‘It must have been posted to Friar Street,’ said Jesson. ‘That postage label looks like your usual Post Office printed one, so we should be able to find out where it was sent from.’ The Friar Street address was in neat block capitals written in black marker pen.
As Mariner tipped up the package he saw something else, stuck to the inside. ‘Hold on,’ he said. It was a slim plastic bag, like a re-sealable sandwich bag, which contained something that at first glance looked like a black hair net, but when Mariner broke the seal and peered inside he realised he was looking at short clippings of human hair — and body hair at that.
‘Is that what I think it is?’ said Glover with distaste.
‘Looks like it,’ said Mariner.
‘So it’s one of those,’ said Jesson.
‘Or made to look like one of those,’ said Mariner. ‘I think we can safely assume that this will match Grace’s DNA, and that her parents will recognise the clothing.’ He checked the envelope again. ‘But no communication from whoever sent it.’
‘Why bother then?’ Glover wondered aloud.
‘To let us know that someone’s got her,’ said Mariner.
* * *
Given the lack of any headway over the weekend from the reconstruction, it was a despondent team that gathered in CID for the first briefing of the day. The arrival of the parcel injected some fresh enthusiasm, the subsequent discussion following much the same pattern as the one that had already taken place in Mariner’s office, though the focus was more on the laundering of the clothes.
‘Whatever it might mean,’ Mariner said, ‘we share with the media that we have received some clothing. But details of what else the package contained, we keep to ourselves for now. Is that understood?’
It appeared to be. Individuals were tasked with following up existing lines of enquiry. Meanwhile Mariner went to speak to Superintendent Sharp. He explained the parcel and its contents. ‘I think it’s a clear indication that we’re looking at something more than a straight MisPer,’ he said. ‘I’d like to start directing the enquiry through an incident room.’
‘I agree,’ said Sharp. ‘Let me know as and when you need additional resources.’
‘Have we made a big mistake with this?’ Mariner said.
‘No,’ said Sharp. ‘We’ve been suitably cautious.’
* * *
Grace’s mother and father were asked to come in to positively identify the clothing. Whilst Mariner welcomed the opportunity for further close scrutiny of the couple, he was acutely aware of their potential distress in the face of so little contextual information. On the surface they were composed; Mrs Clifton was stylishly dressed, her olive skin dark against a lemon-coloured suit. She was of Middle Eastern origin, Mariner seemed to remember. Dwarfed beside her husband’s powerful physical presence, she seemed nonetheless calm and contained.
With Vicky Jesson in attendance, Mariner took them to the forensic suite where the clothes, visible through the transparent panes of the evidence bags, had been laid out on the table. The shoes remained in the plastic bag they’d arrived in. ‘I have to ask you not to touch anything, please,’ Mariner said. ‘Just confirm for us, if you can, that they belong to Grace.’ He could tell immediately from the quiver of her lip that Grace’s mother recognised them. She nodded wordlessly.
‘You’re certain about all the clothes?’ Mariner asked, gently.
‘Yes,’ Mrs Clifton replied, her voice barely a whisper. She cleared her throat. ‘And those are definitely Gracie’s shoes. I keep telling her they’re ridiculous to wear for work, when she’s on her feet all night, but she swears that they’re comfortable. She’ll suffer for that when she’s older.’
‘I really hope she does,’ added Councillor Clifton, and Mariner saw that suddenly the possibilities were becoming real to him too. Until now he had been brash, and confident to the point of bombastic, but seeing these items spread out, Mariner could see he’d taken a body blow. It took several seconds for his wife to grasp the implication of what he’d said, and when she finally did, she glanced up briefly, pain distorting her attractive features. ‘No. Do you think this means . . .?’
Jesson touched her arm in a sympathetic gesture. ‘We’re still trying to figure it out ourselves,’ she said.
For several minutes Mrs Clifton continued to stare at the clothing. ‘There’s something wrong here,’ she said suddenly. ‘I’m sure those are Gracie’s shoes, but she never keeps them this clean. None of the kids have ever polished their shoes. I always end up doing it for them, when they get really scuffed.’ She caught Mariner’s eye. ‘I don’t understand. Why would she have cleaned her shoes?’
‘I’m sorry, that’s something else we don’t yet know,’ Mariner had to admit. ‘I realise this is an odd question, Mrs Clifton,’ he went on, ‘but is it possible to tell if the clothes smell like your usual detergent or fabric conditioner?’ He opened up one of the bags and she dipped her head over it, sniffing at the clothes.
‘It’s a pleasant smell,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it’s the one I use, but it’s hard to say.’ Finally, unable to resist, she put her hand on the bag containing Grace’s shoes, as if that would somehow bring her closer to her daughter.
* * *
‘You smell,’ said Ethan Fisher, holding his nose in exaggerated fashion and wafting his free hand in front of his face. The other boys in his little gang laughed and did the same. ‘She stinks!’ cried Sajid Latif and the others joined in the chant: ‘She stinks, she stinks!’ Dominique couldn’t help it then. A big pain came up inside her and she wanted to shout, ‘I want my mum!’ But instead she covered her ears and ran, as far away from them as she could get, onto the grass and behind the low bushes. There she sat down where nobody else would be able to see that she was crying. When the whistle blew and they all filed back into school, one of the dinner ladies stopped her. ‘Are you all right, darlin’? Have you been crying?’
‘I fell over,’ said Dominique, touching her knee for effect. ‘But I’m all right now.’
At the end of the day, when it was time to go home, Dominique scanned the crowd of waiting parents, desperately hoping to pick out Mum’s cloud of dark, curly hair, and a sign that things would be back to normal again. But as she stood straining to see, one by one the other kids dispersed with their mums, disappearing off down the road and calling out goodbye as they went. Some of them were going to do what Dominique liked best, and stop off at the newsagents for sweets. The others would climb into their mums’ cars and be driven home. Bit by bit, the mob at the gate started to thin, conversations between the grown-ups dwindled and parents and children drifted away. The last stragglers ran out of the cloakrooms, racing to catch up and being chastised for being slow.
A group of year two boys who’d started to kick around an empty water bottle while they waited for play dates to be arranged, went tumbling noisily off down the street. Dominique followed them out and looked each way down the road to see if Mum was coming, hurrying and breathless and sorry she was late. She didn’t want to go back to the flat alone, and perhaps if she waited for long enough, this time Mum would come. All day long she had thought about telling a teacher. But then she would also have to tell her secret. And she couldn’t do that.
Dominique stood watching the cars go past, mostly mums driving with kids in the back. Black, shiny cars, silver cars, big people carriers, and a workman in his white van. She hugged her coat tightly round her. The sun had gone down behind the big, grey clouds and the wind was clattering the dead leaves around on the pavement. Miss McBride said that autumn was coming early this year because it had been such a nice warm summer. Dominique spied a loose thread on the sleeve of her coat and was concentrating hard on pulling it free, so that the man’s voice behind her made her jump.
‘Hello, bab, are you all right?’
Dominique looked round to see the building supervisor, Mr Warren, with his bunch of keys, swinging shut one of the steel gates. He was bigger than Dad and quite old, and
the skin on his face was red with lots of tiny holes and tiny wiggly lines in it. The gate squealed like a creature in pain.
‘Yes, thank you,’ Dominique replied, good manners having been drummed into her at an early age. ‘I’m waiting for my mum. She’s just coming.’ Dominique glanced off down the road. It wasn’t quite a lie. She was sure that Mum would come in the end — it was just that she couldn’t see her yet.
‘Righty ho.’ Mr Warren smiled, showing his brown teeth, then, pulling the gates together with a clang, he snapped shut the big padlock and clomped away again. On the far side of the playground Dominique saw the teachers beginning to come out to their cars and drive out through the other entrance. She turned away hoping that they wouldn’t see she was still there. Mr Rhys got cross about kids whose mums didn’t collect them on time. Picking up her school-bag she started out along the main road, carefully stepping on the paving slabs. She’d see if she could get all the way home without standing on a crack.
* * *
Mariner was starting to feel the now-familiar claustrophobia as the walls of Superintendent Sharp’s new second-floor office began to close in on him. He, Sharp and the ACC were sitting around Sharp’s desk, discussing the significance of Grace Clifton’s clothing. As soon as he had learned about this latest development, Dawson had insisted on a personal briefing, and his frustration that they could determine so little from it was patently evident. As always his timing was bloody awful, arriving just as Mariner was about to leave for the afternoon, and now Mariner’s only point of focus was the second hand on his watch as it bumped the minute hand inexorably towards the point of no return. He’d heard barely anything of the last five minutes of discussion — mostly the ACC offering procedural advice that added nothing to what Mariner and his team had already put in place. Instead Mariner’s mental energy was consumed by calculating the time it was going to take him to drive from Granville Lane out to his Kingsmead home at this time on a Monday afternoon, and anticipating in graphic detail the potential delays along the way. Even with a clear run, any second now he would go past the limit at which it was achievable. And here it was.
At that precise moment Superintendent Sharp’s voice cut into his consciousness. ‘You need to go, Tom,’ she said, throwing him a lifeline.
‘Yes, I do,’ said Mariner, getting to his feet. ‘Sorry.’
The ACC’s accusing gaze swept his way. ‘Oh. Of course, that’s fine, Tom.’ Mariner thought he saw a tell-tale flush of annoyance fleetingly cross Dawson’s face. It was a look he knew well, but usually from the other side — the gut-deep disbelief that anything else could be more important than — in this case — locating a missing and vulnerable young woman. Even though the meeting had been approaching its natural conclusion, the guilt cut through Mariner as he hurriedly shook hands and left the room, hearing the door bang loudly behind him in the deserted corridor. Now he was free, he bounded down the stairs with the lightness of a kid who’s been let out early from school. Seven and a half minutes to make the three-mile suburban journey on the cusp of rush hour. Where was a Tardis when you needed one?
He pulled into the service road, at the end of which was his house . . . and his heart sank as the parked-up bus came into view, Joseph Chamberlain Centre emblazoned along the side. He would incur a fine for this. It wasn’t the money that mattered, but Mariner hated the thought that he was letting people down. Coming to an untidy halt he saw that it was Declan once again who waited in the open doorway, finishing a sly cigarette and watching over Jamie as he paced around in what passed for Mariner’s front garden. His was a strange job, Mariner had often thought. A couple of hours in the early morning, a few more in late afternoon and the rest of Declan’s day was his own. He was a relatively young man. Not for the first time, Mariner wondered what on earth the man did with the rest of his time.
‘Have a great evening, guys,’ he said, brightly, swinging back into the bus. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’
* * *
The walk home seemed longer than ever, and though she was tired when she rounded the corner of her street, Dominique couldn’t help running the last hundred metres or so to their block. The main door was propped open with a brick as always and she climbed up the cold, concrete stairs to the fourth floor. Reaching in through the aluminium letterbox she groped around for the rough-edged string, its key dangling on the end. ‘Shouldn’t really do this,’ her mum had told her, when they’d fixed it there. But she said that Dominique had to have a way of getting in if she needed to. And Dominique couldn’t see that anyone else would ever want to get into their flat. Mum had tried hard to make it nice and Dominique had thought it was cosy until she’d gone for tea at Somia’s house. With its thick carpets, squashy leather sofas and a special room for eating their tea, it had been like going into a palace.
She was glad to be home, and pushing open the door she felt a rush of hope that Mum would be there. But the flat was even colder and emptier than it had been before. Dominique was hungry again, but the yogurts had all gone and the bread in the cupboard had furry spots on it and smelled funny. She switched on the telly for company and the electric fire and, when it got dark, the lamp in the corner. But a bit later, while she was watching a cartoon, the TV screen suddenly went black and the light went off. The meter had run out. Dominique knew that when this happened Mum had to put more tokens in the slot, but now that it was dark she was too frightened to move off the sofa. After a while, when her eyes got used to it and she could see the shapes of things, she felt braver and she went out to the cupboard in the hall where the meter was. She knew she had to put a token in, but when she found the jar where Mum kept them, it was empty, and Dominique didn’t know where to get more from.
Chapter Eight
On Tuesday morning, Mariner had been at his desk just a short time, and was fixated on his computer screen, when something large plopped onto the desk before him. ‘Someone must really like you,’ observed the post clerk. Except that today’s parcel was in much better condition than yesterday’s offering. It was identical to the one that had contained Grace Clifton’s clothes, but this time it was directly addressed to Mariner and the franking mark suggested it had come through the regular external post.
‘Shit,’ he said, staring at it for a stunned moment, then he phoned through to Vicky Jesson and Charlie Glover. Minutes later, the three of them were experiencing an unpleasant case of déjà vu.
‘Not much doubt about it then,’ said Mariner, sweeping his gaze over evidence bags containing, this time, jeans, underwear and well-worn but highly polished ballet flats, black, with a decorative row of steel stars. To one side, he’d placed an identical plastic bag containing hair, along with another plastic identity badge. Today there was no distinctive logo to help them out and the name, in block capitals, simply read ROSA.
Mariner picked it up. ‘Not one of Symphony Hall’s,’ he said. ‘This one is cheaper and more generic.’
‘And less formal,’ Glover pointed out. ‘Grace’s has her full name on it.’
‘So who the hell is Rosa, and what, if anything, does she have to do with Grace Clifton?’ said Mariner, more to himself than to anyone else. ‘Any of her friends go by that name?’
‘None that have been mentioned to us,’ said Jesson.
‘Can you see a date on that postmark?’ Mariner said, getting in close. The others did the same, so that all he could hear for several seconds was the sound of their collective breathing.
‘Looks like the fourteenth to me,’ said Charlie. ‘Yesterday.’
‘So this one has definitely come straight here.’
‘And it’s got your name on it,’ added Vicky. ‘Whoever sent this must know that you’re in charge of the investigation.’
‘From the reconstruction perhaps,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s been aired a few times now, and they’ll have seen the Q&A afterwards with your name scrolling along the bottom.’
In the newly created incident room, the development was shared with o
ther officers working the case.
‘Our first task is to check through missing persons for the last week or so and see if anyone with this name has been reported,’ Mariner said to Charlie. ‘Start locally and work your way incrementally out to a wider radius. There could be all kinds of reasons why this girl or woman hasn’t come to our attention.’ Mariner couldn’t help but think back to the case of Ricky Skeet a few years ago, one of the many hidden victims in this over-populated city. ‘If that doesn’t work then we’ll need to harness our friends in the media. We can also get the hair DNA tested, though that will only help if Rosa is already on our database, and it will be a good couple of days before we get an outcome.’
‘What about Grace?’ Charlie asked.
‘We keep pursuing the current lines of enquiry. And we start to cautiously explore the possibility that these two women are somehow linked.’
‘Do we now believe that Grace Clifton may have been taken?’ Vicky Jesson asked.
‘I think we have to accept that as an increasingly strong possibility,’ said Mariner. ‘Either she’s really yanking our chain, or both these women have been taken by person or persons unknown.’
* * *
It was such a beautiful, sunny afternoon that Millie decided to take Haroon for a walk. On impulse she arranged her route so that she could call on Louise. It was about time she saw inside her new friend’s house and this might be the only way to make it happen. As she entered the cul-de-sac she felt as if she were walking into a different world. The noise of the city seemed to melt away behind the mature trees, and the shrubs and expansive lawns gave an illusion of rural charm. Louise’s house was a large though far-from-ostentatious brick build, detached and with mullioned windows that rendered it dark and mysterious. Millie stepped into the porch and rapped the brass knocker three times. She was preparing her ‘surprise!’ face for Louise, and was therefore completely wrong-footed when the door was answered by a man, who could only be Greg. Millie was immediately on her guard, which made two of them apparently — although a less observant eye than Millie’s might have failed to notice the split-second delay before he turned on the dazzlingly handsome smile. Of average height, he was dark-haired with film-star good looks and confidence radiating from him. Millie’s first thought was what a mismatch he was for Louise. She could imagine him being very successful at his sales job.
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