“Sir!”
“What?”
“Look at this.” Mills drifted over to me, holding the thin folder in hand. Inside were clippings from newspapers, printed off articles from websites.
Mills pulled one out and handed it over.
“Missing Boy. Jack Wellins, fourteen years old. Last seen leaving school wearing a school uniform: green blazer and tie. Please call 999 or Elizabeth Wellins with any news.”
“Missing boy?” I mused, looking at the date of the article. It was over ten years old.
“Any memory of that?” Mills asked, leaning against the desk.
I shook my head. “I’ve worked a few missing persons, but the name isn’t familiar. By this point, I was already working homicides more than anything.”
“Why would Schmidt have these?” Mills asked, looking over my shoulder at them. He had a fair few, all wedged in the pages.
“He was interested, that’s clear. Maybe he knew the boy.”
Mills hummed distractedly, and I turned to him.
“What is it?”
“There is one article in particular, sir,” he said, reaching for the folder and pulling out a cut out from a newspaper. He tapped the by line.
Jeannie Gray.
“Of course,” I muttered. “Of course, she covered this.” I sighed, shutting the folder.
“Do you think it’s connected?” Mills asked. “His interest in the missing boy and his murder?”
“Quite possible, though I don’t see how, truth be told.” I breathed in and out deeply. My eyes pinched shut, and I let out a groan.
“I suppose we’re going to the Post then,” I said. “Find out what we can about this missing boy.”
“We could always check the old case files,” Mills suggested. “See if he’s still in the system.”
It was a fair point, but even Mills sounded unsure by it. That could take a while, and Jeannie was prone to keeping all her old notes fairly within reach. And it was ten years ago.
“We can do both,” I said. “Text Fry, see if she’s able to spend a few hours scouring through some old files for us.”
“Oh, I’ll bet she’ll be delighted,” he murmured, already pulling his phone from his pocket.
I drummed my fingers on the desk, looking at Schmidt’s barren pinboard again. Things were gone unless he never wrote anything down. Things were emptied and ripped out and left in a state. He must have stumbled upon something.
Mills’s phone dinged a moment later, and he nodded to himself before putting his phone away.
“She’s on it,” he said, checking his watch. “I reckon we’ve got time still to head to the Post before Sharp demands an update.”
I nodded. “Hopefully, by then, Dr Cavell will have something for us as well,” I added. Wishful thinking, but I was in need of a little of that right now.
We grabbed the folder and Schmidt’s notebook and gave his desk area one last sweep before walking out of the lab and heading across the hall.
In her office, Dr Bayat sat at her computer, typing away. I knocked gently on the doorframe, and she looked up, standing a second later.
“Any joy?” she asked, walking over.
“A little,” I said. “Was Dr Schmidt fairly meticulous in his work?” I asked as she started to lead us back the way we came.
“Oh, yes. Dotted every I, crossed every T, he did. Notes on notes. Why?”
“His desk appears to be rather empty,” I said.
She looked surprised by that. “He wasn’t usually one to take anything home with him,” she muttered. “Unless he finally decided to start embracing the digital age at long last. I’d been telling him to digitise his files for months now.”
Perhaps he had finally taken her up on that, and Wasco would be able to get us access to all of it. More wishful thinking.
“He preferred paper and pen?” Mills asked as Dr Bayat opened the thick metal door back into the reception area.
“He did, generally speaking. Liked to make a lot of notes which aren’t always easy on a computer. The odd sketch here and there.”
“Did you ever see him write anything in Hebrew?” Mills asked.
Another look of surprise from Dr Bayat. “I can’t say that I did. I heard him mutter to himself once or twice, mostly when he was annoyed, but he always wrote in English.”
The Hebrew in the notebook was of interest then, more so since it had been ripped from the page.
Dr Bayat walked us all the way to the reception desk, where I nodded politely to the man there before shaking her hand.
“Thank you for your assistance, Dr Bayat. I hope you don’t mind, but it’s likely we’ll be in touch again at some point.”
“Not a problem, Inspector. Anything that we can do to help, we will do. Dr Schmidt was our friend, as much as anything else.” She shook Mills’s hand then, and we walked outside onto the damp pavement, heading straight for the car.
I placed the folder and notebook in the boot, then stood there for a moment, girding myself up for our next point of call.
The Post and Jeannie Gray, two things I had not thought I’d been seeing again any time soon.
Twelve
Thatcher
The Post hadn’t changed since the last time I visited, not that I had really expected it to. The old stone building wrapped around the little courtyard where a few benches sat beneath trees, a coffee kiosk looking sorry in the rain. Mills and I stood outside, staring up at the building.
“You sure about this?” Mills asked me. “I know you’d rather not see her.”
“This is about the investigation,” I said. “We’re not about to let personal problems get in the way of solving a man’s murder.”
Mills nodded but stayed put, hands in his pockets, until I started walking to the front door. I shouldered through it and headed for the little desk on the ground floor where a woman sat with her legs propped on the surface, a book in hand.
I walked right up to her, hitting the bell on the desk. She looked over lazily and swung her legs down, closing her book with a smile.
“Good afternoon, welcome to the Post. How can I help you today?”
“We’re here to see Jeannie Gray,” I informed her stiffly. She frowned and glanced at her computer screen.
“Miss Gray doesn’t have any appointments today,” she said dutifully. “Are you sure you’ve got the right day?”
“We don’t have an appointment,” I said, showing her my ID. “Tell her that DCI Thatcher and DS Mills from the North Yorkshire Police are here. I’m sure she’ll have no problems.”
The woman blinked and nervously rolled her chair back a bit, grabbing the phone as she went, hitting one of the buttons. I drifted back over to Mills, who stood with an amused expression on his face.
“It’s always rather funny watching you do that,” he said. “I can never get it right.”
“You’re too friendly,” I told him. “People like you too much.”
“Doesn’t sound so bad,” he answered with a shrug. “Though I would like to be able to intimidate them sometimes—might come in handy.”
“Practice in the mirror,” I teased, clapping him on the shoulder. “You’ll get the hang of it sooner or later.”
“And give someone a right good laugh if they walked in on me doing that,” Mills added.
“Yes, well, that part’s more for my own amusement.”
Mills rolled his eyes, nodding over my shoulder as the girl from the desk walked over, her hands wrung together.
“Miss Gray says you can go straight up. She’s in the middle of something, but she’ll be there in five minutes. She also said you know where to go.”
I nodded, I remembered where her desk was, and it was good to know that she hadn’t been moved after her long stint away. The girl wandered back to her desk, and Mills and I hit the stairs, clambering up into the busy newsroom above. The desks were all occupied, minus or two reporters out on a job, and the room had the faint smell of paper and coffee,
cigarette smoke lingering on a few coats and scarves.
Jeannie’s desk was over in the corner by one of the long sash windows. She used her desk and a shelf to create herself a little nook whereby other people couldn’t bother her so much, a lamp in the corner, a stack of books on the desk. Her laptop sat quietly whirring, multiple pots of pens here and there, several notebooks, most of which were probably unused, and an empty mug sat idly. Her bright green coat was hung up on the wall behind her chair, an umbrella propped beside it. Little ornaments were scattered here and there, a few shells, some postcards, a snow globe. There was a little stuffed frog in one corner that I recognised: I’d given it to her at some point.
Jeannie was not a very tidy person, but her note keeping was meticulous. Every folder was dated and labelled, stacked on one of the shelves. There would be other, more intimate notes tucked away in locked drawers here and there, but she rarely actually printed anything that could be deemed too personal.
Mills and I hung around by her desk, looking out of the window and at the rest of the room as it hummed quietly. We weren’t waiting long for the office door at the other end of the long room to open, and a bright head of red hair began weaving through the desks over to us. Jeannie was scowling as she walked, dumping the folder in her hand on her desk angrily. She looked up at me, then at Mills.
“Well, this takes me back,” she said, taking a seat in her chair, folding one leg over the other. “How long has it been since you two stood here?”
“A while,” I replied.
Jeannie hummed, turning her chair idly. She looked paler than usual, skin white beneath her freckles, shadows under her eyes, and she was thinner than she was when I last saw her.
“Trouble with the boss?” I asked, nodding to the office she’d walked out of. Jeannie pinched the bridge of her nose and made a dismissive noise.
“Nothing I haven’t had to deal with before. Now,” she looked up at us. “What do you need?”
No teasing, no flirtations. I liked to think that her change in attitude came from the distance between us, my new relationship that she was respecting. But Jeannie didn’t flirt for romance. She did it for fun; it was her way of converting. This stoic, to-the-point attitude was odd and unlike her.
I pulled the article from my coat pocket and handed it over. She took it without a word, and even Mills turned to look at me with a confused expression. No rings on her fingers, no polish on her nails, she wasn’t even wearing red lipstick. She always wore it unless she was sleeping.
“Jack Wellins,” she said softly. “Missing boy from ten years ago.” She indicated two chairs across the way that we grabbed and dragged over, sitting by her desk. “I spoke to his mother, Elizabeth. She was worried that word wasn’t getting out there properly, poor woman.”
“Did they ever find him?” Mills asked.
Jeannie shook her head. “Trail went cold. The police on the case said it’s likely he just ran away, headed off to London or something.”
“Without a word to his mother?” I asked.
“Single mother,” Jeannie pressed. “It was only the two of them. And all of his things were still in his room, his bag, his clothes, his Gameboy. What fourteen-year-old boy would leave home without his Gameboy?” she asked. Mills made a face that I took to mean “not me.”
“Police said insufficient evidence that something bad had happened to him, anyway,” Jeannie added, looking down at her old article, at the boy’s face on the page. There was a look of great sorrow on her face, one that she usually hid well.
“What can you tell us about him?” I asked her gently.
“Elizabeth, his mother, was only seventeen when she had him. They left the city, moved to a smaller village so she could look after him a little more easily. Jack went to a secondary school close to the city, got the bus home every day and walked home from the stop. We know he made it home because he stopped in the local shop for some crisps,” she added. “But his mother never saw him, nor did anyone else in the village. From the timing on the bus route, the police thought that he got off, got himself a snack, then got back on the bus.”
“No sign of him since?”
“Not a peep,” Jeannie said. “Course now he’d be an adult, so he could very well be living a full, vibrant life outside of Yorkshire.”
“Were they close?” I asked. “He and his mother?”
“From the way she made it sound,” Jeannie said. “She worked at the local primary school so that their schedules were always the same, and she had holidays with him. Usual mum and teenager stuff, I suppose, but not so bad that he’d run away.”
“Could it be that he went to find his father?” Mills asked.
Jeannie nodded. “Elizabeth got in touch with him, but he claimed to have no idea about it. I thought he could be lying, but pursuing it was difficult. He moved to Scotland, so Jack would have gone there.”
I breathed in deeply, trying not to let myself get too caught up on this missing boy and his story. Our business was finding out what interest Schmidt had in it.
“Where did you find this?” Jeannie asked, looking down at the page again.
“Our latest homicide victim had it,” I told her. “Had a few, actually, but yours was the only name we recognised.”
Jeannie pursed her lips. “A little stash of them? That doesn’t sound good, Thatch, if you ask me. Like a little hoard.”
A trophy hoard. Mills and I shared another look. Perhaps our loyalty to Lena had stopped us from questioning that particular narrative.
“What’s his name?” Jeannie asked. “I can check my old notes and see if he comes up.”
“Not really releasing that information yet, Jeannie,” I told her.
She rolled her eyes and glared at me. “I’ll just see if his name is in the notes. I promise not to report anything. I’ve got a tough enough job with my current story to start pissing you off about yours.” Definitely odd behaviour.
“Swearing you to secrecy here, Jeannie,” I warned, lifting a finger. She made a little cross motion over her heart. “Dr Stefan Schmidt.”
She wrote the name down, a slight crease between her brows.
“Name ring a bell?” Mills asked, studying her expression.
“I don’t think so,” she replied, putting the cap back on her pen. “Schmidt. European?”
“Parents from Germany originally,” I said.
Jeannie nodded slowly. “Jewish?”
“Does it matter?” Mills asked.
“Elizabeth’s Catholic,” she said. “So, it might.” I thought about that for a moment, then glanced at my watch. The day was wearing thin, and I still wanted to see Dr Cavell at some point, maybe check in with Wasco as well before calling it a day.
“Let me know what you find, Jeannie,” I said, standing up and replacing the chair. “We appreciate you doing this.”
She nodded, standing up as well and leaning against her desk. I hesitated, then as Mills dragged his chair away, I stepped closer.
“You alright?” I asked her in a low voice.
“Right as rain,” she replied, putting on a bravado smile. “Nice of you to worry, though.” Though the effect wasn’t quite there, the light wasn’t in her eye. Something was up. Perhaps it was just work, whatever had brought her scowling out of that meeting with her boss.
She took a step back as Mills returned. “I’ll check my notes and let you know if anything sticks out. Might be worth checking your own files on it, though,” she added.
“We’re in the process of checking,” I said.
Jeannie raised an eyebrow. “Got Smith doing all your desk work, have you?”
“Smith’s gone,” Mills said. “Promotion took her out to Leeds.”
Jeannie blinked. “It really has been a while, hasn’t it? Well, my sympathies to your new constable then,” she said, giving me a jaunty two-fingered salute before settling back down at her desk.
“Thank you, Jeannie,” I said. She smiled up at us, turning her attention
back to her laptop. Mills and I wandered away quietly, heading out of the newspaper building and back into the outside.
Once the door closed behind us, Mills turned to me. “Is it just me, or did she seem out of sorts?”
“Very much out of sorts,” I replied with a frown. “Something’s up with her.”
Mills studied my face for a bit. “Probably just work,” he said quietly. “I doubt anything we could help with.”
I shook my head, recollecting my thoughts. “You’re right, Mills. And maybe doing this little job for us will buck her spirits.” I doubted it, but it was a comforting thing to tell myself.
“It is odd,” Mills remarked as we started walking back to the car. “That Schmidt had all of those things, all the articles.”
I nodded, rather disturbed by that as well. “I wouldn’t like to tell Crowe that he might have had some involvement in that boy’s disappearance.”
Mills made an agreeing sound deep in his throat. “But he had them at work, not at home?”
“I doubted many people would have gone and looked through his work folders,” I reasoned. “Not like you might nose through a photo album. Who’d look for them there?”
“But how would he have even been involved? I mean, did he meet him through his school or something?”
“Potentially. Ten years ago, remember Mills. Schmidt would have been in his early thirties, late twenties when all this happened. Maybe he even knew Elizabeth Wellins before she moved from the city.”
“Perhaps he knew why she moved from the city,” Mills added darkly. It was an odd situation to consider, but I didn’t think that Schmidt had those articles out of mere curiosity. Something linked the two of them.
“Between Jeannie and Fry looking into it,” I said as we climbed into the car. “No doubt we’ll get an answer to it all soon enough.”
Mills nodded, looking pensive as he sat and closed the car door. “Do you think it’s worth asking Lena? If she ever heard of the name Wellins or anything?”
Cradle to Coffin (A DCI Thatcher Yorkshire Crimes Book 10) Page 10