First One Missing (17 page)

Donna Shields leaned back in her chair rubbing together her thumbs and fingers with their glued-on nails as if rolling an invisible cigarette. She still looked scornful, but at the same time the slump of her shoulders indicated defeat.

‘I knew you lot wouldn’t take me seriously. Don’t know why I bothered.’

‘I’m sorry. We will run a check and make sure there are no other reports against him. And obviously if he breaches his restraining order, you call us immediately.’

The woman looked infuriated now. ‘He’s always doing that, but by the time you lot turn up, he’s long gone.’

‘Well, like I say, contact us with any further breaches, but otherwise I’m afraid there’s really not a lot else we can do.’

Leanne was already filing away the form she’d been filling in and putting her pen back in the holder on the desk. But still the woman opposite didn’t get up. When she finally looked at Leanne, all trace of the earlier bravado was gone.

‘I’m scared of him. I’m scared of what he’ll do to me and Keira. You don’t know what he’s like. There’s something missing inside him where other people have feelings. He never had no dad and his mum was a bitch, and nothing grew in him, d’you get what I’m saying? He never developed that thing most people have that makes you care how other people feel. I just wanted you to know that. So if another little girl is found with a rope around her neck or her pants around her ankles, or if I wash up with my throat cut, you’ll know who it is. Right?’

Afterwards Leanne made her way back to her own desk only to find the normally buzzing open-plan office hushed and everyone facing the front where Desmond stood checking something on his phone.

‘What’s going on?’ Leanne whispered to Ruby Adjaye who occupied the seat to her right.

The other woman rolled her eyes. ‘We’re awaiting another papal address – one-week review of the Glover investigation, I think. Rumour has it—’

‘OK, could I have everyone’s attention please.’ Desmond held up a hand for quiet. ‘Thank you. For the benefit of DC Scott O’Brian and the other two new members of the team, I just wanted to grab five minutes to go over where we are with the Poppy Glover case. Just to recap, the facts of the case are these: Poppy was seven, the same age as Megan Purvis. She and her parents, Susan and Oliver Glover, were picnicking with their younger daughter Mia by the pond on the Heath.’

‘’Scuse me, sir.’

Leanne bit her lip. She’d worked with Scott O’Brian before and he was a lovely guy, but he had this terrible pedantic streak that meant he was constantly asking pointless questions.

‘There are quite a few ponds on Hampstead Heath, aren’t there? Which one are we talking about here?’

Desmond consulted with his slight, perpetually nervous deputy, Andy Curtis, who stepped forward to explain.

‘Strictly speaking, it’s one of the Highgate ponds. The one nearest the Highgate entrance to the Heath. You come down Merton Lane and where it meets Millfield Lane there’s an entrance where there’s always an ice-cream van parked, and some toilets, and then the pond is just down to your left with a big grassy bank around it where people picnic.’

Now Curtis withdrew, and Desmond resumed, the two changing places with a seamlessness born out of nearly a decade of working together. ‘Which is exactly what the Glover family was doing late afternoon last Wednesday. If you remember, it was the day the weather turned fine, the first proper warm day of the year. They’d been there an hour or so when Poppy asked if she could get an ice cream. She wanted to go by herself, to show she was a “big girl”, is how her mum put it.’

Desmond made quote marks in the air when he said ‘big girl’, as if he were translating from a foreign language.

‘From the blanket where they were sitting on the slope, the Glovers could see the exit and the ice-cream van perfectly.’

Here Desmond held up his hand.

‘It’s not our place to judge the rights and wrongs of letting a seven-year-old go off on her own. We’ll leave it to the great British public to do that.’ They were all aware how hard-lined people could be when it came to other people’s parenting. ‘Anyway. Mr Glover gave Poppy the money and she went up the slope to join the queue. They could see her the whole time. Mrs Glover swears she never took her eyes off her – until there was some sort of disturbance. A woman standing just ahead of Poppy in the queue found her purse had been snatched and she started yelling and then a crowd gathered around her, and when it parted, Poppy had vanished. That’s the last anyone saw of her until her body turned up the next morning.’

‘And just to clarify, sir, she’d been sexually assaulted?’

Desmond closed his eyes briefly before responding to Scott O’Brian’s question.

‘As you all know, we were hoping to keep the details of how the body was found quiet, but somehow they seem to have got out. We all know the body was found on the Heath Extension. For those not familiar with the area, that’s a completely separate green area to the north of the main Heath. We’re still examining CCTV footage from the road that runs directly around the extension, but the body was found in woodland in the quietest section, which is between cameras. Nonetheless we’re hopeful some footage of the car used will turn up and we have people on that as we speak. The body was partially unclothed but according to the pathologist there is no evidence of sexual assault, although traces of semen were found on a dock leaf just a few feet away. And yes, Scott, before you helpfully point it out, it is a departure from the last two victims.’

‘But not from the first one.’ Leanne stifled a smile when she saw Scott lick his finger and start busily flicking through his notebook. ‘Megan Purvis was also found partially unclothed and in that case there was clear evidence of sexual motivation, and semen and other DNA were recovered – if I can just find the place where I wrote down all the details …’

‘No need, Scott. I think we’re all quite familiar with the facts. And I can tell you the lab has now finished comparing the samples of DNA from the Poppy Glover and the Megan Purvis crime scenes, and they are unequivocally not from the same person.’

Leanne’s head shot up and something bitter and acidic coursed through her gut. So there was more than one of the bastards. It had always been a possibility, but hearing it spelled out made her feel sick in that part of her she tried not to show at work.

As if he were reading her mind, Desmond carried on: ‘This means we’re looking for at least two men. Maybe a gang. As some of you might be aware, we’ve had some intelligence about the existence of an online paedophile forum that has taken a particularly strong interest in this case. That’s one of the leads we’re following up.

‘I don’t need to tell you all that it’s vital that none of this information goes further than this room. Now, Scott, since you’re the one with the answers, perhaps you might suggest what other lines of inquiry we might follow.’

Put on the spot, Scott blushed and looked down at his notebook as if the answer might be written down there.

‘Leanne? How about you?’

She might have known he’d pick on her next. One of Desmond’s fondest claims was that he liked to ‘keep his staff on their toes’. Sometimes, back in the good days, Pete used to pirouette around their flat like a ballerina, shouting, ‘Come on, Leanne. On your toes!’

‘Well, if the DNA samples don’t match, sir, couldn’t there be the possibility of a copycat murder?’

‘Exactamundo, Leanne. It’s pretty rare, thank God, and it would mean that the detail of the “SORRY” written on the leg had somehow got out, either from the families or from the killer himself, but it does happen and we have to cover all the bases.’

After Desmond had gone, Ruby Adjaye leaned across Leanne’s desk and whispered, ‘Exactamundo, Leanne,’ in her ear, which made them both giggle.

‘Who was the woman you were interviewing before?’ Ruby wanted to know, and Leanne was startled at how completely Donna Shields had slipped from her mind.

‘Oh, just another woman wanting to nail her ex for the Kenwood Killings – and probably the Jack the Ripper murders as well while she’s at it. Though he does sound like a wrong ’un. I could see she was scared stiff of him, but she had no evidence at all. Only that he was particularly interested in the case, which would make half the bloody country suspects.’

‘Worth checking the records, making sure he’s not on any registers?’

‘Unlikely. She said he’d never been in trouble with the police. He did keep a stash of child porn on the family computer, she claimed, but she deleted it and then sold the computer as well.’

Ruby shrugged. ‘Not much you can do then. And like you said, she’s hardly the first bitter ex we’ve had in here, is she? That’s why I’m never going to allow Carl to divorce me, in case he starts coming down here pointing the finger at me for every atrocity going.’

‘Don’t say that,’ said Leanne, making a mock scared face. ‘Now I know what Pete was up to when he disappeared into Desmond’s office with a photo of me and a list of unsolved crimes.’

They both smiled, but for a long time afterwards Leanne couldn’t rid herself of the image of Donna Shields with her scraped-back hair and her disappointed face.
You don’t know what he’s like
, she’d said.

That was the problem, Leanne thought. No one ever really knew what anyone else was like – until it was too late.

20

All week the knowledge of Guy’s affair had been a barbed wire around her heart. To all intents and purposes, Emma inhabited the world in the same way she had done for the last two years, but now every time she moved or swallowed or ate or spoke the wire tightened, reminding her of all she didn’t have. Whenever she thought about Guy preparing to leave work early to meet whoever he was meeting, having that butterflies feeling inside him, standing in front of the mirror in the toilets at work making sure his hair looked just right, feeling that pulse-racing, heat-building excitement as he drove nearer, feeling
alive
, she wanted to tear him into little pieces. Her rage frightened her. It was as if all the anger that she carried around inside towards Tilly’s killer had been transferred suddenly to her husband. And yet, when it came down to it, who could blame him? She’d rebuffed every overture of intimacy from him until he’d given up making them. They hadn’t had sex in nearly a year. When they watched television, side by side on the sofa but inches apart like strictly arranged cushions, she tensed at any portrayal of physical affection on screen, a lingering kiss or, God forbid, a bedroom scene. At those moments the silence between them thrummed and she felt her cheeks burn, staring rigidly ahead while her nails dug into the soft palm of her hand.

So why shouldn’t he look for love somewhere else?

Because if she was suffering, so should he.

Emma knew her feelings were inconsistent, but still she couldn’t help it. She tried to remember what kind of wife she’d been Before. Had there been a time when she’d have put Guy’s happiness ahead of everything, even her own, given anything to save him from suffering? She suspected so, but as always when she delved back into the past, it was as if she was another person and when she tried to ascribe to her other self motivations and emotions, she was doing so from the outside, as an observer, not a participant. It was all guesswork in the end. Occasionally a memory would be triggered – she and Guy on honeymoon in Italy, dragging a mattress up on to the sun-baked roof of their borrowed apartment and making love to the sound of a million revving scooters and car horns; the two of them slumped exhausted on the sofa the time all three girls had chickenpox at once, surrounded by DVD boxes and crisp packets and broken crayons and endless sheets of paper with pictures of rainbows and houses and aliens and ponies and those folded-paper things you put over your fingers. ‘Pick a number!’ Tilly had commanded, her beautiful face studded with livid red spots. ‘Now pick a colour. No, pick
orange
, Mummy. Orange is better.’ Unfolding it with barely suppressed laughter to reveal the words ‘You’re a poo’. And she and Guy, limp with exhaustion, still managing to look at each other over the heads of their giggling daughters and smile. But now, though Emma could see those memories in her mind, she couldn’t feel them. That other Emma, that other Guy, they were just people she used to know whom she’d lost touch with a long time ago.

It was one forty-five in the afternoon. Too soon to be thinking about the school run. Too late to begin preparing a lunch which she anyway would only pick at.

She recited her daily litany in her head.
Maybe home-made chips? Must buy potatoes. But didn’t they have potatoes last night and the night before? Rice? Caitlin would object, but perhaps with pesto … Jemima’s maths tutor tonight. Remember to call in at the cashpoint. And make sure I have a fiver this time. He never has any change and I’m always too embarrassed to remind him the following week. Caitlin MUST practise the violin tonight. Be firm, don’t accept any excuses.

She sank down on the sofa and drew her legs in their plain-black capri pants up underneath her. So many things she needed to get done, but instead she thought about Guy and whether he was at work or had left early again and who he might be with and what they might be doing.

For the first time Emma considered what had driven her and Guy apart. Was it the thing that had happened itself, or was it the fact that they couldn’t bear to be around each other and see their own suffering reflected back at them?

Her chest tightened, as it always did when she thought about the past. In a panic, she tried to switch her mind on to something else.

Her hands were on the strap of her handbag before her brain had even had a chance to catch on to what she was doing. What harm could it do, anyway? Why shouldn’t she look?

She knew the harm and she knew why she shouldn’t, but she did it anyway.

The photo of Tilly in her painting overall was looking frayed around the edges, yet still there she was, gazing at the camera with her clear blue eyes. Again that tugging feeling in the back of Emma’s mind as she looked at the opened mouth, those two perfectly symmetrical bunches on either side of her head, secured with the bands of red and orange flowers.