The Great North Road. The words had always held a strange romance, the promise of adventure, albeit quite chilly adventure. The signs advertised coming attractions, Nottingham, Sheffield, Leeds, places she had no personal connection to but felt as if she did. It had to be books: she’d gone through a phase at fifteen and sixteen where she’d hoovered up the Angry Young Men – John Braine, John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe; their sensibilities had suited her teenage angst nicely.
She stopped at the services north of Sheffield to fill up the car, stretch her legs and drink some of the coffee. It was frank daylight now, past six o’clock, but there was still the lovely fresh-washed edge on the light and air, a sense that the day hadn’t yet been dirtied by human activity. She shook the last drops from her cup and got back in the car.
It was a good thing they’d gone early to the hospital last night, she thought, because it had taken a long time to calm down after the confrontation with Luke. She’d walked round the car park for ten minutes in an effort to normalize, but on the way back up to the ward, she’d caught sight of herself in a mirrored-glass door and her face had been so crimson, it looked like she’d fallen asleep on a sunbed; she’d hoped none of the nurses wanted to take her blood pressure. Len and her parents had looked at her askance but no one had said anything, Keep the lid on that particular can of worms, please. She wasn’t sure but she thought she’d seen entreaty in her mother’s eyes and she’d looked quickly away.
It hadn’t only been Luke. The bad news had started rolling in before she left the station and it had kept coming all evening, through the trip back to Mary Street to pick up Len, the hospital, the beans on toast they’d had on trays when they got home, one thing after another.
That David Pearce could be solidly ruled out she’d expected, but Lara’s stepbrothers were out, too, and her boyfriend before Pearce. ‘Same thing,’ said Malia, who’d come into her office as Robin was throwing her phone into her bag. ‘Rock-solid alibis and they’re all too short. Also,’ she added, grimacing, ‘we’ve heard from Forensics about the hair found on Lara’s body.’
‘And?’
‘It doesn’t belong to any of them.’
‘Or, moreover, to anyone else in the system,’ Robin had inferred, heart sinking. ‘Damn.’ That didn’t mean it wasn’t her killer’s but even if it was, it wasn’t the fantasy, where the database led them straight to him, address and all.
‘She’d come from a bar,’ Malia said. ‘And a pub before that. The hair could be any old Tom, Dick or Harry’s.’
‘It might also still be his, in which case it’ll help us with a conviction rather than an arrest. How about Interpol? Anything there?’ They’d filed the DVI a couple of hours after they’d discussed it (increasingly, Robin had started to notice, Olly could be relied upon to deal swiftly with anything Malia asked of him).
‘Three enquiries so far, two of them from the Czech Republic, which is interesting, but none of them look right.’
‘Well, it’s early days on that front, at least.’
‘Yeah,’ Malia had replied, but she’d sounded flat.
Tark had called as she and Lennie were pulling out of the hospital car park. ‘Thought I’d better give you a quick bell, guv,’ he said. ‘That tape we got in from the honeymoon place on Warwick?’
‘Yes?’ Come on, Tark, no suspense today.
‘They’ve got two cameras and I’ve been through both, eight p.m. to eight a.m. The footage gives quite a clear view of the pavement on the Gisborne side, particularly the stuff from the second camera.’
Right …
‘But there’s no sign of her at all, coming or going. Nada.’
Shit. ‘How about couples? Did you look at them – people who might have gone in together? Or groups?’
‘Of course.’ He’d sounded insulted and rightly so.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m clutching at straws here.’
‘I know, it’s all right. I’m sorry I haven’t got anything for you. Thing is, we’ve got tape for all that night now on both blocks, Warwick and Bradford streets, and there’s no sign of her. I mean, they’re long blocks, aren’t they, but we’ve got tape at all points, no gaps, no time gaps now, and there’s still nothing, so how the hell did she get in there? Magic? Teleportation?’
Robin remembered the network of underground storage rooms. Could Rafferty and his crew have missed an access point other than the one Gupta had used, one leading not to the buildings either side but under either Bradford or Warwick? Was that feasible?
‘We need to broaden it out,’ she’d told Tark. ‘I’ll ask Rafferty to take another look at the underground level, and we need to start looking more closely at the streets beyond Warwick and Bradford. We also need to expand the time window. You were looking from eight p.m.?’
‘Yes.’
‘So let’s go further back now, and forward. Start at six p.m. and go to noon on Sunday.’
‘Right,’ he said but he’d sounded weary. ‘I’ll come in tomorrow.’
‘Thanks, Tark – I appreciate it. But get some rest first, your eyes must be wrecked.’
‘They’ve been less bloodshot, I’ll admit.’
Perhaps the final straw in the destruction of all morale last night, however, had been the response to the CCTV of Lara and her attacker. After checking that Deborah Harper and David Pearce were happy for them to do it, they’d put it out on West Midlands’ own social media. Sara Kettleborough had got it up on the Post’s site at the same time and Robin had recorded an appeal that had gone out on the teatime edition of Midlands Today.
In light of the Herald’s piece, she’d questioned if it would be better for someone else to do it – ‘Someone like you,’ she’d said to Samir hopefully. ‘Kilmartin would like that, wouldn’t he, the Most Senior Foot?’
‘Nice try,’ he’d said. ‘But I’m not letting you hide.’
‘I’m not trying to hide.’
He’d raised his eyebrows: Really? ‘You’re doing it, Robin.’
So she’d put on the suit she kept in dry-cleaner’s plastic on the back of her door and, for the second time in a week, she and Webster had back-to-back TV spots.
‘We’ve gathered a significant amount of information in this case,’ she’d told the interviewer, ‘very significant, including, as viewers will see, CCTV of the moment we believe Lara met her attacker. The man who did this will be caught – all we’re looking for now is the final piece of the puzzle.’ She’d turned to look directly into the camera. ‘Lara Meikle was a young woman on the brink of her adult life. If you recognize this man or even think you do, get in touch. Please, help us get the final piece and catch her killer.’
The results had been negligible. The comments on social media had been either expressions of horror, calls for the return of hanging, well-intentioned but pointless blithering to the effect of ‘Hope the police catch the bastard’ or less well-intentioned blithering about their failure as a force. They’d hoped for better from the television but for the most part it had been more of the same, along with the usual smattering of nutjobs and conspiracy theorists. Only two tips had looked at all promising but one of them turned out to have the best alibi going: he’d actually been in police custody in Smethwick at the time of the attack, drunk and disorderly. The other was a man previously convicted of sexual assault who’d recently been released from Winson Green.
‘What do you think?’ Samir said when he’d called at ten. She’d been stacking the plates in the dishwasher.
‘Varan and Niall went to talk to him.’
‘Not him?’
‘We’re doing the due diligence, of course, but it seems unlikely, for the same reason we didn’t flag him straight away when we looked to see who’d been released recently.’
‘Which is what?’
‘He’s gay. The three people he attacked before were all men. There was no sexual element to Lara’s murder but all his previous was sexual.’
‘Right,’ he said, and she’d heard hope fa
de at his end, too.
York, Harrogate, Scarborough: North Yorkshire now, the moors. This was Brontë country, of course, but before them, she’d loved it from The Secret Garden. Sallow, spiky little Mary Lennox had been the first fictional character with whom she’d really felt a kinship. It had taken her aback, finding someone like herself in the pages of a book – until then, the female characters she’d read about were naughty at the very worst but always charming and feminine. Mary had felt like a real girl: she’d been tough as well as spiky. She hadn’t been scared of Misselthwaite Manor, even alone at night with the wind howling across the moor and a child crying piteously in a hidden room. She’d sorted the lot of them out just as much as they’d sorted her.
Tough. If you were going by national stereotypes, Robin thought, she was much more northern by nature and yet she’d always known that when she finished school, she’d go to ‘soft’ London because that was where you found out whether or not you could swim with the big fish. London was where you proved yourself, or so she’d thought at the time.
Well, here she was nearly twenty years later, back, and she was still trying to prove herself: to her team; to Samir and Kilmartin; to Lara’s family; to the public, worried Midlanders and Daily Herald readers alike. She wondered now if Freshwater, her old commanding officer at the Met, had heard about all this. If so, he’d be loving every minute. She shuddered at the idea of his ferrety little eyes on the photo of her boobs.
After talking to Samir last night, the ashes of all their efforts so far heaped round her feet, she’d summoned a final ounce of energy and fired up her laptop.
We’ve gathered a significant amount of information in this case. The man who did this will be caught. She’d watched herself again on the Midlands Today website and been impressed by how convincing she sounded. She’d said it to scare their killer, if he was watching, or to persuade anyone who might be protecting him to give him up. Was it true, though? Probably. Even if their current lack of progress made her want to tear her hair out, to have this much information and still come up empty-handed would be extremely unlucky.
The Gisborne Girl with her huge, near-empty board, however, was a different matter. Nothing suggested they would catch her killer. Instead, she was slipping further and further out of view by the day.
Chapter Twenty-nine
It was eight thirty by the time she reached Durham. God, it was a long way – more than two hundred miles, according to the satnav. They weren’t much shy of Scotland.
She’d only been here once before, on a university open day she’d grudgingly agreed to because her parents had wanted her at least to see other options. She remembered it as being nice, though, and that seemed to be the case. Judging by the elevation and proximity to the castle, which had loomed up ahead before she’d taken the final turn on to this side street, she was in the old part of the city. The architecture said the same: a mixture of styles that ranged across centuries: modern, Victorian, Georgian, some of it much older than that, medieval-looking. All of it was well-maintained; clearly, there was money here.
According to the website, the shop didn’t open until nine thirty so she put on her jacket and went to find something to eat. The streets were pedestrianized, a lot of them cobbled, and a surprising number of independent shops and cafés held their own among the usual homogenous Boots and Starbucks. She bought an egg and bacon roll at one of them and sat to eat it on a stone plinth in a square dotted with statuary. The sky was a sheer distant blue.
Church bells struck nine o’clock. She checked her phone but there was still nothing from Lennie. Well, she was probably tired after the week they’d had, and she was a teenager. She left a message for her dad asking for a progress report from the hospital then went in search of Jude Everleigh’s shop.
She found it easily, near the acute angle of a block that divided two curving streets, one leading uphill, the other downhill towards a stone bridge high over a river. The storefront was narrow but she recognized the leaded bay window immediately from the Instagram pictures – last night she’d thought it looked like the transom of an old pirate galleon. On display were an abundant collection of cushions and make-up bags, oven gloves and tea-towels printed with quirky designs. Jude Everleigh, née Chapman, was a fabric designer.
There was a light on in the room behind the display, and as she squinted past her own reflection in the glass, a figure appeared in an arched doorway at the back, a woman in a dark body-con dress and biker boots who looked up and saw her outside. Robin raised a hand.
The woman hesitated a moment, checking her watch – old-school – then started to move towards her. A bunch of keys rattled against the door.
‘Hi,’ she said, smiling from the top step, a hint of something herbal in the air that escaped around her. ‘I don’t open till nine thirty, really,’ she indicated a sign in swirling calligraphy, ‘but if you’re pushed for time …’ Her accent was Geordie, warm-toned.
In the flesh, at close range, her face was so like Miriam’s no one would question they were sisters, and Robin felt a growing sense of rightness: yes, this was right, and she had been right to come.
Jude had coloured her hair a more lustrous chestnut brown and she’d put a single gold streak through a lock at the front that kinked quiff-like before disappearing under a patterned green band knotted on the top like a washerwoman’s headscarf. Robin remembered Miriam’s difficult cowlick. Her eyes were large and green, liquid-lined in black.
‘Jude Everleigh?’
Surprised, she looked Robin up and down, taking in the jeans and boots and the incongruous suit jacket. Robin was almost tempted to apologize for the ensemble, a pitiful effort compared to her biker-rockabilly thing.
‘Would you mind if I came in?’ she said instead.
Jude hesitated momentarily – What the hell was going on? – then stood back to let her by.
Inside, Robin traced the herbal scent to a lit candle on the stripped wooden counter at the back. The smell matched her first impression of the room as a whole: green – very green – and a little wild. It relied heavily on artificial light, the downside to an old building on a narrow street, she supposed, but there were several healthy-looking plants in big Victorian-looking brass pots. One wall was covered with deep shelves stacked with bolts of cotton fabric. Last night, looking at some of the patterns on the website, Robin had thought ‘William Morris on magic mushrooms’: at first glance, the designs were traditional-looking but when you looked closer, you saw that the birds perched among swirling foliage had glasses on or pocket-watches tucked into their breast-feathers. Vines, traditional-looking at first, put out tendrils that became slender fingers reaching for bunches of grapes among which nestled tiny imp-like faces.
Jude was waiting for her to say something.
She reached into her pocket for her warrant card. ‘I’m sorry to come unannounced like this,’ she said. ‘But I thought it would be best to come in person. DCI Lyons, West Midlands Police.’
‘West Midlands?’
‘I’ve driven up from Birmingham this morning.’
‘Why? I mean, what’s it about?’ Then her expression changed. ‘It’s Mirry, isn’t it?’ Instinctively she put a hand on the display table next to her, as if to hold herself steady. ‘Have you found her body?’
‘No, we haven’t.’ Robin looked around. ‘It’s a complicated situation. Is there somewhere we could sit down?’
Visibly shaken, Jude led her through the arch into a second room at the back, this one darker still, the only natural light coming from a small leaded window that overlooked a miniature courtyard. It was part stockroom, part office, part packing-and-dispatch, Robin guessed from a grey mail-sack nearly full of parcels. Jude gestured that she should take the wooden chair at the desk then went back into the shop for another, presumably from behind the counter. ‘Would you like something to drink?’ she asked, pointing at a kettle on a shelf. ‘Coffee? Or tea – I’ve got quite a few different flavours of fruit, and mint,
or …’
She was playing for time, terrified of what she was about to hear. ‘I’m fine, thank you,’ Robin said gently. ‘Mrs Everleigh …’
‘God, Jude, please, that makes me sound ancient.’ Her laugh was edged with panic.
‘Sorry. Jude, almost a week ago – a week tomorrow, in fact – a body was found in a derelict factory near Birmingham city centre.’
Her eyes were wide open, pupils huge in the weak light. ‘But you said you hadn’t found her.’
‘Yes, it isn’t her – it can’t be. Your sister was fifteen when she disappeared and that was twenty years ago so she’d be thirty-five now if …’
‘Thirty-four,’ Jude said. ‘Her birthday’s in November.’
‘Right. We haven’t been able to identify the woman but we know it’s not Miriam because she’s significantly younger. She’s no more than early twenties at the most.’
Jude sat back heavily, relief written across her face along with something that wasn’t disappointment, Robin knew, but resignation: back to the uncertainty and not knowing. The imagining. ‘So if it’s not her, with respect …?’
‘Look, I need to preface this by saying I might be completely wrong – at this point, it’s only a theory and I don’t have any evidence. It might also come as a shock.’
She shook her head. ‘Can’t be worse than the pictures I’ve had in my head for the past nineteen and a half years.’
‘Well … I think it’s possible – only possible – that the woman we found is your sister’s daughter.’
Jude stared at her for a moment but then – Robin could almost see the cogs cranking behind her eyes – she worked through the implications of what she was hearing. ‘If the woman you found is about twenty …’
‘Likely younger – eighteen or nineteen.’
‘You think Miriam had a baby at fifteen? That that’s why she disappeared?’
Risk of Harm Page 25