Stranger Child (3 page)

‘Was the anorak on the ground, away from the body?’ Tom asked.

‘Just where you saw it,’ Jumbo answered. ‘It was all photographed, of course, but I put it back when I’d checked the pockets so you could see it in situ.’

Becky’s radio beeped and she moved to one side to leave Tom and Jumbo to talk as she pulled out her notebook and answered the call.

‘If she’s left home in the last week or so, obviously nobody’s bothered to let us know. It makes me sick to think of all the runaways that aren’t even reported,’ Tom said. ‘The parents or carers are probably expecting her to come back after a few nights of sleeping rough.’

‘Yeah, and most of these kids have no idea how many predators are out there, waiting for the opportunity their isolation presents.’

The two men stopped talking as they heard a rise in Becky’s tone. She turned round and came towards them.

‘Has her ethnicity been established? They did a trawl of
all
girls, and we have a few that have gone missing that might fit the bill. It’s all down to the ethnicity.’

Tom looked at Jumbo.

‘James was certain she was white – although quite how he could tell, I don’t know. Is there somebody in mind?’

Becky spoke into her radio again and all three listened to the response.

‘We’ve been looking through old cases – kids who have been missing for months or even years. We’ve come up with three possibles: Amy Davidson, Hailey Wilson and Natasha Joseph.’

3

Tom’s post-holiday good spirits had totally evaporated by the time he and Becky returned to headquarters. The sight of the body bag being transported from the tent had hit him harder than he had expected. It was always traumatic when children were hurt, but the image of the child dressed in a white nightie propped up against a tree with her thin legs stretched out in front of her was particularly disturbing. Tom thought of his daughter Lucy and wondered what she was doing at that moment.

The pathologist, James Adams, had called with his initial report.

‘She was a white girl aged around twelve I would say. No identification on her, and no clear distinguishing features that I could see. Naturally blonde hair, very slightly built but not malnourished. We bagged her hands at the scene but I think it will be difficult to get fingerprints. We’ll get what fragments we can when I’ve done the post-mortem. My initial estimate is that she had been there for about a week, but we’ve had some very cold weather – particularly at night – so I may want to reassess that. At the moment, I’m not able to give you cause of death, but you’ll be the first to know. I presume you’ll be attending the PM?’

Tom agreed that he would be there and was ending the call as Becky nudged his door open with her hip, juggling two cups of much-needed coffee while trying not to drop a stack of files held tightly under one arm.

‘Here you go, boss. I think we both need this,’ she said, putting the cups down and pulling up a chair. ‘The incident room is being set up as we speak, but I brought through some notes on the three missing girls.’

Tom reached for his coffee and took a sip, not caring that the scalding liquid was burning his tongue.

‘OK, let’s take a look at them, but any number of kids could have done a runner in the last couple of weeks and not been reported,’ Tom said, ‘so let’s not limit ourselves to considering these three. I still can’t quite work out what’s bothering me about the nightie.
It’s as if she was plucked from her bed. But how many girls of that age wear white nighties, buttoned to the neck? I don’t like the fact that the neck had been ripped either. The buttons were fastened, so a hand must have been placed inside the neck and the fabric torn with some force. It will be interesting to see if James can find any evidence of sexual trauma, but I’m not liking how this feels.’

Becky nodded and referred to her notes.

‘James also said there were no obvious signs of malnutrition. So she’s either a recent runaway who has somehow got caught up in something – been picked up by one of the bastards who prey on unprotected kids – or she’s one of the long-term missing who may have been through God knows what. We can rule one of them out, though. Hailey Wilson has dark hair. So that leaves Amy Davidson and Natasha Joseph. Amy Davidson was a child in care. She started going AWOL when she was about eight, just for a night at a time, but her nights away became more frequent and then she stopped coming back altogether when she was eleven, eighteen months ago. We don’t have any DNA to compare, and I’m not sure what the parental history is – we’ll have to look into that.’

Becky put one of the files on the floor by her chair and picked up the next one. ‘Natasha Joseph – do you know anything about her? You were here in Manchester at the time, weren’t you?’

Tom nodded. ‘I remember her case, but I wasn’t involved.’ Tom decided not to share the fact that he had gone on compassionate leave a few days after the child went missing. ‘Her mother was killed in a car accident, and Natasha should have been in the back of the car, but wasn’t. They never found a trace of her, or a plausible reason for the accident either.’

‘Jumbo remembers the case too,’ Becky added. ‘He was called out when they realised it was more than a collision, but he says there was nothing of interest to report. No sign that the child had been hurt in the accident – in fact no sign that she had been in the car at all. They’ve got some DNA on file but he says we need to treat it with caution. It was from a hairbrush and could easily have been contaminated with somebody else’s hair – although the father was adamant that nobody else would have used it.’

‘Why don’t you track down the father and explain the situation to him, Becky? Get a DNA sample for comparison but make it clear that we just want to rule Natasha out. Same for Amy Davidson. Social services will need to be notified in her case, and her carers, but see if you can trace one of her parents to take a swab. And we should notify Hailey Wilson’s family that we know it’s not her so they don’t panic when the news gets out. Speaking of
which, I want it kept under wraps for now until everybody relevant has been informed. In reality we know nothing about this girl, and we can’t risk compromising the investigation by following up a mass of hysterical reports if it’s made public before we’re ready.’

4

Day One

‘Come on, Mr Grumpy. You’re all clean and dressed again now, so let’s have a smile.’

Emma tickled Ollie’s little tummy and he started to giggle – her favourite sound in the world. He had always hated being dressed. As a baby he had cried, and Emma had worried that he had something wrong with him – one of those terrible illnesses where children can’t be touched because their bones break easily. For weeks she had dreaded dressing him, until she realised that at all other times he was happy to have his limbs manoeuvred. It was putting clothes on that he hated. Now he sometimes offered physical resistance as Emma tried to push his legs into his cute dungarees, and he shouted his indignation as loudly as possible – a trick he had learned from one of the workmen who had come to fit their new kitchen. The foreman had shouted ‘Ay’ every time he wanted something. ‘Ay, Bill – pass us that hammer,’ or ‘Ay, missus – any chance of a brew?’ and Ollie had copied, adopting it as his favourite sound. He could do a bad-tempered ‘Ay’, as if to say ‘stop doing that’ but more often than not it was just to get attention. Emma hoped he would grow out of it as his vocabulary expanded from its current limitation of about ten words.

Lying next to him on the bed, propped up on one elbow, she used her other hand to creep her fingers up Ollie’s body, singing, ‘Incy wincy spider climbed up the water spout.’ Ollie shouted, ‘Dow, dow.’ He knew what came next.

‘What a clever boy, Ollie.’ Emma blew a raspberry on his tummy. She felt a burst of happiness at the thought that this beautiful baby was hers. She had been thirty-seven when she had married Ollie’s father and hadn’t dared to hope for children in case she was disappointed.

‘Come on, let Mummy put your socks on,’ she said, smiling to herself. She had always sworn she would never refer to herself in the third person – it seemed such a bizarre thing to do. But she got it now.

Ten minutes later, Emma carried Ollie downstairs, stopping at the bottom – as she always did when she was alone in the house – to look at the portrait facing her at the end of the hallway.

Her husband’s first wife had been beautiful. There was no doubting that at all. Her delicate features and pale, almost translucent skin had been captured to perfection in a painting commissioned by her father on her twenty-first birthday. Emma tried so hard not to make comparisons between this woman’s fragile beauty and her own rather more prosaic, if not unattractive, features. But it was difficult. She could never ask to have the portrait removed, though.

Irritated by her inability to shake off the last vestiges of insecurity, she pushed open the door to her fabulous new kitchen. It had taken Emma some months to get her own way with the alterations to this part of the house. David had lived here for seven years before Emma moved in and said he loved it the way it was. But Emma had explained the practicalities of demolishing the back of the house and adding a full-width extension to create one large room – a kitchen, dining and living room combined.

Since the builders had left this had become her and Ollie’s daytime world. There was plenty of space for her son to play on a floor mat in the living area, and the under-floor heating made it warm for him even in the depths of winter. In truth, she couldn’t deny that she had also wanted to stamp some of her own personality on the house. She had had to stop feeling like a visitor. The new extension felt like
her
space.

‘London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down,’ she sang as she walked into the kitchen, flicking the light switch and turning towards the sink, where the lunch dishes were waiting for her. Ollie started bouncing in her arms, banging his hand on her shoulder.

‘Ay, ay,’ he shouted.

Emma laughed. ‘Are you joining in, sweetheart?’ She gently put him into his chair, but he wasn’t looking at her. ‘You’re a funny little man, aren’t you,’ she said, dropping a kiss onto his sparse blond hair.

She glanced out at the dismal day. The black clouds heavy with rain were creating such gloom that the kitchen lights were a necessity even this early in the afternoon.

Her eyes settled on the garden, which was in desperate need of some attention. The workmen had paid little regard to the niceties of maintaining the lawn or the flowerbeds as they had tramped backwards and forwards in their heavy boots, but she didn’t mind. She had visions of the spring days just around the corner, out in the sunshine with Ollie playing on the big waterproof mat. She was going to plan and design a real cottage garden with lots of roses. She had always loved roses.

For a moment, Emma was in a trance, staring at nothing because in her head she could see summer days when the garden was finished, the beds bursting with newly planted flowers. She could almost smell the lavender she would grow in the borders.

She wasn’t sure of the moment that it happened. It wasn’t an instant in time, it was more of a gradual awareness, but as she stared blindly at the black window, dreaming of the happy months ahead, something moved at the edge of her peripheral vision. Her eyes refocused from the garden to the surface of the glass, the bright lights of the kitchen against the dark sky beyond creating a perfect mirror.

Every nerve ending in her body prickled, and she gasped as her brain finally acknowledged what she was looking at.

It was a pair of eyes. A pair of eyes that were behind her, watching.

Close behind her.

In her kitchen.

5

A beam of sunlight burst through the black clouds, hitting the kitchen window and obliterating the reflection as if it had never been there. Emma’s fingers gripped the edge of the sink. Had she imagined it? But as quickly as the sun had come out, it was chased away by the squally clouds and the mirror image returned.

Locking eyes with the ghostly reflection that ebbed and flowed as the light outside adjusted from black to grey, Emma groped along the draining board, searching with her fingers for a weapon. There was nothing more than a plastic bowl. Reaching up to the cutlery holder, she felt a sharp pain and a rush of liquid warmth as her fingers grasped the blade of a sharp boning knife, and she followed the steel down to grip the handle with damp, sticky fingers.

Scared of breaking the fragile eye contact for even a second in case the person moved – moved closer to her or to Ollie, moved out of her line of vision or into the hall, where she would be forced to follow – Emma took a deep breath and spun round, leaning heavily back on the sink for support as her legs suddenly weakened.

Her heart thumping and her throat too tight with tension to scream, she stared at the person in front of her as adrenaline pumped through her body, preparing it for fight or flight.

It was a girl, little more than a child.

She was slightly built with straggly blonde hair that settled on the shoulders of her scruffy dark-grey duffle coat, her hands thrust deep into the pockets. The eyes that Emma had seen reflected in the window were mesmerising. Large, oval and the deep grey-green of a stormy ocean, they flinched slightly as Emma brandished the knife. But the girl didn’t move.

Emma lowered the knife onto the kitchen island, but kept hold of it. She had no idea what the girl wanted, but, young as she was, Emma didn’t trust her.

‘What are you doing in my kitchen?’ she asked. ‘Get out now, before I call the police.’

The girl didn’t move. She just stared back, her eyes never leaving Emma’s face. In them Emma thought she could read hostility, but perhaps it was confusion, or fear.

‘Ay, ay,’ shouted Ollie, not used to being ignored. Neither pair of eyes strayed to him even for a second.

‘I’m not going to ask you again. Either go
now
, or tell me who you are and what the
hell
you are doing in my kitchen?’ Emma repeated.