Hard Evidence (5 page)

'Is that to be a polite conversation?'

'You heard what the boss said?'

'I did.'

Delaney turned to Inspector Audrey Hobb, early
fifties, two years off her thirty and looking forward
to retirement.

'Audrey, I want all your available uniforms out
on the street with pictures of Jenny. Young girls
don't just disappear in broad daylight; somebody
must have seen something.'

'Let's hope so.'

The group got to their feet as though dismissed,
but Delaney held his hand up.

'Hang on a minute. There's one more thing.' He
pointed to the picture on the left of the noticeboard.
'Jackie Malone. Some of you are familiar
with the case. She had a boy sometimes in her
care, Andy. We think he's with his uncle, Russell
Martin, but we want to make sure. DS Bonner will
organise some photos. When you're out on the
street, I want you to show his photo too. Okay,
Audrey?'

'Fine by me.'

Bonner leaned in. 'You think the chief will like
it, sir?'

Delaney ignored him. 'Okay, that's it. But one
last thing. We all know how these cases sometimes
turn out, and we all know how critical time is. The
longer we take, the less chance we have of finding
her alive. But this isn't going to be one of those
cases. We're going to find that girl. We're going to
do everything to make that happen, and we are
going to take her out of harm's way. We clear?'

'Sir.' The response was immediate, and,
galvanised, the briefing room emptied. Delaney
fumbled a couple of painkillers from a small bottle
he kept in his pocket and sighed. It was going to
be another long day.

Delaney stopped at the water cooler in the corridor
outside the briefing room and poured himself a
clear plastic cup's worth. The gurgling of the cooler
as it dispensed the water matched the gurgling in
his stomach. Whiskey and late-night kebabs, not a
good combination. He looked out of the window
up at the massive flyover that poured traffic into the
city like a Roman aqueduct sluicing sewage. The
water was cool at least and did something to ease
the throbbing in his forehead. Bob Wilkinson
joined him at the cooler, pouring himself a cup.

'You look like shit, boss,' he said.

Delaney winced. 'Everyone's a detective.'

'I'll stick with the uniform, thanks. Leave the
glory-hunting to the likes of you and young Sally
Cartwright.'

Delaney snorted. 'Glory. Right.'

'Any word on Jackie Malone?'

Delaney shook his head. 'The post-mortem's
tomorrow. Might give us something to go on, but
I doubt it.'

'It's not like the books.'

'Rarely.'

Bob Wilkinson moved as if to leave, then hesitated,
looking back at Delaney.

'What is it?'

'Just thought you ought to know . . .'

'Go on.'

'There's a bit of gossip going round.'

'About?'

'About you and Jackie Malone.'

'What about her?'

'That you might have been too friendly with
her. Maybe you're not the best man to be looking
into her murder.'

'And what do you think?'

'I think if I were Jackie Malone I wouldn't want
anyone else on it.'

'Thanks, Bob.'

Wilkinson scowled. 'Yeah, well. I'm off to St
Mary's to sweet-talk a paedophile.'

Delaney dropped his cup into the bin as the
sound of purposeful feet clacking on the hard
floor behind made him turn round. Sally
Cartwright approached eagerly. She was joining
him in interviewing Morgan and was clearly
relishing her first day as a detective constable. As
they walked along the corridor towards the
interview room, he recognised the all-too-youthful
enthusiasm that shone from her eyes and felt sorry
for her. People came on the job for all kinds of
reasons, and the ones who wanted to do good,
who wanted to help people, who wanted to put
something back into the community were the
ones who suffered most. There might at one time
have been a place for idealism in the Girl Guides,
but not any more, and certainly not in the Metropolitan
Police. Pest control, Delaney thought,
that's all we are, glorified pest control, but at
least stamping on bugs was something he liked
to do.

Interview room number one was on the ground
floor near the entrance. Usually used for talking to
members of the public, taking witness statements
and so on. For the serious villains the room at the
back of the station near the custody cells was used.
Windowless and soulless. Interview room number
one at least had a window; even though it just
showed the car park beyond, it let sunlight in and
that made all the difference. Otherwise it was a
bland square room with a mirror on the wall
opposite the window, and a rectangular table with
two plastic moulded chairs either side, in
unapologetically seventies orange. Morgan sat
with his back to the window and Delaney pulled
out a chair for Sally and sat down beside her,
giving Morgan an appraising look. Estate agents
reckoned prospective buyers made their minds up
about a property within minutes; it took Delaney
a lot less than that with people. This guy had
bent
tattooed all over him. He could see it in the way
he sat restless in the chair. His fingers mobile,
rubbing his arms or smoothing the fabric of his
oil-stained jeans. He was as comfortable in a
police station as a pig in a slaughterhouse.

Morgan rubbed his thigh again and looked up
at Delaney, the hope hungry in his hangdog eyes.
'Is there any news? Have you found her?'

'We've only just found out that your daughter
has been missing overnight, haven't we?'
Delaney's tone was far from sympathetic and
Sally, taking out her notebook, watched puzzled
as he leaned in angrily, getting into Morgan's face.

'And those hours could have been vital!'

Morgan blinked, clearly unnerved by Delaney's
proximity.

'What are you saying?'

Delaney slammed his hand down hard on the
table, 'I'm saying we need to know exactly what
you know and we need to know it now.'

'Guv . . .'

Delaney flashed a look at Sally. 'Shut it.' He
looked back at Morgan. 'You do understand what
I'm saying?'

'Of course I do. I want her found.'

'Why did you attack Philip Greville?'

'He brought his car to my garage last week.'

'And?'

'And afterwards some people told me he'd been
in the paper. He'd taken some girl and been in the
paper for it. And prison . . .'

'Go on?'

'And then . . . and then when my Jenny didn't
come home . . .'

'You thought it was him?'

Morgan looked up. 'Wasn't it?'

'See, what I don't understand is, why . . . If you
knew there was a known child offender in your
area, and your daughter didn't come home from
school, or at any time during the night, why did
you leave it to this morning till you did something
about it?'

Morgan shook his head. 'I didn't know.'

'You didn't know what?'

'I didn't know she was missing. I was working
late on a job. I came in, I assumed she'd put herself
to bed. She takes care of herself.'

'She's twelve years old, for Christ's sake.'

Morgan shook his head again, remorsefully,
and Sally gave him a reassuring smile as she
looked up from her note-taking.

'It's all right, Howard, just tell us what you
know. Anything you tell us could be important.
When did you last see her?'

Morgan shifted awkwardly in his chair, his eyes
not meeting hers. 'I work late sometimes. Since her
mother died she's been good at taking care of
herself.'

Sally nodded sympathetically. 'When did her
mother die?'

'Two years ago.'

Delaney sat back in his chair, crossing his arms.
'How did she die, Mr Morgan?'

'Cancer. They couldn't do anything. Too late,
they said. We never did hold with doctors. They
said if we'd been earlier, but we weren't. Too late,
that's what they said.'

Sally wrote in her notebook. 'So it's just the two
of you?'

'That's right. Just the two of us. And Jake.'

Delaney sighed angrily. 'Who's Jake?'

'He's my brother. My older brother. He works
with me at the garage. There's no one else.'

'Do you have any other relations? Anyone she
might have gone to see?'

Morgan shook his head. 'No, it's just us. We've
got each other.'

'Okay, Mr Morgan. Think carefully: did either
you or your brother see Philip Greville after you
had fixed his car?'

Morgan's brow furrowed, as if trying to squeeze
some juice of memory from his troubled mind. His
eyes had the look of a hurt and hunted animal as
he tried to remember.

'I can't see him.'

Delaney cursed under his breath and fumbled in
his pocket again for his bottle of painkillers.

St Mary's Hospital is a sprawling Victorian
complex on Praed Street in Paddington. The old
and the modern rose-coloured cheek by pierced
jowl. Where Princess Diana once came to have her
babies, and where the punched and the battered
drunks of a Friday and Saturday night clog up the
rooms and try the patience of the night staff
working A&E as regularly as a Swiss clock.

Bob Wilkinson was standing at the vending
machine squashing a thin paper cup between his
bony, nicotine-stained fingers, scowling as he
drank the bitter fluid contained within and hoping
to Christ the thing wasn't swimming with the
MRSA bug. He hated hospitals almost as much as
he hated people. He looked further up the corridor
where Bonner was finishing talking to Greville,
who was laid out on a bed; the DS was smiling at
him, treating him like he was a normal human
being, not kiddie-fiddling pond scum. Bonner was
the future of the Met as far as Wilkinson could
tell, just like Superintendent Walker. More spin
doctor than thief-taker; the kind of shiny-suited,
even-teethed bastards who danced around to a
political agenda, letting the paedophiles fiddle
while Rome burned.

The object of his scrutiny, Bonner, smiled a final
time at Greville and walked back up the corridor
to join Wilkinson at the vending machine, fishing
in his pocket for some change and wrinkling his
nose. 'What is it with the smell in this place?'

Wilkinson shrugged. 'Hospitals are all the same,
boss. Nothing about them is pleasant.'

Bonner chunked the coins into the machine.
'Including the coffee.'

'Especially the coffee.'

Bonner jerked his head back to the room where
Greville lay on top of the bed, still clothed, his
nose now taped. 'What do you reckon to
twinkletoes?

Bob scowled. 'He'll live. Unfortunately.'

'He had it coming, I guess. Sooner or later on
that estate he was going to get a kicking when
word got round what he was.'

'You ask me, he deserves a lot more than he
got.'

'Just as well our job is just to catch them, then.'

'Maybe.'

Bonner gave him a shrewd look. 'Someone
leaked his name to the press.'

Wilkinson laughed. Short, dismissive. 'Don't look
at me. I'm coming up to my thirty.'

'You reckon he's involved with this missing
girl?'

Wilkinson shook his head regretfully. 'His alibi
stands up.'

'An entire orchestra saying he was in rehearsal
all day and in concert all evening. I'd say that
stands up.'

'He's probably clean on this, but he's involved
in something. Take it to the bank. It's not just his
wand he's been wagging.'

'That would be a baton.'

'Call it what you like. Slags like him don't
change, they never do. You ask me, we should be
leaning on him. And leaning on him hard. Not
tiptoeing around like a pair of fucking ballerinas
so he doesn't press charges.'

'Times have moved on, Constable.'

Wilkinson crumpled his plastic coffee cup and
threw it into the bin. 'You might look good in a
tutu, boss, but I'm too old for this crap. We should
be out looking for that little girl, not covering the
suits' blue-nosed arses.'

'I reckon you and Delaney would make a good
team.'

'That's because he's a proper cop.'

'What's that mean?'

Wilkinson gave him a flat look. 'Someone who
knows that the end always justifies the means,
Sergeant Bonner.'

Bonner gave a short laugh. 'Jack Delaney. Last
of the midnight cowboys.' He threw his own
coffee cup into the bin and jerked his thumb at
Bob Wilkinson. 'Come on then, Tonto. Time to
see what scum has washed up on the morning
tide.'

Morgan's Garage was about half a mile from the
Waterhill estate in a run-down stretch of mainly
commercial real estate, a no-man's-land of lockups
and storage facilities within a brick's throw of
the Harrow Road. Wire fences protected weed-polluted
tarmac and graffiti-sprayed warehouses.
At the end of the street stood a few houses that
had been built in the fifties in the hope of an
urban renewal for the area that never came.
Morgan's workshop was an extended garage that
his father had fitted out sometime in the early
sixties and that hadn't been touched since. Red
bricks and a concrete floor. A bare bulb overhead,
a 1972 Ford Escort stripped back beneath it,
yellow, rusting and in need of serious loving
attention.

Inside the garage Delaney moved a grease-covered
spanner to one side of the cluttered
worktop as Morgan picked up a photo frame and
carefully replaced the original of the photo that
was now pinned to the briefing room wall back at
White City police station. Jenny still looked out at
the camera, her eyes giving nothing away. Sally
took the frame from his callused, stained and
shaking hands.

'This is definitely the most recent photo you
have of her?'

'She don't like having her picture taken.'

Delaney held his gaze. 'Why's that?'

Morgan shrugged and looked off to the side.
'She just don't.'

Sally smiled sympathetically. 'What about
boyfriends?'

'What do you mean?'

'Does she have a boyfriend?'

Morgan shook his head angrily. 'Of course she
doesn't.'

Sally continued gently. 'It's possible. Someone
from school, perhaps?'

'I would know!'

'She's a very pretty girl.'

'She's my girl. I would know!'

Delaney considered the fury that shone in the
man's eyes with an almost religious fervour. He
listened to the body language and met Morgan's
defiant gaze with a look that held as much anger,
and more, in check.

'You didn't know she was missing for nineteen
hours, though, did you?'

Sally flinched, startled at the aggression in his
voice, as Delaney stepped forward, getting into
Morgan's space.

'What else don't you know?'

Morgan rubbed his left arm, up and down, as he
stepped back a pace. 'I didn't know she was gone.
I look after her.'

Delaney snorted. 'You do a great job. Does she
have a computer?'

Morgan didn't answer, and Sally prompted him
gently. 'Does she have her own computer, for
schoolwork?'

'In her bedroom. She has one in her bedroom. I
don't know how to use it.'

For the first time, maybe, Delaney felt a twinge
of sympathy for the man.

Sally continued to smile encouragingly at
Morgan, good cop to Delaney's bad. 'Do you
mind if we take the computer, Mr Morgan?'

'Why would you do that? She needs that. She
told me she needs it for her homework. All the
kids have got them.'

'I know.'

'When she comes home, she'll want to know
where it is. She'll be home soon, won't she?'