Paper Girls

by Alex Smith

  “I remember,” said Kett. “We had a briefing about it down in the Met. Because he wasn’t guilty, was he?”

  Spalding sighed.

  “Not that we could prove.”

  “Not at all,” said Pearson, throwing another warning look at Spalding. “He had a cast iron alibi for when the girl was taken. He was at a football match, a Norwich game. He was on CCTV for the whole thing, and he even made an appearance on Match of the Day behind the goal.”

  “And the DNA?” asked Kett, racking his brains. “He claimed he was a rambler, didn’t he?”

  “He was,” said Pearson. “They found his DNA all over the woods where he’d snagged himself while exploring. He used the boat to rest on when he walked. Sat there with Jenny right underneath him, bleeding everywhere, and didn’t have a clue.”

  “Jesus,” said Kett.

  “It’s one of those flukes,” said Dunst. “Completely unpredictable. Without that CCTV Percival would have been locked up for life for something he didn’t do. They caught the actual killer a few months later, after Percival was banged up. He looked like Percival, same build, same hair, drove the same colour car—different make, though. It was a catalogue of coincidences.”

  “And it fuc—uh, fonked? It fonked him up for life.” Spalding sighed. “He was fired, his house got torched.”

  “And he was stabbed in prison,” added Figg, shaking his head. “Somebody took offence at his supposed crimes, shanked him in the thigh. I worked with him a little after his release, back when I was a therapist, he was a hollow man.”

  “Which is why he sued,” said Pearson. “And why he won. We look in on him from time to time and he’s broken. He had therapy, joined a whole heap of support groups, but you just don’t recover from something like that. And it’s why the CPO let Stillwater off so easily, because they couldn’t risk it happening again. Without hard evidence, there was no case.”

  “But Stillwater was guilty?” Kett said. “He planned it, took his time, made sure he kidnapped the right girl. He admitted it. Where did he take her?”

  “This is the interesting thing,” Spalding replied. “Stillwater’s grandfather had recently died. He owned this monster of a house over in Town Close and the place was sitting empty, falling down. Stillwater took her there. Luckily one of the neighbours saw him and got talking to him, got talking to the girl too. We think it spooked him, because about an hour later he took the girl to the police station in the city. He was arrested, of course, but the thing with the mother, and the fact that the girl—Emily, uh, Coupland, I think—hadn’t said a bad word about Stillwater, I mean he’d even bought her ice cream, meant he walked right out the door.”

  “But he’s still on file?” Kett asked. Spalding nodded.

  “Nobody believed a word of his story. He was planning to take that girl and do god knows what to her. We’ve kept an eye on him ever since, but he’s been squeaky clean. Too clean. And this isn’t Minority Report. You can’t arrest a guy for what he might do in the future.”

  “Fits our guy’s MO, that’s for sure,” said Kett. “Smart, patient. What’s he do?”

  Porter smiled.

  “Estate agent,” he said. “Plenty of access to empty properties.”

  “You’re bringing him in?”

  “Trying to,” said Porter. “He’s off the grid.”

  Kett nodded, a shiver settling in the nape of his neck. He rubbed the hair there, studying Stillwater’s photograph. The man’s eyes were bright, that smile like a razor’s edge. He’d seen that look before, more often than not on the faces of the men he’d dragged in wearing handcuffs, men who left a trail of screams and tears and blood in their wake.

  “Feels like our guy,” Kett said. “Let’s go find that bastard.”

  “Bar-star!” yelled Moira from across the room.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “I keep telling you, Christian’s no here.”

  The young, red-eyed Scottish woman—Lucy Clarke, according to the electoral register—stood in the door of the Stillwater house like she meant to barricade it, even though she was five-two and looked like she’d been carved from matchwood. She smudged her unbrushed, copper-red hair away from her face, glancing over her shoulder again at the two constables who were searching the house. Then she turned back to Kett and Porter.

  “He’s no been here for days now, I told the last polis, and the ones afore that. A’ve no seen him and I’m no wanting to either.”

  “You had an argument?” Kett asked, looking back to check that the Volvo was still where he’d left it. Moira peered out from the back seat, frowning. It was a pretty crappy thing to do, leave the baby in the car, but he couldn’t exactly show up at the home of a potentially violent wannabe child molester with an eighteen-month-old child in his arms, could he? Besides, he’d cranked the windows down a bit.

  “Aye,” said Lucy. “I mean, no, not really, just one of those stupid ones that couples have.”

  “Mind telling us what it was about?” asked Porter. “Just between you and me.”

  “And all the other polis I’ve told?” she shot back. “Babies, we were arguing about having a baby. I wanted to, he didnae. I lost it first, told him to fuck off. And lo and behold, he did.”

  “Did he say why?” Kett asked.

  “Why he didnae want to have a bairn?” she said, pulling a face. “What fuckin’ business is that of yours. Be careful in there!”

  She directed the last comment over her shoulder at a series of thumps and bumps from the kitchen. Then she took a deep breath.

  “Just didnae like kids, although he’s changed his tune from when we first started talkin’. Charmed the pants offa me with his speeches about a big house in the country, little’uns runnin’ around—literally charmed the pants offa me. Bastard.”

  “How long have you been together?” Kett asked.

  “Two year,” she spat, rubbing her finger. The ring was gone, but the welt it had left was still there. “Proposed to me in the spring. Bastard.”

  “You know about his past?” Porter asked, and she glared at him.

  “Aye, I do now, thank you very much. If I’d’a known it before then maybe I’d not have given him the time of day. Bastard!”

  “I know you’ve already been through this,” Kett said. “But anything else you know about him, any places he used to visit, anywhere he spoke about, even if it was just once. Take a moment and think. It could mean the difference between life and death for those girls. You want to see their photos again?”

  Lucy shook her head, turning so pale that the freckles on her nose and cheeks looked like pen marks. She wrapped her hands around herself, sniffing. Porter had shown her Maisie and Connie’s photos when they’d arrived, and it wasn’t the first time they’d been thrown at her.

  “Believe me,” she said. “I want him caught as much as you. If he’s… If he’s really capable of doin’ something like that, I want him sent away for good.” She looked up, meeting Kett’s eye. “You really think he…”

  “We don’t know,” said Kett. “But whether he did or not, we need to speak with him. So please, think.”

  She chewed on it for a moment, checking over her shoulder again. The two constables were there, and one of them shook her head. Lucy sighed, kicking the door gently with her bare foot.

  “He never opened up to me, not really, not truthfully,” she said. “Have you ever been with somebody like that? They act like they’re the most open person on the planet, and you believe it without really thinkin’, and it’s only after that you start to realise you didnae ken them at all.”

  “Classic sociopath,” Kett said. “Everything is planned, their whole life is a fiction. They can make you believe just about anything.”

  “Aye,” she said, nodding. “He didnae do much outside of being here and being at his work—he sold houses but he wasn’t in every day, kept his own hours. But every now and again he’d piss off out. Always told me he was meetin’ friends at the pub but he didnae have
friends, not really, not that I ever saw, and his breath never smelled of alcohol. The only thing that ever smelled was him.”

  “In what way?” asked Kett. She shrugged her bony shoulders.

  “He just smelled, just off, I dinnae ken. There was a sweetness to it, but an awfie sourness too. Or somethin’ else. Rot, maybe? I thought he was havin’ an affair at first, but it wasnae that kinda smell. I cannae describe it.”

  “He’s gone out recently?” Porter asked.

  “Last weekend, Saturday. I thought we were gonna drive out to the coast but he told me he had plans. Pissed off first thing in the mornin’ in the car, came back at supper time. Six, maybe. I was furious with him, because the bastard came back and he was covered in sand. He’d been to the fuckin’ beach without me. All fuckin’ day.”

  Kett met Porter’s eye. Saturday. Two days before Connie had vanished.

  “You wouldn’t happen to have those clothes here, would you?” Kett asked. “The ones with the sand?”

  She nodded, disappearing into the darkness of the house.

  “Looking more and more like our man,” said Porter as the constables walked out. “Anything?”

  “Nope,” said the PC. “His stuff’s all gone.”

  “All of it?” asked Kett.

  “It’s here,” came Lucy’s voice from inside the house. She emerged from the gloom carrying a black binbag, obviously struggling with the weight of it. She tossed it at Kett’s feet. “All his shit’s here, I was gonna take it to the tip but you’ve saved me the bother. He fucked off on Sunday after we argued, no seen him since.”

  “This is great,” said Kett, picking up the bag. “You don’t happen to know which beach he’d been to?”

  “Aye,” said Lucy, wearing the same hard stare. “A fuckin’ sandy one.”

  She started to slam the door but Porter planted a big hand on it.

  “He shows up, you call us straight away. 999 if you have to, you hear?”

  “If he shows up here,” Lucy said. “He’s a fuckin’ dead man.”

  By the time Kett had made it back to the car, Moira was crying. It wasn’t one of her angry screams, it was a proper sob, and the sound of it caught him by surprise.

  Her words, though, just about shattered his heart.

  “Mamma! Mamma! Pliz.”

  It was the little ‘please’ at the end that did it, that one word jamming a lump down his throat and making his eyes wet with tears. He handed Porter the evidence bag then opened the back door of the car. He pushed his head in further than he needed to, mainly so that Porter wouldn’t see the emotion on his face. But the big man would have been a poor detective if he’d missed it.

  “Can’t imagine what you’re going through,” Porter said when Moira was free of her car seat. He tied the binbag in a knot then handed it to a uniform, who carried it to the car.

  Kett rested the baby on his shoulder, feeling her chubby arms wrap themselves around his neck and gently pat his skin.

  “Pliz, pliz.”

  “Hey, beautiful,” he said. “Daddy’s here, it’s okay.”

  It could go one of two ways, he knew. Sometimes the effort to sooth her would backfire and she’d have a tantrum of biblical proportions, one that would rage for hours sometimes. Billie had been the only one able to calm her, partly because she had a natural aura of peace and compassion, and partly because she had boobs. Kett had neither of those things. All he had were cuddles and kisses and kind words, and they didn’t always do much to temper the storm.

  Fortunately, this wasn’t one of those occasions. He could feel it in the way the baby moved, those subtle motions. She didn’t strain away from him, she settled against his shoulder and burbled into his neck. Kett threw an apologetic look at Porter, who waved it away.

  “Robbie, we appreciate you being here, especially under these circumstances,” he said. “If you need to go, just go. We’ll see you when we see you, and we’ve got your number until then.”

  “It’s fine,” he replied, his voice low and soothing. “She just misses her mum. We all do.”

  “Billie’s probably…” Porter started, popping his lips. “Look, you’re police, you know the reality of cases like hers. But don’t give up, okay? I remember seeing you on the news, with those twins. I remember you saying the same thing, that you wouldn’t give up hope until they were found. You never gave up on them, not once, not even in all those weeks.”

  “Months,” said Kett. “Seven months they were missing.”

  And he had given up hope. He’d given up hope more times than he could count.

  “You’re a good dad,” Porter said. “Nobody would say any different. She loves you. It’s clear how much she loves you, by all the dribble and snot that’s dripping down your collar right now.”

  Kett laughed, and Moira pushed herself away, grinning at Porter.

  “I mean, it’s disgusting,” Porter went on. “It’s like a river of the stuff.”

  “It could be worse,” Kett said, sniffing. He pulled a face. “Oh, hang on, it is worse.”

  He held the baby out to Porter.

  “You want to do the honours?”

  “Do I want to clean up a Chernobyl-sized radioactive turd explosion?” Porter said, shaking his head. “No, I absolutely do not.”

  Kett pulled Moira back, smoothing her springy blonde curls as best he could.

  “Guess it’s up to me again, then,” he said.

  “If you ever want to talk about it,” Porter said. “I’m here.”

  “If I ever want to talk about baby poop?” Kett said.

  “No, you idiot, if you ever want to talk about Billie.”

  Kett nodded a thank you to the man.

  “I’ll let you know,” he said.

  “DCI Kett,” called one of the constables. Kett looked over to where they both stood by the squad car. The man held a phone. “Call for you, from PC Savage.”

  “Here,” said Kett, handing the baby to Porter. He wasn’t sure which of them squealed more at the change of hands. He walked to the squad car and took the phone. “Savage?”

  “Yes sir,” came the PC’s voice, distorted by a poor signal. “I’m still at Walker’s, and there’s something you need to see.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The traffic had picked up, and getting around the city was a nightmare. Christian Stillwater lived in what was known as the Golden Triangle, an area of small but expensive middle-class houses just outside the city centre, and getting from there up to the north of the city proved to be a nightmare of buses, bikes and lorries. Kett wished the old Volvo had lights and a siren, but all it had was its croaky horn and that did bugger all to shift the people in his way.

  He’d been offered sirens, of course. Porter had told the constables to escort him over, but Kett had refused. Savage hadn’t exactly sounded urgent, and the uniforms would be put to better use joining the hunt for their most promising suspect. Porter had offered to come too, but Kett had told him to get the bag of clothes to forensics ASAP. If they could find out which beach Christian Stillwater had been to, they stood a better chance of finding the girls.

  “Besides,” said Kett as he’d hurriedly changed Moira’s nappy in the passenger seat of the Volvo. “Savage seems more than capable of holding her own if there’s trouble.”

  “And even if she isn’t,” said Porter with a smile. “She’s called Savage. Just yell ‘Go get ‘em, Savage!’ and they’ll be running like the devil was on their tail.”

  The parking bays by the shops were full, and Kett didn’t want to block the road, so he drove another quarter mile and found a small Co-op store with a car park out back. It claimed it was for customers only, so he nipped in and bought a box of baby rusks as yet another bribe to get Moira into the buggy. Luckily, there was no time to feel guilty about it, because as he entered the parade and passed the dilapidated pub he heard a rap of knuckles on glass and turned to see PC Savage staring at him through the Albion’s filthy windows.

  He bumped an
d shunted the buggy through the double doors, shivering in a sudden blast of air conditioning. The pub was actually much nicer inside than out, the floor polished wood and the tables and chairs sleek and modern. Other than the sour-faced man behind the bar there wasn’t a soul inside the place, and it didn’t take much to work out why.

  “Thanks for coming, sir,” said Savage, silhouetted by the light from the window. She’d taken off her jacket and hat, but she was still every ounce the copper—and round here, coppers weren’t good drinking partners. “You didn’t find Stillwater, then?”

  “No,” Kett said, wheeling the buggy to the window. From here he had a perfect view of the newsagent’s and the flat above. He could even make out the diminutive form of David Walker behind the till. “He’s in the wind, which makes it even more likely that he’s guilty. What about you? What caught your eye?”

  Savage grinned, looking exceptionally pleased with herself.

  “First, I did some research,” she said, and Kett held up a hand.

  “Hang on,” he said, turning to the bar. “Couldn’t grab a tea over here, could I?”

  “I don’t know,” muttered the man in a tone of pure sarcasm. “Could you?” But he shuffled over to the machine and switched it on.

  “And a juice,” Kett asked. “For the kid.”

  “Oh, I’m fine, thank you sir,” said Savage. Kett frowned, pointing at the buggy where Moira was chowing down on baby rusks.

  “This kid,” Kett said.

  “I… uh… sorry,” Savage said, blushing. “But anyway, I did some digging while I was sitting here. Walker has four children.”

  “Yeah,” said Kett. “One’s done time, right?”

  “Burglary, two counts,” she said, nodding. She picked up her phone from the table, showing Kett a photograph of a man in his fifties. He was grizzled, tanned, balding, and fat—as big as David Walker was tiny—but he was the spit of his father in his eyes and nose. “His name’s Brandon Walker. Fifty-six. His last arrest was for a big job in the Midlands, he and some other guys tried to knock off a pawn shop. Turns out it was owned by the Albanian mob, and they got their arses kicked, then they got busted on top. Two years for aggravated burglary.”