Cold Justice (3 page)

Willis picked up the photo pack prepared for the officers and handed it out among them. ‘It is crucial that we find him fast,’ Carter said as he waited until all the officers had the pack. ‘You now have a photo of Samuel. He was wearing a navy all-in-one suit, which has two large snowflakes appliquéd on the front. This is distinctive and unusual; the maker’s label is Ski-Doo from the States. There are matching mittens, label just inside the cuff. He’s also wearing a cream-coloured knitted bobble hat and red snow boots from GAP. He has blond hair, blue eyes.’ Carter looked around and made sure each officer made eye contact. ‘We know how fast a kid’s hair can be dyed, how much a change of clothes and buggy can throw us off, but check every small child you see. Be polite but be insistent. Samuel’s only differentiating feature is a small raised birthmark the size of a five pence piece beside his left eyebrow. Make-up would have to be quite thick to cover it. We need to find this little boy. If he’s been dumped he won’t last the night in these temperatures.’

Carter pointed to the map layout on the floor in the back of the van.

‘We have divided the route into sections. You will be searching the section just west of the Cutty Sark DLR station – the officer in charge of your unit will divide you into teams and I’ll hand you over to them in a minute to explain in more detail. But before I do I just want to make sure each one of you understands – no stone left unturned. No bin unchecked, every space where a child could be hidden has to be examined. Remember, Samuel is smaller than your average two-year-old. He could have been squeezed into a very small space. I want you climbing walls and getting under cars. I want every inch checked. Any problems getting access to an area of interest, alert your commander straight away and we’ll get officers there to assist you. Good luck . . .’

Carter picked up his case and he and Willis walked across to his car, the black BMW parked on the approach to the park. Carter started the engine and reversed at speed.

‘We need to throw everything at this, Eb.’ She nodded. She was deep in thought. Carter was used to being the one who chatted. ‘The father’s story is too vague,’ he continued. ‘Sensitive type, isn’t he? Doesn’t say a lot. He’s really vague when it comes to pinpointing his movements; there’s a missing period of almost forty minutes after he leaves the Observatory. Have you ever been there?’

‘Once.’

‘I’m impressed. Was it with that boyfriend who liked train sets?’

She didn’t rise to it; she’d heard it before. Instead, she reached into her backpack and pulled out her phone. Carter continued, ‘First he attends his famous dad’s funeral, then his son gets abducted. Been one hell of a day.’ In his head Carter was running through the checklist: ports, trains, motorway cameras. Service station, lorry drivers . . . ‘Robbo’s checking for any history on the father,’ said Carter, as he looked about him for a way out of the traffic jam they were in and decided to take a different route. Being the son of a London cabbie, and spending a lot of his spare time sitting next to his dad, meant that Carter’s knowledge of the streets of London was extensive. He also knew where to stop for the best bacon sarnies.

Willis had several things on her lap at once. The police radio was the best for receiving a signal no matter where but it wasn’t good at downloading data quickly. The smartphone was best at that. But for a bigger screen she needed her iPad and then she always had her notebook.

Carter glanced across at her lap. ‘Sort yourself out, Willis, for Christ’s sake.’

They’d worked together for the last four years. They knew one another’s strengths and weaknesses. Carter knew that Willis would have recorded all the facts in her analytical brain. But if he asked her what it was like to lose a child, she would look at him blankly and she’d struggle to put herself in those shoes. Whereas Carter came from a big part-Italian family. Family was everything to them. Willis had grown up with a mother whose cold heart and deranged mind led her to murder easily. Luckily, Ebony had been taken into care for a good part of her childhood.

‘He had a famous father but I doubt if anyone’s heard of Toby Forbes-Wright until today,’ said Willis.

‘Have we got Family Liaison in place? asked Carter. Willis made a grab for her lap as Carter did a U-turn and headed back the way they’d come, then scooted up a back street.

‘Yes, Jeanie Vincent has gone over already.’

‘Great, she’s the best. Any similar incidences, any attempted abductions in this area?’ asked Carter.

‘No, not so far as we know. We may get someone come forward after the public appeal; it’s just gone out on the radio,’ said Willis.

‘We’re going to need the public on this one,’ Carter said. ‘If the father left the belt undone on the buggy, and Samuel wandered off, he could have fallen into a gap somewhere. Jesus . . .’ Carter banged his hand on the steering wheel. ‘My Archie’s just a year older. He wouldn’t last two minutes in this cold. We have to find him fast.’

‘Would Archie ever have got out of his own buggy and run off?’

‘You’re kidding me? First chance he got! You have to have eyes in the back of your head with kids. Tell Robbo we’ll be back in twenty. I’m not waiting in this traffic any more.’ Carter put on his emergency lights and swerved into the bus lane.

The Murder Squad was part of the Major Investigation Team in London. They were based in three locations around the capital and served different areas. From its Archway location, tucked behind the tube station and connected to the local police station, Fletcher House housed three MIT teams and served north London.

It was an inconspicuous concrete box of a building joined by a door linking the buildings at the first floor. The officers in Archway police station said the door marked the entrance to the Dark Side. Carter and Willis worked on the third floor of the Dark Side in MIT 17.

When they got back, they went straight into the Major Incident Room to see if there had been any calls from the public. It was where all the information came in first before being filtered and then farmed out to the other departments. Inside the MIR there were four civilians working behind the desks, manning the phones, and two detectives sifting the information as it came in. A category-A incident – a missing child – drew a full team of both civilian staff and police officers. All leave was cancelled.

Carter approached a desk straight ahead.

‘Anything?’ he asked as he waited for the operator to come off the phone. Willis was checking the screens to see what information had been fed into HOLMES, the central program designed to coordinate major investigations. She gave Carter a sign that she was heading out. He nodded he understood.

‘One sighting of a kid with a snowflake on his jacket, sir,’ the operator answered. ‘But turned out to be a picture the child was holding on his lap. Several new sightings of Toby Forbes-Wright – all confirm the first half of his route.’ The officer from the desk on the left looked through the pages of notes beside him and said, ‘A woman in a café saw him. A man walking his dog on the park. All of them confirm seeing Toby pushing a buggy but no one looked inside it or noticed Samuel after four fifteen.’

‘No one saw him on the walk back from the Observatory to his home?’

‘Not so far.’

Carter followed Willis down to the Enquiry Team office. Long desks housed detectives working diagonally across from one another, their monitors back-to-back. He negotiated his way across the busy office. The commotion of a full team working flat out made the room squawk and yell like a stock market on a ‘boom or bust’ day. All officers who had been working on other cases were now focused on Samuel Forbes-Wright’s disappearance. Everything else could wait. Carter stopped at the second of six desks from the left and looked over Willis’s shoulder at her screen. She was looking at CCTV footage from the camera outside the
Cutty Sark.

‘Anything?’

‘It was very busy, that’s one thing.’ She tapped her pen on the list of names next to her: ‘Looking at the sex offenders’ register.’ Each name was accompanied by a duo of mug shots and a brief resumé. ‘All the addresses were around the Greenwich area. Number four on the list looks interesting – Malcolm Camber. He’s only just come out of prison and he went inside for child abduction – he kidnapped and assaulted a four-year-old boy, released him after four hours.’

‘Where did he let him go?’

‘Parkland near his home.’

‘Does he work alone?’ asked Carter.

‘He did then. We have no idea what friends he might have made in prison.’

‘Have you been in touch with his parole office?’

‘Yes, his parole officer said he called in sick the last few days.’

‘Did she go round to see him?’

‘She went round this afternoon but he wasn’t there.’

‘Put a warrant out – pick him up urgently. Anyone else?’

Ebony pulled out three files.

‘There are seven more living in the same area who are high priority.’

‘Get someone round to their houses with a search warrant now. I’ll head down to talk to Robbo.’

‘Yes, guv.’

Across from Willis was an empty chair, that of Jeanie Vincent, the Family Liaison Officer.

‘Jeanie been in touch yet?’

‘Not with me, maybe with Robbo?’ answered Willis.

Robbo looked up from his desk as Carter walked in. Robbo had worked in the force for over twenty years and sat next to his ‘work-wife’ Pam. He’d had a lifelong affair with Haribo sweets and great coffee but he was really addicted to work and had to be reminded that the purpose of work was to enjoy a better life and not the other way round.

‘How’s the father’s background looking?’ Carter asked Pam.

Pam looked over her leopard-print reading glasses as she answered: ‘Private education, the best. He went on to study Physics and Astronomy at Oxford. He’s been working in the Observatory, full time, sourcing and making the interactive exhibits for the last seven years. He’s extremely bright. The Observatory job is almost a volunteer post. He gets paid less than twenty thousand a year.’

‘It’s a hobby then,’ said Carter.

‘He’s capable of a lot, on paper.’ Pam scrolled down her screen and made notes as she went. ‘I mean, I’m not being funny, but if my kid had gone to Eton I would have wanted him to aim a bit higher, at least earn a good salary. That’s a hell of a lot of investment.’ She glanced up and over her glasses. ‘Not keen on living in the real world, maybe?’

‘And what about her?’ asked Carter.

‘Lauren Forbes-Wright works for an American drugs company with a research department over here in east London,’ answered Pam. ‘We are guessing that’s how they can afford to live in the middle of Greenwich; it’s the usual thing for Glastons to pick up the tab on their overseas workers. Toby and her married in 2011 and they produced Samuel bang-on nine months later.’

‘There’s a twelve-year age difference,’ added Robbo.

‘So she could have been looking at a ticking baby clock when she married him. And what about him? What was he looking for, do we think?’ Carter asked.

‘The mum he never had, maybe?’ answered Robbo. ‘She ran away to live in Argentina with a boyfriend when Toby was seven. His dad packed him off to boarding school soon after. Seems like Jeremy Forbes-Wright concentrated on his career, for all the good it did him.’

‘That’s the trouble when you set yourself up as Mr Traditional Values and spotless,’ said Pam, ‘and then caught with an underage escort.’

‘That was denied, and a long time ago,’ said Carter.

‘Maybe he just couldn’t pay his way out this time,’ said Robbo. ‘But is that enough to kill yourself over? Politicians have survived worse.’

‘I think he was banking on getting back into the Cabinet. He must have known he had no chance,’ Pam said.

‘The missing forty minutes, Robbo?’ asked Carter. ‘Any nearer to solving it?’

Robbo stood and used a marker to draw a balloon shape on the whiteboard behind his desk. ‘This is his verified route.’ Robbo drew in the
Cutty Sark
and the Royal Observatory. ‘Here’s his house. We know that Samuel and his dad Toby left the Riverview apartments on Thames Street at two thirty.’ He wrote the times on the map as he talked. ‘They were seen by a neighbour as they left. He was seen passing by the
Cutty Sark
and then he headed up to the Royal Observatory. We know Samuel was still inside the buggy at this point because work colleagues saw him in there. After Toby leaves the Royal Observatory at approximately ten past four and makes his way home we lose any sightings of the buggy until we pick him up again at just before five in the middle of Greenwich,
here,
and then again
here.
But we do not know whether he still had Samuel in the buggy then. At twenty past five he arrives home without Samuel.’

‘What about the internet?’ Carter continued. ‘If he’s with a paedophile there will be footage being circulated on the net, I’m sure.’

‘All being monitored, sir, so far as we can,’ answered Hector, a detective who had been seconded in from the Exhibits Room. He’d helped out in Robbo’s department before and was needed again now. ‘We’ve distributed Samuel’s photo to every officer looking at tapes.’

‘There’s an alert out to all Special Branch officers within a three-hundred-mile radius of here.’ Robbo went back behind his desk. ‘You could get far in that missing forty minutes. And, what if it wasn’t a random abduction? What if it was planned?’

‘Then there are a few areas we are looking at,’ Carter said. ‘The father is socially inept. He seems to have a touch of Asperger’s to me. He’s shy and awkward and he didn’t have the kind of childhood that involved any parenting. He was abandoned soon after his mum left. I doubt very much if he wanted Samuel.’

‘So we step up the search for a body in the park.’

‘Yes, and all around the Royal Observatory. He could have killed and hidden his son’s body there. He knows the place back to front.’

‘Then the Royal Observatory stays shut until we also know it back to front,’ said Robbo. ‘What else do you have?’

‘There’s always the possibility it has something to do with Jeremy Forbes-Wright,’ said Carter.