Black Rabbit Summer (33 page)

There had to be
something
there to embarrass me.

And I suppose, in a way, there was.

But it was an oddly distant kind of embarrassment, and I don’t think there was any bitterness attached to it. I didn’t think Nic had done anything wrong. I didn’t blame her for anything. I just felt a little bit sorry for her.

When Dad had finished telling me what happened, I asked him what he thought it all meant.

‘Well, they need to corroborate Nic’s story first, which means bringing in Luke Kemp for questioning, and at the moment they don’t know where he is. And then there’s the question of Nic’s reliability as a witness, given the state she was in. Particularly if it turns out that she’d been drinking the spiked tequila. But even if she
is
telling the truth, and her story checks out, I’m not sure it’s going to help Raymond that much.’

‘Why not?’

‘He was
watching
them, Pete. He was peeping through the window in the middle of the night, watching them doing… well, whatever they were doing.’

‘I think he was just watching out for Nic,’ I said. ‘You know, like keeping an eye out for her, making sure she was OK.’

‘Well, maybe,’ Dad said, shaking his head. ‘But I don’t think anyone else is going to see it like that. They’re just going to see a mixed-up kid who gets his kicks by watching people have sex. They’re going to think he was sick and frustrated, and then he got chased away, and maybe that made him even him more frustrated, so maybe he turned his attention to someone else.’

‘Or maybe Luke didn’t
just
chase him away,’ I suggested. ‘Maybe he caught him.’

‘Possibly,’ Dad said. ‘And if that’s the case, he’ll have left some trace in his trailer, which forensics will match up with Raymond. But Nicole said he wasn’t gone for very long, and she didn’t see any signs of a struggle when he came back.’

‘But if Raymond was at the trailer, doesn’t that mean he couldn’t have done anything to Stella?’

Dad shrugged. ‘It all depends on the timing. Nicole isn’t sure what time she saw Raymond, and the pathologist is still working on the exact time of… I mean, until all the reports are in…’ Dad hesitated for a moment then. His eyes flicked away from mine, and he seemed to think about something for a second before quickly looking back at me. ‘They think the car had something to do with it.’

‘What car?’

‘The burned-out car at the river. It’s possible that Stella was driven down to the river that night, and then the car was torched to get rid of any evidence. It’s being checked, but there’s not much chance of finding anything. They’re still checking Tom Noyce’s caravan too –’

‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ I said.

Dad stared at me.

I looked back at him. ‘That’s what you were talking about just now – the pathologist’s report, the exact time of death. They’ve found her body, haven’t they?’

Dad didn’t say anything, he just carried on staring at me, but I knew I was right. I could tell by the sound of his silence.

‘When did they find her?’ I asked him.

He sighed. ‘Early this morning… in the river. About a hundred metres downstream.’

‘Shit…’

‘I’m sorry, Pete. I didn’t want you to find out like this, but the investigation team are trying to keep it quiet for as long as possible, and I promised John Kesey I wouldn’t tell anyone.’ He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘Stella’s parents have been informed, and they’ve agreed not to go public yet, so it’s imperative that you don’t tell anyone either. All right? Not a word to anyone. Because as soon as this gets out, there’s going to be absolute chaos, and that’s going to make it almost impossible for the police to do their job.’

‘How did she die?’ I asked quietly.

Dad looked at me. ‘Do you promise to keep quiet about this?’

‘Yeah.’

He nodded. ‘Well, at the moment, the cause of death seems to be a head injury. The autopsy isn’t conclusive yet – they’re still waiting for the outcome of some more tests – but the only apparent injury she suffered was the wound to her head.’

‘What about her clothes? I mean, was she… you know…?’

‘No, she wasn’t sexually assaulted. Her body was naked, but there were no signs of assault.’

The full horror of what we were talking about suddenly sank in then, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt so empty and dark. I
think it was the words ‘naked’ and ‘body’ that did it. Those two simple words had somehow managed to strip away the frail illusion that Stella was still alive. Even when I’d seen her on the video tape, and I’d got the feeling that I was looking at a ghost, there’d still been something inside me that wasn’t willing to accept the reality of her death. But now… well, now she was nothing but a naked body. A dead naked body. Pale and white, cold and lifeless.

I could smell dark water.

I shuddered.

I could feel myself shrinking, my senses fading, and I just wanted to sit there and do nothing. I didn’t want to talk, I didn’t want to listen, I didn’t want to do anything… but I could already hear Dad talking to me, asking me if I was feeling OK, and I knew that I was listening, because I could hear myself telling him not to worry, that it was just a bit of a shock, that I was fine…

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah.’

My voice sounded a long way away, and it didn’t seem to have anything to do with me.

‘What about Tom Noyce?’ it said. ‘Is he still a suspect?’

‘Well, he’s been questioned, and they’re still taking his caravan apart, but apart from Stella’s blood on the outside, they haven’t found anything of interest yet. His mother has given him an alibi for most of the night anyway. He’s been released for now, but they might want to talk to him again.’

‘I suppose they still think that Raymond did it, do they?’

‘You can’t blame them, Pete. Everything’s pointing that way. They’ve even found pictures of her on his computer. Photographs, film clips –’

‘That doesn’t
mean
anything,’ I heard the distant-Pete say.
‘Everyone I know has seen those pictures on the Internet. I’ve seen them, everyone at school has seen them, including most of the teachers. You’ve probably seen them too.’

‘I haven’t seen them,’ Dad said prudishly.

‘Yeah, but you didn’t go to school with her, did you? I mean, come
on
, Dad… if you went to school with a good-looking girl and you found out there were naked pictures of her on the Internet, wouldn’t you be just a little bit curious?’

‘That’s not the point –’

‘Yes, it is.’

My voice was becoming more and more distant now. I could still hear it, and it wasn’t actually getting any quieter, it just seemed to be moving further away from me. And for a while then, as Dad and I carried on talking, I was totally unaware of what we were talking about. I was deep down inside myself, thinking – without thinking – of other things. My thoughts were raw and black.

I don’t know what made me come back to myself, but when I did – emerging quite suddenly, my head thick and dull – Dad was still talking to me, but I had no idea what he was talking about.

‘… and when I put that into the CCA system,’ he was saying, ‘I found at least three incidents that shared some similarities, and quite a few more that might be worth looking into.’

‘Sorry?’ I said.

He looked at me. ‘What?’

‘You lost me there for a minute. What’s CCA?’

‘I’ve just
told
you. Weren’t you listening?’

‘Sorry,’ I smiled. ‘I must have drifted off or something…’

‘Maybe you’d better get some sleep,’ he said, giving me a concerned look. ‘I can tell you all about this in the morning.’

‘No, it’s all right. I’m not tired. I just wasn’t concentrating, that’s all.’ I smiled at him again. ‘I’m listening now.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Well, do you remember what I told you about the PNC?’

‘The what?’

‘PNC. Police National Computer.’ Dad looked at my blank face and sighed. ‘I’ll start again from the beginning, shall I?’

‘Please.’

I listened then as he told me how he’d gone into work that afternoon and his DCI had sent him up to an isolated room on another floor to keep him away from the investigation, and he’d spent the morning reading through case files and transferring data to computer records, and after a while he’d got so bored
that he’d logged on to the Police National Computer and just started browsing around.

‘I wasn’t really
looking
for anything to do with all this,’ he told me. ‘But I suppose it was on my mind, and I didn’t think it’d do any harm to try a few things. So I started seeing if I could find any links to this case on the CCA system.’ He looked at me. ‘CCA stands for Comparative Case Analysis. It’s basically a national database application that can be used to compare and analyse crimes of a similar nature.’

‘You mean like serial killers?’

He nodded. ‘Serial killers, serial crimes… it’s especially useful if you’re trying to find patterns between crimes committed in different parts of the country.’

‘But this isn’t –’

‘No, I know this case doesn’t
sound
anything like that, but as I said, I was just having a look, seeing if I could find anything.’

‘And did you?’

He frowned. ‘I don’t know… I might have found
something
, but I’m not sure if it means anything or not. You see, the system works by analysing certain aspects of a crime and seeing if they match the identifying aspects of other crimes. But the trouble with this case is that most of the identifying elements are too wide-ranging to be of any use.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, I knew that if I put in quite general keywords – things like
missing teenager
,
abduction
,
murder
– I’d get literally thousands of matches, so I realized that I had to work out a way to narrow it down. I tried everything I could think of – time of day, time of year… I searched by age group, by town, by county… I even started putting in things like
river
,
rabbit
,
celebrity
– but none of it really got me anywhere. It wasn’t until I tried
narrowing down the location even more that I finally started to see something.’ Dad looked at me. ‘In the last four years, fourteen teenagers have been reported missing after visiting a fairground.’

‘Fourteen?’

He nodded. ‘Five of them either returned home later or were subsequently found to have simply run away, but of the remaining nine, six are still missing and three are dead. Two girls, one boy.’

‘How did they die?’

‘Two from strangulation, one from a knife wound. All three murders are still unsolved.’

‘Shit, Dad,’ I whispered. ‘That could mean –’

‘It
could
mean anything, Pete. That’s the trouble. There’s no pattern to any of it yet. None of the missing kids knew each other, none of them had anything in common, and there’s no obvious parallels between the three murders. The only thing that links all three cases is the fairground connection, and even that’s pretty shaky.’

‘Yeah, but if it was the same fair every time –’

‘It wasn’t. Two of the kids went missing from a Bretton’s Funfair, and another two disappeared after visiting a Funderstorm Fair, but on both occasions the fairs were in different towns, and all four cases occurred at different times. The rest of the kids all went missing from different fairs. Different fairs, different times, different parts of the country. So if there
is
someone out there taking all these kids, it’s probably not a fairground worker.’

‘Unless they move around a lot and work for different fairs,’ I suggested.

Dad shrugged. ‘They’d have to work for a
lot
of different fairs.’

‘Yeah, but it’s not impossible, is it?’

‘I suppose not…’

‘And if –’

‘Listen, Pete,’ he said calmly. ‘Don’t get too carried away with this, OK? It’s all just conjecture at the moment, and there’s a pretty good chance that it won’t come to anything in the end. I’ve passed it on to John Kesey, and he’s going to try and get someone to look into it in more detail, but I don’t want you to start getting your hopes up too much.’ He looked at me. ‘Yeah, I
know
I’m contradicting myself – giving you the possibility of hope and then telling you not to get carried away with it… and I know that sounds really stupid. And maybe it is. But I just wanted you to know –’

‘The man with the moustache,’ I said suddenly.

‘What?’

‘It could be
him.
’

‘What are you talking about? What man?’

I looked eagerly at Dad. ‘When I was leaving the fair, I saw this creepy-looking guy hanging around the exit, and then later on I saw him going into Back Lane.’

Dad frowned. ‘What do you mean
creepy-looking
? What was he doing that made him look creepy?’

He was standing in the shadows
, I thought
, watching a vision of Raymond on a non-existent merry-go-round. An old-fashioned fairground organ was playing and I could hear the sound of children’s laughter and I could see Raymond sitting on a jet-black horse that wasn’t a horse but a horse-sized rabbit with shining black eyes and I wanted to join him on the carousel… I wanted us to ride those horse-rabbits together like two lost cowboys riding in circles…

It was too late.

‘He had a moustache,’ I muttered.

‘That’s all?’ Dad said. ‘He was creepy because he had a moustache?’

‘No… he was creepy because… I don’t know. I mean, he wasn’t actually
doing
anything, he was just kind of hanging around, you know… lurking in the shadows, watching people as they left.’

‘Did you see him talking to anyone?’

‘No.’

‘Have you mentioned this man to anyone else?’

‘I told DI Barry.’

‘Did he take a description?’

I shook my head. ‘He didn’t seem that interested.’