Authors: Rebecca Bradley
61
Sally
breathed a sigh of relief as she walked out of Hannah's office. She had
just photocopied documents to be sent to the CPS when Hannah had called
her in. For a minute she'd considered her DI already knew about the
pregnancy, so she'd jumped on the excuse Hannah had handed her in
mentioning the blast.
The
blast wasn't the distraction, though indirectly, it hadn't helped
matters. It had fuelled Tom's need for her to disclose the pregnancy at
work. It was better if Hannah continued to believe her distraction was
a result of the explosion they'd been involved in. Should she become
aware of the pregnancy then Sally had no doubt she would ground her and
potentially remove her from the case. She was connected to this case.
She was there when Jack did the PM on Rosie. She saw what the girl went
through. And maybe it was her parental instincts kicking in, or the
hormones, but she felt a need to close this for Rosie and see it
through to the end. She was not going to risk that by disclosing the
pregnancy, especially if there was no chance of harm coming to the
baby. She was seeing this through because she felt a duty to the child
she had seen on the mortuary table.
She
looked at the pile of papers in her hand and flicked her fingers
through the loose leaves as she walked back to her desk, happy she was
still on the case and pleased she could, for a short time at least,
juggle the job, the deception, and Tom.
62
After
talking with Sally I decided to catch up with Evie. She was still going
through the intelligence work I had given her the previous day and
didn't have any useful information. It frustrated the hell out of me.
The
last thing I did before I left work relatively early, was to text Ethan
to see if he was free to meet up and to apologise for not calling the
night before. Texting was a coward’s way out, but the ease of a message
without having to deal with any kind of conversation appealed to me
most of the time, so it was the default option when I was feeling in
the wrong. I expected him to be annoyed or at least ambivalent to my
request after standing him up, but he answered straight away and we
made arrangements to meet in the local Antibo Italian restaurant on
Lower Parliament Street, half an hour later.
The
lighting was low and gentle music created an ambiance. Dark wooden
tables and chairs, against the white tiled floor gave the restaurant a
comfortable feel I could easily relax in. I lifted the bottle of Pinot
Noir and topped up our glasses. The restaurant was quiet; evening
diners hadn't started to fill up the tables. Other than Ethan and I,
three others were taken. A young couple chatted over pasta, their faces
lighting up as they spoke in hushed voices. A middle aged couple with
two small children, and what looked to be a working dinner: five people
in suits and heels on the women. I had no idea how the women walked in
their killer heels for five minutes, never mind a whole working day
that extended into the evening. How were Ethan and I were perceived?
Did we look like a couple out for a quiet, close dinner, or two
strangers with nothing to say to each other? I studied Ethan over my
glass as I drank. His face looked drawn and heavy, but his eyes found
mine and it felt as though they were searching my soul. The one thing I
wasn't sure I still possessed at this point in time. I felt violated by
the case, like the dregs of humanity were permeating my very being. I
looked away and allowed myself to succumb to the safety of the glass in
my hand.
“Do you want to talk about it, Hannah?”
I
placed my glass back on the table and looked at him. “I don't know.
There's something else to this case the media don't know and it's
eating away at me.”
Ethan
didn't move a muscle; he just continued to look at me. “And you don't
want to talk to me about it because you're worried about what I will do
with the information.”
A
statement rather than a question. I didn't know how to talk to anyone
about the things I saw, never mind a journalist I was in some kind of
relationship with. “It's difficult.”
He nodded.
“It's
not that I don't want to talk to you.” I took a breath. “It's the case
itself. It's nasty and words don't seem enough.” I raised the glass to
my lips again. An easy transparent barrier.
“I
won't probe. I want you to know that you and work are two different
things. If you want to talk then I'm here, but for now, let’s eat.” He
gave me an easy smile, the tension in his face broken by a softer,
gentler look. I exhaled, not realising I had been holding my breath and
leaned in to the table. I was happy to see where the evening took us.
I
hadn't been at my desk long the following morning when Evie walked in
with a stack of paper and her laptop tucked under her arm.
“Hey,”
I looked at her, “since when do you make house calls?” I was referring
to the fact she had left her office, which she seldom did.
She
plopped herself down in the chair opposite my desk and threw her papers
on it before putting down the laptop. “I'm hoping the biscuits also
have a home here and not just in my office.” She opened up her
computer. “Otherwise I might have to take my sexy, intelligent ass and
its computer accompaniments back to civilisation.”
I smiled at her. “I'm sure I can find some. But will it be worth my while?”
She looked up from her tapping, feigning shock. “Since when is anything I give you not worth your while, missy?”
I acquiesced and pulled open my drawer, placing the chocolate biscuits on top of my overflowing desk.
“You ever clean your desk?” Evie asked, fingers tapping away at the keyboard as report boxes popped up all over the screen.
I
grabbed some papers and dropped them onto the chair at the other
corner. “I know where everything is,” I replied. The chair failed to
hold everything I had just dumped on it and we watched as half the
contents slid to the floor.
She raised her eyebrows in question.
“Okay,
most of the time I do.” I stuck my nose back into my mug and eyed my
best friend over the rim of it. “Stop moaning. You have biscuits. Now,
what do you have for me?”
Evie grinned, perfect teeth on show. “Remember all those background enquiries you set me a few days back?”
I
remembered. It felt like a bottomless pit of a task when I handed it
over to her and I wasn't sure whether I had expected results from
it. But Evie was bolt upright in front of me, her body language
very much saying otherwise.
“Stop gloating and let me have what you've got.”
She
shoved half a biscuit into her mouth and started to speak. “I found a
link between our cases with Rosie and Allison and another misper in
another force area. And if we have a link like this, we may find a lead
on the girl in the photograph, right?” She coughed a little as she
forced the dry crumbs down her throat and reached for my mug. Taking a
slug, she then looked at me in disgust as she realised it was cold.
I
liked her logic but realised it didn't necessarily mean that it would
lead to the girl we needed to find. However, it was a step we currently
didn't have. “Okay, tell me about it.”
63
Sally answered the phone on the fifth ring as she pulled at the towel rack in the ladies toilets.
“Sally?”
“Yes.
Yes, it's me.” She wondered how they had coped before the invention of
mobile phones. If you wanted to avoid someone, all you had to do was
get out of their way. Walk out of the house and go to work. Now though,
now was different. She knew he was worried. It was a lot for them both
to take in. But not giving her time and space was not going to make
their situation any easier.
“How are you? How's things?” he asked.
“I'm
okay. It's busy. We're under deadlines from the Crown Prosecutors and
waiting for the Digital Investigation Unit to give us something to
identify another girl. There's no need to be concerned about me here
today.”
“You
shouldn't even be there.” He was annoyed. “You've just got out of
hospital and you wonder why I'm worried and checking up on you?”
“I
won't be late home.” She tried to placate him, give him something back,
to show she understood where he was coming from and was taking care of
herself and the baby.
“If I have to come to the station and collect you, I will. I don't care what she says.”
“She
won't say anything. She won't need to. I'll be home. She's not making
me do this, Tom. You didn't see the girl.” She knew he couldn't even
imagine. How could you explain to someone the horror of a child's
violent death? She had now also seen the images retrieved from Benn's
computer and she was angry. There was no way she could describe those.
No way at all. She couldn't get her own head around it never mind
asking a loved one to comprehend. “I'll be home and we'll talk. I'll
get a takeaway on the way. I love you, Tom.”
“I
love you too, Sally. So much. I don't want this to drive such a wedge
between us, I just worry. I nearly lost my mind when they came to pick
me up from work when you were involved in that car blast. I have never
been so scared in my entire life. I thought I'd lost you. It's my role
to protect you, you're my wife and maybe that's why I'm finding this so
difficult.” Sally looked in the mirror at her pale face. Her husband
was scared. She owed him more.
“I'm going to make an appointment at my doctors' and set up my antenatal appointments. Trust me. I will keep this baby safe.”
She ended the call, pushed the phone back into her pocket and walked back to the incident room with a feeling of dread.
64
“Well,”
Evie went on, stuffing another half biscuit into her mouth. It
made me wonder how she kept so trim. “You gave me a pretty hefty task
of searching through the national database of missing children of a
certain age. Do you know how many there are at any one time?” she
asked, not really expecting an answer. “A bloody lot, I can tell you.
Around 200,000 children under 16 years of age go missing in a year and
up to 500 are missing at any one time.”
“Go on,” I was disheartened by the facts and figures Evie was reeling off.
“Well,
as I worked with Danny in DIU, I was able to narrow down a general
location to help with my searches, due to some specific markers in the
photograph of the girl you want identified. I narrowed it down as much
as I could, then took into consideration which of them had the
potential to be sexually exploited.” She knew her stuff. “And while I
was doing this I came across a linked file.” She looked at me as though
this should mean something. I returned her look with a blank one. I
knew my way around the basics of the missing persons software but it
had been a long time since I had used it so the terminology was going
over my head a little.
“Oh,
Han,” she said, swallowing hard. “A missing person report has links on
it. People, be they friends, family or associates, of where the person
could, or have turned up before, or know in some way shape or form.
It's so investigating cops have somewhere to start checking.” This I
remembered and I could tell Evie was leading somewhere. “One of the
regular missing children in Peterborough has a linked file with…” she
paused for effect.
“Yes?”
“Rosie Green.”
65
“In what way is this girl connected to Rosie Green and why don't we already know about it?” I snapped.
“Hey.”
Evie stopped me with a stare. She was well aware this case had got to
me, but she still wouldn't give any ground to take it out on her. “She
was a tenuous link. It wasn't picked up. Rosie lived in Norfolk while
Izzy lived in Cambridgeshire.”
“Izzy? the missing girl?” I asked, trying to catch up.
“Yes.
Isabelle Thomas. Fourteen years of age. A problem child for her
parents, the education authority and with a knock on effect for local
police for a couple of years. Always going missing, drinking, seen
hanging around with older boys. Inappropriate relationships.”
“And
the link to Rosie?” I didn't get it. The information on Rosie was that
she was a good child with none of these behavioural problems. This
wasn't the life Rosie had been living and they lived so far away, so
why the link.
“Isabelle’s
list of friends, contacts and associates is huge. She was often found
in different counties because she'd get into cars with anyone that
offered her money and alcohol. They'd use her up then leave her
stranded wherever they'd taken her, so she got to know people in the
areas she found herself.”
“How does Rosie come into it?”
“Her
name was added to the list of associates one night by a conscientious
neighbourhood policing officer in Norwich, where it seems Izzy found
herself once or twice. It looks as though they spent a couple of
evenings hanging out in the same inappropriate places with older boys
that were no good. Police attended outside some shop fronts, removed
alcohol bottles from the teenagers, took some details and moved them
all on. Not long after that incident Isabelle went missing for good.”
“What happened to her?” There had to be a reason this had come to my office, biscuits or not.
“She
was found dead a week later. Beaten. Post-mortem results show
asphyxiation by strangulation.” She stopped looking so happy with life
now. Inputting and collating information was what Evie did and she did
it well. She hadn't paid attention to what any of it meant. It was
easier for her that way. This was a stark reminder of the shitty side
of life out there, beyond the comfort of the walls she was used to.
“How long ago was this? I need details. Where was it and who was the SIO?” My mind was running several steps ahead.
“Just a minute.” Her fingers worked the keyboard. “Three weeks ago. The offender was arrested and charged.”
“They have an identified offender?”
“It says they do here. The SIO of the investigation was DI Shaun Harris and the body was found just outside of Peterborough.”