by Louise Voss
His partner hesitated before nodding. ‘OK. We’ll follow the leads we have. Which are?’
Patrick took his Moleskine notebook out of his pocket and waved it at Carmella. ‘Have you had breakfast?’
‘Yes, I had a bowl of muesli.’
‘Well, all I had was half of piece of toast and jam that Bonnie chucked on the floor. I’m ravenous. Let’s go to Diners’ Delight.’
‘Oh god, just stepping in that place makes me break out in zits.’
Ten minutes later they took a table at Patrick’s favourite greasy spoon and while Carmella played it safe with bottled orange juice and a round of toast, Patrick went for the full English and a bucket of tea.
‘Everything alright with you?’ he asked.
She looked up from her OJ, surprised. ‘Yes. Why?’
‘Oh, just checking. This is a tough case. Wanted to make sure it’s not getting to you.’
‘If I say it is, will I get a week’s leave?’
Patrick’s navvy-sized breakfast was plonked down before him and he squirted it with watery ketchup that had been poured into a Heinz bottle, giving it ideas above its station. ‘Er – no.’ He jabbed a corner of toast into his fried egg, breaking the surface and causing the yolk to ooze across the plate. Carmella wrinkled her nose. ‘Everything OK at home, yeah?’
Her shoulders drooped. ‘Everything is rosy.’
‘Cool. I just thought you seemed a bit …’ Could she tell how awkward he felt? ‘Emotional.’ He cringed at his choice of word.
‘Hmm. Well, I am a woman. We tend to get a bit emotional every now and then.’
‘Sorry.’
She smiled at him. ‘Everything’s fine, honest. Nothing for you to worry your pretty big head about. Let’s talk about the investigation, can we? I thought you had all the answers in your magic notebook.’
He gulped tea and looked around to make sure no one was ear-wigging. ‘I wish. But, so far, what has this case turned up? No DNA, no decent witnesses, no suspects.’
‘What about the travellers?’
‘We’ll carry on interviewing them all, but I believe Wesley Hewson when he says Isabel was dumped there and that he hid her because he knew the travellers would get the blame.’ He took a bite of sausage. ‘We need to know the motive. What connects the children? The amount of risk the abductor took tells me that these kids weren’t selected randomly.’
Carmella shuffled her chair as an old man with whiskery ears squeezed past, the chair legs scraping painfully on the hard floor. ‘But all the children are so different. Two girls and a boy. None of them look alike.’
‘The only thing they have in common is area, and their ages. They live in a three-mile radius of each other. They’re all between two and three. And all their parents are well off.’
‘No ransom demand, though.’
Patrick sat back, fighting the urge to burp. ‘We need to find where the lives of the three families intersect. If we draw a Venn diagram of everything we know about the Hartleys, the Philips family and the McConnells, there might be something in the point where they meet that tells us why these kids were targeted.’
‘I’m guessing you’ve already got a Venn diagram drawn in your notebook.’
He smiled. ‘Yeah. But there’s nothing in any of the intersections.’
They sat in silence for a few moments, watching punters come in and out of the cafe. A copy of The Sun lay on the next table and Patrick grabbed it. Isabel’s smiling face was on the cover along with that morning’s headline The Sun Offers £100k to Find Izzy’s Killer. Two days after Isabel’s abduction, against the advice of the police, who knew it would bring forth every nutter in south west London, the Hartleys had offered a hundred grand to anyone who could help bring their daughter home safely. Now the newspaper was replacing that offer with a reward to find the murderer.
‘Let’s go talk to the families now. I’ll go to the Philipses, you can go and see the McConnells and then I’ll go and talk to the Hartleys too. Get them to brainstorm everything they can remember. Get them to go back through their diaries, their Facebook pages, their phones, their photos – anything that will prompt memories of what they’ve done and where they’ve been over the last three months.’
They left the greasy spoon and Patrick drove Carmella back to the station so she could pick up a car.
‘Good luck,’ she said, stepping out into the heat of the morning.
As he was about to drive off, his phone beeped. It was a text from his mum, reporting on what Bonnie was doing. They had been to a petting zoo and Bonnie particularly loved the goats, apparently. Then a second text came through.
I wasn’t going to say, but B keeps asking about her mum. I don’t know what to tell her.
Patrick sighed and fired off a reply. Let’s talk about it later.
He had known this time would come but had been burying his head in the sand, ostriching, as his mum put it. But it was something he had to deal with. What to tell his daughter about the mother who had tried to murder her – and whether to let Gill see Bonnie. If she wanted to see her, that was. He had no idea. It was another thing he tried not to think about.
Chapter 13
Helen – Day 3
Helen felt as though her brain could be divided into two lobes, not left and right, but Frankie and That Message. She had thought of nothing else for the past ten hours, lying awake the entire night fretting about it, resenting Sean for the scant sleep he had managed, even though for most of the time she knew he was awake too, lying silently next to her. Occasionally he rolled over and cuddled her tightly, almost fiercely, but it was of no comfort. Several times she almost blurted it out to him, asked his advice. They were a team. Surely she had to tell him that there was someone out there claiming they knew where Frankie was? But it was too risky. Tell no-one, the message said. It was from a woman called Janet Friars. What if she did tell Sean or that detective, and Frankie suffered for it?
Also, their FLO had made a dismissive comment that had stuck with Helen, as the FLO had unpacked milk and bread from the corner shop. She’d said that Izzy and Liam’s parents were being hounded by ‘nutters on Facebook’ insisting they knew stuff: psychics, hippies, the mentally ill, the attention-seeking … ‘Wasting police time like that,’ the FLO had tutted. ‘Diverting valuable resources. Shameful. You ignore them, if you get any.’
But what if she ignored it and Frankie suffered more? Helen felt the sword of Damocles hover over her, hanging by a single hair, about to cleave her in two – and for a moment, she thought she would have welcomed it. At least it would be an end to this intolerable nightmare.
She had been spending a lot of time on Facebook recently, obsessively checking the page Marion had told her about at the gym, reading the kind comments and obsessing over the nasty, critical ones. She had messaged Marion about it and her friend had fired back a message telling her to ‘Ignore them – they are stupid trolls.’ Then Marion had added, ‘I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have told you about the page if I’d known about the trolls.’
It was easy for Marion to say, wasn’t it? Ignore the trolls. Helen felt compelled to read the vile comments about what a bad mother she was, how she would burn in hell for letting that ‘sweet little angel’ out of her sight. In the rare moments that she slept, she dreamed about them, about a mob screaming abuse at her, pointing their witchy fingers and taunting her.
The endless night finally morphed into a reluctant peach sunrise, and a morning bringing the mixed blessing of getting out of bed in their own house again. On one hand, it was a relief to once more be surrounded by the familiar scents of home and their own belongings, knowing where everything was …
Everything but Frankie. And that was the other hand. It was a particular sort of mental torture, to be there without her, seeing her finger paintings on the fridge and her toys tidied, unplayed with, in the basket in the conservatory. Photos on the piano and her tiny stripy wellies in the hall. At least being in the Jamesons’ house had spared
them that. They had been allowed home late the night before, and gone straight to bed, too distraught to focus on anything but the vain attempt to sleep.
When Helen came downstairs on the morning after their first night in the house alone without Frankie, she found Alice and her friend Georgia already sitting at the kitchen table, looking at YouTube clips on Alice’s laptop, empty cereal bowls in front of them.
‘Oh! Hi, Georgia. We don’t usually see you this early.’
‘Hi Helen,’ said Georgia through her fringe. With what was clearly a vast amount of effort, she muttered something else that Helen didn’t catch, but which made Georgia’s pale cheeks flush scarlet. Alice looked embarrassed too.
‘Sorry, what was that?’ Helen tied her dressing gown belt tighter, suddenly aware of how terrible she must look – hair like a bird’s nest, sleep in her eyes and creases on her face. At least it was only Georgia.
‘I said, I’m really sorry about Frankie and I hope they find her soon,’ the girl blurted in a rush, staring at the tabletop. ‘Everything will be fine. I’m sure it will,’ she added half-heartedly.
Helen smiled wanly and came over to give Georgia a hug around the shoulders. Helen had always thought that Georgia was the most beautiful of all Alice’s friends, with her long wavy red-blonde hair and flawless skin. She looked like a perfect English rose – but, according to Alice, had already slept with three boys, and managed to get herself an ASBO last year for jumping on and damaging the roofs of three cars late at night after one too many Breezers. Apparently she was mortified, though, and voluntarily wrote letters of apology to all three of the cars’ owners … Even so, Helen had thought at the time that she was glad Alice was her stepdaughter, rather than butter-wouldn’t-melt Georgia. She didn’t dislike Georgia’s mother, a mouthy posh woman called April, a writer of bonkbusters, apparently, and every time they met, one of other of them would say, ‘we MUST go out for that glass of wine soon’ – but somehow they never did.
‘Thanks, honey.’
‘Did you watch the press conference?’ Alice asked Helen. Helen was surprised at the question – it was the first time Alice had spoken to her since she had stormed out yesterday.
‘Yes, I watched it on the ten o’clock news.’ She flicked on the kettle and put a teabag into her favourite mug, one that Frankie had – with some help – decorated for her at one of those paint your own pottery places. Her hand trembled as she added sugar, feeling the need for the sweetness. ‘It was awful. Isabel’s poor parents. I can’t imagine what they’re going through.’
Although she could.
‘Do either of you want tea?’ she asked, but both girls shook their heads. ‘It was weird, hearing our statement read out. I’m glad they didn’t show our pictures though – or worse, ask us to read it out ourselves. They showed that photo of Frankie. And one of Liam O’Connell. I thought that detective did a pretty good job.’
‘John Lennon,’ said Alice, and immediately corrected herself. ‘No, Patrick, isn’t it? I was thinking of the Beatles.’
Helen managed a brief laugh. ‘He’s coming over this morning. He wants to talk to me and Sean again.’ She tried to keep her tone neutral, aware of the dangerous ground she was now treading. ‘Might be helpful if you could stick around, Ali, just in case …’
She tensed, waiting for the next instalment of yesterday’s outburst, but Alice merely looked at Georgia. ‘Don’t think I can come to Kingston with you then, if I have to stay here. Go without me. Say hi to the others.’
‘Are you sure, babe? We could go tomorrow instead?’
‘Nah. Not really in the mood for shopping anyway.’
Helen felt relief swoosh through her. She made the tea, turning briefly away so the girls couldn’t see her face.
‘Have you finished all your exams, Georgia?’ she asked, taking her steaming mug across and sitting down next to Alice at the table.
Georgia nodded. ‘Yeah. Glad I’m not doing Drama, otherwise I’d still have one to go, like poor old Alice.’
‘I won’t have to do it though, will I, Helen?’ Alice asked anxiously. ‘The school said they’d put in for mitigating circumstances. I don’t care about Drama anyway, I’m shit at acting. I only took it ’cos I thought it would be easy, but it isn’t.’
Helen sighed ‘Well, I’d say these counted as Mit Circs, yes.’
Alice brightened. ‘In that case, I’ve finished my GCSEs!’ An expression of half-guilt, half-delight flashed across her face, making her look sly.
Helen had to bite the inside of her cheek hard to prevent herself making an extremely snide comment. The doorbell rang, and she groaned. ‘Don’t tell me he’s here already … Ali, please could you get that? I’m not dressed.’
Alice slouched with bad grace to the front door. She objected on principle to doing anything that Helen asked her to do.
It was Lennon. He followed Alice back into the kitchen and Helen saw him take in with interest the sight of Georgia sitting at their kitchen table. Georgia stood up immediately and put on her denim jacket. ‘Anyway. I better get going. I only came over to see if Alice wanted to come to Kingston with us.’
Georgia vanished out of the kitchen before Helen had the chance to say goodbye, Alice close behind her.
‘Something I said?’ Patrick Lennon asked, raising his eyebrow. He sat down at the kitchen table uninvited, which irritated Helen slightly, although she made sure not to let it show.
‘I doubt it. That’s teenagers for you. Tea?’ Helen asked.
‘Thanks. No sugar, please.’ He took out a black Moleskine notebook – rather poncy for a copper, thought Helen.
‘Is Sean about? I need both of you for this – and Alice, if that’s OK,’ he added, as Alice returned, hovering uncertainly in the doorway.
‘He’s upstairs. I’ll get him,’ she said, retreating. ‘Da-ad!’ they heard her shout up the stairs.
‘He’s probably in his study,’ Helen said. ‘I haven’t seen him all morning.’ She couldn’t quite keep the bitterness out of her voice. She yearned for Sean’s support, to feel that they were in this hideous nightmare as a team, bonded together as tightly as two halves of a walnut in its shell – but Sean had retreated from her, emotionally and physically, to the point that she almost felt she had lost a husband as well as a daughter. He always had been a bit of a tortoise, retracting his neck into a silent unreachable place as a response to difficult emotional situations. Helen supposed she thought, when they met, that she could change him.
Every woman always thinks that, she thought now. And they never can.
Alice’s footsteps stomping back down the stairs were joined by Sean’s quieter ones. Helen took out two more mugs and re-boiled the kettle.
‘DI Lennon just wants to ask us a few more questions,’ she said to him, taking in his unshaven, grey face and bed-head hair, even though it was ten thirty and he’d been up for hours – his side of the bed had been empty since about six A.M. Her heart squeezed with pity for him, forcing herself to understand that he felt as bad as she did. He just showed it in different ways.
‘Yeah, I know,’ he replied shortly. ‘Alice told me.’
‘Sorry we’re not dressed,’ Helen said. She felt embarrassed at the state of both of them – Alice was the only one who looked halfway presentable.
‘Right, thanks, folks,’ Lennon said, once they were all seated with cups of tea in front of them. ‘The main reason I’m here is because I’m asking all three families for a comprehensive list of places you’ve taken the kids in the last six months. Not just nurseries or clubs, but parties, coffee shops, toyshops even, if you can remember. Outings you might have had locally. Trips to the swings. Santa’s grottos, if you can remember that far back.’
‘What’s this for?’ Sean asked. ‘Trying to find somewhere the children might have been … spotted by the bastard who took them?’
DI Lennon nodded and they sat for ten minutes or so, compiling a list on the back of an A4 envelope that had contained a travel
brochure. It helped, thought Helen, having something concrete to do, and something that united them, even just for a short time. They all called out suggestions, which Alice wrote down in her careful cursive. Helen wished she could write down all the memories of Frankie that each suggestion conjured up.
‘Nursery – it’s Ladybirds Nursery in Church Road. She goes – went – every morning. And the playgroup at the church, All Saints in Fulwell. We sometimes go to their Wednesday afternoon session. She likes it there. Mostly because they have homemade cheese straws.’
‘How about that soft play centre we took her to in March, at Syon House? Remember, she spilt my cappuccino all over herself.’
‘Archie Fuller’s birthday party the other week – Dad, you took her there, didn’t you?’
‘Well remembered, honey. Yeah, I did. And there’s the Dads’ Club in Bushy Park on a Saturday morning – when I was desperate.’
Sean cracked a smile, and Helen put her hand on his knee. ‘He hates Dads’ Club,’ she explained.
‘All those bloody earnest left-wing Teddington dads talking about quinoa and private school fees.’
‘Swimming lessons at the Lensbury.’
Alice scribbled away.
‘Where do you do your grocery shopping?’ Lennon asked.
They all looked at him. ‘Not Sainsbury’s,’ Helen said. ‘We go to the Waitrose in Twickenham, usually …’ She paused. ‘Have there been any leads on poor Liam?’
Lennon shook his head. ‘Not yet, but we’re still assimilating all the information.’
Alice started doodling on the envelope, thick cross-hatched shading on the inside of the outline of a church, next to the word ‘Church playgroup’ on her list. She leaned her head slowly onto Sean’s shoulder, and he hugged her tightly. Helen tried not to feel jealous.
She opened her mouth to tell them about Janet Friars’ Facebook message – then stopped. Suddenly her decision was made. She was going to tell no-one. She was going to reply to Janet Friars herself. It was almost certainly a hoax, but if that was the case, there would be no harm in not telling Sean. And she could feel that she was doing something practical herself, even if it was just ruling out the woman, without causing any more stress to anybody else.