Blood Money (14 page)

Christie did as he asked, but the phone was switched off. ‘It usually is when he’s at work. He’s probably with customers.’

Before leaving, Knox said, ‘Do you mind if I have a look round upstairs?’

‘No.’ She seemed unsure, but Knox felt certain it wasn’t because she had anything to hide. She was worrying about what Bond would say if he found out. It didn’t take him long to scrutinise the small, boxy bedrooms and bathroom, but there was nothing that bothered him, and when he glanced out of the window and into the garden he saw only a small patch of green lawn surrounded by bare wooden fencing. Nowhere to hide out there.

‘Christie, if you’re protecting Jimmy, you’re in big trouble and there’s nothing I can do to help you. You understand that, don’t you?’ Knox said, fixing her gaze.

She didn’t waver. ‘Of course I do.’

The address she gave Knox for Jimmy Bond’s garage led him to a street corner off the Pershore Road in Balsall Heath, close to the city centre. But when he got there it was all closed up. Knox peered through the plate glass windows, but alongside the row of dubious looking ‘preowned’ cars, there was no sign of human life anywhere. So where the hell was Bond?

He’d told Christie he was going to work as usual, and surely Saturday was a good day for the used-car trade. He couldn’t afford to close unless he had some other, more pressing business to attend to. Knox crossed over to the other side of the road and stood back to have another look at the garage building. The showroom itself was a wide single-storey structure, but built on at the back he could see a higher two-floor structure, with an iron fire escape snaking up towards a single window. Had those curtains been closed when he got here?

Walking round the side of the garage Knox came to a high wooden gate. It was unlocked. Knox walked in and crept up the fire escape and when he got to the top, banged his fist on the panelling of the door as hard as he could. Christ it hurt. ‘Police! Open up, I know you’re in there.’ He could have sworn he heard a sound. The door looked flimsy and unsubstantial. He probably could shoulder it if he needed to. ‘If you don’t open up we’ll break it down,’ he shouted, giving himself some imaginary back-up. ‘Five seconds.’

This time there was definite scuffling and the door opened a crack, behind it a white male, thirties, slightly flabby in nothing but boxer shorts. Knox could see why Bond had shortened his name. Double-O Seven he wasn’t. He peered over Knox’s shoulder to ascertain how many he was up against. He was in for a disappointment.

‘Jimmy Bond?’ said Knox, holding out his warrant card.

He didn’t deny it. ‘What the hell do you—?’

Catching Bond off guard, Knox shoved open the door and pushed his way in, slamming it shut again behind his back. He’d walked straight into a room that offered little more refinement than the houses they’d raided on Ocean Blue, and contained a double bed that, judging from the state of the sheets, had seen a lot of very recent action. In an alcove off to the left a woman stood, wearing a look of indignation and probably very little else under the thin duvet that she hugged around her. Small and slim, as far as Knox could tell, she had coffee-coloured skin and her cropped black hair was in tight curls. ‘What is this?’

Ignoring her, Knox strode over to where she stood and peered in. It was a tiny bathroom of the most basic kind. Not much doubt about what was going on here, and it had nothing to do with Jessica Klinnemann. Set to vibrate, Knox felt his phone ringing. He ought to respond to it and there was nothing else to be done here. ‘Christie know about all this, does she?’ he sneered as he walked back past Bond. ‘You disgusting piece of shite.’

Back out on the street Knox checked his phone. The call was from Mariner. He returned it straightaway.

‘Meet us up at the Lickeys.’ Mariner raised his voice above a background roar. He was in a car. ‘Coven Lane behind the chapel. Some baby clothes have been found, including a yellow Babygro.’

‘Oh Jesus.’

‘Yeah. We’ll see you up there.’

‘Right, boss.’

 

Mariner drove up the steep incline of Rose Hill, with the dread of anticipation lining his stomach. He’d ordered the area to be cordoned off and called for back-up from the dog-handling team. He drove past the little church on to the road, little more than a lane, that ran between a row of detached houses to their right and woodland on the left, and pulled into a rough layby behind a pale blue minibus. The call had come from the leader of a Scout group on an orienteering exercise in the woods and now a crowd of boys in bottle-green jumpers milled around the back of the bus, some of them swigging from sports bottles, all of them high with excitement as they watched the drama unfold.

Uniformed officers in fluorescent green jackets were already stretching crime-scene tape to the side of the group, around the tree trunks, beeches Mariner noted, their leaves orangey-gold in the late afternoon sun. Mariner sought out the woman in charge of the boys, who introduced herself as Akela. She in turn took Mariner over to Ryan, the ten-year-old who had found the clothing.

‘We were having a leaf fight,’ Ryan explained, ‘and I grabbed it by accident with a handful of leaves. It was disgusting. Then I remembered what they said on the telly last night about that baby that got taken so I went to tell Akela.’

As he was talking Mariner became aware of another car pulling into the layby. Tony Knox.

‘Can you take us to where you found them?’ Mariner asked the boy.

‘I left my neckerchief there to mark the spot,’ the boy said proudly. ‘Akela told us to leave them where they were.’ Good old Akela.

Impressively, in a thickly wooded area where each tree looked almost the same as all the others, the boy was able to lead them, unfaltering, to the exact place, about a hundred metres into the woods, where he’d come across the clothing. After a while Mariner was able to spot the bright red and yellow scarf up ahead.

‘Well done, Ryan,’ Mariner said. ‘You did the right thing. Now, can you go back to your friends exactly the same way as we just came?’ Taking out a business card he handed it to Akela. ‘Give me a call when all this is over and we’ll arrange a visit for them all to Granville Lane.’

When Ryan and Akela had retreated back to the road, Mariner turned his attention to the crumpled garment, still half-buried and difficult to identify at all from where it now lay. Pulling on latex gloves, and with Knox squatting beside him, he gingerly picked it up. The little suit was filthy with soil and leaf mulch and around the neck and down the body was a more distinct reddish brown stain that to him was all too familiar. ‘It fits the description,’ he said. It did, even down to the same manufacturer’s label that had been on the one they’d seen at the nursery yesterday afternoon. Bagging it up, he noticed the condensation that immediately began to form on the inside of the polythene packet. He and Knox walked around the spot but there was nothing else to see.

‘This doesn’t fit with the ransom demand,’ Knox observed.

‘It could do, we’ll have to wait and see. Maybe it’s Zion’s way of letting us know how serious he is. Or it might be nothing at all,’ Mariner said. ‘It could simply be that the abductor has discarded the clothes because they’re identifiable.’ It didn’t explain the ominous stains and he said it more in hope than reason.

‘He came a long way from the road to dump just a baby suit,’ said Knox, as they started back towards the road, following the dying light of the sun through the trees. ‘If that’s all there was, why not just to throw it into the trees from the road. It would still have been pretty well hidden.’

‘Perhaps that’s what he did and an animal, a fox or something, picked it up and brought it further in,’ Mariner said, avoiding the other, more obvious alternative. As he walked, his foot kicked up something greyish white among the dead leaves. He picked it up. It was a chunk of plasticky material backed with some kind of wadding.

‘Is this what I think it is?’ he asked Knox.

‘It’s a chunk of nappy.’

If his theory was correct they’d a highly organised fox on their hands.

Back at the roadside, a couple of vans were disgorging police dogs and their handlers. The clothing was despatched to the lab for analysis and uniformed officers, some enlisted from the incident room, were pulling on forensic suits to commence a fingertip search of the immediate area. All of which would take at least a couple of hours to complete.

It had begun to drizzle. ‘We can’t do anything more here,’ Mariner said. ‘We may as well go back to base and do something useful.’ Like hope and pray.

‘Will you tell the Klinnemanns?’

Mariner watched the group of young lads piling back into their minibus. ‘I’ll have to. It’s only a matter of time before the press will get wind of what’s going on up here. I’m amazed they haven’t already.’

In the car Tony Knox had the opportunity to fill Mariner in on his visit to Christie and Jimmy Bond. ‘So we can rule him out?’ Mariner concluded.

‘He hasn’t taken baby Jessica. He’s been too busy for that, but there’s something about him—’

‘—aside from the fact that he cheats on his girlfriend and beats her up? He’s just a pathetic loser.’

On the way back they stopped off at the hotel to break the news, Mariner taking Peter Klinnemann on one side to tell him. ‘It doesn’t necessarily mean the worst,’ Mariner stressed. ‘All we’ve found is clothing, nothing else.’

‘I’ve made some calls,’ Klinnemann said, chalk white. ‘I can raise the money.’ So Emma O’Brien had talked him round.

‘Let’s just wait and see what happens next,’ Mariner said. He looked at his watch. ‘Zion could call back at any time.’ But almost the whole day had passed and Zion had remained silent.

 

Back in the incident room everyone seemed to have stopped working. Manpower was depleted, thanks to the search, but even so . . .

‘What’s going on?’ Mariner asked. All eyes turned on him.

‘You didn’t get the message, sir?’ One of the detectives spoke up. ‘Shortly after you left the scene the search officers found the body of a baby close to where the clothing was discovered. It’s on its way to Croghan’s office.’

Mariner and Knox drove to the mortuary in silence, Mariner unable to believe this was happening. How could this be over so soon when they’d made so little progress on the case? What had they done that was so wrong, and what could they possibly have done differently? Did Zion know they were on to him, or did he think they weren’t taking him seriously?

They arrived at Newton Street just as the tiny body bag was being transferred from the mortuary ambulance, and had to endure frustrating minutes while Stuart Croghan prepared himself for the examining room, having pushed back all his other work to look at the findings. After what seemed an interminable wait, Mariner and Knox were allowed in.

‘The good news for you guys is that it’s not Jessica,’ said Croghan.

Mariner felt a surge of relief. ‘How can you tell so soon?’

‘The body is in a much too advanced stage of decomposition. It’s been there many months I’d say, possibly up to a year. And the baby is small too, I’d say only a couple of weeks old.’

‘Is it likely that the clothes belonged to this baby?’

‘They’d swamp him a bit, but yes he could have worn them, and he’s still wearing what looks like the remains of a vest, with a bloodstain pattern very similar to the one on the Babygro. I’d say at first glance it’s been chewed by an animal of some kind.’

‘So it’s pure coincidence that the Babygro is the same make as the one that Jessica is wearing?’

‘It would seem so. I suppose these garments must be pretty widely available.’

‘Any idea how this baby died?’

‘That kind of detail I can’t give you yet,’ Croghan said. ‘Sadly I haven’t yet perfected the old X-ray vision. I’ll let you know as soon as, but meanwhile,’ Croghan broke off what he was doing, ‘go and find baby Jessica. Aren’t you due a phone call?’

 

The atmosphere in the incident room felt ready to explode as the hours passed, waiting for Zion’s next call, and Mariner had to remind everyone to continue pursuing other lines of enquiry. ‘Somebody must have seen something.’

Then at five past five in the afternoon, the phone rang and Zion identified himself. As before, Mariner activated ‘record’ and lifted the receiver.

‘Have you got the money?’ Zion asked immediately.

No reference to the findings at the Lickeys, Mariner noticed. He didn’t know. ‘We haven’t had enough time,’ he said, reasonably. ‘It’s the weekend. Mr Klinnemann can’t put his hands on that amount of money instantly.’

‘Then he’s not trying hard enough. If he wants his daughter back he’ll find it. I’ll call back tomorrow morning with the location.’

‘I need some kind of proof that you have Jessica and that she is safe and well. She has a birthmark. Can you tell me where it is?’

‘I’m not playing games. You’ll just have to trust me.’ And the line went dead.

There was an audible echo around the room as everyone seemed to collectively sigh, the tension temporarily relieved.

‘What about the voice?’ Mariner asked. ‘Have we had the voice analysis report on the first recording yet?’

Tony Knox had the paperwork. ‘It’s definitely a man’s voice, but it’s been disguised, muffled somehow.’

‘Professionally?’

‘No, according to this there’s no distortion device. More likely that he’s covering the receiver with something. It’ll disguise the sound of his voice but the vocal pattern will stay the same.’ Knox finished reading. ‘All we need now is someone to compare it with.’

‘Christie said the woman had a northern accent.’

‘That isn’t obvious, though again it could have been deliberately disguised.’

‘I don’t like this.’ Mariner paced in front of the whiteboard. ‘We have no proof that he’s even holding Jessica. I think we should stall it for longer.’