Paper Girls

by Alex Smith

  Something told Kett that wouldn’t be a problem.

  “I’ll come with you,” Kett said to Porter as the coppers began to organise themselves. “I’ve chased guys like this before, they—”

  “Kett,” Clare bellowed. “Come here.”

  Kett sighed, but did as he was told. Hoiking Moira up, he crossed the room to the boss.

  “Look, I know—”

  “Not happening,” Clare interrupted. “I told you yesterday, we can’t offer babysitting services, especially not to a detective who isn’t even on the payroll. You’re grounded, Kett. Until the kid goes someplace safe, I don’t want you out of this room.”

  It was pointless arguing, so Kett shut his mouth. Moira spoke for him, firing a heartfelt raspberry in Clare’s direction.

  “Ni-Ni-Saw,” she said again.

  Clare ignored her, gathering his papers and leaving the room along with everybody else. Well, almost everybody. Raymond Figg remained, and PC Savage stood on the other side of the table with a folder in her hand.

  “You too?” Kett asked her.

  “The boss is a little annoyed with me for letting you go into the Walker flat yesterday,” she said. “He hasn’t, like, said it, but it’s pretty easy to read his mind.”

  “Sorry,” said Kett, but she waved it away.

  “I’m just lucky to be in here at all,” she said, putting the folder on the table. “I feel like I’m pretending to be a detective.”

  “Join the club,” said Figg as he carted a bunch of files to the photocopier. “I’m actually a detective and I still feel like a complete imposter here.”

  “Nothing pretend about it,” Kett said, putting the squirming baby on the floor. “You’re first class police, Savage. What’s he got you working on?”

  “Phone duty,” she said. “We’re calling the other paper girls who worked for David Walker, seeing if they know anything. To be honest, we’ve spoken to most of them already and none of them have a clue. A few have ‘fessed up to selling cigarettes on the heath, and a couple even knew that there were drugs inside. They’re all scared shitless, and none of them are delivering any more. But he wants me to go through them again, push them for anything they might be hiding, maybe try some of the other newsagents too. Figg’s helping out, aren’t you, Raymond?”

  “Anything to get these bastards,” he replied as he hammered buttons on the copier.

  “Sounds like fun,” Kett said, pulling out a chair and groaning as he eased his aching body into it. “Well, there are three of us now, so what do you want me to do?”

  Savage smiled, pushing the folder across the table.

  “You any good on the phone?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Okay, thank you. And if she thinks of anything else make sure she gets in touch immediately.”

  Kett muttered a goodbye and replaced the handset on its cradle, rubbing his eyes.

  “I can’t believe you got me out of bed for this,” he said.

  It was only just gone half nine, but he felt like he’d been awake for days. The buzzing strip lights in the windowless room had kickstarted his headache again, the pain not helped by the fact he’d just had exactly the same conversation with twelve different mums and dads.

  “Why aren’t you doing anything?”

  “Why haven’t you found them?”

  “It could have been my girl, do you realise that? She’s extremely upset.”

  “Are they going to be compensated for the hours they miss?”

  People really were dicks.

  Savage held up a hand to silence him, the other holding her own phone to her ear.

  “We will keep you posted, Miss Swain. Thank you.”

  She ended the call and looked at him.

  “Huh?”

  “I said I can’t believe you got me out of bed for this,” he repeated, checking on Moira. Savage had given the baby her mobile phone, and as much as Kett hated the idea of beating his child into silence with an endless run of Peppa Pigs he was grateful for the break. She hadn’t moved or spoken for about forty minutes. It was a miracle. Figg had made a few calls too but had left after a while, heading for the cafeteria, his stomach rumbling.

  “Who’s left in your pile?” Savage asked. “Mine’s done.”

  Kett leafed through the four remaining files.

  “Do you want Delia or Abi?” He laughed. “Delia. Only in Norfolk, right?”

  “I couldn’t get through to either of those two yesterday,” Savage said, taking Abi’s file. “Better luck today, eh?”

  Kett dialled the number on Delia’s file, staring at her information as he waited for somebody to pick up. Cordelia Patrice Crossan, eleven, 14 Drayton Close Road, Date of Employment: 23.03.18, routes: Drayton North, Fakenham Road, Friday / Saturday / Sunday.

  On the other side of the table, Savage was speaking to Abi’s family, but his line kept on ringing, eventually clicking into silence. He put the handset down.

  “Thank you,” said Savage, ending her own call. “Anything?”

  Kett shook his head.

  “No answer. You say you couldn’t reach her yesterday?”

  “No, although I don’t know if somebody else did.”

  “You brought in Walker’s files from the shop, didn’t you?” Kett asked. Savage pointed over her shoulder to a mountain of evidence boxes in the corner of the room.

  “He was about as good at keeping records as Porter is at making tea,” she said as she scooped the last two files from Kett’s side of the table and started to call. “We haven’t had time to go through it yet, but it’s all— Oh, hi, this is Police Constable Kate Savage calling from the Norfolk Constabulary.”

  Kett left her to it, crossing the room to the boxes and opening the lid of the top one. Savage hadn’t been lying, they were stuffed with seemingly random pieces of paper, receipts, payslips and notebooks full of route logs. He picked up a book and opened it, seeing entries from last August. He tried another, then another, eventually finding one from this month. Each page had a list of customers, papers, and which route they were on. Stapled to every corner was a timesheet for each delivery girl. The goosebumps stood to attention on his arms when he saw Maisie’s name on Tuesday. Flicking back a couple of pages he found Connie too. He carried the book back to the table and found Delia’s file again.

  “Friday, Saturday,” he muttered to himself, running his finger down the entries for both days. There was a note next to Delia’s name on the space for Sunday afternoon.

  No show, Eleanor to cover.

  “Hey,” he said when Savage had hung up the phone. “Delia Crossan, the girl you couldn’t get hold of. She didn’t show up for work on Sunday.”

  Savage looked at him, a frown creasing her forehead.

  “That’s odd,” she said. “Worth a visit?”

  Kett checked his watch. It was nearly ten.

  “Definitely,” he said. “I’ve just got to make a quick stop first.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The stop wasn’t as quick as he’d hoped. By the time he’d found the address the nursery worker had given him—a cute semi-detached house south of the city, ‘Welcome to Bumblebees!’ written on a sign above the door—it was way past ten, and even though he’d insisted he was in a hurry, the girl who met him at the door had a ream of paperwork for him to fill in.

  The good news was that Moira had been all too happy to stay there, waddling into the large, airy living room to join the two little kids that were already inside. She hadn’t even noticed Kett saying goodbye. It had been hard to leave her, of course, his ‘what ifs’ going into overdrive as he walked out of the front door. He had to resist every urge to pin the childminder to the wall and grill her about whether she was a serial killer or a child trafficker. In the end, Savage had practically pulled him out of the house and thrown him into the Volvo.

  “She’ll be fine,” she said as Kett started the engine. “I promise. I Googled them when you were signing the paperwork, four-point-eight on Trust Pilot. Moira’
s in safe hands.”

  “She’d better be,” he grumbled as they headed to the circular again. His anxiety chewed away at him while they ground their way through traffic, easing only when they pulled into a quiet residential close on the other side of town twenty-five minutes later. He cruised past the houses, counting numbers, before stopping at a detached, two-storey chalet bungalow with a floral 14 painted on the gate post.

  “By the book, this time, okay?” Savage said as she popped her door and clambered out.

  “Hey, I basically wrote the book,” he replied, stretching until his spine popped. He’d automatically walked to Moira’s door before he remembered he was child free. It was such a strange feeling that he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.

  “Curtains are drawn,” said Savage. “All of them, upstairs too. Must have a loft conversion.”

  “Maybe they’re just late risers,” Kett replied. “Or on holiday.”

  “If they were on holiday, they would have let Walker know,” Savage said as she opened the gate and stepped onto the uneven flagstone path. The garden was overgrown, but what was growing there was beautiful: great piles of lavender and rosemary and even a rosebush against one of the windows. The smell of it was intoxicating. “Walker wrote ‘no show’. She just didn’t turn up. And their car is here.”

  She nodded to the driveway on the other side of the garden, an ancient blue Renault 4 parked there.”

  “You should be a detective,” he said with a smile.

  “I’m working on it, sir. Do you want to do the honours?”

  “Nope, this is all yours.”

  He stood back as Savage rapped on the door, the sound of it making his ears ring.

  “That’s some knock you’ve got,” he said.

  “My granddad taught me,” she replied. “You want them to know you’re here, and that you’re in charge.”

  The street was incredibly quiet, the only sounds the pigeons warbling in the trees and the faint buzz of somebody’s lawnmower. It was hot again, too, the air seeming to swim. If there was somebody in the house, they weren’t answering. Savage knocked again, so loud that Kett half expected the glass to shatter.

  “Mrs. Crossan? Delia? It’s the police.”

  Nothing. Kett was getting that feeling again, an instinct gnawing at his intestines. There was nobody inside the house. There was something in the stillness of the place, its immense silence, that made him sure of it. He pushed through the garden, brambles snagging on his trousers and the smell of herbs exploding. There was an integral garage, and past that a small, weed-littered gravel passage that led to the back garden. He crunched his way down it until he reached the kitchen door. A cat sat there, scrawny and ginger, and as soon as it saw him it came over and started rubbing itself against his leg.

  “Hey,” he said, reaching down to tickle its head. It purred like a generator. “You live here?”

  The cat meowed a reply, but it wasn’t really necessary. There was a cat flap in the white PVC door, a food dish beside it that was empty of anything except flies. The noise they were making made his skin crawl, because what he was hearing wasn’t the buzz of a few bluebottles, it was the sound of hundreds.

  “Savage,” he called out. “Better get back here.”

  Gently nudging the cat out of the way, he crouched down beside the cat flap. He didn’t even have to open it to know what he was going to find in there, the smell hit him like a fist, right in the back of the throat. He put one hand to his mouth then used his knuckles to push open the flap. The smell roared out like it was trying to escape, a few flies batting against his hand. It was too dark inside to see much, but despite the shadows and the stench-induced tears in his eyes he was pretty sure he could make out the outline of a body lying in the middle of the kitchen floor.

  “Sir?” Savage said as she emerged from the passageway. She sniffed the air. “Oh fudge.”

  “It’s okay, Savage,” he said. “I think this is one of those occasions where the word ‘fuck’ is perfectly acceptable. Call it in.”

  She put a hand to her radio and started talking. Kett stood up, tried the handle, then grabbed a large piece of flint from the shrubbery.

  “Stand back,” he said, turning away as he lobbed the stone at the glass panel in the door. It punched through with surprisingly little mess, and Kett kicked the rest of the glass from the frame before reaching in and finding a key in the lock. Twisting it, he opened the door and stepped into a thunderous vortex of flies. “Police!” he yelled. “If anyone is here, make yourself known immediately.”

  It took him a moment to find the light switch, the fluorescents blinking on reluctantly, as if they didn’t want anybody to see what lay there on the cracked linoleum.

  “Fuck,” said Kett, taking a deep breath through his mouth.

  It was the body of a woman, or maybe a girl, dressed in denim dungarees and a cream blouse, her bare toes pointing to the sink. It was impossible to tell how old she was because she was face down beneath a shroud of blood-matted hair. It was as if somebody had covered her in a blanket of flies. They crawled everywhere, the angry noise of them making Kett’s skin itch.

  “Oh shit,” said Savage as she walked in behind him, waving a hand to chase away the insects. “Ambulance on the way, backup too.”

  “It’s a little late for an ambulance,” Kett said. “But Delia might be here.”

  “I’m on it,” said Savage, stepping carefully around the woman and vanishing into the darkness of the hallway. It was impossible not to have flashbacks from yesterday, a shape bouldering out of the shadows, a hammer gripped in its meaty fist.

  “Just be careful,” he shouted after her, and in response he heard the sound of her flicking out the telescopic baton.

  He turned his attention back to the woman, fishing a pen from his breast pocket and using it to pull the hair from her face. An eye stared up at him, bloodshot and broken like a cracked egg. Her skin was mottled and black where the blood had pooled post mortem, and the flies had laid eggs there, hundreds of them. He couldn’t make out much, but he could see enough to know that this wasn’t a young girl.

  He didn’t want to disturb the crime scene, so he let the woman’s hair drop and followed Savage out of the room. She’d found the light switch in the hall, the bulb doing nothing to fight the oppressive shadows that had gathered there like ravens. All Kett wanted to do was rip the curtains open and crack the windows, but there would be forensic evidence everywhere.

  There could be girls too, he knew. Maybe three of them.

  “Dining room is clear,” said Savage, appearing beside him. “I’ll check upstairs.”

  She creaked her way up the narrow wooden steps, and Kett peeked into the small toilet before heading through to the living room. He switched the lights on with his knuckle, seeing a cosy space full of photographs, a sagging couch covered in homemade cushions, a small TV perched precariously on a bookshelf.

  “Nothing up here,” Savage called down. “Two bedrooms and a bathroom.”

  She walked down the steps, her face ghostly.

  “Living room is clear as well,” Kett said. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” Savage said. “I will be. I’ve never actually, you know, seen one before.”

  She didn’t have to say what, it was written all over her expression. He’d been exactly the same the first time he’d witnessed a dead body—a road traffic accident in his second week of duty as a PC. He hadn’t been able to stop seeing the young man’s face for months, the way his jaw had been cleaved off by the windshield of his motorcycle. That face had been everywhere, in every thought, in every nightmare, enough that he’d almost handed his notice in three months later. It had been a grizzled sergeant who had talked him through it in the end, who had taught him how to push the memory from his skull and keep it out of his dreams.

  “I’ll deal with the rest,” Kett said. “Head out and wait for the ambulance. Does the boss know?”

  “I couldn’t get through to him, but di
spatch will. I spoke to Porter.” She took a deep breath, a soft groan spilling out of her. But she stood tall. “I’m okay, sir. If that’s Delia’s mother then we’ve got to assume the worst about Delia, right?”

  Kett nodded.

  “Find out if she was staying with any relatives,” he said. “I don’t see any sign of a dad here, no photos on the wall. Maybe she’s with him. Grans, aunties and uncles, friends, anyone she might be with.”

  It would be a futile search, he knew. Delia hadn’t shown up for work on Sunday, and it was clear her mother had been dead for days.

  “But I’m pretty sure this was an abduction,” he said, walking into the living room again.

  “You think it’s our guy?” Savage said.

  “Same age as the other victims, same employer. Yeah, it’s our guy. I think it went wrong because this was his first. The suspect got to her here, killed the mother, then took Delia. That would have been Saturday night or Sunday, because she was supposed to be working on Sunday but didn’t show. Might be why he snatched the others from dead houses on their routes, when he knew they’d be alone. He didn’t want to murder any more parents.”

  “Jesus,” said Savage.

  Kett walked to the fireplace, studying the grid of photographs that had been hung there. Most showed a grinning young girl and her mother—in Paris, at the seaside, bundled up in duvets together on the bed—and Kett had that same awful feeling of disconnection he always felt in these situations, the knowledge that the woman in those photographs was now a cold, stiff piece of meat in the other room. Had she ever suspected that this was how her life would end? That her last sight would be of her killer dragging her daughter out of the house?

  You never see it coming, he thought. You never think it’s going to be that way. Billie hadn’t. Billie had never suspected that one day a van would screech to a halt beside her and that two men in animal masks would tear her kicking and screaming from the world.

  Kett screwed his eyes shut against the wave of vertigo that swept through him. Only when the dizziness had passed did he dare open them again, and when he did he found himself staring at another photograph. This one wasn’t in a frame, it had been blu-tacked just above the mantelpiece along with a handful of others, one corner peeling away from the wallpaper. He grabbed it by the loose side and pulled it free.