The Reckoning on Cane Hill: A Novel (22 page)

‘She was good with kids,’ Harold said. ‘She seemed happy.’

‘Did she stick with that?’

‘More or less. She moved around a bit. Different places. But she took courses and got qualifications.’ By now, I’d finished my coffee, and his must surely have gone cold, but he continued to sip at it slowly. ‘She stayed in the profession. She was working at a nursery when she went missing.’

‘Can you remember the name?’

‘Cherubs, I think.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. It’s been such a long time.’

‘That’s okay.’ It would be in the files, I was sure. ‘How did she seem in herself? Before she went missing?’

He took a deep breath.

‘I don’t really know.’

The truth, he explained, was that Rebecca had moved beyond independence by then, to a position where she seemed to be actively pushing her parents away from her life and keeping them at a distance. They spoke on the phone intermittently -once a week at most – and they rarely saw her. Despite their best efforts, they knew little about her life beyond the tiniest parcels of information they managed to extract from her in conversation. They didn’t even know if she was seeing someone.

‘But she seemed happy.’ He shrugged helplessly. ‘That’s all I can tell you. The last time we spoke, she seemed fine. Same old Becky. Resilient and steadfast. We were never able to wear her down enough to get past the barricades.’

It was his turn to smile sadly at that, looking down at his hands, still encircling the coffee mug. It seemed clear enough to me that in Harold’s mind at least, the pair of them had lost Rebecca a long time before she disappeared.

‘We always called her on Monday evenings,’ he said. ‘Mavis did, I mean. It was usually the best time to catch her, and I guess we’d fallen into a kind of routine with it.’

Another element of the arms race between parents and daughter: a kind of truce that they’d all agreed to without speaking it out loud. But on this occasion, the phone rang out. They had tried again later, with the same result.

‘We just sent an email at first. Sorry to miss you; hope everything’s okay. That kind of thing. And there was no reply, which wasn’t like Becky at all; she’d normally manage to send a quick message at least. We did have a spare key for her flat, so on the Saturday, Mavis was getting worried and I drove us over. We knocked – obviously – and there was no answer. So we let ourselves in.’

What they had discovered inside was a perfectly normal scene. The flat was tidy and well kept, the kitchen was clean,
and there were no signs of a disturbance. On a glass coffee table in the front room, they found a note, apparently written by Rebecca. It explained that she was fed up with her current life in the city and wanted to start afresh where nobody knew who she was, severing ties completely with her old life and beginning something new. Perhaps she would be in touch, but she couldn’t guarantee it; she needed to find out who she really was, and to do that she needed to leave and be on her own for a time. Possibly for ever. There were also suggestions that she felt stifled by Harold and Mavis and found their attentions oppressive.

‘That was the hardest thing to read,’ he told me. ‘I know it hit Mavis badly. For a long time she felt like she’d driven Becky away. She blamed herself. And I think for a while I blamed Becky for that. It was cruel. Unnecessary. But that was when I still thought the note was genuine.’

Even so, they had still reported their daughter as missing. The police had taken samples of Rebecca’s handwriting and concluded that it was likely she really had written the letter. Her bedroom had been left tidy, but clothes had clearly been taken, along with a few other valuables – a laptop; a phone and charger. Basic things. It was discovered that on the Monday, she’d withdrawn almost all the savings from her bank account – a relatively paltry sum of less than two hundred pounds -and that the account hadn’t been touched since. Whatever had happened to her, and whether she was alive or dead, Rebecca Lawrence had been off grid ever since that day.

I said, ‘You don’t think the note was genuine now?’

‘Who knows for sure?’ Harold shrugged, as though it made no difference any more. ‘Maybe it was, and she really did mean to start again somewhere else. But how likely is that? With that much money? How can that be possible?’

I didn’t think it was.

‘She didn’t have friends elsewhere?’

‘No. And that was all checked, all gone through.’

‘It would certainly be hard for someone to disappear in those circumstances,’ I said.

‘Exactly. So maybe something happened to her afterwards, and that’s why we’ve not heard from her. But that’s not what I think.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘I think she was forced to write that message. I think someone else took her things, along with her, and withdrew that money. And I think she was dead long before we went to her flat. That’s what I think these days, Detective.’

I nodded slowly. In his position, I might well have come to exactly the same tentative conclusions. Of course, assuming Rebecca had been the real victim in the car crash two years ago, that wasn’t the case. Whoever had taken her had kept her for three years before she died.

Harold was still looking at me. He looked helpless now.

‘What I don’t understand,’ he said, ‘is
why
.’

Outside the house afterwards, I took a deep breath, trying to work out the repercussions of what had happened to Rebecca Lawrence. My thoughts were interrupted by my mobile buzzing once in my pocket. A text message.

And when I took the phone out and read it, I stopped thinking about Rebecca Lawrence entirely as panic set in.

Sasha was in hospital.

Groves

The homeless boy

Groves figured the odds of finding the homeless boy were pretty good. It seemed a reasonable guess that he was based in the city centre, and he was unlikely to have moved on in the past twenty-four hours. With the burns and scarring, he was distinctive enough that people would remember him. So late afternoon, after checking the phone for messages once more, he set out to find him.

Back at the department, Sean was continuing the investigation into Edward Leland’s murder. Groves had already talked to DCI Reeves and removed himself from the case. There were other things for him to do. And yet, after pottering around with them for a while, he had decided on this course of action instead. He might not be able to be involved in the case in his capacity as a detective, but there was nothing to stop him pursuing it from a different angle.

The first place he tried was St John’s Crypt.

The Crypt was the basement of the city’s main church, which had been converted into a soup kitchen for the homeless. It was run entirely by volunteers, and given that their customers had frequent low-level run-ins with the police, the department had a working relationship with the staff. Groves had personally dropped people off there himself on a few occasions. While
a police presence was never exactly welcome, it was always tolerated, and the workers helped them out when they could. Groves was confident that if he could spin his search for the boy named Carl into something positive, someone there would be prepared to talk to him.

He pushed open the heavy oak doors and entered the Crypt, struck immediately by the smell of the steaming pots of vegetable broth on the far counter, and the sweet, sickly aroma of wine and unwashed skin that hung constantly in the air. The sounds echoed: the clattering of metal pans; the sniffs and murmurs. At this time of day, there were only a handful of people in. Two homeless people were seated at the far end, little more than enormous bundles of layered, greasy clothes and wild hair. The guy behind the counter was wiry and middle-aged. Taking in his pale, pockmarked face and the thin streaks of beard, Groves wondered how long he’d been on the working side of the counter rather than queuing up on this side. It often worked that way here.

‘Yeah,’ the man said. ‘I know him. Carl.’

He’d barely even looked at the badge Groves offered. He gave the impression of being someone who’d seen it all before and didn’t much want to see it again.

Groves put his wallet away.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah, little guy. With the burns down one side of his face?’ He gestured vaguely. ‘Looks a lot younger than he is. I know him.’

‘That sounds right. Do you know his surname?’

‘Thompson or something. Timpson maybe.’ He shrugged.
Why would it matter to me?
‘Didn’t see him around for a while, but the last couple of weeks, he’s been back in. What are you looking for him for?’

‘There was an assault in town last night. We got it on camera, and it was pretty vicious. Bunch of skinhead types kicking off on someone.’ It was the best he’d been able to come up with. ‘We picked them up straight away, but we lost the victim. Want
to make sure he’s all right, first and foremost, but also see if he can help us with the charges.’

That got Groves a suspicious look.

‘Doesn’t sound much like any police I ever knew.’

‘We’re not all the same. Has Carl been in today?’

‘Nah. He’s usually in much later on. Spends the day underground. Evenings, he begs around the station, I think.’

Groves nodded.

‘Underground where?’

‘The arches below the station.’ The man shrugged again. ‘Close to his
place of work
, you know?’

Back at the car, Groves used his tablet to log in to the police database and search through the files for a Carl Thompson or Timpson. Given his behaviour, he was confident he would be in there somewhere. And there he was, under Thompson.

Groves worked through the file. Carl Thompson had been arrested a number of times. There were drug offences and convictions for shoplifting. On one occasion he’d walked into a Chinese restaurant, eaten a five-course banquet with wine, and only revealed at the end that he had no means of paying for it. He was twenty-three. There was – unsurprisingly – no mention of military service.

Which begged the question: where had he got the scars? Groves kept searching back. There was a wealth of detail at the beginning of the file covering Carl Thompson’s upbringing: a summary prepared by a social worker as mitigation for an offence he’d committed. He’d been taken away from his parents at the age of two, and spent the following years ricocheting from one foster home to another. There were accusations of abuse made against people in a number of the places he’d stayed in, although none of it was proved. Later, Thompson became disruptive at school, and was diagnosed with learning difficulties that were not adequately addressed. By the age of twelve, he had been cautioned several times for drinking and
drug use in public places. But it was not those offences that the mitigation had been prepared for.

Groves felt something fall away inside as he read through. When he was thirteen, Thompson had been arrested in the women’s changing room of the council swimming pool. The mother of a five-year-old girl had allowed the child to get changed by herself – a treat for her, acting grown-up. Thompson slipped in unnoticed, and was caught by a member of staff masturbating a short distance from the child. He had been crying as he did it.

Because of both his age and the distressed state he was in, he escaped an actual custodial sentence, but was hospitalised for a short time, then referred for counselling upon release. He was placed on the sex offenders register for a period of two years, and lived on licence for that time. He wasn’t charged with any further sexual offences, but the file detailed plenty of drug-related offences from his late teens onwards. Nothing for the last year or so, though, which seemed strange. Groves remembered what the man at the soup kitchen had told him:
Didn’t see him around for a while:

So where had he been?

Groves looked away from the screen for a moment, thinking.

He had to check something. There was no reason for it to be there, but for some reason he still expected to find it. He went through Thompson’s drugs convictions one by one, the sinking feeling intensifying, until there it was again.

SIMON CHADWICK.

The arrest had been made in similar circumstances to Edward Leland’s, except this time the pair had been caught in possession of heroin in a car park.

Oh God
.

Very quickly Groves scanned through the rest of Thompson’s file. There was no mention of Edward Leland, and he didn’t remember seeing Thompson’s name on the list he’d started to compile that morning.

But the connection was there. Both Leland and Thompson
had – or were at least suspected to have – child-related offences in their history. Both had convictions for drugs. Both were known associates of Simon Chadwick.

What was going on here?

Groves stared at the screen, remembering how Thompson had seemed last night. The scars. How frightened and desperate he’d appeared. The way it had felt like he’d been acting on orders by giving Groves the mobile phone, with its message about his son.

And what he’d said, of course.

I’ve been through hell, sir
.

He checked the train station concourse first of all, asking around a few of the staff, but nobody had seen Carl Thompson that day. A couple of the guards recognised him from the description, but he wasn’t hanging around the two entrances to the station, or the beer garden out back of the single pub.

So. It was time to head into the arches.

Groves had been down there a few times years back, mostly to deal with shoplifters who had run off and hidden, although he knew the darker stretches were frequented by the homeless and the occasional prostitute and punter. The entrance was below an underpass. You turned right, passed through a cave of small retail units, most of them craft shops and cafés, until finally you reached a warren of walkways and tunnels. They were nominally closed to the public but were easy enough to access via the various missing service doors. Nobody cared.

He made his way between the shops now. In the time since his last visit, many of them had closed and been boarded up. The few places still open were empty; the place was dying, really. It was one of the older areas of the city, where the rails overlaid the river, and the sporadic attempts to commercialise it anew rarely lasted long. There was nobody around to pay him any attention as he reached the far end and walked through an empty doorway into the depths.