by Cara Hunter
Quinn rolls his eyes. He clearly considers the line between clued-up colleague and pretentious know-it-all tosser is pretty thin too.
‘So why do you think this is different?’ says Gislingham.
‘Exactly,’ says Quinn quickly. ‘Even if this tosser did do something, what are the odds it was Faith? It could be absolutely bloody anyone. We don’t even know where these wankers live –’
‘Look at that last username,’ says Somer quietly.
They stare at her and then at the screen.
‘What, the YeltobYob one?’ says Quinn, none the wiser.
Baxter turns to her. ‘That’s just a name, isn’t it – like that BBC bloke, whatsisname –’
‘Alan Yentob,’ says Everett. ‘It’s not the same.’
But Somer is shaking her head. ‘It’s not a name at all,’ she says. ‘It’s backwards. Yob is Boy. And Yeltob is Botley.’
* * *
At Summertown High the bell has just rung for the end of the period. In the GCSE art class, students are rolling up sheets of cartridge paper and stacking paints and brushes on the long bench that runs underneath the window. Outside, the clouds are racing across a low grey sky.
The teacher stops behind Sasha Blake’s chair. She doesn’t seem to have heard the bell. Or if she has, she’s not as bothered as her classmates about getting to the next class. She leans back a little to scrutinize her watercolour of the still-life arrangement in the centre of the room. A white china bowl of plums and lemons, and a pale-blue jug with a sprig of forsythia. Along the side of her sketch she’s dabbed swatches of different purples. Reddish mauves, bluish indigos; none of them quite match the colour of the fruit glistening in the bowl.
‘You’re coming along, Sasha,’ says the teacher. He’s perhaps thirty-seven, with sandy hair thinning a little and a check shirt in a thick cotton that’s gone bobbly from long use. He’s not wearing a wedding ring.
‘You have a real eye. You should think about doing A level.’
She turns round, finally, and looks up at him.
‘There’s a book you might like,’ he begins tentatively, ‘Still Life by A. S. Byatt – it has a wonderful passage about how to describe the precise colour of plums – how to capture the bloom on them. In fact, it’s why I chose this particular arrangement –’
He’s just getting into his stride when one of the two girls lingering at the door calls over.
‘For God’s sake, Sash! Get a move on, can’t you?’
Sasha looks round and gets quickly to her feet. As she reaches for her bag, her long dark ponytail swings forward over her shoulder.
‘Sorry sorry sorry!’ she calls to her friends, rushing to clear her materials away. ‘Just got a bit sidetracked.’
‘Yeah yeah,’ says the other girl with a smile, ‘like that’s never happened before.’
Sasha grins and hoists her bag over her shoulder, throwing a half-apologetic, half-relieved glance at the teacher still standing behind her chair. The classroom door bangs shut behind the girls but he can still hear their voices filter back as they go down the corridor.
‘Was Spotty Scotty actually hitting on you back then?’
‘Er, that’s like, totally gross! Imagine him actually kissing you!’
‘He is such a creep!’
The man stands there, his cheeks flaming and his fists clenched, as their arrogant young laughter drifts slowly away.
* * *
Adam Fawley
2 April 2018
14.35
‘OK,’ says Quinn. ‘That username could mean this bloke is in Oxford. But we don’t actually know that. For a start, there must be other places called Botley, right?’
‘Two I’ve found,’ replies Asante steadily. ‘There’s a village near Chesham, in Buckinghamshire, and another one in Hampshire.’
I see Somer start a little, and then I remember – her new bloke is with the Hants force.
‘Right,’ continues Quinn. ‘So that’s two to one against for a start. And even if it is the Oxford Botley, we don’t know when it happened – we don’t even know if it happened at all.’
Asante leans over and presses a key. The comments under the last entry are now visible on the screen.
‘Shit,’ says Gislingham under his breath. ‘Shit.’
* * *
At the allotments, it’s starting to rain again. Nina Mukerjee parks the forensics van on the far side of the car park and sits there a moment taking in the location. The line of compost heaps, the noticeboard with posters offering surplus plants and second-hand tools, the skips loaded with broken bits of pot and slate. She’s been doing the job so long she sees everything as a crime scene. Fingerprints, smears, flakes of skin, tumbleweeds of dust. It makes eating at other people’s houses especially trying: the only kitchen that ever looks really clean is her own.
She pushes open the door and pulls her kit across from the passenger seat. A few yards away she can see Clive Conway standing by a shed behind a line of blue-and-white crime scene tape. The tape is whipping in the wind and Clive has his hand to his head, keeping his hood in place. She pulls on her protective suit then moves as quickly as its bulk will allow to where Clive is waiting for her. There’s no sign of CID, just a couple of uniforms milling about and stamping their feet to keep warm. She wonders who’s been put on the case – whether it might be Tony Asante. They discovered a while back that they have a couple of friends in common at the Met and he’s bought her a coffee once or twice since. She can’t decide if it was just out of politeness or whether he’s actually interested. Or what she’d do if he was. She’s seen the mess made by relationships at work and she likes that aspect of her life clean too.
Clive doesn’t bother saying anything when she reaches him, just pushes open the door, letting her see inside. Her uncle had a shed about this size when she was a child – she remembers the windows thick with cobwebs and sticky with snail trails, the shelves haphazard with rusting implements, the musty, dead-insect smell. But this is different. It’s neat enough to live in – well, almost. There are watering cans and plastic flowerpots stacked in lines on the shelves, spades and forks hanging on their own individual hooks, and on the work surface two bags of seed potatoes and a neat line of earth-filled seed trays with small white plastic labels and tiny spikes of green just visible here and there. The floor has been swept, even in the corners, but the dark stain spread across it tells a different story. As does the smell.
‘I don’t think there’s any doubt that’s urine.’ He crouches down and points. ‘I also found some shreds of hair. But no roots as far as I can see. In fact, I’m pretty sure they’re going to turn out to be extensions.’
* * *
Adam Fawley
2 April 2018
14.43
No kidding – my mate grabbed a hot cunt only to find she was packing a dick
submitted 9 hours ago by YeltobYob
6 comments share hide report
Serously? That really happened?
submitted 9 hours ago by downwiththegynocracy
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No shit. He said no way u cdve known. Well hot. Tits, arse, the lot. Until he gets her fucking pants down
submitted 8 hours ago by YeltobYob
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Fuck me – those chicks with dicks theyr the fucking worst. All come and fuck me + dont even have a fucking hole
submitted 8 hours ago by letscutthecrappeople7755
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Too fucking right mate. He said he shd have realized something was wrong when her fucking hair came away in his hand It was only fucking EXTENSIONS wasn’t it
submitted 8 hours ago by YeltobYob
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were the tits fake too?
submitted 7 hours ago by KHHVandsowhat88
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What a cunt. Hope he made her suck him off
submitted 7 hours ago by supremegentlemen89
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report
Never got the fucking chance. Anyway, who wants beard burn on your fucking dick. These tashhags are the worst slags of the lot
submitted 6 hours ago by YeltobYob
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* * *
Someone at the back mutters, ‘Sick bastards’; Baxter is shaking his head, Gislingham’s face has hardened. There isn’t much they haven’t seen, in this job, but it doesn’t make vileness like this any easier to confront.
‘He’s right about the extensions,’ says Somer into the silence. ‘We only just found out about that ourselves.’
‘But taking a step back, it doesn’t actually prove anything, does it?’ says Gislingham. ‘Like Quinn says, he could just be making stuff up to impress all the other shits, and it’s an easy guess to make. I mean, there must be quite a few trans girls who have extensions.’
But even if he’s right, it’s still a coincidence. And you know how I feel about coincidences.
Asante looks around. ‘You can see how it could have played out – if this bloke abducts her off the street, not knowing what she really is –’
Somer stares at him. ‘‘‘What she really is”? Please tell me you didn’t just say that.’
Asante looks uncomfortable. Now there’s a first. ‘I’m sorry. I was only referring to her pre-operative status, that’s all. If you’re an Incel it’s the ultimate betrayal – sex flaunted but then denied.’
‘Faith doesn’t “flaunt” herself,’ says Somer coolly. ‘She goes out of her way not to do that.’
I cut in. ‘Did Faith say whether she’d seen anyone hanging around recently, Somer? Anyone acting suspiciously?’
She glances at me and shakes her head. ‘We did ask, but she said not. Not that she’d noticed, anyway.’
But just because she didn’t see him doesn’t mean he wasn’t there. He could have been stalking her for days, and picked that precise moment, and that precise place, because he knew by then that she always passed that spot around that time. On the other hand, he might simply have been parked up in those garages having a fag when she happened to go by.
Gislingham turns to Asante. ‘Can we track him down through the website or is that asking too much?’
Asante hesitates a moment. ‘The ISP for the discussion board will have a record of the IP address that logged those posts – we’ll just have to hope they’re based in the UK –’
‘Right, so –’
‘– but as I explained to the DI, most of these boards don’t even ask for names let alone emails. And he’ll probably be on public Wi-Fi rather than his own account. These people use stations, libraries, coffee shops –’
‘Not people,’ interrupts Everett. ‘Shits. Total and utter shits.’
Gislingham frowns. ‘So you’re saying we won’t be able to identify him even if we get the IP address?’
Asante makes a face. ‘If he’s in a public place it’ll all depend on whether there’s CCTV, and even if there is –’
‘Right,’ says Gislingham. ‘So we’d better get a bloody move on, and organize a warrant.’
‘DC Asante’s also been monitoring the board,’ I say, ‘and YeltobYob hasn’t been online since he posted these comments.’
Asante looks around the room. ‘He doesn’t post that often but I’m going back through his past activity to see if we can find anything about him that way. Something that might indicate which Botley he’s talking about, for a start. But so far, it’s all the same poisonous misogynist venting.’
‘What about registered sex offenders?’ asks Baxter. ‘Shouldn’t we be checking all these Botley places in case anything pops?’
I shake my head. ‘Already done. And nothing doing.’
There’s a silence.
‘It’s not just what he says about the extensions,’ says Somer quietly, staring at the board. ‘It sounds like he was interrupted. Like Faith’s attacker was.’
I turn to Baxter. ‘Have we managed to track down the emergency vehicle Faith heard?’
He nods. ‘Squad car, sir. There was a burglary reported in Headington High Street and they got stuck behind the roadworks on the Marston Ferry Road.’
‘But the officers didn’t notice anyone entering or leaving the allotments? No van of any kind?’
‘Sorry, sir. I spoke to the two guys and they don’t remember seeing anything. But I’m getting the footage from the speed camera along there and the petrol station on the Cherwell Drive roundabout. And if he got away in the opposite direction he’d have passed Summertown High so the school CCTV may have picked him up.’
‘Challow and the CSI team are on-site,’ says Gis quickly. ‘And we have the cable ties and the plastic bag. We’re also going to question the neighbours in the immediate vicinity of where she was abducted. You never know, someone might have seen something.’
And yet they never bothered reporting a girl being kidnapped off the street right under their noses? Some hope. But there are motions to be gone through in this job, and that’s one of them.
‘And there’s the question of Faith’s handbag, as well,’ Somer continues. ‘Her mum went back that afternoon and found it chucked in one of the bins round by the garages. Minus the valuables, of course.’ She sighs. ‘Forensics will check it in case but it’s possible her attacker just left it where it fell and someone else came along later and stole the money and the mobile. But no one’s used the phone since.’
So GPS isn’t going to be any use either. Another cul-de-sac.
‘What about Faith herself?’
Somer makes a face. ‘She’s reluctant to be examined, sir, for obvious reasons – and in any case she’d showered at least twice before we spoke to her –’
‘But what about her clothes? There could be saliva – DNA –’
Somer shakes her head. ‘She threw the whole lot in the wash. It’s only natural, to react like that, but it does make our job ten times harder. The only thing we have is the shoes. We’ll get them tested, but I suspect it’s a very long shot.’
* * *
Interview with Jackie Dimond, 35 Rydal Way, Oxford
2 April 2018, 4.15 p.m.
In attendance, DC V. Everett
JD: I’m not sure what I can tell you, I hardly know the Applefords.
VE: We’re speaking to all the neighbours, Mrs Dimond. Sometimes people have seen more than they realize.
JD: This is about Monday morning, yes? I wasn’t even in then.
VE: Yes, you did say that. I was more interested in whether you’d seen anything unusual in the last few weeks.
JD: Unusual, as in?
VE: Anyone hanging around you didn’t know? Someone asking about the Applefords? Taking an interest in their house? Perhaps someone parked up in a van?
JD: Sorry, love. I’d have told Diane if anyone was snooping about.
VE: I thought you said you hardly know them?
JD: I don’t. But she’s on her own, isn’t she. Like me. No bloke to fall back on. I’d have definitely said something if I’d seen some pervert hanging about.
VE: Do you know the girls – Faith and Nadine?
JD: Not really. Mine are a bit younger so there isn’t much of an overlap, if you see what I mean. Faith is always very pleasant. Smiles and says hello. And always looks lovely, too. I wish my Elaine would smarten up a bit, but you know what teenagers are like.
VE: And Nadine?
JD: I can’t say I’ve had much contact with her, to be honest. Keeps her head down. Slouches. Doesn’t make the best of herself, you know? It must be tough, though, mustn’t it – with her sister being so attractive whereas Nadine –
VE: Actually, they seem pretty close to me –
JD: I mean – she’s not much to look at, is she?
* * *
By 4.30 Andrew Baxter has been staring at CCTV footage for over an hour. In front of him, on the screen, cars swing in and out across the petrol station forecourt. He’s found six vans so far, along with a horsebox, a vintage Harley-David
son he rewound a couple of times just to admire, two trucks from a travelling circus and any number of yummy-mummy SUVs in the thick of the school run. The chances of their man being there at all are pretty remote, as far as Baxter can see, and even if he was, how the hell are they supposed to recognize him? It’s a total bloody waste of time, that’s what it is. He pushes the chair back and gets up, feeling a headache lurking in the back of his neck. Must be low blood sugar, he thinks. Better be safe than sorry. Lucky the snack machine is only a few yards down the corridor.
* * *
Adam Fawley
2 April 2018
17.25
‘Pull up a chair – if you can find one.’
I’m in Bryan Gow’s office. Or, strictly speaking, his temporary office, since his building is being refurbished and the Department of Psychology is camped out in a few spare rooms in Plant Sciences. It’s a solid 1950s building on the South Parks Road with fixtures and fittings to match – wooden panelling and parquet floors and rare botanical specimens in glass cases. Though most of the potted living versions look in need of a good water and a bit of old-fashioned TLC.
Judging by the books heaped haphazardly on the only free seat, Gow’s current room-mate is an expert in psycholinguistics, whatever the hell that is. Last time I was here Gow spent the whole time telling me that it’s only for a few months and he really doesn’t mind sharing, but he isn’t fooling me. It seems there’s nothing more instinctively human than a desire for our own space. Even psychologists can’t talk themselves out of that one.
‘I wanted to run something past you,’ I say. ‘On Monday morning an eighteen-year-old girl was abducted near Cherwell Drive. I want to know who we should be looking for.’
He raises his eyebrows, then sits back and joins his fingertips together. ‘OK. Shoot.’
It takes me a good five minutes to tell him everything, but he’s frowning long before I’ve finished. And even more so when I give him the printout from the Incel board.