First One Missing (30 page)

‘Oh God, I’m such a selfish cow sometimes!’ She gave herself a playful slap to the forehead. ‘I should have known being here would make you miss your daughter. I can’t even imagine how I’d feel if someone tried to take Bethany from me. I’m going to help you take your mind off it though. Come on.’

She turned him round until he was facing away from the trampoline and then started pulling him in the direction of the back door. ‘This lot will be busy for a while and I’ve got a really good idea for distracting you from gloomy thoughts.’

She briefly rested her hand on his bum and Jason stiffened, fighting the wave of anger that swept over him, taking him by surprise.

But by the time he’d followed Suzy up the stairs, he was feeling calmer. There was no rush. He had all night, after all.

36

Leanne felt it the moment she swiped in through the office door – a low-level energy like the whole place was humming. There was a familiar prickle as the hairs on her arms stood up in anticipation. Ever since Desmond had called her first thing to tell her they’d arrested Sally Freeland’s source and he’d given up the details of the paedophile ring, she’d had that on-the-edge-of-your-seat feeling which had almost, though not quite, made her forget about Will.

‘We’ve got them. All of them.’

Desmond’s deputy, Andy Curtis, didn’t smile often so when he did it was always a shock, taking ten years off him at a stroke.

‘You did well, Leanne, and don’t think it won’t be recognized. We’re on the verge of cracking this one.’

‘Don’t tell me you can feel it in your water.’

‘Oi, my water never lies, I’ll have you know. Seriously though, we’ve got all five of those bastards in separate rooms downstairs.’

‘Five? Including Blake?’

A prick of conscience pierced Leanne’s excitement. She’d promised Sally Freeland she’d do her best to keep her source, Julian Blake, out of things. After all, without his information they wouldn’t have had any grounds to pull the Nemo lot in.

‘Yeah, he’s here too. Crying like a baby apparently. Did you know he’s a schoolteacher? Head of a sixth form apparently. Married as well.’

Leanne felt a wave of nausea. From what Sally had said, Julian Blake, aka ‘Serge’, was a man who battled daily against his compulsions.

‘Don’t lose any sympathy over that scum.’ Curtis had noticed her expression. ‘Anyway, if he wasn’t involved and his information leads to an arrest then he’ll get off lightly.’

‘Has anyone fessed up?’

It was too much to hope, but there was always that faint chance of an instant, total cave-in.

‘Not yet, but once they realize we’ve seized their computers, they might get more chatty.’

‘How’s the Lion of the North?’

Curtis smiled again, his face looking awkward as if the smiling muscles were protesting against the unfamiliar exercise.

‘Yes, well, Bobby Jarvis is trying his best to roar, but actually it’s more like a mewl. The boss is in with him right now.’

Leanne had wondered which of the men would get the dubious honour of the Desmond treatment.

‘Pete’s talking to one of the others. Stephen Lancaster. A barrister as it turns out, would you believe?’

Leanne remembered now Howard Walsh telling her about a teacher or a lawyer who had passed on secrets about the ring to one of his contacts who was holding compromising information about him. Instinctively she knew here was the weakest link. And it was Pete who had him.

‘Here she is, the hero of the hour,’ said Ruby as Leanne came to sit down.

Leanne made a face. ‘Hardly,’ she said.

Ruby examined her more closely. Leanne had taken time with her appearance that morning, smearing foundation over her blotchy skin and concealer under her dark-ringed eyes, but she still looked exactly like what she was – a woman who’d spent half the night crying.

‘You OK?’

Leanne nodded stiffly.

‘It’s just that for someone who might very well have helped solve the most infamous murder case of recent times, you don’t look very happy.’

‘Is it that obvious?’

‘Only to a person with a modicum of emotional intelligence – which rules out 99.9 per cent of the people in this place.’

Leanne sighed. ‘I finished with Will.’

Ruby’s perfectly shaped eyebrows shot up. ‘But I thought things were great with you two.’

Leanne felt something tearing inside her as she remembered the myriad little kindnesses Will had shown her. She knew how it would look from the outside once people knew, yet she was convinced he hadn’t been using her to further his career. He had been trying to impress her. He had thought that was what she wanted – a man with ambition, a man going places. He’d been trying to compete with Pete, not realizing that it was precisely for his un-Peteness that she’d first fallen for him.

‘He let me down, Ruby. It was him leaking the stuff to the papers.’

‘Oh. Shit. Sorry.’

Leanne held up her hand. She couldn’t deal with anyone being nice to her at the moment.

‘Leanne?’

She hadn’t noticed Desmond until he was just yards from her desk. She was already clambering to her feet when he said, ‘In my office, please.’

Pete was already in there. He looked as rough as she did. His hair was a mess and his eyes had that droopy hooded look she remembered from when they were together, mornings after they’d stayed up far too late, talking and having sex. Instantly heat surged to her face and she cursed herself for letting her thoughts get carried away. Still, she couldn’t help glancing at him again. He was doing that thing he always did when he was excited, fluttering his fingers against his thigh as if playing an invisible piano.

‘Sir?’ The suspense was killing her. ‘Have you got a confession, sir?’

‘Not as such.’

Desmond loved this kind of scenario – having information that you didn’t have, eking it out, revealing things little by little.

In the end it was Pete who explained: ‘Lancaster admitted they were at the scene of the crime when Poppy Glover was killed – so that photo Julian Blake says he saw was authentic – but he says they got there after she died.’

‘What?’

‘These guys were obsessed with the case. They had a detailed online map of the area and they’d try to guess where the next victim would show up. One of them, a creep called Ben Gattis who lives in an apartment block just off the Heath Extension, became convinced that sooner or later the killer would dump a body there. It’s separate from the main bit of the Heath, very quiet, completely open to the road all around its border and, crucially, far smaller and more manageable than the other part. Gattis walks his dog in the area every day so he knows all the likely places – where the cameras are, and aren’t. It didn’t happen with Leila Botsford, but still, the day after Poppy Glover disappeared he was up again before dawn patrolling the Heath Extension. Bingo. He came across Poppy’s body and called the others.’

‘But why?’

Despite her training and her months in Vice, Leanne couldn’t or didn’t want to get her head around what these men were hoping to get from stumbling across the body of a child.

Pete sighed. ‘They’re fantasists, Leanne. They’ve built a world around fantasizing about having power over children. A dead child. It’s their ultimate fantasy.’

Leanne closed her eyes, feeling dizzy. Suddenly the emotion of the last few hours, combined with lack of sleep, made her feel she was going to keel over. Pete stepped across the room to put his hand under her elbow.

‘Breathe,’ he whispered in her ear. She took in a lungful of air. Her elbow burned where he touched it.

‘Are you sure you can believe them?’ she asked.

Desmond chipped in this time. ‘Once Lancaster opened up, the others caved in pretty quickly and, separately, they all told the same story. They came across the body in situ.’

Leanne felt too weak even to mind about Desmond saying ‘in situ’.

‘And they didn’t see who put her there?’

Pete shook his head.

‘But we still have the semen sample from the dock leaf, right? We still have that much evidence to find the killer?’

‘The semen came from one of the men. We’re not sure which one at this time.’ Desmond was clipped and to the point.

Leanne swallowed down the bile that had shot up into her mouth at the thought of what these men, these pillars of the establishment, had done when confronted with the body of a dead child.

‘They are the ones who took off her clothes as well,’ Pete continued woodenly, clearly thinking she might as well have it all in one go. ‘When they found her she was fully dressed and laid out carefully as if asleep, just like Tilly and Leila.’

So now they were back at the beginning again. Four little girls dead, four families decimated. And the man responsible for it all was still out there, going about his business, picking his next victim.

37

There were empty pizza boxes piled on the coffee table, their bases soaked with grease. Jason tried not to look at them. Earlier he’d suggested to Suzy that she might want to get a bin bag and clean them up along with the empty Coke cans and Quality Street wrappers but she hadn’t yet made a move.

They were all sitting around in Suzy’s cramped, red-cushioned living room. Jason and Suzy were squashed into the armchair while the four girls shared the sofa. They’d changed into their pyjamas in readiness for the sleepover and Jason had had to look at a point on the wall, next to the blown-up photo of Suzy and Bethany in a photographer’s studio wearing matching white outfits and in bare feet, so that he wouldn’t stare as they trooped in. He hadn’t been able to look at Emily at all, just the most fleeting glimpse of pale, skinny calves coming out of white cotton knee-length pyjama bottoms.

The flashbacks were coming almost constantly now – fragments that he batted away only to find another coming at him, and another. The curve of a bare shoulder, a sweep of dark eyelashes against a plump cheek, then a piercing scream, the kicking of a leg, his own voice shouting, the black fog of loss of control. Now panic. His breath being torn from him in strips of pain. Is she breathing? No. No, no, no.

He shifted in his chair, cursing Suzy who’d insisted on sitting on his lap and now lay across him like a dead weight, her head snuggled into his chest.

‘You sure you want to watch this?’ She raised her face up to whisper in his ear. ‘I’m sure romcom isn’t really your cup of tea. Why don’t we slip off and leave them to it?’

She was stroking his cheek now with her long nail. It felt like a cockroach running across his face.

‘No, you’re all right. I like her. Jennifer Aniston. I could watch her all day.’

She folded her arms across her chest in a mock sulk. To his left, Emily, who was wedged between Bethany and the arm of the sofa, shifted position and Jason closed his eyes against the sudden image of his own hands, huge, around a slender throat.

‘Come on, babe. Let’s go.’ Suzy was prodding him in the chest.

‘I said no. All right?’

It had come out harsher than he intended and he felt Suzy stiffen on his lap. The girls on the sofa suddenly went quiet.

‘Sorry. I’m a bit knackered and bad-tempered. Don’t pay any attention to me.’ He planted a kiss on Suzy’s forehead and she appeared to relax a little.

All through the rest of the film, he worried that his outburst might have put Emily off. He didn’t dare look at her, but he could tell from the way she’d curled up tighter, pulling her legs right up under her, that he had made her uncomfortable.

He worked his fingers into the pocket of his jeans and grasped his keys, then he deliberately pressed the sharp edge of one into his thigh over and over.

38

Leanne felt drained of everything – energy, hope, love. All seemed to have seeped away. Will had called her so many times she’d put her phone on silent. She’d listened to the first message – an incoherent ramble trying to explain why he’d done it. Endlessly begging her forgiveness. She was the best woman he’d ever known, he said. He couldn’t face losing her. After that she didn’t listen to any of the others.

The whole station had been muted since the afternoon’s disappointment. For a moment they’d believed the Nemo gang were going to be the key that unlocked the Kenwood Killings case once and for all. But, after all, the body had been there when the men had arrived. Already dead. Now, hours later, they were all slumped at their desks as day dragged on into evening.

Back to square one. That’s where the investigation was, and that’s exactly where she was too. All the time she’d invested in Will, all the energy, all the trust. It hadn’t been an explosion of fireworks or anything, not like with Pete, but rather a slow, gentle sliding from friendship into love. And now it had been all for nothing.

Her phone started vibrating, convulsing against the laminate desktop. She almost didn’t bother checking it. Will again. It had to be. But when she finally gave in and flipped up the lid of the leather case, she saw an unfamiliar number.

‘DC Miller?’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s Gary Allison from the forensic lab.’

‘Blimey, you’re keen, aren’t you? Working on a Saturday?’

‘Yeah, well, I’m off on holiday on Monday and I had the ridiculous notion that if I came in on the weekend I might not come back to a mountain of stuff. Anyway, you asked me to run a DNA check for you?’

For a second her mind was blank, then suddenly it came to her: Donna Shields. Amid the emotional turbulence of the last twenty-four hours she’d forgotten all about the hatchet-faced woman and the hair sample she’d brought in for testing. Leanne’s heart sagged as she thought of the paperwork she’d have to fill in now that the test had been completed. Her mind was so preoccupied that she failed to properly register what Gary Allison was telling her.

‘What?’ she asked. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said we have a match.’ The man was trying to hide his excitement but there was a giveaway tremor in his voice. ‘The sample you sent me is a match for the DNA found on the body of Megan Purvis.’

39

‘Mum, Emily’s not feeling well.’

Jason and Suzy were sitting downstairs on the sofa watching on catch-up a programme where people were filmed on a first date in a restaurant. Suzy had been laughing like a drain, which infuriated Jason because he couldn’t hear what was going on in Bethany’s room upstairs where the girls had been for the last hour. He’d been trying to control his growing anger, digging the key ever deeper into his leg, but he could sense it building up, so it was a relief when Bethany had burst through the door.