Paper Girls

by Alex Smith

  “Yeah, I love you too, Evie,” he said.

  He walked into the kitchen and ran the tap. A proper cup of tea, maybe a biscuit, and everything might be okay. Just so long as there were no more surprises.

  He was just grabbing a mug from the drainer when the doorbell rang. He sighed, wondering whether it was worth even answering it. But Alice took the decision out of his hands.

  “Someone’s at the door!” she yelled, thundering down the stairs. He heard her fiddling with the lock. “Dad! Someone’s at the door!”

  There was a tall, curly-haired silhouette in the frosted glass that could only belong to one person.

  Great.

  “Out of the way,” he said to Alice as he twisted the brand-new Yale and opened the door. Superintendent Colin Clare stood there with an expression that almost perfectly matched Evie’s. He was holding a manila folder in one hand and a large carrier bag in the other.

  “Sir,” said Kett. “You didn’t have to come all the way out here.”

  “I did,” he replied. “Because you weren’t answering your phone.”

  “Who are you?” Alice asked, indignant.

  “Alice, be nice,” Kett said. “This is Colin, he’s my boss.”

  Clare grunted at Alice, and Alice grunted back.

  “Why is your nose so hairy?” Alice asked, craning up on her tiptoes to get a better look. Kett didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so he just stood there, waiting for Clare to react. To his immense surprise, the boss just smiled.

  “It’s for when I go undercover,” he said. “All this nose hair pulls out into a moustache and beard so nobody knows who I am.”

  Alice pulled a suspicious expression, looking at her dad.

  “It’s true,” said Kett. “The hair in his ears pulls out into a wig as well.”

  Clare gave him a look: don’t push it.

  “Come in,” Kett said. “I was just making tea.”

  “Do you make it better than Porter?” the boss asked as he stooped beneath the lintel.

  “God yes. That man wouldn’t know tea if he had to identify it in a line-up.”

  Clare hissed a small laugh through his nose, hovering in the doorway to the living room. Moira was still bawling on the floor, but she stopped when she spotted the giant above her.

  “Ook!” the baby said, pointing. “Ee-ee, ook!”

  Evie did as she was told, staring. She picked up a cushion and held it over her face, her standard response to any stranger.

  “Boss, this is Moira, and Evie on the sofa. And Alice, of course.”

  “Good to meet you all,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind. Porter told me you didn’t have a chance to get bed linen, and that the movers aren’t coming until the weekend. I took the liberty.”

  He unloaded the carrier bag over the easy chair, releasing bundles of brightly coloured sheets, pillowcases and duvet covers. Alice and Evie dived in like it was Christmas, Moira doing her damnedest to clamber into the middle of the melee.

  “They’ve all been washed. My lot don’t exactly need them any more.”

  Kett nodded a thank you, steering Clare through to the kitchen. He grabbed another mug from the drainer and rinsed it, then filled the kettle.

  “That was kind of you, thank you,” he said as Clare took a seat at the little table. “You’ve got kids?”

  “Six,” he replied, smiling at Kett’s shocked expression. “We were going for four. The last batch were triplets, they run in Fiona’s family. We should have been more careful.”

  “How old?”

  “Youngest three are fourteen, the oldest is twenty-one.” Clare gave Kett a sympathetic look. “It was nightmarishly hard, and that was with two of us and a whole village of support. This… How are you coping?”

  This wasn’t the conversation Kett had expected at all.

  “Fine,” he said as he popped the teabags in. “As well as can be expected, anyway.” He paused, listening to the kids in the living room. “It’s hard, to be honest. Every day I wake up and think I can’t do this.”

  “And every day you do,” Clare said. “Trust me, I’ve been there. There is nothing in this universe harder than being a parent. Except maybe being a single parent. Except maybe being a single parent of three girls.”

  “It’s only… it’s only until Billie comes back.”

  He’d called Bingo last night, of course, even though he’d tried not to. Just a quick call, with an even quicker answer: no news, sorry Robbie.

  “She was taken, wasn’t she?” Clare asked. “I remember seeing the security footage on the news.”

  Kett nodded. He knew the CCTV off by heart, a grainy video of Billie heading to Gospel Oak after meeting a friend. Moira in the buggy. Then a white van with no tags, two men wearing children’s animal masks, smoking tyres as they burnt down the road—three seconds and it’s over, no more Billie, just Moira’s ghostly face in the buggy screaming and screaming and screaming.

  And that was three and a half months ago.

  “We searched everywhere, we checked out every lead. I was convinced it was the Otley crew, you know them?” Kett glanced at Clare and Clare nodded. “The ones who kidnapped that politician’s son. I worked that case too, put three of them behind bars, including Jonus and Philip Otley, the brothers. Saved the kid. They couldn’t put a price on my head, being a copper, so I think they went after Billie instead.”

  “And?”

  Kett poured water into the mugs, letting it steep.

  “We tore them apart, every den, every brothel, every safe house. By the time we’d finished with them there wasn’t a stone left they could hide under. But Billie wasn’t there. Lead after lead we followed, but nobody connected to me or to any of my cases knew anything. It just felt like a… like a random attack.”

  He heard footsteps, turned to see Evie charging down the hall. She glanced warily at Clare, then held up a Spider-Man duvet cover.

  “I want this one. Can I have it?”

  Moira was right behind her, trying to carry a Trolls pillowcase even though it kept getting stuck beneath her feet.

  “You can have it,” Kett said. “But only if you go back through. Watch the iPad with your sisters.”

  She bolted, and Kett fished out the teabags and added a dash of milk to both mugs.

  “Sugar?”

  Clare shook his head, moving the folder so that Kett could put the mugs down.

  “Anyway,” Kett said, picking up Moira and putting her on his lap. “It’s still an active case, and some of the Met’s best coppers are on it. We’ll find her.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Clare said, looking at the wound on Kett’s head. “Benson told me you were thorough, that you gave everything to a case. I see now that he wasn’t just trying to sell me a story.”

  Kett started to reply, but Clare held up a hand.

  “You’ve done this job long enough to know what I’m about to say, but let me say it anyway, just so it’s on the record. Your decision to enter the Walker property was based on extremely tenuous evidence. Luckily, you have PC Savage backing you up. She claims to have seen Brandon Walker inside, and she told me your reasoning for an immediate search. It’s not what I’d call solid, but it will hold up.”

  He leaned forward, pointing a cracked nail at Kett.

  “What doesn’t hold up is you going all Errol Flynn on me, bursting in there without a plan, and without backup. You may not be one of mine, Kett, but I still have a duty of care to everyone who works under me, whether it’s you, or even her.”

  He nodded to Moira, who was using the pillowcase to play peekaboo.

  “You cannot use my officers as a babysitting service, is that clear?”

  Kett nodded, and Clare sat back.

  “Brandon Walker is going away for a long time,” he said. “And that’s on you. It was good work. More importantly, it gives us access to everything in the Walker shop. We swept the place after you’d gone, found a whole bunch of documents detailing what they were up to
in Mousehold. The paper girls were distributing the pills inside the cigarette boxes.”

  “Maisie and Connie too?” Kett asked.

  “Maisie, yes, although I doubt she knew she was doing it. We’re still trying to find out about Connie. Mousehold was their turf, if you like. David Walker knew his son was up to something, but I believe him when he said he didn’t know about the drugs. I don’t think he dared even ask Brandon about it.”

  “Could this be a gang thing?” Kett asked. “Could the girls have been taken as part of some territorial dispute? A warning? Brandon Walker had ties to the Albanians.”

  “It’s something we’re looking into,” said Clare. “It would be unlikely, but there has been an increased level of organised violence in the city in recent years, and this would certainly follow that trend. Trafficking too, although this doesn’t have any of the hallmarks of a trafficking case. More and more gangs are coming up the A11 from your part of the world, DCI Kett, and it’s causing me any number of headaches.”

  He gave Kett a look that implied this was all his fault, but it was short lived. He sighed, opening the manila folder.

  “Our main line of enquiry remains the same,” he said. “That this isn’t related to organised crime, and that the girls were taken by a single, dangerous individual. Of course, when they’ve finished wiring Brandon Walker’s jaw, and he remembers how to hold a pen, we may know differently.”

  He gave Kett another accusing look.

  “But the focus has to remain on finding Christian Stillwater. Porter filled me in on your talk with Lucy Clarke, the girlfriend, and forensics came back an hour ago with a report on the sand found on his clothing.”

  “Daaaaady!”

  Evie’s shout from the living room coincided with Alice charging down the corridor holding the iPad.

  “Evie wants to watch Peppa Pig,” she said, stamping her foot. “But it’s my iPad.”

  “Put something on that’s suitable for everyone,” Kett said.

  “No, that’s not fa—”

  “Alice,” Kett snapped, making her jump. “Until we’ve got our TV, you have to learn to share. Find something, or I’ll decide.”

  She growled like a werewolf, then stormed back. Moira slid off Kett’s knee and ran after her.

  “Sorry,” Kett said. “The sand. Lucy said she thought he’d been to a beach.”

  “He hadn’t been to a beach,” Clare said. “There were deposits of clay and iron in it. It’s sharp sand.”

  “From a building site?” Kett asked, and Clare nodded.

  “Okay, so this fits his MO, right? Our guy likes abandoned places, or at least places where there aren’t many people. Stillwater got the sand on his clothes on Saturday, according to his girlfriend. Commercial building sites don’t generally run at the weekend, but they’d be back to work on Monday, when Connie went missing, so it doesn’t make any sense that he’d be preparing something on site. Somebody would see him, and he made that mistake last time, right? With the other girl, um…”

  “Emily Coupland,” said Clare, taking a sip of his tea.

  “Right, Emily. So he wouldn’t pick anywhere where there’s a chance of being spotted. Unless he was on a building site that’s in limbo. We should check to see if there are any stalled construction works in the city, any sites that aren’t currently in use.”

  “Spalding’s already on it,” said Clare. “We’re working on the theory that Stillwater snatched both girls and took them somewhere pre-planned, someplace that was set up to contain them.”

  “A location he’d already prepared,” said Kett, nodding. He gulped down a mouthful of hot tea, wincing as it burned its way into his empty stomach. Then he shook his head.

  “What’s wrong?” Clare asked.

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “I’m not feeling the whole building site thing. Stillwater’s all about control, he’s a planner. There are too many variables in a large, open construction zone. If I was him, I think I’d be looking for somewhere smaller, more private. I think we need to be looking for a renovation project, a house that’s getting an extension, maybe a new build.”

  “I bloody hope not,” muttered Clare. “This city’s on a boom. There are five or six extensions being built on my street alone, and at least a hundred new build estates across the county.”

  “So cross reference as many as you can with people who’ve recently died,” Kett said. “I think we’re looking for a vacated property that was undergoing significant renovation.”

  Clare nodded.

  “Have there been any letters? Any communication at all?” Kett asked.

  “None. Why?”

  “It’s just with a case like this, there’s usually something. People like Stillwater want the world to know how clever they are. They thrive on being smarter than the people who are chasing them. Stillwater’s a clever guy, he’s chosen to disappear, he knows that we’re going to suspect him. It feels odd that he hasn’t reached out.”

  “Maybe he’s waiting until it’s too late for us to do anything about it.”

  “Maybe,” said Kett, taking another sip of tea. “Just be on the lookout for it, it might be subtle. Psychopaths are bastards.”

  “There’s a lot riding on your theory that Stillwater is a psychopath,” said Clare.

  “There’s a lot riding on your theory that it’s him at all,” replied Kett.

  Clare nodded, polishing off his tea in three huge gulps. He stood up, leaving the folder on the table.

  “Everything’s in there, take a look when you get a chance,” he said. “And Kett, I know I can sound cranky.”

  “Really, sir, I hadn’t noticed,” said Kett, getting to his feet.

  “But we do appreciate you being here. I just want to bring those girls home, okay? We’ll be working through the afternoon, and the night, so anything you think of, call us.”

  “Sir,” said Kett with a nod that set the ache rolling around his head again. “If you want, I can find a sitter, I can come in.”

  Clare stopped at the front door and looked back.

  “You’ve done enough for today,” he said. “Spend some time with your girls, let us do the hard work.”

  He let himself out. Kett stared into the living room to see all three girls smacking the hell out of each other with the sofa cushions, half-laughing and half-screaming.

  Sure, he thought, almost longing for the quiet and the calm of the major incident room. Because this isn’t hard work at all.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  To give them their due, the kids calmed down after Clare had left. Alice found Moana on Amazon Prime and the three of them snuggled side by side on the sofa, enraptured, their eyes full of blues and greens and oranges reflected from the screen. Kett bundled them up in a couple of the duvet covers, opened a family sized packet of crisps, and left them to it.

  He took a photo first, to show Billie when she turned up. His phone was full of them.

  He wasn’t sure what was creakier as he made his way to the first floor: the stairs, or his joints. He washed out the bath, chasing away the spiders from the corner of the room, then ran the water. He’d forgotten a tonne of stuff when he packed up their old house, but he’d remembered their toiletries, and after a quick search he squirted some bubble bath into the water.

  While it ran, he made his way back downstairs, boiling the kettle again and grabbing a bag of crisps for himself. He sat at the table with his brew, flicking through the folder that Clare had given him. Most of it was information about the two girls, copies of their Instagrams, messages from their phones, their paper routes, the CCTV footage, even school reports. Kett noticed a couple of posts from Maisie that hinted at the extra money she was earning dealing cigarettes—and, unknowingly, class A narcotics—out of her newspaper bag, but other than that they were just your typical pre-teen girls. It was hard not to imagine that they were his own children, especially Connie, who with her big blue eyes and chubby cheeks bore a passing resemblance to an older Evie.<
br />
  The forensic report for the sand was there, and Kett glanced over it before putting it to one side. Beneath it was everything they had so far on Christian Stillwater. On the surface the guy was as clean as a whistle—apart from the incident that had got him arrested in 2014—but still waters ran deep, Kett knew, and his were probably as polluted as they came. They hadn’t found his computer, he’d probably taken it with him to wherever he was hiding, but if Kett’s experience with men like this was right, it would be full to the brim with bad things.

  The last documents in the folder were the files for other suspects, including the Neanderthal-like Niel Dorey and, to Kett’s surprise, Lochy Percival, the man wrongly accused of the murder of a tourist back in 2013. Kett read his file, seeing absolutely nothing there that would make him a person of interest. And Dorey’s gallstones and hospital stay ruled him out entirely.

  That was it. That was everything they had.

  Clare had scribbled the MIT’s phone number in the top corner of the folder, plus his and Porter’s mobile numbers. Kett fished his phone out of his pocket and dialled Porter, heading upstairs as he waited for it to ring through.

  “DI Porter,” came the reply.

  “Pete.”

  “Hey, Robbie, how you holding up? Savage tells me you got your arse kicked.”

  “Yeah, pretty much. Anything new?”

  He heard Porter scoff.

  “Nope. Wait, yeah. Sand was from a building site.”

  “Heard that already,” said Kett. “Clare came over.”

  “Yikes, he give you a bollocking?”

  “Actually, no.” Kett put a hand in the water then pulled it straight out again. It had to be close to a hundred degrees. He made a mental note to check that the boiler wasn’t on fire.

  “Robbie,” said Pete. “Please reassure me about something.”

  “What?” said Kett.

  “It’s just, I really don’t want this image in my head, but the echo in your voice, the gentle lapping of water… you’re not in the bath, are you?”

  Kett laughed as he turned on the cold tap.