Chasing Innocence (36 page)

‘If you think I’m drinking that you’re insane,’ she said, folding her arms.

He stepped closer, still offering it to her. ‘It’s full of nutrients, carbohydrates, proteins, fibre and even a little fat. It’s good for you.’

‘But you made it.’ She kept her arms where they were, looking right back at him.

‘I did make it. It’s all clean if that’s your concern, I am a very hygienic person.’

She half laughed. ‘That is not my concern. I don’t trust you. Why something like this now?’

‘Why not? I want to discuss your future with you. You should take the drink as a good sign. If I was going to do you harm I would not be feeding you such healthy concoctions.’

She blinked back at him and he sighed. ‘You think it is drugged, is that your problem? You watched me make it! Why would I do it now when I could have laced the water you have been happily drinking.’ He shrugged his shoulders and drained the offered glass, wiping froth from his top lip. ‘The other is yours if you want it. The chilli fuses all the tastes. It really is quite nice and you must be ravenous.’

She looked from him to the glass and then back to him. She was starving and could not face another biscuit. ‘You mentioned brothers?’

‘I did,’ he said, placing the remaining glass on the counter beside her. ‘My problem is that I ship out in two days and you were not part of the original equation.’ For a moment he looked lost and uncertain. ‘I don’t think I’m ready to say goodbye to you just yet.’ He fell silent, what he wanted to say caught in his throat. ‘I know what the brothers will do to you. I will not let that happen.’

The last statement completely threw her. Not just his compassion and her relief in finding the unlikeliest ally, but in her instinctive empathy towards him. She saw the boy he had once been and had to check herself from reaching out a hand to him. She broke the moment by taking the drink, watching him with wide eyes over the top of the glass. She took a cautious sip. The drink was unbelievably delicious.

‘So what are you going to do?’ She drank more of the thick liquid, the taste sending her mouth into spasms and then powerless to do anything but greedily gulp it all down, wonderfully fresh and spicy and cold into her stomach. ‘Wow!’ she said. ‘Who’d have thought!’

He nodded acknowledgement. ‘What am I going to do? The answer is simple. I’m taking you with me.’

‘What about the girl?’ she immediately returned.

‘The child is going too. That is indisputable.’

‘And where are you going?’

He took the empty glass and rinsed it with the other. ‘We are going to the one place you will cause me the least trouble, the wide open ocean. First to the Atlantic around Portugal, and then through the Mediterranean, Suez and then the Arabian and South China Seas.’

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘What happens then?’

‘I pilot private yachts and cruisers for a living. I deliver them to their owners. I test them or sail them to wherever they need to be. What happens after? In four months I will anchor off Hong Kong’s Gold Coast and hand over the boat. With you, I hope. After that I don’t know,’ he said truthfully. ‘We can work that out along the way.’

‘And Andrea?’

‘I hand her over sometime before. Hakan radios the coordinates. Probably not for a few months. The yacht is a convenient mechanism for transport. The owners never know and are incredibly wealthy, it sometimes helps.’

‘Helps you sell little girls into slavery!’ She tempered her vitriol and he shifted uncomfortably. Quiet descended as she contemplated a thousand questions and scenarios.

‘You know I’ll do everything I can to stop you, whatever that may be. It isn’t going to end well.’

‘Life generally doesn’t. And you never know, we might come up with something inventive.’ He shrugged his large shoulders hopefully.

Sarah now felt overcome with too much information and incredibly weary. ‘But why?’

Simon stepped across and took her hand, which she let him do. ‘Why risk so much and take you against Hakan’s orders? I’m trying to figure that out myself.’

He reached into a drawer and pulled out a pair of scissors, cutting through the bandage around her hand and carefully lifting it away. He did the same for the other hand, his attentive movements soothing, directing her to the sink where he cleaned the cuts with tap water and soap. Neither were swollen which meant no infection. He dabbed her hands dry with a towel and retrieved the plasters, smoothing each across a palm.

Sarah now felt exhausted and barely able to think. Curling up right there on the kitchen floor seemed unimaginably appealing. She struggled to string together a cohesive thought and was losing the ability to command her body. She knew why but was unable to physically react.

‘You drugged me! How?’ Her pronunciation drawn out. ‘You drank it too?’

He smiled and looked at her with soft eyes, lifting her unprotesting into his arms. ‘I weigh 110 kilos, Sarah, that’s 230 pounds. I have a body fat ratio of 17%, in bare feet I’m six foot four. I’m good for a while yet.’

‘You rambled,’ she slurred as he carried her upstairs.

‘I did gamble. But then you’re unbelievably stubborn and resourceful. I need you quiet and out of the way for a few hours.’ He carried her into the study and sat in his chair, Sarah curled on his lap. He moved her head so it rested on his shoulder, exposing the length of her neck.

She fought heavy eyes and managed a last, ‘Why?’

He did not answer aloud. He cleared the syringe and carefully pushed it into her neck and the liquid into her. Her eyes stayed closed. He felt her body relax, watching her in his arms, the rise of her chest.
Why?
That was simple. She was the perfect echo of a memory and a time and no one would take her from him again.

His own thoughts were starting to fray. He dropped the syringe into the drawer and carried Sarah’s body into the bedroom, lowering her into the largest of the two suitcases, shifting her legs and folding her in. He padded the back of her head with a fresh towel and folded another beneath her chin, now increasingly struggling to coordinate his own movements. He gave up and returned to the study. He set the alarm on his phone and sat in the chair, his eyes heavy and closing. He would fetch the child later. Then it would simply be a matter of clearing customs and that would not be an issue. They were methodical and efficient but also people he had known all his life.

SIXTY-NINE

Helen Ferreira sat at her desk in the station, sipping water from a small plastic cup. She was taking a break from the tedium of paperwork, her frustration palpable.

With all the manpower now available to them, it was being wasted interviewing sex offenders and raking through Sarah Sawacki’s past, looking for some oblique context for why she bought two coffees in Delamere. Deciphered by Chief Inspector Anne Darling, this meant Sarah was involved with Simon. With forensics still holding onto the Peterborough crime scene, Darling’s only concession to any of Boer’s information so far had been to notify Lincolnshire that Dunstan was thought to be on their patch.

Despite Ferreira’s frustration there was also a part of her that empathised. For all the Chief Inspector’s articulate speeches and drive, she was the figurehead of a system that was bureaucratic and slow, that focused at the beginning of any investigation as much in protecting itself against recriminations as it did the investigation. Chief Inspector Anne Darling was simply covering all the angles and her own back.

Ferreira tried imagining what Boer’s focus would be now the press conference was over. How would he move forward and keep outside the Chief Inspector’s radar? Having resisted all afternoon she reached for the phone, secretly disappointed he had not called to comment on her star turn.

Then it hit her. A realisation she would never be able to explain. It slapped her hard like an unexpected wave, stunning her for a few seconds. Disorientated, she placed her cup on the desk with shaking hands. She sat back and closed her eyes, then opened them again. The world was just as it was and a little different. She pulled her keys from her bag, moved her bag onto the desk and looked for the keys, knocking a stack of papers onto the floor and finding the keys under the bag. She rested both her hands on the desk, took a deep breath and counted to ten. Then she walked quickly out of the station.

She did not go straight there. Instead she drove home and changed. She pulled on her favourite loose jumper over a white T-shirt and jeans. Comfortable and smart. She ran a comb through her hair and tied it back. She left a note for Ricky, telling him not to wait up, and then slung her coat over her arm, her bag heavy over her shoulder, and drove to Boer’s.

He was sitting slouched in his study in his chair. From behind she was still hopeful he might be asleep. That he would laugh at her foolishness. The reality was apparent as she circled around. His chin rested on his chest, a hand each on an arm of the chair, his skin lifeless, his body a waxwork effigy of the man that once was. She checked for a pulse all the same.

She moved around to his desk with her hand on his shoulder, taking in all that was on his desk. The case file lay open with a much used notepad on the top, several pages of printed addresses underneath. She ignored them for now, instead picking up the whiskey glass and sniffing it. She wrinkled her nose and stepped back to look on the floor, knocking the empty bottle over with her foot as she did.

She rinsed the glass in the bathroom and left it there, slipping the bottle into her bag. Then she checked the drawers and found the letters, the envelope with her name on top. She dropped it unopened into her bag and flicked open her phone and called in Boer’s death.

Boer’s children were scattered and from recollection, only the oldest daughter was still occasionally in contact. She leaned across him and pressed down the top of his old address book. The lid sprang up. She ran her finger down the lettered index and stopped at R, tapping the numbers into her phone and waiting through an international call tone. It occurred to her when she heard the distracted female voice that this was one of the few calls that anyone had answered that day. Boer’s ex-wife was called Rebecca and took the news of his death quietly, and with gratitude that Ferreira had made the call first.

With her phone back in her bag, Ferreira set about sifting through the sheets of Boer’s scrawl. Words were circled and joined to others with arcing lines of ink,
Dunstan
headlined one page above the address in Cleethorpes, detail of the letting agent, notes from Adam’s voicemail after Peterborough and Boer’s conversations with Brian. Another page was full of large lettering amid random doodles;
beach, blonds, short, tall, American?
A set of small wings, more pages of random thoughts with no context by itself. Little that would make any sense to anyone other than Boer and Ferreira. Endless sheets devoted to the scrap of paper found in Andrea’s picture frame. Boer had fixated on it.

It was easy when you found evidence to give it more importance or read into it more meaning than it was due, simply because you wanted it to be the one thing that made the difference. Except Boer had found that vital detail so often. If he thought it important it was pointless thinking it was anything else. Boer also never worked on hunches or instinct, had spent four years drumming that into her. The most obvious paths he seemed to ignore, although she knew he never did. He simply left the obvious to mortals. What he did have was an eye for the flaws of the human psyche. She considered this was because Boer was flawed himself, that he saw his own weaknesses reflected in others, probing into the subtle cracks of human nature and often prising free the truth while all others looked elsewhere.

On this occasion he saw something Ferreira could not see or even comprehend. The scrap of paper had led Boer to a name he circled over and over, the page almost worn through with dark ink. If she did not know Boer so well she would immediately dismiss it as too obvious. There was too little substance. Everything for the stepfather had checked out. She had studied the transcript of his interview and paid keen interest before and after the press conference. The guilty more often gave themselves away because they hid their guilt behind reaction. The stepfather had shown her nothing today but a man struggling to face a harsh reality.

But Kevin Smith was the name Boer had circled. Ferreira picked up the notepad and puzzled aloud, as if Boer might explain himself. She then spent the time as she waited flicking through the case file, shifting backwards and forwards through the pages, unearthing his mobile used as a bookmark between pages of Sarah’s past. The display on the phone listed no missed calls. She pushed it into the pocket of her bag and resumed her study, but there was no other detail she did not already know.

Presently a strobing blue light made itself known across the hallway. She took one last look around the room, pondering whether to take a keepsake from his bookshelves. Her eyes skipped along the shelves and settled on a book she sometimes pondered from the wicker chair. A leather bound pocket Bible. She pulled it out and opened it. It was the type that zipped closed but the zip was broken for the wad of Boer’s notes wedged inside. She was already looking forward to going through it, sliding the Bible into the side pocket of her bag with his phone. She then ran her fingers through his hair, something she had always wanted to do, then kissed him on the forehead and walked downstairs.

Ferreira opened the door to the paramedics and watched as his body was lifted into the ambulance. Then she waited in her car for the square vehicle to pull away, the flashing lights chasing along the houses either side of the street, a few faces peering from windows.

If she left now it would be ten before she arrived. The best time to question suspects as far as Boer was concerned, the last hours before midnight. It made them pliable and more prone to error. Ferreira was inclined not to because she wanted to go home and quietly cry. She did not because finding Sarah had been important to him. She called family liaison and arranged to meet them at the house. There were rules, of course, about interviews, the when and where. This early in an investigation they were rarely refused. She arranged for an officer from the local station to attend as well. She made herself comfortable as she passed through suburbia onto the A34, trying to alter her mindset, working on how she would approach the questioning and not looking forward to it one bit. She could not stop thinking it would be a complete waste of time.