Fallen Angel (10 page)

Stacey needed only the fingers of one hand to count the words Sophie had spoken to her from the time she had woken up to the time she had dropped her daughter off at the weekly drama class she attended every Sunday morning during the summer.

The drive to Streatham community hall had taken place in complete silence, with Stacey periodically glancing at her daughter's face in the rear-view mirror – Sophie had refused to sit next to her mother in the front. It was only when they arrived that Sophie uttered her final word.

‘Grandma is going to pick you up and cook your tea. I should be home early tonight,' said Stacey, as Sophie clambered out.

‘Yeah.'

It was spoken in a monotone voice. What Sophie was really saying was that she no longer believed a single word her mother said. In that same instant Stacey Collins seemed to travel back in time, back to when she had been only a little older than Sophie and had uttered the same word in the same style to her own mother.

It happens to every child. You grow up thinking your parents are invincible, all-knowing and the masters of their universe. You spend years believing there is no question they cannot answer, no task they cannot accomplish. Most
of all, you grow up believing that whatever danger you might face, from monsters in the wardrobe to trolls under bridges, they will always be there to protect you. And then one day the reality hits home and you realize that the only person you can really rely on is yourself.

For Stacey that day came when she, her mum and her dad had been walking through the Blenheim Estate on the way back from the local supermarket, all of them carrying heavy bags of shopping. The lifts were out of order, as they almost always were, so the trio had no choice but to struggle up the stairs to the fifth floor of E block where their flat was.

As they rounded the third flight of stairs, three young men emerged from a corner and blocked their way. Even now Stacey could remember their faces, the casual smirks they wore as her father asked them, please, to step out of the way.

‘No one gets past here without paying,' one of them had said.

Stacey's father looked at them, put down his bags at the top of the steps and smirked in mock disbelief. He pointed at the lad in the middle of the group. ‘You're Brian's lad, aren't you? Does he know this is what you've been getting up to? I don't think he'd be very impressed.'

The three teenagers glanced at each other, their earlier confidence fading away fast. This wasn't what they had expected, but Stacey's dad was not the sort of man to be easily intimated. Stacey watched her father in silent awe. Her mother reached over and took her hand, giving it a little squeeze of reassurance.

Her father stepped towards them, seizing the initiative.
‘Now clear off, the lot of you, before I give you a clip round the ear.'

Stacey and her mother moved to one side of the stairs as the three boys, heads bowed slightly, began to shuffle past on their way downstairs. After that everything seemed to happen so fast.

As the last boy walked past, his hand flashed out and grabbed the straps of her mother's handbag, which was hanging from her shoulder. Her mother screamed in shock and surprise, and the boy tugged harder, jerking her body roughly away from the wall.

Stacey remembered seeing her father's mouth wide open in a fierce scream of disapproval as he tore down the few steps that separated him from the boy. His right arm stretched out and clamped around the boy's neck. The two other boys turned and began to make their way up the stairs to help their friend.

The boy tried to punch and claw and scratch away the man's hands, but Stacey's father was too strong. His two friends grabbed his shoulders and pulled him down. Stacey's father somehow lost his footing and fell towards them. The boys swerved to avoid him, and he crashed head first on to the stairs, cartwheeling over and over, until he landed at the bottom of the steps, his body twisted and broken in a way that even a child could tell was simply not natural.

The boys ran off. Stacey and her mother tried to help her dad to his feet, but, as soon as they moved him, he started coughing up blood. So they called an ambulance. The rest of that night was a blur of flashing blue lights, hospital rooms and polite but grim-faced doctors. His
spine had been badly damaged. He was going to survive, they were told, but they should prepare themselves for the fact that he'd probably never walk again.

When the police turned up at the hospital bed, Stacey's father refused to identify his attackers, for fear of reprisals against his family – a family he felt he could no longer protect.

After four months in hospital John Collins was able to return home, but a shortage of available housing stock meant they had to stay on the estate and were allocated a ground-floor flat on block E – the only level that was even vaguely wheelchair accessible and just five floors away from their old home.

The youths themselves were eventually caught for a similar offence and given a two-year stretch. But they were back on the estate within a year – time off for good behaviour. It never seemed quite right to Stacey.

The day they moved into their new home Stacey's mother tried to put a brave face on it all. ‘We're going to be all right, my darling,' she said in her gentlest voice. ‘You'll see, once you've got used to the changes, we'll be just as happy as we always were.'

Stacey had looked at her mother for a few moments, searching out the truth of those statements in her eyes. Then she replied with a single word.

‘Yeah.'

Collins was on her way back to the incident room when her mobile phone began to ring. Somewhere at the back of her mind she hoped it might be Sophie phoning to try to make things up. She had never been a fan of hands-free
devices or Bluetooth headsets, and hated the new law that made it illegal to drive and speak on a phone at the same time – therefore she chose to ignore it.

She put the phone to her ear. ‘Hello?'

‘It's him, it's him, it's him.' Christina Eliot's voice was hysterical. ‘It's my baby boy. Oh, God, it's my little baby boy.'

Collins could only barely make out the words, they came so thick and fast and were delivered with such pained emotion. ‘What's happened, Christina? What's going on?'

But Christina only continued to scream ‘It's him, it's him, it's him', before collapsing in a mass of sobs.

Collins's adrenalin was pumping so hard she could feel the beat of her heart. ‘Don't do anything,' she shouted, struggling to be heard above the sound of the woman's cries. ‘Can you hear me? Don't do anything. I'm on my way.'

Collins arrived at the house twenty-five minutes later and made her way past a number of journalists and the small group of well-wishers leaving tributes outside the house. The family had received literally hundreds of cards ever since Daniel's body had been discovered. At first they had been from friends, parents of the children in Daniel's class and others in their immediate social circle. But, as the news spread around the country, people came from further afield to pay their respects. Some of the cards had a religious theme, and contained prayers and meditations. Others came from mothers who had lost children of their own. They included telephone numbers, words of encouragement and offers of the chance to talk or
meet in order to help the healing process. A few contained money, never a huge amount, but enough to show that someone cared. Not all the cards were nice. Some were distressing, put together by sick pranksters. But one card and one card alone stood out above all the rest.

Collins walked into the makeshift shrine that the lounge of the Eliots' home had become. Christina was curled up on a corner of the sofa and didn't even manage to look up. Collins looked instead at the family liaison officer beside her, who nodded silently towards a square of glossy paper in a clear plastic bag on the edge of the coffee table.

She picked it up and immediately recognized the scene. It was the interior of the church of St Andrew's, where Daniel's body had been found. The altar, with its statue of the Madonna and the stained-glass window above depicting the Last Temptation of Christ, were the first things she noticed. But what made her blood run cold was something in the top-right-hand corner of the photograph. A pair of small legs and bare, swollen feet.

On the other side of the photo were words cut from newspapers and carefully pasted into place.
The sins of the fathers are revisited upon their children
.

It took a few minutes for the words to sink in; then she signalled to the family liaison officer to meet her in the corridor.

‘Where's the father?' Collins asked.

‘He went out just after the card arrived.'

‘And you didn't stop him?'

‘I had no reason to. He's not a suspect.'

‘Well, he is now.'

DCS Higgins was halfway through his morning briefing when he noticed Collins arriving. He eyed her disapprovingly as she found a seat next to Woods and Cooper towards the back of the room.

‘Next item. As you're almost certainly aware, we had a bit of a fiasco last night. Something that seemed like a firm lead ended up not giving us anything at all. The story is obviously being picked up by the press, and there's a hell of a lot of speculation going on out there, so we've decided that the best form of defence is attack. We're holding a press conference at the Yard at two this afternoon. That will give us the chance to make a wider appeal for witnesses to the events around the church. The parents of Daniel Eliot are still too traumatized to appear before the media, so myself and DI Collins will be conducting the briefing.'

Woods turned to Collins. ‘Nice one,' he whispered, knowing how much she hated them.

‘Fuck off,' she muttered back. They both smiled. Collins loathed having to deal with glib reporters and questions that said one thing but meant another. Everything was black and white to them: victims were always good, criminals always bad, and when things went wrong the police knew nothing about anything. Still, they were a necessary evil. In cases such as this maintaining a high public profile
was crucial. The more press coverage there was, the greater the chance that a member of the public might come forward with that one crucial piece of information that would lead to the killer.

For the members of the press the conference could not come too soon. With little solid information to go on, they had begun to speculate wildly about the motive behind the bungled kidnapping. Appeals to leave the couple alone had fallen on deaf ears. Half a dozen reporters had been permanently camped outside the house since news of Daniel's murder had broken, and two tabloids had offered the Eliots large sums of money to tell their story.

The minute Higgins finished his briefing, Collins headed towards him with copies of both sides of the photo in hand.

‘Have you got a reason for being late or did you just not want to show your face after what happened last night?'

She ignored his sarcastic comment and held up the paper. ‘Sir, you need to see this.'

Higgins studied the sheets carefully. ‘When did this arrive?'

‘Mrs Eliot got it this morning. Forensics are checking the original.'

‘You think it's the father?'

‘Either that, or it's something the father has done.'

‘You think someone's out for revenge?'

‘It would explain the torture.'

‘Maybe, but why would you torture a child to that extent to get back at the father?'

‘Revenge for something he's done.' ‘So you think someone's punishing him?' ‘Or maybe he's punishing himself.' Higgins paused. ‘Where is he?'

‘We don't know. He left the house this morning. I've put out an All Points Warming.'

DC Natalie Cooper had been working solidly since Saturday morning. Her principal task within the murder team was to run the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System, known within the force as HOLMES. Introduced in 2000, it had proved invaluable to the investigation of serious crimes. All the intelligence gathered by an enquiry could now be cross-referenced – provided that the operator kept up with the flow of information. So every piece of evidence, every statement, every line of enquiry followed up, had to be logged by Cooper. This included the bungled raid on the home of the innocent family, much to Collins's annoyance.

In an enquiry this size, running the case through HOLMES was a full-time job, but Natalie had been given another task by DI Collins: to search through hours of CCTV in the hope of spotting some suspicious activity close to the home of Daniel Eliot.

The makeshift viewing suite, with its comfortable chairs, blacked-out windows and large television, was not available, as DI Drabble and her team had based themselves there. Instead, Cooper was forced to make do with an ancient TV/video combi with a fifteen-inch screen that she had found in a corner of the canteen. But, despite these limitations, it had not taken her long to find what
she was looking for. With a rough idea of when Sammy and Daniel had travelled to the shops to buy sweets, she had managed to narrow the time frame and quickly found traffic-camera footage of the two boys excitedly tearing along the pavement on their bicycles.

The newsagent had provided tapes from his own cameras, showing the front and rear entrances of the shop, the stock room and the counter. Although the clock was out by several minutes and the system split each screen into four, Cooper managed to identify the grainy images of the two boys entering and leaving.

After making an allowance for the time difference, Cooper was able to examine footage from the closest council-run CCTV camera to the scene. It had given her a fleeting glimpse of a white van pulling into the alleyway beside the newsagent's moments before the boys had arrived at the shop, followed by a second glimpse of the van leaving as the boys ate their sweets.

Cooper found various bits of footage of the boys making their way home, but one scene sent a shiver down her spine. It was the view from a traffic camera that gave only partial coverage of the side street close to where the boys lived. She first saw Daniel and then Sammy playfully cycling past – then a white van slowly following behind.