Just What Kind of Mother Are You? (16 page)

Lorna pulls a face. ‘Hardly any. We got those drop-offs yesterday, remember?’

‘Oh, yes, I forgot. Shit. Maybe I’ll have to ring Bill at West Cumbria, see if he can take any.’

‘How many are there?’

‘The woman didn’t know. More than two—’

‘Never a good sign,’ says Lorna.

At first I think I must be at the wrong place. I’m outside a big old manor that’s been converted into apartments. Not the usual type of dwelling I pick up wild cats from. I check the scrap of paper with the address: Apartment 6, Helm Priory, Bowness. Yes, this is it.

The snow has been cleared and I open up the boot of my car and get three cat baskets out. There’s a woman watching me from the window of one of the ground-floor apartments. She’s young, mid-twenties, looks a bit sad.

I retrieve my Bitemaster handling gauntlets from the flap behind the driver’s seat and at the last second slip an odour mask in my pocket, just in case. I buy them from the painter’s suppliers in Kendal. I’ve found them to be the best. If they can block out the smell of oil-based gloss, they can usually block out cat shit. In all the years I’ve
been doing this job it’s the one thing I’ve never got used to.

I smile at the woman, but she looks down as I approach the building, makes it obvious she’s washing up by lifting her elbows in an exaggerated manner. She’s possibly Polish.

For a time, they were everywhere around these parts, the Poles. Thin, pleasant girls, all dressed identically. All in just-a-bit-too-short black skirts and toffee-coloured tights, a colour my mother would have worn back in her twenties. I remember going to Asda one time, standing in the section marked ‘Polish’ and, after staring for a while at the borscht and kielbasa, it hit me that I wasn’t going to find the Pledge or Mr Sheen there.

I lean into the front door, which opens into a porch area lined with letterboxes. The internal door beyond that is locked. I locate the Yale – the most likely-looking key on the bunch the girl gave me – and I’m relieved when it works without a hitch.

The entrance hall is pretty grand; plush, hotel-type carpet. There’s a huge window at the top of the first flight of stairs, original leaded glass sending light bouncing every which way. A jasmine fragrance is discharged from a plug-in air freshener, and I find myself thinking for the second time in five minutes that I can’t possibly be in the right place. It’s too nice.

Apartment six must be upstairs. I take care as I climb, so as not to bang the paintwork with the cat baskets. At the top of the second flight there are two doors. On the right is apartment five. Flanking both sides of the entrance are two neatly trimmed bay trees, and on the floor is a pretty red floor mat, the message ‘
HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS
’ printed on it.

I look to the left. Apartment six has a desiccated plant outside, its soil covered over with cigarette dimps, along with a few joints that have been smoked down to the roach. This is more like it, I think, as I put the key in the lock.

I open the door, and the stench hits me, so I close it while affixing my mask. I feel for the light switch and flick it, but
nothing happens. The electric’s been cut off. Cursing, I realize I’ve no torch with me and the hallway to the flat is dark; the doors to each room leading off are closed shut.

I think about heading in blind, just get it done as quickly as possible, but then I stop. Two years ago, I was removing a starving dog from a house in Troutbeck Bridge. The poor thing was yelping so much I wasn’t thinking and I went straight on in. Treading on a needle. Which, if you can believe it, went straight through the sole of my trainer and punctured my foot. A needle-stick injury they call it, and I spent the next six months convinced I was HIV positive. Not something I want to repeat if I can help it.

I leave the baskets and the gauntlets outside the flat, pull the mask down around my neck and knock on the door of number five. No answer, so I nip back downstairs to the ground-floor apartment where I saw the woman earlier.

I knock lightly. She opens the door immediately, just a couple of inches, and eyes me warily. ‘Hi, I’m from an animal-rescue charity and—’

‘I don’t have money,’ she says in heavily accented English.

‘No, I don’t want money. I need a torch.’

‘Torch? But is daylight.’

I gesture up the stairs. ‘The man in number six, he is in hospital, I come to take his cats.’ I am speaking with almost the same accent as her, I realize.

‘You wait. I look.’

She shuts the door.

When she returns a minute later she has a baby on her hip. A big, bonny, blond boy about twelve months old. You would never put them together as mother and son if your life depended on it. I reach out to touch his hair, an automatic reflex I acquired on becoming a mother myself and say, ‘He’s beautiful. What’s his name?’

‘Nika.’

‘That’s nice – is it Polish?’

‘Is from Georgia.’

I go to speak and at the last second realize she means the country below Russia, not the state next to Alabama.

She hands me the torch, a small black-and-yellow one made by Stanley and, as always happens when I see that particular brand name, I’m whipped right back to the day my father’s wife slit her wrists with the Stanley blade in our living room.

‘Leave outside,’ the woman says, and I look at her, confused.

‘Leave torch outside door when finished,’ and I say, ‘Ah, yes, okay, I will.’

I stand in the kitchen doorway and take a long, unsteady breath.

More than two, the woman said. I’ve spotted four adult cats already, and there’s a litter of kittens in a cupboard over by the sink. I can hear them mewing pitifully. To be frank, this is really an RSPCA job. In instances like this, I usually make a phone call and they turn up with a local vet, ready to certify it’s a case of cruelty. They gather all the evidence they need to move forward with a prosecution. But that takes time. And the owner’s in hospital. Probably not coming out, from what the daughter said, so it’s a pointless exercise.

I decide to gather up the cats in the kitchen first before checking the rest of the flat. One step at a time, or it’ll be overwhelming.

The cats are a bit wild. They’re really stringy things, all legs and claws. I pick up one female, a mangy tortoiseshell with three white paws, and feel a pregnant bellyful of kittens inside her.

One female cat is capable of producing twenty thousand kittens if all her offspring go on to breed. That’s why a huge bulk of our budget goes on neutering – to prevent scenes like this. If owners would neuter their pets at six months, instead of ‘letting
them have one season’, we could almost put an end to unwanted pups and kittens. Of course we’d still have to deal with the fallout of those who believe neutering is interfering with nature, but I tend to think if that crowd weren’t causing trouble for the likes of me, they’d just be causing it elsewhere. Cock-fighting probably. Maybe wife-beating.

I double up, putting two cats in each basket, then I go to the sink. I’m guessing the guy who lived here was a drinker because, even though the place is a cesspit, there’s not much food around. Just empties. I say a silent prayer of thanks, because I don’t think I could have faced moulding scraps and rancid meat today.

There must be over sixty tins of Special Brew scattered about the work surfaces, as well as countless empty bottles of gin. I don’t recognize the brand so I turn it over in my hand and look at the label on the back. It reads: ‘Specially produced for Aldi stores’. An image of the drinker pushing his trolley filled with gin forms in my mind: thin as his cats, with yellowed corneas and that hypermobile lower jaw alcoholics seem to develop. I hear another tiny, strangled meow from the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink.

There are five kittens in a cardboard box. One dead; the other four are not far off.

Fleas. They’re riddled with them.

The fleas have sucked off so much blood from these tiny beasts that I’ll be lucky to save them. Their gums are white as alabaster and their little bodies are limp. Only two are able to make any sound. They’re a mix of black and white. The hardest to rehome at the moment, I don’t know why.

People are going a bundle for ginger toms and tabbies; they come in asking if we’ve got those silver tabbies off the Whiskas advert, not knowing those are pedigrees and sell for around four hundred quid.

I don’t bother putting the kittens in a basket just yet. They’re
too weak to go running off, so I leave them in the cardboard box. I go and check the rest of the flat and find two more adult cats. Both black, both semi-feral, and one is pregnant. I have a quick look round in wardrobes and behind chairs, but I can’t find a trace of anything else, so I head off down the stairs with two of the baskets and lock them in the car before returning for the others.

The Georgian woman is pretending to wash up again and I give her a half-wave, but she’s trance-like. I think about giving her another knock to return the torch, but she was adamant:
Leave torch outside door when finished
. So I do that. Some people just don’t like visitors.

I collect the rest of the cats and have one last check round before leaving. Then, propping the porch door open with the third basket, I check my pockets for my car keys and the bunch belonging to the man’s apartment, making sure I’ve got everything.

And it’s then that I notice the name on the letterbox belonging to apartment two.

Riverty.

‘G. Riverty,’ it says, in small, neat letters. As in Guy Riverty. As in Kate’s husband, Lucinda’s dad.

Guy and Kate have lots of cottages scattered around the Lakes, but I didn’t know they owned anything here.

They’ve never mentioned it. Then again, I think, closing the door, why would they?

19

‘B
UT WHAT IF
it’s not the same guy?’ DS Ron Quigley asks the
DI
.

‘Too many parallels,’ he replies. ‘The girls are the same age, same type, similar area, went from around school. Too much for us to not work on that assumption.’

‘But he’d let Molly Rigg go by now. He only kept her for the day.’

Detective Inspector Pete McAleese sighs. ‘Ron, it’s not atypical for the crimes to escalate as they go along. You’ve seen that for yourself enough times. First time, they test the water, see what happens, then they move up a gear.’

They are in the operations room. It’s packed with bodies, but Joanne still has her coat on because there’s a frost on the inside of the windows. She’s warming her hands on a mug of strong tea, hoping they are still dealing with a clever rapist and not a clever killer.

Joanne clears her throat, addresses McAleese. ‘I know we’ve got to move quickly with this new information Lisa Kallisto’s given us – about Lucinda meeting with an older man – but I agree with Ron. What if it’s not the same guy taking the girls? I think we need to take a closer look at the father.’

‘We always do,’ agrees DI McAleese, wearily. ‘But in this case we can rule him out. One, because his alibi stacks up: he was with his family when Molly Rigg disappeared. And two, we’ve
shown a picture of him to Molly and she says it’s not him.’

Joanne puts down her tea. ‘I re-interviewed Molly this morning and she doesn’t know
what
she knows. She was so drugged up with Rohypnol. How can she give a sure negative when she can’t recall any of it?’

‘Like I said, his alibi stacks up. So even if you’ve got the hunch of your life, Joanne, you’re going to have to let this one go for now. So, that leaves us with—’

‘What DNA we got?’ Ron asks.

‘No semen, no skin, no hair. We’re limited to a suit fibre found around Molly’s genitals. It’s not definitive, but the lab reckons it comes from something with a silk thread in it. A pinstripe maybe.’

‘Great,’ Ron says, leaning towards Joanne. ‘A dapper paedo … that’s all we bloody well need.’

Joanne senses the meeting is about to come to a close. ‘Sir,’ she says quickly, ‘I really feel it would be a mistake to ignore the father here, even if he’s got his alibi—’

McAleese holds up his palm. ‘Joanne, listen, you know what we’re dealing with – thirteen-year-old girl, white, middle-class, missing from an area of outstanding natural beauty. The second girl to disappear in a fortnight. So, yes, I’ll be looking at the father, and, yes, I’ll be putting someone on to that, but remember: everyone’s watching us. The whole country’s watching us. We’ve got to find the bastard who’s taken this girl
today
. Not tomorrow. And that means following up what we actually have to go on right now.’

Joanne nods. ‘I understand.’

‘You and Ron get yourselves back to Windermere and go and interview Sally Kallisto,’ instructs McAleese. ‘See if you can’t get her to give you more about this mystery man, see if anything correlates with what Molly Rigg’s said this morning.’

Joanne stands, and she and Ron gather up their things as McAleese delegates more house-to-house.

She’s just about to leave the room when she doubles back and stops beside McAleese, interrupting him mid-flow. ‘Molly Rigg was taken to a place with laundered sheets,’ she says quietly. ‘Guy Riverty’s got rental properties. Is anyone checking them out?’

Weird to be back here, Joanne’s thinking, as she and Ron are directed to the deputy head’s office.

‘Brings back all the old memories, does it?’ Ron asks her.

‘Yeah. Which school did you go to, Ron?’

‘Lancaster Grammar.’

‘You’re cleverer than I had you down for.’

‘I was pretty sharp when I took the eleven plus, deteriorated straight after that, though. Came out with nowt at sixteen, so I joined the force … I only signed up on account of all the sport.’

Joanne casts Ron a sideways look. He’s not what you would call a fine physical specimen. He can get out of puff tying up his shoelaces.

‘I know what you’re thinking’ – Ron smiles – ‘I don’t play so much any more, but I did use to play a lot of cricket. This police scout came round to our cricket club and told me he had the perfect career for me. Said I could play all the sport I wanted if I joined the police cadets.’