Before Liam could retort Craig scored the exchange, “Fifteen love” and waved the analyst on.
He woke up his smart-pad and turned it for them to see.
“OK. Davy said you wanted to know if the vehicles around the hotel were checked when the girl was taken. They were and they were all clear. Same thing with the French equivalent of an Amber Alert. All communications and media were alerted immediately and they checked cars, ports and airports for days afterwards. Bulletins were posted, searches were run and all known paedophiles were brought in, questioned and cleared.”
He turned the pad back to face him and tapped again, and a map of the south of France beside a larger one displaying the whole of Europe appeared.
“There were checkpoints set up for miles around and the police checked for anyone travelling with a little girl, but got nothing.”
Craig stopped him. “Did they look for anyone travelling with a boy?”
The computer expert shook his head. “No, unfortunately. I actually thought of that last night and checked. It seems obvious that they should have, kids of three mostly looking the same sex except for their hair and clothes, but they didn’t.” The screen darkened as he went on. “The problem is it would only have taken the abductor an hour to cross from Nice into Italy, so they could have been out of France and into another Schengen country before the blocks went up. From Italy...”
Craig nodded. “It’s into Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria or by ferry to Malta or Greece.”
Liam added glumly. “Then maybe into Turkey or the middle-east.”
The words triggered something in the analyst and he tapped and scrolled for a moment until he found what he was looking for, enlarging the page and turning it towards the detectives again. It was an image of a blonde infant with lighter blue eyes than anyone Craig knew.
He asked the obvious question.
“Bella Westbury?”
“Yes. When she was only fourteen months. I found it yesterday, in an EU-wide mothers’ chat-room where Nicola Westbury apparently went to interact after they moved to France. I guess she missed speaking to other mums in English.”
Craig sat forward for a closer look, a dozen thoughts vying for space in his head. After a short silence he voiced the first.
“Did other mothers share their baby photos on there as well?”
“Yep. There were dozens on there. But they had to register using their FaceChat accounts and it was password protected too. So pretty secure.”
Liam gave a sceptical snort. “Get away with you! You’re a flipping hacker, so you know how easy those groups are to infiltrate.”
Ash didn’t argue, but he did qualify his comment. “Infiltration’s not the issue. Yes, people can get into chat-rooms and even download the photos, but not without leaving some sort of trace-”He stopped abruptly, seeing a smile slowly forming on Craig’s face. “You want me to see if the chat-room was hacked, don’t you?”
“I do. And to trace any hack back and get me a name.”
The analyst’s normally soft voice became a whine. “But this photo was posted five years ago...”
“Consider it a challenge. You like those.”
Before Ash could confirm or deny it, one of Craig’s other thoughts came to the fore.
“Not the middle-east, and probably not Turkey, Liam.”
The D.C.I. was curious. “Why not?”
“Look at those eyes. She would have stuck out like a sore thumb in an Arab country.”
“Don’t some Arabs have blue eyes?”
“With olive skin, yes, but rarely with skin that pink. And rarely such a light blue either. The combination marks the girl out as a westerner. Maybe they could have fake-tanned her, and cut and dyed her hair, but even so, unless someone has invented tinted contact lenses for babies they couldn’t have changed her eye colour. Or if they did try to use lenses, she might have rubbed them out. Anyway, tinted lenses always look fake.”
Ash laughed. “Don’t tell Mary that, she was looking at buying some green ones last week.”
Craig rolled his eyes at his constable’s seemingly constant need to change her already attractive appearance and went on.
“No. I’m convinced that someone would have noticed Bella Westbury in an Arab state.”
“So what are you saying?”
Ash interjected. “I know, and I think you’re right, chief. I’ve visited India with my folks, and I’m guessing the middle-east isn’t much different; almost everyone has brown eyes of some shade. A child with those eyes would have been noticed, and why would a kidnapper have taken any risk of attracting attention? It’s just asking for trouble. Europol and Interpol circulated photos of the girl across the whole world, including the middle-east, and there was media coverage on her for weeks.”
Craig nodded. “Exactly. And those images will be on the Net for years, so if Bella Westbury’s not dead then she must be somewhere that she doesn’t stand out.”
The analyst anticipated his next request and pulled up a map of the world, moving the cursor from country to country as he spoke. “Scandinavia, Germany, The Baltics-”
Craig chipped in. “UK, Ireland, Canada, the USA, Australia. Anywhere that blue eyes are common, although they might have aimed for countries outside the EU to be safe.”
Liam’s face fell. “Damn. You’re basically saying we’ve no hope of finding out where she went.”
Craig shook his head. “No, not at all.”
He motioned Ash to revert to the map of Europe. “OK, look. There are only two real choices; either she remained in some European country where her eyes wouldn’t have stood out, or she was taken quickly to somewhere else similar. With the EU media covering the abduction they won’t have wanted to cross too many borders, not even the invisible EU Schengen type, so...” he gave a decisive nod as his thoughts suddenly crystallised “...I think she was transported out of Europe within days.”
“Not stay in France, chief?”
“With the gendarmes on alert? No.”
Liam warmed to the theme. “OK, so how? Plane?”
“Or boat, but plane’s more likely. So... flying from the EU countries already mentioned to Canada, America and so on would -.”
The D.C.I. interrupted again.
“But there’ll have been millions of kids flying every year.”
Craig turned back to his analyst. “Children of either sex between two and five, departing around the end of August twenty-fifteen. Can you do it, Ash?”
The younger man frowned. “I can check every country in the world if you give me a realistic deadline for when you want the answer.”
It was a dig at Craig’s tendency to want everything yesterday.
Liam was shaking his head.
“OK... But what’s to say they didn’t keep her somewhere till the heat had died down before they flew her out?”
“It could have taken months for the press coverage to wane, and we have to start somewhere, Liam. I think they’ll have had her on a flight within hours.”
Ash typed some notes on his screen, “OK, that narrows the search parameters a bit.”
Meanwhile, Liam had begun tapping the desk thoughtfully.
“Flying with a man or a woman?”
Craig considered for a moment before answering, “Either or both, probably posing as her relatives; maybe even parents. At that age she’d have been accompanied, or if she wasn’t then the airlines will have a very short list of kids that age travelling alone. They might also have had to put her on her supposed parent’s passport to fly, so check the ages for that, Ash. They could vary from country to country.”
The analyst typed some further points. “OK, I’ll check all that. I’ll look for any hair colour in case they dyed it, and coloured lenses would have been spotted by someone in passport checks. Even if the kidnapper spun some story about them being for medical reasons there should be a note of that somewhere.”
Liam shook his head. “You hope they would have been spotted.�
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Craig ignored him, mainly because he couldn’t afford any doubts that might knock him off path. “And remember, Ash, only eight to ten percent of the world has blue eyes of any shade so that might help.”
Liam was surprised. “Eight? Really?”
“Yep. We only think blue eyes are common because they’re common around here.”
Craig linked his hands behind his neck for a moment, wondering how he could narrow things down even further.
“Distinguishing marks have to be noted on passports, don’t they?”
“Yes. But what distinguishing marks would a baby that age have?”
“Birthmarks perhaps? We can ask Edgar Westbury if his daughter had any when we see him later.”
Liam sounded a warning. “Without getting his hopes up that she’s still alive, boss. You’ll put the man through hell.”
“Good point. Thanks. I-”
Ash pulled a face that made Craig break off to ask, “What’s that look for?”
“Well... it’s just, aren’t we being a bit optimistic here, chief?”
Liam cut straight to the point, although it made him feel sick to say it. “You mean the girl’s probably dead.”
The analyst swallowed hard and nodded. “Yes. I’m sorry, but... yes. We could just be looking for a straightforward paedophile like Pierre Galvet.”
Craig lurched forward. “You’ve found something more on him?”
“Nothing useful, sorry. He was definitely in the vicinity at the right time, but he had a job picking fruit from six every morning so he would have been at work when the girl was snatched.”
“Prove to me that he was and I’ll strike him off our list.”
The Hindu warrior’s eyebrows shot up. “How do I do that?”
“Dig into the detail. Contact the farmers Galvet worked for back then and get sight of their records. Odds on it’ll be a family farm and they’ll know all their regular pickers. See when Galvet clocked in and out on the day of the abduction and if anyone actually remembers seeing him there. Check the hours he got paid for that month from their tax records –they won’t have paid him if he wasn’t producing the goods, and with fruit picking the only way to do that is if you’re physically there working the hours and have fruit to weigh at the end of the day.”
Liam chipped in. “And see if he had the use of a car. It’s hard to abduct someone using a bus or train. People tend to notice that sort of thing.”
“Good thinking, Liam. Ash, if you need a hand with the French I can make some of the calls for you. Or Andy, he speaks it pretty well I think. ”He motioned to his deputy. “Tell the style icon here why Bella Westbury is unlikely to be dead, Liam.”
The D.C.I. screwed up his face. “OK. But brace yourself, Millennial, ’cos it’s disgusting.” He swallowed hard, trying to shut out the images filling his head. “So...whoever took the girl viewed her as a commodity not a person. Paedophiles mostly abuse children and discard them, either alive or dead, within hours of abduction, so either Bella or her body should have been found during the police searches-”
Ash interrupted. “But maybe they buried her somewhere quickly.”
“Unless it was very deep there’s too much risk of early discovery from wild animals, not to mention that the police use dogs in searches and they’re pretty good at finding things. And derelict buildings are out too; they’re some of the first places cops check. No, even if whoever took her had their own lockup or house they would’ve just abandoned her after the attack and legged it, and her body would have been found by someone by now.”
The analyst wasn’t giving up. “But what if they transported her to another country and then killed her?”
The deputy shook his head. “You’re giving the scum credit for having impulse control, but that’s not how they work. They see, they covet, they take, they abuse, and then they kill or abandon. It’s an urge that they either can’t or don’t want to control, and even waiting till they’d driven a kid an hour across a border would be too long for most of them.”
The D.C.I. took a deep breath, fighting hard not to vomit at the topic they were discussing. He took some small comfort in the fact that the others were looking just as bad.
“If they aren’t being driven by impulse then they’re being driven by profit, either financial or for the kudos they’ll get from their filthy mates.”
He stopped dead, his eyes pleading with his boss to pick things up. Craig stared down at his desk as he did.
“Liam’s right. The kudos comes from taking and circulating pornographic images of the child to other paedophiles, to establish and maintain their position in that community, and for that to occur the child has to stay alive. Or, God forbid, they’re an age preferential paedophile and they pass the child along when they age out of their preferred age group to someone who likes older children. But, importantly, in both of those cases the child would still be alive.”
The words, “but damaged” hung unspoken in the air, and nobody was even touching the pariah topic of snuff movies.
Liam signalled that he was ready to take over again. “The last and best option is that our kidnappers were motivated by money. I mean that the girl was stolen to order for someone who was looking for a kid.”
Ash’s eyes widened. “You mean to adopt them?”
“We hope. Abduction and illegal adoptions aren’t as uncommon as you’d expect unfortunately, especially now that a lot of countries are clamping down on adoption tourism.”
The analyst looked confused.
“That’s foreigners flying into poorer countries and adopting their orphans to take back home. It was tolerated at one stage in some places because of the high incidence of orphans after wars and such like, but popstars taking selfies have-” He broke off suddenly and gawped at Craig. “That’s another reason you were harping on about her eyes!”
“Yes.”
Ash was staring blankly at them so Craig explained.
“Sadly a great deal of the wealth in the world is still held in western countries, where blue eyes and fair skin are also more common. A lot of people want to adopt a child who looks like them and wealthy westerners can afford to pay. It’s a long shot but not out of the question that someone in the western world wanted a blonde, blue-eyed baby and Bella Westbury fitted the bill. Or the abductor might have just stolen her on spec, recognising that her colouring was likely to attract a good price and betting that they would find a buyer eventually.”
He shook his head sadly, thinking of Nicola Westbury. “Bella was only left alone in her garden for one minute, so someone must have been watching and waiting, and someone who might have planned the kidnapping for money fits just as much as a paedophile, more so in my opinion because of what Liam said about impulse control. That’s another reason I don’t believe that Bella’s dead; she was worth too much money.”
Liam had been nodding in agreement but now he screwed up his face in doubt. “OK, I know I’m playing Devil’s Advocate here, boss, but would a poacher really have taken the risk of stealing such a well loved child for cash? Knowing how hard her parents would hunt for her?”
“We’ll find out won’t we.”
Just then Craig thought of something and turned back to his analyst. “Do you have aging software on your computer?”
“I can easily get some. You want me to age the girl up from this photo?”
“And any later images that you can get your hands on. Let’s get a range of what she’s most likely to have looked like between her abduction and now.”
“What then? Should I circulate them to cops around the world?”
The detectives said “NO!” simultaneously and then Craig added a quieter, “No. Thank you. It could put her at risk. If whoever has her believes the heat’s died down they might relax, but if they get wind of us getting close they might kill her just to stay out of jail, no matter whether they’re raising her as their own child or not. Just produce the images and let me have them as soon as you can.”
He rose to his feet. “Right, that’s enough to get on with for now. Tell Davy I’ll call him later.”
With that Craig opened his office door and they exited. He paused as he passed his PA’s desk.
“Alice, we’re off to Monaghan now. You have the address. Inform the others that they can call me if they need to, please, and we’ll be back in time to brief at six.”
He glanced meaningfully at his deputy who was already heading for the lift and added, “Although the exact time depends on whether Liam drives like the usual maniac or not, in which case we may actually arrive back here before we’ve left.”
It earned him a shout of, “JUST CAUSE YOU DRIVE LIKE A NUN” from the D.C.I., but Craig’s intended snappy comeback of, “eighty isn’t slow!” was drowned out by a much more cerebral, “time doesn’t work like that” from the Doctor Who loving analyst who had just returned to his desk.
The exchange provoked nothing but a raised eyebrow from the secretary, who for her sanity’s sake had learnt to tune out most of the team’s banter in her months with them, now only ever listening to sentences that began with her name.
Liam’s, “I take it that means I’m driving again” as they entered the lift was accompanied by a martyred look that wouldn’t have fooled anyone, even if his tone hadn’t been so gleeful at the thought of the mileage claim he would be putting in.
“I need to think” was Craig’s only response, and think he did, not uttering another word until an hour later when they reached the invisible border between Ireland’s six and twenty-six counties, and even then only to voice a hope that, “Brexit doesn’t bugger this place up.”
Liam took it as a sign that political discourse was now in order, and as every person in Ireland regardless from where they hail lives and breathes such debate, with even airport taxi drivers giving up-to-date briefings on the state of the country and indeed the world before their tourist passengers have even reached their hotels, the next twenty minutes was spent as the locals said, ‘ripping the ass’ out of politics and everyone involved. The result of the debate was that Liam arrived at their destination thoroughly satisfied that he’d solved the whole of humanity’s problems, and Craig was left thinking that they should just press the off button, reboot the planet and start again.
The Depths Page 14