Blood Money (10 page)

‘They’re holding up pretty well considering,’ said Mariner.

‘What an ordeal to have to go through.’

Glancing out Mariner saw the brand-new Jeep Cherokee parked half on the pavement, with its nursery sticker in the back window. ‘Mrs Barratt seems to be doing very well out of the business. How profitable do you reckon it would be, a set-up like this?’ he queried.

‘She’s got a captive market,’ said Sharp. ‘This has to be the most convenient nursery for hospital staff to leave their children. I noticed the list of charges on the wall though, and the rates seem pretty competitive.’

Mariner wondered how she knew that. ‘Doesn’t seem right somehow,’ he said. ‘Leaving kids here at such a young age. Shouldn’t they be with their mums?’

Sharp allowed herself a wry smile. ‘Only a man would say that. In theory of course it’s a great idea. But have you any idea of the impact a break in career has on a woman? If you don’t have qualifications then you’re consigned to the lowest paid jobs that can accommodate childcare, and if you are qualified and experienced you drop countless rungs on the career ladder. Some women never catch up. If there was no alternative we’d have considered this for ours.’

‘I didn’t know you had kids.’ Mariner couldn’t keep the surprise from his voice.

This time she laughed out loud. ‘Three of them; two, seven and nine.’

Mariner tried to reconcile this with what he’d been told of her career history. There had been no mention of maternity leave and certainly not three lots of it. And if she’d taken all that time out her rise to DCI had been even more meteoric than he’d thought. Maybe the kids were adopted. ‘So who looks after them?’ he asked, thinking of the two year old.

‘We made the decision early on that my partner would be the stay-at-home parent.’ She placed her own interpretation on Mariner’s silence. ‘You don’t agree with that?’

Mariner shrugged. ‘I’m old fashioned I suppose. I still think young kids should be with their mothers.’

‘She is their mother.’

‘Ah.’

‘I’m disappointed in you, DI Mariner. It’s the good detective’s mantra.
Never make assumptions about anyone
, including your colleagues.’ There was mischief in her voice. She’d got a buzz out of stringing him along.

Across the road in the hospital entrance they could see the fluorescent jackets of the officers stopping passing drivers, and further along a couple of uniforms consulting on the house to house. Now that all the children and most of the staff had gone, it was time to close the nursery.

‘So, what next?’ Sharp asked.

‘I think we’ve done what we can here,’ Mariner said. ‘We should move across to Granville Lane.’

‘I was thinking the same thing.’

Mariner went back into the staff room to break the news to PC Khatoon and the Klinnemanns, who gathered together their things. Brian Mann would remain on the premises until Trudy Barratt left and would seal off the building, but the rest of them would decamp. Charlie Glover went out in advance to bring round a car.

The press office was doing its job and outside a gaggle of reporters had begun to assemble. For once, Mariner didn’t mind. It was one of those rare occasions when press interest was to be actively encouraged.

‘Chief Inspector!’ someone called out. ‘Baby Jessica has been missing for several hours now. Do you think she’s still alive?’ the voice came from the back of the pack.

Mariner cringed. Too much to expect that the Klinnemanns hadn’t heard.

Once they were bundled into a car and safely on their way, accompanied by Millie, Sharp responded, approaching the nearest reporter. ‘There will be a press conference at around seven o’clock at Granville Lane police station when we’ll be able to give you more details.’

‘Chief Inspector! Do you think what’s happened here this afternoon is a consequence of the government’s growing policy of forcing mothers to return to work, leaving their babies in the care of the state?’

Sharp ignored the question that came from a middle-aged woman in denim dungarees, who stood apart from the group, and unlike the others seemed to carry no recording equipment or notebook.

‘Should have known that she’d crawl out of the woodwork at some point,’ Sharp muttered as they walked back along the road to the cul-de-sac where Mariner’s car was parked, now in isolation.

‘Who is she?’ Mariner asked, unlocking the car.

‘Marcella Turner. She’s a longstanding campaigner for a return to the “traditional family” unit. Runs an organisation called “Families Come First”. She thinks that women should stay at home to care for their children, and be paid by the state for doing so. In many ways I agree with her views but she takes them to the extreme. Breastfeeding children until they go to university and all that.’ Sharp saw Mariner’s face. ‘Okay, I exaggerate, but some of her group have been known to infiltrate day nurseries posing as potential parents, then make official complaints to OfSted in an attempt to close them down. I don’t doubt that she’ll cash in on what’s happened here and get the press all fired up.’ Minutes later in the car Sharp said: ‘Are you happy about taking the lead on this one, Tom?’

‘Any reason why I shouldn’t be, ma’am?’

‘I just thought with the upcoming trial—You must have a lot on your mind.’

‘I’m fine, thank you, ma’am.’

‘Good. So let’s find out what all this is about.’ And she’d moved on, just like that. She was starting to trust him, Mariner realised with some satisfaction.

 

Back at Granville Lane, Mariner left Millie to settle the Klinnemanns in a side room making them as comfortable as possible, then headed up to the incident room on the first floor adjacent to the pressroom. There was no shortage of volunteers for overtime and he opened the door on to a dozen or so uniformed worker-bees, either fielding phone calls or working at computer stations, logging information as it came in. It was crucial at this stage that every detail was recorded. Something that right now could seem insignificant could later on in the enquiry be of the utmost importance.

A whiteboard took up the length of one wall. In the middle of the organised chaos was Tony Knox, sticking up an enlarged version of the efit. ‘How’s it going?’ Mariner asked. ‘This is the picture Christie gave us?’

‘This is it,’ said Knox. ‘She did a really good job in the end. I think she quite enjoyed it.’ The two men stood back for a few seconds and studied the image of the woman with tied-back brown hair framing an unremarkable face.

‘She looks so bloody ordinary, doesn’t she?’ Mariner complained. It wasn’t going to help them.

‘But somebody knows her,’ said Knox. ‘It’s gone out to the press and we’ve set up a voice bank of up-to-date information that the media can tap into. We’re getting a lot of response from the initial appeal, close to a couple of dozen calls so far, but nothing yet in the way of concrete sightings. ’

‘What we could really do with is a link to a vehicle or transport of some kind.’

‘Well if she did get into a car, no one’s yet come forward to say they saw her.’

Glover, Khatoon and DCI Sharp appeared and they gathered round one of the tables at the quieter end of the room, while Mariner summarised what they had learned so far. It wasn’t much. ‘I think the most helpful way of approaching this is to consider motive,’ he said. ‘If we can understand why Jessica has been taken it will lead us to who may have taken her. There are a number of possible scenarios: This could only be a one-off, so I think we can rule out the possibility that Jessica has been taken for commercial reasons. Similarly if the baby has been taken as part of a religious ritual, I can’t believe that the abductors would go to all this trouble just for one child. I think we can also discount the idea that the baby has been taken in error. I agree with Tony that no mother would mistake her own child and this woman behaved as if she knew Jessica.’

‘And if she simply took the wrong baby, where is her baby, the one she left behind?’ said Millie.

‘Precisely. I do think, however, that we have to explore a possible link with the hospital. It’s too close to ignore. The crèche facility is publicly advertised there, and details of the children booked into the crèche are sent to the admin office. What we don’t yet know is whether the reason for the snatch is personal to the abductor, or if there’s some kind of external motive.’

Millie spoke up first. ‘If you think about the baby-snatches that have happened in the past, in most of those cases the abduction was a result of some kind of psychological disturbance, a woman who has recently lost a child and was desperate to fill the hole that’s been left. The nursery is right next to the hospital’s maternity wing and the fertility clinic, so we could be talking about a woman who has lost a baby, or who has been told that she can’t have children.’

‘Yes, but in the last couple of years security in maternity units has been stepped up big time,’ Knox pointed out. ‘They electronically tag all newborns, they have coded locks on the doors and the staff are trained to be alert to strangers.’

‘So perhaps this woman saw the nursery as the next best thing,’ Millie came back. ‘The women who do this kind of thing aren’t thinking rationally, are they? Normally theirs is an act of desperation. She might even have started off in the maternity wing, and when she saw that she wouldn’t get away with it, the nursery was the next best place.’

‘But this doesn’t sound like a desperate woman,’ Knox countered. ‘The nursery staff describe her as being reasonably calm. At the time they didn’t particularly notice anything odd about her behaviour. Would she be that composed?’

‘It might depend on how deeply delusional she is,’ Sharp chipped in. ‘Abductors in the past have managed to pose quite convincingly as health visitors or social workers. If this woman has concocted the fantasy that she is Jessica’s mother, and she truly believes her own fabrication, then she may appear outwardly calm.’

‘That would tie in with her encounters with the staff in the nursery,’ Knox conceded. ‘In the first instance, when Christie asked if she could help she said: I’ve come to collect
my
baby. Christie was quite clear on that. It’s the first time the abductor’s been put on the spot and her automatic response was to claim Jessica as hers.’

‘So we’re looking at a woman who has already thought herself into the role of the baby’s mother and, when she takes her, truly believes that Jessica is rightfully hers. If she knows about the crèche arrangement this woman could have simply convinced herself that she’d deposited her baby at the nursery that morning, and that all she had to do was go and collect it. Blond, blue-eyed babies would fit most people’s ideal, so this woman goes into the nursery and into the crèche, sees Jessica and picks her.’

‘But that line could equally be rehearsed,’ said Charlie Glover. ‘The success of the abduction depended on the nursery staff believing the woman to be Jessica’s mother, so she would have practised it.’

Knox remained unconvinced. ‘I still don’t think a day nursery is an obvious place to abduct a child from if you just wanted any child. Surely a woman who’s lost a baby or who can’t have kids is going to want a brand new one that they can pretend is their own, not a child who already belongs to someone else. Nurseries are more associated with young children than newborn babies.’

‘But they take very young infants,’ Glover pointed out. ‘We saw that today.’

‘The abductor wouldn’t necessarily have known that. And Jessica Klinnemann is seven weeks old. She’s hardly a newborn, is she?’

‘Naomi Carr was taken to sustain and protect a relationship, ’ said Millie. ‘She thought that having a baby would make her partner stay with her. She went through the whole pregnancy thing.’

‘That’s what I mean,’ said Knox. ‘The success of what she did entirely depended on her friends and family believing that she had given birth. You couldn’t do that with a child of even a few weeks old.’

‘The other aspect to this is the staff,’ said DCI Sharp. ‘In most nurseries the staff would be too familiar with the parents to allow this to happen.’

‘You think she knew about the crèche?’

‘It’s the feature that makes this nursery unique and vulnerable. She wouldn’t have got away with it in another establishment.’

Having sat back and listened thus far it was time for Mariner to step in. ‘I’m inclined to agree with DCI Sharp,’ he said. ‘That this isn’t a conventional baby-snatch. It was neither random nor impulsive. There was too much that could have gone wrong.’

The murmurs of agreement signalled that they were all coming round to that way of thinking. ‘It’s no simple thing to walk in off the street and take a baby,’ Mariner went on. ‘So this operation was carefully planned and executed, meaning that the abductor must have had pretty in-depth knowledge of how the crèche operates and the shift patterns of the staff. It’s interesting too that the snatch took place while Mrs Barratt was out of the building, when she was the one person who could identify Jessica’s real mother. The abuductor even double-checked that Mrs Barratt wasn’t there.’

‘But that was a risk. How would she know that Mrs Barratt had gone?’

‘That car is distinctive enough.’

‘And if she knows how the crèche operates then she’ll know that the staff in the crèche wouldn’t recognise the person who’d brought the child in, and that the crèche is staffed by agency workers who may also be less familiar with security procedures. And if we’re in agreement that this was a planned operation then that leads me into thinking that either this child or this nursery were targeted for a reason.’

‘We should start looking at former nursery employees and anyone linked to the crèche up at the hospital. How long has the crèche been open?’ asked Sharp.

‘About seven years, Glover told her.’

‘Look at former members of staff,’ said Mariner, ‘especially those who haven’t yet had children, or possibly even married. The nursery has a high staff turnover and I’ve asked Mrs Barratt to compile details of the staff who have left in the last six months. Tony, I want you to go through that and find out if there’s anyone who has reason to hold a grudge against Mrs Barratt.’