“Yes, boss.” She stood in the doorway, shuffling the paperwork in her hands, her eyes downcast.
“Come in, sit down.”
She sat in the chair opposite my desk, holding herself tightly. She tapped the sides of the papers on her knees to straighten the edges, then turned them to another edge and repeated the action.
“How are you?” I asked her, giving her my full attention.
“I’m good, ma’am.”
“Don’t give me that; you’ve just got out of hospital. I’m certainly not expecting a good. Maybe an okay, but not a good.”
She looked relieved as though I had given her some magic answer.
“I have to admit, I feel a little shook up. It was hard coming back in to work, but I feel passionate about this job and wanted to be here.” She relaxed.
“Do you think you came back too soon? I know I’m feeling the strain, so I understand. Do you need to call it a day for today?”
“Maybe. Soon. I need to finish what I’m doing. I don’t want to slack off with this.” She genuinely cared about the case. Maybe I had it wrong. She had been through an ordeal. We both had.
“Finish that, then knock off for the day. If we don’t see you tomorrow, we don’t see you.”
She practically jumped out of the chair.
“Oh, I will be in tomorrow. I’m fine. I’m tired. I will be here tomorrow and won’t leave until I’ve finished this.”
I leaned back and smiled at her.
“Great. That’s good to hear.”
62
Sally breathed a sigh of relief as she walked out of Hannah’s office. She had just photocopied documents to be sent to the CPS when Hannah had called her in. For a minute she’d considered her boss already knew about the pregnancy, so she’d jumped on the excuse Hannah had handed her in mentioning the blast.
The blast wasn’t the distraction, though indirectly, it hadn’t helped matters. It had fuelled Tom’s need for her to disclose the pregnancy at work. It was better if Hannah continued to believe any distraction was a result of the explosion they’d been involved in. Should her DI become aware of the pregnancy then Sally had no doubt she would ground her and potentially remove her from the case. She felt connected to this case, seeing what the girl went through when Jack did the PM on Rosie. Maybe it was her parental instincts kicking in, or the hormones, but she had a need to close this for Rosie and see it through to the end and she was not going to risk that by disclosing the pregnancy, especially if there was no chance of harm coming to the baby.
Sally walked back to her desk, happy she was still on the case and pleased she could, for a short time at least, juggle the job, the deception, and Tom.
63
After talking with Sally I decided to catch up with Evie. She was still going through the intelligence work I had given her the previous day and didn’t have any useful information. It frustrated the hell out of me.
The last thing I did before I left work relatively early, was to text Ethan to see if he was free to meet up, and to apologise for not calling the night before. Texting was a coward’s way out, but the ease of a message without having to deal with any kind of conversation appealed to me most of the time, so it was the default option when I was feeling in the wrong. I expected him to be annoyed or at least ambivalent to my request after standing him up, but he answered straight away and we made arrangements to meet in the local Antibo Italian restaurant on Lower Parliament Street, half an hour later.
The lighting was low and gentle music created an ambiance. Dark wooden tables and chairs, against the white tiled floor gave the restaurant a comfortable feel I could easily relax in. I lifted the bottle of Pinot Noir and topped up our glasses. The restaurant was quiet; evening diners hadn’t started to fill up the tables. Other than ours, three others were taken. A young couple chatted over pasta, their faces lighting up as they spoke in hushed voices. A middle-aged couple with two small children, and what looked to be a working dinner: five people in suits and heels on the women. I had no idea how the women walked in their killer heels for five minutes, never mind a whole working day that extended into the evening. How were Ethan and I perceived? Did we look like a couple out for a quiet, close dinner, or two strangers with nothing to say to each other? I studied Ethan over my glass as I drank. His face looked drawn and heavy, but his eyes found mine and it felt as though they were searching my soul. The one thing I wasn’t sure I still possessed at this point in time. I felt violated by the case, like the dregs of humanity were permeating my very being. I looked away and allowed myself to succumb to the safety of the glass in my hand.
“Do you want to talk about it, Hannah?”
I placed my glass back on the table and looked at him. “I don’t know. There’s something else to this case the media don’t know and it’s eating away at me.”
Ethan didn’t move a muscle; he just continued to look at me. “And you don’t want to talk to me about it because you’re worried about what I will do with the information.”
A statement rather than a question. I didn’t know how to talk to anyone about the things I saw, never mind a journalist I was in some kind of relationship with. “It’s difficult.”
He nodded.
“It’s not that I don’t want to talk to you.” I took a breath. “It’s the case itself. It’s nasty and words don’t seem enough.” I raised the glass to my lips again. An easy transparent barrier.
“I won’t probe. I want you to know that you and work are two different things. If you want to talk then I’m here, but for now, let’s eat.” He gave me an easy smile, the tension in his face broken by a softer, gentler look. I exhaled, not realising I had been holding my breath and leaned in to the table. I was happy to see where the evening took us.
I hadn’t been at my desk long the following morning when Evie walked in with a stack of paper and her laptop tucked under her arm.
“Hey,” I looked at her, “since when do you make house calls?” Evie rarely left her office.
She plopped herself down in the chair opposite my desk and threw her papers on it before putting down the laptop. “I’m hoping the biscuits also have a home here and not just in my office.” She opened up her computer. “Otherwise I might have to take my sexy, intelligent ass, and its computer accompaniments, back to civilisation.”
I smiled at her. “I’m sure I can find some. But will it be worth my while?”
She looked up from her tapping, feigning shock. “Since when is anything I give you not worth your while, missy?”
I acquiesced and pulled open my drawer, placing the chocolate biscuits on top of my overflowing desk.
“You ever clean your desk?” Evie asked, fingers tapping away at the keyboard as report boxes popped up all over the screen.
I grabbed some papers and dropped them onto the chair at the other corner. “I know where everything is,” I replied. The chair failed to hold everything I had just dumped on it and we watched as half the contents slid to the floor.
She raised her eyebrows in question.
“Okay, most of the time I do.” I stuck my nose back into my mug and eyed my best friend over the rim of it. “Stop moaning. You have biscuits. Now, what do you have for me?”
Evie grinned, perfect teeth on show. “Remember all those background inquiries you set me a few days back?”
I remembered. It felt like a bottomless pit of a task when I handed it over to her and I wasn’t sure whether I had expected results from it. But Evie was bolt upright in front of me, her body language very much saying otherwise.
“Stop gloating and let me have what you’ve got.”
She shoved half a biscuit into her mouth and started to speak. “I found a link between our cases with Rosie and Allison and another misper in another force area. And if we have a link like this, we may find a lead on the girl in the photograph, right?” She coughed a little as she forced the dry crumbs down her throat and reached for my mug. Taking a slug, she then looked at me in disgust a
s she realised it was cold.
I liked her logic but realised it didn’t necessarily mean that it would lead to the girl we needed to find. However, it was a step we currently didn’t have. “Okay, tell me about it.”
64
Sally answered the phone on the fifth ring as she pulled at the towel rack in the ladies toilets.
“Sally?”
“Yes. Yes, it’s me.” She wondered how they had coped before the invention of mobile phones. If you wanted to avoid someone, all you had to do was get out of their way. Walk out of the house and go to work. Now though, now was different. She knew he was worried. But not giving her time and space was not going to make their situation any easier.
“How are you? How’s things?” he asked.
“I’m okay. It’s busy. We’re under deadlines from the Crown Prosecutors and waiting for the Digital Investigation Unit to give us something to identify another girl. There’s no need to be concerned about me here today.”
“You shouldn’t even be there.” He was annoyed. “You’ve just got out of hospital and you wonder why I’m worried and checking up on you?”
“I won’t be late home.” She tried to placate him, give him something back, to show she understood where he was coming from and was taking care of herself and the baby.
“If I have to come to the station and collect you, I will. I don’t care what she says.”
“She won’t say anything. She won’t need to. I’ll be home. She’s not making me do this, Tom. You didn’t see the girl.” She knew he couldn’t even imagine. How could you explain to someone the horror of a child’s violent death? She had now also seen the images retrieved from Benn’s computer and she was angry. There was no way she could describe those. No way at all. She couldn’t get her own head around it never mind asking a loved one to comprehend. “I’ll be home and we’ll talk. I’ll get a takeaway on the way. I love you, Tom.”
“I love you too, Sally. So much. I don’t want this to drive such a wedge between us, I just worry. I nearly lost my mind when they came to pick me up from work when you were involved in that car blast. I have never been so scared in my entire life. I thought I’d lost you. It’s my role to protect you, you’re my wife and maybe that’s why I’m finding this so difficult.” Sally looked in the mirror at her pale face. Her husband was scared. She owed him more.
“I’m going to make an appointment at my doctors’ and set up my antenatal appointments. Trust me. I will keep this baby safe.”
She ended the call, pushed the phone back into her pocket and walked back to the incident room with a feeling of dread.
65
“Well,” Evie went on, stuffing another half biscuit into her mouth. It made me wonder how she kept so trim. “You gave me a pretty hefty task of searching through the national database of missing children of a certain age. Do you know how many there are at any one time?” she asked, not really expecting an answer. “A bloody lot, I can tell you. Around 200,000 children under sixteen years of age go missing in a year and up to 500 are missing at any one time.”
“Go on.” I was disheartened by the facts and figures Evie was reeling off.
“Well, as I worked with Danny in DIU, I was able to narrow down a general location to help with my searches, due to some specific markers in the photograph of the girl you want identified. I narrowed it down as much as I could, then took into consideration which of them had the potential to be sexually exploited.” She knew her stuff. “And while I was doing this I came across a linked file.” She looked at me as though this should mean something. I returned her look with a blank one. I knew my way around the basics of the missing persons software but it had been a long time since I had used it so the terminology was going over my head a little.
“Oh, Han,” she said, swallowing hard. “A missing person report has links on it. People – friends, family or associates – where the person could or has turned up before, or know in some way. It’s so investigating cops have somewhere to start checking.” This I remembered and I could tell Evie was leading somewhere. “One of the regular missing children in Peterborough has a linked file with…” she paused for effect.
“Yes?”
“Rosie Green.”
66
“In what way is this girl connected to Rosie Green and why don’t we already know about it?” I snapped.
“Hey.” Evie stopped me with a stare. She was well aware this case had got to me, but she still wouldn’t give any ground to take it out on her. “She was a tenuous link. It wasn’t picked up. Rosie lived in Norfolk while Izzy lived in Cambridgeshire.”
“Izzy? The missing girl?” I asked, trying to catch up.
“Yes. Isabelle Thomas. Fourteen years of age. A problem child for her parents, the education authority, and with a knock on effect for local police for a couple of years. Always going missing, drinking, seen hanging around with older boys. Inappropriate relationships.”
“And the link to Rosie?” I didn’t get it. The information on Rosie was that she was a good child with none of these behavioural problems. This wasn’t the life Rosie had been living and they lived so far away, so why the link.
“Isabelle’s list of friends, contacts and associates is huge. She was often found in different counties because she’d get into cars with anyone that offered her money and alcohol. They’d use her up then leave her stranded wherever they’d taken her, so she got to know people in the areas she found herself.”
“How does Rosie come into it?”
“Her name was added to the list of associates one night by a conscientious neighbourhood policing officer in Norwich, where it seems Izzy found herself once or twice. It looks as though they spent a couple of evenings hanging out in the same inappropriate places with older boys that were no good. Police attended outside some shop fronts, removed alcohol bottles from the teenagers, took some details and moved them all on. Not long after that incident Isabelle went missing for good.”
“What happened to her?” There had to be a reason this had come to my office, biscuits or not.
“She was found dead a week later. Beaten. Post-mortem results show asphyxiation by strangulation.” She stopped looking so happy with life now. Inputting and collating information was what Evie did and she did it well. She hadn’t paid attention to what any of it meant. It was easier for her that way. This was a stark reminder of the shitty side of life out there, beyond the comfort of the walls she was used to.
“How long ago was this? I need details. Where was it and who was the SIO?” My mind was running several steps ahead.
“Just a minute.” Her fingers worked the keyboard. “Three weeks ago. The offender was arrested and charged.”
“They have an identified offender?”
“It says they do here. The SIO of the investigation was DI Shaun Harris and the body was found just outside of Peterborough.”
67
She didn’t know why she hadn’t told Hannah about the pregnancy. Something was stopping her. Tom believed she had told Hannah. It happened when Benn was charged. It had been what she promised and Tom had taken her at her word and never thought to ask the question. She knew she was in the wrong, but she never corrected him. She let him believe it.
She didn’t feel pregnant. There was no growth around her middle. And the nausea was bearable. There hadn’t been any great heaving, vomiting down the toilet every morning. Neither had she craved strange combinations such as gherkins and ice cream, or anything else equally as odd. There was nothing to stop her telling Hannah, but something held her back. Something she couldn’t put her finger on. What harm could there be in doing the file for trial?
“Ross, have you got a copy of all property seized please?” Sally looked up and asked as she typed. His desk faced hers, his face was screwed up in a mask of concentration as his fingers worked through more paper they’d created, pen in hand, scribbling notes in his blue pad as he went.
Ross, easily distracted, looked up and grinned as though
she had just asked him if he wanted to go out for a pint. He was frustrating. Reminded her of her younger brother, Alan. “Electronically or do you want me to stand at the printer for an hour?” he answered, reminding her even more of Alan and their constant sibling spats which usually ended up with Alan taking a punch in the arm and him buying her a drink down the pub.
She glared and Ross put his head down. “Email will be fine,” she said, knowing the problem was her mood and not Ross. “Thanks.”
Her inbox beeped as the list arrived. She opened it. There were pages and pages of items. She needed to list the ones to be used as evidence on the MG9 exhibits form. The rest would be logged as unused material. She began the onerous task.
“Tea?”
She lifted her head. Caught up in bodily fluids, computers and components, she didn’t see him coming. Ross stood at the side of her, a sincere look on his face.
“Fancy a cuppa?” he asked again.
She felt ashamed and cornered. “Thanks, Ross. Tea would be great.”
68
I picked up the handset and dialled. After several frustrating re-directions, I was put through to the correct homicide unit at Bayard Place, Broadway, Peterborough, and the DI in charge of the investigation into the murder of Isabelle Thomas, Shaun Harris.
I needed information in relation to their investigation, to find out what linked these girls and these very different locations. If we could find the link, we had some chance of finding the girl photographed in the cage.
Harris was personable and helpful. Due to the intense press attention, he was aware of the Rosie Green and Allison Kirk case, but he hadn’t connected it to his investigation. As soon as he was aware of what we had found on Benn’s computer he was more than happy to share what he knew. He talked me through the sequence of events that led up to Isabelle’s murder, the stuff we already knew from her missing persons report, then went on to the murder investigation and where that had taken them. The picture painted of Isabelle was a now familiar one. There had been issues at home, a failure to attend school which had not been addressed by her parents and when she did attend she was surly and uncooperative with regular missing episodes. There was a rapid and now obvious decline, and one that was not picked up by any agency: the police service, children’s services, education or health. All agencies failed to engage with each other sufficiently to make a difference. There was now a Serious Case Review running. These are conducted when a child dies and a factor of that death is abuse or neglect, though reviews are also conducted under various other scenarios but ones based on harm to children. The review is not created to allocate blame, as culpability is looked at by coroners or criminal investigations. It’s a means to identify shortfalls and to learn lessons and to see what could have been done differently by the various organisations involved with that child before and after death.
The DI Hannah Robbins Series: Books 1 - 3 (Boxset) (Detective Hannah Robbins Crime Series) Page 17