Paper Girls

by Alex Smith

  “Are you any closer to finding the paper girls?”

  “Why were two men arrested and then released?”

  “Is Lochy Percival guilty? Do you now suspect his involvement in the death of Jenny O’Rourke in 2013?”

  The poor bastard, Kett thought as he came to a halt in the middle of the waiting room. Percival was never going to be clear of that cloud.

  “I’d take the side entrance, sir,” said the sergeant. “They’ll eat you alive out there.”

  “Thanks,” Kett said, heading back the way he’d come. He bumped into Porter and Figg on the way. His old friend looked about twenty years older than he had yesterday.

  “Don’t listen to the boss,” Figg said with a shrug, smoothing down his goatee. “He’s just looking for somebody to take it out on. He’ll call you back in time. It’s this case, whoever did this is smart, and Clare feels outfoxed and outwitted. He feels stupid, and a man like him can’t handle that. Give it time, everything will become clear. It will be just like it was on the Khan case back in London.”

  Kett squinted at the FLO.

  “I hope not,” he said. “That little boy died.”

  “Oh, god,” Figg said, a hand flying to his mouth. “Sorry. He did. Well, you know what I mean, just don’t be too hard on yourself. Sorry.”

  Kett waited for Figg to scuttle away, then he turned to Porter.

  “Sorry about that,” the big DI said. “He bollocked me pretty good too, after you’d left.”

  “It’s my fault, Pete,” Kett replied. “He’s right. Ever since Billie… I don’t know. I went for the jugular before I took the time to work out exactly what I was trying to kill.”

  “Don’t kill anyone, daddy,” said Evie, genuinely concerned. She put her little hand to his cheek, her eyes full of worry, and it took some of the pain from the day.

  “I won’t,” he said. “In fact, I’m not going to do anything else today except take you guys home and chill.”

  He felt guilty for saying it, because there were three girls out there who needed all the help they could get. But he hadn’t been lying to Porter, Billie’s disappearance had changed him. It had made him desperate, and that made him dangerous. The Norfolk team were good, they were clever, they knew exactly what they were doing. It would be better for everyone if he got out of their way.

  “Well we’re right here,” said Porter. “If anything pops into your head, let me know. And thank you, Robbie. Whatever the boss says, it was good police work.”

  Kett shook the man’s offered hand as they parted, then navigated his way through the warren of corridors until he found the side exit. There was nobody around in this part of the building and he lifted Evie onto his shoulders before heading down the side of the nick and making his way into town. It was baking, the heat sapping his strength, but the longer walk was worth it because by the time he’d fought his way through the tourists and the shoppers and circled back to the library he was well out of the reach of the reporters. He could see them, though, further down the street. Clare was out there already, presumably giving a statement that involved much kissing of Lochy Percival’s arse.

  “Come on,” Kett said to Evie. “Let’s forget about all this and go get your sisters.”

  Forgetting about it proved more difficult than Kett would have liked. The instant he pulled the Volvo out of the concrete tomb of the library car park the news fizzled onto the radio, the three missing girls in Norwich now the headline on national radio. The man speaking wasn’t Clare, it was the top brass, the Chief Constable, and he was doing his best to plaster over a lot of mistakes. Kett prayed he wouldn’t hear Percival’s name, but there it was, bright and clear and just about perfectly pitched for a second lawsuit.

  “Fudging artholes,” he muttered as he drove through the narrow streets. It was only just gone two, a little too early to pick up Alice—although he was pretty much driving past her school. Instead, he made his way out of town and headed for the childminder. Most of the traffic was coming the other way, and it didn’t take long to reach the house. He was almost disappointed when Moira didn’t want to come home with him.

  “It happens all the time,” said the woman, whose name Kett still couldn’t remember. “It lets me know I’m doing something right.”

  Or that I’m doing something wrong, Kett thought, picking up the screaming, wriggling blob that was his youngest daughter.

  “Email me an invoice,” he said. “And thank you.”

  Moira settled on the way back into the city, so tired that for a while he thought she’d actually fallen asleep with her eyes open. It was a little late for a danger nap, but fortunately Evie was there prodding and shouting and generally doing all she could to piss off the baby. He couldn’t be bothered to tell her to stop.

  He parked the Volvo on the road behind Alice’s school, taking the girls to the little park there to pass the time. Evie was happy to explore, and Moira just wanted to fall asleep on the swing, so he pushed the baby for a while and did his best not to think about his failings. But how could he not? Arresting Stillwater had been an amateur move. He’d just been so sure that it was him, everything had been lined up—almost too good to be true. Here was a man who’d kidnapped a girl before, who displayed all the traits of a genuine psychopath, who was standing in an abandoned house with a knife in his hands and blood all over him. If he’d wanted to bait the police, he couldn’t have done it any better.

  But the cameras never lied. Stillwater was innocent.

  “Daddy, I need a poo,” said Evie after what felt like five minutes but which, when he checked his watch, turned out to have been nearly half an hour.

  “Is there ever a moment in the day when you don’t need a poo?” he asked Evie as he pulled Moira out of the swing. They walked down the street together, using the school’s toilet. Both girls went wild in the playground as they waited for Alice’s class to finish, but Kett did his best to avoid meeting the eye of any other parent. He wasn’t in the mood to talk.

  Alice wasn’t in the mood to talk either. She stomped out of her classroom, almost elbowing her teacher as she went. Mrs. Gardner flashed Kett a look that said, don’t worry, we’ll deal with this tomorrow, and he nodded back in gratitude.

  “You and me both, kiddo,” he said to Alice as they walked through the gate. “It’s been a bad day all round.”

  As it turned out, the bad day wasn’t done yet.

  Kett saw them before he’d even pulled up, two men and a woman sitting on the low wall of his house. They were on their feet and running towards him as he parked, the woman rapping on the window with her knuckles.

  “Daddy who are they?” Alice asked, her eyes almost wild with fear. “I don’t like it.”

  It didn’t take much to make Alice hysterical, and Kett popped the door of the car, clambering out with murder on his mind.

  “There are kids in here,” he hissed. “Why don’t you piss off and bother somebody else?”

  “There are kids out there, too,” said one of the men—in his fifties, Kett guessed, prematurely grey and wearing a chequered jacket that looked like it belonged in the 1970s. He aimed his dictaphone at Kett like it was a weapon. “According to our source you harassed and beat a suspect in an attempt to make him confess, even though there was video evidence of his innocence. Police video. Care to comment, DCI Kett?”

  Stillwater, he thought. The bastard must have gone straight to the papers.

  “You want a statement, talk to CID,” he growled. “Now get the hell out of my way so my children don’t have to see what a bunch of rotting arseholes looks like.”

  He opened Evie’s door, lifting her out and ushering her onto the pavement. Alice was out like a flash, wrapping her arms around Kett so hard she pulled his shirt out of his belt. He slammed the door and walked to Moira’s side, the reporters closing in.

  “DCI Kett, how do you respond to claims that you’re unfit for duty following the abduction of your wife?” asked the woman.

  “Dadd
y?” said Alice, speaking the words into his stomach.

  “You were forced to leave the Met,” she went on. “And you are currently meddling in an ongoing case in which you have no official jurisdiction. Is that right?”

  “Daddy!” Alice was screaming now, and Evie wasn’t far off joining in. The fury that churned inside Kett was greater even than that he’d felt sitting opposite Stillwater. It almost blinded him, the world burning like the surface of the sun. He pulled Moira from her seat, trying to steer past the reporters without tripping over Alice.

  “No comment,” he said.

  The other man—young, suited and booted—stepped forward, his phone actually glancing off Kett’s lips.

  “If you couldn’t find your wife,” he said, almost smiling. “What makes you think you can find three missing girls?”

  If Kett hadn’t been holding Moira in one hand, the other resting on Alice’s head to calm her, he would have punched the man in his face, no question. He would have knocked the bastard to the floor and broken his teeth and been damned with the consequences. But he couldn’t, so he didn’t. He put his head down and walked insistently through the melee until he reached the front door. Only when he’d opened it and ushered the children inside did he look back.

  “You could be out there searching for them too, you know,” he said. “Never mind me, you could be out there trying to find those girls. But look at you.”

  He did look at them, really look at them, in a way that made all three lower their gadgets. The two men muttered as they walked away, and the woman stared back at Kett with a genuine expression of remorse.

  “Look, off the record,” she said. “Do you think you’ll find them?”

  Yes, Kett wanted to say. They’re out there, they’re okay, wherever they are, whoever took them, we’ll bring them all home. He wanted to say that more than anything.

  But it wasn’t true.

  He sighed, hanging his head.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Then he shut the door.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  He wasn’t just a shit copper that night.

  He was a shit dad too.

  He couldn’t focus, his mind packed full of the case. There were three young girls in the house waiting for him to appear, waiting for him to emerge from the cocoon of his work, but the three girls he couldn’t stop thinking about were Connie and Maisie and Delia. He saw them in every worst-case scenario, and in most of those they were dead—doll-stiff corpses who stared at the sky with glassy eyes as their killer shovelled soil over them. Days had passed since they’d been taken, and with the world now looking for their kidnapper it was unlikely anyone would ever set eyes on them again.

  They’d missed their window. They’d messed up.

  He had messed up.

  He put the iPad on for the girls then he sat at the table while he waited for the kettle to boil. All he wanted to do was call Bingo down in London and ask the same damned question he always asked—any news?—but he managed to stop himself. The day was bad enough without another crushing blow.

  Billie’s gone, part of his mind told him, but he shook his head, refusing to believe it. Even now, even after all this time, he still expected to hear the jingle of her keys as she came through the door, the little ‘phew!’ she always breathed when she got home; he still expected to feel her arms wrapping themselves around him and her lips pressed against his.

  How have they been? she would ask. Little monsters?

  “Yeah, like always,” he said. “Moira had her first day at the childminder, she did really well. Alice is settling in, slowly but surely. And Evie helped me with a case. She’s going to be a detective for sure.”

  And you? How are you?

  “Better, now you’re home,” he said. He could almost smell her perfume. “Always better.”

  “Dad? Who are you talking to?”

  He realised his eyes were shut and he opened them to see Alice hovering in the doorway.

  “Nobody, sweetie,” he said. “I’m just tired. You ready to tell me how school went?”

  She didn’t reply, just hung onto the door and swung to and fro.

  “You hungry?”

  She nodded, and Kett stood up, grabbing a mug and throwing a teabag into it.

  “Takeaway?”

  “Or you could cook?” she said. “I miss normal food.”

  Mum food.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “Go watch something, I’ll be through in a minute.”

  She didn’t move.

  “Alice,” he said, a warning now. She scowled at him, then turned and slouched back to the living room.

  He sighed as he prodded the teabag with a spoon. He was being an arsehole to her, he knew. None of this was her fault, and she needed him now more than ever. But there was an invisible barrier between him and the kids tonight, he didn’t feel connected to this world. He was deep inside the dark, cold ocean of the case and he was sinking fast. This was his lot, this was the company he was destined to keep—the missing, and the dead. Until he, too, was so lost that his kids would never find him again.

  Christ, he said, rubbing his eyes. Just go spend some time with them. Just be with them.

  Spending time with them wasn’t a problem. He carried his tea through to the sparse living room, squeezing onto the sofa and letting Moira and Evie climb onto his lap. Reluctantly, Alice held the iPad where they could all see it, some Netflix show he half recognised.

  But he wasn’t with them. Not really.

  Where were the paper girls? What connected them? What did they have in common? Who did they have in common? Connie, snatched on her route and dragged into a dead person’s house. Maisie too, less than twenty-four hours later. And Delia, taken from her own house even as her mother lay dying on the kitchen floor. She was the first, and Kett was almost certain her kidnapper had botched the job. He hadn’t meant to murder Evelyn Crossan. That’s why he’d altered his MO, targeting the girls as they delivered to dead houses on their rounds where they were unlikely to be interrupted. Why else had his pattern changed so drastically?

  But how did he get the girls from the houses to wherever he was keeping them? They were all slight, but even an eleven-year-old could pack a punch if she wanted to—Alice gave him problems sometimes, when she was having a serious meltdown, and she was only seven. They could scream the world to pieces if they needed to. The kidnapper had to have had a car, which meant—unless he’d killed them outright, which there was no evidence to support—he’d carried the girls kicking and screaming to the kerb, fumbled for his keys, dumped them in the boot, all in broad daylight. And yet they’d canvassed every street, every house. No witnesses.

  There was the question, too, of why the kidnapper would need three girls. It didn’t make any sense.

  “Dad!” Evie grabbed his mouth, twisting his lips. He wrenched free.

  “What?”

  “Moira’s chewing the cable again,” said Alice, trying to pull the iPad charger from the baby’s mouth. Kett grabbed it and yanked it free—a little too hard. Moira’s eyes welled, her bottom lip jutting out.

  “Sorry,” he told her, but it was too late. She threw herself back, almost tumbling off his knee, and when he lunged for her he knocked Evie onto her older sister’s lap. And then they were all screaming.

  “Sorry!” Kett yelled. “Just be calm.”

  He picked Moira up, clamping her to his chest.

  “Keep the noise down, okay,” he said as he stood up. “I’m going to try to get her to sleep.”

  He left the room, the anxiety like a lead weight in his gut. What he wouldn’t give to have his wife here, their mother. What he wouldn’t do for an extra pair of hands. It was impossible, he simply couldn’t do it.

  He used his phone to search for nearby delivery places as he carried the baby up the stairs, settling on a Chinese that was one street over from the Walker shop. He made an order for chicken balls, spring rolls, and chips—although whether th
e guy on the phone could hear him over Moira’s screams was anyone’s guess.

  Ignoring the fact that there were still no curtains in the master bedroom, he laid the baby on the bed. Trying to change her nappy was like trying to wrestle a bronco, and at one point he thought her kicking heel might have shattered his nose. He bit down on the anger as he lay next to her and held her tight, plastering her sweaty head with kisses until, at long last, she calmed down. She lay there, sniffing, every breath hitching in her throat. She lay there, and he sang to her.

  “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy, when skies are grey.”

  It was Billie’s song, the one she’d sung to each child in turn every single night before they went to sleep. He’d carried on the tradition, even though it was the hardest thing imaginable, even though every verse was torture.

  “You’ll never know dear, how much I love you. Please don’t take my sunshine away.”

  Billie’s magic worked, though, even thought it was conducted through him. Moira settled, pawing at his face with her chubby fingers. She lay that way for a while, almost asleep, almost awake, but she didn’t go off entirely. Neither did he, although in the heavy silence he easily could have done.

  “Addy,” she said after a while. “Shoes.”

  “I thought you were tired?” he replied.

  “No, shoes,” she said, then something that sounded like ‘open peanut butter horse.’

  “I don’t have a peanut butter horse,” he said, stroking a finger down her cheek. “Sorry.”

  She sighed again, then sat up, scrubbing her eyes with her fists.

  “Shall we try again after dinner?” he asked.

  “Nana.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”