by Roz Watkins
The kitchen door poked open and Mandy said, ‘Who’s for tea?’
‘Mandy, you should go back to bed,’ Gary said.
‘I’m fine,’ Mandy said. ‘Someone needs to look out for you, getting into stupid fights.’
‘Well, since you’re here,’ Gary said. ‘Tell them I was with you all Sunday night.’
Mandy spoke with such a lack of conviction I wondered if she actually wanted us to think she was lying for her husband. ‘Yes, he was.’
‘We’ll need you to pop in to the station to make a formal statement,’ I said. I suspected she’d talk when she was away from Gary.
‘Go back to bed now,’ Gary said.
‘I’m fine.’ Mandy flicked her eyes at Gary. There was a subtext here that was intriguing me.
‘We’re okay for tea,’ I said, ‘but sit down a moment.’
Mandy walked across the room and perched on the sofa arm, giving the dog a wide berth. ‘Gary rescued Flossy,’ she said. ‘She was abused. That’s why she’s not very friendly.’
Gary looked embarrassed. ‘The police don’t need to know that,’ he said. ‘I only did what anyone would have.’
‘He loves dogs,’ Mandy said.
I hadn’t expected that. ‘Well, good for you,’ I said to Gary.
‘Whatever. What else do you need to know?’
‘I gathered yesterday that you were concerned about the threatening comments on the Great Meat Debate website?’
‘Of course we’re concerned.’ He put concerned in air-quotes. ‘You’ve just seen those nutters. How would you feel if a bunch of eco-terrorist twats were threatening to cut your throat?’
‘Do you know anything that specifically links them with Violet’s disappearance?’
‘Other than saying they’re going to kill her and then putting a banner up basically confessing? I told you – they’re psychos. There’s children starving, and all they’re bothered about is a few pigs.’
As if you couldn’t care about both children and pigs. Maybe this was to re-establish full macho mode after Mandy’s revelation about Flossy.
‘I’m worried about Gary,’ Mandy said. ‘The Pale Child saw his face.’
The Pale Child? I pictured Violet in her video, eyes stretched wide, trying to hide her fear.
Gary spun round to Mandy. ‘For God’s sake, woman! You need to go back to bed. The detective doesn’t want to hear this crap. This is about Violet. And if anyone’s going to get me, it’s not the bloody Pale Child!’
‘What exactly did you see?’ I asked Gary, intrigued by his outburst.
‘It’ll have been some idiot kid running around in the woods,’ he said.
‘You told me she saw you, Gary.’ Mandy’s voice was rising. She looked at me imploringly, giving me the impression she wasn’t used to being listened to. ‘He admitted it last night when he’d had a few drinks. He was in the woods and the Child saw him.’
‘The detective doesn’t want to hear about this,’ Gary snapped.
I noticed the use of the singular detective. Did he not even acknowledge Jai’s existence?
‘Why were you in the woods last night, Gary?’ I asked.
‘I took a walk with the others involved in Anna’s stupid website. To talk about the fact that some maniac has got Violet and that we might be next. And looking at that banner, we were right to think they were coming for us.’
‘If the Pale Child sees your face, you die.’ Mandy’s eyes were wide, her expression vacant.
Gary slapped his hand against the sofa arm. ‘Shut up, Mandy!’
Jai spoke to Gary. His voice was icy. ‘Perhaps you should give your wife a chance to tell us why she’s so worried.’
Gary finally looked at Jai, and then at me. The dog rolled onto her back and Gary stroked her saggy, bald tummy. ‘Mandy’s not been well,’ he said. ‘She has mental health problems.’
Mandy whispered, ‘We all know how it works – if she sees your face, you die.’ She wiped a tear from her cheek. ‘She saw Gary and it means he’s going to die next.’
13
Jai and I headed out of Gritton and set off for West Bridgford where Bex Smith lived. It was over an hour away but we could talk through the case in the car so it wouldn’t be wasted time.
‘That was hairy,’ I said.
‘Yeah. The Animal Vigilantes have definitely upped their game recently.’
We drove in silence for a while, leaving the hills of the Peak District behind and heading towards Nottingham.
‘What do you reckon about this Pale Child?’ I said.
‘Sounds like the over-active imagination of a bunch of villagers who need to get out more.’
I sighed. ‘I know. It is strange though: Violet makes a video saying she’s seen the child and then promptly disappears. And nobody wants to talk about it.’
We fruitlessly batted ideas around the car as we travelled down the M1 and around Nottingham, before finally arriving at the address we’d been given for Bex. It was a ground-floor flat in an old Victorian house. I pushed a bell, which annoyingly gave no indication of whether or not it had rung, meaning that when a woman pulled the door open, I had my ear pressed against it. She gave me a confused look, while I acted as if this was normal procedure and showed her my ID.
She ushered Jai and me into a gloomy hallway.
I blinked in the dim light, and my eyes came into focus. It was like walking into one of those crazy antique/junk shops where every nanometre of space is crammed with old and bizarre paraphernalia. The walls were lined with gold-framed paintings – portraits, still lives, horses and dogs, landscapes, and even the odd surrealist. Furniture on both sides of the hallway left only a narrow passage for us to walk down, and even that was cluttered with coat and hat stands, magazine racks and an alabaster bust.
Bex was dressed in loose black clothing, and was large, making it even harder for her to navigate her way between all her stuff.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I have a lot of things. Come through to the kitchen if you want. But I can tell you now there’s no way that girl’s my daughter.’
We stepped carefully along the hallway and into a much lighter room at the back of the house. A dresser was heaving with old plates, jugs and a clutch of strange china dogs playing musical instruments. Kitchen worktops were covered in books, including what looked like art portfolios. Minimalist this was not.
Bex had prepared for our visit: three wooden kitchen chairs were clear, and she gestured towards them. ‘Sit down. Sorry it’s a mess. I collect odd things without meaning to.’
‘I’m the same with books,’ I said.
We sat, and Bex took the third chair, blinking as if she’d recently emerged from a dark place, which I supposed she had.
I asked her a couple of questions about the saxophone-playing china dogs, just to settle her down, and then got stuck in. Jai sat with his notebook, exuding calm.
‘Did you have a baby in 2000?’ I asked.
‘Er … yes, but it can’t be that girl. She couldn’t be more different from me. She’s beautiful and confident and slim and … she just can’t be mine.’
She said this, and yet I could still see in her a trace of the girl in Tony Nightingale’s photograph – beautiful, clear-skinned, wide-eyed. Admittedly the years hadn’t been kind. Her skin was rough and her features not clearly defined, almost as if they were out of focus or badly drawn. I said gently, ‘Could you confirm your child’s date of birth?’
‘Nineteenth of May 2000.’
‘Violet Armstrong was born on the nineteenth of May 2000 and her mother was Rebecca Smith.’
Bex shook her head and I could hear her breathing coming fast. ‘No, she can’t be. She’s too …’
‘Too what?’
And then Bex was sobbing. ‘Oh God, oh God, I never really thought … I tried to forget, but I could never stop thinking about her.’
I sat forward and let my breathing come faster to match hers. That way I could slowly bring her down. I u
sually get a feel pretty quickly whether they’re going to bond with me or Jai, and this one was mine. ‘It’s a very difficult situation,’ I said.
Bex let some tension go from her body, and blew her nose loudly on a tissue which looked too pre-loved for comfort. I grabbed a pack from my pocket and pushed them over the cluttered table.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m disgusting. It’s when people are nice I can’t cope. I didn’t expect you to be sympathetic. You’re the police.’
She must have had pretty low standards of being nice. All I did was shove a few tissues at her. These old-money families tended to run low in the sympathy department. ‘We’re doing our absolute utmost to find Violet,’ I said. ‘Most teenagers who go missing do turn up.’
Bex took a tissue and blew her nose again. ‘Sorry. How gross. She didn’t want to see me. I registered with that thing to get in touch. If you both register, they connect you, but she never did. Sometimes I wondered if she might be dead, but I couldn’t let myself think that. It felt like she was alive and dead at the same time, like that physics cat.’
‘She’d been told you were dead. But she did want to find her biological family.’
‘Oh my God.’ She sank lower into her chair.
‘It’s okay. It’s a huge shock for you.’
‘I saw on the news that Violet was wearing a brooch when she disappeared – a pelican?’
‘Yes. And we’ve confirmed that she had the brooch when she was a baby. She wears it on a chain around her neck all the time, and her friend told us she has a tiny tattoo of a pelican on her hip.’
Bex softened. ‘I left it with her. It’s our family crest. Did you know the thing about the mother pelican gouging out its own chest to feed its babies? The pelican image is supposed to represent parental sacrifice, so it’s a bit of a joke that it’s used for our family.’
Jai and I sat and listened. Most people don’t get listened to – not properly. Usually the other person’s just waiting for their chance to speak. So, even though we’re cops and they know in the rational part of their brain that anything they say could be used against them, the child inside is so grateful to be listened to that it’s surprising what people come out with to keep our attention.
‘Our family wouldn’t win any parenting prizes,’ Bex said, ‘as you might have worked out. My mother went back to the Ukraine when I was three, and Dad sent me away to live with my aunt in Southampton. I suppose we’re a strange lot. Not good with emotions. But Violet’s so full of life. It’s … it’s so awful that she’s missing.’
We sat quietly and gave her a moment to contemplate the child she’d never known. ‘I’ve thought about her every day,’ she said. ‘Wondered if she’s okay, what her adoptive family are like, praying she’s had a happy childhood – better than what I could have given her. Now I feel like my insides are dropping away. Plummeting down in a lift-shaft. My child. You gave her to me but then took her away.’
‘Most missing teenagers turn up,’ I said, not believing my own propaganda. This was so far from a typical missing teenager.
‘She’s the opposite to me,’ Bex said. ‘I would never have believed she could be mine. Maybe I would have been like that too, if … if my life had been different. I’m glad she has good parents.’ It hollowed me out inside, the way this woman felt about herself. The way she’d assumed Violet couldn’t be hers because Violet was confident and sparkly and full of life.
‘Bex,’ I said. ‘We need to know who the father of your baby was.’
She wiped her palms on her trousers. Took a few juddery breaths. ‘I’m sorry but I don’t know.’
My hope of turning up useful information sank a few notches.
‘Tell us what you do know,’ I said.
She paused. ‘It sounds bad …’
‘It’s fine. Nobody’s judging you.’ I regretted that as soon as it was out of my mouth. Might as well scream, We’re all judging you. I settled back in my chair and hoped I hadn’t put her off.
‘It happened in Gritton.’ She leaned back and looked up at the ceiling, searching for the memory. A tiny wince as she found it. ‘I’d been to stay for a month with my dad, the first time I’d been back there since he sent me to live with my aunt when I was three. Anyway, it was my last night. I got drunk. Very drunk. I wasn’t used to it. And … and stoned. Sorry. The others went off because I thought I saw someone in the trees. And I …’ A twinge of embarrassment crossed her face. ‘I passed out and when they got back it must have already happened. I’m sorry, but that’s all I know.’
I spoke gently: ‘You must have been raped, you mean?’
She nodded. ‘It’s awful, not remembering.’
‘Who was there that night?’
‘My sister, Kirsty, and her boyfriend, Lucas. My friend Anna and her brother, Gary. And Daniel who was a friend of Gary’s.’
Jai tensed beside me. Gary, Anna and Daniel had all been there. I’d known Gary had been shifty at the mention of Bex. Pretending he barely knew her. Could he have raped her? Could he be Violet’s father?
‘So you were raped by Daniel, Gary or Lucas?’ I prompted.
‘It wasn’t Lucas. He stayed with Kirsty and there’s no way … Oh, I don’t know, take it from me – no boyfriend of Kirsty’s would’ve dared have anything to do with another girl, let alone … that.’
‘Did you go to the police?’
‘I tried to, but … I couldn’t go through with it.’ She looked at us from under a strand of damp fringe. ‘The policemen … I heard them laughing and joking about one of their colleagues. The size of her breasts. I couldn’t talk to people like that about what had happened to me. I don’t suppose they’d get away with it now.’
I felt a moment of shame even though I hadn’t been a cop in 1999. That a girl who’d already been so thoroughly kicked by life, who’d been raped by a so-called friend, had encountered the worst kind of macho dickery and hadn’t been able to go through with reporting a crime. And unlike Bex, I wouldn’t bet against similar happening now. ‘Is that why you said yesterday that you wouldn’t come to the police station?’
She nodded.
‘Did you see any of the boys afterwards?’
‘No. I left Gritton and vowed never to go back.’
I pictured her father in his neglected kitchen, with his run-down rose garden outside. ‘You haven’t been back to Gritton since that night, even to see your family?’
‘No. My dad and sister never even knew I had the baby. And imagine coming across one of the boys and not knowing if it was him that did it. Part of me wanted justice, but I couldn’t make myself go back there. Something deep inside me was terrified of the place.’ She wrapped her arms around her stomach, almost as if protecting a baby in there. ‘Please don’t ask me to go back to Gritton. I couldn’t do it.’
14
I projected an image of the banner onto the white wall of the incident room. The piglet being roasted over the fire, mouth gaping open, terrified eyes. The statement – Who will be next? The image was even more grotesque in the confines of the station; the threat even more chilling.
The room filled with shocked muttering, which rose and then died down. A couple of lads at the back laughed at a comment I hadn’t heard. I felt a brief spark of annoyance but didn’t react. ‘This was found draped down the side of the abattoir this morning,’ I said. ‘In the light of Violet’s disappearance, I think we have to take it seriously.’
The muttering died down. The lads shut up.
‘Yeah, Violet could just be the first,’ Craig said.
‘We can’t rule that out,’ I said. ‘There’s been a scuffle in the village involving Gary Finchley and the Animal Vigilantes. It’s not clear how it would have progressed if cops hadn’t shown up.’
‘That banner’s a clear threat,’ Jai said. ‘I’ve spoken to our insomniac, Mrs Ackroyd, and she saw a van drive past her house at three in the morning. It checks out against one seen at Animal Vigilantes protests.’
‘Mrs Ackroyd’s golden,’ I said. ‘So we need a serious look at the Animal Vigilantes. They know too much, they’ve made some very nasty comments online, they put that banner up, and they sent the aggressive mob to Gary’s house.’
Jai fanned himself. ‘The ringleader of the aggressive mob has a cast-iron alibi for Sunday night. But you’ve arranged an interview with the leader of the Animal Vigilantes, haven’t you?’
I checked my watch. ‘Yes. Shortly. There’s also been a development on Violet’s parentage. We’ve spoken to Bex Smith, Violet’s birth mother. She was raped – she’d passed out and doesn’t know who did it. But both Daniel Twigg and Gary Finchley were there at the time. She’s sure it was one of them.’
Sharp intakes of breath all round.
‘See if they’ll submit voluntarily to paternity testing,’ I said. ‘And there was a third man there – Kirsty’s boyfriend. Bex doesn’t think it was him, but see if you can track him down just in case. Where are we at with other stuff?’
‘We checked Tony Nightingale’s alibi,’ Jai said. ‘A call was made from his landline to Bex Smith’s phone at the same time that Violet’s car was spotted by Mrs Ackroyd and then confirmed on CCTV. The voicemail confirms it was him. Also, someone watched catch-up TV at his house just after that, and he lives alone, so it’s unlikely that he went anywhere with Violet. In terms of the implications of having another relative, his will splits everything fifty-fifty between Bex and Kirsty, so Violet turning up wouldn’t make any difference to them.’
‘Okay, good. Anything on Violet’s laptop?’ I turned to Emily, one of our best tech people. When she’d arrived the previous year she’d been so shiny and sparkly I’d practically had to wear sunglasses, but she’d faded. Contact with sex offenders’ laptops could do that to a girl.
‘We obviously haven’t gone through it all yet,’ Emily said. ‘But she’s done lots of research on finding lost parents. Also on whether online comments ever turn to real violence. And on this myth of the Pale Child. We don’t have access to all her social media at this stage. We’re working through what we have.’