by Helen Fields
‘Did you see much of his face?’
‘No, I’m sorry. The car was dark, though – either blue or grey – and shite.’
‘We’re going to show Melanie some photos of different cars, to see what we can figure out about the make and model,’ DC Champion said. ‘She didn’t notice the number plate.’
‘Young people usually don’t,’ Connie said. ‘Adult witnesses often miss vital information about an offender or the mechanics of a crime because we’re all so conditioned by TV to get the licence plate. Often, that’s been tampered with or stolen and doesn’t help at all. I think the details Melanie’s been able to recall by not focusing on the licence plate will prove much more useful.’
Melanie gave her a shy smile of thanks. ‘Actually,’ she added, ‘about the number plate … the reason I didn’t get it was because it was covered with mud. Like really covered, all over.’
‘Clever girl,’ Connie said. ‘One last thing. Did you hear anything in particular when he drove away? Anything about the car and how it was moving?’
‘Um, no, and I was listening carefully, because I wanted him to leave and not come into the library. I was still worried he might have noticed me.’
‘So no squealing tyres or revving engine? Nothing like that?’
‘Nope,’ Melanie said. ‘Nothing like that.’
Connie gave her a nod. She was pleased to see the mother still holding her daughter’s hand. Parents reacted oddly to children when they were forced to interact with any type of official, whether that was the police, or doctors, or a school administrator. Melanie would be scared for a while, and she was going to need her mother to reassure her. Someone had kidnapped a kid, and when the media broke the story, every parent within a hundred miles was going to be freaked out.
‘You did great. I’m going to leave DC Champion to look at those car pictures with you then hopefully you can go home. If you feel stressed or scared, it’s important to ask for help. It’s normal. Don’t you keep that bottled up, okay?’
Tears appeared suddenly in Melanie’s eyes.
‘I’d better go have a chat with DI Baarda. The information you’ve given will definitely help,’ Connie said. She exited the library to cross the car park and join a group of officers stood around a crying woman and a man with a face that encapsulated all the tension of an unexploded bomb.
‘Are you normally late collecting her, Carmen?’ the man demanded.
Older than Carmen by several years and by multiple style generations, they made an odd couple.
‘Because if you’re always this late, then someone could have figured out that she’s always kept waiting out here,’ he finished.
‘Don’t you dare do that. You’re not going to make me feel guilty about this. Maybe Meggy’s mother finally turned up and decided to try her hand at a bit of parenting,’ the woman screeched.
‘Meggy’s mother left years ago. We’ve moved house twice since then, and she’s not the least bit interested in Meggy. If she really did want to see her, she could have just asked. She knows I wouldn’t ever stop her from seeing her daughter.’
Baarda stepped forward, hands at his side. Connie was impressed. Too many police officers intervened in heated situations with their arms up, palms forward, which without fail made people feel even more aggressive.
‘We’ll obviously do our best to trace Meggy’s mother if you’ll give us her details, Mr Russell, but we have to consider wider options.’
‘None of this is helping. Do you have cars out around the city looking for my daughter? You should be closing all the roads within the city and checking every vehicle. Why are we standing around talking?’ Meggy’s father was ashen and shaking.
‘The first thing we need to establish is that Meggy hasn’t simply gone elsewhere, become bored of waiting or decided to go to a friend’s house. There’s no firm evidence yet that an abduction did actually take …’ Connie caught his eye and raised her hand flat, fingers outstretched, dipping it left and right – maybe, maybe not. ‘… place.’ His voice trailed off. ‘Just give me a moment.’
Connie began walking away from the group, leaving Baarda to catch up with her, where they couldn’t be overheard.
‘What did the witness say?’ Baarda asked.
‘She heard raised voices, a man and a girl. Sounded like an argument, but she couldn’t make out the details. Then everything went silent. He didn’t drag the girl into the body of the car, though. That was the librarian summarising during the 999 call. Your witness says the man dumped something in the boot, and she got the impression he was having to put pressure down before he could shut the boot. We have a good description of him, less so of the vehicle. Muddy number plate, dark paint, blue or grey. The man looked around before driving off, presumably to see if anyone had witnessed the event. Drove off slowly, though, no obvious signs of panic, which if you’ve just stashed a girl in the boot of your car is unusually controlled.’
‘How credible is the information?’
‘Teenage girls are too often passed off as hysterical or attention-seeking. Something sounded wrong, so she checked it out, and she saw behaviour that made her feel scared. She didn’t embellish or dramatise. I believe her.’
‘Doesn’t mean it’s Meggy Russell. There could still be other explanations.’
‘Any of which would require a coincidence at this moment. One girl thinks another has been kidnapped. Independently, parents turn up to collect a child who isn’t where she should be.’
Baarda sighed. ‘Okay. We’ll put out a general alert, distribute Meggy’s details. I’ll get officers checking out Meggy’s known friends in case she was reporting any concerns. We’ll also need to access her social media, see if she’d made contact with anyone suspicious online.’
‘I’ve done all I can. I’m going to Angela’s house. I need to go back into the first crime scene, immerse myself in it, figure out what it was about Angela that attracted her killer. You coming?’
‘I think they need my help here,’ Baarda said.
‘I think they do, too,’ Connie said. ‘Watch the woman – Carmen. The father’s expressing distress and upset through anger. Carmen’s just pissed off at getting the blame. Not sure I’m seeing much real emotion there.’
‘You think she might be involved?’ Baarda asked.
‘It’s not that, but she doesn’t genuinely seem to care enough about Meggy, so maybe she was regularly late to pick her up. If that was the case, you’ll need to check for suspicious activity in the area going back a while. I’d guess that someone was watching the family home as well as the school.’
‘We’ll start canvassing the area now,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Connie. I appreciate the assistance.’
‘That’s okay. Sorry I called you an extra from a Jane Austen movie.’
‘No you’re not,’ Baarda said, already walking away. ‘Detective Sergeant,’ Connie heard him shout. ‘I want a helicopter in the sky straight away looking for a dark blue-grey car leaving this area or parked up with mud-obscured plates. I want this man left in no doubt that we’re looking for him.’
Chapter Twelve
Meggy stared at the inside of the door. The peepholes worked from the outside inwards. That was horrible. Being locked in was bad enough, but the thought of being locked in and spied on was extra disgusting.
As soon as he’d closed the door behind her, there’d been thumping and crashing on the staircase, and Meggy thought she’d heard him cry out. Slowly, she’d tried turning the doorknob, holding her breath with hopeful anticipation. She tried not to let her disappointment turn to tears, shifting her attention instead to the darkened flat. A bloom of light came from a crack in a doorway at the end of the corridor. Meggy wasn’t a fan of darkness. She didn’t dislike it as much as she hated the sight of blood, but still. She wanted to go to the light, to find a safe place.
Already she was imagining fashioning a weapon, searching for a phone, climbing out of a window. But the man was a creep, not an idi
ot. He’d known enough about Carmen to fool Meggy briefly and get her talking. He’d watched her, known Carmen was often late. And he’d been in the park that day.
She wondered how he’d found her. Not online. Meggy couldn’t be bothered with all that social media rubbish. YouTube videos sometimes for science projects, and there were some really funny ones on there. But it wasn’t like she’d been fooled by some old git trying to make out he was fourteen years old and looking for a girlfriend. She knew better than to give out her details over the internet.
A faint cough came from the end room as Meggy contemplated what her next step should be. She backed up against the door, her breath a hot lump in her throat. There were two options. Either the man had delivered her to someone for purposes best not considered in detail, or there was someone else here, like her, trapped and scared. If she were a delivery – Deliveroo! her brain screamed with inappropriate jollity – then she would be expected, and avoidance would be temporary at best.
Taking a shaky step forward, one arm reached out to the wall to keep her steady, Meggy walked towards the light. Beneath her fingertips, the sensation was of damp and crumbling paint. Her feet, lifting slowly as she went, registered the stickiness of old carpet. But the worst of it was the smell. In the near dark, with so little else to think about, that smell was everything, and it was getting worse the closer she moved to the room at the end.
Unmistakably, nauseatingly, she knew it was human shit. There was a proper word for that, a non-swear word, but her advanced vocabulary had gone on strike. Her imagination hadn’t. She had a vision of a genetically challenged half man, half beast, chained loosely to the floor, ready to pounce when she pushed the door fully open. A beast that needed freeing. Or that needed to kill. Or that needed to torture her first, then kill her, then eat her. Slow was worse, she told herself. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen. But she wasn’t going to creep towards it like some stupid slug sliding inevitably towards the salt.
The battle cry she released was half Amazonian, half William Wallace. Raising her arm ready to strike, determined to go down fighting, she charged. Kicking the door, she flew into the room, eyes scrunched, teeth bared as she prepared for the horror within.
It took her a moment to find the creature. Shivering beneath an iron-frame bed, face shoved beneath a pillow, naked and stinking with the matter covering her legs and the floor, was a woman. Meggy didn’t want to admit to herself that in spite of her terror, there had been a seed of hope that she might find an adult in there. Someone not evil, who would actually take care of her. This wasn’t that.
‘Is there anyone here who can help me?’ Meggy asked. ‘Please? I don’t know where I am.’
There was more than one room in the flat. Perhaps there was a real grown-up in here somewhere.
The woman looked up at the sound of her voice. That was progress. At least she could still hear and understand. She looked at Meggy, glanced away, frowned, looked again.
Meggy took a small step towards her, and the woman did her best to slither into the far corner beneath the bed.
‘I won’t hurt you,’ Meggy said, the words, those adult words, sounding entirely foreign coming from her mouth.
The woman was staring at the open doorway.
‘That man’s not here. He locked me in and left. It’s just us then, is it?’
The woman stared at her then looked down at her own legs. She began to cry. Meggy considered doing the same. Half an hour earlier she’d been standing in the school car park and wondering what was for dinner. Now she was trapped in a mostly dark, unknown place with a woman who’d completely lost control of herself.
‘My name’s Meggy,’ she said. ‘What’s yours?’
The response was louder sobbing.
She bent down and held her hand out to the woman peering from below the pillow. As she reached in, the mess on the floor gave off not just a stench, but palpable warmth. The realisation dawned that the woman had lost control of herself when she’d heard the door open. Presumably she’d thought the man was coming in. The full meaning of that sank in as Meggy stared at the physical and metaphorical pile of shit she’d landed in. If this grown-up couldn’t fight him, couldn’t bear the thought of what he might do to her, then how was Meggy supposed to survive it?
Weapon, she thought again. This is no good. Sitting here is doing no good. I have to find something to fight him with. She looked around. There were five plastic hooks on the wall, each with the same pale pink dress hanging from it, a darker pink ribbon at its waist, tiny white buttons down the front shaped like daisies. Who the hell needed five dresses exactly the same? Meggy wondered.
The light source was a small plastic child’s lamp with a peeled-paint Disney figure at its base. Hitting him over the head with that would be like smashing someone over the head with a paper plate, but she did need it to look around with and that meant unplugging the short lead and finding other power points.
‘I’m going to have a look round and I need the light. Will you be okay if I take it out of here?’
Then the woman met Meggy’s eyes, shaking her head in tiny small jerks at first, then whipping it to and fro, her matted hair flying.
‘No,’ she moaned. ‘No, don’t take the light, don’t, don’t take it.’
‘All right, but we have to do something, because I can’t stay here. I’m going to have to move the lamp to look around, but you’re coming with me, and we’re going to find something to clean you. You’ll have to do it, I’m not …’ Meggy tried not to let too much disgust show on her face. ‘But I won’t leave you. What’s your name?’
‘Elspeth,’ she whispered. ‘How old are you?’
‘Twelve,’ Meggy said, delighted that the woman – Elspeth – was finally forming words. Less pleased when the woman began to laugh, then cackle, then to cry again.
‘Twelve?’ Elspeth cried. ‘How can you help? We’re going to die here. He’s insane!’
‘Stop,’ Meggy ordered. ‘Don’t do that. If I don’t cry then you’re not allowed to, either. Grown-ups aren’t supposed to be stupider than kids. It’s not fair.’ She marched across to the doorway, identified the nearest electrical socket then marched back to the lamp. ‘I’m unplugging this now, but it won’t be for long, so you need to get up and follow me. And you can’t cry any more. It’s crappy of you.’ She pulled the plug and waited for the hysterics.
What she got was the noise of dragging then shuffling. A hand hit her shoulder first, then trailed down her arm to grasp her hand, hard. It was all Meggy could do not to pull away. Finding a weapon was important, but running water was coming a close second.
‘Is there a bathroom? We have to deal with’ – she waved a hand generally in the vicinity of Elspeth’s body – ‘all this.’
Elspeth managed a nod.
‘Show me.’
They went out into the hallway. The bathroom was on the left.
In the ceiling was a small inset light. Meggy tried the switch on the wall.
‘Won’t work,’ Elspeth said. ‘He controls the electricity from outside for the light and the heating. If I’m good, he turns the lights on.’
‘You should have a shower,’ Meggy said. ‘Tell me afterwards.’
The shower unit was nothing more than a head set into the wall and a circular base. No glass surround, or even a curtain that could have been pulled down.
As Elspeth showered, Meggy put her hand in the water to test the temperature. It was warm enough to be comfortable but not really hot. She looked around. A plastic sink sat in a vanity unit. He’d removed the doors of the cabinet the same way he’d taken the mirror from the wall. She didn’t like it. The man was much cleverer than she’d wanted him to be. He’d thought about everything. Really thought about it, not just like some stupid TV show where you could see fifty different ways you could get yourself out of trouble.
It took a few minutes for the stench to subside, but eventually Elspeth stepped out of the shower and took a small
towel from the radiator.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly as she rubbed herself dry.
‘That’s okay,’ Meggy told her. ‘Do you have any clean clothes anywhere?’
‘Pyjamas, in the bedroom. I’ll wrap the towel around for now. His name’s Fergus.’
‘Fergus,’ Meggy repeated. ‘Did he tell you that? Only it might not be his real name. He wouldn’t tell you his real name in case you escaped. Then you’d be able to identify him to the police straight away and they’d find his address …’
‘I don’t know if it’s real,’ Elspeth murmured. ‘But we got married. He said it all had to be legal and binding.’
‘You’re married?’
‘Not in a church. We did it here. He made me put on a dress and …’ Her words got swallowed between a breath and a cry, the noise a seagull might have made.
There were too many questions in her head. About Fergus. About the wedding. What he’d done to Elspeth. If he’d hurt Elspeth. If Elspeth thought he was going to hurt Meggy, too. But she didn’t want to hear the answers. She knew that sooner or later, she’d end up asking anyway. But not yet. Not while she could barely stand and her whole world had become comic book quicksand.
‘Show me everything,’ Meggy said. Lamp, hands joined, onwards.
She tolerated playing mum and pulled Elspeth along behind her, lamp tucked under one arm as she used her free hand to follow the path of the wall through the door, across the hallway, bend down, find the socket. Plug in the lamp. It flickered then lit up the room. Meggy made a mental note to be careful with it. Break the bulb and they were in for a long, dark night.
Disentangling herself from Elspeth, Meggy waited for her eyes to understand the room. It was a painting. All of it. A rectangular room, much like a sitting room in any other flat, but the windows …
Meggy stepped forward to run her hand across the wall, reassuring her eyes that they hadn’t disconnected from her brain.