Death Comes First (12 page)

It had been a normal family night. Perhaps the most normal since Charlie’s death. Joyce had enjoyed it more than she would have thought possible after the day she’d had. She’d
even enjoyed her children’s noisy banter. Molly and Fred’s incessant barbed teasing of each other had helped banish all thought of the letter, if only for a few hours.

She pottered around the kitchen until Molly had gone to bed, then decided to have an early night herself, once again armed with a bottle of wine.

There was a Joan Hickson
Miss Marple
on ITV 3 which she didn’t think she’d seen. And as she settled into the pillows, with a glass of red at her side, to watch the definitive portrayal of Agatha Christie’s unique detective, Joyce realized she felt surprisingly content.

The letter continued to hover at the back of her mind, coming to the fore during commercial breaks. But she dealt with it by reminding herself how erratic Charlie’s moods had become under the influence of the various drugs he was taking. He could have been in the grip of drug-induced paranoia when he wrote the letter. Perhaps it was as simple as that, and there was absolutely no substance to his allegations about her father and the family business.

Maybe the best course of action would be for her to forget about the letter and focus on trying to rebuild her life, and bringing up Molly and Fred alone as best she could. Realistically, what else could she do? She was no Miss Marple; if Henry and Stephen couldn’t be persuaded to divulge the secret workings of Tanner-Max to her, it wasn’t as if she could come by the information by any other means. And even if she could, did she really want to risk finding out something she’d be better off not knowing?

That damned letter had not only made her fearful for the future, it had made her dangerously nostalgic for her past. Particularly the one truly carefree and happy time of her life, when she’d been a young student, madly in love with Charlie.

It had also brought back memories of her early feelings for Stephen, which he’d treated so carelessly. She’d been a bit hard on Stephen that afternoon, she decided. But she’d let him stew a bit before relenting and telling him all was forgiven, she resolved before drifting off to sleep.

Joyce woke a few minutes before her 7 a.m. alarm after the best night’s sleep she’d had since Charlie’s death. While not exactly bursting with cheerfulness and the joy of being alive – she wondered if she’d ever feel that way again – she felt well rested and more positive about the future than she had in a long time.

The sun was shining, filling her bedroom with mellow morning light. Even the weather was showing signs of improvement. When the alarm sounded, she quickly got dressed and went downstairs to begin preparing breakfast for Molly and Fred. Half an hour later, she shouted up the stairs for them to rise and shine.

‘Or at least make the best impersonation you can of shining at seven thirty in the morning,’ she called, chuckling at her own wit.

Molly made it downstairs at twenty to eight, which was good by her standards. She lowered herself, yawning, into a chair at the kitchen table and started to pick disinterestedly at the bowl of fruit and cereal her mother had prepared for her.

Joyce removed four golden slices from the toaster and put them on the table along with assorted condiments. Peanut butter and honey for Fred. Low-fat spread and sugarless strawberry jam for Molly, who was starting to fret, unnecessarily in her mother’s opinion, about her weight.

This was one of Monika’s days. She arrived on the dot of
eight and immediately began tidying up the kitchen around Joyce and Molly. One of her more irritating habits, but Joyce didn’t mind. Her taciturn presence was somehow reassuring, and she couldn’t imagine how she’d have coped these last few months without Monika.

Joyce gave it a few more minutes before poking her head through the kitchen door and shouting up the stairs, ‘Come on, Fred, or you won’t have time for breakfast. It’s five past eight – Geoff will be here in fifteen minutes.’

Five minutes later there was still no sign of him.

‘Right, that’s it,’ muttered Joyce, heading for the stairs. And as she climbed, she shouted a warning:

‘I’m coming to get you, my lad. And if I find you still in bed, I swear I’ll pull you out by your hair and drag you to the car!’

That should do it, she thought. Even though her son would know full well that she was joking. Perhaps it was time for her to surprise him with a little parental brute force.

Smiling in spite of her irritation, she opened the door to her son’s bedroom.

There was no sign of Fred, although his bed had clearly been slept in. She made her way to the family bathroom. He wasn’t there either.

‘Where are you hiding, Fred?’ she called, anxiety rising within her. ‘Come out this minute – this isn’t funny.’

She raced through the first floor, checking each of the five bedrooms and three bathrooms. There was no sign of Fred.

Heart pounding, her legs turning to jelly beneath her, she practically fell down the stairs in the rush to enlist the help of Molly and Monika. The three of them searched the entire house and garden.

Fred was nowhere to be seen.

Joyce kept shouting out his name until she was hoarse, yet already she knew it would do no good. Her son was mischievous at times, like any eleven-year-old, but there was no way he would torture her like this. The moment he heard the panic in her voice, he’d have emerged from his hiding place, full of apologies for having frightened her.

And she was frightened. Terrified.

Someone had come into the house in the night and taken her child.

Seven

The Major Crime Investigation Team were alerted to the disappearance of young Fred Mildmay at 10.05 a.m., an hour after his mother had dialled 999 to report her son missing, the first responding officers having conducted a preliminary search of the house and the gated community in which it was located and found no trace of the boy.

Detective Inspector David Vogel, a recent transfer from the Metropolitan Police Force, was unfamiliar with the area where the supposed abduction had taken place. His first action was to type the postcode into his computer and study satellite imagery of Tarrant Park. Then he began a meticulous study of the report submitted by constables Yardley and Bolton, the two uniformed officers who had been dispatched to the Mildmay home to carry out the initial search.

According to Mrs Joyce Mildmay, she had last seen her eleven-year-old son the previous evening, when he went to bed at his usual time, just after 8.30 p.m. She did not realize he’d gone missing until breakfast time the following morning.

Yardley and Bolton reported that the boy’s bed appeared to have been slept in, and his pyjamas were lying on top of the covers, as if tossed aside. They could find no signs of
forced entry and the burglar alarm had not gone off. Neither the boy’s mother or sister had heard anything suspicious during the night.

The officers had then asked Mrs Mildmay to check whether any clothes or other possessions were missing. She reported that the clothes he had been wearing the previous evening – black jeans, blue T-shirt and grey sweatshirt – were not on the bedroom chair where he usually left them. His favourite trainers and a much-prized All Saints leather bomber jacket were also missing. So, it appeared, was his iPhone.

Mrs Mildmay didn’t know how much money her son had left of his weekly pocket money, but she was certain it couldn’t be more than a few pounds at most. Not enough to get him far, and in any case she was adamant that her son would never run away from home – it was completely out of character.

Years of experience as a police officer had taught Vogel that parents were rarely willing to believe that their child had left home voluntarily. The fact that there were no signs of an intruder and the boy appeared to have left the house fully clothed and carrying his precious phone would, ordinarily, lead him to conclude that the mother was deluding herself. But as he monitored the reports coming in from officers responding to the missing person alert, he couldn’t help feeling uneasy.

His senior officer, DCI Reg Hemmings, was of the same opinion. Within the hour a full-scale MCIT investigation was under way with Hemmings at the helm as Senior Investigating Officer, and Vogel working alongside DI Margo Hartley as joint deputy SIOs. Hartley, who was renowned for her organizational skills, was designated operations manager, overseeing the mechanics of the investigation from a dedicated
incident room at MCIT headquarters in Kenneth Steele House. This left Vogel free to play a more flexible role.

In order to create an account on HOLMES, the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System, a case name had to be assigned. For the sake of confidentiality, the names of victims or suspects are never used; and ever since the infamous and unfortunately named Operation Swamp in the 1980s, which involved swamping inner-city and predominantly black communities with a zero-tolerance police presence, the names chosen have been as neutral as possible, and unconnected with the case. In the Met, these names are chosen from an approved list that has been decided in advance. Within the Avon and Somerset Constabulary, however, it fell to the senior officer working the case to come up with a name, the only criteria being that it must begin with the initial of the appropriate constabulary district – E for Bath, J for Weston-Super-Mare, F for Yeovil, and B for Bristol. It was Vogel, a devotee of backgammon, who came up with Operation Binache – a backgammon redoubling convention – for the case of missing Fred Mildmay.

Like most forces, Avon and Somerset had a specialist kidnap and abduction unit. However, it was decided that until conclusive evidence emerged that Fred Mildmay had been taken by persons unknown, the operation would remain in the domain of the MCIT.

Vogel’s first step was to do a preliminary Internet search on the Mildmays. Which was how he learned of the death of Charlie Mildmay. The yachting accident which claimed his life six months earlier had received considerable local media attention. Such a traumatic loss might well have left the boy upset and disturbed, and therefore liable to do something as drastic as running away from home.

Then Vogel looked deeper, investigating the family in the way that he did best, through the numerous records now stored online and readily accessible to those who knew their way around the Internet, whether or not they were a police officer. Records of business activities, financial status, property ownership and so on. For Vogel, accessing such records – and more – was child’s play.

By noon he had assembled quite a dossier on young Fred Mildmay’s family. And the more he learned, the stronger became his gut feeling that all was not as it should be.

As yet, Vogel still had no idea why or how Fred had gone missing, or whether foul play was involved. But that familiar sensation in his gut was telling him that this case was neither a straightforward domestic crime, nor – as part of him continued to hope, regardless of his misgivings – a small boy running away because he had fallen out with his mother or a sibling, or couldn’t face going to school that day.

At 12.40 p.m. DCI Hemmings, frustrated at the inability of officers attending the scene to come up with a single sighting or clue to the boy’s disappearance, told Vogel he wanted him to re-interview the family in person. Though they hadn’t been working together long, Hemmings had faith in Vogel’s ability to see things others didn’t. And given Henry Tanner’s status in the community and his influential connections, the DCI was determined there must be no slip-ups in their handling of the case.

Vogel was happy to comply. He preferred to take a hands-on approach. In fact his biggest flaw as a police officer was that he wasn’t good at delegation. Aside from his old boss, DCI Nobby Clarke, whom he’d left behind at the Met when he’d secured his transfer to Avon and Somerset, there
was only one person whose abilities Vogel had complete faith in and that was himself.

‘I’ve requested a family liaison officer, too,’ said Hemmings. ‘We’ve no one available here, so Division are sending a uniform over: PC Dawn Saslow. She’s just completed the FLO course. Oh, and she can drive. She’ll be picking you up in a few minutes.’

Vogel was pleased that he would be accompanied by a woman. There was an old-fashioned side to him. He still reckoned, whether an FLO was assigned or not, that it was best to have a woman present when investigating a delicate family matter, particularly when it was something as serious as a missing child.

He ignored his senior officer’s heavy-handed reference to PC Saslow’s ability to drive. Vogel, having lived in London all his life, had never learned to drive. Previously stationed in the heart of the West End, he had relied on public transport and the occasional nerve-shattering ride in a squad car driven by some young constable desperate to show off their all-too-often dubiously acquired advanced driver’s skills. This was not an option in the vast rural area covered by the Avon and Somerset Constabulary, and so it had been a condition of Vogel’s transfer that he take driving lessons.

Thus far, Vogel had managed to complete only three lessons, which had been enough to convince him that it was unlikely he would ever pass his test. He had not, however, confided this in his superiors. Thus he was more than content to be PC Dawn Saslow’s passenger as she navigated Bristol’s nightmare traffic system.

By the time Saslow arrived in a squad car, squealing to a halt by the front doors to Kenneth Steele House, the early morning sunshine, which Joyce Mildmay had so fleetingly
relished, was long gone. Aside from a brief respite during March and early April, it had rained incessantly since Vogel’s arrival in the West Country. And it was pouring down now as he hurried to the waiting car, shoulders hunched and the collar of his inadequate corduroy jacket turned up against the elements.

If he’d realized how exceptionally wet it was in the West of England, Vogel told himself, he might not have allowed his wife to persuade him to move there. He’d never paid much attention to the weather in London, where tall buildings gave considerable protection. But he’d become obsessed with checking the forecasts since his transfer to the back of beyond. He was aware that most Bristolians would be horrified to hear their thriving and much-regenerated city referred to in such terms, but Vogel had lived and worked in the heart of the capital, and by his criteria Bristol barely qualified as urban. Green dripping stuff everywhere. And no backgammon scene worth mentioning. Or if there was, he had yet to discover it.