‘Billy as in Hideous Billy?’
Her mother sighed, And you were doing so well. ‘I wish you wouldn’t call him that.’
‘Well, he is.’
Billy had been a friend of Luke’s since childhood; his parents had lived four houses further along on Dunnington Road until a few years ago when they’d retired to a spot somewhere outside Weston-Super-Mare. Like Luke, Billy had never left Birmingham. Robin had no idea what he did for work – who’d employ him? – and she knew he wasn’t married. Corinna used to say there wasn’t a woman desperate enough and while there probably was, somewhere, she hadn’t materialized in the years they’d known him. He’d actually had a potent crush on Corinna herself for a while and when she’d finally had to say no in terms he understood, he’d spread a rumour that he’d seen her getting off with someone other than Josh, her boyfriend at the time, later her husband.
‘Well, he’s being kind today,’ her mother said firmly. ‘He’s coming over and I’m hoping he’ll cheer Luke up a bit.’
‘I hope so, too.’ It would be a good reminder that there were others less fortunate at least. ‘Has he spoken to Natalie?’
‘Yes.’ Her mother’s voice dropped. ‘They talked last night, she came over.’
‘How did it go?’
‘Not as well as he’d have liked.’ Her voice was barely above a whisper now. ‘He wanted to go home but she’s asked him to stay here for a bit while she “does some thinking”.’
‘Really?’ Somehow, despite what Nat had said on the phone, she’d assumed they’d patch things up quickly.
‘Things have been bad for a while, love.’
‘As I’m beginning to realize.’ She couldn’t quite keep the edge out of her voice.
There was a moment’s awkward silence before her mother asked, ‘How’s my lovely Lennie?’
‘Good, as much as I’ve seen her this week.’ She’d texted earlier to ask if she could go round to Asha’s again after school. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I was just checking in.’
She hung up feeling strangely melancholy. Why? She tried to parse the feeling. Of course she didn’t want Luke and Natalie’s marriage to break down. He loved Nat, he always had, and he was better when he was with her, she was definitely a positive influence. For all that Robin had never considered her a potential friend, she respected Nat. She worked hard, she had goals and achieved them – she and Luke owned their house, which was more than she could say despite earning a lot more. Nat never forgot a birthday; she was kind to their parents. She had backbone, basically, and she lent Luke some of it.
But the nub of the melancholy, Robin admitted, was personal, that feeling of exclusion again. Natalie was in the Lyons circle of trust; she wasn’t.
She went back to her notebook, telling herself to stop being selfish and focus. She started writing quickly, free-associating – Lara, hair stuck in blood on shirt. Please let it be the killer’s. She paused. If it was, they had another difference in the cases. Obviously there was nothing remarkable about a killer leaving a hair behind – where would forensics be without hairs? – but it was worth noting that they hadn’t found one on the Gisborne Girl, or any other evidence with DNA potential – a broken nail, saliva, semen – and she’d been stabbed, too, at exactly the same close quarters. He must have been incredibly careful. Added to the debit-card receipt, did it point to less care second time around?
Robin turned to the notes she’d made in her office. The carpet, too. Lara’s death was so much more out in the open. There’d been some degree of concealment – she hadn’t been killed on the pavement, like poor Kieran Clarke – but being killed and left in an alley between two working businesses on a street facing residential blocks was different from being covered with a carpet deep in a derelict factory traversed only by the dispossessed.
Hm. It was far too tenuous a thread to support any conclusion but it was worth bearing in mind – definitely that.
The other question, then, was how the Gisborne Girl’s killer had achieved this meticulousness. Gloves? Had he covered his hair? Maybe he’d worn full-body PPE – there’d been no one to see him, as far as they knew, no one to question why he was dressed for an Ebola ward. Ah – her pen went running across the paper – the lack of CCTV on Warwick Street as well. Planned – meticulously planned. She wrote the words and underlined them three times.
Was the same true of Lara’s death? They’d had CCTV footage of her straight away, plenty of it, and it was only a question of time before they saw her attacker, too – the area was bristling with cameras. If the crime was less meticulous, had the planning been, too? Was it just how the cookie crumbled – the killer happened to lose a hair, he missed the super-soft paper – or had there been less attention to detail? And if so, why?
Robin tapped the biro against the table’s edge. This was why she did the mental download and why it helped to get out of the office – a change of scene. And the luck of Malia happening to call when she did with the hair detail. Feeling eyes on her again, she looked up to see the woman at the next table staring pointedly at her tapping pen. ‘Sorry.’
The Gisborne Girl’s killer must have brought her to the factory. It hadn’t happened by chance. Which raised two questions. One they’d asked before: how had he got her in there? The other had to do with Lara. Was it simply bad luck that she’d become his victim? It wasn’t her regular routine to walk home at midnight and she hadn’t posted her whereabouts on social media. Either she’d been chosen at random or her killer had known where she was going to be.
Her phone buzzed, dragging her out of the thought-bubble. Bugger, just when she was getting somewhere. These moments of crystalline thinking were like dragonflies, beautiful but fleeting, near-impossible to summon; you had to grab them when you could. She was tempted to leave it – even DCIs were allowed to go to the loo from time to time – but when she looked at the screen, she saw Maggie. She havered but Maggie had saved Lennie’s life. And the damage to her concentration was already done.
‘Maggie?’
‘Hello, how are you?’ Her chatty tone was disorientating after the intensity of the thinking, like standing up from an all-absorbing work session to find oneself thrust into the middle of a cocktail party. ‘Am I interrupting something?’
‘No, you’re fine. What’s going on?’
‘Well, I thought I’d give you a ring because I’ve worked out who she reminded me of – your girl at the factory.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh, don’t get too excited, I doubt it’s going to help, but I thought I’d let you know anyway. It’s an odd one – goes back to when I was married to Trevor.’
Robin felt her enthusiasm evaporate. That had to be twenty years ago.
‘It was the last Christmas we were together – that was the straw that broke the camel’s back, if I’m honest. We were up in Whitley Bay staying with Trev’s mother – God, what a nightmare. The woman meant well, she did, but talk about boring. Don’t get me wrong, bar the spectacular outbursts of temper, Trevor was pretty boring himself by that point but compared to his mother, he was Keith Richards. The routine, Robin – what’s that poem about measuring out your life in teaspoons or something? Up at half past seven. Cup of tea. Tea at breakfast. Tea at eleven with a supermarket digestive – heaven forbid she’d spring the extra few pence for McVities, Christmas or not. Everything so carefully measured out, so … tight. I thought I was going to suffocate. Either that or go Incredible Hulk and tear her crocheted doilies to pieces with my bare hands. But we’d had Christmas with my lot for the previous three or four years so I just had to grit my teeth.
‘Anyway, you know what those days between Christmas and New Year are like, deathly dull at the best of times, only tell what day it is by what’s on the telly. I got hooked on the big local news story, a missing girl. I followed it in the local paper, on the local news. She was fifteen, and she’d vanished without a trace on Boxing Day. Something about being trapped in that house, the grey mist and the g
rey water and the grey sky when we went for our daily fifteen-minute allowance of fresh air along the sea-front – I don’t know, it got under my skin. She felt sort of symbolic: unless I sorted myself out, split up with Trevor, my life was going to vanish into the mist, too.’ She paused. ‘Maybe literally.’
Robin was startled. Maggie was very open but she never talked about Trevor; thinking back, she could barely remember her speaking his name since he left the scene, which she had the impression he hadn’t done quietly. Her mother never mentioned him, either, but from scraps of eavesdropped conversations at the time, she’d come to suspect that Trev had been violent towards Maggie, something that still amazed her. Maggie, the woman who took no prisoners, self-employed and entirely self-governing, her inspiration in many ways, she’d realized last year, the victim of some scumbag not worth the mud off her winkle pickers.
‘This girl of yours in the factory,’ Maggie was saying, ‘she looks like her.’
But it couldn’t be her: if she was fifteen back then, she’d be mid-thirties now, and the Gisborne Girl was nowhere near that old. ‘Do you remember her name?’
‘Well, I didn’t so I did a bit of poking round. The Net was up and running twenty years ago, luckily, so I found a few scrips and scraps, including a picture. I’ll ping it over to you now. Miriam Chapman, she was called.’
‘Was she ever found?’
‘Unclear. I couldn’t find anything one way or the other – no “local girl reunited with family” but no funeral announcement or “grim discovery”, either.’
Robin’s phone vibrated with another call. She held it away from her ear to see the screen. ‘Look, I’d better go, Maggie, I’m out and the station’s ringing, but thank you. Send me the picture and I’ll take a look.’
It had been Tark who’d rung, with two bits of news. The first was that Dhanesh Gupta’s alibi for Lara’s killing checked out: the shop whose entrance he’d been sleeping in had ponied up their CCTV sharpish and on the timestamped tape he could be seen for the entire duration of 10 p.m. until 4.33 a.m., first sitting under his blanket, knees drawn up to his chest, visibly wide-eyed with nerves even in grainy freeze-frame, later conked out on his side, head resting on a ‘pillow’ contrived by wrapping a bit of clothing round a cardboard packing tube.
Kilmartin would be thrilled.
The second piece of news was that a security camera on a tool-hire shop on Charles Henry Street had picked up a figure walking towards the junction with Vaughton Street in the same two minutes Lara had been approaching Vaughton from Gooch. Robin and Malia stood at Tark’s shoulders to watch. ‘Here he comes.’ He pointed to the left side of his monitor, ‘There.’
He was on the opposite pavement, on the side of the street bordered by the area of public space, mown grass and a handful of large trees before the housing developments behind. Tall – very tall – apparently Caucasian, wearing dark trousers, a dark sweatshirt and a cap that obscured his face, he was moving at speed, long strides eating up the pavement, carrying him in and out of the frame in four seconds.
‘He’s definitely keeping his head down, isn’t he?’ Malia said. ‘He never looks up – his eyes are on his feet the whole time.’
‘Is he too tall to be the boyfriend – David Pearce?’
‘I’d say yes, but I’ll ask tech to give us a height estimate.’
‘Yeah.’ Robin’s phone buzzed, a text from Kev: How’s things? How’s Luke today? x She locked it and slid it back into her pocket. ‘It could be the way he holds himself,’ she said, ‘but I think you’re right, he’s conscious of the cameras. He might have some other nefarious intent – lots of places to break into along there – but it’d be an unfortunate coincidence as far as he’s concerned. Does he look like he’s hurrying to you? Let’s have another look, Tark.’
They watched again, eyeballs straining for nuance. ‘Hard to say whether he’s hurrying,’ Malia said, ‘but he’s definitely moving quickly.’
‘But if he was, that would imply he’s got a goal, wouldn’t it? Something time-limited he’s heading for.’
‘Like Lara reaching the top of Angelina Street and getting home safe, you mean?’
‘Maybe. Which would mean he knows where she is, and how would he? He’s not following her – he’s coming the other way. Did he call her? She nearly took a cab, didn’t she – did he know she didn’t?’
Abruptly the balloon of conjecture slipped from her fingers and set off round the room at high speed blowing an extended raspberry before flopping limply on the carpet at her feet. ‘But maybe he’s just a naturally fast walker. Or he’s on his way to a ’bab van that shuts at twelve thirty.’
‘Not many that shut that early, to be fair,’ said Tark. ‘And he’s definitely keeping his head down.’
‘So where does he go from here? That’s the million-dollar question.’
He put a hand on the stack of tapes next to him. ‘We’ll find out, guv. There’s no way this’ll be his only appearance. It’s not like Warwick Street – we’ve got stuff coming in from all over the shop on this side.’
‘Where are we with her phone records?’
‘I was expecting them this afternoon,’ Malia said. ‘I chased again earlier.’
‘God, what about the words “urgent murder enquiry” do these people not understand? Let me know the minute they come in – we need to get straight on that.’
Dhanesh Gupta looked up in alarm when she and Varan entered the interview room. ‘Mr Singh?’ he said, eyeing the door as if they were thugs in an alleyway and his bodyguard was on a bathroom break.
‘There’s no need to worry, this isn’t an interview,’ Robin told him. She watched his face as Varan translated. ‘I wanted to tell you a couple of things. First, we’ve been able to confirm your alibi for the night of Lara Meikle’s murder.’
Gupta listened to Varan then nodded emphatically.
‘He says yes,’ Varan told Robin. ‘It wasn’t him, he had nothing to do with either of the murders but he doesn’t know how to prove it for the girl at the factory.’
‘Right, well, he’s not the only one.’ She nodded at Gupta. ‘The second thing is, we sent some officers to talk to your would-have-been father-in-law about stealing your money. He didn’t sound very happy about it but eventually he admitted to a “misunderstanding”. He’ll be returning the payment to your father’s account by bank transfer this afternoon.’
Varan translated and Gupta’s head fell forward. He covered his face with his hands.
‘We’re going to check back with him tomorrow to make sure he didn’t run into “technical problems” with the transfer or anything similar.’
Gupta’s shoulders were shaking.
‘Dhanesh?’ Varan said gently.
‘Dhanyavaad,’ Gupta said, lifting his face and touching his palms together. ‘Thank you.’
Chapter Eighteen
Robin watched her team through the internal window. The figure on Charles Edward Street had boosted morale but the afternoon energy-lull was well underway now. The CCTV lot were slumped in front of their screens like glaze-eyed walruses, Varan was on his second KitKat and even Malia, usually the very poster girl for correct ergonomic furniture use, had her elbows on the desk.
After two nights of little sleep, one way or another, and the early outing to Sparkbrook this morning, she felt so stale she might as well have slept on Stewpot and Martin’s old mattresses, drying her eyes over their fire. She opened her drawer and sifted through the detritus for the bottle of Optrex. When she’d finished blinking, she clicked to her inbox. Dozens of emails that needed answering prontissimo, plus seven from journalists. They’d been phoning all day, after the story in the Herald. She forwarded their messages straight to the press office. As the last one went, Samir’s name appeared in bold at the top: 7pm good for update? Ugh.
Maggie’s email had already fallen off the bottom of the screen. Robin scrolled down until she found it. As discussed, she’d written. Doubt it’s relevant but see wh
at I mean about similar?
The link was to an archived story on the Newcastle Chronicle’s website.
WHITLEY BAY: PARENTS’ DESPERATE APPEAL
FOR MISSING MIRIAM, 15
Robin’s eyes went to the picture. Like Kieran Clarke’s, it was an official school photograph, the same hazy pastel background and unnatural smile, the same awkward now-turn-to-look-at-me-love posture, legs facing one way, torso the other. She was wearing school uniform, too: bottle-green V-neck jumper and green-and-silver striped tie with a grey skirt smoothed to bony knees in grey woollen tights.
If you’d told her it was a picture of the Gisborne Girl, the only things Robin would have questioned at first glance were her age and haircut. The Gisborne Girl was definitely older than fifteen, albeit not by many years, and where her hair had no particular style, Miriam Chapman’s had been cut into a long fringe which, though thick, had a slightly unfortunate cowlick that revealed an area of pallid forehead. Robin reached across her desk for a photograph from the scene and held it alongside: the hair wasn’t the same shade – the Gisborne Girl’s was two or three shades lighter; the word ‘burnished’ came into her mind for some reason – but it wasn’t far off. Their girl had freckles, Miriam didn’t, but the faces were strikingly alike otherwise: the same gentle oval shape with a similar lower lip and – she double-clicked on the photo but it wouldn’t enlarge – what looked like the same ridged top front teeth. And the nose. Miriam’s wasn’t quite as Roman nor as large but it was of the same ilk.
She scanned the story. Maggie had obviously read it before she rang so there weren’t many new details. As she’d said, Miriam had spent Christmas at home with her parents then gone for a walk on Boxing Day. There’d been one sighting of her a minute or two after she’d left the house, a neighbour who’d said hello at the end of the street, and then – poof! She’d vanished in a puff of smoke.
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