Spider's Web (4 page)

‘Maybe Freddie Harding had an accomplice his brother didn’t know about.’

Jim pushed his lower lip out thoughtfully. ‘It’s possible. But it’s pure speculation. And right now I don’t have much use for that.’ He raised a hand as Anna made to say something else. ‘I realise you’re perfectly within you’re rights to stand out here all day, Anna, but as a favour to me I’m asking you to move along.’

‘Alright, but it won’t make any difference.’ Anna jerked her chin – which bore a thin pearly white scar – towards the Mercedes. ‘Camera or no camera, I’ll find out who he is. And when I do I’ll put his face out there for the world to see.’

Jim took hold of Anna’s arm and firmly guided her out of sight of the yard. ‘I’d think long and hard before doing that if I were you.’ His voice was low with concern. ‘Trust me, that man’s not someone you want to antagonise.’

Anna’s lips curled into a contemptuous smile. ‘Oh yeah, what’s he going to do, sue me? You’d better tell him to get in line.’

‘Look, I know I can’t stop you from doing what you feel needs to be done. But just be careful how you go about it. Please. I’d hate to see you get hurt.’

‘Is that how you brought down Forester and Harding? By being careful?’ Anna held Jim’s hangdog brown eyes for a moment, letting the words sink in. She wrote her mobile number on a notepad and tore out the page for him. ‘You’d better not damage my camera, Chief Inspector, or you’ll be the one in trouble.’

Jim waited for her to get into a beaten-up old VW camper van across the street and accelerate away, before heading back to the yard. ‘Is she gone?’ asked Burnham.

‘Yes.’

With a nervous glance to make sure Jim was right, Villiers rose from behind the Mercedes. ‘Did she recognise me?’

‘No.’

‘Who was she?’

‘Nobody you need worry about.’

‘For once I agree with the Chief Inspector,’ said Burnham. ‘She’s just some wannabe journalist. Her name’s Anna Young. She runs a blog called The Truth.’

‘The truth about what?’

‘About whatever gets her goat. She fancies herself as some kind of crusader exposing injustice. Personally I think she’s got a screw loose. What about you, Chief Inspector?’

I think I’d like to slap the smugness off your face
, thought Jim. He kept his voice neutral. ‘Thank you for your time, Mr Villiers. I’m sure we’ll be seeing each other again.’

‘Don’t bank on it,’ countered Burnham. ‘Not unless you’ve actually got something worth talking to him about.’

Villiers and Burnham ducked into the Mercedes. As Jim watched them drive away, Anna’s words stalked around his mind like a caged tiger.
Is that how you brought down Forester and Harding? By being careful?

2

On the way home, Anna stopped to pick up some flowers. She bought two bunches – lilies for her mum and yellow roses for her dad. As she neared Queens Road, a familiar tightness rose into her throat. Her hands twitched with the urge to make a sharp left into the warren of back roads and rat runs she usually took. She resisted it.
Not today
, she told herself. Today she felt the need to see where
it
had happened. She pulled across two lanes of oncoming traffic and parked up in the same spot that the white van had done. A car beeped her. She didn’t notice. She was back in that terrible moment again, fighting for breath as the gloved hand covered her mouth, eyes bulging at the short, stocky figure of Jessica’s abductor. With the vividness of a lucid dream, she saw his chubby cheeks, his short-cropped hair, his dark, ugly eyes. She felt the fist driving into her stomach, felt herself lurching towards Jessica, grabbing for her. So close. So agonisingly close. Then the pain between her shoulder blades and she was falling. The keyring… distant shouts… the van speeding away… Jessica gone…

Anna snapped into the present with a trembling intake of breath. She shoved the camper van into gear and accelerated away in the opposite direction to that which the white van had taken. There was one more stop she needed to make on the way home. She turned off Queens Road and, after a short distance, pulled over by some iron railings that enclosed a green space of lawns, trees and paths. She got out of the van and headed through a gate. She stopped by a bench shadowed by an oak tree. A small brass plaque on the bench read ‘IN LOVING MEMORY OF RICK YOUNG. DIED 13TH JUNE 2003, AGED 50’. This had been her father’s favourite spot to sit and think. After Jessica’s abduction, he would come here day after day and spend hours staring out across the River Sheaf and the terraced roofs towards his beloved Bramall Lane. And one day, when all hope had finally deserted him, when he could no longer endure the endless grief, he’d come here to die. He’d tied one end of a rope around a branch and the other end around his neck. And then he’d stepped off the bench. A dog-walker had found his lifeless body.

The council had wanted to cut down the tree, almost as if it was guilty of some crime. Anna had convinced them not to. Removing the tree would solve nothing. Just as leaving Sheffield behind to start fresh somewhere else would solve nothing. You couldn’t outrun memories. And besides, she didn’t want to. She wanted to hold onto each and every tormenting memory and use them like batteries to power her search for Jessica.

Anna laid the roses at the base of the tree. She closed her eyes briefly, then headed back to the VW. When she got home, she found her mum sitting in the living room, staring at a framed photo of her late husband. Anna put the lilies in a vase and placed them on a table at the side of her mum’s armchair.

Fiona Young looked up at her daughter. Deep creases spread from the corners of her sad blue eyes as she smiled.

‘Hello, love.’

‘Have you been to the cemetery?’

Fiona nodded. ‘I waited for you until four.’

‘I’m sorry, Mum. I was busy. I’ve left flowers in the park.’

Fiona’s gaze returned to the photo in which Rick and she were sitting with their faces pressed together on a balcony overlooking the sea. It was an old photo, taken on a rare family holiday to Spain. Fiona looked tanned and healthy, her blonde hair shone in the sun, her eyes twinkled with the same cheeky spark that Jessica’s had done. That spark was gone now. Nor did her hair shine or her skin glow. There was a sallowness to her complexion and a greyness to her hair that she’d long since ceased to conceal with makeup and dye. ‘Ten years,’ she said. ‘It’s difficult to believe it’s been so long.’

Anna stooped to kiss her mum’s head, then made her way upstairs to a bedroom that obviously doubled as an office. A desk with a PC on it was squeezed in between a wardrobe and an unmade single bed. Filing cabinets lined one wall. Cardboard boxes were stacked under the window. A set of shelves sagged under the weight of books on criminal psychology, law and investigative procedures. More books lay open on the carpet, their pages marked with post-it notes. There were no pictures or photos, no ornaments, no makeup. Next to a lamp on the desk was an ashtray brimful of cigarette butts. Shrugging off her jacket, Anna picked her way through the clutter. The room had long been difficult to move around. Her mum had suggested many times that she use the spare bedroom as her office. The very thought of it made Anna shudder. After her dad’s death, her mum had finally stripped the room of Jessica’s belongings. But it would always be Jessica’s bedroom to Anna. A sacred place. A haunted place.

As she dropped onto a chair, her elbow knocked over a tower of boxes. One burst open, scattering dozens of Red Devils keyrings across the carpet. ‘Shit,’ she muttered, gathering them up. Her conviction that Jessica’s abductors were Manchester United supporters had compelled her to visit sporting goods and memorabilia shops all over the country and scour the internet in search of the same keyring that had fallen from the man’s pocket. She’d never found an exact match. But if they even vaguely resembled a devil, she bought them anyway. Occasionally she would lay them all out in front of herself. It had become as much of a ritual as the yearly laying of roses at the tree. Yet another reminder, if one were needed, of what had happened and what needed to be done. She’d also spent many – too many – Saturdays and Sundays watching Man U supporters file in and out of Old Trafford and opponents’ grounds. All to no avail.

Anna lit a cigarette and scanned through her emails. Over a hundred more had landed in her inbox during the afternoon. They came from all over the UK. All over the world. Many of their senders were people like herself. People whose loved ones had been abducted or gone missing. People stuck in a psychological limbo of endless suffering. People who spent their lives in pursuit of the truth about what had happened to their child, brother, sister, boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, husband or whoever. Most approached her for the same reason that she’d started up her blog – they wanted to raise awareness about a case, keep it from fading out of the public consciousness, as even the most shocking inevitably did. Others were seeking advice. And others still simply wanted to confide in someone who understood what they were going through. Not all the emails concerned abductions and missing persons. Over the years, her blog had grown to encompass almost every kind of crime and miscarriage of justice. In particular, she’d highlighted the cases of rape, abuse and domestic violence victims who’d been failed by the legal system, naming and shaming perpetrators who thought they could hide behind the law, encouraging her thousands of loyal readers to spread the word to every corner of the internet. And in doing so, she’d come into conflict with Miles Burnham and his ilk. They’d brought dozens of civil and criminal cases against her. The fines had piled up until she was forced to declare herself bankrupt. She’d even served a couple of short prison sentences. She didn’t care. All she really cared about was finding Jessica – or rather, finding her abductors, for Jessica herself was surely long since dead.

Who were they?
That question had possessed Anna for twenty years, and would continue to do so until she answered it.

She opened a filing cabinet drawer. Inside were dozens of folders containing newspaper clippings, dossiers she’d compiled on potential suspects, transcripts of police interviews, and anything and everything else she’d managed to get her hands on relating to Jessica’s case. She withdrew two time-faded composite sketches. One was of the chubby-faced man. It was a good likeness, except for the eyes. She’d had the man’s face sketched many times over the years by different artists. But none of them had ever truly managed to capture the ugliness that had shone through his eyes. The second sketch was of a more slimly built figure in a parka with the hood up. She navigated to her blog, clicked on ‘new post’ and typed ‘Ten years ago today these men killed my dad’ into the title box. She scanned the sketches into the main body of the post, before continuing typing, ‘They didn’t put the rope around his neck, but they killed him nonetheless…’

When Anna was done writing, she took out her iPhone and touched the photo icon, bringing up the photos from outside Police HQ – photos which had been wirelessly transferred to her phone the instant she took them. ‘Now,’ she said, studying Villiers’ sharp, hawkish face, ‘let’s find out who you are.’

Jim rested back in his chair, staring at the names pinned to the board. There were forty-four – all those from Herbert’s book, plus the author and his wife’s. Beneath each name there was a photograph and a few particulars. An interlacing web of lines had been drawn between some of the names, accompanied by a few words indicating how they were connected. More lines radiated from one name than any other – ‘Thomas Villiers. DOB 1955. Manager of Craig Thorpe Youth Trust Children’s Home.’ Jim’s gaze dropped to Anna’s camera. He scrolled through the photos of Villiers. There were three of them. In the first two, Villiers was focused on the Mercedes, his face as composed and smooth as usual. In the third, he was staring into the camera, his eyes wide with surprise. No, not just surprise. Fear. The bastard was terrified of public exposure. Of course, given the sensitive nature of his work, some would say he had good reason to be. But Jim had spent most of his life staring into the eyes of innocence and guilt. And he’d rarely seen that kind of fear in the eyes of the innocent.

Jim deleted the first two photos. He hesitated over the third, his forehead knotting. Again, Anna’s words reverberated in his mind.
Is that how you brought down Forester and Harding? By being careful?
His finger was still hovering above the delete icon when Garrett knocked and entered the office. The Chief Superintendent showed no surprise at finding Jim at his desk several hours after he’d been due to knock off. Since being cleared to return to duty, Jim had been first in the office and last out. His cardiologist had warned him against working long hours. Those who knew him better knew such warnings were a waste of breath. The job was all he had left.

‘Evening, Jim.’

Jim nodded in return. The greeting wasn’t exactly friendly – their approach to the job and life was too different for them to ever be friends – but there was a grudging respect in both men’s eyes. ‘Let me guess, Miles Burnham’s been on the phone.’

‘He’s not happy. What were you hoping to achieve by showing Mr Villiers those photos?’

‘I just wanted to see his reaction.’

‘Well you certainly got a reaction. Mr Villiers is threatening to file a harassment complaint against you.’

Jim grunted with amused contempt. ‘The last thing Villiers wants to do is draw attention to himself by kicking up that kind of stink.’

‘You’re probably right, but…’ An uneasy frown pulling at his forehead, Garrett indicated the board of names. ‘These aren’t people to be toyed with, Jim. They have the power to hurt us just as badly as we can hurt them. That’s why we need to be—’

‘Especially careful how we deal with them,’ Jim interrupted, finishing Garrett’s sentence for him. He’d heard this speech too many times over the past year. ‘Well I’m sorry, but being careful doesn’t always get results. I know you don’t want to hear this, but if we’re going to move this investigation forward we need to start taking more risks.’ He jerked his thumb at the board. ‘And that means stopping giving these pricks such an easy ride.’