by Hylton Smith
Chapter 16
A new dawn, more people back on the treadmill, and time to shed the excesses of the last few days. Prentice arrived, unlocked his office door, and managed to get to the front of the caffeine queue without even trying, a la parting of the Red Sea. He had a dilemma, he always had a dilemma, but this one was precarious. He’d slept fitfully over whether or not to slap Olivia in the face with the wet fish of her parentage. There were pros and cons, and he was unusually apprehensive about Gladstone’s curt invitation to do exactly that, challenge Olivia. She would be here any minute and he was still shifting from one foot to the other, when Martha rescued him. She had been waiting for such a moment. Of course it had been DI Jones who said the security cameras should be checked, but she’d done the legwork around Hamsterley Mill, and galvanised the residents, leading to a very quick strike. She convinced herself that Jones wouldn’t have achieved this breakthrough, more likely he’d have pissed off most of the residents with his detached approach, whereas she’d focussed on the plight of a little boy with ‘severe’ neurological difficulties. Every mother would respond, and they did. She deserved some recognition for this, and wouldn’t get it from her immediate boss.
When Prentice saw the still he flopped into his chair. “Are we sure about this Martha? All the residents claim they’ve never seen this guy before?”
“Yes sir, well most of them. I pressed every single one for a definite answer. A significant majority of them were absolutely sure he didn’t live there. It’s not a vast, sprawling estate and they have a vigorous residents association. The committee members always approach new residents about joining. Nobody knows this man. I didn’t push it too far, because he’s a hell of a good descriptive match for Derek Wallace’s tall and bald guy. Some of them might have blabbed to the press, if I’d got over-excited.”
Prentice responded. “And we’ve got him close to Olivia’s house at about the right time. By the way, what time was on this frame when the footage was paused?”
“Another hit sir, this is the best shot of him, but we do have others. He was seen before and after the call to Peter Radford. If only we knew which vehicle was his we’d have him.”
Martha wanted to be ordered by Prentice to get on to this immediately, and find the owner before Jones arrived. It was sanctioned. “Do it, and while you’re at it, get this still image of him cropped and enlarged, it’s a bit grainy, but we need a bigger mug shot.
*
Tom felt utterly empty again. For a few days the investigation had periodically lurched forward, but from his standpoint it had stalled again. He called his brother. “It’s me, just a quick call to hear if there’s any news on whether we have a date for the funeral yet.”
“Yes, I should’ve got back to you by now but I’ve been snowed under with lots of other things. January the fourth is the earliest we can get, so I went for it. Listen Tom, this other stuff, I had to look into Dad’s will, and I don’t quite know how to put it – he left the flat to me. He never spoke to me about it and I just assumed it would pass on to both of us.”
“Don’t get into a spin Michael, you’ve done everything for him, I wasn’t there. I’m good with this, he always knew what he wanted. I’ll have to let you know if anything crops up, otherwise I’ll be there on the fourth.”
“Well, that’s another thing, my girlfriend wants me to move in with her, has done for a couple of years. Now that he’s gone I ain’t got an excuse. Anyway, I can’t stay in the flat now, there’s too many memories there. I have to get out. I’m putting it up for sale after everything else gets sorted.”
“Right, so I can still stay there with you for the funeral? And this doesn’t change me paying the bill for Dad’s send off.”
“Leave it out, he left some money Tom, not a big lump, but more than enough to take care of the arrangements.”
“No Michael, I’ve learned a lot about my own priorities recently, and it must sound strange, but all I want from him now is the letter of my acceptance for Uni. The fact that he hung on to that piece of paper right to the end breaks me up. I’ll treasure it for the rest of my days, especially when I come back to London for good. Ok bro, see you on the fourth.”
*
Olivia arrived and seemed impatient to get on with whatever it was that Prentice had told Tom, in order to justify him being excluded. Coffee was declined. Prentice had Martha’s picture in his hand as he talked. “We may have a new lead and I wanted to show you something, without you having any distractions of any kind. Please take your time, have you ever seen this man before?”
She looked, seemed unperturbed, and was in the process of handing it back, when she hesitated. Taking her reading glasses from her bag, she subjected the still to a much more thorough examination. Her pallor became distinctly grey. She put the picture back on the desk and accidently knocked over a table lamp with her elbow. “I’m sorry Inspector, I, I, it’s such a shock after all these years. Now I know why I thought the voice on the message was vaguely familiar. Where was this taken?”
“Just outside your house, on the night Peter was attacked.”
“Oh God, no, no, please no.” This was not the Olivia of the last few days. She’d caved in emotionally, and now she couldn’t catch her breath. In a moment of panic she uttered, “I’m hyp-hyper-ventilating.”
Prentice opened the office door and yelled, “A plastic bag, someone, quickly, a plastic bag.”
Several minutes later, and breathing heavily but in control she whispered, “You’re right, someone is trying to get at me. I’d never have believed he would come back. He’ll hurt Kieron, I know he will, just to get back at me. You have to stop him Inspector. I can help you to find him, I have records at the hospital and other stuff at home. Can we go to the hospital first, his name and address will be on file from twelve years ago. We have to hurry.”
*
“Daddy wasn’t there.” He hadn’t forgotten altogether.
“I know Kieron.” It was the first time the nice man had used his name. “I’m going to see him, because I’m very angry about that. What do you want to do when I’m away?”
“Come with you.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea because there might be a big argument, and you don’t like shouting do you?”
“No. Can I play my puzzles again?”
“Of course you can, I won’t be long.” He showed Kieron a picture of the London Eye. “Would you like to see it, and maybe have a ride on it?”
“Yes, yes, a ride.”
“There, I’ve put a new puzzle on the screen for you. I’m going to bring you a giant ice cream back.”
“Ice cream, I like strawberry.”
*
Olivia went directly to records with Prentice as her shadow. She asked for a particular case record from twelve years ago. “Mitchell, I don’t remember the first name, it was for the removal of a tumour.”
The computer sifted through the files and then settled on James Mitchell.
“What are we looking at Olivia?”
“I lost this little boy. The tumour had been considered inoperable by my colleagues, but after a lot of consideration I told them that I thought differently. Because the boy was going to die anyway, I persuaded Gladstone to speak to the father, Edward comes to mind, we can check later. I thought we had all agreed that a very slight chance was better than no chance, and the father signed the disclaimer. Several weeks after the surgery, he must have spoken to some fast-talking lawyer and they demanded to see the case notes. To cut a very long saga short, they claimed malpractice, based on an allegation that there was disagreement between myself and the anaesthetist, which brought about the fatality. The claims went on for over a year, but were eventually kicked out. I wondered where the father had got enough money to sustain the rant as long as he did. He confronted me, here at work, and said I would pay for this one way or another, and that he’d stop me playing God again with anyone else’s child. As you can imagine, this haunted me for a long
time. I eventually thought he’d had time to remember his son was going to die if he hadn’t agreed to let the surgery go ahead. It seems he still harbours a need to punish me.”
Chapter 17
Prentice walked Olivia back to her office, tried to calm her down, and finally had to shout at her to keep quiet. “It doesn’t work like that, for Christ’s sake. We have to find this guy and then ask him to help with our enquiries. If he declines we need rock solid evidence which puts him at the scene, but that in itself isn’t enough either. It makes him a suspect, that’s all. We have to connect him to the stun gun via DNA, because even though Derek Wallace may be able to identify him, he didn’t see him strike anybody. And maybe you’ve forgotten, but if he does have Kieron, we’re going to have to keep him onside until we know where the boy is. It’s a tricky call Olivia, slapping him inside a cell will be bad for Kieron if Mitchell is the kidnapper, but refuses to talk. If all this anger built up twelve years ago, the family may not even be at the address on the hospital records any longer. One step at a time please.” She stayed quiet long enough for him to call Martha.
“Any good news on the car registration yet?”
“No sir, it was bloody stolen wasn’t it. About three months ago. The true owner lives in London, really helpful.”
“Ok, stay on it, it might have been dumped by now, get traffic to look out for it, check with local crushers.”
On checking with the electoral register and council tax statements for the area in the hospital records, Prentice was right on the money, Mitchell didn’t live at the same place, and there was no forwarding address in his name. He called Tom’s mobile, asking him to join them. Olivia broke down in tears when he entered, and he was brought up to date by Prentice. The pressure of knowing Mitchell could have her son, had pushed Olivia over the edge. Tom’s head dropped straight into his hands.
“The guy’s a maniac. Why hasn’t he made any demands? Do you think? Oh hell….”
“No I don’t Tom. My guess is that he wants to hurt Olivia, not Kieron. But we need to be careful, I keep saying this, but now that we have a possible suspect, I’m going to say it over and over. I’m going to get Derek Wallace to look at this picture of Mitchell. It will hopefully give us further confidence that he is the man Wallace saw at the scene. Until we know where Mitchell is, we shouldn’t disturb him, making him unstable carries a big risk for your son. This guy hasn’t done a particularly thorough job in covering his tracks, and I still think he’s ultimately leading us to identify him. That isn’t the same as catching him. Let’s make him think we are playing his game for now, and it’s imperative that we don’t give the press any chance to screw things up. We also have to think about how we put together this national appeal, he’ll be expecting it to come on air pretty soon.”
Tom digested all of this, and it triggered a need to respond. “I hear you Inspector, but you know what, I don’t think you have any fucking idea what you’re doing. Everything is supposition and hunches. I’ve had it with the police. I ain’t gonna sit around any longer. I’ll find this bastard myself. Olivia, you should get back to the house in case this Mitchell calls, he may even have called already and not said anything. Monitoring our calls don’t help if it’s an unregistered mobile and the caller says nothing. Now that we know he was around our house that night it’s too much of a coincidence, it has to be him. You’re wasting your time sitting here, your mother can keep tabs on Peter.”
Prentice shuddered at the prospect of a loose cannon like Tom making waves. He thought the media would latch on to his anxiety and misquote him at best, but possibly extract knowledge from Tom that the police didn’t want to become known to the kidnapper, whether that was Mitchell or even a nutter pretending to be Lord Lucan. He had little time in which to douse this threat, but he didn’t want to play such a strong card right now. He gave in, he had no other choice. “I strongly advise you to think this through again Tom. Perhaps you have a point about the monitoring of your home phone. You should check it out yourself. Olivia still has conflicting loyalties to deal with. Of course Kieron is the centre of all this now, but you aren’t helping by saying her mother should be left on her own to worry about Peter, without being able to see him. Olivia wanted only the IC team to see him for now. Gladstone got the case surgeon to agree. I’d like to see him myself, because I heard that he got over-excited about his car’s wing mirror just before he was hit. Maybe he saw something which Derek Wallace didn’t. I can see Olivia’s point, she wants to protect her mother, whose forgetfulness is a concern, and she wants to protect her father, then there’s Peter.”
Olivia’s face betrayed confusion, Tom simply laughed at him. “You can’t even remember who’s who can you Prentice? What a bloody shambles. I’m out of here.”
“No Tom, I mean Olivia’s real father.”
Silence reigned for an uncomfortable period. Olivia still couldn’t speak. Tom stared at her, expecting a response. Prentice had Gladstone’s words, ‘ask her yourself,’ at the forefront of his mind, and he was now pretty convinced she didn’t know. He couldn’t leave it there.
“You see Tom, your wife needs another concern like a hole in Peter’s head. We have genetic evidence that Peter is not Olivia's biological father, and quite frankly you aren’t making it any easier for anybody with this ‘I’ll save the world and bring Kieron back’ bullshit. I’m sorry I’ve had to burden you with this now Olivia, but we need to bridle this maverick husband of yours. He’s becoming more of a threat to your son’s welfare than he realises. So, you have to make him get a grip. Personally, I don’t give a shit whether he thinks I’m on top of the case or not. I don’t really value his opinion. I could have hit you with this bombshell some time ago, but I didn’t think it was central to getting Kieron back, even though it could be connected to the events of the last few days.”
Olivia nodded, even though she was still in shock at this allegation. “Can I see this proof?”
“Not yet, but you will have it as soon as we can give it to you. I can’t stop you asking questions, and perhaps we can discuss this further in private. I think we’re on the same page, so can you sort out Mr Angry here? I don’t have time for petulant, over-indulged children like Tom. I haven’t met Kieron yet, but I’m sure I’ll like him a lot when I do.”
He left them to stew over how to proceed.
*
Martha had left the physical search for the car with Traffic while she contacted regional scrap metal dealers. She wasn’t hopeful but was surprised when one on the outskirts of Newcastle said the magic words. “Yeah I remember it, Xmas Eve, just before we closed. We don’t get many as old as that one these days, a real blast from the past, collector’s item, stands out from the other run-of-the-mill stuff. Recently re-sprayed, I wondered about that, but the guy had all the paperwork. Just a minute, when you said you were police I said we’re legit, what’s this really about?”
It was a dead end in a way. The documents had been stolen with the car, it matched the police data which put the owner in London. “Would you recognise the man who brought it in?”
“Are you serious? We get hundreds of punters a day, I’d have difficulty remembering my own grandmother if she came in with a wreck for the crusher.”
“So, it’s already in the recycling waste then.”
“Not this baby, there wasn’t anything wrong with it, and I gave him washers for it. I’ll make a bit on it.”
“Oh really. Don’t touch it. Where exactly is it?”
“In the yard, under cover, why?”
“Like you said, I told you I was police, there’s nothing to worry about if you cooperate. We need to have forensics look at it, that’s all. It’s a stolen vehicle, but you did the checks thinking this guy was the owner. It’s from London, and when we’ve finished with it I guess the real owner will give you that ‘bit’ you hoped to make on it.”
“Sounds good to me. Just let me know when you want to start with it, sooner the better for me.”
&
nbsp; *
Olivia’s first thought was to speak to her mother. But Tom wouldn’t let this go. “So, Peter ain’t the piper after all. The unending crap and lecturing I’ve put up with, and ‘Pa-Par’ turns out to be a fake. It figures, he’s always been a pretentious bore. And now he’s only a pretend granddad, so I don’t have to humour him anymore.”
“Fuck off Tom!!” screamed Olivia. He’d never heard her use the ‘F’ word before. “Prentice is right, your mental age is on a par with Kieron. You said you were leaving me, well good riddance. Just go, go now. I’ll fight you for custody. And there will be those who can testify as to your unstable character. Now just get out of my way. Sod off back to London like you threatened to do, make my day.”
She pushed him violently and he fell over. He was already regretting his lack of control over what came out of his mouth, bypassing his brain.
Chapter 18
Olivia took her mother to the restaurant for a sandwich. Eating had become a necessary chore rather than a desire. It was a delicate situation, one of extreme foreboding. Rehearsing it in her mind did nothing but complicate her feelings. “Mum, I’ve never asked you before, was my birth difficult?”
“No darling, it wasn’t pleasant but I can’t remember it being difficult. Why are we talking about this?”
“Well, I really meant difficult in another way. Was Dad there?”
“No, I don’t think so. Oh dear, my memory isn’t what it was. Ask him when we are allowed to see him.”
“When did you tell him it was confirmed, you know, that you were going to have a baby?”
“You’re right Olivia, it was difficult. Unless I’m mistaken, he was away at sea. In the navy, the proper navy, not the other one. He never liked that one you know.”
“Yes, I know. He left the Royal Navy about that time. He always said it was because of conscience, some of the decisions during the Falklands conflict didn’t sit right with him. I seem to remember him telling me when I was a little girl that he wouldn’t have missed my birth for the world.”