Paper Girls

by Alex Smith

  Porter didn’t reply, and when Kett turned to him he saw that the DI’s face was warped into an expression of disgust.

  “What?” Kett asked.

  “You said fudging.”

  “What?” Kett said again.

  “A fudging nightmare, you just said it,” said Porter.

  “I did not,” said Kett.

  “You did. You meant to say a fucking nightmare, and it came out as fudging. What the hell is wrong with you? Is this what having kids does to a man?”

  Kett spluttered a laugh.

  “You need to get your hearing sorted, Pete,” he said. “Now fudge off.”

  This time it was Porter who laughed, a deep, booming roar that Kett remembered all too well from their academy days. The DI managed to cut it off after a couple of seconds, and they both turned back to the Malone house expecting Clare to appear and give them another bollocking. Fortunately, he must have been busy doing something else. By the time Kett looked back to the street Savage had almost reached them.

  “Out for the count,” she said. “Alright, Porter?”

  “Savage,” Porter replied, nodding. “Got you on babysitting duty, have they?”

  “This is serious police work,” she replied without missing a beat. “Working with you is babysitting duty.”

  “Do you two want me to step aside?” Kett asked, and when it looked like Porter was about to laugh his baby-waking guffaw again it was all he could do not to slap a hand over the big man’s mouth. Porter caught himself in time.

  “So we’ll meet you back at HQ?” he said. “Whenever the little one decides to wake up.”

  “Yeah,” Kett said. “But as I’m on foot, I may as well head to the newsagents. Savage, come with me, you can bring me up to speed on the way.”

  “Happily,” she said. “I’ll push.”

  It was a surprisingly long journey, but there was plenty to talk about.

  “Tell me about the other missing girl,” Kett said as they reached the end of Maisie’s street. A few of the reporters were snapping photographs and Kett didn’t blame them. It wasn’t often you saw a detective chief inspector, a constable, and a baby making their way into town together. Savage nudged the buggy to the left and Kett took the hint as he walked onto the main road, heading downhill.

  “Connie Byrne,” Savage said. “You’d think Constance, right, but it’s actually short for Conifer.”

  “Like the tree?” said Kett. Savage nodded.

  “She went missing the day before Maisie, while delivering papers. Her family didn’t call it in until the next morning.”

  “Why?” Kett spluttered, loud enough to stir the baby. Savage jiggled the buggy, making shushing noises until Moira settled.

  “They’re known to us,” Savage said. “And to social services. A history of drugs, dad’s been in and out of prison, mum’s in rehab but not really. Connie did her route in the evening, she left at five-thirty. By the time she was supposed to come home dad was out and mum was off her face on Aldi’s budget gin. They never thought to check on her until the next day, when she didn’t show up for breakfast.”

  “Jesus,” said Kett. The road was sloping down surprisingly steeply. For a city that had a reputation for being pancake flat, Norwich had a crazy number of hills. Cars and trucks rumbled past but the traffic was light, and compared to London it was unnervingly quiet. “Any reason she’d take off? Other than the family, that is.”

  “Yeah,” said Savage. “And she’s done it before, twice last term alone. Both times the school reported her missing, and both times they found her with friends. But this time nobody knew where she was. We checked everywhere she might have been—I was on the search team myself. Nothing. So she gets an MP alert, but it’s not considered serious enough straight away.”

  “Because a quarter of a million people go missing every year,” Kett said, nodding. “Fair enough. But when Maisie vanished delivering papers for the same shop, things changed. There was a pattern.”

  Savage nodded, pausing at a junction until a bus had passed, exhaust pouring from its backside. She held up a hand, parting the rest of the traffic like Moses and the Red Sea until they’d crossed.

  “Connie didn’t have a phone, and there was no sign of her bag or any of her belongings. No witnesses, no CCTV. She just vanished.”

  “But it’s obvious which house she was at when she was taken, right?” said Kett. “The first one without a newspaper.”

  “Sure,” said Savage. “I was coming to that. It was another dead house. Owner had recently passed, the house was waiting to be cleared. When we got in, we found her bag of newspapers.”

  The buggy hit a loose paving slab, jumping, and Savage swore beneath her breath.

  “It’s a bit of a beast, do you want me to take it?” Kett asked, and she shook her head.

  “It’s a great quads and triceps workout,” she replied.

  “How do you think I got a body like this,” Kett replied, smiling. “Dad muscles. So, we’ve got an MO. The perp scopes the routes, finds a dead house, hides there and waits for his newspaper girl to arrive. Any evidence that he… that anything happened inside?”

  “Forensics are still taking the place apart,” Savage said. “But so far nothing. Our man’s careful.”

  “And patient,” Kett said. “People don’t die that often, even old folk. He had to wait for the right person to pop their clogs, then infiltrate their home, then lie in wait for the delivery girl. This guy’s a thinker, that makes him dangerous.”

  Despite the heat of the day, Kett felt an unpleasant chill pass through him, one that raised an army of goosebumps on his skin and tickled the nape of his neck. In the space of one conversation the case had gone from an opportunist attacker to a cold, calculating, serial kidnapper—and there was still space for it to get a whole lot worse.

  “You know a lot about this,” Kett said. “For a constable, I mean. I’m impressed.”

  “Thank you, sir. I’m going to go for detective soon.”

  “Something tells me you’ll crush it.”

  She smiled a reply, then eased the buggy to a stop. They’d reached a small shopping plaza that ran up and down both sides of the main road. On this side was a chippy, a chemist, a KFC rip-off called CFK, and two charity shops, all of which clustered around a squat, half-dead pub called the Albion. On the other was not one but two off-licences, a betting shop, and sure enough a large newsagent with WALKERS written in blue italic letters above the windows—complete with racing stripes.

  “The girls aren’t the only thing missing here,” Kett said, nodding to the sign. “What happened to that apostrophe?”

  A group of five kids stood outside the newsagent looking like they were trying to audition for Norwich’s own version of The Wire. All of them had their hoods pulled up and their trousers pulled down, and two of them had bottles in paper bags. They’d already spotted Savage’s yellow jacket and they were pacing back and forth like caged tigers.

  Well, caged squirrels maybe.

  Kett took in the rest of the row. The whole place looked worse for wear, the paint peeling from the windows, the gutters packed with litter, at least three sad little mounds of dog shit. Two of the windows in the nearest off-licence were smashed, one covered with a board. Above the shops was a row of single-storey flats that didn’t look in any better condition. The whole place stank of piss and petrol fumes.

  “How do you want to play it?” Savage asked. “Shall I keep the kid?”

  “No,” Kett said, shaking his head. “I’ll take her in, but I might need your help with the squirrels first.”

  Savage’s confused frown was lost on him as he took the buggy and crossed the road.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Kett didn’t go straight in, mainly because one of the little piles of dog shit was situated right in front of the newsagent’s front door—already well-trodden in, judging by the sorry state of it—and getting the buggy around unsullied would be difficult.

  Instead, he
wheeled Moira towards the little door to the left of the window. It had to lead up to the flat above, and it looked as neglected as the rest of the area. Flakes of salmon-pink paint peeled like sunburn, and the quarter-circle windows were yellow with dirt and age.

  In order to get closer, Kett had to walk past the teenage lads—six of them, now, as another one emerged from the weed-strewn alley beside the newsagent still pulling his grey tracksuit trousers up. He looked over with an expression of such insolence that Kett felt like slapping it out of him here and now, baby or no baby.

  “Fella’s got a kid to sell,” said one of the lads, the rest of them laughing even though the joke wasn’t the least bit funny. They were all eyeball and swagger, and they reeked of cheap booze even though not one of them could have been older than fifteen. But they were still Norwich lads, it wasn’t like they’d stepped off the Willow Tree Lane Estate. Kett glanced back to see Savage right behind him.

  “Got a kid to sell you’re in the right place,” said another of the boys, taking a few steps towards Kett—his fake limp so extreme it looked like he’d shit himself and was trying to stop it from dropping down his trouser leg. “Old paedo Walker’ll give you a fiver furrit.”

  Another round of laughter, but there wasn’t a shred of warmth to it.

  “He’s got a reputation?” Kett asked, rolling the buggy back and forth to keep Moira asleep. “Walker?”

  “Fuck, he is here to sell a baby!” one boy roared.

  “Why you wanna know?” said another. “You Five-0?”

  Kett almost burst out laughing. Five-0. He hadn’t heard that since the 80s.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I am. DCI Robert Kett of the Hawaii Five-0. This, in the buggy here, is DCI Kett Junior.”

  The boys frowned, their swagger slightly punctured. Kett had faced off against enough teenagers to know that confrontation was a sure way to light the powder keg of their aggression. But not one of the dickheads knew how to respond to a bit of humour.

  “She has to take a nap between arrests or she gets cranky, but don’t underestimate her, she’s a supercop. So, David Walker, you’ve heard stuff about him?”

  Savage was hanging back, and Kett couldn’t help but be impressed. Most of the constables he knew, the blokes especially, would have come in all guns blazing. The boys eyed her, then Kett, and the last of their bravado seemed to drain away.

  “Nah,” said a kid in a red hoodie, shrugging. “Just with those girls gone missing. Walker’s alright, let’s us—”

  That earned him a thump on the arm from one of the other boys. Kett let it go, for now.

  “Shouldn’t you all be in school?”

  They shuffled around, feet scuffing the floor, all of them suddenly looking their age.

  “Go on, now,” Kett said, and they started to move away. “But not you.”

  Kett jabbed a finger at the boy in the red hoodie. He grumbled but stayed put, watching mournfully as his friends scattered.

  “What were you about to say?” Kett asked him. The kid scratched at the blonde bumfluff growing on his chin, looking at everything that wasn’t the DCI. “Walker lets you…”

  “Nuffink, man,” the kid replied. “Just, you know, like fags and stuff. He lets us have them.”

  “He lets you buy cigarettes? From the shop?”

  “Nah,” the kid said, shaking his head. He pulled the red hood over his spotty forehead as if he could cover himself up completely, make himself invisible. “From the heath, you got to go over there.”

  “Mousehold?” asked Savage, and the kid nodded, his eyes growing moist. It might have been Kett’s imagination, but he thought he could hear him whining like a baby beneath his breath.

  “He gets the girls to do it, doesn’t he?” Kett said. “The paper girls.”

  The boy nodded, those whines getting louder.

  “Saturday mornings,” the boy said. “You can get fags, booze, whatever.”

  “Drugs?” asked Kett.

  “No, man, we don’t do that stuff. Honest.”

  He looked like he was about to explode into a full-scale sobbing fit and Kett took pity on him.

  “Go on,” he said. “And if I catch you out here on a school day again then DCI Kett Junior here is going to book you so fast it’ll make your head spin. Got it?”

  The boy looked at the buggy and frowned, utterly confused.

  “Go,” said Kett, firmer now. The kid turned and bolted, so fast that his trainers slipped out from beneath him and he had to do a strange little jig to stay upright. Kett chuckled beneath his breath as the boy fled around the corner, then he turned to Savage.

  “Did you know that? About the newspaper girls delivering the cigarettes?”

  “We had a hunch. Happens all the time around here. Newsagents, ice cream vans, a fair few of them flog cigarettes and booze to minors.”

  Kett toed the buggy brake and walked to the door of the flat above, pushing open the letterbox and peering inside. A draft of cold, damp air hit him in the face, but the stairwell was completely clear.

  “I’m not sure if Maisie or Connie were part of that, though,” added Savage. “Neither of the parents seemed to know anything about it.”

  “Well,” said Kett as he snapped off the brake and wheeled his way around the dog shit. “There’s one way to find out.”

  The second he walked into the shop, the sensor beneath the mat triggering a bell overhead, Kett knew why David Walker wasn’t being taken seriously as a suspect.

  For a start, he had to be eighty years old if he was a day. He was a small man, in height and frame, with about three strands of white hair plastered to his liver-spotted scalp. He wore a white shirt and brown tie, and a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles was perched on his button nose.

  There was also the fact that he moved like a badly made and badly oiled robot in a high school science competition. Right now he was serving a couple of young men, and at the rate he was moving they’d be old men by the time he finished. He creaked and swivelled around to the till, counting out coins painfully slowly into the hands of his customers, then he bid them goodbye in a voice made up of a thousand scraps of ancient parchment.

  Kett wheeled the buggy into the nearest aisle, seeing the usual collection of crisps, chocolate and overpriced, under-nutritious groceries. The shop was old, but it was well equipped. Two CCTV cameras were mounted above the tills, one in front and one behind, and a third was positioned right at the back by the staff door. CID would have everything they could get off them already, not that it would be much.

  Kett glanced back to see Savage through the window. He’d asked her to stay outside, just for the first few minutes. Sometimes the bright yellow uniforms helped, sometimes they didn’t, and Kett guessed that the newsagent had seen plenty of them in the last few days.

  He stopped by the baby aisle to pick up an apple and banana pouch, then he made his way to the till. From this angle he could see right behind it, and he was shocked to notice that Mr Walker was actually standing on a box. He had to be five-foot-tall and sixty pounds soaking wet. The old man craned his head, looking every bit like Penfold from that old cartoon. His eyebrows were practically floating above his head as he nodded in greeting.

  “Little one asleep then?” he croaked in a broad local accent. “I miss ‘em when they were that small, and that quiet.”

  “She’s not always quiet,” Kett replied, putting the pouch on the counter. “Trust me.”

  “Just this?” Walker asked, scanning it through, and then scanning it through again by mistake. “Oh, hang on. Blasted machine. Never works. Anything else?”

  A packet of Marlborough reds please, is what he wanted to say. But he’d made Billie a promise, when they were first trying to conceive, that his smoking days were over—and even though she wasn’t around at the moment he wasn’t about to break it.

  “Just the pouch, Mr Walker, thank you.”

  At the mention of his name, the old man looked up wearily.

  “I’d ask if
you were a policeman or a journalist,” he said, his eyes flicking to the window and the smudge of yellow in the glass. “But I’m old, not blind.”

  “Sorry,” Kett said, fishing a five from his wallet and handing it over. He pulled out his warrant card while he was at it. “DCI Robert Kett.”

  “You look like a copper,” Walker said, but it was clear it was a statement, not an insult. “Just more exhausted.”

  “I’m more of a dad than a policeman these days,” he said with a smile. “In all honesty, being a copper is way easier.”

  “Tell me about it. I had four of the buggers.” He grimaced as he swallowed, opening the till using a hand that was warped with swollen knuckles. “And I was a lot younger than you when I started.”

  “Took me a while to get going,” Kett said. “So, four kids. Is that why you’re still working at, what, eighty? Eighty-five?”

  “Ninety-two,” he replied with a grin. “Apple a day, core’n’all. The only reason I’m still here. You should try it.”

  The buzzer sounded as a man in shorts walked in, wiping the sweat from his forehead. Kett leaned in.

  “I’ll try it,” he said. “Thanks for the advice. Look, I know the Norfolk Constabulary have been in to talk to you already. I’m only helping them. I’ve had some experience with missing children.”

  And missing wives, he tried not to think.

  “There are some questions that very much need answers. I’m hoping you can help.”

  “Anything,” the old man said with genuine sincerity. “I love Maisie, and Connie too. They’re good girls, bright girls. They don’t deserve what’s happened to them.”

  “They both delivered during the week, is that right?” Kett asked. Walker nodded.

  “Connie on Monday and Friday, Maisie on Tuesday.”

  “And they did weekend routes?”

  The old man swallowed again, seeming to turn a shade paler as his eyes wandered to the ceiling.

  “I believe they did, yes.”