Ready or Not (6 page)

             
‘It’s not like that,’ Kate said. ‘When Dawn Reed was interviewed at the beginning of the investigation she told us that on the day she went missing, Stacey was carrying her favourite bag – the green frog rucksack. Weeks later she retracted that and said she wasn’t sure – that she couldn’t remember for a fact if Stacey had the bag or not, but she couldn’t find it in the house.’

             
‘Does it matter?’ Chris asked. ‘Maybe she’s not sure whether she had it or not. How is the bag relevant?’

             
Nathan had done something infuriating: looked Kate up and down and let a smug, self-satisfied grin slowly creep across his face; the same smirk that he’d greeted her with the previous evening. The look made Kate want to slap him. He knew she was onto him, but he also knew that she had nothing concrete or tangible to go on and the bastard was relishing the fact. It would be her word against his.

             
‘I don’t know that it is,’ Kate confessed. ‘But I know one thing: the bag proves Dawn Reed is a liar. When I was at her house last night that rucksack was lying on her kitchen floor.’

Six

Yesterday Kate believed she may have – almost – found a missing child.
If she could just nail Dawn Reed and Nathan Williams, she was sure that she would find Stacey. Today, however, she had lost another. A twelve year old boy, Ben Davies, had been missing for three days and his foster parents had just been to the station and spoken with Kate. They had contacted the station on Sunday evening after Ben had failed to return home, and had been told by the officer on duty to ring around friends’ houses and get back to them if he hadn’t returned by the following day.

Very helpful, Kate thought.

              The woman and her husband sat opposite Kate in the least intimidating and lifeless of the station’s interview rooms. Kate had been pressing the need for a family liaison room for what seemed forever but, as with everything these days it seemed, her requests had simply been ignored.

Caroline
Jennings, a stocky woman in her late forties with streaky grey hair and a slight balding patch by her left temple, clutched the hot paper cup in which her tea remained untouched. She stared with a creased expression at the surface of her drink like a fortune teller studying a crystal ball. Her husband, older – mid fifties, Kate guessed – held his wife’s hand beneath the table, squeezing the fingers around her wedding band.

             
Kate studied the boy in the photograph on the table in front of her.

             
‘Looks older than his years,’ she commented.

             
Caroline sighed sadly. ‘Acts it as well,’ she said. ‘Thinks he’s seventeen. Comes and goes as he pleases.’

             
Kate wondered what had made Robert and Caroline Jennings choose to foster. In her eleven years since joining the police she had met a number of couples who fostered, all of varying ages and from a range of different backgrounds, and she was aware of a whole host of reasons behind the decision to foster. Many couples were unable to have children of their own; some wanted to help young people less fortunate than their own. Too many did it for the money.

             
Kate made a mental note of the face looking up from the photo. Light brown hair; brown eyes. A cheeky grin for the camera; good teeth. In the photo, Ben Davies was sitting on a mountain bike, one foot on the ground to steady himself.

             
‘When was this taken?’ Kate asked.

             
‘About six weeks ago,’ Robert Jennings said. ‘Christmas present,’ he added, gesturing towards the bike.

             
An expensive bike, thought Kate as she continued to study the photo. Very generous. No children of their own, she guessed.

             
‘I know you’ve already been asked this,’ Kate said, ‘but have you checked around Ben’s friends?’

             
Both Caroline and Robert nodded.

             
‘Anyone you may have missed out?’ she continued.

             
‘Not that we know of,’ Caroline said. ‘Ben doesn’t have that many friends at school. There are a couple of boys he hangs around with, but I’ve spoken to both their mothers and they haven’t seen or heard from Ben.’             

             
Kate paused. ‘What about his family?’ she asked. She picked up the photograph from the table. ‘May I keep this?’

Caroline nodded.

‘Is there anyone Ben may have gone to stay with?’ Kate asked.

             
Caroline sipped at her tea. ‘I know his mother died,’ she told Kate. ‘It was quite a few years ago now, but I don’t know much else about his family. Not the extended family, anyway.’

             
Kate nodded and took some notes. Caroline told her that this wasn’t the first time Ben had taken off without telling anyone where he was going; although, she added, he had never been gone longer than twelve hours. Kate found herself having to make a conscious effort to avoid Caroline Jennings’ face; the anguished, fraught look she wore was an expression that Kate was far too used to and understood all too well. If she looked at her for too long, she would remember exactly how it felt, and she didn’t want to. She couldn’t allow herself to. 

Ben Davies was probably hiding out somewhere, trying to purposefully cause as much concern as possible, Kate suspected. He was probably streetwise, confident and able to look after himself until the novelty wore off and he was bored.
If he hadn’t been gone for three days already she’d have fully expected he would be back soon, with his tail between his legs and an empty, hungry stomach. If this was just a cry for attention, if only he could understand what he was doing to his foster parents, Kate thought.

             
Although it was a relief when a child was discovered, or returned, safe and sound, it was also frustrating for Kate when someone wasted police time in this way. For every ten children who returned home safely – the ones who ran away after a family argument, or who hid and sulked when something hadn’t gone their way – one child was genuinely missing, exposed to the elements or, in the worst of cases, in the hands of someone who meant them harm.

             
For every moment Kate wasted on a child who had run off in a sulk, she lost a vital minute on a child who had been abducted or worse. Stacey Reed, Kate thought, unable to distract her focus from the girl. Where are you?

*

Before the Jennings left the station, Kate took a short list of telephone numbers from them and spent the next half hour calling Ben’s friends and relatives to confirm that nobody had seen Ben since Sunday. She had also taken a list of addresses and was planning the order in which she would visit them as she was leaving the station. Although Caroline Jennings had made the calls herself, it was not unusual for the friends of a missing child to cover up and lie for them. It was unlikely that Ben Davies would have hidden outdoors overnight, no matter how much worry he wanted to cause or how much attention he wanted to gain. No doubt he would be hidden at a friend’s house, carefully concealed from the suspicions of the friend’s parents. Nine times out of ten, a police presence and a persuasive threat of arrest soon prompted a friend who was covering for a runaway to change their story.

             
So far, the day had produced nothing but bad news. The search at the Reed house proved unsuccessful and the rucksack that Kate had seen lying on the kitchen floor just the previous evening was now nowhere to be found. Like so many things, it seemed to have just disappeared without trace. When it was mentioned, Dawn Reed denied seeing it and reiterated the fact that she never said she was absolutely sure Stacey had it with on the day she went missing.

Nathan Williams, typically cocky and unhelpful, was now claiming police harassment and was threatening to take action against the department
and Kate in particular. He hadn’t mentioned the fact that Kate had waited outside Dawn’s house for him, but she had lined up her explanations and her justifications in preparation for the onslaught of criticism that would no doubt be thrown upon her by Superintendent Clayton. There was no way that the Super should believe a word of Nathan Williams’ before hers, but there was no guarantee of that anymore.

There was no guarantee of anything anymore.

Seven

Chris Jones and Matthew Curtis were back in Michael Morris’ front room. The driveway was a crime scene: the front garden cordoned off with police tape.
Forensics had been all over the drive in microscopic detail and the tent that had kept them shrouded from the prying eyes of the neighbours had only recently been collapsed. No fingerprints that didn’t belong to Michael on the car; no bruises on his body to suggest that there had been a struggle: no mud or prints to help identify the killer’s footwear. Michael Morris’ killer had apparently disappeared into the night.

             
Diane Morris was alabaster pale; as drained of colour as when Chris had arrived at the house the previous evening to find an army of police officers surrounding the driveway and Michael Morris dead beside his car, his forehead smashed in. He remembered the man’s distorted features and shuddered. His face had collapsed under the force of the blow, but there was something else that had disturbed Chris; something about the expression on the victim’s face that had made it all the more sinister.

The similarities between
this case and that of Jamie Griffiths, a year earlier, seemed too much to be coincidence. This was South Wales, not London; having to investigate murders like this hadn’t been a prerequisite when Chris had taken on the job. Despite that, a nine mile and thirteen month gap between the two incidents was something Chris was unable to fathom.

             
Matthew Curtis lingered in the doorway like an uninvited guest who was anxious not to outstay his welcome. He always seemed uneasy making visits to family homes and Chris sensed it wasn’t just for the obvious reasons. It was never a pleasant experience for any officer to visit the family of someone who had died, but there was something more to Matthew than simply being sensitive: something Chris suspected Matthew preferred to keep well hidden. He rarely talked about his own family, but Chris had gleaned enough information to get the impression that he wasn’t particularly close to his parents, but got on well with his only sibling, an older brother.

Chris noticed Matthew trying to avert his attention from the photographs of Michael and his two children that lined the windowsill and mantelpie
ce. He was young, Chris thought: he would learn to switch off, eventually.

             
‘Would you like a cup of tea or anything?’ Diane asked politely, taking refuge in the ordinary.

             
Chris shook his head and Matthew followed by example. Chris felt he should be offering her something, rather than the other way around, but he had the sense to know that no amount of well-intentioned words would make any difference to the sheer anguish this woman was experiencing.

             
‘We won’t keep you long, Mrs Morris,’ he said, sitting on the sofa opposite her. ‘I just need to establish Michael’s movements yesterday.’ He threw Matthew a sideways glance and gestured to the end of the sofa. The last thing Diane Morris needed was a police officer standing frozen in the doorway like some misplaced Lurch. 

             
‘It’s OK,’ she said quietly. ‘Call me Diane.’

             
Chris hesitated, hating his job; feeling the sadness emanating from her and knowing that, even with a conviction, there was nothing he could do or say that would ever remove that hurt. ‘How are the children?’ he asked, at once regretting the banality of the question. He often wondered at the senselessness of the questions people were asked by news reporters on the TV: ‘What was it like, being hit by that grenade and losing both legs?’ – ‘How did losing your daughter affect the family?’ Bloody stupid questions from bloody stupid, insensitive people. And here he was, doing exactly the same.

             
‘Not good,’ she said. ‘David is particularly upset. He and his father were very close.’

             
Chris nodded and looked towards the picture of Michael and David that stood on the sideboard in the corner. A vast lake stretched into the background behind the father and son and a clear blue sky soared over them. David was holding up a huge fish they had obviously just caught and Michael was standing behind him, a happy grin on his face; the proud, doting father.

             
‘Can we just go over again what happened yesterday?’ he asked.