by Lisa Cutts
Bill topped up my wine glass.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘No problem. I can’t drink any more anyway.’
‘I didn’t mean for the wine. Well, I did. The wine, the meal, taking me out and not asking endless questions. I’ve had a great time.’ It was true. Until Joe had showed up, I’d forgotten all about Jake Lloyd and Scott Headingly and work in general.
‘My pleasure. I’ll get the bill and we’ll go back to yours. Oh, not like that! I mean I’ll walk you back to your house.’
His hand was resting on the table. I put my own over it and said, ‘I know what you meant.’
The bill settled, we walked back to my house. I put my arm through Bill’s, not quite believing my luck. This one was definitely a keeper.
At the front door, I got out my keys, hoping for a sign that he wanted to come in. When I didn’t get one, I asked, ‘You have time for a coffee?’
‘I really should be going. Any chance that when you get back from Birmingham we can go out again?’
‘Without a doubt,’ I said, not even attempting to play it cool and aloof. ‘I’ll be there for a night or two. I’ll give you a call when I get back?’
‘Sounds good to me. Goodnight.’ He moved towards me, caressing my face with his fingertips, his mouth meeting mine. We kissed. He lowered his hands to my waist and pulled me tight to him. I felt my knees begin to buckle.
Bill loosened his hold on me. ‘Take care in Birmingham,’ he said, before stepping back, and watching me go inside.
Chapter 52
30th September
The next day, I met Laura in the back yard at the nick. On our way up the stairs, I asked her if she’d mind driving first so I could read up on the enquiry’s latest developments. Truth be told, I was tired. A couple of days of worrying about Stan, plus a night spent thinking about Bill after he’d left, not to mention working on three linked murders and having a stalker, and I was beginning to crack.
‘Sure, Nin,’ said Laura as we made our way to the detective sergeants’ office, ‘happy to.’
Ray was sitting in the office stapling papers together when we walked in. He glanced up, set the stapler down and said, ‘Fantastic: a blonde and a brunette. Always handy if you two want to make a porno. Lets the viewer know who’s who.’
‘What have you got for us?’ I asked. ‘And keep it clean.’
He chucked the paperwork across the desk. I picked it up. Laura was trying to read over my shoulder.
Ray said, ‘That’s a Missing Person report from West Midlands Police. It relates to Benjamin Makepeace. He went missing just under six weeks ago. No sign of him since. Initial enquiries were made, and then he swiftly became another of the two hundred thousand people who go missing every year.
‘As you can see, a bit like Amanda Bell, he was last seen on CCTV, believed to be heading home. No use of his mobile or bank accounts, car hasn’t moved, no word to family or friends. All very odd, but if you flick to the final page of the report you’ll see that we have a DNA hit.’
I turned to the final page. The noise of Ray moving in his chair caused me to glance in his direction. ‘Catherine mentioned that. It’s to do with Gary Savage, isn’t it? Second bloke we nicked for murder?’
Ray nodded. ‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘The knife you found in his van had Makepeace’s blood on it. As a missing person, Makepeace’s DNA was taken from his toothbrush and loaded into the MisPer Database. As you probably know, the blood from the knife was checked against the National DNA Database then the Missing Persons Database. The bloodstain profile took a couple of days to come back. When it did, it matched Benjamin Makepeace’s profile. Get yourselves up there, speak to Robin Cox in Intel; his number’s on the first page. See what you can find out about Makepeace. They’re sending some officers down to us here at some point, probably once you’ve been up there, I’m not sure when, but this may now be the start of a countrywide investigation.’
As we went to leave his office, Ray said, ‘Oh, Nina. You may want to see this.’
He pushed further paperwork across the desk. It was the newspaper article about Lloyd stalking me, shouting the same heading I had read at Stan’s. Someone had cut it out of the local paper and stapled an ‘Other Document’ Incident Room sheet to the top. ‘Relates to Op Guard so it’s a part of the unused material,’ Ray told me. As if to pacify me that it was routine, he then added, ‘All items from the media get logged as ODs and reviewed by the disclosure officer for murder enquiries.’
I glanced at it, pushed it back across the desk and tried to banish it from my mind. I would never know who else had seen my name associated with Jake Lloyd.
Laura had the good grace to avoid talking about the newspaper article. For that I was grateful. We spent the next couple of hours making calls, researching what we were embarking on, drinking tea and packing up the car. Satisfied that we had everything we needed, we shouted our goodbyes to the others still typing and reading in the Incident Room and set out.
Laura drove first. ‘Where are we staying?’ she asked.
‘Somewhere right in the middle of the bars. Got a recommendation for a fantastic curry house, too.’ I flicked through the paperwork supplied by Ray. ‘Laura, how do you think this guy’s blood turned up in Savage’s van?’
‘Dunno,’ she said. ‘We know that Savage’s van hasn’t been to Birmingham from the Automatic Number Plate Readers on the motorway. Could the van have been on false plates?’
‘Yeah, possibly, but it seems that the vehicle hasn’t even been out of county for weeks. Last time was that sighting near Gatwick two months ago. I remember that from the work around Savage when he got nicked. Makepeace has been missing for less than six weeks. Can’t be that. Gatwick, though?’ I mused. ‘Tony Birdsall said he flew in to Gatwick a few days before we saw him last week.’
Laura took her eyes off the road for a second to look at me.
‘Think they’re connected to Birdsall, Nin?’ she asked.
‘Too much of a coincidence not to be?’ I said. ‘Anyway, Lol, thanks for coming with me. I think I owe you an apology too?’
‘What for?’ she asked, frowning.
‘I do know that I’m being sent to Birmingham to keep me away from the Lloyds. Keep me away from the Lloyds, you keep me away from the heart of the enquiry. I appreciate not being kicked off it. If this was a single murder enquiry, I’d have been sent back to Beckensale by now. Boss is only tolerating my presence because he’s really short-staffed.’
‘Do you reckon?’ said Laura. ‘I think he genuinely likes you, and you’ve worked hard on this job, in spite of the personal stuff.’
‘Yeah, but he still doesn’t need the grief I bring. Anyway, let’s formulate some sort of a plan.’
I spent the rest of the journey making calls to the officers we were supposed to meet with. We made good time, only taking about four hours to get to our destination. The hotel was a pretty miserable affair. The taxpayer was once again footing the bill, so enjoying our stay was out of the question. My single room contained a tiny bed with a frayed tartan cover, badly hung tartan curtains that didn’t meet in the middle and a broken tartan lampshade. Could have been worse: at least I wasn’t Scottish; I’d have really been insulted. I did have a kettle and tea tray. Oh, and shortbread.
We drove to the nick. The security was very tight; it took ages to get parked and into the building. We had a quick meeting with an overworked DS. He was very pleasant and offered any help he could. He introduced us to the intelligence officer, Robin Cox, who couldn’t do enough for us, researching anything we requested. Armed with everything we needed, including contact mobile telephone numbers for his staff, we set off for the home address of Benjamin Makepeace.
His ageing mother was his only living relative. Fortunately for Laura and me, local officers had already told her that her son’s blood had turned up a week ago in a van hundreds of miles away. At least the poor woman had had some time to adjust to this latest news. Not know
ing what had happened to your nearest and dearest must rip a soul apart. I knew only too well that grief played tricks: a face in the distance fleetingly morphing into the one whose company you craved, until disappointment and reality would break through. What must uncertainty do to the mind?
Mrs Makepeace opened the door. She was broken.
‘Mrs Makepeace,’ I said. ‘I’m Detective Nina Foster. This is Detective Laura Ward. Can we come in and speak to you?’
She nodded, moving back into the gloom. She probably would have agreed to anything.
The house smelt musty. Dust jumped in the sunlight bursting through the open door. We followed her into the dining room, where she sat down at the glass-topped table. Its entire surface was covered in Benjamin memorabilia: photographs, school certificates, swimming badges, a lock of hair in a frame. My eyes were drawn to a small plastic pot with a screw-on lid.
She caught me looking and palmed the pot, holding it to her chest. Closing her fists around it, she said, ‘Benjamin had his appendix out when he was eight. These were the stitches.’ Now I knew what this was doing to her mind. Making it crazier than it had already been. Grief magnifies the person you already are, I thought. We all revert to type.
Laura began. ‘Can we talk to you about Benjamin? We know that you’ve been told we’ve an indication he may have been in the south of the country. We haven’t found him, but anything you tell us may help.’ Laura continued speaking but to be truthful I wasn’t listening. I was staring at a photograph on the wall. A black and white photograph of a much younger Mrs Makepeace with her son. They were laughing, hair blowing in the breeze. They were standing in front of a two-storey Victorian building. Complete with turrets and a water tower.
‘Where is this place?’ I said, already knowing the answer.
The old lady turned her head to where I pointed.
‘Oh, that’s the children’s home at Leithgate. Used to be a mental asylum but they shut it down. Used it as a children’s home instead.’ She got up and staggered to the wall as if every step was agony. She stroked the boy’s hair in the photo, and a tear rolled from her eye. ‘We had a few problems with Benjamin, and he went there for a couple of weeks to give us a break.’
‘When was this photograph taken?’ I asked.
‘When Benjamin was seven years old – 1985,’ she said, running her finger along the outline of her son’s image. ‘Want to see his room?’
Without waiting for an answer, Mrs Makepeace moved around the table, leaning on the glass top for support on her way to the door. Laura and I exchanged looks. The progress along the corridor was slow: our guide paused every couple of steps, withered fingers grasping door handles, the banisters, anything for support. The mental torture she must have been going through was matched by physical pain, if her ascension of the stairs was anything to base a judgement on. Her son was missing and it was crushing her. From the notes we had, Mrs Makepeace was in her late sixties, but she moved like a woman much older.
We reached the top of the stairs and entered the bedroom of a child. The single bookshelf contained football annuals, an atlas, board games, puzzles; the bed was draped in a Birmingham City duvet cover. Whatever I’d been expecting, it wasn’t this. I searched for something to say that wasn’t too critical of why a man in his thirties would be living like this.
I began with a non-judgemental question, ‘Benjamin is a Birmingham City fan?’ Pretty obvious thing to ask, but I was pulling words out of a mental tombola.
Mrs Makepeace looked at the bed. Laura looked at the bed. I joined in. No one spoke. I thought for a moment I was the insane one. I stole a look at Mrs Makepeace, who was biting her lower lip.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’s a Birmingham City fan. I’ll put the kettle on. Please have a few minutes in here. I haven’t moved anything since the last time he was here.’
Laura moved to one side to let our host out of the room. My friend raised her eyebrows at me once we were alone, listening to Mrs Makepeace hobbling down the stairs. I opened the wardrobe, largely because I just had to check there wasn’t a school uniform or a Boy Scout outfit. I was relieved to see that it contained normal men’s clothes. A cursory glance at the labels showed me that he took a sixteen-inch shirt collar, size Large for Tshirts and jumpers, inside leg was thirty-two, thirty-four-inch waist, and size nine shoes. He shopped largely in M&S, had one good suit, and middle-of-the-road taste. I made a note of what I’d found out. It was probably not going to be relevant but you never knew.
Laura joined me in leafing through the garments. ‘This has all been logged with the initial local patrol who came out and took the Missing Person report,’ she said. Lowering her voice, she added, ‘This is a very strange set-up for a grown man. There’s nothing to suggest he had any kind of social life or hobbies outside of football.’
Other than the wardrobe, bed and bookshelf, the room contained an empty bedside cabinet. There were no magazines, newspapers, handwritten notes or sign of a mobile phone. That at least couldn’t be correct; we’d been told that his mobile phone records had been checked for recent contact. We made our way downstairs to speak to Benjamin’s mother. There were a few things we wanted answers to.
We found her in the kitchen filling up the salt cellar. ‘Mrs Makepeace,’ I began. She continued to pour salt into the bottom of the overflowing pot. She watched the white grains spill on to the table for three or four seconds before abandoning her chore. Her dull eyes focused on mine. ‘Are there any of Benjamin’s belongings anywhere else?’ I asked. ‘A mobile phone? Personal items?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He didn’t have a mobile phone. We didn’t like them. All of his stuff is in his room, apart from his certificates and photographs. You’ve seen them in the dining room.’
‘Is there any other family?’ asked Laura.
The lifeless eyes roamed in search of the speaker. ‘My husband died,’ she said. Adding, ‘He was killed on his way home one night. Drunk driver.’
‘That’s terrible, Mrs Makepeace. Is there anyone else that visits you or pops in from time to time?’ asked Laura.
‘No,’ she said to the floor. ‘My sister died from cancer a couple of years ago. She was the only other relative I had. Just me and Benjamin. Now just me.’
‘What about friends?’ I asked.
This was met with a shake of her head encasing a brain riddled with sorrow. ‘Lost the few I had over the years; they either died or we drifted apart. Always knew I had Benjamin so I didn’t need them.’
‘Benjamin’s friends?’ I asked. ‘We have the details of the library where he worked, but the Missing Person report stated he didn’t have any friends or a girlfriend.’
Her head snapped up, eyes opened wide as she said, ‘He didn’t need a girlfriend. Women are trouble. He was clever enough to know that.’
I was getting a bit of a different picture of this whole scenario. The house was smothering me and I’d only been there for an hour. How Benjamin must have felt being brought up by a Brummie council house Miss Havisham was anyone’s guess. More than likely he’d killed himself, or my favourite theory was that he’d had enough and legged it. Didn’t explain the bloodied knife hundreds of miles away, however. We said our goodbyes, left our numbers and asked that she call us or West Midlands police if she heard anything.
‘Right, well, she was hard work,’ I said to Laura as we got into the car. ‘I’m gonna call the Intel bloke we spoke to at the nick, find out if he has any Social Services contacts we can meet with about the children’s home.’ I glanced at my watch. Time was getting on. If they agreed to see us, it would probably be in the morning.
‘Children’s home?’ asked Laura, shifting in the passenger seat to face me. ‘That was over twenty-five years ago. What’s your thinking?’
‘Thing is, Lol, last week at the nick, I spoke to Alf in his office.’
‘Yeah, you told me. Tony Birdsall was there too.’ Her delicate features were weighed down with a heavy crease mark across her forehead.<
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‘What I didn’t tell you,’ I said as I searched my paperwork for our Intelligence link’s phone number, ‘was that in the 1980s Alf’s son was taken into a children’s home in Birmingham.’
‘I’m still not following. You think they’re connected?’
‘It’s the same home. The photograph she had on the wall back there – ’ I jerked my thumb in the direction of the Makepeace house ‘ – it looked as though Benjamin and his mum were standing in exactly the same spot in front of the building that Alf and his son had done. It was almost the same pose, same location, and most definitely the same building behind them.’ I stopped talking and read the look of concern Laura was giving me. I realised that I was slightly breathless, having not paused for air. I concentrated on getting my breathing back to normal.
Why all this was taking such a toll on me, I could only guess. I was pretty sure I knew the reason, but I had taken Eric Nottingham at his word about making sure my sleep wasn’t disturbed. It had been an unusual few days to say the least. I should probably cut myself some slack.
‘OK,’ Laura said after a few seconds’ thought, ‘you call the Intel man and I’ll give the library a call.’ Taking her notes out of the passenger door’s side pocket, she climbed out of the car, adding, ‘You use the car’s hands-free kit. It’s all set up. I’ll get out of the way.’
My mind wrestled paranoid thoughts: Laura could have waited until I’d made my call, then made hers. Why the disappearing act? No, that was nonsense. I was going to have to stop thinking that way about my friend. Still, I tried to hear who she was talking to and what she was saying on her mobile as she walked up and down the pavement beside the car. Stalling as long as I could, I called the Intel number we’d been given in case we needed any further information or help, put in my request for Social Services to call me, and waved Laura back into the car. She got in, making arrangements for us to attend the city’s central library to speak to Benjamin’s supervisor. Who else would she have been speaking to?