by GJ Minett
But he’s not fooled for one minute.
He knows she would have if she could.
9
NOW: MONDAY, 6TH OCTOBER
HOLLOWAY
Detective Superintendent Marie Loneghan was a cold, calculating, ambitious bitch with an eye for the main chance and legs she was happy to spread for anyone in a position to enhance her career. Alternatively, she was a calm, perceptive professional who did not suffer fools gladly and had high expectations of everyone in her team, to which she herself measured up at every turn. In short, she polarised opinion without seeking to do so and which camp anyone belonged to was a matter of personal preference.
Minor considerations such as actually having worked with her counted for very little. Indeed, Holloway suspected some of her loudest critics would have had trouble picking her out of a line-up but that wasn’t going to stop them having their say. He’d always defended her in the strongest terms but was no longer under any illusion that her detractors might be converted. The only weapon he had at his disposal was first-hand experience – her critics were armed with prejudice and personal grudges, a far more pernicious and persuasive combination.
She was sitting across the table from him now, looking sharp and alert in a dark grey trouser suit and open-necked blouse. She often asked for a quick word before they joined the rest of the team for the morning briefing and today’s promised to be one of the more positive sessions in recent weeks. Any arrest was always good news, even if grim satisfaction sometimes seemed more the order of the day than high fives and fist pumps. The Jamie Barrett case had finally broken open and even though his body had not as yet been recovered, his mother’s live-in boyfriend had been charged with his murder. He was still screaming his innocence from the rooftops but CCTV footage had come to light which blew a hole in his previous statements. A wedge had been driven between him and Jamie’s mother, who had been covering for him out of misguided loyalty and a refusal to face reality. Without her crucial support, everyone was confident he would fold in the next twenty-four hours. Maybe then they’d have some idea what he’d done with Jamie’s body and the whole sorry episode would be brought to a close.
It wasn’t the unqualified success they’d been hoping for at the outset but they were used to dealing in cold realities and the plain and simple truth was that they’d known for some time that they weren’t going to find the boy alive. It was a result of sorts though, and a much-needed one which might earn them a welcome brief spell out of the firing line. If nothing else, it meant their attention could now focus solely on Owen Hall and whether his strange tale of a disappearing girl might have anything at all to do with the murder of Callum Green in South Mundham.
The interviews with his neighbours had unearthed a few surprises. Neil Horgan wasn’t the only member of the team with doubts about whether the girl in the car even existed. The general consensus of opinion was that Hall had invented her and was throwing up some sort of smokescreen in an attempt to run them ragged. He’d even disowned the photofit he’d helped them to put together, claiming he wasn’t very good with faces. It was ‘sort of like her’ was as far as he was prepared to go, which struck almost everyone as hugely convenient.
Holloway was reluctant to dive head first into the pool of common consensus just yet but even he hadn’t expected much joy to come from canvassing the neighbourhood, given that Hall was adamant she’d never been to his house. He’d viewed it as a box they had to tick before they could move on, but then again, ticking boxes was how they’d managed to close the Jamie Barrett case. Good, honest plodding.
For most of the previous morning, their suspicions had been confirmed. The photofit, for what it was worth, had been shown to everyone living in the same road as Hall and not one of them could remember having seen the girl. They described him as a strange lad, polite enough but almost pathologically shy. Didn’t go out much apart from when he was working. No social life they were aware of. He did have the occasional visitor but they were presumed to be business callers. The elderly couple next door remembered a girl leaving his house just a few weeks earlier but they insisted that she hadn’t looked anything like the photofit.
They might have left it at that but Holloway had instructed them to cast the net a little wider just in case, and that had eventually brought their first piece of good news. A woman serving in the local fish-and-chip shop had been on the point of handing back the photofit when she took another look and said, ‘It’s not Julie, is it?’ She pointed out that it wasn’t a brilliant likeness but it looked a bit like young Owen’s girlfriend. The woman knew Owen well because he came in every Saturday evening, regular as clockwork – same order every time: large cod and chips and a battered sausage.
A couple of times recently a girl had come in and bought it for him midweek – Tuesday and Thursday, maybe? The first time she’d referred to herself as his girlfriend. ‘Nice girl, very chatty.’ The woman remembered thinking she’d be a good person for Owen to be around as she’d probably bring him out of himself. And then the second time she’d come in, the girl had been much more subdued, her face badly bruised. She’d tried to make out a cupboard door had swung back and caught her just below the eye but that didn’t explain the red marks on the other side of her face as well. ‘Not many doors come back and take a second or third swing at you, know what I mean?’
Once they’d added the facial bruising to their description of the girl, they soon found other people who remembered her. She’d posted a parcel for Owen in the local post office; bought a box of After Eight mints from the sweet shop because they were Owen’s favourites; called in at the chemist’s for some lozenges because her boyfriend Owen had a sore throat. Not everyone knew this Owen she was talking about but they remembered her, all right – especially the bruising. So one thing was settled, that was for sure. The girl was no figment of Owen Hall’s imagination.
And then his version of events at the petrol station had been further supported when DC Walker – it would be him! – had called Holloway over to look at the CCTV again. When they’d first viewed it their focus had been entirely on the truck and on the inside of the store where Hall had queued for the mints before kicking off outside the toilet. Walker had used footage taken from a different angle and identified a blurred figure, hovering on the edge of the shot, heading away from the forecourt towards the grass verge which separated it from the main road. The figure disappeared behind a parked lorry, then reappeared for a second or two before being swallowed up by the bush at the back of the tyre-pressure gauge. Seconds later the same figure re-emerged, scuttling back in the opposite direction before disappearing for good from the edge of the screen, presumably heading for the rear of the petrol station.
They had done what they could with the image but there was no way of making the figure any clearer. It was almost certainly a male but beyond that it was impossible to determine anything for certain. The only inference to be drawn from it was that his movements were strange to say the least. It was difficult to imagine why he would have chosen to wander off in that direction unless he wanted to use the bush as a screen.
They’d gone back to the footage of the truck, synched the timelines on the two cameras and identified the five-second slot when the figure would have been at the far side of the bush. They’d run it several times, stared so intently at the screen that their eyes hurt, but the images were so grainy and dark that it was impossible to make anything out for certain. Some of Holloway’s colleagues were adamant they could see something near the window on the far side of the truck but he couldn’t be sure it was anything more than wishful thinking.
There was enough there though to add at least a shred of credibility to the version of events Hall had been peddling.
‘I’m not sure whether this is good news or bad,’ said Loneghan, making a note on her iPad.
‘It’s just news, Ma’am,’ he replied, forgetting himself for a moment. In front of everyone else Loneghan always insisted on the appropriate form of address but when t
hey were together like this she usually preferred to keep things on a less formal basis. ‘It’s another piece in the jigsaw, that’s all. The more we’ve got, the clearer the picture.’
‘But if we could have proved she doesn’t exist, at least we’d have known for sure Owen Hall isn’t being straight with us and must have something to hide.’
Holloway sniffed.
‘Always difficult to prove a negative. The best way to look at it now is that we’ve answered one question and can move on to the next.’
‘Which is what?’
‘Take your pick. Was she in the truck? If she wasn’t, why is Hall trying to make out she was? And if she was, what happened to her? Where is she now?’
‘How about: who is she?’
The phone on her desk rang. She checked the caller ID, then lifted and replaced the receiver.
‘Yeah. That too,’ said Holloway. ‘We’re not getting anywhere as yet with Julie Mowbray, Investigative Journalist, that’s for sure, so we’re assuming it’s fake.’
‘So this could be someone messing with Owen Hall’s head, right?’
‘Could be. Assuming he’s not the one who set it all up.’
Loneghan frowned. ‘But why would he do that?’
‘Exactly. Brings us back to was she in the car or not,’ said Holloway, sketching a loop with his forefinger. ‘If you ask Neil, and most of the others for that matter, she never was. They’ll tell you Hall is either in league with this girl for some reason we haven’t identified yet or he’s done something to her and is blowing smoke up our collective rear end to cover himself in case we ever connect him to her.’
Loneghan smiled.
‘Wasn’t Neil equally adamant that she didn’t even exist?’
‘He was,’ said Holloway, ‘but to be fair, the fact that we now know she does makes very little difference to his argument.’
‘But you’re still not convinced by it?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
Holloway absent-mindedly played with his mobile, turning it end over end on her desk as he marshalled his thoughts.
‘Because Owen Hall is not an idiot. It’s ironic really – that’s about the only thing we all agree on and yet, for their theory to work, he’d have to be just plain stupid.’
‘Explain?’ Loneghan pushed her iPad away from her and leaned back in her chair.
‘OK. What’s the one thing more than anything else that makes Owen Hall look iffy? I mean, we’ve got one person saying a girl has disappeared and a handful of witnesses at the petrol station saying they never saw her at any stage. And the two officers sent to check it out decided in all probability it was a hoax. What made them think that?’
‘Owen Hall’s connection to South Mundham?’
Holloway shook his head vigorously. ‘They didn’t know who he was at that stage. And the name probably wouldn’t have meant anything to them anyway.’
‘The fact that he ran off?’
‘Could have been any number of reasons for that. Back up a bit.’
Loneghan thought about it, fingering the silver cross on her necklace. ‘The CCTV,’ she said.
‘Right. There’s no sign of her getting out of the car. So this elaborate scheme of his is in danger of coming apart right from the outset, which begs the question: why try to pull this stunt somewhere they’ve got security cameras? I mean, if I wanted to make up a story, the last thing I’d do is act it out with someone filming what’s really going on. He could have chosen anywhere, told us they’d met in a car park in Eartham Woods or on the beach at West Wittering or in Pagham Harbour. Why in God’s name would he drive all the way to Littlehampton and pick out a petrol station where there was bound to be CCTV?’
‘Maybe he didn’t realise there were cameras there.’
‘So now he’s stupid all of a sudden? I thought the whole idea underpinning this theory was that he’s the exact opposite, that he’s capable of putting together a complex scheme which is making us chase our tails. I don’t see how it can work both ways.’
The phone rang again and this time Loneghan snatched it up and cut the call without even checking who it was. She rested the receiver on the desk and Holloway could hear the dialling tone buzzing away in the background.
‘And then there’s the way this girl was behaving before she disappeared,’ he continued. ‘I go into a chip shop, I’m there to buy chips, not trot out my life story. How many people do you know who introduce themselves to everyone they meet in shops and tell them they’re so-and-so’s girlfriend? Does that sound right to you?’
‘No, but that could have been something she and Hall had worked out between them.’
‘It could – but again, why? He could have taken her round to a few neighbours to introduce her himself, paraded her up and down the street if he wanted everyone to notice her. Why would he ask her to do it in such a bizarre way?’
Loneghan pushed a stray lock of hair back behind her ear.
‘So you’re saying she had to do it that way because she didn’t want it to come to Owen’s attention, right?’
‘Not before she’d had a chance to disappear, no. Again, the only way he can be making all this up is if he’s stupid.’
‘Or very, very clever and working a double bluff?’
Holloway pinched the bridge of his nose, using thumb and forefinger to massage away an ache that had been developing since he’d woken that morning. He wished he’d thought to take a couple of paracetamol before setting out.
‘That would be a real gamble,’ he said, pulling back from the involuntary Ma’am at the last moment. ‘And I know I’m no expert but I really don’t think that’s how his mind operates. This whole business of him plotting away and coming up with a scheme that Machiavelli would have been proud of – I just don’t buy it. It’s not him. You know about this numbers thing of his?’
Loneghan nodded.
‘Well, that’s who he is. He’s a numbers man. Thinks in straight lines. And even if he was that imaginative, even if he was capable of weaving an intricate web of lies to keep us all wrong-footed, there’s still one thing that doesn’t make sense.’
‘Which is?’
‘Why bother? I mean, why would he imagine for one moment that we needed wrong-footing? It’s not like we’ve been swarming all over him. We had to question him about Abi Green’s alibi and the fallout from that but we haven’t hauled him in here and put him through the wringer. What on earth would make him think he needed to go to such lengths to throw us off a scent we hadn’t even picked up in the first place? He’s gone from insignificant bit-player to chief suspect in some people’s eyes in one jump. Again, how can he be that stupid and so devious at one and the same time?’
‘So you think he’s being set up?’ she asked.
‘Not necessarily. But it makes at least as much sense to me as what we’re being asked to believe. We need more answers.’
‘More of your little boxes ticked,’ she said with a smile.
‘It’s how we get there.’
‘So what’s next?’ she asked, replacing the receiver on the phone.
Holloway picked up his mobile and put it in his pocket, taking the hint that the briefing was due to start any minute.
‘I want to start by impounding his truck.’
10
EARLIER: SATURDAY, 13TH SEPTEMBER
PHIL
The day after the day after. One day at a time. Still on compassionate leave until Monday, although a part of him wondered if he might not be better off back at work where Anna’s wacky conversation would have taken his mind off things. Then he remembered she’d booked the day off anyway because she was having her first competitive MMA bout that afternoon in Sittingbourne of all places. It was a hell of a way to go for a fight but he wondered even so about turning up to surprise her, see what all the fuss was about. Problem was, he didn’t know exactly where the event was being held and ringing her to ask felt a bit iffy. He wasn’t sure how it would look.
So instead he decided he might as well get started on painting the front of the house. It had been crying out for attention for some time now and he’d been putting it off, half-hoping the wet weather would arrive and put paid to laudable intentions for another summer. The sky was still clear though, the weather set fair for a few more days yet, so he was fresh out of excuses.
With the day stretching ahead of him, he took his time over breakfast and thought it all through. He’d need to pick up the paint and brushes which he’d been meaning to buy since the end of May. Then he’d have to drive over to Callum and Abi’s . . . to Abi’s place in Bosham to pick up the ladder which Callum borrowed last Easter to clear some of the gunk out of his gutters. He had to take her birthday card and present over anyway – nothing much, just a book about Amy Winehouse and a DVD of series 1 and 2 of The Inbetweeners which she’d missed on TV. Nice cup of tea and a chat there with Abi for an hour or so, as long as she wasn’t too busy. Just to make sure she was bearing up, he told himself. Then he could pop down to the Anchor Bleu and have lunch on the terrace overlooking the quayside. Ploughman’s and a pint of lager. If he took a paper with him, he could probably drag it out until two or three o’clock by the time he got back home. Paying homage to the god of procrastination, if there was such a thing, he told himself it probably wouldn’t be worth getting started that late in the day. Might be better if he left any actual painting till the following morning. No problem either way. His time was his own. And he had lots of it.
It was 10.15 by the time he arrived at Homebase in Chichester. If he’d been thinking straight he probably would have chosen another DIY store, rather than one within spitting distance of the crematorium, but he was almost there before it dawned on him. And besides, if he was going to go out of his way to avoid anything with the slightest connection to Callum, he might as well pack up now and move out of the area altogether. Suck it up, he told himself.
Shortly after eleven he was heading down Walton Lane into Bosham. He followed the road round to the right, past the primary school, and pulled up outside Hedge End, the expensive four-bedroom detached house Callum had bought which was so much larger than they’d needed. Typical Callum extravagance. Playing to the galleries. The first property he and Sally had bought outright was a two-bedroom bungalow with a postage stamp for a back garden. It had been more than big enough, not just for them but for Callum too until he was three or four. They’d have rattled around inside Hedge End, never managed to find each other. That bungalow had set them back £21,250 – Callum had spent twice that on his car.