Keep Her Close

by M. J. Ford

  Pictures of the three missing girls were displayed on screens behind the parents. Jo recognised Malin’s, from her room in Oriel, Rita’s looked like it was taken on holiday, and Sophie’s was a class photo, in school uniform. All the girls were smiling, perversely, it seemed to Jo. Their happy faces seemed to mock her. Look at what we were, before you, Josie Masters. Look at the lives we had before we became characters in your story.

  ‘Do you think they’re still alive?’ said Lucas, as if he could read her desperate thoughts.

  ‘I really don’t know.’

  She took a seat on the sofa, to avoid having to look him in the eye. Did he not wonder why she was here, at home, when the rest of Thames Valley were out searching?

  She thought back to something Dr Stein had said – that this could all be a game for the perpetrator, not necessarily a murder spree. Most of what he’d conjectured she was happy to forget – the strange little man had clearly loved the sound of his own voice. But this had stuck, or perhaps she was clinging to it. Because games could actually be won.

  After Mr and Mrs Prakash had added their appeals to that of Sophie’s parents, Stratton spoke next, explaining that the public should be vigilant, but go about their business. He mentioned the potential connection with a white van, and gave a number for information and enquiries. Finally, his tone firmer, he addressed whatever individual or individuals were ‘responsible for these horrible crimes’.

  ‘… we don’t know who you are, but rest assured that all our efforts are focused on returning Sophie and these other young women to their families. There is still time for you to do the right thing, and whatever grievance you have, we encourage you to pick up the phone and talk to us or to someone you trust.’

  The news story moved on, but Jo knew that in the press conference room, the questions would be firing. Would anyone, she wondered, make the connection with the hit and run of Natalie Palmer? And if they did, how would Stratton respond? Likely with a simple deflection. There was really no way anyone outside the immediate CID team should make the link with her name.

  Lucas rested his hands on her shoulders from behind, massaging firmly. ‘You’re tense.’ His face was reflected in the black window opposite, but she couldn’t read his expression.

  ‘I hate just sitting around,’ she said.

  ‘I could help you relax if you like?’ He bent down and kissed her beneath her ear.

  She pulled away. ‘Thanks, but I don’t think that’s going to help tonight.’

  He stopped, and straightened up. ‘All right. I’m going to crash.’

  ‘I might head back to the office.’

  ‘Now?’

  She switched off the TV. ‘Sorry. Until this is done, I know I’m not going to sleep.’

  It was the perfect excuse. There was no way she could spend the night there, wondering about the phone perched under his driver’s seat.

  She drove to her old place, head thumping with a hundred confused thoughts. Dealing with Lucas had to wait. In the scheme of things, he wasn’t important at all, and neither were their problems. What had it been – six months? Her niece probably had longer relationships. Whoever he was using the phone to ring, whatever secrets he was keeping, didn’t matter until they had someone in custody.

  Jesus, Oriel, Somerville, Iffley. Natalie, Malin, Rita, Sophie. A white van. A face hidden behind a balaclava. Someone from her past.

  But who?

  MONDAY

  There’d been a time, once, when Mrs Masters had been a formidable cook. When Jo’s friends would come to dinner and be treated to an array of exotic dishes lovingly prepared, their ingredients sourced from the early organic markets, the mystifying oriental supermarket, the garden where her father was put to work in all weathers. The kitchen was her mother’s domain. At times growing up, Jo had been jealous of her contemporaries enjoying their fast food treats, with parents happy to cook from the freezer, or explore the novelty of ready-made meals. Jo’s mother had never owned a microwave, and had treated even tinned food with suspicion. On their early package holidays as a family, she’d often insisted on seeing the kitchens of the restaurants before she agreed to sit down and eat their wares. Some of Jo’s earliest memories – the happy ones before she and her mother grew apart – were watching her mother cook. A tablespoon held out for tasting, the cake-mixture to be sampled, vegetables fresh from the ground, almost glossy with life.

  So it was somewhat heartbreaking to see her spooning slippery segments of sweetened canned grapefruit into her mouth, a plastic bib fastened to stop her blouse getting spattered.

  ‘I saw Paul on Sunday. He’s back from holiday. You should see his tan.’

  Jo dabbed her mum’s chin with a tissue, and her mother didn’t even acknowledge it. ‘He never comes to see me.’

  Paul, as the visitor log attested, came once a week, normally for about three quarters of an hour.

  ‘Well, he’s been away. I’m sure he’ll drop in soon.’

  ‘I never see the little ones.’

  That much, Jo thought, was true. Not that Jo blamed Paul for not bringing them. The place was hardly a barrel of laughs for a rambunctious six-year-old like Will. And Emma’s online social life probably wouldn’t withstand the forty-five minute blackout.

  ‘Em’s not that little now. She’s taller than me.’

  ‘Hm.’

  Even with her mind failing, Mrs Masters could still deliver eloquent disapproval in a single syllable.

  ‘And how’s Ben?’

  Jo had been anticipating the question, because her mum asked it every time she came.

  ‘We’re not together anymore, Mum,’ she said. ‘Remember?’

  ‘Oh, that’s right. There’s a new one, isn’t there? What’s his name again?’

  ‘Lucas.’ The name caught in Jo’s throat.

  He’d actually visited on a couple of occasions, despite Jo telling him it wasn’t necessary. He’d completely charmed Mrs Deekins in the room next door, and even came along to tidy up the garden one afternoon in October. Jo pushed the fond memories away. That morning she’d requested the call logs relating to Lucas’s secret phone number. Strictly, that information was accessible only if there was reasonable suspicion that the phone would yield evidence of a crime, but in practice it was easy to work around. Whatever came back, Jo wasn’t sure she wanted to see it. That morning she’d driven to the home through Summertown, and on a whim, taken the side street past Off Piste – the specialist ski travel consultant. The sign on the door was an extra kick in the teeth. It had been closed down for the last two months. So even if he’d spoken to Heidi about a holiday, he’d lied about coming here last Thursday.

  The most disappointing thing – besides the deception itself – was how bad he was at it. He couldn’t even tighten up his own alibi, and that made her respect him even less.

  Jo’s phone vibrated in her pocket. It was Carrick.

  ‘Excuse me, Mum,’ she said, stepping out into the hall. The door was kept open all the time, in case of emergencies. None of the residents seemed to mind the lack of privacy. To close it would have been like shutting up a tomb. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘I’ve had an email from Surrey Police,’ said Carrick. ‘Just forwarded it to you. They’ve got the call logs and texts.’

  ‘Sorry?’ She was thrown for a moment. How had he found out about her call log request? Then it clicked what he’d said. Surrey. ‘You’re talking about Anna Mull.’

  ‘Of course, and it looks dodgy. The headline is that Anna called a single number several times between the hours of ten pm and one am the night Malin disappeared. That directly contradicts her story that she went to bed after the news. The last call that night, at 12.36, came from inside or close to the Oriel college grounds, not the house she shared on Longwall Street.’

  ‘Bloody hell. So she was close to the crime scene.’

  ‘She rang the number again the following day, three times, after you and Pryce interviewed her at the college.’
r />   ‘Let me guess, it’s an unregistered phone.’

  ‘Afraid so. I’ve tried the number, but it’s not working anymore.’

  ‘So where’s Anna’s phone now?’

  ‘We don’t know. It’s stopped pinging. But the last time it connected was to the same number, and we have that location. Bernwood Forest.’

  ‘I know it.’ It was a small place, less than three miles from where she grew up in Horton, north-east of Oxford.

  ‘I’m going to head there shortly, but the DCI wants me here when Nick Cranleigh comes in. Every available uniform is out in town. Are you busy?’

  Jo looked at the clock over her mother’s dresser. She’d been there less than twenty minutes. Her mum was chasing the final segment of grapefruit around the bottom of the bowl. Her grasp of time passing was limited, but that wasn’t the point.

  ‘Give me another ten minutes.’

  Chapter 21

  Carrick texted her the GPS co-ordinates, and she plugged them into the car’s SatNav, then drove out of Oxford. As the time to her destination shrank, she felt her nerves sharpen. There’d been something about Malin’s friend from the start, now she thought about it. A current of shrewd intelligence lurking underneath the scared expression and shy glances. What had Myers called her? That little minx. At the time she’d written it off as sour grapes, but maybe he’d spotted it too. Anna had come across as the most straightforward witness when they’d first met her. Out of the watchful eye of her Vice Provost, she had proved the point, detailed in her responses, completely credible. But since then, most of what she’d told them appeared to be unravelling.

  Then there was the plagiarism accusation Pryce had mentioned – it hadn’t really registered, because it had seemed insignificant at the time. But now, from somewhere deep in her memory banks, a thought surfaced for the first time in decades. There’d been a cottage industry of essay-flogging that had gone on when she was at uni too. In fact, after an ill-advised long weekend of getting hammered with mates, she herself had panicked and purchased a two-thousand-word piece on the Russian Revolution from a student four years above her. In the end, she’d bottled out of submitting it, coming clean with her tutor about missing her deadline. But it had been cowardice and the fear of getting caught rather than any moral rectitude that had stopped her. If Anna Mull was the sort of person who would go through with that type of deception, perhaps she wasn’t as risk-averse and upstanding as she’d appeared. How that possibly connected to Malin’s disappearance was another question entirely.

  She reached the edge of Bernwood Forest in no time at all, and soon was passing trees to her right, a plantation of established conifers. She drove past a couple of narrow tracks blocked by metal-barred gates. As she neared the location of the phone’s last signal, she considered parking up at the side of the road to proceed on foot, then saw there was an entrance sign for a car park. She turned in, under a height-restriction to which a sign was attached, saying that the woodland was managed by the Forestry Commission and that visitors were welcome, but should stick to the marked paths. She slowed her car to a fifteen miles per hour crawl on the pot-holed track. She thought she might once have come here as a girl, perhaps even with a boy, but it was a vague feeling of recognition with no emotion, good or bad, attached. Neither the occasion, nor the young man, could have been that memorable.

  As soon as she reached the car park, she saw the green Fiat registered to Anna. It was the only other vehicle about. There was no one nearby that she could see, but she pulled over fifty yards away, switched off the engine and climbed out. The air was still in the clearing between the trees. Mid-morning on a Monday in December was never going to be a busy time for dog-walkers or ramblers.

  Her chest felt light as she leant back into the car and took out her baton. She hefted it in her right hand. Couldn’t be too careful.

  Her footsteps crunched across the car park towards the Fiat. In her left hand she thumbed through her phone to Andy’s number.

  ‘Anna?’ she called.

  Her voice was swallowed by the trees.

  As she got nearer, she could see the seats were empty, and the doors were locked. She tried the tiny boot, and was almost glad to find it locked too. She checked around the car, looking for obvious footprints, or any other markings. Nothing.

  She called Carrick and told him what she’d found.

  ‘Doesn’t sound good,’ he said. ‘I’m about to leave. I’ll order forensics.’

  ‘Better get a dog unit out here as well, Andy.’

  After he’d hung up, Jo stared into the dark spaces between the trees. Maybe it was because the forest was artificially planted, or the air was so still, but it seemed oddly devoid of life under the wintry sky.

  ‘Where’ve you got to, Anna?’ she muttered.

  * * *

  While she waited, she checked on her own device the phone files that Surrey had sent through. Carrick had annotated a few – Anna’s parents, Malin, the mystery burner Anna had called so many times around the time of her friend’s disappearance. What Jo noticed immediately was that Anna hadn’t actually called Malin the morning she came to her room, claiming to be worried about her friend. So she’d been lying to them about that too. What explanation could there be for not making that call, other than the most obvious – that she’d known all along that Malin had gone, and coming to Oriel College, then subsequently alerting Belinda Frampton-Keys, was all a cover?

  But there was no way she had carried her friend out wrapped in a shower curtain. Not alone, anyway. Anna Mull couldn’t have been five-four in heels. Maybe Stein was right about the accomplice. But if Anna was the assistant – the person who’d opened that fire door or the security pass entrance, who had she admitted? The owner of the unregistered burner was untraceable.

  There were a few texts – mostly to her parents. Nothing to Malin or the other phone, which was not that much of a shock. SMS was almost obsolete among Anna’s generation.

  Forensics and Carrick arrived in convoy, the dog unit a few minutes later. Jo was glad of the company in such a lonely place. Carrick himself broke into the Fiat quickly with a specialist rod slipped down the door seal, and the boot proved to be empty. He and Jo donned protective gloves and began to catalogue the contents of the car, but none of it looked promising – a takeaway coffee cup growing mould, a month-old magazine, a college sweater, rubbish. They let the German Shepherd get a good sniff of the clothing and the handler set off into the forest.

  ‘How d’you think she’s connected with all this?’ asked Jo.

  ‘I’ve stopped hazarding guesses a long time ago with this case,’ said Carrick.

  Jo reached into the seat-back pocket. A road atlas. She almost smiled. Her dad had given her one, when she’d got her first car, and she’d never even used it. She wondered if Anna’s had come to her that way too. She was about to put it back when she saw the corner of an envelope sticking out from the middle pages. She pulled it out. It was unsealed, but the front had a typed label reading ‘Hana Sigurdsson, Randolph Hotel’.

  Holy shit.

  ‘Andy …’

  ‘Got something?’

  Inside, there was a single sheet of paper, which she unfolded. A thick lock of blonde hair fell out onto her lap. Carrick looked over her shoulder. In printed, courier font, the note was just a few lines.

  IF YOU WANT TO SEE YOUR DAUGHTER AGAIN, DO NOT INVOLVE THE POLICE. DELIVER £50,000 IN CASH, WRAPPED IN A PLASTIC BAG, TO THE WASTE BIN IN THE BERNWOOD FOREST MAIN CAR PARK. YOU HAVE UNTIL MIDNIGHT ON 14TH DECEMBER, OR THE NEXT PIECES WE TAKE WILL BE MORE PAINFUL.

  * * *

  Forty minutes later, the ransom note lay on the table in IR2 at St Aldates, sealed in plastic. Hana Sigurdsson seemed afraid to touch it. DCI Stratton had his arms folded, leaning against the wall. Carrick and Jo sat opposite Malin’s mother.

  ‘You think this girl, Anna, wrote it?’ asked Hana.

  ‘There’s a printer in her bedroom,’ said Jo. ‘We can test the ink i
f we need to, but the note was found in her car, and we’ve uncovered a pattern of lies which suggests she knows a lot more than she was letting on about Malin’s disappearance.’

  ‘So where is she now?’ asked Hana.

  The dog had found her phone, about twenty yards into the treeline, spread over a two metre square area. It looked like someone had driven over it then tossed the pieces into the bushes. After that, they’d expected the worst, but the search for a body had come up empty. It looked like Anna had abandoned her car for one reason or another.

  ‘We don’t know,’ said Jo.

  ‘We’re curious though,’ said Carrick, ‘why this note’s addressed to you, rather than to your ex-husband Nicholas?’

  ‘Presumably they thought I was more likely to pay. I’m not sure Nicholas has fifty thousand pounds lying around.’

  ‘But you do?’ said Jo.

  Hana looked at her sharply, like a bird of prey. ‘I would be able to get my hands on the funds fairly quickly, yes.’

  Jo moved on. ‘We think it’s likely Anna was working with someone,’ she said. ‘There’s a possibility she let them into the college through the fire door in Malin’s corridor.’

  ‘What confuses me is that the note wasn’t delivered,’ said Hana. ‘Why kidnap someone and then not extract the ransom?’

  Jo and Carrick had discussed the same thing most of the way back to the station. Even if Malin was dead, there was nothing preventing the kidnappers continuing with their ruse.

  ‘It might be that Anna and her accomplice had a difference of opinion on the way to proceed,’ said Jo. ‘He and Anna stopped communicating by phone three days after Malin disappeared, and we haven’t received ransom notes for any of the other missing girls.’