First One Missing (6 page)

Jason closed his eyes for a moment. Suzy’s words had conjured up an image that he was reluctant to let go of. They’d already exchanged photographs so he knew exactly what Suzy’s daughter Bethany looked like. Suzy had sent him one with her very first message showing the two of them squashed into an armchair together. Jason reckoned it was supposed to show what a fun, ‘bubbly’ mum Suzy was, but it was Bethany who had captured Jason’s attention. Thick, wavy blonde hair, hanging down over her shoulders, big clear-blue eyes gazing out over smooth, rounded cheeks. Jason thought she was younger, but Suzy said she was ten, almost eleven. Though she’d described her as ‘very young for her age’.

Jason imagined the preparations Bethany would be making for her sleepover, the spare duvets – a heart pattern, he decided, or flowers maybe – the odd pink sleeping bag, a couple of blow-up mattresses, all heaped in a corner of her room, awaiting the big day. He envisaged her labouring over the invitations, the tip of her pink tongue protruding from between her lips. He imagined her friends talking about it at school, shiny heads bent together as they discussed which DVDs to watch.

‘It’s still two and a half weeks away, but she’s already counting down!!!!!!!’ Suzy had written. So. He didn’t have long to get his feet under the table and insinuate himself into the lives of mother and daughter. It was doable though, he thought. But he’d have to move quickly. Women like Suzy were ripe for the big dream, the whirlwind romance. They wanted love at first sight – and half the time they’d already decided you were it before even meeting you. Because love at first sight leads to happy ever after. It was amazing how many intelligent women actually thought like that.

Suzy was in the market for being swept off her feet. You could always tell. Jason glanced at her profile photo again with indifference. She wasn’t bad-looking – teeth a bit too large for her mouth maybe, chin a little weak, but he wouldn’t mind too much, doing what he had to do. He’d done a lot worse, that was a fact.

Jason clicked open the photo of mother and daughter sitting on the armchair. Suzy was slightly to the back of the photo, while Bethany was sitting on her lap, but over to one side, leaning in towards the camera. He cringed when his gaze passed over Suzy’s feet, which were crammed into a pair of those awful sheepskin boots. What would possess a woman of that age to go around in things that looked like elephant’s feet? He put his hand over the boots, and then moved it so that it covered Suzy up altogether.

On impulse he went back to the kitchen and brought out the printer he kept in the cupboard in its original box. Once he held the printout in his hand, he gazed at it critically. The skin tones were a bit orange on account of the inks being low, but no way was he shelling out for another cartridge. It would have to do. Suzy smiled out at him with her florid face until he had a stroke of genius and folded the paper down the middle of the picture. He ran his thumb and fingernail down the crease until it was razor sharp. When he’d finished Suzy was safely on the reverse and only Bethany was visible. That was better. Now he was getting somewhere.

Everything was taking shape.

6

The women reporters were definitely worse, Leanne decided. At least the blokes didn’t bother to try to put on an act, but the women? They had these fake sad eyes and these fake shocked expressions and then they put up a hand and asked a question so brutal it took your breath away.

‘Was she raped?’

‘Was she naked?’

Leanne wasn’t one of those police officers who nursed a blanket hatred of all reporters, it would be hypocritical, wouldn’t it, seeing as she was going out with one. They had a job to do, just like she did, and like her they were the lucky ones, hanging on to their careers when there were so many out of work. Doing liaison work meant she occasionally formed quite close relationships with journalists, and one or two had even become friends. She remembered working on the case of a missing teenager. She’d been in Wetherspoon’s with a woman writer from one of the nationals when the news came through that a body had been found, and the two of them had both ended up in tears. But sometimes at these press conferences she found herself thinking, as she knew some of her colleagues did,
Scavengers.

‘What was the mother’s reaction, DCI Desmond?’

The
mother, mind, not even
her
mother. What did she think
the
mother’s reaction was going to be on hearing that her seven-year-old daughter had been found strangled? Did she think she maybe shrugged and said ‘never mind’ and invited the officers in for tea? The truth was that reporter knew exactly what the reaction would have been but she wanted to see the spilled guts for herself, like a rubbernecker at a motorway pile-up. She wanted
the
mother delivered up with her heart ripped out and smeared all over the plate like so much ketchup.

‘We’d ask that the Glovers’ privacy is respected at this most difficult time.’

Desmond was in his element of course. Sitting there with three huge microphones on the table in front of him and sporting his Solemn and Dignified Look. Desmond had a limited repertoire of looks, which he selected like jackets from a rail, and over the years Leanne had seen them all. He had this way of picking out individual reporters who were waving their hands around in the air and fixing them with his eyes and waiting for a fraction of a second before nodding at them to ask their question. It was a one-man show.

‘Is it definitely linked to the others, Detective Chief Inspector Desmond?’

Again, Desmond did his deliberate hesitation thing, so it looked as though he was weighing something up in his head before he answered. As if he hadn’t been waiting for this question since the moment he got the news.

‘It’s too early to say at this stage whether this tragic murder is in any way connected to the deaths of Megan Purvis, Tilly Reid and Leila Botsford. However, naturally, that’s one of the theories we will be investigating.’

When he said the word ‘tragic’, Desmond closed his eyes momentarily.

The woman in the orange flowery top who’d asked the question about Susan Glover’s reaction had her hand up again.

‘The public is going to be asking where the police were in all of this. The killer has struck four times now and each victim has been found on or around Hampstead Heath within a few days of disappearing. Why were the borders of the Heath not adequately patrolled? Why hasn’t he been caught?’

Desmond fixed the woman with a long, steady look.

‘I’m glad you brought that up. Those of you who are not from London might not be aware of just how large an area we’re dealing with. Hampstead Heath is getting on for two square miles and much of its border is unfenced. It is not a park where there are only so many gates which are closed overnight. As you’ll remember, Tilly Reid was found in woodland in the West Heath, which is a separate area. And this most recent victim, Poppy Glover, was found on the Heath Extension, which is in a completely different location altogether. Even the two victims who were found on the Heath itself were a long way apart. Be assured there was a very strong police presence in the general Heath area last night, not just our people, but also officers from the dedicated Hampstead Heath Constabulary. Cars were routinely stopped and drivers questioned but there was simply no way of closing off all the roads within a two-mile radius. As you know a couple of the victims – Tilly and Leila – were found some days after they disappeared. Unfortunately there was no way of second-guessing the killer’s intentions.’

Ms Orange Top wasn’t satisfied. ‘But surely you must have captured something on CCTV? Aren’t we always being told we live in the most Big Brother country in the world?’

Desmond made that face people make when they’re trying to swallow a big sigh.

‘We will of course be studying any CCTV footage. However, it must be stressed the areas where the bodies have been found are very quiet. Some of the most expensive real estate in the country is around there, so of course there are security systems, many of them privately operated, but the cameras tend to be positioned to keep watch on the properties themselves, rather than the roads, particularly the quieter parts of the roads where there are no houses. Nevertheless, I can tell you we are following some active lines of enquiry resulting from existing CCTV footage.’

It wasn’t completely a lie.

Two of the investigations into the murders – Megan’s and Leila’s – had yielded CCTV footage of a vehicle most likely to have been used by the killer, but in the first case, the number plate of the car, a black VW Golf, had been obscured, and in the other the picture had been too grainy to make out any details at all, only that it was a dark-coloured estate. Calling up data on every black Golf in the area had practically brought down the entire computing system.

Leanne looked around the crowd of assorted police and reporters. There was a young lad a few rows from the front with a phone in one hand and an apple in the other. He looked in his early twenties, face still pockmarked with faded acne, and he had a half-bored expression. The young man raised the apple to his mouth and took a huge bite, leaving a string of saliva stretching from his lower lip to the flesh of the apple, and she looked away.

‘Has there been any contact between Mr and Mrs Glover and the other parents?’

Instantly, Leanne recognized the clipped, slightly too-loud voice and her heart sank. Trust Sally Freeland to be straight on the scene. The woman sought out tragedy like a pig truffling. Hearing Sally’s voice transported her straight back two years to the time of Tilly’s murder when her marriage to Pete was in its final death throes and she was shuttling between a home full of loaded silences and the Reids’ house where the initial fear surrounding Tilly’s disappearance was fast superseded by horror and then a tidal wave of sorrow. Leanne remembered it as the worst period in her life. Worse even than when she’d had all those tests only to be told by a doctor, who hadn’t looked much older than the apple-eating reporter over there, that she was unlikely ever to have children, and who urged her not to keep on looking for causes, because sometimes there just weren’t any, but simply to accept it as one of those things, and besides, had they ever thought of adopting? She remembered Pete’s face – as if he’d just been punched in the gut – as the future she’d imagined for them unravelled in an overheated consulting room with a view of the hospital bins.

‘Of course there is a wide range of support available to Mr and Mrs Glover, if and when they should need it.’

Had Desmond been taking actual classes in smoothness? Leanne leaned forward so she could get a good look at Sally Freeland. She was sitting in the second row, scribbling furiously in a notebook.

Sally looked up suddenly, before Leanne had a chance to react, and the two women locked eyes. A puzzled look passed across the journalist’s face, as if she was trying to place her, but she quickly lost interest and her gaze slid away. Leanne wasn’t altogether surprised. At thirty-six she was big enough and old enough to accept that she had one of those not-terribly-memorable faces.

It was weird to see Sally Freeland again, though not unexpected. She’d poked her nose in all over the place at the time of the last murder. Awful to think it wasn’t even a year ago. She made herself very unpopular, from what Leanne could tell. Emma Reid had refused to have anything to do with her, luckily. The Botsford mother had been persuaded into giving an interview and had apparently gone ballistic when it appeared.

Something occurred to Leanne. Wasn’t there some kind of funny business involving Sally Freeland and Megan Purvis’s stepfather? Rumours of some kind of affair. She pictured Simon Hewitt – there was something a little
womanly
about him with his soft, blurry features and wide hips. As the stepdad, Simon was top of the initial list of suspects for Megan’s murder. But he’d had a cast-iron alibi – a dinner with the CEO and marketing director of a big insurance firm – so he’d been in the clear. You had to wonder, didn’t you, though, what kind of man would get involved with someone like Sally Freeland.

Leanne turned her attention back to Desmond, who was gracing the room with his best Steely Look. He must have been really working on that over the last few months. It was pretty impressive. She’d have to memorize it so she could re-enact it for Pete later on. Oh. No. Scratch that. She wasn’t with Pete any more. Sometimes even now, nearly two years later, that fact could still come as a shock. Not that Will wasn’t enough for her. It was just that he wasn’t force, so there was a massive part of her life she’d never be able to share with him.

She supposed she’d be seeing Pete again soon enough. He’d become the Botsfords’ FLO when their daughter was killed last year. He’d been an obvious choice, having been involved in the murder investigation since day one, like her. Still, she’d been upset when Desmond first told her. Everything had been so painful back then. When Pete had had himself transferred to a station a couple of miles away following their split she’d been glad of the distance. But his position as FLO for the Botsfords meant he was regularly in and out of the main office. Unlike her own experience with the Reids, he’d bonded with the grief-stricken couple to the extent that he’d even joined them for a meal out in honour of Mark’s fortieth birthday. It hadn’t been much of a celebration, from all accounts. And now there’d been another death, Helen Purvis would no doubt hold a get-together of the support group the press had cloyingly nicknamed Megan’s Angels, at which she and Pete would meet. The thought of being in the same room as Pete did funny things to Leanne’s stomach.

Leanne didn’t relish meeting the Botsfords again. She didn’t think she’d ever seen anyone look quite as raw as Fiona Botsford had in the weeks following their daughter’s death. Leila had been the Botsfords’ only child. That was a particular kind of grief, Leanne always thought. All of the families had lost children, but the others were still technically parents. How must it feel to be a childless mother? She couldn’t imagine it. It was hard enough to imagine being a mother, full stop. At the last Megan’s Angels meeting Fiona Botsford had seemed like someone flayed.