Post Mortem (26 page)

Collins felt she was floundering but she pressed on, pushing for a connection with Baillie, for a language he would understand.

‘OK, sir, but consider the context – the public interest is enormous. What happens if we don't watch Shaw, don't follow every possible lead? Then later, much later perhaps, even twenty years on – God knows it wouldn't be the first time – we are found to have missed something or are simply judged not to have tried hard enough. How would that be construed? I'm sure we can agree that neither you nor I wants this coming back to bite us.'

‘No, Sarah, no.' Baillie shook his head. ‘That's just plain wrong. I'm not in the business of covering anyone's arse. I use my powers within the law. I wouldn't put a civilian under surveillance in these circumstances and I won't do it to a cop.'

Collins began to speak. ‘Sir—' but Baillie put up his hand.

‘No, hear me out, Sarah. I don't like what you're saying. Not at all. Shaw has a wife and child, remember. You're asking for directed surveillance at his home address, with all the collateral damage that implies. Is that really justifiable, considering how little you have? We have to do things for the right reasons, not because we think – what was it you said? – because we think something is going to come back and bite us.'

Collins winced. Her ill-judged attempt at a connection with Baillie had completely misfired.

The DCI was continuing. ‘I'm not talking morality here, not being nice or nasty to officers. I'm talking the law, Sarah. The Regulation of Intelligence Powers Act. But you go ahead – convince me otherwise. Tell me you've got something more than you've already told me.'

Collins took a breath. She had definitely lost this battle, and that being the case, it was best to bow out gracefully.

‘OK, sir. I accept what you're saying. My apologies if my language was ill-chosen. You're the boss.'

‘Thank you, Sarah. I'm sure you're acting from the best possible motives. Didn't you say you were tired? Why don't you knock it on the head for now? Go home. Tomorrow's another day.'

30

L
izzie caught sight of herself – a white-faced stranger with a Lulu dark bob – reflected in multiple repeating fragments in the silvered shove-halfpenny machine. The man was closing up the arcade and she hurried to leave before she drew attention to herself. A cold wind was blowing across the seafront and she walked towards the town centre. Two cabs were waiting at the rank outside the station and she jumped into the first one. The driver was a portly white guy, probably in his fifties, with his ID hanging from a lanyard around his neck. She asked him to go to Rye.

‘Whereabouts exactly, love?'

‘Two seconds please, I've lost the address.'

She switched on her phone, searching quickly on the internet for B&Bs. She read out the address of one chosen randomly and then turned the phone off.

‘Would you mind stopping at a cashpoint?'

He glanced in his rear-view mirror. ‘All right, my dear.'

The cashpoint gave her £300. Twenty minutes later, the cab dropped her at the bed and breakfast in Rye.

‘No luggage, love?'

It hadn't been much of a question, but Lizzie noticed it.

‘No,' she said. ‘My boyfriend's bringing it.'

31

T
he corridor was in darkness. Triggered by movement, the lights flickered on for the solitary figure of Collins making her way back to her office. The desks were littered with empty boxes, as if the crew of the
Mary Celeste
had been eating pizza when the mysterious event occurred.

Collins sat alone and made herself consider Baillie's viewpoint coolly, as if it had been advocated by someone she respected – by Steve, perhaps – rather than by a bolshie DCI with his eye on some serious career progression. Seen in that light, she had to admit that Baillie had a point. The evidence she had was circumstantial at best, made up of fragments, speculation. And Farah, that shadowy figure, the girl with the cuts on her forearm and the Hello Kitty backpack, had been a troubled child. Perhaps it was just as Kieran Shaw had said – Hadley Matthews had been very unlucky to ever encounter her.

She flipped the switch on the kettle and got out the case file. She thought of her abandoned home: thank goodness she didn't have a pet! She bent over her desk and began to search once more for where the seismogram's needle might have left some helpful tracery on the page.

The mobile she had left on her desk burst into unexpected life.

Collins pulled the window of the office open on to the London night. She lit a cigarette and stepped onto the roof. After just two rings, Steve picked up.

‘OK, Sarah?'

‘Hi, yes, sorry to disturb . . .'

‘Don't worry. Go ahead. What have you got?'

‘Sussex Police just called – a taxi driver has gone into Rye police station. He thinks he just had Lizzie in the back of his cab.'

20 APRIL

32

C
ollins stirred on the camp bed she had set up in the office. There had been a carefulness about her sleep, an awareness that the bed was uneven and that as she relaxed, her vertebrae displaced. She was careful too about getting up: the last thing she needed now was for her back to go. As she trekked down the corridor to the toilets, she was beset by a burst of intense irritation, a cursed feeling of ineffectiveness and missed opportunities.

The damn trail had been cold, of course. The taxi driver had left it too long before he reported to police. The B&B owner in Rye had told the surveillance team that a young woman matching the taxi driver's description had enquired about rooms but had then decided to look elsewhere. Yes, it had seemed odd, he had told the officers, but you don't call the police just because someone doesn't want to rent a room. Collins and Steve had still given it more than three hours before they gave up. Steve, who had driven to Rye, had got a hotel room in Hastings so he could carry on in the morning. Collins, supervising from the office, had decided there was no point going home and had broken out her camp bed from its unofficial store place in the photocopying room.

She pulled a box of cereal from her bottom drawer and raided milk from the tea club. Her thoughts were elsewhere. It wasn't just missing Lizzie; it was this feeling that she could not knit the
investigation into something conclusive. All night, in between supervising the search, she had trawled through the evidence, determined that there must be something, something that would break the impasse. As she ate her cereal, she took the black video tape from the top of her desk and slotted it into the VCR that lived in the corner of the office.

Collins scribbled a note on her pad.
Initial report 23rd March, charged and remanded 17th April
. It wasn't an overly long period for such an investigation, although the remand to court was perhaps a bit unusual for such a minor offence. Still she would look at the timeline again. She put down her pen. Her breakfast abandoned halfway through, she rested her head in the heel of her hand and watched.

The recording was poor quality, the images indistinct and the sound inaudible. In any case, the recording of the custody suite on 17 April from 14:00 hours was unremarkable. The time counter on the top right-hand corner of the screen cycled round as the day unravelled.

It was the usual charging routine. Lizzie Griffiths leaned on the desk with Mehenni standing beside her. The custody sergeant, a black female, worked through the slow procedure. The solicitor leaned in and out of the desk from time to time, making notes on his pad. Officers passed by, busy on other cases. Other suspects came and went. A cleaner mopped the corridor.

Collins glanced at the custody paperwork that she held in her left hand. There had been two charges – criminal damage and malicious communications. She looked back at the screen and saw Mehenni leaning over and signing the computer pad. She looked at the paperwork again. Lizzie Griffiths had applied for a remand on the grounds of preventing further offences and intimidation of
witnesses, and it had been granted. Younes Mehenni would be kept in the cells overnight to appear at court the following day to enter his plea. The routine immigration form had also been served. It was no more than paperwork – for such a minor offence, immigration issues would never come to anything. Mehenni would have to do a lot worse than criminal damage to face an immigration tribunal. There was a further note on the custody record and Collins scribbled it down on her pad: the custody sergeant had allowed Mehenni to go outside and explain to his daughter what was happening.

Collins ejected the video and slipped another into the player. It showed the station office, the time stamp displaying the same date at 14:28 hours.

Farah was sitting waiting in her school uniform. People queued at the counter. A man came in with a Staffordshire bull terrier on a lead and three children in tow. Then, in the bottom left of the frame, Younes Mehenni, in the company of a uniformed detention officer, entered the station office from the direction of the custody suite. Farah stood up and Mehenni went over to her. They were small figures at the back of the picture, partly obscured by the man standing at the counter. Mehenni gestured with his right hand and gave some papers to Farah. Then the detention officer came over and touched him on the elbow. Mehenni turned and left his daughter alone in the station office. Farah stood for a moment and then left, her head bowed, studying the papers.

Less than two hours later, she would be dead.

33

T
he room had a distant view of the sea. There was a tray on a table by the window with a floral tea set and a cordless kettle. Lizzie had made herself a cup of coffee and piled up the individually wrapped shortbread biscuits on the bed beside her. Eating her way systematically through them, she lay in her underwear and the hotel white towelling dressing gown watching the news.

The same thin man she had seen on the television set in the hairdresser's at St Leonards was being interviewed again.

‘. . . The CCTV images we have of her are recent but we have reason to believe that she may have changed her appearance since they were captured. The pictures you are going to see are an artist's impression of how she may look now.'

The screen changed to a chalk drawing of a young woman with a short chestnut bob wearing a dark coat over a dark dress.

It wasn't at all a bad likeness and it confirmed Lizzie's suspicions about the taxi driver last night. He must have got a really good look at her. She remembered standing in the hotel lobby waiting for the cab to leave before she made her excuses and, heart thumping, walked quickly to the taxi rank in Rye. On her way back along the coast towards Eastbourne, an unmarked police car had passed her in the opposite direction, its blue lights flashing.

The television report cut back to the man in the suit and a byline now gave the name of the interviewee: Detective Chief Inspector Robert Baillie.

‘. . . I'd like to stress that PC Lizzie Griffiths is not currently a suspect in the ongoing inquiry. She witnessed a horrifying incident and we have concerns for her safety. Any member of the public identifying her is asked to contact police. To Lizzie I'd like to say, call us, or just walk into a police station. Your family and your colleagues want to see you home safe and sound.'

Safe and sound: she tried to imagine how that could feel. It felt extraterrestrial, unreachable by any obvious method.

Someone was moving along the corridor outside her room. Doors were opening. She switched off the television and pulled the towelling hood of the dressing gown up. She opened the door slightly and looked out. A fat blonde woman in jeans and T-shirt was pushing a trolley down the corridor, knocking on doors.

‘You want clean?'

Lizzie said, ‘Would you come into my room for a minute. I want to ask you something.'

She stood in front of the bathroom mirror and carefully cut her bleached hair into the plastic sack from the bin. Then she dried it off and gelled it into a scruffy style. She put on the jeans and T-shirt, stuffing the dress she had discarded into the plastic sack and putting that into her handbag.

The chambermaid had said her name was Joanna, but Lizzie didn't know whether that was true. It was as if both women had tacitly agreed that they would believe each other and ask no questions. Joanna said she would have helped for nothing – she too had once had to avoid an angry husband. Nevertheless, returning with the plastic bag from the chemist's and the secondhand clothes, she had taken the money quite readily, stuffing it into her back pocket and making a quick exit.

Lizzie inspected herself in the mirror. She wondered whether
she would lose her hair after two colourings in as many days. It had gone a bit yellow, but it didn't really matter; in fact it almost contributed to the look. It was her second transformation and equally disassociating – a young art student perhaps, or someone in a grungy band dreaming unrealistically of fame. She dressed it up with some mascara and red lipstick that Joanna had offered her from her own bag:
No, no, take it. Is my pleasure. Good luck
.

Lizzie had only spotted CCTV cameras in the hotel lobby and bar area, and they were easy to avoid. She slipped quickly along the first-floor corridor and out down the back fire exit.

34

A
lice had called up to the office: Mr Mehenni was waiting for Collins in the entrance hall.

‘I'll be down in a minute. I've just got to finish this call.'

She went back to her mobile.

‘OK, Steve, sorry about that.'

‘So, her phone was switched on briefly in Hastings at 22:34 hours, but it's been dead since. She didn't make any calls, just accessed the internet. The taxi driver who thinks he had her in the car is ex Old Bill. I wish he'd called us immediately instead of waiting to report it at a police station. He says he wasn't sure at the time but, having seen the pictures, he is now. We're enquiring with local taxi firms here to see if anyone took her from Rye, but we've got nothing yet. There's so many cab companies down here, plus the independents. There's a rank outside the station, so if she took a cab, it could have been any of them. There's no CCTV in the B&B in Rye, so we can't get an image. The other bad news is she's got more cash. She withdrew three hundred pounds in Hastings.'