by Louise Voss
‘What are you doing here?’ Marion asked, wide-eyed, stepping onto the treadmill beside Helen’s.
Panting, Helen answered, ‘I had to get out.’
Marion nodded seriously. ‘Has there been … any news?’
‘No.’
Marion started to run. Right now, Helen wished she would either go away or talk about something else. Tell her some stories about her pop star dad or moan about her manicurist. Just for five minutes, that was all. Give Helen’s brain something else to think about before it ate itself.
‘I heard about Iz …’
Helen didn’t give her a chance to finish the sentence. ‘I have to go.’
She slowed the treadmill to a halt and began to walk away. Then, feeling guilty, she turned back.
‘I’m sorry, Marion. I just can’t talk about it.’
‘I understand. You poor thing. But I’m sure she’ll turn up, safe and sound. Just wait and see. Everybody is looking out for her. I saw it on Facebook – a special page.’
‘I didn’t know about that.’
Marion nodded. ‘It’s got thousands of members. The whole country wants to find her, Helen. We’re all praying for you.’
As soon as she got home Helen went onto Facebook and searched for her daughter’s name. Within moments she was on the ‘Find Frankie’ page that some well-meaning local had set up. Her heart skipped a beat at the sight of Frankie’s little face in the photograph, and she reached out and touched the screen with her fingertip, stroking Frankie’s cheek. There were already 43,000 ‘likes’ of the page. To comfort herself, she began to scroll down through the hundreds of comments, needing to know that other people cared about Frankie too, that she wasn’t alone.
The first few did help: ‘God bless that little mite, and keep her safe. Please share her photo so that everyone can look for her,’ ‘My heart goes out to the family, hope she’s found soon,’ and many similar. But the next one made Helen catch her breath: ‘Those comments below should be deleted, they’re horrible. How can people be so cruel?’
What comments?
Fresh tears welling, Helen considered closing the laptop lid and walking away – but she knew she couldn’t, not without looking.
She scrolled down, and the vitriol she discovered in the next few remarks made bile rise in her throat.
‘I blame the parents. What were they thinking, going out and leaving a child to look after that little girl?’
‘Frankie’s mum and dad should be in prison – they DISGUST me. Leaving that child at home with a 15 year old’.
‘Someone told me they reckon the parents done it and they buried the body of that poor little baby in the park. THERE’S NO SMOKE WITHOUT FIRE!!!’
Her head sank onto her arms, and in the silence the only sound she could hear was the blood pounding in her ears.
After what could have been another minute or ten, unable to stop herself, anger coursed through her, replacing the lethargy of grief. She sat up straighter and started writing a post on the Facebook wall, telling them who she was, typing so fast that her brain couldn’t keep up with her fingers.
‘It shocks and appals me that people, strangers, can come on here, people who know nothing about me or my family, and cast judgement upon us. Do you think we deserve it? That our beautiful little girl deserves to have been taken? Yes, I wish more than anything in the world that I hadn’t gone out that night, that we had never left her with her half-sister (although it’s completely legitimate for us to have done so. Fifteen is a legal and acceptable age to babysit other children, particularly family members). I fantasise that I have a remote control that will rewind time, take me back to the other evening and instead of going out with my husband – which I was perfectly entitled to do! – I had spent the evening cuddling my daughter and protecting her. Thank you to all the people who have offered support and sympathy – please, I urge you, to look for Frankie. To the people who slate me and my husband – I hope you are ashamed of YOURSELVES.’
She hit ‘enter’ before she could change her mind.
Within seconds, the page went crazy, comments flooding in, most agreeing with her, some questioning her identity, others backing up the words of the original trolls, berating her as if they were barely literate moral guardians of the universe. She sat back and watched the list of comments grow through teary eyes.
As she sat there, a blob of red appeared to signify that she’d received a private message.
She opened it, and her whole body went rigid with cold.
Chapter 10
Patrick – Day 2
Air. He needed air. But he was unable to tear himself away from the wall where pictures of the three missing children were posted. He corrected himself – two missing, one missed. He hadn’t seen the parents of Isabel Hartley since they’d been told the terrible news, was saving that particular ordeal till the next day. How would they cope? Isabel was their only child and he knew the answer to his question: they wouldn’t. How could you cope with something like that? Sure, they would probably carry on living, most likely for another fifty years. They might go on to have more children, together or with new people. They would go on living – but their lives as they knew them had ended this afternoon when one of Patrick’s team had sat them down and spoken to them with a soft voice.
The press conference had ended an hour ago. The room had been silent apart from the click of cameras, the sounds of shuffling and the reporter from The Sun hacking away with a dry cough. But as soon as Patrick had finished speaking, the Sun reporter, whose name was Harry Carlson, asked if it was true that Isabel had been found on the Crane Park gypsy camp, as he put it, and the room erupted. Now it was all over the web and the hotline was going crazy. There were nineteen official traveller sites in Surrey plus a lot more private and illegal encampments. People who lived around every one of them were now calling in with reports of seeing travellers with small children in tow.
Patrick sat down at his desk and plugged his headphones in, bringing up his iTunes playlist and choosing one of The Cure’s lighter albums, The Head on the Door, the music helping to soothe his mind and get his neurons firing. Listening to the tracks he’d loved when he was a teenager made him feel young. It was as if he was tricking his brain into believing it was the agile mind of a nineteen year old, but with the experience and knowledge of a man twice that.
He took out his Moleskine notepad and opened it to the next blank page. His colleagues smirked when they saw it, and he knew it was an affectation, but it still irritated him when Winkler called him Dickens, or sometimes JK – the only bloody writers he had heard of, probably.
The notepad was full of scribbles, thoughts, questions, a tangle of information that had become so knotted and jumbled that he felt lost. He needed to step back, make some clear notes to sort out what he knew and, more importantly, what he didn’t yet know.
On the blank page, he started a list.
Isabel + travellers
Liam/Sainsbury’s
Frankie + family
He tapped the page with his pen, listening to Robert Smith sing about how yesterday he had felt so old, and began to write down the facts beneath the first heading, starting with Isabel’s disappearance, the fact she had been taken from her house, and then what he knew so far about her fate. But after a few lines he stopped, frustrated.
Yes, he knew she had been found by Wesley on the edge of the encampment six days ago – one day after she disappeared – and that she had been naked. From what he had seen, there were no obvious signs of how she had died, no visible wounds or injuries. He also knew that neither Wesley nor Mickey, whose details had been run through HOLMES, had any convictions beyond one twenty-year-old charge of GBH for Mickey when he had been involved in a fight in a pub. At the moment, two DCs were crunching the names of everyone else in the camp through the system, and so far nothing had come up.
He wrote ‘Need to eliminate travellers’ and underlined it. His gut told him that Mickey Flanagan was right: that the body
had been left there deliberately to shift attention onto the travellers. There were two possible reasons for that. Reason one was that it was someone with a vendetta or some other reason to want to cause hellfire to rain down upon the travellers. But how did that tie in to the other missing children? Were they about to find the other kids’ bodies dumped on other traveller sites? He made another note to get that checked out, his stomach clenching as he wrote it, knowing how that would look, to both sides.
The vendetta idea seemed unlikely. Which left the most obvious reason: a diversionary tactic. The only problem with that was that it seemed so obvious and ill-thought-out. He drew a large, elaborate question mark on the paper. He needed to talk to the forensic pathologist, Daniel Hamlet, and was waiting to get the call from the mortuary.
He moved on to the second page. Liam and Sainsbury’s. It still astounded him that someone had managed to remove a child from a car in a busy supermarket car park without anyone noticing. No doubt they would be receiving calls right now from people claiming to have spotted a ‘dodgy gypsy’ lurking by the trolleys. But they had already been through the CCTV, which didn’t cover the McConnells’ car nor, to Patrick’s dismay, the entrance or exit of the car park. They had also been running appeals on TV and in local papers for anyone who had been in Sainsbury’s between 10 A.M. and noon on June 4th who had seen anyone carrying a small child to come forward, so far with no useful leads.
Finally, as the album neared the end of what would have been side one when he had originally bought it on cassette, when he was at school, he turned to another page and wrote FRANKIE AND FAMILY.
The SOCOs had turned up nothing useful at the house. No prints, no DNA, nothing at all. The field team had been going from door to door all day and had come up with one potentially useful fact. An elderly man who lived opposite, and who had opened the door to let his cat in just as the ten o’clock news was finishing – ‘I bloody hate the amusing story they always have on at the end,’ he had grumbled – had seen ‘a lad cycling away on a pushbike’. He hadn’t seen this lad coming out of the Philipses’ house but there was a strong chance that this was where he’d been.
Patrick wrote down Larry’s name on the paper. Patrick didn’t think for a second that this teenage boy was responsible for abducting his girlfriend’s half-sister, but he wanted to talk to him. If Larry had been in the house when Frankie had been taken, or just before, he was an important witness. He made a note to ask Carmella to go and find him. She had a way with teenage lads.
There was also Sean Philips. In the madness of the day, he hadn’t personally interviewed Frankie’s dad yet, although Carmella had taken a brief statement from him. That was another job for tomorrow.
Finally, he wrote down ‘Frankie’s picture’. The child’s drawing, stored now as evidence, made Patrick’s skin feel like hundreds of tiny baby spiders were crawling across it. When had Frankie seen someone peering through her window, if that was what the drawing signified? And why hadn’t she alerted her sister if she’d seen a face at the window? Surely, that’s what any small child would do? He double-underlined the question just as his phone vibrated on his desk. He pulled his headphones down around his neck and said, ‘Yes?’
Daniel Hamlet was the most serious person Patrick had ever met. He was a black man in his mid-forties and, while on TV forensic pathologists tended to employ gallows humour to make what they did more bearable – just as Patrick and many of his cop colleagues did – Hamlet was like his Danish namesake in that he was intense and not known for his sense of humour. He didn’t even smile when faced with the ‘Alas, poor Yorick’ quote for the 10,000th time in his life. But then, thought Patrick, who could blame him?
He followed Hamlet through the brightly lit corridors of the mortuary, wondering as he always did if the lighting was so intense because it was the only way to keep ghosts from creeping into the shadows. Or perhaps that was just him. If he was religious he might pause to reflect on all the souls that had passed through this building. Actually, that wasn’t right, was it? By the time you got here your soul had already departed. They were just bodies. Meat and bone and hair. Whatever it was that made you a person was gone, alive only in the memories of those left behind, in the genes you’d passed on.
He hated this fucking place.
‘My full report will be ready tomorrow, Detective Inspector,’ Hamlet said when they reached his office.
‘I understand.’
‘But we want to catch this bastard as soon as, don’t we?’
Patrick was taken aback. He had never heard Hamlet swear before, or show anger. He followed the line of the pathologist’s vision to a framed photo on his desk. A little girl with chubby cheeks and a grin that contained everything that was absent from this building.
‘We do.’
‘I watched a little of the press conference on the TV earlier. Looks like everyone in the country is rather keen for you to find them.’
‘What can you tell me?’
He laced his fingers together. The fingers that had wielded the scalpel that had cut a little girl open that afternoon. ‘There are no signs of external damage. No wounds. I checked her throat for signs of strangulation but there is no bruising.’
Patrick pictured an adult’s hand on a small child’s throat and shuddered, trying with all his mental strength not to connect this case to his personal life.
‘But her lungs tell us a story. They are spongy and contain water.’
‘She drowned?’
Hamlet inclined his head. ‘It’s exceedingly difficult to tell with certainty if a person drowned. If a body comes to me that was found in water, we might assume they drowned but it could be that the person, for example, suffered cardiac arrest. It’s possible that this child swallowed a large amount of water but then died by some other means.’
‘But in your opinion?’
‘She drowned.’ As Patrick thought about this and what it might mean, Hamlet asked, ‘When was she found on the traveller’s encampment, exactly?’
‘Last Monday, the third. At roughly ten in the morning, according to the idiot who found her.’
‘Hmm. You know that in cases like this, when days pass between death and the autopsy, it’s difficult to estimate the date of death.’
Patrick nodded. ‘But I think we can surmise that she was left there during the night between the second and third. There are lots of joggers and dog-walkers around in the early morning, passing the encampment, so it’s most likely that she was dumped under the cover of darkness. Which means she was killed very shortly after she was taken from her house.’
He had figured this out already. Isabel had gone missing at 3.45 P.M. on the 2nd. If her body was found the next morning, unless Wesley was lying or mistaken about the day, it meant that whoever had taken her had murdered her within hours.
‘Is there any evidence that suggests that Wesley has given us false information about when he found her?’
Hamlet frowned. ‘No. Like I said, it’s very difficult for me to give an exact time of death but I would say that, from the condition of the body, a week seems correct.’
Patrick made a note in his pad and waited for Hamlet to continue. In his pad, he already had details of what she had eaten for her last meal: macaroni cheese with peas, and melon for dessert. He asked Hamlet if there were any other foods in her stomach and was told that there weren’t.
He waited for Hamlet to reveal the piece of information he most needed to know, but dreaded. He braced himself.
‘There are no signs of sexual activity whatsoever,’ Hamlet said.
Patrick looked up, surprised. ‘Really?’
The pathologist said, ‘Yes. No sexual penetration, no semen on the body or in the mouth, no signs that her genitals had been touched at all.’
At the same time that Patrick felt relief, he experienced more confusion. The fact that the first two missing children were different sexes had always made the team wonder if paedophiles were involved. Most paedophiles
preferred one or the other, boys or girls, but that had shifted their thoughts onto a gang – a paedophile ring, possibly traffickers of children. But if there was no sexual assault, why was that? Had something happened that had panicked the abductor?
Why go to all the trouble and risk of abducting a child from her home and murdering her almost immediately if sexual assault was not the motive? Or maybe, Patrick realized, it was the motive but the abductor had not, for whatever reason, had the chance to carry out their vile aims.
‘It will be of some comfort to the parents,’ Hamlet said. ‘A crumb. There’s one more thing.’
He brought out a pile of clothes, which Patrick recognized as the ones Isabel had been wearing: a pair of jeans, a lilac T-shirt and a white cardigan, stained with filth. The clothes had been left beside the body.
‘Smell them,’ Hamlet instructed.
Patrick did as he was asked. They smelled smoky, like she had been close to a bonfire.
‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘Wood smoke?’
Hamlet tilted his head. ‘I’m not sure. I think it’s smoke, yes, but I’m not able to say from what. Not cigarettes. Possibly a bonfire.’
‘It probably got on her clothes at the encampment. OK, Daniel, thanks again. I’d better get back.’
Hamlet nodded. ‘Well, I’ll be seeing you.’ He caught hold of Patrick’s arm and looked him in the eye. ‘Please catch him.’
As Patrick walked back to his car, he tried to work it out in his head. If not a paedophile, then who? What was the motive? Had Isabel been targeted specifically because of who she was? Had the killer done it to get at her parents, to cause them the greatest pain possible? And if so, did that mean that the targets in all three cases were the parents?
Perhaps it was the families they should be looking at. Maybe it was there, in some connection between the sets of parents, that they would find the motive – and the killer.
He turned the key in the ignition and drove slowly out of the car park, heading back to the station. Isabel Hartley had been killed very soon after she was taken. If he, Patrick, was one of the parents of the other two kids, Liam and Frankie, that fact would ram a shard of fear into his heart. Because the likelihood was, the two other children were already dead. Their bodies were out there somewhere, waiting to be found.