‘You know what this means?’ Varley said. ‘The abductor—’
‘Is playing games,’ Fennimore interrupted, not wanting to hear it from Varley.
‘It’s personal,’ Varley said. ‘He has singled you out – he probably planted the victim’s blood on this envelope, too.’
‘If there is DNA on this letter, you can be sure it won’t be Julia and Lauren’s,’ Fennimore said. ‘I received this letter by special delivery on Wednesday – the day Julia and Lauren Myers were taken, which means he would have to’ve posted it on Tuesday – the day before the abduction.’
‘All right,’ Varley said. ‘But he is forensically aware – I can’t believe he would be so stupid as to deposit his own DNA on the first letter.’
‘I’m not the psychologist,’ Fennimore said, ‘but I’m guessing he was angry when he wrote it. He must have known I’d have a lot of that junk to sort through after the YouTube farrago – maybe he was banking on it – I did nearly throw the damn thing out.’
‘I’ll have someone to you by mid-morning tomorrow.’ Enderby, at least, sounded convinced.
Fennimore checked his watch. ‘I’ve missed the last flight out of Aberdeen, but if I catch the first morning departure, I could have the evidence with you by eight-thirty,’ he said.
‘No.’ Enderby seemed determined. ‘Box it up and stay where you are. What you need to do is think who might be targeting you. The SIO will need a list of cases you’ve worked on – this could be someone you helped to put away.’
Fennimore debated. He didn’t want to piss Enderby off and risk being barred all access. ‘Okay – if someone can send me the investigating officer’s contact details, I’ll liaise with him.’
‘DCI Simms will be your point of contact,’ Enderby said. His tone brooked no argument.
Fennimore wasn’t particularly good at reading people, but he wished he could see their faces now. Was Kate Simms to be the cordon sanitaire between him and the investigation?
‘Nick?’ Simms said; his silence had gone on too long.
‘I’ll put you in my favourites,’ he said, and regretted it immediately. This wasn’t Kate’s doing. He knew damn well that she wouldn’t ask to be his minder – she had stood between him and an investigation before, and that hadn’t ended too well for her. In the months after Rachel and Suzie disappeared, he had manipulated and cajoled and coerced Simms into breaking just about every rule in the Murder Manual. It was Simms who had been battered by the media storm that followed, while he ran and buried himself in academe. Fennimore would hate to compromise her in that way again, but if this was linked to Suzie’s disappearance – however obliquely – he couldn’t guarantee to play by the rules. Not even for Kate.
17
Abduction, Day 6
‘Mummy?’
Julia Myers fought to turn her head. What was that noise – a loose bolt? The exhaust housing? The constant jangle of metal on metal made the hairs rise on her arms; she wanted to turn and look behind her but she had to face forward, keep her eyes on the road; it was so dark. What had happened to the headlights? Why couldn’t she see any streetlights?
‘Mummy.’
Lauren. She sounded frightened.
‘Mumm-ee!’
Something was in the car – she felt, rather than saw, a black shadow.
‘Lauren?’ Julia turns, wrenching her shoulder; she feels something tear around the socket. She wakes, struggling to make sense of her surroundings: the smell of damp, the cold; the ache in her right arm. The burning pain in her wrist. She remembers. The rattle in the car, the sudden void where the seat-back should be. The thing emerging from the shadows like something from a horror movie—
Lauren is calling her.
‘Lauren – baby – Mummy’s here. What’s the matter?’
‘You were crying.’
Julia wipes her eyes. ‘All right, poppet. Just a bad dream, that’s all.’
A ring of fire encircles her wrist. Even the slightest movement sends jolts of pain through her shoulder. She has tried everything, but she can’t break free.
On the fourth day, they had heard a police helicopter overhead; it shone a knife-blade of silver light through the gap in the displaced boarding of the skylight, and for five heart-racing minutes they really thought they were going to be rescued. But it went away, spiralling up and up, the clatter and buzz of its rotor blades becoming fainter and more indistinct, until it was gone.
She leans across and starts gnawing at the plastic binding on her wrist. Her saliva sears the torn flesh. Tissues. I need to protect the skin under it. She reaches down for her handbag and screams as the muscles give in her shoulder.
Lauren wails.
‘All right – shhh, now, it’s all right,’ she soothes, reaching inside the bag, feeling for the few remaining tissues. The bag tilts and she almost drops it. Something shifts, sliding from one end to the other. She tilts it back in the other direction, feels something hard move and slide again. Sweat breaks out on her upper lip. There’s something inside the lining. She pokes about, finds a small hole, tears it wider. Her fingers close on cold metal. Scissors. Her nail scissors must have slipped inside the lining.
She goes to work on her wrist binding, and ten minutes later, with both arms free, Julia can reach across the three-foot gap that separates them. Lauren has never been a cuddly child; from infancy she was all bone and sinew and savagely beating heart, but now she falls into her mother’s arms and they hold each other fiercely. Julia kisses the top of her little girl’s head, smelling the biscuity odour of sweat mingled with damp plaster dust. ‘We have to be quick, sweetie,’ she says.
She feels Lauren twist in her arms, peering frantically over her shoulder in the direction of the door. ‘Is he coming?’
‘I don’t know. But I want to get far away from here as soon as possible. Okay?’
She feels Lauren’s head bob in agreement, and she pinches and pecks at the plastic tie around her daughter’s ankle with the tiny blades of the nail scissors. Her hands are still sore from trying to break open the water bottle, but she grits her teeth and carries on. After a minute or two, the blades twist and the scissors buckle. The points scrape Lauren’s ankle.
‘Ow!’ she shouts. ‘You hurt me.’
‘I’m sorry, darling. Sh-shhh,’ Julia soothes. ‘Nearly there.’ Lauren squirms, crying, trying to pull away, but Julia grips her daughter’s foot tightly, trying to hold it steady as she cuts through the last of the binding. This done, she turns to the plastic on her own ankle. Lauren moves to sit next to her, drying her eyes and snuffling disconsolately.
‘There’s some tissues in my bag,’ Julia says. A second later, Lauren is blowing her nose.
For a few minutes, Julia scrapes and picks at the binding with the blunted and now distinctly wobbly scissors, while Lauren rummages in her handbag.
‘Mummy …’ Lauren gasps. ‘You told a big fib.’ She hears wonder and shock in her daughter’s voice.
‘Mmm?’ Julia says, sweat stinging her eyes as she works on the stubborn loop of plastic around her ankle.
‘You said you threw my sweeties away.’
Julia groans inwardly. Those bloody sweets.
‘They’re bad for you, darling.’ She holds her hand out for the handbag. Her daughter scoots out of reach. ‘Lauren, don’t you dare …’
She hears a busy crunching as Lauren stuffs sweets into her mouth. ‘Lauren – you stop that.’ She works the scissors furiously. Suddenly, they buckle again and snap in two. Julia screams in agony as one of the blades drives deep into her flesh.
‘Mummy!’
Julia breathes fast, hyperventilating to control the pain, then pulls the blade out by the handle, biting down on another scream.
‘Mummy – I didn’t mean it!’
‘I know,’ Julia says. A wave of nausea sweeps over her and she is suddenly cold. ‘It’s all right.’ She clamps her hand over the wound and feels a warm trickle of blood through her fingers. ‘Not your f
ault. Just pass me the handbag.’
She wads up a few tissues and binds them in place with the silk binding torn from her blanket using one blade of the nail scissors. Her hands sticky with blood, she rotates the ankle binding and with grim determination resumes scraping at the plastic. A minute later, she begins to feel weak.
‘There’s blood on the floor,’ Lauren wails. ‘Mummy, I’m sorry.’
‘I know that, love.’ She tears more silk from the blanket edging and tries again to staunch the wound. The dressing is soaked; she must have punctured a vein.
Oh, my poor little girl …
‘Come here,’ she says. ‘Come and sit with me.’ Lauren moves closer, and Julia feels the welcome weight of her daughter against her body. She hugs Lauren, stroking her hair, feeling grit and dirt sticking to the blood on her fingers.
She thinks about flinging the sweets into the far corner of the room, but a clear-eyed rationality stops her.
‘Lauren, you know why Grandma calls you her Yellow Peril, don’t you?’
Lauren bows her head. ‘Because the yellow sweeties make me be horrible.’ Even in the dark, Julia can make out the tormented look in daughter’s eyes. ‘I try to be good, Mummy – but it’s like there’s someone inside me making me be naughty.’
‘Yes. That’s because of the stuff they use to make the colours.’
‘I won’t be naughty, this time,’ says Lauren.
‘I know it sounds strange,’ Julia answers. ‘But just this once, I want you to be Grandma’s Yellow Peril.’
Lauren gasps, twisting on her lap. ‘Why?’
‘To keep you safe.’
‘But I nearly got squished by a car after the film. You said I could of been killed. You always say I do silly things when I eat E-numbers.’
‘You also do brave things,’ Julia says. She has never before described Lauren’s hyperactive behaviour as anything but naughty and reckless and silly. But sometimes there is a kind of bravery in her daughter’s wild disregard for her own safety.
‘But it will make me do something bad.’ Lauren begins to cry again. ‘Tha— that’s why the man came and got us and locked us up.’
‘No!’ Julia says. ‘No.’ She takes her daughter’s face in her hands. ‘Lauren – this isn’t your fault. He’s just a bad man and we were unlucky he picked on us.’
Lauren’s breathing hitches and she wipes her nose with the palm of her hand.
‘Remember the princess in the film?’ Julia says. ‘She thought she was a bad girl because when she sang the high notes, all the mirrors and windows in the castle would shatter.’
She feels Lauren nod.
‘She was naughty,’ Lauren says. ‘Because sometimes she did it just to upset the King and Queen, and everyone was very cross with her and she had to sit in a corner and BE QUIET.’
Julia can feel her gesturing sternly.
‘But they changed their minds, didn’t they, when the town got overrun by rats and the Piper-man held them all to ransom?’ Another nod, more hesitant this time, and Julia can tell that Lauren is trying to follow her line of reasoning. ‘What did they do, Lauren?’
Lauren squirms in her lap, leaning back into her like it’s story-time, and Julia wraps her arms around her.
‘The King and the Queen and the prince and the mayor and all the people of the town went to her and begged her not to be quiet,’ Lauren says. ‘So she sang very high and very, very loud and all the rats ran away.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And all the dogs came from miles around – “From the fields and the forests, from the barns and the backyards, baying and barking and killing the rats as they fled, eager to do her bidding,”’ Lauren quotes perfectly.
‘She didn’t know it, but her worst fault was also her secret superpower,’ Lauren whispers. ‘Like your ADHD.’ Lauren’s hair tickles Julia’s skin as she turns again to study her and in the gloom, Julia thinks she sees puzzlement in her daughter’s face. ‘It was naughty of the princess to use her superpower to break windows,’ she explains. ‘But when she used it to chase away the rats …’
‘Everyone loved her and she broke the Piper-man into a thousand pieces!’ Lauren is quiet for a time, then her voice fills with wonder: ‘Mummy, have I really got a superpower?’
‘Well, the nasty man is scared of you … Remember when you screamed and kicked and he left you alone?’
‘Mm …’ Lauren plucks at her T-shirt. ‘But he wears a mask like a super-villain. So maybe he’s got superpowers, too.’
‘Now you know superheroes are always stronger than super-villains,’ Julia says.
Lauren sighs as if it’s all too complicated.
‘He is scared of you, Lauren, and that’s a good thing,’ Julia says, bringing her back to the point. ‘He’s most scared of all when you get hyper, so …’
‘I’ve got to eat the sweeties and be bad?’ Lauren still sounds unsure.
‘Lauren, I want you to be the naughtiest little girl in the whole world.’
‘But—’
The sound of a car engine outside the building makes her stop. They both listen; the engine is silenced. Julia strains to hear. He has always come on foot the other times. What does this mean?
‘He’s here,’ Lauren whispers.
Their abductor unlocks the padlock and Julia hears the rattle of the chain as he unthreads it from the hasp. She seizes Lauren’s bony shoulders, fighting a woozy sickness. ‘Listen to me, Lauren. I want you to scare him like the princess scared the Piper-man. But you have to keep far away from him.’
‘How, Mummy? We’re locked in.’
‘Yes, but there are places you can hide.’ Julia casts about for inspiration. In the almost dark, she can make out the hulking shapes of the giant metal looms. ‘You’re a good climber – I want you to climb high up, out of reach,’ she adds, thinking, Please don’t fall. ‘Okay?’
The door creaks open and Lauren pants, terrified.
‘Quick,’ Julia orders. ‘Gather up as much food as you can find. Hide it. Then climb. Climb as high as you can.’ She catches a gleam of fear in her daughter’s eyes and gives her one hard shake. ‘Do you hear me, Lauren Myers? If he finds you, run away. If he tries to grab you, spit and scream and kick. Are you listening? Be brave, like the princess, and don’t believe anything the bad man says. Mummy and Daddy love you. And you’re allowed to be naughty because I say so.’
18
No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.
ATTRIBUTED TO ALBERT EINSTEIN
Cambridgeshire, Tuesday
They say it pays to advertise, but over the years UK forensic labs and their employees have had anthrax in envelopes, letter-bombs in jiffy bags. Added to that, ram-raids, fire-bombs and cyber-hacks, while not always an immediate threat, were certainly a background hum in their working lives. So, when it came to advertising, forensics services tended to err on the side of caution. Click on a website’s ‘Contact us’ link, you’ll get a PO Box number; paste the post code into Google, the closest you’ll get to a physical location is a Royal Mail sorting office. Which was why Fennimore was driving down a quiet lane in Cambridgeshire, navigating the old-fashioned way, by road signs and landmarks, a map open on the seat next to him.
He pulled the car off a two-lane A-road on to a business park like any other in the south-east of England, except there was just one building – an unassuming four-storey concrete-and-steel structure. He had visited this lab a few times when he worked for the National Crime Faculty, so he recognized it for what it was, but come upon it by chance, and you might mistake it for an office supplies business – except for the ram-proof steel bollards set three feet apart in front of the building.
Essex Police had arranged for him to take samples of the stains on the victim’s skirt as part of his evidence review for the Mitchell case. Fennimore had taken an early flight from Aberdeen to London City airport – a ninety-minute trip. From London, it was another
hour’s drive by hire car to the lab.
The forensic scientist acting for Essex Police met him in the foyer. Doctor Jane Wilton was tall, her grey hair cropped close to her head; Fennimore had met her a couple of times at conferences. She offered and he declined refreshments and the use of the facilities, and within minutes they were in a dressing area outside the lab, getting kitted out in hairnets, long-cuffed gloves, overshoes and face masks; DNA-free disposable lab coats completed the look.
They exchanged small talk about his journey as they dressed: ‘Did you ever think of moving somewhere more convenient?’ Dr Wilton asked.
‘Convenient for whom?’ Fennimore said.
She smiled. He knew from that smile that she knew his history, and that he had once lived and worked at the heart of police forensic policy-making.
They accessed the lab through an ante-room, feeling the positive pressure within force air out into the corridor as the door opened, reducing the chances of stray contaminants entering the lab. Crossing a tacky mat designed to pick up stray particulates from their footwear, they moved on into the cool, filtered air of the lab.
The evidence was already laid out, the chain of custody tag on the evidence bag noting that the skirt had been subjected to testing just two days before Fennimore’s visit.
He glanced across the table to Dr Wilton. ‘You started the party without me.’
‘Can’t have it said that the appeal team got in before us,’ she said.
‘Appeal?’ He broke the new seal and laid the skirt on a plastic sheet. The pink linen had been marked in crayon: three neat circles just above the hemline indicating the areas that had been tested. ‘Does that mean they’re having doubts about Mitchell’s guilt?’
She shrugged. ‘Jury’s out. Though I did get a personal call from the chief constable, urging – how did he put it? – “promptitude”.’
Fennimore placed a large sheet of forensic-grade filter paper over the skirt and marked its outline on the sheet. ‘Promptitude,’ he mused. ‘Sounds like an attack of nerves.’
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