From the Cradle (28 page)

Chapter 33
Patrick – Day 5

Patrick opened the door to his parents’ house and let himself in, surprised to hear Dora the Explorer urging Swiper to stop swiping from the TV in the living room. He peeked in – Bonnie was propped up on the sofa, the new cuddly monkey he had bought in a petrol station during a moment of parental guilt clutched to her chest. The stair gate that acted like a prison cell door was shut and Bonnie’s eyelids were drooping despite the noise coming from the TV. Plastic toys and brightly coloured books were scattered across the room, the aftermath of the toddler-sized hurricane that swept through the house every day and that Patrick’s mum, Mairead, spent hours clearing up. She wouldn’t let Patrick hire a cleaner, despite his protestations. For the ten-thousandth time he felt a pang of guilt, followed by a stab of resentment aimed at Gill.

He found his parents in the kitchen, sitting at the table, half-empty cups of tea in front of them.

‘What’s wrong?’ he said, reacting to their glum faces. ‘Has something happened?’

‘Oh, decided to pay us a visit, have you?’ Jim’s expression w
as dark.

‘Leave it, Jim.’ Mairead forced a smile. ‘Would you like a
tea, Pat?’

Patrick ignored the question and addressed his dad. ‘You know I’m in the middle of a very intense case. You should also know that I feel terrible about you having to look after Bonnie all the time.’

Normally, his dad would have told Patrick not to worry about it, but today he said, ‘And so you should. Your mum is exhausted. We both are. We love Bonnie to bits but we’re retired now. We should be out enjoying our retirement, but we’re stuck in this house every day.’

‘Jim!’ Mairead protested, but Patrick felt a chill run through his veins. It was pretty obvious that this was what they’d been talking about, why they’d left Bonnie sitting on her own in the other room. And he didn’t blame them. Instead, the guilt he’d felt a
minute
ago intensified and took away all his strength. He sat down with a thump at the table and rubbed his face.

‘I know. I’m really sorry. I feel terrible about it.’ His eyes stung with emotion.

‘Now look what you’ve done,’ Mairead hissed at her husband. ‘Pat, my darling, don’t worry – your dad and I are just having a bad day, that’s all. Bonnie’s been playing up, having tantrums. She chucked an entire bowl of Cheerios over the floor, went crazy in Tesco because I wouldn’t buy her any sweets and has basically spent the whole day refusing to do anything we tell her to do.’

‘She’s spoiled rotten,’ Jim muttered.

‘We’re the ones who’ve spoiled her.’ Mairead stood up and went over to Pat, resting a hand on his shoulder. Pat had a flashback to when he was a kid, coming home from school with another lousy report saying he needed to try harder, that he was ‘so laid back he’s nearly laid out’. Jim would tut and shake his head and lecture
Patrick
about how he was never going to fulfil his potential if he didn’t buck his ideas up. But his mum would almost always be calm and reasonable, making him his favourite dinner to help him feel better. But then, as now, he could tell what she was thinking, the emotions she was too kind to express.

Patrick said, ‘Dad’s right. I’ve been asking far too much of you, taking you for granted. I need to sort something out – get a nanny or something. Bonnie can go to nursery.’

‘That’s so expensive, though, Pat. We really are happy to look after her. I don’t want you to spend all your money on childcare.’

‘I’m happy to help pay for the childcare,’ said Jim. He added hastily, ‘Not because I don’t love spending time with Bonnie but . . . We’re too old for this. We just need to be able to cut down on how much we do.’

Patrick nodded. ‘I know, I know. Listen, as soon as this case is over, I’ll sort something out. I promise.’

The three of them fell quiet. The only sound was a singing guinea pig from the TV in the other room.

‘What about Gill?’

Both Patrick and Mairead looked at Jim. He usually refused to speak Gill’s name.

‘She can hardly look after Bonnie,’ Mairead said.

‘I know that. I don’t want her anywhere near our
granddaughter
. But do you know what’s happening there? When are they going to let her out? Is she going to be allowed access?’ Before Patrick could respond, his dad fired another question at him. ‘You went to see her the other day, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And how was she?’

‘She seemed . . . better. A lot happier. More her old self, in fact.’

‘So, what? Are they going to let her out? What are you going to do when that happens?’

Patrick sighed. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’

‘I don’t know why you haven’t divorced her . . .’

‘Jim!’ Mairead finally snapped. ‘For goodness sake, shut up.’

Jim pouted like a pre-schooler. ‘Alright. But if and when they do let her out, you’d be mad to take her back, son. As mad as her.’

Down the hallway, Bonnie started wailing. Mairead immediately moved towards the door.

Patrick stopped her. ‘No, Mum. I’ll go.’

He hurried off toward Bonnie calling out, ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart, daddy’s coming.’ At the same time he thought about his dad’s questions. Why hadn’t he divorced Gill? And what was he going to do when they discharged her? Did he still love her?

It was a bigger, more difficult puzzle than any missing child.

He waited until Bonnie was fed, bathed and in bed before heading back to the station, leaving his parents in front of the TV, his dad frowning at his Sudoku while his mum watched
Coronation Street
. Through the day, Carmella had updated him on the lack of progress and their failure to locate Alice and Larry.

When Patrick got to his desk and checked his email, he found that Helen had emailed him the list of Alice’s friends. At the top was Alice’s best friend, Georgia, followed by around forty more names. How did girls have so many friends? He imagined her Facebook friend list was considerably longer but, according to Helen’s email, these were her real friends.

This was the kind of job he ought to delegate to a lower-ranked member of the team, but Patrick wanted to hear the voices of the girls and boys on the list. He wanted to hear any hint of a lie or cover-up. He picked up his desk phone and started dialling, beginning with the name at the top of the list.

It was going to be a long night.

For the second time in a week, he awoke with daylight penetrating the room and the sound of the cleaner’s hoover buzzing in a nearby room. He unpeeled his face from the desk and sat up, rubbing at his scratchy eyes.

The buzzing stopped and was replaced by another sound: shouting. He got up, ignoring the moans of protest from every muscle in his body, and walked out into the corridor. Someone – a woman – was yelling and screaming obscenities, the sound coming from the direction of the front desk.

He decided to check it out, see if they needed any help. When he got there, he found two PCs trying to usher an old woman out of the building, while she continued to yell about ‘babies’ and ‘th
ose kids’.

One of the constables appealed to her to be calm, at which point she threw herself to the floor, just as Bonnie had apparently done in Tesco earlier.

‘They tried to kill my baby,’ she screamed, thumping the ground.

It was time to step in and help.

‘Come on,’ he said, kneeling beside the woman. He looked up at the PC and said, ‘It’s alright, I’ll take over from here.’

‘Are you sure, sir?’

‘Yes, don’t worry.’ He gently coaxed the woman from her prostrate position. ‘We know each other. Don’t we, Martha?’

Chapter 34
Winkler – Day 6

St John’s was one of the biggest and best secondary schools in
Richmond
, the kind of school that sent property prices in the surrounding streets soaring as parents who couldn’t quite afford to go private clamoured to get into the catchment area. This was the school that Alice Philips attended along with her boyfriend, who lived in one of the Local Authority houses that the middle-class parents wished could be moved to allow space for more of their little darlings. If those parents knew what Winkler had just watched, they might think about putting their overpriced houses on the market, start looking for a different school.

It was dynamite. After the girl – he assumed it was a girl –
calling
herself Hattie Styles had sent him the link, he’d watched the video it had led to with a slack jaw, so stunned and amused by what he was watching that his brain forgot to send the signals to his body that porn usually elicited.

In the ten-minute clip, a boy and girl – or should he think of them as young man and woman? – shagged each other in what was actually a pretty vanilla way. A strip, a quick blow job, followed by missionary position sex and a bit of doggy style on a double bed. As porn went, it was at the softer end of the scale. What made it remarkable though was the fact that, until they stripped, the fornicating couple were wearing school uniforms, and on their heads they wore masks to conceal their identities. Because he couldn’t see their faces, Winkler couldn’t tell exactly how old they were, though he would guess from their bodies, and from their voices as they spoke a few lines of clichéd dialogue, they were no more than
fifteen
or sixteen. A quick Google image search told him the uniforms were, as he suspected, from St John’s.

By the time he’d finished watching the video, Hattie Styles was no longer online. He printed out all her messages – and, more crucially, his own replies masquerading as Helen – then deleted them from Helen’s Facebook inbox. Then he sat back and thought about what all this might mean and how it could be connected to the investigation. The girl in the clip was definitely white, so it wasn’t Alice. But ‘Hattie’ had said Alice was responsible for the video. So . . . what, she’d filmed it? Were she and her boyfriend amateur porn directors? Good grief, teenagers today. When he was a kid, the worst things he ever did were shoplifting seven-inch singles from Woolworths and getting into the odd scrap with lads from the rival school. The closest he came to porn was passing round a contraband copy of
Penthouse
with his mates and marvelling at the bushes. Now, though, he lived in a world where women didn’t have pubes and every teenager in the western world had instant access to every variety of hardcore porn ever created. He sighed. This generation was so fucking lucky.

Now, he walked across the grounds of the school towards the reception. It was that time in the summer term when most pupils had finished their exams and there was a giddy quality in the air. Winkler felt like he had a hand grenade in his pocket that would destroy all that carefree good feeling. Pull the pin and
boom!
He had a Tigger-ish bounce in his step as he buzzed for the receptionist to let him in.

Five minutes later he sat in the head teacher’s stuffy office drinking a lukewarm glass of tap water. The head teacher, Hazel Fletcher, was a smart white woman with a golden bob who reminded him a little of Helen Mirren. A silver vixen. He felt only slightly guilty about ruining her day.

‘I’ve found out something involving a couple of your pupils that might shock you,’ he said.

Hazel Fletcher gave him a wry smile. ‘I’ve worked with children for almost thirty years, Detective Winkler. I don’t shock easily.’

‘Do you have internet access on that computer?’ he asked. ‘And do you have a firewall that prevents access to adult material?’

She did. Winkler waited while a guy with a head that was balder than a baboon’s bum fiddled with the settings on Hazel’s computer. After Baldy had left, Winkler read out the URL of the porn clip, then sat back while the head teacher watched it. Her face gave nothing away. He wondered idly if she was slightly turned on by it. She’d never admit it, and neither would he, but when it came down to it humans were animals. The whole lot of them were only a few social niceties away from tearing off their clothes and cluster-fucking in the streets.

Winkler told Hazel what he knew about the source of the video. ‘And Alice Philips and Larry Gould are currently whereabouts unknown.’

He expected her to start spouting off about how Alice and Larry were model pupils and how she couldn’t possibly imagine how they could have done such a dreadful thing. But he guessed she hadn’t been exaggerating when she’d said she’d seen it all.

‘So you think Alice and Larry made this video with some other . . . children from this school.’ She grimaced at the world ‘children’.

‘We don’t know that for certain, Mrs Fletcher.’

‘Ms Fletcher.’

Of course she was. ‘Sorry. I was always getting into trouble with the headmistress when I was at school.’ Tumbleweed rolled in the space between his sentences. ‘I need to find out everything I can about this video and who knows about it.’

‘Is it a criminal offence, what Alice and Larry appear to ha
ve done?’

‘It depends. If the kids in this video are under sixteen, it becomes a lot more serious.’

She nodded grimly and picked up her phone. ‘Sarah, can you get Danny Clarke in here? Yes, I saw him earlier. He’s here today. For a change.’ She put the phone down and addressed Winkler. ‘If anyone knows about this, it’s Danny Clarke. He knows everything that goes on at this school.’

Shortly afterwards, the receptionist escorted a five-foot-nothing boy with a fringe that flopped over his eyes into the office. Winkler had been expecting a member of staff, not a kid. But Danny Clarke was, as Hazel now explained, a Year Ten student. Winkler almost laughed. It appeared that the head teacher used Danny as the equivalent of a police informant. Danny sat down and his leg immediately started to jerk up and down; he had the worst case of restless leg syndrome Winkler had ever seen. His leg gave off enough kinetic energy to power a small town for a week.

Hazel fixed Danny with a serious look. ‘Danny, this is
Detective
Inspector Adrian Winkler.’

Danny sniggered.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ he said innocently.

Winkler wondered if Danny had broken any laws recently and if he could find an excuse to arrest him and give him a proper scare.

Hazel pressed on. ‘We need to talk to you about a very serious matter. We have learned that an . . . explicit video may have been made by some students here.’

Danny grinned. ‘The St John’s porno? Yeah, everyone’s seen it. It’s a bit vanilla for my tastes but still pretty cool.’

Vanilla? Winkler wondered if this kid had read his mind.

Hazel had gone white. ‘Everyone’s seen it?’

‘Yeah. Well, I guess there are a few totally lame kids who’ve missed it but everyone I know has watched it. Curtis was showing it to everyone on his phone at lunchtime.’

‘Today?’ Winkler asked.

‘Nah, a few days ago. It’s old news now.’

‘Do you know who the kids in the video are?’

Danny’s eyes widened. ‘No! It’s a total mystery. Nobody knows. I mean, there have been a lot of guesses and accusations going around. James Peach reckons the girl is India Ripley, said he recognized the mole on her bum. But I’m sure he’s bull – I mean lying.’

‘And do you know who made the video?’

He squirmed. ‘I don’t want to grass no-one up.’

‘It’s alright, Danny,’ Winkler said. ‘We know who made it. How did you hear about it?’

‘It just kind of went round school. Viral, you know? There was a Facebook group that you had to ask to join, and once you were approved you could get the link. But everyone had the link anyway.’

‘And can you remember when you found out about it?’

He scratched his chin. ‘Yeah, it must have been last weekend. It went live on Sunday night. I remember because I was round Jack’s and we watched it together. Not in a gay way, you understand.’

‘Yes, Danny,’ Hazel sighed.

Winkler smiled at him. So it appeared that the video had been uploaded and sent out on the same night – the night Frankie had disappeared.

This was great. Because if Alice and Larry had been busy messing around with online videos and sharing them with their mates at the time Frankie had vanished, there was no way they would have had time to do anything else. And it also explained why they had been so reluctant to confess to Larry’s presence at Alice’s house and why they had done a runner now. It was because they didn’t want any adults to know about the flesh flick.

‘One last question,’ Winkler said. ‘Do you know anyone who calls herself Hattie Styles?’

Danny laughed. ‘Yeah – she’s this mental Year Ten girl, completely obsessed with 1D. Her real name is Emily Foggett-Hayes.’

‘And do you know any reason why she might have it in for Al
ice Philips?’

‘Alice? Why do you ask that?’

‘I’m asking the questions, Danny.’

The boy thought about it. ‘I dunno. A lot of girls hate other girls for completely random reasons. Maybe she dissed 1D or
something
.’

Winkler smiled. He would have shaken Danny Clarke’s hand if he didn’t suspect where it had been. Now he had something to tell the DCI that would prove to her that Lennon was heading off in the wrong direction again. OK, so he might not have any great leads of his own, but here was a chance to make Lennon look even more stupid and there was no way he wasn’t going to take it.