their society had created. Far less people in the younger generation were smoking now, though with
the rise of vaping, she worried about what kind of health issues may arise from that in ten or twenty years. When smoking cigarettes had first been introduced, it had been touted as being good for the health, so who said vapes were going to be any different.
The automatic doors slid open in front of them, and they entered the large entrance lobby. It was all so familiar to her—the scent of cleaning products, the squeak of her shoes on the floor. Business combined with exhaustion.
“What do you think about the girl going missing?” Shawn asked her as they walked through the hospital. “Do you think she’s just run away?”
“I’m not sure. We can’t rule anything out right now.”
“Eyewitnesses said that the two suspects circled the park before the attack. What if they were scoping out the girl?”
Erica frowned. “That’s what’s bothering me.”
She hated to think the child had fallen into the wrong hands.
They headed to intensive care, taking the lift, and punching the button for the correct floor. A couple of other people joined them, and they all stood straight, no one making eye contact.
The doors opened onto the floor they wanted, and they followed the signs to the ward.
In the corridor leading to the ICU, a short bank of plastic chairs had been fixed to the wall. A man in his mid-to-late thirties sat with his head in his hands. Next to him sat a uniformed police officer who Erica assumed had stayed with the victim during her journey from the park to the hospital and was now remaining at the husband’s side while she was in surgery. The officer sat awkwardly, looking as though he had no idea what to do about the man beside him, and when he spotted Erica and Shawn, he clearly recognised them as being police, and his face smoothed in relief.
“Mr Dempsey?” Erica double-checked.
Just because a man of about the right age was sitting here with a police officer, it didn’t necessarily mean they were approaching the right person. It wasn’t as though the stabbing in the park was the only incident in the area the Met police were dealing with right now. In the course of a weekend, there could be as many as ten stabbings and a couple of shootings across the city. Most weren’t unprovoked attacks, such as this one, and tended to be gang or alcohol related, but that didn’t make them any less important.