‘Good,’ said Derek. ‘Let’s hope it helps find Annie.’
Penny picked listlessly at her food. ‘Don’t you get a lot of nutters ringing up?’
‘There’s always a percentage of timewasters, yes, and people who are trying to be helpful but have simply been mistaken. We check everything out regardless, just in case something that looks daft turns out to be exactly what we’re waiting for.’
‘Anyone want a glass of wine?’ Penny got up from the table and took a bottle of Chardonnay from the fridge. ‘I’m having one.’
‘Not for me, thanks,’ said Ruth and Derek shook his head.
Penny sat back down with a large glass of wine and, pushing her food to one side, had that for dinner instead.
***
It was almost midnight when Ruth left the house. Tina had fallen asleep on the couch, and Derek had covered her and her bunny with a fleece throw, tucked it in around them, stroked his daughter’s dark, wavy hair and kissed her forehead. Penny stood at the open kitchen door with a glass of wine and a cigarette, staring into the darkness, lost in her own thoughts. She waved a perfunctory goodbye to Ruth, then went back to staring.
‘I’ll be back in the morning,’ Ruth told Derek. ‘Try and get some rest.’ Outside, she waved goodnight to the nightshift then jumped in her car and headed for home.
Next morning Ruth was back by eight and the household was in an uproar. At some point during the night someone had crept up to the front door, unnoticed by the policemen in the car, and posted a package through the letterbox. Penny had picked it up off the mat when she went downstairs for coffee and a cigarette, and had taken it into the kitchen with her.
It was a padded envelope, about eight inches by ten, addressed to ‘Penny and Derek’. The contents felt soft and squashy. She tore the flap open and tipped out the contents, and immediately gagged at the stench. Inside the padded envelope was a sealed plastic bag, rigged to rip open when the main envelope was opened. It contained excrement, more liquid than solid, and it spilled all over the kitchen table. Penny had immediately ran outside and shouted for the police in the car. Derek had heard and raced out of the bedroom, pulling on a jumper as he took the stairs three at a time. By the time Ruth got there one of the police officers was on his radio calling for a forensic team. Derek was busy comforting Tina in the garden, the child dressed in ‘Hello Kitty’ pyjamas and matching slippers, clutching her bunny to her chest.
The mess on the table stank to high heaven: Ruth looked at it, then noticed the corner of a folded piece of paper just peeking out of the torn flap. Fishing a pair of latex gloves out of her bag, she pulled them on and gently teased the paper free. Miraculously it was largely untainted, having been tucked in between the envelope and the plastic bag that held the contents. She opened it up to read it, then folded it again quickly as Penny moved towards her.
‘What is it?’
‘Nothing.’
‘It’s obviously something.’
Ruth looked at Penny. ‘Honestly, it’s nothing to worry about.’
Penny bristled. ‘Don’t treat me like a child. I want to see it.’ She took a drag on her cigarette. ‘It was addressed to me. I have rights.’
‘Okay. But it means nothing, Penny. Remember that.’ She opened out the piece of paper and held it so that Penny could read it. Derek came inside, wanting to know what was going on, and he read it, too.
The letter was scrawled, barely legible. Penny peered at it, then she gasped and put her hand to her mouth.
‘No,’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh, God.’
‘Come away, love,’ Derek said, taking her hand and leading her outside. He hugged his wife and daughter and left the police to do whatever they had to do.
***
‘I hate these clothes, they’re stupid.’
‘You should get used to them. This is what you’ll be wearing from now on.’
‘I want my MC Boyz T-shirt.’
‘It’s dirty. Put these on.’
‘No.’
‘You will wear these clothes.’ The man smacked Annie’s legs, hard. She had never been hit before, not by an adult, and she began to cry. ‘It’s time you learned how to behave. Now stop crying and get dressed.’
Annie began putting the clothes on, and made sure to cry quietly. Her legs were stinging and she didn’t want to be smacked again.
***
‘Who would write such a thing?’
The mess had been taken away, the residue cleaned up, air freshener sprayed liberally around, and still the smell lingered in the house. Derek had put the table in the garden then phoned the council to come and collect it and take it to the dump. Penny had taken Tina into town for an hour or so, a police escort following at a discreet distance. Derek and Ruth sat in the lounge, each clutching a mug of coffee. He still couldn’t believe that someone would do such a thing.
Ruth tried to play it down. ‘All sorts of people come out of the woodwork when something like this happens. They all think they know best. Honestly, try to forget it. We’ll catch them if we can, but they’re just nasty-minded folk, best ignored.’
‘It called me and Penny “scum”. It said we didn’t deserve our kids and they’d come for Tina next.’
‘We’ll keep a close eye on things, believe me. We’re not taking any chances, but threats like that are usually empty. The chances of the person who took Annie also being the person who sent this are pretty slim, but we’ll check it all out just to be sure.’
‘How could people think we don’t care about our girls? Don’t they know what happened?’
‘They probably don’t, Derek. They’ll have heard that the girls were out on their own at that time of night and not listened to anything else.’
Derek put his mug down on the coffee table. ‘They must know us,’ he said slowly. ‘How else would they know where we live? It must be someone who knows us.’
Ruth’s heart sank: she’d been hoping they didn’t think of that. ‘That still leaves a lot of people to consider,’ she said. ‘There are all the families of the kids the girls go to school with, and friends of those families, as well.’
‘People we work with.’
‘People in the street or who you see in the supermarket. Put it out of your mind. You’ll end up suspecting everybody. You can’t live your life like that.’
***
The day wore on. Penny and Tina returned from their outing. Derek fixed beans on toast for lunch, after which Tina went up to her bedroom. Penny opened a bottle of wine and sat at the table on the patio with a drink and a cigarette. Ruth checked in with DSI Hardcastle, but they had nothing new to tell each other. Derek slumped in front of the television set, staring in the direction of the screen.
‘What are we supposed to do?’ he asked Ruth, eventually. ‘I feel … useless. I want to be doing something constructive, not just sitting about.’
‘There’s not much you can do, in fairness,’ said Ruth. ‘We have the investigation in hand. The team are working through the list of car owners and checking out the leads the appeal brought in. There’s a presence at Heworth Metro station and all known sex offenders in the area are being contacted and questioned.’ She saw the look of horror on Derek’s face. ‘It’s routine,’ she said quickly. ‘We wouldn’t be doing our job properly if we didn’t speak to them.’
‘The more time passes without hearing anything, the less the chances are of finding Annie alive. That’s right, isn’t it?’
‘Each case is different.’
‘But as a general rule.’
‘As a general rule, yes, okay, that’s probably true. But we’ve got quite a bit to go on here. Often we have no idea what’s happened, some poor kiddie just seems to have vanished into thin air. With Annie, we know quite a bit. And with what we know about the car, we’ve got a direct lead to the culprit.’
‘I wish I could do something more positive. I don’t feel like I’m helping at all.’
‘Look after your wife and daughter, Derek. Leave the investigation to us, we know what we’re doing. Why don’t you see what’s on at the pictures? It would do you good to get out somewhere together. Take your mind off things.’
‘But what if anything happens? What if Annie rings, or comes home?’
‘There’ll be people here and I’ll be with you. If anything happens, we’ll know immediately.’
‘Well, okay. I’ll see what Penny says. Even if we just go out for a pizza or something, it would be good for Tina.’
***
Around the same time, police constables Ian Atkinson and David Cross pulled up outside a neat semi-detached house. They could see the car on the driveway, a red Ford Focus. It was the tenth red Ford Focus they had looked at that day.
‘Christ, not again,’ complained Atkinson. ‘I’m bloody sick of this. Whoever took that little lass would have used a stolen car and dumped it by now. This is a complete waste of time.’
Cross shrugged. ‘Got to be done.’ He got out of the car and sauntered over to the Ford on the drive, gave it the once-over. It looked like all the others. And Ian was probably right: the car the nonce had used most likely had been torched and left on waste ground somewhere, as yet undiscovered. He glanced inside the vehicle on his way to the front door, then stopped, stepped back and looked again.
‘Ian? Come over here, mate.’
‘What’s up?’
‘What was the name of that band the lasses had been to see?’
‘MC Boyz.’ Ian Atkinson and his missus had two little girls of their own, both of them crazy about MC Boyz.
‘Look.’
Atkinson squinted through the glass. There, on the floor behind the front seat, was a small, crumpled, blue T-shirt with writing on the back. Atkinson could make out the letters ‘OYZ’ and ‘our’ above a string of dates. ‘Gotcha!’ he said softly.
***
Derek and Ruth were drinking glasses of coke while Tina dunked the last of her pizza crusts into a pot of mayonnaise and demolished them. Penny had in front of her a plate with a half-eaten slice of pizza on it, and her third glass of wine. She hadn’t fancied Ruth’s suggestion of the cinema, but had been happy to be driven to the coast so they could all get some fresh air and stretch their legs before having dinner in Tina’s favourite seafront Italian restaurant. They’d had to run the gamut of the press when they left the house, but Ruth had successfully pleaded with them to be allowed a few hours out in peace.
Derek had called for the bill and Penny had excused herself to go outside for a cigarette when Ruth’s phone rang. The half of the conversation Derek and Tina could hear gave nothing away, and neither did Ruth once the call ended.
‘Let’s get the bill paid and head home, folks,’ she said, standing up and taking her jacket from the back of her seat.
‘What was the call about?’ asked Derek, signalling to a waiter to hurry up.
‘Have they found Annie?’ asked Tina.
Ruth shook her head. ‘Not in here.’ She made them wait until they were back in the car before she spilled the beans. ‘The good news is that we’ve found the car and arrested the owner. The bad news is that there’s still no sign of Annie.’
‘Have they looked in his freezer?’ Tina was close to tears.
‘Freezer?’ Penny was confused.
‘No, Tina, you mustn’t think like that, love.’ Ruth fired the engine. ‘Let’s get back to the house, then we can talk properly and I can make some more calls.’
***
George Cotter didn’t look like a child abductor. Then again, in DI Karen Fitzgerald’s experience, people rarely revealed the monster within. He had been dealt with by the custody officer on his arrival at the station and she now had him sweating in the interview room, a grubby space with one small window, and that too high up to afford a view of freedom. She looked at her watch: he’d been in there about twenty minutes, no laces in his shoes, inky fingertips reminding him of his guilt.
She nodded to her colleague. ‘Come on then, let’s go and see what he has to say for himself.’ They went into the room and, once the preliminaries had been dealt with, Fitzgerald got on with the business of the day.
‘Mr Cotter, I’m DI Karen Fitzgerald and this is DC Robert Winter. Do you understand why you’re here?’
Cotter nodded. He looked dazed, like he couldn’t believe this was happening to him. ‘The car. You found something in my car.’
‘Your car has been provisionally identified as the vehicle used in the abduction of a child on Saturday night.’
‘That’s not possible.’
‘Can you tell me where you were between the hours of ten p.m. on Saturday night and two a.m. on Sunday morning?’
‘I was at home with my wife. We went to bed about ten o’clock.’
‘Is that usual, sir?’
‘Yes. We have a cup of Horlicks around half past nine, then put the mugs in the sink and go to bed. We’ve always done that. For years.’
‘And your wife will be able to confirm this?’
‘Well … yes. Yes, of course she will.’
Yes,
thought Fitzgerald, o
f course she will. Guaranteed.
The wives always bloody did. ‘The officers who called at your house found a T-shirt in the back of your car. Can you tell me how it got there?’