From the Cradle (17 page)

‘Git aways from me!’ she screeched, trying to turn the heavy old pram. She pointed at him with a shaky finger. ‘You’re a bad man!’

Jerome mimicked her in a high-pitched mocking voice. Then he stuck his face close to hers and dropped his voice two octaves. ‘You is right. I is a
BAD
man.’ He was showing off, thought Larry with disdain.

Jerome darted his hand into the pram which, Larry saw with a brief shock of cognizance that he felt physically in his belly, was full of dolls. Dirty, charity shop sad cases, rag dolls with stuffing spilling out, naked Barbies with matted hair, blank Bratz dolls wearing nothing but stilettos and bras. They were all piled on top of each other, reminding Larry of when they studied the Holocaust in Y
ear Ni
ne, the unforgettable images of naked gassed bodies in unspeakable heaps that, although he never admitted it to anyone, gave him nightmares for weeks afterwards.

But Jerome seemed to know exactly what he was looking for in his sinister lucky dip. He grabbed at the doll on the top, a slightly cleaner, better-cared-for one in a stained pale blue Babygro. They were supposed to be able to blink, those dolls, although this one had one eye stuck open, and the other stuck shut.

The old woman wailed, a heartrending screech of pain.

‘Give it back, Jerome,’ said Larry, without much conviction.

‘Fuck off, you little twat,’ Jerome responded, waving the doll around by its foot, like a lasso, taunting his dog with it as though the doll was a juicy steak. The woman clutched at Jerome’s arm and he batted her away in disgust. ‘Get your filthy claws off of me, you old hag.’

‘Give me my baby!’ she screeched in a cracked voice. RiRi the dog was working herself up into a frenzy, sensing the tension and aggression in the air, which was doubtless Jerome’s intention, as he kept smiling down at the dog and barking back at it. Then he somehow activated the doll’s crying mechanism, and its thin mechanical high-pitched wail could be heard above the rest of the commotion. Jerome found it hilarious. Larry had had enough.

‘I’ll do it,’ he said abruptly, ‘but in a couple of weeks, yeah? Got a lot on right now. Catch you later.’ He started walking away as more kids gathered, at a safe distance, watching the entertainment with blank faces.

Loud screams broke out behind him and when Larry turned around he saw the old woman on her knees trying to reach into RiRi’s jaws, where the dog had hold of the doll and was violently shaking it into several separate bits, limbs flying, the head rolling off and bouncing on the tarmac.

Jerome stood by with his arms crossed, laughing as though it was the funniest thing he had ever seen. Then he kicked the pram over, scattering all the other dolls.

Oh man
, thought Larry.
What have I let myself in for?

Chapter 18
Patrick – Day 3

Patrick gathered together all the members of the team in the incident room, with a couple of notable exceptions; Winkler was missing – no one was sure where he was but Patrick was hardly cut up about it – and the DCI, as he was trying to think of her, was in a meeting with the Deputy Commissioner. But everyone else was here, all focussing intently on the large square photograph pinned to the centre of the board.

‘Denise Breem,’ Patrick said. ‘Everyone recognize the name?’

Mike was first to respond. ‘Caspar Doyle’s missus.’

The name Caspar Doyle sent a shudder of revulsion through the room from both sexes. Seven years ago, Doyle had been convicted of abducting and murdering ten-year-old twins, Lucy and Kelly Draper, who had been on their way home from school. He had brutally raped them before stabbing them to death and attempting to bury them in the back garden of his terraced house. Fortunately, a neighbour had heard him digging up his lawn at midnight and called the police. Two days later, after refusing to speak in interviews and threatening to go on hunger strike, Doyle had hanged himself in his cell.

The police had always suspected that Doyle’s girlfriend, Denise Breem, had helped him abduct the girls by luring them to the house. She, or someone matching her description, had been seen hanging around the school in the days immediately before the two girls were murdered. But there was no evidence, she denied everything and, with Doyle dead, it was impossible to make a case against her. To the sickened frustration of every officer involved, they’d had to let her go. With no charges, she wasn’t on any registers and her record was clean.

‘What do we know about her?’ Patrick asked. ‘She was
twenty-fo
ur at the time, so she’s thirty-one now. Brought up on the Kennedy Estate, both parents on long-term sick, her dad, by all accounts, a violent, drunken scumbag. Denise left school at sixteen, no qualifications, a couple of convictions for shoplifting to her name.’

‘Wasn’t there some . . . incident with her sister?’ Carmella asked.

‘Well remembered. Yes, when Denise was fourteen, her
ten-yea
r-old sister was taken into care after social workers discovered that a friend of her parents, a guy called Steve McLean, had sexually assaulted her. McLean was living with the family at the time as their lodger. According to the reports from the time, the whole family blamed the little girl, as if she was some kind of Lolita and he was an innocent victim.’

Heads shook and voices murmured darkly around the room.

‘But the social workers didn’t think Denise was in any danger after McLean was put away, and Denise denied that he’d touched her too. When questioned about it when she was being interviewed about the Boyle case, Denise said her sister was “a little slut who was asking for it” . . . But none of that matters right now. All that matters is that Denise is the only person with any kind of record we can find on the list from the Eleven O’Clock Club that all three of our abducted children attended.’

‘What the hell was she doing there?’ Mike asked.

‘I’ll come to that in a moment,’ Patrick replied. ‘First, this afternoon I interviewed Bowie Hollister—’

He ignored the sniggers.

‘—a seven-year-old boy who says he saw Liam McConnell being taken from his mum’s Audi . . . by a woman.’ He explained the rest of what Bowie had said and as he spoke he could feel it: that buzz in the air, as it seemed that finally they were getting somewhere. ‘Bowie has been with a sketch artist here this afternoon. And this is what he came up with.’

Enjoying the theatricality of it, Patrick lifted the enlarged sketch from where it lay face down on the table and pinned it to the board beside the photo of Denise.

‘Fuck! It’s her,’ Mike said, as most of the other detectives in the room made similar noises.

‘It
could
be her,’ Patrick corrected him. ‘The woman in the sketch appears to have the same dark, frizzy hair, the same shaped face, similar features.’

‘The same cruel lips,’ Carmella interjected.

‘Very poetic, Carmella. Perhaps. But there are a lot of women who look like this.’

‘I’ve been out with a few of them,’ wisecracked a DC from the back of the room.

‘I need a detective to go through the CCTV from Sainsbury’s again, looking for Denise. Preet, can you do that please?’ He made a mental note also to ask Preet Gupta if she knew where Winkler, her supposed partner, had got to.

‘Also,’ Carmella continued, ‘Zoe McConnell said that she thought a man bumped her on her way into the supermarket, which was how we assumed she lost her car key.’

Patrick said, ‘Mike, can you talk to Mrs McConnell again, find out if she is certain the person who bumped her was a man? I don’t think she’d be mistaken about that though – in which case we can assume there were two of them working together. The man bumped Zoe, then passed the key to his female accomplice.’

Mike was deep in thought. ‘If McLean is out of prison now, which I guess he would be if it was ten years ago, maybe he and Denise have hooked up – he has a hold over her from when she was a kid. And now she’s helping him procure other kids . . . a cycle o
f abus
e.’

‘It’s a theory,’ Patrick agreed.

With the room buzzing, Patrick explained what Denise had been doing at the Dads’ Club. He caught Carmella’s eye. ‘Let’s go and find Denise Breem.’

The Helping Hands Agency was based in a cramped, dingy office above a KFC in Whitton, the smell of fried chicken hanging in the air and making Patrick’s stomach growl. He told the woman who ran the agency, which provided temps for manual work – cleaning, menial factory work, jobs on building sites, and so on – who they were looking for and watched her press her lips together until they turned white.

‘Hounding that poor woman, are you?’ The owner, Sarah Mason, was in her early fifties with dyed pillar-box-red hair.

‘You know about her past?’

‘Yeah, of course. She told me all about how the police tried to stitch her up.’

‘And you sent her to work as a cleaner at a club for
children
?’

Sarah Mason’s eyes were full of contempt, a look that bounced off Patrick like a bullet off Kevlar. ‘She loves kids. Just because she made the mistake of going out with a scumbag.’ Her eyes watered, and Patrick understood why this woman felt empathy for Denise Breem. She saw them both as women who’d been let down by men, nothing more.

Carmella leaned in. ‘Ms Mason, we don’t have time to chat about this all day. We need to know where Denise is right now.’

‘And before you argue,’ Patrick added, ‘and start going on about rights and privacy and whatever, save your breath. This is a murder investigation. You might be the one in a million who thinks Denise is Snow White, but if the tabloids find out you tried to protect her, I don’t think you’ll have many clients wanting your helping hands any more.’

Walking out, Patrick felt no pride, just grim satisfaction. This, right here, right now, was the point in the investigation where the ends justified the means. The only thing that mattered was finding those kids.

They pulled up outside Freshtime Foods, a hangar-shaped architectural carbuncle based on the edge of an industrial estate in nearby Feltham. Patrick took off his sunglasses as he got out of the car, sweat prickling his armpits, the air thick and chewy. Carmella followed him into the building, appearing cool and fragrant as always, even as they pushed through the hanging plastic slats across the doorway into the stifling heat of the factory. Patrick had worked in a place like this once, during the summer holidays when he was a sixth-f
orme
r, back at the height of his Goth days, when he always went out wearing make-up. He’d made the mistake of forgetting to remove his eyeliner before coming in to work one day. The meatheads who staffed the factory had loved that, giving him the nickname Rambo. Leaving that factory after a summer picking black cornflakes off a production line had been one of the happiest moments of his life.

A man wearing a foreman’s uniform approached immediately.

‘We’re looking for Denise Breem.’ As the foreman frowned, Patrick said, ‘She’s a temp.’

‘Wait here.’

The foreman walked over to the centre of the factory floor, where pots of jam were boxed and stacked on pallets, a group of women standing either side of a conveyor belt wearing blue and white caps and shapeless smocks.

‘That’s her,’ Carmella whispered.

Patrick squinted. Carmella was right. At the far end of the conveyor belt, down which pots of jam trundled, was the woman they were looking for. And at the same moment Patrick recognized her, the foreman spoke to one of the women, who pointed at Denise – and she bolted.

She ran towards the back of the factory and a row of huge cylindrical vats.

‘Come on,’ Patrick yelled, and he broke into a run, just as a forklift truck sailed into his path. He skidded to a halt, swearing at the man driving the truck, who lifted his ear protectors
questioningly
.

Ignoring him, Patrick and Carmella dashed around the back of the truck and ran past the conveyor belt towards the vats. There was no sign of Denise.

A door led out into a yard where dozens more pallets were stacked up. The two detectives went out into the bright sunshine. The yard was deserted.

She had to be hiding behind one of the stacks. Patrick gestured for Carmella to go down the left hand side of the row, while he took the right. His heart was thumping fast with excitement.

He crept along the row of pallets, Carmella doing the same on the other side. He could feel the sun burning the top of his head.

There was no sign of their quarry.

‘Where the fuck is she?’

Carmella was about to reply when Patrick saw her. She was crouched behind a forklift truck at the far end of the yard, her blue cap just visible.

‘Looks like we’ve lost her,’ he said loudly, walking slowly towards the forklift, keeping his eyes averted. Then as he drew level with the truck, he shot off to the left, Denise popping up and starting to run, but he had the momentum – and grabbed hold of the back of her factory smock as she made a half-hearted attempt to get away.

‘Get off me!’ she yelled. ‘I’ll have you for assault.’

Patrick rolled his eyes. ‘Come on Denise. Why were you running? Something to hide?’

She narrowed her eyes at him and spat, ‘What am I supposed to have done, eh?’

‘We can talk about that back at the station.’

‘I ain’t done nothing.’

‘Denise, we just want to ask you some questions,’ Carmella said in a soothing tone.

Denise flicked her eyes up and down Carmella’s body. ‘Don’t call me Denise. It’s Miss Breem to you. What’s this about? Caspar’s been dead for seven years. Thanks to you lot.’

Patrick leaned in. ‘Whatever happened to Doyle, he did to himself.’

Denise folded her arms, perhaps not realizing how ludicrous she looked, trying to act hard in her factory smock and hat. ‘Whatever. I ain’t done nothing.’

‘So you said. But you can tell us more about this nothing at the station, Miss Breem.’