The Outcast Dead (19 page)

They all look at her. Clough blankly, Tim sceptically, Nelson with slowly dawning comprehension.

‘The Grangers’ other children are tiny,’ he says. ‘Are you saying one of them did it?’

‘No,’ says Judy. ‘But Donna said that the boys were
asleep when she went into their rooms looking for Poppy, and a minute earlier she’d said that Bailey was still awake.’

‘Bailey’s five,’ says Nelson, thinking of the little figure in the purple blazer. ‘Do you really think that he abducted his sister, hid her, maybe even killed her, and then kept quiet about it?’

‘He could have resented her,’ says Judy stubbornly. ‘Youngest child and all that.’

‘I’m the youngest child,’ says Nelson. ‘My sisters were jealous of me but I don’t remember either of them trying to do away with me.’

‘Stranger things do happen,’ says Tim mildly. ‘Maybe we ought to talk to Bailey.’

‘We won’t be able to talk to him without his parents present,’ says Clough.

‘Then we’ll talk to all three of them.’

Judy is grateful for Tim’s support but she finds his calm, rational tone irritating.

‘What about the note?’ she says. ‘Anything on the handwriting? We can compare it with Justine’s for a start.’

‘We’ll get it analysed first thing,’ says Nelson. ‘I think it was significant though that it was stuck onto the Wendy House. Makes you think that it might be someone who knows the house and garden.’

‘Mind you,’ says Clough. ‘That Wendy House is visible from the road. It’s bigger than my flat.’

‘Whoever wrote it was well prepared,’ says Judy. ‘The note was in a plastic folder. They must have known that it was going to rain.’

‘You don’t think the toddler wrote the note then, Judy?’ asks Clough. ‘Precocious little fellow is he?’

‘He’s not a toddler,’ says Judy between gritted teeth. ‘He’s five and at school. And I never said that he abducted Poppy, just that he might know something about it.’

‘OK,’ says Nelson. ‘That’s enough for now. Go home all of you and get a few hours’ sleep. We’ll meet here at seven. The press’ll be onto it by then so we’ll have to issue a statement. I’ve already spoken to the Super.’

Whitcliffe is on holiday in Tuscany but Nelson wouldn’t put it past him to be on the first plane back. As his team leaves, Nelson starts to draft a press release but his mind keeps going back to another case, something that happened nearly fifteen years ago.

Poppy’s disappearance doesn’t remind him of a classic Victorian closed house murder, it reminds him of the abduction of Lucy Downey, the case that nearly killed him.

Nelson had been in Norfolk just three years when Lucy Downey disappeared. According to Michelle the move down south represented promotion, more money, the chance of a better life (unspecified) for their daughters, two and four at the time. All the same, Nelson had to be persuaded. He liked Blackpool CID, his mates, football on a Saturday. The south seemed alien and somehow untrustworthy. London would have been all right but when he first looked at King’s Lynn on a map he had felt a twinge of real foreboding. Norfolk looked worryingly remote out there to the east. It was nearer to Scandinavia than to France. And was it his imagination or was there really no motorway? No, looking closer, he saw that there were only two A roads and they seemed to meet in King’s Lynn. The rest of the county was veined with winding single carriageways that meandered their way to the coast. No-one would ever visit Norfolk on the way to anywhere else. It’s a one-way street, he had thought, trying to drown out Michelle’s talk of private schools and swimming lessons, a road to nowhere.

And, at first, the job too had seemed a dead end. Sure it was promotion, but most of the work seemed to involve low-level drugs and crime. King’s Lynn was yet to acquire its immigrant population and the town seemed inbred to the point of claustrophobia. Then, in 1997, a little girl called Lucy Downey was snatched from her bed in the middle of the night. Nelson can still see the curtains (pink with Disney princesses) blowing through the open window. He remembers Donna Granger’s words:
It was raining and the wind was blowing the curtains in
. Is history really going to repeat itself? It had taken him ten years to solve the Lucy Downey case, if ‘solve’ isn’t too glib a word to choose. He knows that this failure still hangs over his reputation as a detective. And now he has another missing little girl, another grieving family, another potential child killer on the loose.

It’s still raining. If Poppy is in the open somewhere, what sort of condition will she be in? He tries to remember the child in the playpen. She’d looked healthy enough but she’s still a baby, completely dependent on adults. Ruth says that this dependency, peculiar to humans, is why our species developed its superior brainpower, but his own brain does not seem particularly powerful just at the moment. It’s the low point of the night, three a.m., the time when the sick are most likely to die. For Nelson, it’s the waiting that’s unbearable. He can’t get a search warrant until the morning. The search teams will start again when the sun comes up, which will be in about an hour’s time. If he was sensible he would catch a couple of
hours sleep but he can’t sleep, not with a child missing out there in the dark and the rain.

He makes another coffee and tries to collect his wits. He mustn’t let memories of the Lucy Downey case cloud his judgement on this one. It’s not the same. There’s the note, for one thing. Somebody called ‘The Childminder’ claims to have taken Poppy. Does this mean that they will, in fact, mind her? This is what he had said to Donna. ‘Whoever’s taken Poppy wants to look after her. That’s positive. It also means that they’ve left a trail and we’re more likely to catch them.’ But is this true? Notes aren’t always helpful. The police in the Yorkshire Ripper case had been badly distracted by letters claiming to be from ‘Jack’. Nelson too has had his share of sinister notes and cryptic clues. The truth, as he knows to his cost, is rarely cryptic.

He had been surprised at how much he liked Donna Granger. He had expected her to be a typical middle-class ‘having it all’ mother. Instead, she’s a thin, ungainly woman with more than a trace of an estuary accent. She must have worked hard to achieve the perfect house and the perfect family. Nelson, like Judy, is not sure just how much the husband contributes to the process. Donna may be an absentee mother who needs a nanny to cope with a rare evening alone with her kids, but she loves her children. Nelson is sure of that.

And what about Justine Thomas? She may have an alibi but Nelson still can’t forget the look on the nanny’s face when she’d described Scooter as a ‘grizzler’. He remembers
the little boy clinging to the young childminder. ‘He won’t go to you, I’m afraid.’ The children certainly adore Justine. Is this normal? Is this healthy? He remembers the elderly lady, ‘Auntie Amy’, who occasionally used to make tea for his daughters when Michelle went back to work. They had liked Auntie Amy (Michelle makes sure that they still remember her birthday) but there had been no danger of them confusing the elderly figure at the kitchen stove with their real mother. But Justine is young enough to be the Granger children’s mother or, at the very least, an older sister. Does she feel that close to them? Does she want to be more than a mere employee?

And why does the link with Maddie disturb him so much? He had wanted to take care of Cathbad’s daughter, to protect her from the by-products of Delilah’s hippyish upbringing (dubious squats, for example) and from her own crusading nature. He’s not quite sure why he felt this way. Maybe because Cathbad had once risked his life to save Katie. Maybe because he still feels bad about Scarlet. Maybe just because Maddie’s about the same age as his older daughters. And now he feels irrationally let down by her. There’s no reason why she shouldn’t have been with Justine last night. She told him openly that they were friends. But it bothers him that Maddie knows both Liz Donaldson and Justine Thomas, two women who have recently been connected with the death of a child. Maybe three children, if you count Samuel and Isaac. And now another child with close links to Justine has gone
missing. It could be a coincidence, but Nelson has learnt not to trust coincidence.

The phone rings. It’s the search team. No sign of Poppy in any of the surrounding streets but there was one curious sighting. A man returning from the pub saw a short-haired woman pushing a pram in the vicinity of Chapel Road. It may be nothing but why would someone be taking a baby for a walk at ten o’clock at night in the rain? ‘We’ll appeal to the public in the morning,’ says Nelson. ‘Someone else must have seen her.’ He’ll organise door-to-door in the morning too. Get all units on the case.

Justine Thomas has short hair, he remembers.

*

By the time the team come in at seven, Nelson has already been back to Chapel Road. Donna and Patrick were still awake, sitting like grey ghosts in their state-of-the-art kitchen. The search team was in the garden again, raking through flower beds, dredging the lily pond, taking up the decking. The climbing frame loomed out of the early morning mist looking sinister, like a scaffold.

‘Why are they still searching here?’ asked Patrick. ‘She’s probably miles away by now.’

‘We need to be sure that we’ve checked thoroughly,’ said Nelson. ‘It’s just possible that she may have wandered into the garden. The back doors were open.’

‘She could never reach the handle,’ said Donna. Her eyes filled with tears again. ‘She was just wearing her little nightie,’ she says. ‘The one with the Dalmatians on it. She’ll be frozen.’

‘It’s summer,’ said Patrick. But the day was cold after the night’s rain. Let’s hope she’s still able to feel the cold, thought Nelson. But he didn’t share this depressing thought. He left, assuring the parents that one of his team would be back in a few hours.

‘Can you send the policewoman from last night?’ asked Donna. ‘I liked her.’

Giving thanks for Judy’s empathetic qualities, Nelson promised that DS Johnson would be with them as soon as possible.

Nelson also visited the man who saw the woman pushing a pram. Woken at six, bleary-eyed (either from the early start or the night in the pub) the man was a poor witness. Yes, he was pretty sure it was a woman. She had short hair and was wearing trousers but you can just tell, can’t you? Did she seem in a hurry? She was walking fast but it was pissing down … raining hard. He was walking quickly himself. He hadn’t taken the car (virtuously) because he knew he was going to have a few drinks. How many drinks? A couple of pints. Maybe three. Perhaps four. What about the pram? Was it one of those old-fashioned ones with a hood? No, more like a pushchair. A buggy then? Yes, a buggy with big wheels. Colour? He couldn’t remember. It was dark, after all. Nelson had checked with the Grangers, remembering seeing Poppy in her pushchair, that day with Justine. Poppy’s pushchair (a state-of-the-art affair, a Range Rover for toddlers) was still in its usual place, in the utility room. Nothing else was missing.

He holds a briefing at seven. The team are alert, despite their lack of sleep. Everyone is keen to get on with the job. Nelson dispatches Judy and Tanya back to Chapel Road. Tim is given the job of dealing with the media. He will appear on local radio and TV, asking for the public’s help in finding Poppy (or Baby Poppy as she will inevitably be known). He will also mention the sighting of the woman with the pushchair. Clough looks slightly mutinous but Nelson knows that he’s made the right choice. Tim is articulate and handsome, people respond well to him. Whitcliffe will also be pleased to see Tim representing the force because, in his words, ‘he represents our ethnic inclusivity’.

‘Come on Cloughie,’ says Nelson. ‘You’re with me.’ Nelson notices that Clough brightens at this news. Probably thinks that being with the boss means the chance of action.

Armed with his search warrant, Nelson drives to Justine’s flat. He too is feeling better at the prospect of action. The rain has stopped and he allows himself the hope that Poppy might be alive somewhere. Perhaps even now she’s gurgling happily in Justine’s arms. But Justine was out at a nightclub last night says another, more pessimistic, voice. Would she have left Poppy alone in her flat? And if Justine doesn’t have Poppy, where the hell is she?

Justine lives in a flat over a shop in the Vancouver Centre. The shops aren’t open yet, which means that Nelson and Clough are able to make a fairly discreet entrance, parking at the back amongst the bins and old
cardboard boxes. Nelson bangs on the door. ‘Police! Open up!’

There’s a scuffling noise and the door opens an inch. ‘What do you want?’ Nelson recognises Justine’s voice. She sounds scared.

‘I’ve got a warrant to search these premises. Don’t make me force an entry.’

The door opens. Justine stands there wearing a t-shirt and knickers. Her hair is standing on end and she looks bleary-eyed.

‘I don’t understand. Is this about Poppy? Have you found her yet?’

Nelson notices Maddie standing in the background. She too is wearing a t-shirt and infinitesimal shorts. Nelson glances at Clough and is pleased to see that his expression is strictly professional.

‘I’ve got a warrant to search your flat,’ Nelson repeats.

‘Oh my God.’ Justine stares at him. ‘You think I’ve taken her.’ And she starts to laugh hysterically. Maddie puts an arm round her shoulders, glaring at Nelson.

‘Excuse me,’ Nelson pushes past them into the main room.

The search doesn’t take long. The flat is tiny, a bed-sitting room, thin slice of kitchen and a shower room. The girls sit on the bed, arms round each other, staring at them. In the corner of the room, behind a laundry basket, Clough holds up a plastic bag.

‘Baby clothes.’

Nelson goes to look. The bag contains an outfit of
clothes suitable, according to the label, for a child of between twelve and eighteen months. A pink and white striped dress and pink tights.

‘It’s a present for Poppy.’

‘When’s her birthday?’

‘March. But it’s not a birthday present, I just thought she’d look sweet in them.’

‘You’re a very devoted nanny,’ says Nelson.

‘Yes.’ Justine’s chin tilts up. ‘I love them.’