Paper Girls

by Alex Smith

  It was a bollocking, true and proper. Superintendent Colin Clare stood in the house’s microscopic entrance hall—the space so small that his chest was almost touching Kett’s. Any closer and they’d be kissing, not talking.

  Not that Kett was doing much talking.

  “It’s bad enough that you even got sent up here, but you don’t have to hang around outside flouncing in front of the press. Now that’s all we’re going to see on the bloody papers tomorrow: bigshot Londoner brought in to find missing girls.”

  The boss took a deep breath, shaking his head.

  “I wouldn’t say I was flouncing, exactly,” said Kett. “I don’t have the hips for it.”

  Clare snarled, then pushed his way inside—stopping for a moment to look back.

  “It’s our case, Kett,” he said. “You can tag along as much as you like, but don’t forget where you are. Clear?”

  Kett nodded, holding up his hands in surrender.

  “Use me and abuse me however you like, sir,” he said, earning another look of disgust.

  He followed the Super through another narrow door into a postage-stamp sized sitting room. Everything felt too small, as if a giant had picked up the whole row of houses and squeezed them like an accordion. It was probably more to do with the fact that three coppers stood in the room, a uniformed constable and two detectives, one male and one female. The constable and the woman gave Kett a cursory look before dismissing him.

  “DS Spalding, PC Turner, and DC Raymond Figg, our FLO,” Clare said. “This is DCI Kett.”

  The other man—a family liaison officer—nodded at Kett. His face was round and his eyes kind, and there was something almost familiar about him, in his neatly trimmed goatee and pale, receding hair. He was wearing an inoffensive chequered shirt beneath a navy blazer—despite the fact it had to be thirty degrees outside. He dressed like an older guy, but he could only have been in his mid-thirties. He offered his hand and Kett shook it.

  “Kett,” Figg said. “Wow. It’s great to see you again.”

  “Again?” Kett asked.

  “Sorry, yes. We’ve met once before. I was a second down in London, shadowed another FLO—on the Khan kidnapping. Three, no four years ago now.”

  “The Khan murder, you mean,” Kett said, shaking his head like it might stop the memory from returning.

  “Yes,” said Figg. “But it wasn’t a murder when I was there. I followed all your cases. You were the best missing persons detective I met on the job.”

  Not good enough to find Billie, though, Kett thought, managing a weak smile.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Figg said, offering his hand once more. Kett shook it again, by which time Clare looked apoplectic. He marched the five or six paces it took to get from the living room to a kitchen that was full of cigarette smoke. Another detective stood by the sink, a hulking figure who was talking quietly to Miss Malone as she smoked by the open window. Even from the back, Kett recognised him—it was impossible not to with a physique like that—and it was all he could do to stop himself breaking into a smile.

  “This is DI Porter,” said Clare, looking supremely awkward in the middle of the small, smoky room. The other detective turned around, smiled, turned away, then his head twisted back so hard Kett thought it might pop off.

  “Robbie!” Porter said, grinning. “I heard they’d sent you up.”

  “Christ,” Clare grunted in Kett’s direction. “Is there anyone you don’t know?”

  “Pete,” said Kett, shaking DI Porter’s outstretched mutton chop of a hand. “Good to see you. Last I heard they’d posted you up north somewhere.”

  “Yeah, Cornwall,” Porter laughed, and Kett shrugged. “I was there for a while, the wife got offered a job in Norwich last year so I transferred. How’s you? How’s your…”

  The question died on his lips, plunging the room into silence almost as quickly as Porter’s smile divebombed from his face. Kett put him out of his misery.

  “Kids, they’re just fine.”

  Porter nodded, grateful. It genuinely was good to see him. Kett had come up the ranks with Porter, right from their first beat, and they’d graduated to detectives together, both finding a home at CID. They’d only been parted after Porter had moved out of the city, something to do with his mum’s health. Kett was about to ask after her when the superintendent cleared his throat, genuinely aggrieved that the two men had history.

  “Miss Malone, this is DCI Robert Kett. He’s here from London, from the Met.”

  His voice seemed to draw the woman out of herself, her head turning like a snail pushing out its eyestalks. She blinked at Kett, the ghost of a smile on her face.

  “Is it true?” Miss Malone asked. “You found those missing twin girls?”

  “A girl and a boy,” Kett said, keeping his own voice as quiet as he could. “Joshua and Bethany Miller. Twins. Yes.”

  “Kett has found a number of missing children,” Clare said. “He’s one of the best detectives in the country. When we said we would leave no stone unturned, Jade, I meant it.”

  Clare was only singing his praises to make the department look good, Kett knew, but the words were welcome anyway.

  “And you’ll find my Maisie?” the woman asked. Her face had almost crumpled into itself, like it had been drawn on wet cardboard, but the expression of hope there was painfully clear.

  “We’ll do everything we can to bring her home, Miss Malone. You have my word.”

  Jade nodded, taking a drag on her cigarette before folding back into herself.

  “Good,” said Clare. “We have everything we need back at the station. We’ll—”

  “I’d like to speak with Miss Malone a little longer, if that’s okay?” Kett said.

  Clare looked like he was about to argue but the woman nodded. Kett rubbed his hands together, smiling at the Superintendent.

  “But if you want to make yourself useful, sir, pop the kettle on.”

  There wasn’t much space in the kitchen, so Kett cleared the coppers out of the living room. Figg, the FLO, offered to stay and Kett nodded to the corner where he wouldn’t be any bother. Miss Malone slumped into an armchair that looked ten sizes too big for her, and Kett took a moment to sweep the room—a sofa that didn’t match the chair, a seventies faux-walnut and brass gas fireplace complete with a decorative poker, brush and shovel, woodchip wallpaper that had been painted sunflower yellow in some places and magnolia in others, jagged whorls of artex on the ceiling that had done nothing but collect cobwebs. Other than the TV and Sky box, the only thing in the room was a white Ikea Billy shelf laden with dusty DVDs and cheaply framed photographs.

  “Jade, did I hear that right?” Kett asked as he crossed the room to the shelf. He’d seen one of the photographs before—the picture of Maisie in her school uniform that somebody had photocopied for the file—and he picked it up. Maisie smiled back at him, her arms outstretched and her thumbs pointing skyward.

  “Yeah,” said Jade, fumbling for another cigarette. It took her a few attempts to light it. “Jade.”

  “You and Maisie are close,” said Kett, replacing the frame and picking up another, this one showing Maisie and her mum hugging in front of a giant circus tent, the kind they have at Butlin’s. Jade sniffed, wiping her arm across her face.

  “Yeah, she was everything to me.” She seemed to hear herself, gasping. “Is everything. She is everything to me. Her dad died when she was little, he had pancreatic cancer. Stupid bastard, only he could get pancreatic cancer at twenty-three. Since then it’s just been the two of us.”

  “You could be twins,” Kett said. “Same smile.”

  She showed it now, or at least something that resembled it. Kett took a seat on the sofa, scratching his fingers down the stubble he hadn’t bothered to shave since leaving London.

  “I’m going to be as honest with you as I can, Jade,” he said. “Most cases of missing children tend to resolve themselves very quickly. Kids get angry, kids run off, kids like to make a
point that they’re independent. Girls especially. Trust me, I’ve got three.”

  He glanced out of the window, trying to spot PC Savage through the twists of net curtain. If she was there, he couldn’t see her, and he had to push down on a sudden pulse of anxiety. What if Kate Savage isn’t a real cop? What if she’s taken Moira away? He was used to it, it was how a copper’s mind worked. He wouldn’t be able to do the job if he couldn’t what-if the worst-case scenarios.

  “But with Maisie, it’s different,” he went on. “The fact that two girls have gone missing in exactly the same circumstances suggests that there is more going on here.”

  Jade looked like she was about to burst into tears.

  “I know,” she said, looking at Figg. “He’s been through it all. He’s been very kind, very honest.”

  Figg offered the woman a compassionate smile.

  “All this doesn’t mean Maisie isn’t safe,” said Kett. “And it doesn’t mean we won’t find her. It just means we have to be smart, and we have to work fast. Okay?”

  Jade nodded, her head slumping almost between her knees as she took a drag on her cigarette.

  “Did Maisie know the other girl?” He searched his memory. “Connie Byrne? They worked similar routes.”

  “I already told the others,” said Jade in a mumble that Kett had to lean into to make sense of. “She knew her by sight, but not to talk to. They went to different schools.”

  Kett fished for his notepad, remembered he didn’t have one. He slid his phone from his pocket and opened up the notepad app, his clumsy thumbs writing something that even the autocorrect couldn’t make sense of.

  “Uh, and her employer, Mr Walker. Did she ever talk about him?”

  “Yeah, of course,” said Jade, blowing smoke onto the carpet. “She liked him. David’s a nice man. Old. He wouldn’t hurt a fly, paid the girls okay money and always made sure they were ten or over. Wouldn’t let younger ones work for him.”

  “And Maisie always stuck to her route? Never strayed from it to visit a friend, get some chips?”

  “She’s a good girl. She puts her head down and just does it, always quick, always back in less than two hours. I made her fishfingers. They went… they went cold.”

  She sat up, rubbing at her face with her free hand like she was trying to pull it loose.

  “I shouldn’t’ve made her go, the weather was awful, it’s my fault she went, my fault someone took her.”

  “She didn’t say anything unusual before she left?” Kett asked when she’d quietened. “Wasn’t talking about anything new, or anyone new?”

  Jade shook her head.

  “I’ve said all this already. I told Raymond, and the other policeman, the big one, Peter.”

  “And her phone?” Kett asked.

  “She had it with her,” came a reply. Porter walked into the room, two mugs of unbelievably milky tea in his hands. He set them down, tea slopping over the edge onto the coffee table. “We found it at the scene, forensics are going through it now.”

  Kett picked up the mug, staring into its anaemic depths before pulling a face at Porter and mouthing This is tea? Porter shrugged, retreating to the doorway where Superintendent Clare watched on.

  “Okay,” said Kett. He took a sip of what tasted like warm milk and grimaced. “I’m sorry to make you go through all this again, but it’s important we know every detail. Maisie had been delivering papers for…”

  “A year,” said Jade. “A little less. She wanted the money, and it’s not like we have a lot to go around. Three pound an hour don’t sound like much but it’s three hours a week, ten quid int’it. Ten quid’s nothing to laugh at, especially for a ‘leven-year-old.”

  “Has Maisie ever mentioned anyone ever following her, or a car she’s seen more than once? Anything that made her feel nervous?”

  Jade shook her head.

  “Just old folk round there, bungalows full of them and most barely go outside. She knew a couple of people, but they kept themselves to themselves mainly.”

  Kett nodded.

  “Okay, thank you,” he said, finishing the disgusting tea and standing up. “I’ve just arrived, so let me settle in and catch up. I’ll get back to you if I think of anything else.”

  He turned and nodded to the Super, then he frowned.

  “Jade,” he said. “You mentioned Maisie earned ten pounds? I thought the round took her two hours. Three quid an hour, that’s six pounds a week?”

  “It does,” said Jade, dropping her cigarette into her untouched tea. “But she does another route on Saturdays, up Mousehold way, by the woods. Short one.”

  Kett made a note of it, his phone turning Mousehold to mouse hole.

  “Same shop?” he asked. “Walker’s?”

  Jade nodded, immediately fumbling for another cigarette.

  “Just the two rounds?” Kett said. “No more?”

  “No,” she replied. She looked utterly exhausted, a bouncy castle that had been almost entirely deflated.

  “Try to get some rest, Jade,” Kett said “Leave it with us.”

  He slid his phone back into his pocket as he walked to the door, then hesitated, knowing full well he shouldn’t say what he was about to say, and knowing full well he was going to say it anyway.

  “We’ll find her.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Never gets any easier.”

  DI Porter spoke quietly as he closed the front door behind them. Kett rubbed his eyes, taking a deep breath of hot summer air and feeling a sudden craving for a cigarette. His headache was creeping back, probably because of the thimbleful of sleep he’d managed to grab. He’d never been good at sleeping in new beds, and last night had been worse because somehow, somewhere, he’d managed to lose the bag with all the linen in. There had been enough towels to cover the kids, but he’d spent the night lying on a sheetless double bed with nothing but moonlight to keep him warm. There hadn’t been any curtains, either, so the sun had skewered him right in the eyeballs at a quarter past piss right off in the morning.

  “Hmm?” he said, acknowledging the fact that Porter had spoken.

  “This,” said the other man, straightening the lapels of his jacket. His biceps looked like they were about to split the sleeves of his Tom Forde suit clean open. “Mums and dads.”

  Kett nodded. He’d met so many parents with missing kids, and too many with dead ones. Jade Malone had held it together surprisingly well, but it had only been a couple of days. In missing persons cases the early days were numbed by shock and buoyed by hope. As time went on, though, you started to feel the cold and you started to sink, fast, like somebody was cutting the ropes that kept you afloat in a deep, dark ocean. Kett knew it from his work with other families.

  And he knew it from his own experience too.

  He shivered, feeling almost like he was back there in the second and third and fourth weeks of Billie’s disappearance, feeling like he was standing on the edge of that precipice again, reeling.

  The door opened behind them—a welcome distraction, even when it was Clare’s hairy nostrils that appeared.

  “That was a pointless exercise, Kett,” he whispered. “We’ve already spoken to Miss Malone, several times. There was no need to distress her again. I don’t want you anywhere near her.”

  Kett nodded, holding up his hands in surrender, and the Super vanished back inside.

  “He’s—” Kett started, and the door swung open again.

  “And I don’t want you talking to Connie’s family either, got it?” said the boss. “We’ve handled that.”

  Clare slammed the door behind him, but only for a second. It opened again and the Super’s angry face popped out for a third time.

  “And while I think of it, we don’t need you at the crime scenes. Forensics are already there and the last thing they need is you trampling over evidence. Got it?”

  He didn’t wait for a reply before vanishing again, the crunch of the closing door echoing around the street.

 
; “He’s a charmer,” Kett said, wincing. “I just wanted to get a fix on her. The mother.”

  “Makes sense,” said Porter. “Most of the time with missing kids it’s somebody in the family. You think she knows something?”

  “No,” Kett said. “Not unless she’s the world’s greatest actor. And I know she’s not the world’s greatest actor, because the world’s greatest actor wouldn’t be living in a shoebox in the arse end of Norwich.”

  “Good point,” said Porter, walking up the path. Most of the reporters had left but a few hung around like dogs, waiting for scraps. They watched Kett and Porter with big, hungry eyes. Kett just threw a scowl their way.

  “You think it’s worth me checking on the crime scenes anyway?” he asked. “The houses where Maisie and Connie were snatched. Maybe I should have a word with Connie’s mother too?”

  “I wouldn’t,” said Porter. “We’ve done all we can do there, and it’s not worth pissing off the boss any more than necessary.”

  “That’s the only reason I want to do it,” said Kett. Porter laughed, shaking his head.

  “Norwich, eh. Who’d have thought it?”

  “Hm?”

  “Us, me and you, two of the Met’s best, and here we are in Norwich. It’s a weird world.”

  “You don’t like it here?” Kett asked. Porter shrugged.

  “I don’t mind the city, I just don’t like the fact that five minutes in any direction and you’re arse deep in the countryside. All those fields and trees and cows, gives me the creeps.”

  “Pete Porter, terrified of cows,” Kett said with a smile. “Could have fooled me, based on how much milk was in that tea.”

  Porter frowned.

  “My tea is fine, thank you very much,” he said. “Come on, let’s head back to the station. I’ll fill you in on the way.”

  Kett searched the street, spotting the bright orange iCandy buggy halfway down. PC Savage walked a few more steps, pivoted, then started back, throwing a wave and a smile Kett’s way.

  “Sounds good,” Kett said. “But it may have to wait a while. Baby’s asleep, and if I try to get her into the car now she’ll bring the whole street down. She’s a fudging nightmare.”