First One Missing (18 page)

Hair accessories had once been a currency in this house. With three little girls so close in age, all nurturing dreams of waist-long, swishy princess hair, how could they not? Tilly used to have a little box in which she kept her ‘special’ ones – the pair of silver-sequinned scrunchies she’d got as part of a birthday present, a different pair with tiny pink diamanté kittens.

Emma smiled remembering the ceremony with which her middle daughter had opened the box, retrieving each precious item from the box as carefully as if they were priceless jewels and laying them out on the table in front of her.

And yet again that flash of memory, that prickling sensation as if little fingers were drumming on the inside of her head.
Think, silly Mummy. Think
.

And then suddenly her hand flew to her mouth and her stomach lurched and her heart threatened to gallop clear out of her chest.

She ran to the kitchen where her mobile was charging on the work surface and quickly called up a number, cursing when it went straight through to answerphone.

‘Leanne? This is Emma. Can you call me back. It’s urgent!’

21

The thing about knowing something no one else did was that it wasn’t worth a bean unless other people knew that you knew something they didn’t. Even after only two days, Sally was struggling to keep her knowledge of the letter Daniel Purvis had found to herself. Not that it necessarily meant anything, one must always avoid jumping to conclusions. Still, it added another element to the case. And to be frank, new elements were hard to come by on this investigation.

Out for a lunchtime drink with Ken Forbes in one of those child-friendly pubs where you couldn’t get to the bar without tripping over a stray toddler, she came close to blurting out something that would alert him to the fact that she was in possession of some knowledge he would be very interested in. Only self-interest stopped her. And a faint but surprising sense of allegiance to Simon Hewitt. True, he hadn’t been the most dynamic of lovers, and naturally you had to have reservations about a man who’d cheat on his wife, particularly his recently bereaved wife (although Sally was inclined in these matters to see the institution of marriage itself as faulty rather than the act of infidelity). And yet there had been an appealing sense of quiet satisfaction about him, as if he acknowledged his ambitions were modest, yet was still grateful to have fulfilled them. Since reading Simon’s letter to Megan she’d gone over and over her limited encounters with him, looking for hints of a darker personality lurking beneath his bland surface, but had found none.

Could she really have slept, not once but twice, with a man capable of harming a child, either emotionally or physically? Could she have had relations with a paedophile and not have had the slightest inkling? These were the thoughts that were helping her keep the contents of Daniel Purvis’s letter to herself. Sally knew herself to be a piss-poor judge of men but this would be a personal low.

Despite it being not yet one, Ken was drinking a pint of bitter with a whisky chaser. When she’d taken their order the girl behind the bar, who was wearing a tight
Game of Thrones
T-shirt and whose hair was so shiny you could practically see your own reflection in it, had looked shocked.

‘Don’t worry, darling,’ he’d said, winking. ‘Booze is a performance-booster. It’s a well-known fact.’

Afterwards Sally had reprimanded him. ‘You’re not allowed to sexually harass the bar staff any more, Ken. Don’t you think it’s time you joined the twenty-first century?’

‘No, thanks,’ said Ken, showing her his yellow teeth. ‘I’m quite happy back here in the 1980s, thank you very much.’

Sally refrained from asking whether the clothes he was wearing also hailed from that halcyon decade. Really, what was the point? She had a grudging affection for men like Ken, deliberately stuck in their time warp.

‘So how are you getting on?’ she asked him, though she was well aware he knew she hadn’t asked him out for a drink just to make small talk.

‘Not so bad,’ came the infuriating reply. Ken was a freelancer. He made his living out of getting stuff the staffers on the nationals hadn’t. He wasn’t about to share it with her just from the goodness of his heart.

‘Made any inroads with the Glovers?’

He shook his head. ‘No one in that family is talking. The mother’s a total mess, apparently. One of the coppers let slip she’s heavily sedated. I reckon we can write them off for now.’

‘And what about the cops? Haven’t they got anywhere yet?’

Everyone knew Ken had close links with the Met going back yonks. Of course, lots of his original contacts had either retired or been ‘relieved of their duties’, but a few remained. Sally would have loved a chance to go through his contacts book, but she knew those old-style coppers wouldn’t trust her. In her experience, sad old gits tended to confide only in other sad old gits.

‘Oh you know,’ said Ken, winking in an obligingly sad-old-git way. ‘They don’t like to give too much away.’

Even without the wink Sally could tell that he knew something. It was in the expectant way he looked at her as if waiting for her to name a price. She would have to offer something in return. But then she’d guessed that. That’s the whole reason they were both here. She played for time by looking around the pub. If you asked her, it couldn’t really be called a pub. ‘Crèche with alcohol’ was more like it. At the next table sat four women with small children. The women were drinking coffee and the children were building things out of brightly coloured Play-Doh. Sally had much preferred the days when a pub was a pub, full of adults drinking and talking about adult things amid the blessed cigarette smoke. Not that she had anything against children, but weren’t there other places where they’d feel more at home?

‘Tell you what, Ken. You give me an idea what it is you’ve got on Poppy Glover, and I’ll let you in on a lead I have in the Megan Purvis case. How does that sound?’

Ken leaned right back in his chair and stared at her. He was wearing a pale-blue shirt that was now straining across the middle, and there were discoloured patches of dried sweat under his arms that Sally tried not to see.

‘All right,’ Ken said, sitting forwards abruptly. ‘Let’s hear what you’ve got.’

Sally described her meeting with Daniel Purvis and the contents of the letter, omitting only the small detail of who the letter was from. Let Simon keep his anonymity for now. Instead she told Ken the letter was unsigned.

Ken looked thoughtful. At least that’s how Sally interpreted the way he furrowed his brows at her while drumming his yellow-nailed fingers on the table. ‘OK,’ he said eventually.

‘OK?’

It came out tetchier than she’d intended.

‘What I mean is, that might very well tie in with the tip-off I’ve had,’ Ken added.

Now she was interested. All she needed was for that child to her right to stop screeching long enough for her to hear what Ken was saying.

‘Apparently the cops are now looking into the idea that the Kenwood Killings are down to a paedophile ring, not just some lone nutter.’ Ken sat back in his chair with an undisguised air of satisfaction. ‘So what do you think about that, then?’ was written all over his face.

Sally didn’t much know what to think of it. Ken clearly thought the two things were connected – the letter and the possible existence of this paedophile ring. But if he was right, the natural conclusion was that the person who’d written the letter was part of the ring – perhaps had even been grooming Megan, or worse.

On the way back to her hotel, Sally felt herself sliding into gloom. She tried half-heartedly to combat it using some of the techniques her life coach Mina had taught her. She listed her many achievements and reframed her negatives into positives. In place of ‘I’ve been an idiot’ she thought ‘This is another opportunity to learn and grow’. But nothing seemed to shift the knot of dread in the pit of her stomach.

She came to a decision. If she was going to find out she’d had sexual relations with a man linked to paedophilia and child murder, she’d rather get it over with, instead of hearing it from someone else. And what better way to do that than to ask him directly?

Stopping outside an artisan bakery, she was momentarily distracted by the price tag on the large round sourdough loaf in the window. £5.50? For a loaf of bread? Then she unbuckled her leather bag and dug around for her smartphone. When, finally, she managed to access her contacts list, the nail of her second finger, which had been so perfectly lacquered when she left Hove but was now looking a little chipped around the edges (she couldn’t help but notice), hovered over the screen as she scrolled down her ‘H’s.

She popped a piece of nicotine gum in her mouth and pressed call.

22

It was the perpetual existential riddle about undercover cops – did UCs come to resemble their roles, just as dogs are said to resemble their owners, or were they chosen for those roles precisely because of that resemblance? Looking at Howard Walsh, Leanne could understand how he’d been able to pass himself off as a paedophile so successfully for the last three years. It wasn’t that he was sitting there on the bench in a long, dirty mac – his black polo shirt and dark-blue jeans drew no second glances, nor did his pale, thin face and round wire-framed glasses – but there was a diffidence in his manner that was off-putting, a hesitancy that seemed to be born not from shyness but from some gap between the surface of him and whatever was going on inside.

‘I do appreciate you agreeing to meet me,’ she said again, trying to quell her own misgivings. She’d had little choice in the matter. It had been one of the tasks Desmond had allocated her after the earlier briefing. She tried to sound encouraging: ‘I know it’s not—’

‘Look, can we just get on with it? I’m doing this as a favour to my guv’nor, but it needs to be quick. The cover story won’t last for ever.’

The cover story to which he referred was currently sniffing around by Leanne’s feet and she instinctively put out a hand to stroke it behind the ears. The chocolate-brown labrador sat down and gazed up at her contentedly, leaning into her caress. The Heath – or at least the north section where they were sitting – seemed to be teeming with chocolate-brown labradors. As cover stories go, it was perfect.

‘Of course. Sorry. I just wanted to ask you about this Nemo ring. What exactly do you know about it? And how might it be linked to our investigation? You know I’m the FLO to the Reid family. It would be so nice to be able to give them a few answers.’

‘
Nice?
’ Her new acquaintance wasn’t looking at her, but she could hear the mockery in his voice. ‘I don’t think you could call any of this “nice”.’

Leanne was annoyed with herself for getting flustered, and annoyed with Howard Walsh – although of course his name wasn’t really Howard Walsh – for making her feel so uncomfortable. She knew he was simply a police officer playing a role, but still there was a part of her that was finding it very difficult to disassociate the man next to her from the daily reality of the life he was leading.

‘I have to tell you again that I haven’t managed to crack that ring. I don’t pretend to have any in-depth insider information about who they are or how they work.’

‘No. I appreciate that.’

‘All I know is that the ring, or network as it is, exists. And it seems to be dedicated entirely to the Kenwood Killings. At first I thought it was just another fetish group. There are loads of them, they attach themselves to a child celebrity or a particular child abuse case and then they swap information about it or gossip or fan fic.’

‘Fan fic?’

Again that creepy hesitation.

‘Fan fiction. They write fantasies about the people involved and pass them around, you know, in the same way teenage girls do about boy bands. Except these aren’t exactly love stories.’

Leanne was overtaken by a wave of nausea. What must it do to a person to see day in, day out the kind of things Howard had to see? How did it affect your view of the world, your relationships with other people? No one was allowed to know quite how far and how deep UCs had to go to gain acceptance. Just as well.

‘Anyway, at first I thought it was just that. Fantasy. But then I started hearing things on the grapevine – that these guys knew more than they should about the case, that they might actually be involved.’

‘Involved how?’

Howard was still facing away from her, gazing out across the grassy slope, peppered with green spreading trees, as befitted a stranger she’d just struck up a conversation with on a public bench, but still Leanne could sense his quiet tension. The meeting, which had been set up through channels far above her, was as safe as it could be. She had no idea of Howard’s real name, and so there was no risk of her calling him anything other than the alias he’d been living under for the past three years. She knew he worked for CEOP, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection agency, and was masquerading as a self-employed web designer living in a one-bedroom ex-council flat in one of the sprawling estates that lurked behind the Victorian pastel-painted prettiness of Kentish Town. Of course it was natural for him to walk his dog up on the Heath, and of course he was likely to chat to random strangers while he was out, in that way dog walkers do. Nevertheless, his discomfort was tangible, and Leanne knew she didn’t have long.

‘I don’t know exactly how they’re involved. It’s one of the most secretive groups I’ve ever come across. Gaining admission is next to impossible.’

Leanne shuddered. She’d once had a friend on the force who’d gone out with a guy who’d worked undercover for five years investigating paedophiles. Her friend had told her that to pass the ‘test’ to be accepted, her boyfriend had to provide an original photo or video of a child being abused, not one they’d seen before, and as most of these creeps spent all their spare time combing through libraries of images, they knew pretty much everything already out there. Leanne hadn’t asked how he’d got hold of what they required, but she had found out that to get to the next level of acceptance, the inner sanctum, he’d have had to provide photographic or video evidence of him actually taking part in that abuse. She didn’t look at Howard Walsh. She didn’t want to know what he’d had to do or pretend to do to get where he was.