Death Comes First (16 page)

‘I need to talk to each of you individually,’ Vogel announced.
He glanced towards Joyce. ‘Is there another downstairs room I could use?’

She nodded listlessly. ‘The dining room,’ she said.

He thanked her, then asked Monika to join him.

‘You too, Yardley,’ he instructed, leading the way out of the kitchen.

In addition to the kitchen and the sitting room there were two other doors leading off the hallway. Vogel glanced enquiringly at Monika, who gestured to the one which was nearest.

Vogel pushed the door open to reveal a room furnished with a big Georgian dining table, chairs and sideboard – all of it, like the Adam fireplace in the sitting room, reproduction.

He pulled two of the chairs away from the table and gestured for Monika to sit. Yardley was still standing. Vogel invited him to sit too. He wanted these preliminary interviews to be as informal as possible.

The young woman confirmed that she had arrived at the house at eight that morning.

‘During term time I help with the children’s breakfast and getting them ready for school, then when they go I load the dishwasher with the breakfast things, I tidy the kitchen, and I help Mrs Mildmay clear up after them,’ explained Monika.

Vogel, as ever, had done his homework. He knew that she was twenty-four years old and came from Kosovo, Albania. Her English was good, if a tad stilted, with only the occasional grammatical error. Her pronunciation was excellent.

‘They are lovely children, but perhaps not the most tidy,’ said Monika with a half smile.

She was a pretty girl, tall and slim with cropped dark
brown hair and pale skin. But Vogel noticed that the smile did not reach her eyes. There remained an emptiness in them.

‘When did you come to the UK, Monika?’ he asked, opening with an easy, unthreatening question to put her at ease.

‘In 1999,’ she replied. ‘At the end of the war. My father, he fight in the Kosovo Liberation Army. We do not know what happened to him
 . . .
’

Her voice tailed off. She glanced down at her hands, lying on the table before her.

Vogel was aware that the Serbian military had decimated the KLA, amidst widespread allegations of atrocities. So Monika had arrived in the UK as a nine-year-old refugee. The poignant emptiness in her eyes was disturbing; it made Vogel wonder what horrors Monika and her family had experienced.

‘I see,’ said Vogel inadequately. ‘I’m sorry. I interrupted you. You were taking me through your morning here.’

‘Yes. Usually I stay until midday. I clean all the house. I have a routine. A rota. This morning I was to clean bedrooms
 . . .
’

Monika paused, frowning. Remembering what had happened, Vogel thought.

‘Go on, Monika,’ he prompted.

‘But soon after I arrive today, Mrs Mildmay went upstairs to hurry up Fred and discovered he was not in his room,’ she said, corroborating the account Vogel had been given by Joyce Mildmay.

‘At once we began to look everywhere for him, the three of us: Molly, Mrs Mildmay and I. We couldn’t find him. Not anywhere. Mrs Mildmay called her mother. We all kept looking, and Molly began phoning people. Then Mrs Mildmay called the police. I do not believe this has happened. I just do
not believe it. The family, they are like my own family, already they are
 . . .
’

Now that she’d started, Monika couldn’t seem to stop talking. Maybe it was a kind of nervous reaction, Vogel thought. He let her ramble on for a while, but eventually he ended the interview, thanked Monika, and asked PC Yardley to escort her back to the kitchen.

Next to be interviewed was Dr Grant. The GP confirmed that he had been called by Henry Tanner some hours after Fred’s disappearance, and had not seen the boy, his mother or his siblings for at least a month previously. Jim Grant seemed to have no information that might assist the investigation, so Vogel quickly moved on to his next subject: Mark Mildmay, whom Vogel felt to be far more likely to be of interest. The DI already knew that Fred’s older brother worked with his grandfather in the family business, and the letter had implied that he was already embroiled in whatever it was Charlie Mildmay had tried to warn his wife about. Vogel did not propose to question him in that regard, yet. For the time being, he did not wish to reveal the existence of Charlie’s letter, let alone its contents, to anyone who was not already aware of it. Instead he set about trying to ascertain the kind of man Mark was, and to study his reactions to the disturbing events of the day.

Mark Mildmay’s whole body seemed to be trembling when Yardley led him into the dining room and indicated that he should sit down at the table opposite Vogel. His face was ashen beneath his shock of dark-blond hair. He was a thin young man, but his distress made him look even thinner, emphasizing the hollows beneath his cheekbones.

He also looked frightened. Could it be that Mark Mildmay
was afraid of something beyond the prospect of losing his younger brother?

Mark relaxed a little as Vogel began to take him step by step through his movements that morning. He had left his flat above the garage at his grandparents’ well before eight, driving off not long after his grandfather, he said. They were both in the habit of starting work early.

‘Grandma called about ten past nine on Granddad’s mobile,’ he said. ‘We share an office. I knew straight away that something was wrong. Granddad went white. He told Grandma we’d be straight over, then he put the phone down, looked across at me and said: “Fred’s gone.” I couldn’t believe it.

‘We were both shocked, naturally, but at the time
 . . . 
well, I suppose we thought Fred would soon turn up. He’s been very upset since Dad died. Not hysterical or anything like that, just that he wasn’t always himself. He did funny things. We were hoping it was another one of those funny things, I suppose.’

Vogel studied the young man carefully. Everything he said had a ring of truth, but there was something behind his eyes that Vogel couldn’t quite make out. Just as there had been something about Joyce that hadn’t felt right. And in her case it had turned out that, for reasons she’d failed to explain to Vogel’s satisfaction, she had been hiding something important. Was it possible that Mark Mildmay was also hiding something?

‘So you drove over here straight away, did you?’ Vogel asked, studying every flicker in Mark’s eyes, every facial twitch, every bit of his uneasy body language.

The young man nodded.

‘Yes. And Granddad came with me in my car. Geoff had taken the Bentley in for a service.’

‘What about Stephen Hardcastle? Doesn’t he work in the same building? Wasn’t he there? Didn’t he come with you?’

Mark nodded.

‘He’d arrived at the office a few minutes before Mum called, and he came to the house straight away – he’s like family, Steve. But he drove here in his own car. Mine’s a twoseater.’

Vogel had noticed the metallic grey Porsche parked outside and had taken an educated guess that it would be Mark Mildmay’s two-seater. This family had money and clearly liked their trophy homes and their toys for grown-ups. There was something about these people that Vogel didn’t quite approve of. And it went beyond the suspicions aroused in him by those unfinished police enquiries into Tanner-Max which he had learned about that morning, or even Charlie Mildmay’s letter alluding to questionable goings on. For Vogel was a bit of a Puritan at heart. He wasn’t comfortable with excess. And everything about Tarrant Park and the Tanner–Mildmay clan seemed excessive to Vogel.

He was, however, an old hand at not letting his innermost thoughts and suspicions show.

Vogel ended the interview and thanked the young man, informing him that though he had no further questions for the time being, he would be in touch should anything arise. Mark looked even shakier after the interview than he had before, which Vogel considered to be a perfectly satisfactory result.

Felicity Tanner was ushered in next. At first glance she seemed composed, but Vogel could see that she was struggling to control her emotions.

‘Mrs Tanner, perhaps you could confirm for me what time you came to the house this morning?’ he began.

Felicity nodded. ‘Yes. I got here about twenty to nine, I think. Joyce called me as soon as she and Molly were certain Fred wasn’t in the house. We were still hoping he was somewhere close by. Silly, I know, but we kept on looking and looking.’ She paused, screwing up her face in pain. ‘We haven’t stopped all day – we can’t help it. Everyone’s been checking the same places over and over again.’

Vogel felt for her. Felicity Tanner was a good-looking woman for her age, which Vogel assumed to be mid sixties. Her grey bobbed hair was streaked with blonde, probably by a hairdresser rather than nature, Vogel thought, but it looked natural and suited her skin tone. Beneath the grief and the pain, Felicity had intelligent eyes. There was also an air of vulnerability about her.

Felicity went on to substantiate the arrival times of her husband and of Stephen Hardcastle, and everything that Joyce had told Vogel concerning the sequence of events that morning.

Vogel then asked to see Molly. He rose as Yardley brought the teenager into the dining room, then sat down next to her at the table, not opposite as he had so far positioned himself with the adults.

‘I’m sorry I have to speak to you now, sweetheart,’ he said quietly. ‘But I know you want to help find your brother, don’t you?’

Molly was sitting with her head down, fighting back the tears. She glanced up at him and nodded.

It was obvious she had been weeping. Her pretty face was streaked with tears. Her eyes were badly swollen. Surely this was one family member even he could not suspect of any
wrongdoing. Everything about Molly radiated her honest distress. Unlike the rest of the family, she seemed quite transparent and unguarded.

Molly scrubbed her eyes with both hands and gulped a couple of times.

‘I need all the help I can get if we’re going to find Fred quickly,’ Vogel continued.

Molly nodded again, biting her lip.

‘So will you please take me through exactly what happened this morning?’ Vogel asked. ‘Perhaps you could start by telling me when you and your mother first realized Fred was missing, and so on.’

Molly’s story was the same as her mother’s, barely differing in even the slightest detail. If people are not telling the truth, there are almost always discrepancies, unless they have concocted a story, in which case it would often be repeated word for word, the phrasing suspiciously similar. Neither seemed to be the case in this instance. Molly told her story in her own words and in her own way.

‘Good, now perhaps you could tell me about the last time you saw your bother,’ Vogel encouraged. ‘Can you tell me when that was?’

‘Yes, last night,’ answered Molly.

‘And do you remember the time?’

‘It was eight thirty. That is, it should have been eight thirty because that’s Fred’s bedtime on school nights. But I think it was a bit later. We’d been playing around
 . . . 
fighting a bit
 . . . 
it was only fun, but
 . . .
’

Molly’s face clouded over again. Vogel feared her tears had not departed for long.

‘But what, Molly?’ he enquired gently.

‘It’s only that, well, he was being the little horror that he
can be. He was teasing me rotten. So I said, “I’m going to kill you, you monster.”’ Molly stared at Vogel, her eyes wide open, her lips trembling. ‘That’s what I said, Mr Vogel. I told my little brother I was going to kill him. That was the last thing I said to him before he went to bed. And this morning he wasn’t there, he was gone. He’s still gone. And that was the last thing I said to him
 . . .
’

Her words were overtaken by sobs.

‘But you didn’t mean that, did you, Molly?’ Vogel’s question was rhetorical, and he murmured it softly.

Molly shook her head.

‘No. And your brother knew that, didn’t he?’

Molly nodded again, more of a half nod this time. ‘I suppose so,’ she managed.

Vogel leaned towards Molly, careful not to touch her or to do anything that might intimidate her, but leaning so that his face was quite close to hers.

‘You love your little brother very much, don’t you, Molly?’ he said.

She nodded weakly.

‘And you know that he knows that, too, don’t you?’

She nodded again.

Vogel dropped his voice even lower.

‘So don’t you worry,’ he said. ‘I’m going to bring him back for you, darling, I promise you.’

Molly looked at him with hope in her eyes.

‘Th-thank you,’ she said.

Then she started to cry again. It could have been Vogel’s kindness that had sparked her off once more, or it could have been that she simply couldn’t stop. He straightened up, mentally kicking himself. He knew better than to make promises like that, didn’t he? Particularly to a child, because children
took promises at face value. As a rule, they didn’t understand about saying things just to make someone feel better. As a rule, children were more honest than adults. Sometimes brutally so.

But Vogel hadn’t been able to help himself. He had a daughter at home who was only a little younger than Molly. Rosamund Vogel was a sensitive, caring girl. She didn’t have a brother to worry about, but if she had and she feared that anything might have happened to him, she would be distraught. She could never be what Molly Mildmay was. Rosamund Vogel had her own problems, but like Molly, she was still at that stage where she loved her family unconditionally.

Vogel found it difficult to watch Molly’s distress. Whenever possible he tried to keep his questioning methodical and nonconfrontational in style, cool, controlled, dealing with facts not emotions. He had tried so hard not to add to her misery, to try to come up with some words of encouragement to lift her spirits.

Vogel sighed inwardly. Would he never learn? He only hoped he could keep his promise in this instance and bring Molly Mildmay’s little brother home.

At least they were still within the golden twenty-four hours, he reminded himself. He just had to get on with things. As ever.