‘We believe your daughter’s case may have some bearing on another case we’re investigating,’ said Jim. ‘I’m afraid as it’s an on-going investigation that’s all I can really tell you right now.’
‘Back at the door you seemed to think we’d found your daughter,’ said Amy. ‘May I ask what led you to that conclusion?’
‘I know Grace is alive. She phoned me last night.’
Jim and Amy exchanged an astonished glance. ‘What did she say?’ asked Jim.
‘She didn’t say anything.’
‘So how do you know it was her?’
‘I know because I know. It’s a mother thing.’ She turned her watery blue eyes on Amy. ‘Have you got children?’
‘Two. A boy and a girl.’
‘Then you know what I’m talking about. I didn’t have to hear her voice. I just knew.’
‘What time was the call made?’ asked Jim.
‘About eleven o’clock.’
‘Did you get the caller’s number?’
‘Yes. I think it’s a mobile phone number.’ Linda took a scrap of paper with a number written on it from the mantelpiece and handed it to Jim. He jotted it down, then passed it to Amy, who did likewise before returning it to Linda.
‘Have you tried ringing it?’
Linda shook her head. ‘I know my Grace, she won’t answer if I do. She’s a very independent little girl, and she’s stubborn too…’ she glanced towards the hallway, her voice dropping low, ‘like her dad. When she’s ready, she’ll call again.’
At the words ‘little girl’, a glimmer of sympathy passed through Jim. Linda was obviously unable to picture her daughter as anything other than the child she’d been when she disappeared. Her mind was stuck in limbo, frozen in a moment that existed only in history. He wondered whether, if Grace suddenly turned up alive, Linda would even be able to accept her as her daughter. ‘Is this the first silent phone call you’ve received?’
‘Yes.’
‘If it was your daughter, why do you think she would suddenly decide to get in touch now after all these years?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe she’s thinking about coming home. Maybe she just needed to hear her mother’s voice.’
‘Is she giving you her guff about Grace phoning?’ The voice came from the doorway. Jim turned towards its owner. Ron Kirby had put on a fair bit of weight since his case-file photo. He wore a string-vest that bulged like a sack of grain over tracksuit bottoms. His broken-veined cheeks, craggy nose and rheumy eyes told of a diet of alcohol, cigarettes and greasy food. His brawny arms were tattooed with, amongst other things, Sheffield Wednesday’s blue owl insignia and a list of the club’s honours. Lines of meanness spread from the corners of his eyes as he looked from his wife to the detectives.
‘I take it you don’t think it was your daughter, Mr Kirby,’ said Amy.
Ron grunted out a phlegmy laugh. ‘Course it bloody wasn’t. It was just some dirty little perv.’ He prodded a thick, tobacco-yellowed finger at his wife’s head, causing her to wince. ‘That’s the only place Grace is still alive.’
Linda lowered her eyes, fidgeting nervously with her cigarette. Jim felt a prickle of anger, both at Ron’s callousness and at Linda’s apparent inability to stand up for herself. Keeping his voice carefully businesslike, he asked, ‘What leads you to believe your daughter’s dead, Mr Kirby?’
Ron gave Jim a frowning smile, wagging his finger as if the question was a trap he didn’t intend to fall into. ‘Oh no, you’re not leading me down that rabbit hole. I had a gutful of your lot’s snide little questions when Grace first ran off.’ He jerked his chin at Linda. ‘It took me and her years to get back to some kind of normal life. So unless you’re here to tell us something new, you can bloody well bugger off and leave us alone. Do you hear me?’
‘I hear you and I understand.’ Jim vainly tried to catch Linda’s downturned eyes. ‘Thank you for talking to us, Mrs Kirby.’ He proffered a card with his name and number on it. ‘If you get any more strange phone calls, or if anything else out of the ordinary happens, or even if you just want to talk, please don’t hesitate to contact me.’
Ron snatched the card out of Jim’s hand. ‘Why would she want to talk to you? You lot are about as much use as tits on a nun. You proved that back in ‘97. If we get any more of them calls, I’ll deal with them my way.’
Jim shot Ron a brief, hard look. His eyes softened as they returned to Linda. ‘Sorry to have bothered you. If and when we do have something new to tell you, we’ll be in touch.’
The detectives made their way to the front door, which Ron slammed emphatically behind them. ‘He’s a real piece of work,’ said Amy. ‘I think I’d have run away too if I had a dad like him.’ She sighed. ‘Christ, it depresses me to see a woman like that waste her life on a tosser like him. Why do you think she stays with him?’
‘Who knows? Maybe her parents were the same way. I sometimes think these things are passed down through families like diseases.’ Jim sparked up a cigarette, lifting his face to the pale morning sun.
‘What do you reckon to this phone call business?’
‘I reckon we should look into it. It’s probably just a coincidence, but it’s all we’ve got to go on right now.’
‘Pretty big coincidence, don’t you think? News goes out about what went down at the Baxley house. A few hours later, Linda Kirby gets a silent phone call. I’m thinking, what if the news spurred Grace into getting in touch?’
Jim squinted at Amy. ‘Do you buy into what Mrs Kirby said about being able to sense it was her daughter?’
‘As a cop, no. As a mother, I’m not sure. I can tell you this, often when one of my two needs something from me, they don’t even have to say it, I just know.’
Jim took a thoughtful drag, then flicked his cigarette away. As they drove to the station, tiredness settled over him like a thick blanket. Catching a glimpse of his red-rimmed eyes in the rear-view mirror, Reynolds’s words came back to him.
Sleep. That’s the secret to a healthy life.
A wry smile crossed his lips. Reynolds was the last person in the world he’d ever expected to be taking advice from, but he was right. If he didn’t get some sleep soon, he’d be no use to anyone. ‘Does your offer still stand?’ he asked.
‘You mean about covering for you?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Sure, go home, get a few hours’ shut-eye.’
‘Thanks, Amy.’
Jim dropped Amy at Police Headquarters, then turned in the direction of home. By the time he got there, he was almost asleep at the wheel. He dragged himself upstairs, undressed and crawled between the sheets. But when he closed his eyes, his mind began to empty itself of the night’s events. He saw the burnt and bloody bodies. He saw Mark Baxley’s desperate, agonised eyes and Linda Kirby’s tired, sad eyes. But most of all he saw the basement, the naked figures and their victims. Over and over, the sickening footage looped through his brain.
With a sigh, Jim got out of bed and retrieved his cigarettes. As he smoked, he booted up his computer and googled ‘SB Engineering’. He clicked a link to the company’s website. According to the PR bumf, SB Engineering was one of the UK’s leading contract manufacturing companies. The ‘About’ section boasted that the company had expanded rapidly since it was founded in 1996, and currently employed 230 people in 160,000 square feet of hi-tech workshop space.
Jim navigated back to Google and scanned further down the list of links. One entitled ‘SB Engineering: Does Their Success Prove The Government Was Right?’ caught his eye. It led to an article on a financial blog published on 18/03/2010. The article began, ‘Thirteen years ago I wrote about how Stephen Baxley was granted a multi-million-pound interest-free government loan to help get his then fledgling company, SB Engineering, up and sprinting. The loan, whose exact amount and repayment timeframe has never been made public, matched capital raised from private investors. With the general election looming, I thought it would be a good time to revisit the issues raised in that article.’ The author went on to question whether it was right for governments to use tax money to kickstart businesses, congratulating SB Engineering on its success, but stressing that it had not changed his opinion that politicians driven by short-term electoral pressures were poorly qualified to pick long-term investment prospects.
The author was someone called Peter Nichols. Jim signed up to receive email alerts when the blog was updated, reflecting that Nichols would probably soon be publishing another article about SB Engineering, along the lines of ‘I told you so’.
Jim made his way downstairs to the sofa. He lay studying the printouts of Grace and Mark’s faces. His thoughts returned to Margaret. They’d intended to start a family but had always found reasons for putting it off. At first it was money – or rather, the lack of it; then it was their careers. And then, suddenly, it was too late. He wondered, as he often had, whether Margaret would have left him if they’d had children. He sharply dismissed the thought. It was pointless. She was gone and that was all there was to it. It was up to him to find something to fill the hole she’d left in his life. But what? When Margaret had first walked out, things had got so bad he’d sought help from a counsellor. The counsellor had told him that over time his pain would ease, but it hadn’t. Even now after five years, the hole was as cavernous as it had ever been.
Jim flipped through his notepad until he came to the phone number Linda Kirby had given him. He stared at it, brow furrowed. It would be a crazy move to ring the number without even knowing if it was registered to a name, and especially without the back-up of recording and tracing technology. At best it would put the phone’s owner on their guard, at worst it would prompt them to get rid of the phone. But in his mind the clock was ticking like a bomb, pushing him to make something happen. He picked up the photo of Grace. If she was alive, what had become of her? Had she got away from her abusers? Or was she still caught up in their sick fantasies? If the former, maybe news of Stephen Baxley’s possible death had given her the confidence to consider coming out of hiding. If the latter, maybe she was looking for a way out, a way back to the life her abusers had stolen from her. Either way, Jim wanted her to know the path was open, and that if she took it, she would get all the help he could give. Slowly, he picked up the phone and dialled.
When a voice announced over the loudspeakers that the train would soon be arriving at Sheffield, Angel’s eyelids jerked up. She stared out of the window at the sprawl of housing estates and industrial plants that made up north-east Sheffield. Her memories of the landscape were hazy, seeming almost to belong to another lifetime. But she recognised the blue-green roof of Meadowhall Shopping Centre, under which she’d whiled away many Saturdays with friends. And she noted the absence of the Tinsley Cooling Towers, which had stood like sentinels watching over the endless streams of traffic flowing along the M1.
Angel compressed her lips, struggling to keep her breathing steady as the concrete rampart of Park Hill loomed into view. Swinging smoothly around a final curve in the track, the train drew into the station. Angel’s gaze swept over the people waiting on the platform. She knew it was absurd, but she half expected to recognise some of their faces. She pulled up the hood of her sweatshirt before getting off the train.
Looking around herself in a daze, she headed out of the station. It was like revisiting a dream. Everything seemed different yet the same, not quite real, but real enough to evoke echoes of the warnings that had rung in her ears the last time she was in Sheffield. Warnings not to contact her family or friends. Warnings never to return. Warnings that to do so would have dire consequences for her and her family. She knew the names of some of the people behind those warnings. Others had maintained a shadowy anonymity. But all of them had one thing in common – they were people with power and influence, people who thought they could do whatever they wanted and get away with it. Well, she was going to teach them otherwise.
Angel’s phone started to ring. Brow pinching, she snatched it out of her handbag. A mobile phone number she didn’t recognise showed on its screen. Who the hell could be calling? Only Deano knew the number belonged to her, and it obviously wasn’t him. She’d made two other calls on the phone – to James Cook Hospital and to her mum. The hospital had certainly passed her number on to Cleveland Police, and her mum would almost certainly have dialled 1471. So it had to be the police or her mum. She didn’t want to speak to either of them, but she did want to hear her mum’s voice again.
She put the phone to her ear and waited for the caller to speak. Silence. Several seconds passed. More silence. She resisted the urge to ask,
Who is this?
It occurred to her that perhaps that was exactly what whoever it was wanted her to do. She felt certain the caller wasn’t her mum. Her mum was a simple woman. It would never cross her mind to use such a tactic to try and goad her into speaking. So it had to be the police. Didn’t it? Another possibility occurred to her, one that made her heart thump in her chest. Maybe it was her dad. This was exactly the sort of thing
he
would do. Then a man’s voice came over the line.
The voice had a smoke-roughened edge, like her dad’s. But there was also a gentleness to it that her dad had never possessed. ‘Who am I speaking to please?’
Angel made no reply. The caller repeated his question. Again, she said nothing. Then came a question that sent her heart and mind into overdrive. ‘Is this Grace Kirby?’
She stifled a sharp intake of breath, telling herself it had to be the police. But how could Cleveland Police have found out her real name? There was just no way. The only person up there who knew it was dead.
‘This is Detective Jim Monahan of South Yorkshire Police,’ continued the man.
South Yorkshire Police!
Reflexively, Angel’s free hand dove into her bag and curled around the Glock’s grip. She jerked her head from side to side as if expecting to see a clutch of police officers bearing down on her. How the hell could South Yorkshire Police have got her number? The answer was as obvious as it was painful. Her mum must have contacted them. She could have slapped herself for phoning her. That moment of weakness had put everything at risk. Her plans. Her family. Everything! What if the people she was out to exact revenge on had contacts in the police? Word might already have got back to them. This Detective Monahan could be in their employ. She drew a steadying breath, telling herself that all the police had to go on was a mother’s gut instinct. That didn’t exactly constitute hard evidence. They were probably just making enquiries to placate her mum. More importantly, there was no way they could know she was back in Sheffield.