First One Missing (19 page)

‘Any idea why it’s called Nemo?’

Her companion shrugged. ‘I’m guessing it’s to do with the kids’ film,
Finding Nemo
. Maybe they’re looking for something, or someone. All I know is that it’s a very small network, only four or five members, I think. They bonded over a fascination with the Kenwood Killings case, the fantasies growing more and more lurid. What the girls were wearing, what had been done to them. All the usual shit. They’re all local to North London and swapped snippets of information about where police had been searching, who they’d been talking to, where exactly on the Heath the bodies had been found. They knew a lot, but nothing that couldn’t have been got legally, if you see what I mean. And then all of a sudden they took it to a private chatroom, and no one knew any more about it until last week when one of my contacts told me that he’d heard Nemo was actively involved in the killings. You should have heard his excitement – it was like he’d found out someone he knew was actually royalty.’

Something occurred to Leanne. ‘But couldn’t you approach them with some bit of information from the police investigation they can’t possibly already know – as a sort of sweetener, to help you infiltrate that way?’

The labrador was getting restless and Howard leaned forward to give it a treat he’d retrieved from his jeans pocket.

‘And how exactly do I do that without them questioning exactly how I got hold of it?’

Leanne had no idea. Her handbag – a scruffy black leather thing whose zip was starting to go – was in her lap, and she could feel the tell-tale vibration of an incoming call. Surreptitiously she reached her hand in and tilted the screen so she could read the caller ID. Emma Reid. Now that was unusual. Emma almost never called her. Probably because Leanne triggered such unwelcome memories.

‘Look, if you haven’t got any more questions, I really do have to go.’

Howard hadn’t moved, yet still Leanne could sense his restlessness. When she glanced at his profile she saw a muscle in his jaw was twitching.

‘Will you let me know if you hear anything more? Anything at all?’

‘If there’s anything that helps the case I’m sure you’ll be told.’

He was so closed up, it was as if there was no way into him at all. Leanne could never do undercover work. She’d always known that. The idea of having to wear someone else’s life like armour, never allowing it to slip for a second, was anathema to her. She’d known one or two over the years who’d tried to slip back into normal police life after working as a UC for a few years but had really struggled. It did something to a person. All those lies.

Leanne watched Howard Walsh head down the hill, labrador in tow, a solitary figure in dark clothes holding himself rigidly in the buttery sunshine of an early summer afternoon. Then she checked herself, remembering she was just some random stranger he’d got talking to on a bench. It didn’t do to stare. Instead she got her phone out from her bag intending to check her emails or compose a pretend text, but then she saw the missed call message from Emma Reid.

‘Emma? It’s—’

Before she’d even had time to finish her sentence, the other woman launched into a speech in a voice so uncharacteristically animated that for a few seconds Leanne doubted it could actually be Emma at all, something about photographs and hair elastics.

‘Sorry, Emma, I missed that. Can you repeat it?’

An impatient sigh, then she started again, and this time the words were slower, with space to breathe between the sentences.

‘I found a photograph of Tilly in Guy’s desk that reminded me of something, but I couldn’t for the life of me work out what. She had her hair in bunches as she always did and in my head I kept hearing her saying how both sides had to be the same and the elastic bands had to match. I kept staring at it for hours like a bloody lunatic trying to dislodge whatever it was that was floating around my brain, and then a few hours ago it just came to me.’

Emma’s voice had been speeding up as she spoke, the pitch growing higher, and Leanne was shocked at the barely suppressed excitement in her voice. Was this what Emma Reid had been like before what happened to Tilly? This woman whose voice pulsated with energy? Leanne felt herself being swept along by it. She tried to stay calm, but a part of her couldn’t help feeling she was on the verge of a discovery.

‘Slow down, Emma. What came to you?’

‘The thing that had been nagging at me. And then I went to look at the box in the wardrobe where I keep it.’

‘What? Keep what?’

‘The Ziploc bag that the police gave me with all Tilly’s things that she was wearing – the things they didn’t keep as evidence. And there they were. And they’d been there all that time and I simply hadn’t noticed.’

‘Emma. What was in the bag? What hadn’t you noticed?’

‘The bands Tilly was wearing in her hair when she was … when they found her. They didn’t match!’

In the expectant silence that followed, Leanne hoped Emma couldn’t hear the sound of her heart plummeting. ‘They didn’t match,’ she managed to repeat.

‘Tilly was kind of OCD about things like that,’ Emma explained. ‘If things didn’t match perfectly, she couldn’t relax. We were always trying to reason with her about it, but she was so stubborn. So many times we were late because she’d thrown a tantrum about something not exactly matching something else. And it wasn’t just hair stuff. Her socks had to be pulled up to exactly the same height, the loops on her shoelaces had to be tied the same size, with military precision. She would never, ever have gone out with hair bobbles that didn’t match.’

‘So what exactly are you saying, Emma?’

‘Don’t you see?’ She sounded frustrated as if Leanne were being deliberately obtuse. ‘
He
must have switched them. The killer. One of them looks like Tilly’s but the other isn’t. I’m sure of it. It’s a clue, isn’t it? We know he sometimes brushed their hair. But this is a step further, isn’t it? What kind of man buys girls’ hair elastics? One of your profilers would get a lot out of a detail like that.’

Leanne tried to stifle the sigh that had built up inside her. ‘Emma, I know you’re desperate to uncover something we’ve overlooked. It’s only natural. You want to know who did this to Tilly. We all want to know. But surely you must see that this is grasping at straws. There might be any reason Tilly had mismatched bands in her hair. Maybe she lost one at school and a friend lent her a different one.’

‘But that’s just it. She would never have allowed that. She would rather have had her hair loose or in one single ponytail down the centre of her back. She just wouldn’t!’

Leanne heard the crack of emotion in Emma’s voice.

‘Look, I’ll bring it to the attention of the team. Maybe it will ring a bell with someone else.’

‘But don’t you need to take them back? The hair bands she was wearing?’

‘If they had any DNA on them, Emma, they’d have kept them.’

‘But maybe they didn’t check for the right thing. Maybe he got the other band from some other girl. Her DNA might be on there, mightn’t it?’

Leanne closed her eyes. She didn’t need this right now. Not after the tense meeting with Howard Walsh. Opening them again she looked around, her gaze sliding over the grassy slope which was beginning to go brown in places after the recent heat, over the solid oak trees in the shade of which people were either stretched out napping or picnicking on blankets.

‘I’ll talk to my boss, Emma. If he thinks there’s something there, we’ll come round to pick up the hair bands. After all this time, it’s not going to make any difference if you hang on to them a little while longer.’

There was a pause then, and Leanne could almost feel the energy draining from the conversation as if someone had taken a pin to a balloon and let all the air out.

‘You think I’m mad, don’t you?’ Emma’s voice was once again flat.

‘No. Not at all. I’m really glad you’re still trying to think of details we might have missed.’

‘Please don’t patronize me, Leanne.’

And then she was gone. Leanne remained sitting with the phone pressed to her ear, long after the gentle click that told her Emma was no longer on the line. She should have handled things differently. She could see that now. She should have called round to see Emma rather than trying to deal with it over the phone. She had a pressing urge suddenly to call Pete to get his advice, or at least his sympathy.

Then she tossed the phone into her bag and set off down the hill in a different direction to the one Howard Walsh had walked just moments before.

Back at the station, she found a Post-it note on her desk from Ruby Adjaye saying ‘Call Desmond!!’ After the double exclamation mark, she’d drawn a heart in red biro. Leanne glanced over at Desmond’s office where the clear-glass door revealed an equally clear desk and empty chair. Plunging her hand into her bag, she pulled out her phone along with a couple of old, furry-edged receipts and a packet of Polos, the wrapper shredded with age.

‘Hello, sir? It’s Leanne here. I had a message to call you.’

Wherever Desmond was, it sounded lively. There was a lot of low-level talking in the background punctuated by the odd roar of laughter, and Leanne could clearly hear a glass clinking nearby.

‘Ah, Leanne. Let me just go somewhere a little quieter.’

In the distance, Leanne heard someone shout, ‘And it wasn’t even switched on!’ to the accompaniment of braying laughter.

‘That’s better.’ Desmond’s voice was clearer now, the background noise all but gone. ‘I’m at City Hall. One of Boris’s civic functions. You know how it is.’

Alone at her desk, Leanne rolled her eyes. No. She didn’t know how it was.

‘I wanted to let you know of a development that has arisen in the Tilly Reid case. It goes without saying that this is utterly confidential, but as FLO to the Reids it seemed imperative to keep you up to speed.’

This time Leanne’s eye-rolling was so automatic, she wasn’t even aware of having done it. ‘Of course, sir.’

‘It’s about Mr Reid. Guy Reid. Apparently his car has been spotted several times loitering outside a girls’ prep school in St John’s Wood around the end of the school day. A teacher first noticed it a couple of weeks ago and got suspicious when he didn’t pick anybody up. Since then she’s seen him five or six times.’

Leanne’s mouth went dry and she closed her eyes momentarily.

‘Guy Reid has two other daughters, sir. Couldn’t this be one of their schools?’

‘No. We’ve already checked that out. It’s definitely not a school his daughters attend.’

There was painful throbbing at Leanne’s temple and she hoped she didn’t have a migraine building.

‘And what does he do while he’s there? Did the teacher say?’

‘Just sits there, apparently. And watches. We’ve made some enquiries and it doesn’t seem like he’s ever talked to any of the girls or approached them, but a couple of the older ones did say he made them feel uncomfortable.’

Leanne tried to picture Guy Reid in the black executive saloon she’d seen parked outside the house the last time she was there. She was hopeless at remembering makes and models of cars but she knew this was a different one to the car he’d had when Tilly was killed. That one had been a silver convertible. She assumed men like Guy Reid got a new company car every year. She had a momentary image of Will’s car, a twelve-year-old Honda hatchback with a dent in the driver’s side and a clutch that had been on the way out for almost as long as she’d known him.

‘I want you to sound out Emma Reid,’ Desmond was saying. ‘Don’t tell her what we’ve found out, but try to get some info on her husband’s routines and about what’s going on between the two of them.’

‘But, sir, he was investigated at the time of Tilly’s death. Nothing came up then.’

‘No, but we were fairly sure from early on that we were dealing with the same perpetrator as in the Purvis case, so maybe we just weren’t looking for the right things. Maybe we missed something.’

Long after Desmond had gone back to his function, Leanne remained at her desk with her phone in her hand, staring into space.

23

‘I did it! I did it! Oh yeah. Get in!’

Bethany was leaping around excitedly as the electronic voice shrieked, ‘Strike! Strike! Strike!’ Dancing over to the table, she demanded a high five from her friend Emily who held up a hand so small and fragile-looking it was a wonder it didn’t snap when Bethany smacked it with her own.

Sitting opposite her, Jason took the opportunity to assess Emily. Slight and small for her age, certainly compared with Bethany who really could do with laying off the chips and chocolate, Emily had straight dark hair which she wore in a fringe that was far too long, as if she was trying to hide behind it. Her skin was that kind of pale that didn’t look completely healthy. She needed to get outside more, Jason decided. Maybe then she’d grow a bit. Still, there was something appealing about her. Jason liked the way she shrank into herself when he looked over at her, and then gave the faintest ghost of a smile like she was smiling just for him.

‘Ah, look at them. They’re having such a great time. They can’t believe their luck, going bowling on a school night.’

Suzy put her hand on his thigh and squeezed. Glancing down, he caught sight of her nails which were long and painted with some sort of rainbow motif. Happy Hands, she’d called them earlier when she held them up to show him. She’d had them done especially for today, even though it meant she touched the bowling balls as gingerly as if they were unexploded bombs. Jason couldn’t believe she was allowed to go to work like that. He couldn’t stand nail varnish. He hated the way women painted layers on themselves to try to fool men into not seeing who they really were. The older they got, the more layers they needed – foundation so thick it cracked when they smiled, hair that had been dyed so many times they couldn’t remember its original colour. It was like they thought men were idiots.

‘They’re great kids,’ he said to her. ‘I just wish …’ He tailed off, as if too choked to continue and she squeezed his leg tighter.

‘I know,’ she cooed, nuzzling his neck so that her perfume shot straight up his nostrils, bringing on a sudden surge of nausea. ‘You’re missing your baby, aren’t you?’