Risk of Harm

by Lucie Whitehouse

  ‘We’re going to catch the man – or men – who killed Lara Meikle and the Gisborne Girl,’ she said. ‘We’re going to clear Dhanesh Gupta’s name beyond any shadow of a doubt. That’s what we can do for him now. We are going to channel all the anger – the impotent rage – we feel about what has happened to him into proving his innocence.

  ‘Maybe some of you have strong views about arranged marriages or marrying for a passport – that it’s wrong, shouldn’t be done. I’m going to ask you to remember that life is complicated. Nuanced. Gupta’s aim wasn’t to sponge off the state or steal jobs. He wanted to make his father proud by making a success of his life, and he thought he could do that here. That was his view of the UK. That was his compliment to us. There’s a father in Bangalore who’ll have his heart broken today. Let’s show him that people like the man who killed his son are not who this country is. We’re going to be responsible for proving to Gupta’s family that although some elements here are full of hate, this is still a place where justice is served. That’s in our power. That’s what we can and will do.’

  Amit Kapoor, Webster told her, was distraught. Robin remembered his excitement at the idea of helping catch a serial killer and wanted to weep for him. ‘Yeah, he thinks it’s his fault,’ Webster told her. ‘He keeps saying that if he hadn’t tipped us off, it would never have happened. He died right in front of him – on him. He’d pulled him up on to his knees, to get him off the pavement. He was drenched in blood when Response got there. His wife went out to see what was going on and she’s beside herself, too. Horrific.’

  ‘Will you let me know when you interview Ben Tyrell?’ she asked. ‘I want to see him.’

  ‘But as you said before, it might not have had anything to do with him. Plenty of other people spitting the same bile, online and otherwise.’

  ‘But the combination of bile and the arrest video – he might as well have put out instructions.’

  It was the video, they thought, that must have told Gupta’s killer where to find him. In the background behind the van, behind the close-ups of their faces, hers and Varan’s and Gupta’s, the names of the shops across the road from Kapoor’s were clearly visible: a travel agent, a Balti house. Tapping the names into Google was all it would have taken.

  ‘Hard to prove, though,’ said Webster. ‘If he’d posted the video at the same time, it’d be easier. But because there was an hour between them, and the specifics came first …’

  ‘Well, we know he’s crafty,’ she said. ‘Cyber have been saying that from the start.’

  Varan hadn’t heard the news before he arrived. Robin had seen him come in, early as usual, earbuds in as usual – she had no idea what kind of music he was into but she’d once had the mental image of him pumping himself up in front of the bathroom mirror to ‘The Eye of the Tiger’ and now she was stuck with it. He’d sat down at his desk, turned on his computer and was peering at a Post-It he’d left for himself when Malia put her hand on his shoulder. He jumped, took out the earbud and gave her a smile which melted off his face in seconds, like snow brought inside.

  He’d sat quietly for a couple of minutes, hands in his lap, head bowed, and Robin was on the point of going to make sure he was all right when he stood up suddenly and strode across the room to her office. She thought he was going to do something totally out of character and yell at her, lay the blame at her feet – and personally, at least, she would have been fine with that – but instead he closed her door behind him and without preamble said, ‘I want to tell him.’

  ‘Tell who what?’

  ‘Gupta’s father.’

  It rolled over her, something very close to love, she thought afterwards, a profound appreciation for him mixed with a pride that was undeniably maternal. (God, what was happening to her?) She remembered the first time she’d met him, less than eighteen months ago even now, sitting on her parents’ daft aqua-seashell sofa writing down her every word with an earnestness more appropriate to transcribing the tablets from the Ark of the Covenant than her scattered drivel that day and she was proud. He might look like a teenager but he was as grown up as they came.

  She shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’ He pulled himself up, ready to argue.

  ‘Because you’re here, in Birmingham, and he’s in Bangalore. We can’t tell him over the phone, Varan, it needs to be done in person. There’s a consulate – we’re in touch with them now.’

  He sagged, recognizing she was right.

  ‘Sit down a minute,’ she said.

  He did as he was told, taking the chair whose frayed electric-blue fabric exposed the crumbling yellow sponge underneath. ‘I wanted to tell him that we liked him,’ he said. ‘That he wasn’t completely on his own here – that he’d made friends in the van, and we liked him. We saw him, what he was like. We knew he was a decent bloke.’

  Chapter Twenty-five

  They were in gear, foot to the floor, engine roaring, with the handbrake stuck on. The collective will was like a generator in the room, she could almost hear it humming, but there was nothing to plug it into, or nothing new.

  The frustration was making it hard to sit down. She was prowling the incident room like a panther (Cougar, you mean, said the voice in her head unhelpfully) and it was freaking people out. They liked her contained in the glass tank of her office, locatable through the interior window, not looming up behind them every five minutes to see what was going on. Allow people some oxygen, Robin, she told herself. Let them breath. God, it was tough, though.

  The problem was, she was deoxygenated herself. They needed another lead. After the CCTV of Lara’s attacker yesterday, she’d thought they were full steam ahead but there’d been nothing new since the taxi driver.

  The threat of an obstruction charge had galvanized the phone company but when they’d finally arrived, Lara’s records hadn’t helped them either, or at least not yet. In an ideal world, there would have been a call in the narrow window between her parting ways with Cat Rainsford and appearing on film with her attacker at 12.21, she’d have told her attacker – or he’d have been able to work out – that she was walking home. But the last person she’d spoken to had been her partner, David Pearce, a few minutes before eleven, and he wasn’t tall enough to be the man in the tape and he’d been two hundred miles away at the time.

  Malia had dispatched people to do another round of house-to-house, re-interview the neighbours. ‘Someone must have seen something,’ she’d told them. ‘Did he disappear into a building somewhere? Get into a car? If he got on a night bus, someone must have noticed that he was covered in blood.’

  Unless he’d changed his clothes, Robin thought. In the darkness of the alley where he’d killed her, had he also changed into clean clothes, scrubbed his hands and face with baby wipes that he then tucked carefully away in his backpack? Given the attention to detail elsewhere, it didn’t seem impossible.

  She went back to her desk now, reminding herself that this was what detective work was, the patient building of a picture, brushstroke by brushstroke. People were caught by forensics and the painstaking putting-together of CCTV and ANPR, phone records, bank and witness statements, not opium-fuelled flights of blinding genius.

  Some genius was what they needed, though. Or some luck.

  Maybe the tape from the place on Warwick Street with the honeymooning boss would come up trumps. It had finally come in, and Tark was on it himself. ‘It’s decent,’ he’d told her, ‘in terms of what we can see. Obviously, the focus is on their place, not Gisborne’s, but the angle gives us a length of the pavement on that side of the road. I’ll keep you posted.’

  ‘Soon as you like,’ she’d said.

  Clicking in to her inbox, she highlighted another three emails from reporters and deleted them. She opened a red-flagged message from the guy at the CPS, hit ‘reply’ and typed ‘Dear Stephen’. Then she stood up and went back out to the main room.

  They’d run out of space on the free-standing board so yesterday
she’d asked one of the admins for another to put alongside, and even the new one was a third full already. By contrast, the wall board was still almost empty. Avoiding the picture of Gupta, Robin looked at the Gisborne Girl’s deathly-pale face.

  Maybe they would be lucky, and in finding Lara’s killer, which surely they’d do first, they’d also find hers. But the more time passed, the less and less confident she felt about that.

  The Gisborne’s Girl’s killer had given them nothing.

  Malia stood up, straightened her jacket and came to join her.

  ‘Not a single person’s come forward to say they know who she is,’ Robin said. ‘Even anonymously. She has to be from overseas, doesn’t she? Her picture’s been on TV, in the national press. Even if she had no family at all, grew up in care, there’d be people who know who she is.’

  ‘Unless they do know who she is and they don’t want to get involved.’

  True. Though the Gisborne Girl had no police record herself, it didn’t mean she wasn’t part of a criminal world. They’d thought of it early on, of course, but it had been low on her mental list, she admitted, because she didn’t look like a gangster’s girlfriend, her whole aesthetic was wrong. But, as they’d initially thought, perhaps that was the point. Maybe she’d been making a break for it, incognito, and he or a goon had tracked her down.

  They couldn’t let themselves assume – at this stage, with this lack of progress, they needed to go back and interrogate all their working premises, conscious and otherwise, and make sure they weren’t leading themselves down blind alleys. She took a marker from the ledge under the board and wrote Criminal connections? Player or partner?

  ‘Let’s get in touch with Organized and ask them to put a quiet word out, see if there’s anything on the vine,’ she said. ‘How’s the DVI coming on?’

  The Disaster Victim Identification form, a.k.a. the pink form, was Interpol’s form for identifying victims in mass disasters like the tsunami but it had become their preferred format for single cases like this, too. Pages long, it was exhaustive – and exhausting, to fill out – but it was recognized internationally and it had the advantage of getting all the details on a single document.

  ‘We’re just waiting for Olly to put in all the technical stuff.’

  ‘Right. Will you chase him up? Let’s get that off ASAP.’

  She went back to her office. Dear Stephen, thanks for the update, she typed then stopped. Had the Gisborne Girl grown up in care? Or overseas? Or had she been brought up off the grid, leaving no trace in public records? Was that still possible in the UK in this hyper-connected age? And say it was – no record of the birth, no doctors, no dentists, no schools – why would someone want that? It would take an enormous amount of effort.

  To avoid attention from the state, was one possible answer. Some people wanted no part of it. Travellers, actual Romany gypsies, for example – all they wanted was to live free, outside the lumbering machinery of The Man. But it might be about avoiding police attention specifically. If the mother had been underage, for example, her father older and afraid of prosecution for abusing a minor.

  Miriam Chapman had been fifteen when she disappeared – she’d only just turned fifteen, had George Chapman said in the newspaper piece? She found Maggie’s email, clicked on the link and scanned down. Yes: ‘Miriam’s just turned fifteen, she’s young for her age and very shy.’

  Robin looked at Miriam’s photograph then opened a Google window and typed Judith Chapman. Twenty-two million hits – there was an American soap actress with the name. She added ‘UK’, reducing the number to a mere four million, the top hits being a legal secretary, an HR manager in Ilford, a fundraiser for Cancer Research, a local councillor in Leeds. Leeds – not so far from Newcastle, and you could conceivably be a local councillor in your early to mid-thirties in this politically charged age. She clicked on the link but the picture showed a blonde, blue-eyed woman in her fifties.

  If only the Chapmans had gone a bit wilder with their biblical names; a Hepzibah or Bathsheba would make this much easier. And poor Judith, anyway; it was a fusty old name for someone of their generation. She added Miriam, sister, disappear, missing, Whitley Bay and Newcastle to the search terms and tried again. One of the first hits this time was another article from the Chronicle about an event to raise awareness about the long-term missing. Miriam was mentioned but not Judith. There were plenty of links to Victorian Judiths, 1830–1877, 1841–1892, and a loving tribute to a ‘Nanna’, 86, who’d died the previous year. Robin glanced at the top of the screen – 8,460 results in total. She went back to her email, finished the message to the CPS, then returned.

  After three quarters of an hour, she’d drawn a blank and she knew she was wasting time. Her inbox was filling at a frightening rate – every time she looked, another twenty or thirty new messages had arrived. The phone kept ringing, and enough people had stuck their heads round the door with trivia that in the end she’d got up and closed it, despite the competing desire to be completely available to her team today.

  Judith Chapman, it would appear, had vanished almost as effectively as her sister.

  Fifteen minutes later, Webster rang to say Ben Tyrell was downstairs. She told him she was on her way and then, almost as an afterthought – perhaps to try and justify the wasted time – she gave it a final shot: Chapman, Whitley Bay, Jude.

  Her eye landed immediately on the third hit down. Mr and Mrs John and Jude Everleigh (née Chapman). It was a wedding report from an online parish magazine in a small town Robin had never heard of, a write-up no doubt done from details sent in by the bride and groom. Robin looked at the accompanying photograph, a modest shot taken on the steps outside what looked like a register office. Shallow as she was, her first thought was that John Everleigh was foxy, brown-eyed and tawny-haired – nice one, Jude – and her second was that she approved of her dress, too, a tailored Forties-looking number in a sort of petrol blue-purple with a pencil skirt that reached just below the knee. Blood-red shoes, matching lipstick – she looked cool. She also looked like the Gisborne Girl.

  Samir was in the observation room already, watching with such focus that there was a satellite delay in him realizing she’d come in. ‘Hey,’ he said quietly, shifting over to make room.

  Webster was doing the interview himself, Leena Bradley, one of his favourite DCs at the table with him, Tim Horrocks, black, six-four, weekend rock-climbing enthusiast, positioned against the wall behind him and staring at Ben Tyrell as if he’d like to wring his neck with his bare hands. It was kind of a shame he couldn’t do it, she thought. She was all about due process, a hundred per cent, no exceptions, but there were certain people who really tested your convictions.

  ‘No solicitor?’ she said, amazed.

  ‘He said he didn’t need one. Webster tried to tell him he really did but he wasn’t having it. Says he’s done nothing wrong.’

  Both Webster and Bradley were pulled right up to the table but Tyrell was lounging, his chair pushed back, one ankle resting across the opposite knee, brown lace-up shoe bobbing in a way that felt insolent, if you could be insolent in your forties. Cocky was really the word. White shirt, top button undone to reveal the collar of a white T-shirt underneath, khaki trousers stretched by his pose to be slightly too tight across the crotch, perhaps for Leena’s benefit. He had his sleeves rolled in a way that reminded Robin of the urban explorer, Jonathan Quinton, but he was much more confident than Quinton, who by comparison she remembered as jumpy and insubstantial. Ben Tyrell was planted; he wouldn’t be budged.

  ‘What do you do, Mr Tyrell?’ Webster asked.

  ‘I manage a fleet of company vehicles.’ The voice Robin recognized from his webcasts, surprisingly deep.

  ‘For who – whose fleet?’

  He named a medium-sized budget hotel chain.

  ‘Do they know about your double life as a far-right Internet rabble-rouser? I can’t imagine it really fits their corporate image.’ Their recent TV ads featured a mixed-
race family bouncing on a bed, improbably ecstatic for people who’d found themselves in a hotel at the side of the motorway.

  Tyrell shrugged. ‘It’s still a free country, isn’t it? Just about? That’s the point of the page – free speech. Everyone’s so frightened of the lefty PC brigade that they can’t express an opinion any more. My point is, free speech is for everyone, not only the people who’re going to parrot whatever the “liberal elite” wants them to.’ The words dripped with scorn.

  ‘There’s a difference between expressing an opinion and spewing racist bile,’ said Webster.

  ‘Yeah?’ Tyrell said. ‘But it’s not bile, is it, it’s fact. British people are meant to be white, these islands have always been white, and trouble starts when people who’ve been here since day dot have to shift over and kowtow to frickin’ immigrants.’

  ‘Well, happily not everyone sees it like that.’

  ‘Yeah, there’s a lot of eager Koolaid drinkers around. Must taste nice, being sure you’ll get a pat on the back every time you say the socially acceptable thing. There’s a good dog.’

  Robin saw Webster take a breath then stop himself. She imagined his inner monologue: don’t rise, don’t let him wind you up.

  ‘Some of us like to think for ourselves,’ Tyrell said, ‘and we’re man enough to handle a bit of opprobrium from the slathering left up in London.’

  Robin would have loved to rap on the glass and ask if he really believed London’s slathering left would give him the time of day. The arrogance: I alone am man enough to be a free thinker, to break free from centuries of earnest political and philosophical enquiry into how best humankind can live. She thought of Lennie – Wankers – and grinned.

  But at the same time, she had to admit she could see it. She could see how, if you were feeling lost and directionless and unimportant, unemployed, poor, someone like Tyrell – or even Tyrell himself – might be appealing. The ego was part of it, the self-confidence. The certainty. If you were feeling a bit spineless, he had extra for you.