“Mr Adams?”
Nick Adams’ explanation of where he was the previous night held. It might not have been comfortable, but he was in the pub with people he could loosely call friends. People I would call fellow sex offenders. Certain public houses were known haunts for them. Places they felt safe. The restrictions on registered sex offenders may be in place to protect children but they didn’t prevent them fraternising with fellow offenders. Offenders who built their lives around trying to fit in, to appear invisible. People knowing what they had done always made their lives difficult. Fit in or stay hidden were their only real options. This stuck in my throat like a piece of barbed wire. Sex offenders gathering, exchanging notes and suggestions, and leering at any unsuspecting young girls who didn’t realise the place they had entered was such a hell hole. I didn’t subscribe to the suggestion they could be rehabilitated. A bit like boxing going underground if the sport was stopped for health reasons, only more necessary for those taking part. They could no more stop their sexual interest in children than I could stop breathing. Maybe some managed to curb their actions, but I wasn’t sold on that either.
Ross growled out his thanks for Adams’ time, we left and moved on to the next on our list, a large five bedroom family home that belonged to a wealthy offender.
10
The contrast between Adams and Derek Habden was stark. He had a wife and a large, well-kept house in Sherwood. Where Adams had been dirty and seedy, Habden oozed class and cleanliness, though no amount of cleanliness would get Habden anywhere close to godliness with the offences he had racked up. His PNC record showed several offences for sexual assaults on teenagers, but a clever and expensive barrister had managed to convince a jury his client was not the type of man who needed to turn unwanted attention on to a teenager new to adulthood. It was, he claimed, the females who had made up the allegations after his client, a community man, respected amongst his peers and friends, had rejected their advances, advances made in an effort to progress their own social standing. The jury bought this. Habden was great at projecting the good, honest man. Why indeed, would he want females barely out of childhood? Unfortunately for Habden he was caught again, and the last time was an offence he couldn’t get out of. The girl was fourteen. His defence claimed Habden could not have known she was fourteen because her dress sense and make-up indicated otherwise, her behaviour, provocative. His previous bad character was brought in to play and Habden was found guilty, given a suspended sentence, placed on the sex offenders register and ordered to complete a sex offender’s programme.
The conversation was a lot more difficult than the one we’d had with Adams. He was arrogant. Ross bristled every time Habden opened his mouth.
“You understand I do not have to answer your questions, don’t you, inspector?” he asked, making the word inspector seem dirty. I felt the movement in Ross as his shoulders went back yet again.
“I appreciate your time, Mr Habden.”
“I was at home with my wife, as I am every evening.”
I looked across to Lorraine Habden; her black hair hung down the sides of her narrow face, making her appear thinner, almost skeletal. She managed to look down her nose at us and nod her concession at the same time. She was a small woman, one who had stood by her husband during some pretty damning evidence and who felt vindicated by a not guilty verdict from a jury. It didn’t explain her demeanour in the face of a guilty verdict a year later. I presumed she still bought his lies, it was either that, or she was afraid to go it alone without the upstanding man by her side.
“Derek has been at home since five-fifteen yesterday. I don’t know why you feel the need to persecute my husband. It was all a misunderstanding.”
“You’re sure he was here all evening?” Ross prompted her to respond to the same question again.
“As she has already stated, constable, we were together the entire time. She is not a stupid woman and was very capable of understanding the question the first time you asked it. Unless you intend to arrest Lorraine or me, I do believe you are leaving,” Habden interjected. Lorraine looked from us to him, then down to the floor.
“Thank you for your time.” I nodded my assent to Ross and turned to leave. “I hope we don’t need to attend again, Mrs Habden.” I looked her in the eyes. I could see her hope waning. There is only so much a wife can take. I handed her my business card. I held my surprise as she took the card from me. I’d left her with more to think about.
11
She heard him before she saw him. A door somewhere past the room she was in creaked on its hinges. A sound that represented terror. She held her breath and attempted to stay quiet, be as small as she could, hoping to be invisible. She shuffled on her knees, backwards across the sticky plastic until her bare feet hit wire bars. They weren’t very wide and one of the bars went between her toes. Her hand went to her mouth to stifle the sound as she cried out. He didn’t like her to make a noise. It made him upset. She moved her hand down to her toes and rubbed between them. Any relief from the pain, however small, helped. She looked down at her feet as she rubbed, still trying to force herself further back, smaller. They were stained: the yellow of urine, of vivid red and purple bruises, and plain old brown shades of dirt. The small lamp plugged in on the floor in the corner offered the opportunity to see herself and her surroundings clearer. They were imprinted in her head now. Every inch of the room etched into her mind’s eye. She knew where the cat came in to pee, in the corner under the old-style school desk. The girl knew the time-worn Shackleton chair with its well sunken seat, all faded flowers and leaves, the wooden legs scratched, possibly by the visiting cat.
She jumped at the sound of the metal bolt as it was dragged across the barrel. Rust and age grated together in a squealing whine. Wrapping her arms around her body, knees up to her chest, she pushed further back into the corner, eyes cast down.
“Hello, my little angel, how are you today?”
She didn’t move.
“You must be hungry. I brought tomato soup, not too hot; I wouldn’t want you to be ungrateful. Would you like it?”
She was hungry. She didn’t want to speak to him, but she was so, so hungry and she could smell the food. The need for survival was strong. She lifted her head but fear grasped hard as he peered through the bars at her. Her head dropped. Eyes back to down to the floor.
“You need to keep your strength up, you’ve got to eat.”
She nodded but didn’t look up.
Slender fingers with filed nails fiddled with the padlock on the cage door; within a moment the plastic soup bowl and disposable spoon were set down inside.
“Eat it up; we can’t have you fainting on us.”
She didn’t move, and she wouldn’t move, until he had left. Aftershave added to the myriad of vile smells already in the enclosed space.
“Okay, I know you’ll eat it. Enjoy. I’ll collect it later.” A smile flickered across his narrow lips.
As soon as he had left the room she allowed a real breath. It hurt, her chest hurt, breathing felt like a massive undertaking. She wondered if bones were broken. They felt broken. She felt broken.
She tried not to eat all the food she was given. She never knew what was in it. Not all the time. But she was hungry today and she shovelled the stale, mouldy chunks of bread and lukewarm soup into her mouth. When she’d finished she pushed the bowl towards the cage door and shuffled back to her corner. Her eyes began to feel heavy. The edges of her vision were hazy. She knew what was happening, she couldn’t stop it. It gave relief from the pain if nothing else. She put her head on the floor, with her hands underneath to protect it, then closed her eyes and gave in.
12
I pulled the 308 into the small parking space that Central police station provided. The car park was a place we shared with the fire service in the next building and was cramped, to say the least, having space for about twenty vehicles in total. The temperature gauge in the car read five degrees. It hadn’t warmed much. My jaw t
ightened, forcing tension further up my head. I pushed the door open as far as it would go without risk of scratching paintwork from the adjacent vehicle, breathed in and squeezed myself out. Ross grunted as he attempted to do the same on the other side, and muttered a curse as he managed to extricate himself and slam the door closed. We crossed the small patch of concrete and entered the dilapidated station through the rear door, climbing the stairs to the major incident room. I left Ross in charge of making the drinks, and checked my emails. There was one from Evie.
Going on the description I’d given her, she hadn’t found a match between local missing children and the child in the mortuary. She said she would look at the recorded missing kids for the rest of the county.
In the incident room, over the round of insipid drinks made by Ross, we debriefed the interviews we’d conducted with the sex offenders. Our third interviewee had a cast-iron alibi as he had been locked up in the cells overnight for a drunk and disorderly, and the fourth had notified us about a week’s holiday he planned and a follow-up phone call to the B & B lady confirmed he had gone.
“I didn’t like Habden at all,” Ross offered the group while he stuffed a ham salad on brown into his mouth. Mayonnaise dolloped out and onto his chin.
I sighed. “If it went on whom we liked, Ross, the cells would be full of sleaze bags.”
He let out a grunt and wiped his chin with the back of his hand. I could see he wasn’t happy with the situation and the type of people we had to deal with in the process of this inquiry. He needed to get his head around it though. It was necessary to get into these people, this world, if we were to find out what had happened to our girl and, more importantly, who she was.
Aaron waved his pocket book at me. “We didn’t fare much better. One of them, Darren Scott, doesn’t have anyone to verify he was at home all night wanking into his tissues, but there’s nothing to say he wasn’t either. The other three have weak alibis we would need to look into further. It feels like a complete waste of an afternoon.” Sally sat and nodded her agreement as she picked bits of salad out of the small cob in her hand. Her face wrinkled in disgust at the tomato as it dropped onto the paper bag it had been held in.
“And Martin,” I asked Martin Thacker, the longest serving DC on my team. “How did yours go?” He leaned back in his chair, his shirt buttons straining across his paunch, his arms crossed behind his head.
“Yeah, pretty much the same as you. They were either “in all night alone” with a “girlfriend” or in the boozer. There’s room to get them firmed up, but I didn’t get the feeling any of them were too worried about being tied to a body. They may have been a bit twitchy about being linked with a child generally, but not with a dead one. There’s stuff to check anyway.”
“Okay, so we have a few lines of inquiry to follow up, but no one gets the feeling we need to push harder on anyone, am I correct?”
Nods of agreement went around the room. It baulked them to say they didn’t think these guys had done anything, but they didn’t think the offenders we had spoken to had killed the girl found in the alleyway. Even if they did have a gut feeling one of them was involved, we needed more than instinct, we needed evidence. I was disappointed because we didn’t have an identity for our girl and we were no closer to identifying an offender either.
“Right,” I said, standing, “so the plan of attack now is to put in the leg work and corroborate those alibis one way or another.” As I walked away I could hear the team muttering; how they weren’t happy about having to deal with child sex offenders and how they were already feeling a layer of grime around them just from talking to them.
My office wasn’t so much of an office as a goldfish bowl within a corner of the incident room. Shabby horizontal blinds, lined with years of settled dust, hung on the inside of the glass to provide privacy, should it be required. I leaned back into my chair and looked out.
Uniform cops were milling in and out as they completed the tasks of collecting CCTV in the area of the dump site and house to house inquiries that had been requested of them. All information coming in to the room would be checked and input onto HOLMES – Home Office Large Major Enquiry System – which would keep track of all nominals, phone numbers, vehicles, and a multitude of other items brought up throughout the investigation and link them to each other, as and when necessary. It would also print out actions for officers to conduct following the input of data by an allocated receiver for the system. Its ability to cross reference the intelligence made it an invaluable piece of kit in an inquiry this size, but I was always a believer in human instinct as well, and instinct was the tool I favoured. Because of this, I sometimes butted heads with more senior officers who thought HOLMES was the singular way to work. All too often I had seen people’s instincts turn out right and I wasn’t willing to quite let go of the old fashioned “nose” for a collar. The phone on my desk rang as I watched my team out beyond the glass partitions.
“Hannah, it’s Catherine,” Detective Superintendent Walker announced herself.
“Ma’am.” I tapped the jotter pad with my pen out of an automatic frustration and a need to do something with my hands.
“How is the investigation progressing?”
I attempted not to sigh into the handset. “The post-mortem has been conducted. There was a lot of evidence of trauma over an extended period of time. She was bound at her hands and feet and also had something placed around her throat. Cause of death looks to be asphyxiation. We haven’t got an ID, but I’ve got Evie working on it. She’s already checked out divisional missing children but didn’t find any matches so she’s now widening the search criteria.” The lack of ID wouldn’t please her.
“Any idea on how long it will take to get an identification, Hannah? The press office is on my back and the command team are paying attention to this one.”
The politics of the job were something I hated with a passion. I joined to catch the bad guys, but the further I progressed through the promotion boards, the more politics were involved and the less policing took place. I wouldn’t go for promotion again. I wanted to police, keep my feet on the ground, investigate and get a good honest collar. “No, ma’am, I’m afraid not. We’re working the case and looking at all angles. The girl isn’t known to us as her fingerprints haven’t brought an ID, so it’s a matter of waiting for some forensic results to come in and the system searches to be completed.” Doodled triangles appeared on the jotter paper in front of my keyboard.
I looked up as Ross stuck his head around the door frame.
“Keep me updated please, Hannah.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I had barely got the handset back on its cradle when Ross spoke. “We’ve got a possible ID. In Norwich.”
13
It was now dark. The roads were alive with a river of white and red lights. Well-lit interiors shone out from old and beautiful buildings, and modern and glassy architecture, making the city glow. Cars were filled with drivers impatient to get home. It took close to forty-five minutes to get through the traffic from Central.
The place I called home wasn’t cosy or warm; it held little in the way of memories. It was functional and clean with glossy kitchen sides, low slung sofas, an old battered wooden coffee table bearing my laptop. A single photograph of my parents on their wedding day hung in a frame on the wall. I’d chosen to have one from way back then, as I knew those times were happy and any memories I had now were tainted and troubled. I loved them very much and I missed Mum.
The location, Park Rock on Castle Boulevard, bristled with character. It was a fairly new development, built at the base of Nottingham castle. At night-time, from the Boulevard, I could see the lit cave entrances. It was breathtaking and I could, and did, sit and look at it for hours. I loved this location, but even with its obvious beauty and surrounding history I didn’t have a deep sense of connection and I wasn’t sure why.
I dragged my overnight bag from under the bed and started throwing in the few items I’d
need. It had already been a long day and I hoped, after speaking with the Norwich cops, we could talk to the girl’s family and attempt to give them the information they needed to process their child’s death. It would then be too late to drive back.
Clean clothes and underwear were thrown in the bag, together with the usual basics. This investigation was hitting me emotionally. It was always one of the more difficult parts of the job, dealing with a bereaved family, and not one I looked forward to. Conveying information to grief stricken parents was made difficult by the overwhelming loss and, sometimes, the guilt they carried. Their ability to absorb facts diminished as emotions were raw and wounds open. I struggled to wade through the obvious quagmire they created without getting myself caught up and bogged down in it. I often struggled to maintain a distance with relatives, but distance was a necessary barrier to an emotional minefield.
I tossed my mobile phone charger into the overnight bag. Walking back into the living room, I picked up the laptop from the coffee table and packed that away amongst my clean clothes in case I wanted to make notes later. I was supposed to be seeing Ethan tonight. I texted him as it was easier than making the call, letting him know where I was going, and that I would call him when I returned. There was no reply. This annoyed me. It left me swinging in the wind with no opportunity to counter or explain. It was like the thing with him always leaving before morning and more often than not, leaving as soon as I nodded off to sleep in an evening after we made love. It gave a feeling of vagueness, something I couldn’t quite catch hold of, and I wasn’t comfortable with that.
The DI Hannah Robbins Series: Books 1 - 3 (Boxset) (Detective Hannah Robbins Crime Series) Page 3