Authors: Michael Robotham
“Are you there?”
“I’m here, Daddy.”
“The police are trying to find you. Stay on the line. Don’t move, Piper.”
“What if he comes? I’m scared.”
“I know you are. I’m with a man called Joe. He’s going to talk to you.”
“Hello, Piper.”
“Hi.”
He has a nice voice, soft but strong, not wheedling like George.
“Where are you right now?” he asks. “Describe it for me.”
“I’m in a forest, standing on a ridge. I couldn’t get any signal so I climbed higher. I don’t have much battery left.”
“Where did you get the phone?”
“I took it from George.”
“Is that the man who’s been holding you?”
“Yeah.”
“His name is George?”
“I don’t know. Tash called him George. She said he looked like George Clooney, but he doesn’t really, not unless George Clooney has put on weight and got ugly. Has he got ugly?”
“My wife doesn’t think so.”
“That’s good.”
“What can you see, Piper?”
“Trees.”
“Anything else—a landmark, a river, or a road or a railway line?”
“No.”
“You said you escaped.”
“Yes.”
“Where did you escape from?”
“It was some sort of factory but it’s empty and everything is broken and overgrown. Are you there, Daddy?”
“I’m here.”
“Please come and get me.”
“I will.”
“It’s getting dark and I can’t stop shivering.”
A bird lifts from the trees behind me. Jerking my head around, I search the shadows.
“Piper?”
“I thought I heard something.”
“Why are you whispering?”
“I can’t talk very loud in case he hears me.”
Joe speaks. “When did you last see George?”
“I don’t know what time it was. He said he was going to get Emily.”
“What?”
“He had a photograph of Emily in his wallet. He said he was going to get me a friend. I told him I didn’t want a friend. You have to stop him. You have to warn her.”
“We will. What does George look like?”
“He’s old and ugly.”
“What color is his hair?”
“Brown.”
“How old is he?”
“I don’t know—thirty or forty.”
“Is he tall?”
“Taller than Daddy, but he has small hands. I’m wearing his coat. It hangs down to my ankles. Are you still there, Daddy?”
“I’m here. The police are tracking the signal. I want you to stay put.”
“It’s getting dark.”
“I know.”
“What about Emily?”
Joe answers. “We’ll make sure she’s safe.”
“It’s starting to rain.”
“Can you find somewhere out of the rain?”
“I don’t know. I just want to curl up and go to sleep.”
“No,” says Joe. “You mustn’t fall asleep. You should keep moving.”
“Daddy told me to stay still.”
“You mustn’t fall asleep. Try to stay warm.”
“
OK. I can’t feel my fingers. I’m just going to swap hands…”
…
“Hello?”
…
“Daddy?”
…
“Joe.”
…
“Are you there?”
D
ale Hadley is cradling his phone in both hands as though he’s dropped a priceless vase and is holding the broken pieces.
“The line went dead.”
“She’ll call back.”
“There’s no number on the screen.”
“She’ll call.”
“What if the battery has run out?”
“They’ll still be able to track the previous signal.”
“She’s cold. I could hear her teeth chattering.”
“They’ll find her.”
“She was slurring her words.” He groans helplessly. “Oh God, oh God, we can’t lose her now.”
I hold his shoulders, tell him to breathe. Relax. Stay calm. Piper is going to need him. She’s going to hang on, but only if he does the same.
Ruiz has DCI Drury on the line. I take the phone and can hear Drury yelling instructions across the incident room. He’s with me now.
“Piper Hadley called 999 twenty minutes ago but the signal dropped out. She’s on a mobile. We’ve been tracing a second call but lost it two minutes ago.”
“She was talking to her father. The call dropped out.”
“We have the number but the mobile isn’t transmitting any more. The initial call came into the control center at Milton Keynes and was transferred to Abingdon. The number is listed to a pay-as-you-go subscriber. The handset doesn’t have a GPS locator, but the control room has tracking technology. The call was picked up by three towers, which means we can triangulate the signal.”
“What about the nearest base station?”
“It’s a thirty-two-meter tower in a field about half a mile north of Culham Railway Station.”
“Dr. Leece mentioned Culham.”
“Why?”
“They found traces of tritium in Natasha’s urine. It’s a low-level radioactive pollutant—a by-product of nuclear reactors. She must have consumed tritiated water.”
“There are no nuclear reactors in Oxfordshire.”
“There’s a nuclear fusion research laboratory just outside of Culham.”
Drury yells more instructions across the incident room, fortified and energized. He’s on the scent.
“I’m cancelling Christmas leave. Recalling officers. I can put forty bodies on the ground. Civilian search and rescue teams will give us twice that number. We’re focusing on the closest phone tower until we get a more precise location. I’ll send a team to the research center. There are police choppers at Luton and Benson, but the weather is shit and it’s going to be dark in an hour.”
Dale Hadley is listening to the conversation. I don’t want to voice my main concern. Piper won’t survive another night outdoors. Either we find her or she has to find somewhere warm and protected.
The DCI hangs up. He wants us back at the station.
Dale Hadley is still nursing his phone. “Maybe George found her,” he says. “Why else would the phone be turned off?”
“There could be other explanations.”
“Like what?”
“The batteries might be flat. She might be out of range.”
I take him back over Piper’s call, gleaning every detail. She called the man George but said it was just a nickname. He was tall with brown hair, aged thirty to forty with small hands. He had a photograph of Emily Martinez in his wallet.
I turn to Ruiz. “Let me ask you something: what sort of man keeps a photograph of a teenage girl in his wallet?”
“A boyfriend.”
“Someone older.”
“A father.”
“Come on.”
Ruiz is behind the wheel, braking late, throwing the Range Rover around corners. Wiper blades slap against the rim of the windscreen.
Dale Hadley sits in the back, staring at his mobile phone, willing it to ring. He’s trying to remember every word that Piper said to him, replaying their conversation as though it might give him a clue. A short while ago he was consumed by thoughts of his wife’s betrayal. Forgotten now.
“Someone will tell Sarah, won’t they?” he asks. “The police will call her.”
“I’m sure they will.”
“You told Piper to keep moving. Should we have told her to stay put?”
“She has to keep warm.”
“But how will they—”
“The police can track the signal even if she’s moving.”
He nods, looking at his phone again.
“Can I ask you a question?” I ask. “Did Piper ever meet Phillip Martinez?”
“Emily’s father—I don’t know. Emily used to live with her mother. Her father was in the States. He moved back after Amanda had a breakdown.”
Still driving, Ruiz interrupts, rattling off the background details that Capable Jones uncovered. Phillip Martinez was born in Manchester in 1972 and went to a selective grammar school, before studying medicine at King’s College in London and doing a postgraduate research degree in Boston.
“He didn’t practice,” says Ruiz. “Instead, he focused on medical research, working for pharmaceutical companies and hospitals in Chicago and Hawaii before he took up a position in Oxford. Capable talked to one of his former lecturers, who said Martinez didn’t lack confidence. He was convinced he was going to win a Nobel Prize. It was just a matter of time.
“That was until he blotted his copybook. Five years ago, working in Honolulu, he faced allegations that he falsified data on biomarkers and treatments for cancer in two journal articles. He denied it and later blamed a research graduate who was working with him. He claimed she doctored the figures. She lost her job. Left a suicide note. Disappeared into the sea.”
“What about Martinez?”
“The Office of Research Integrity conducted an inquiry, but the findings were inconclusive. He had to pay back two hundred thousand dollars in research grants. That’s when he moved back to England.”
“What about Mrs. Martinez?”
“Amanda Lowe grew up in London. She was a freewheeling hippie type; a rampant socialist at university, according to her friends, but she settled down when she married. It was an odd sort of match. The good doctor is a raging conservative, controlling, pedantic, apparently quite brilliant. The marriage lasted nine years until it broke down around the time of the research scandal. Initially Martinez didn’t fight for custody, but he came back again when his wife had a breakdown. He accused Amanda of substance abuse and alcoholism; subpoenaed her medical records. Her two stints in a psych hospital swayed the court. Emily went to her father.”
The uneasy sense of disquiet within me has bloomed like a noxious weed. Martinez studied medicine. He would have done a surgical rotation. According to Dr. Leece, whoever mutilated Natasha had some knowledge of surgery or a limited degree of medical training.
Martinez is a research scientist. He’s accustomed to controlling his experiments, knowing the variables, removing them. Scientific research is about questions and observations, striving for facts unencumbered by bias or distortion. It’s about objectivity, reproducibility, exactness and demonstrability.
His model trains are another example of his meticulousness. He fashioned a miniature world in precise detail where he can control everything, the lights, the switches, the trains, the timetables… Most psychopaths build rich fantasy worlds in their heads—he created one in real life.
The Range Rover floats through the outskirts of Oxford, the streets surprisingly empty. Most people have left for the holidays. The stragglers are getting off buses and carrying home provisions.
Ruiz pulls up in front of the house. The driveway is empty. Nobody answers the doorbell. I check the garage. It’s in darkness.
“Nobody’s home,” yells Ruiz, having tried the back door.
I look at my watch. It’s four o’clock on Christmas Eve.
Emily gave me her mobile number. I find her contact details and press the call button. She’s not answering. Her voicemail triggers.
“Hi, it’s me. I’m obviously doing something very cool and exciting, which is why I can’t answer your call. Leave me a message and I may or may not get back to you. After the tone… Ciao.”
I turn to Ruiz.
“Any ideas?”
“She could be working?”
Directory assistance patches me through to the pharmacy. A woman answers. Busy. Flustered.
“Is Emily Martinez working today?” I ask.
The woman sighs. Disgusted. “She didn’t show up for work; left us short-handed.”
“Did she call?”
“No. Are you a friend of hers?”
“More of an acquaintance.”
“Well, if you see her, tell her she’s fired.”
I
diot! Stupid, stupid girl!
I dropped the phone. My hands were so cold that I couldn’t close my fingers. And instead of catching it, I stuck out my foot and kicked it into a puddle. The screen is cracked. Nothing lights up.
I’ve broken it. Shit! Shit! Shit!
I hold the button down. Nothing. I slap the handset against the palm of my hand. It’s dead.