by Louise Voss
She sobbed, her entire body trembling with distress, her fingers clawing at the upholstery, grabbing a cushion and pulling it to her, hugging it against her belly. A terrible keening noise came from her and she stamped her foot on the carpet, her face pink and streaming with tears.
‘Frankie, oh Frankie,’ she cried, a tsunami of grief making her body buck. She kept uttering her daughter’s name over and over. Sean tried to take hold of her but she shrank away and he hovered at the edge of her, stricken and useless.
‘We’re never going to find her.’ Her words trembled in her throat. ‘She’s gone, gone forever.’ She sounded like someone was shaking her.
She lifted her face and looked directly at Patrick. Behind him, the McConnells continued with their public display of joy. Helen pointed a finger and said, ‘You said you’d find her. You’ve failed us. You’ve failed Frankie.’
‘Helen, that’s not fair,’ Sean said weakly.
‘Fuck you,’ Helen spat.
Patrick stood there and took it. Her words made him go cold, but he couldn’t blame her.
‘We will find her,’ he said. Not adding or what happened to her.
A fresh wave of tears broke and, finally, she let her husband pull her into an embrace. He stroked her hair and whispered to her as she continued to cry, clutching the back of his badly buttoned shirt.
Patrick had never felt so awkward.
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ he said.
While he waited for the kettle to boil, his phone rang. It was Carmella.
‘Guess what,’ she said.
‘Larry’s done a runner?’
‘Alice too, eh? I got there and his mum was being all “leave my poor little boy alone” on the doorstep for about five minutes until I eventually persuaded her to let me in. Larry’s nowhere to be seen. His mum admitted she thought he was just having a lie-in, but she hadn’t actually clapped eyes on him since last night. She said his backpack was gone, along with a toy tiger he’s had since he was little.’
‘Bad man, huh?’
‘I know, right? Bless. She said it never leaves his pillow. The last time he took it out was on a camping trip with the Scouts when he was twelve.’
Patrick couldn’t help but laugh.
‘They’re bambinos,’ Carmella said. ‘Him and Alice. They think they’re all grown up but they’re just children.’
When Patrick returned to the living room a few minutes later, holding two steaming cups of tea, each containing three spoonfuls of sugar, Helen was wiping her face with a tissue, the TV was off and the couple sat with their hips touching, facing forward. There was a large wet patch on Sean’s chest.
‘I’m sorry,’ Helen said in a raw voice.
Patrick put the mugs of tea on the coffee table and sat in the armchair opposite. He put his hands on his knees and leaned forward.
‘I’m going to need to ask you those questions. We may have covered some of this before but it’s important now we’re looking at everything from a different angle.’ He deliberately avoided using cold words like ‘case’ and ‘investigation’.
Both Philipses nodded.
He paused for a moment before deciding how to begin. He didn’t want Sean to leap to his daughter’s defence from the first moment. ‘How often did you go out leaving Alice looking after Frankie?’
Sean answered. ‘Once in a blue moon. We hardly ever get out.’
‘I’m never going out and leaving her again,’ Helen said quietly.
‘So it was an unusual event? You didn’t have a regular night that somebody else might know about?’
‘God. No, not at all,’ said Sean.
Patrick had his notebook out. These were warm-up questions whose answers he didn’t expect to be illuminating, but he made a show of noting them anyway.
‘Who knew you were going out?’
Sean said, ‘I don’t know. I think I told a couple of people at work, made a comment about how we were actually going to go out for a change.’
‘What about Facebook or Twitter? Did you announce it on there?’
Helen and Sean looked at each other questioningly. Sean said, ‘I hardly ever update my Facebook. I don’t think I put anything on there. And I only use Twitter for business.’
‘I’m sure I didn’t either,’ Helen said.
‘So the only people who knew you were going out were you – the family – plus a couple of friends and colleagues? Did you pre-book the restaurant? Go there in a cab?’
‘Yes to the booking. No to the cab – we walked. It’s only ten minutes’ walk. It was a nice evening. We gave you those details before.’
‘Of course. But bear with me.’ Patrick knew that they had already spoken to the restaurant, checked out the employees, and that no-one else was under suspicion.
‘So the only other people who would have known would be those who Alice told,’ Patrick stated. ‘Which could be any number of her friends.’
‘I guess so,’ Sean said. ‘But we can’t ask her at the moment, can we?’
Patrick scrawled a line in his pad. ‘Let’s come back to that. Alice told me that her boyfriend, Larry Gould, didn’t come round that evening. Do you believe her?’
Sean said, ‘Yes,’ and Helen said, ‘No.’
‘A difference of opinion.’
Sean said, ‘She was told not to invite Larry round that evening. Why should we disbelieve her when she says she didn’t?’
‘Why did you tell her not to invite him? Don’t you like him?’
Sean laughed humourlessly. ‘I like him as much as any father likes his teenage daughter’s boyfriend.’
Patrick waited for him to say the obvious, and Sean didn’t disappoint. ‘I know what boys are like at that age.’
‘He’s actually a nice kid,’ Helen said. ‘He’s a bit rough round the edges, very “street.” But he’s always very polite and quite funny. I can understand what Alice sees in him. She’s at the age where boys who seem a little bit dangerous and different to what their parents approve of are very appealing.’
Patrick was impressed by how quickly Helen had pulled herself together. She was in that calm state of mind that people often go into after a big emotional episode.
‘So why didn’t you want him coming round while you were out?’
‘Because,’ Helen said, ‘I know what boys and girls are like at that age. I didn’t want them making loads of noise and disturbing Frankie. Maybe it’s because I’m not Alice’s natural mother, but I’m not that bothered about the thought of them having sex in her room. I mean, they’re obviously doing it anyway.’
‘What?’ Sean said, appalled.
‘Oh, come off it, Sean,’ Helen said. ‘They’ve been together six months. Of course they’re sleeping together.’
Sean looked sick and Patrick had a horrible vision of himself in thirteen years’ time, going through the same with Bonnie.
‘But despite your warning, you think Larry did come round that night?’ Patrick asked Helen.
‘I’d be amazed if they could resist. And I bet that’s what they were doing when Frankie … was taken.’ Her face darkened again. ‘Alice was too busy screwing her boyfriend to look after her sister.’
Sean stood up and pointed a finger at his wife. ‘Don’t talk about Alice like that. None of this is her fault.’ His face shifted from white to pink to purple before Patrick’s eyes. The truce between the Philipses was over.
‘Please,’ Patrick said. ‘Mr Philips, sit down.’ He waited till Sean had taken his seat, at the very edge of the sofa, before asking, ‘Do you know if Larry and Alice are into drugs?’
He expected the ‘yes’/’no’ conflict again, but while Helen thought about it, Sean said, ‘It wouldn’t surprise me. Like you said about the … sex thing, they’re teenagers, aren’t they? I’m sure they smoke a bit of dope.’
Patrick hadn’t heard it called that for years. Feeling old, he said, ‘What about harder stuff?’
Sean sighed. ‘I don’t know. No par
ent really knows what their kids get up to, do they? But I do know that Alice didn’t have anything to do with Frankie’s disappearance. She would tell us if she knew anything. She loves her sister more than anything.’
‘So why has she run off?’ Helen asked.
‘Because,’ he said in an exasperated tone, ‘she’s sick and tired of everyone blaming her. As am I.’
Silence settled over the room. Patrick thought hard. All this speculation wasn’t getting them anywhere. Helen and Sean didn’t know a thing. Alice was a teenager; it was like having an alien living in their house, a being they would never fully know or understand. The police had to focus on finding her.
‘OK … Any idea where she might have gone? Does she have access to any other properties? Any distant friends or relatives she might have gone to stay with? Anywhere at all that you can think of?’
The answers were negative.
‘What about her phone?’ Sean asked. ‘Can’t you trace it?’ Before Patrick could reply, he added, ‘I’ve tried ringing her a dozen times, and her phone is going straight to voicemail, as if it’s turned off. But can’t you trace phones even if they are switched off?’
‘We can. But not if the battery has been removed. We’ll try though.’
His own phone rang. It was Suzanne, no doubt wanting an update. He rejected the call and said, ‘That’s it for now. If you think of anywhere Alice might have gone, or if you hear anything from her, please let me know immediately. And it would also be useful to have a list of her friends.’
‘I’ll do that for you,’ Helen said. She looked completely drained.
‘Thank you.’
He left the house and walked a little way down the street, before calling Suzanne back. As he waited for her to answer, he looked back at the Philipses’ house. A week ago, it would have been vibrant, noisy, full of mess and energy.
Now it was a silent, empty nest.
Chapter 31
Winkler – Day 5
Winkler stood in the station car park and watched Lennon and his bitch of a sidekick, Carmella, drive off in separate cars. He was still smarting from the way that lesbian had spoken to him in the meeting, but most of his fury was directed at Lennon. How the hell was he still the lead on this investigation? He couldn’t work out if he was actually fucking the DCI or if they merely had the hots for each other. It had to be one of those, and one of these days he was going to find out and expose the pair of them so everyone could see how corrupt this department was. But first, he was going to put Lennon in his place by finding the kid and showing the tattooed twat up for the crap cop he really was.
He drove home, made himself a cup of green tea – it was important to keep his body in tip-top condition – and sat down at the computer. He rested a hand on his belly, feeling his taut abs, and ran a hand through his lovely hair. Oh Lord, it’s hard to be humble. He resisted the urge to visit the Japanese fetish site he’d become addicted to lately and went to Facebook, logging out of his own account then logging in, for the first time, as Helen Philips.
Lennon reckoned that the teenage duo, Alice and Larry, were responsible for what had happened to the kid but, like he’d said in the meeting, he couldn’t see them having the guts or gumption to pull that off. The girl would have crumpled during her first interview.
No, Winkler was now sure the parents were to blame. An accident, maybe. Or straightforward infanticide. Shit, you’d think Lennon would be able to spot a child-killer a mile off, being married to an attempted murderer. But look at the odds – in cases like this, after they’d discounted the neighbourhood child snatchers, it was always the parents. Behind that middle-class veneer of respectability, Sean and Helen Philips were hiding something dark. He could smell it on them. The thought of Helen, with that perfect peachy arse, having a wicked secret gave him a semi. Maybe he’d find some flesh-bearing shots on her Facebook page.
He was disappointed. Pretty much every picture in Helen’s Facebook albums was of Frankie, along with a load of pictures of bracelets she’d made in her spare time (all of them with tons of likes from her girly mates) or boring close-ups of bees and flowers she’d taken with ‘my fab new macro lens’ in the park. Interestingly, there weren’t many photos of Alice or Sean, apart from a few Christmas snaps in which Alice looked pouty and Sean appeared pie-eyed. There certainly weren’t any pictures that revealed her to be a member of a Satanic cult or anything juicy and incriminating like that.
Her status updates were as vanilla as his ex-wife’s sexual tastes too. Lots of sharing of LOL-tastic pictures of cats and ‘nom nom’-inducing shots of cakes, plus loads of ‘hilarious’ (i.e., completely unfunny) things that Frankie had said or done.
Still, he hadn’t been expecting to find much on here. What he was really hoping was that, like many people, Helen’s Facebook log-in was the same as her email. There could well be something illuminating on there. Before, checking that out, he decided to take a look through her messages.
There wasn’t much. An exchange with an old friend, arranging a play date. A couple of gossipy exchanges with some woman from the gym. A mutual moan-fest with another chick about the challenges of parenting toddlers. Apparently, Frankie had bitten some kid at nursery and Helen was in a total panic about it, though ‘Sean doesn’t see it as a big deal. He says it’s just a phase.’ Interestingly, there was also a string of exchanges, from about 18 months ago, with a friend who lived in Switzerland, Sara, bitching about their respective motherin-laws. Helen had really gone off on one about Eileen.
‘She turned up out of nowhere and told me about how I was too soft on Frankie, that I need to be stricter with her or she’ll end up going off the rails like Sean. I asked her what she meant, coz as far as I know Sean has never done anything bad – nothing I know about anyway!! – but then she clammed up and said she didn’t mean anything by it. I tried to press her but she said she just meant Sean was a bit naughty at school, nothing to, in her words, get my knickers in a twist about. When I asked Sean about it later he said he had no idea what Eileen meant.’
That was interesting. Sean Philips had a dodgy past. What did they know about him? He’d been brought up by a single mum, Eileen, in Braintree where Eileen still lived. Gone to study business at uni in Birmingham, then come to London to work in the City. Done well for himself, and set up his own management consultancy firm about five years ago. The Essex boy done good.
Winkler made a note that he needed to talk to Eileen, or maybe go back to Essex and find some old mates of Sean’s.
There was another interesting message about Eileen from Helen, writing to her friend Sara.
‘She’s such a racist. Even though I’m mixed race, I overheard her once saying she didn’t think Frankie should go to the nursery she goes to because there are too many of “them”. Can you believe it? Has she not noticed that Frankie’s mixed race too?!?’
Sara made some horrified statement and Helen continued:
‘I reminded her that both her granddaughters are mixed race and she said, “Exactly”.’
Winkler pressed print and waited for his shitty printer – was there ever a more temperamental piece of technology? – to grumpily awaken. That could be interesting too. Was Eileen’s reference to Sean going off the rails merely something about him fathering a child with not one but two black women? If Eileen was some kind of BNP nut, that would no doubt be seen as a terrible sin to her. He sighed. That probably was it, in which case the reference to Sean going off the rails when he was younger wasn’t going to lead him anywhere. It was just the ranting of a racist old woman.
There was no sign of the messages from the woman who had apparently contacted Helen saying she knew where Frankie was. He guessed that this woman had come to her senses and deleted all her messages.
He was about to move on to try to log in to Helen’s email when the little chat box in the bottom corner popped up with a new instant message.
It was someone he hadn’t heard of before, someone called Hattie Styles. N
ot one of Helen’s existing Facebook friends. Styles’ avatar was a mean-looking black and white cat. Winkler immediately smelled a rat. And the name … he was no fan of recent pop music, but even he had heard of One Direction and Harry Styles. It was an obvious play on that name. Did that mean he was dealing with a teenage girl here?
I knew Frankie wouldnt b in that house, the message read.
Winkler paused, his fingers poised over the keyboard. He typed, as Helen, How did you know that? Who are you?
The reply came back immediately. U need to look closer to home …
What do you mean?
He paused. He felt tense and excited. He added, Please tell me. I need to know what happened to Frankie. I’ll be so grateful if you can tell me anything.
There was no immediate response. Shit, had he frightened her off by being too needy? Maybe the best tactic would be to play it cool. But he wanted ‘Hattie’ to believe that she had power, make her want to show off. Of course, it was highly unlikely she actually knew anything, but it was worth a try.
Finally, the reply came back. You have a demon livin in ur house.
This was interesting. Was ‘Hattie’ talking about Sean?
He typed, What are you talking about?
Ur stepdaughter. She is evil. An evil bitch!!!
He responded with ???
Alice killd little Frankie. She is a devil. Her and her boyfriend. They are evil and r goin 2 ROT IN HELL for wot they have dun.
Winkler smiled. An obvious nut. Probably seen a picture of Alice in the paper and taken a dislike to her face.
Don’t be ridiculous, he wrote. Alice is a nice girl.
Immediately the response came back: That’s wot YOU think. I can prove she is evil. And eny1 that evil could EASILY kill a little kid. I KNOW wot she is like.
He typed, I thought you had real info for me but you are talking nonsense.