Scream: A DCI Mark Lapslie Investigation (29 page)

‘I’ll head over to the Stottart house,’ Emma said. ‘The constables will have notified them by now. The nature of the poor girl’s death gives us due reason to search the house without needing a search warrant.’

‘Be scrupulously polite and reasonable,’ Lapslie warned. ‘There’s something going on in that family. I forgot to tell you earlier that I saw them last night – the Stottart family – at a concert Charlotte and I were attending. It was as if they had sought me out to gloat over my IPCC investigation. Anyway, the father used the word “gash”, Emma. Maybe it’s a northern expression that everyone uses, maybe not, but with this IPCC investigation hanging over me we can’t afford you getting a complaint against you as well. Be sympathetic, talk to them, but get inside her room and search everything.’

Emma nodded. ‘Look, boss, there’s nothing else you can do here. It’s all process now. Go and check that your girlfriend is okay.’

He turned to go. She let him leave the tent, looked around one final time, then left herself.

She debated switching on her blues-and-twos as she drove, but what was the point? Getting to the house any earlier wasn’t going to bring the girl back to life, and the sound of sirens approaching would only heighten the family’s pain.

She drove past large farms bereft of people but filled with machinery that, in the early morning sun, reared up menacingly over hedges and the fences, like giant mechanical insects frozen in the act of taking over the Earth.

The Stottart family lived in a small semi-detached house in Chipping Ongar, probably built in the 1950s or 1960s. The front garden was well maintained. Stephen Stottart drove a Vauxhall Vectra Estate, she noticed. Two other cars sat in the drive outside the house: a Fiat Uno that probably belonged to Mrs Stottart
and a Mini Cooper, presumably the son’s. Tamara, at fifteen, was too young to have had her own car.

Emma parked behind a police car that was already parked on the road. She took a deep breath before heading for the front door. A WPC opened it before she could knock. She’d probably been watching from the window.

‘How are they?’ Emma asked.

‘Distraught,’ the WPC confided quietly. ‘The girl went to bed last night, but she must have sneaked out some time after midnight. Her bed’s not been slept in. They just can’t understand what could have driven her to …’ She tailed off, shrugging uncertainly.

‘Okay. I’ll have a quick word with them.’ She walked through the hallway, past a display case filled with trophies and medals, and into the living room. Thick carpets, she noticed. Very thick. And leather sofas. The walls were covered with photographs of the children – some posed portraits, some informal snaps; some with their parents and some by themselves.

Stephen Stottart was sitting on the edge of the leather sofa, poised as if he was going to dive off into the deep pile of the carpet. His wife was sitting curled up in a corner of the sofa. She was still wearing a dressing gown. Her face was streaked and blotchy, and the skin around her eyes was puffed up.

They both looked up as she entered; the flash of hope in their gaze soon dying as she shook her head slightly. Emma had experienced that kind of thing before, in situations of extreme grief. It was as if there were two parallel tracks of communication going on: the body language which conveyed so much emotion and the words which just allowed the slower exchange of facts.

‘I’m sorry to be here under such … tragic circumstances,’ she started.

‘There’s no doubt, is there?’ Stephen Stottart asked. His body already knew, but his mind needed to hear the words to help him accept it.

‘We haven’t made a positive identification,’ Emma said carefully, ‘but what I can say is that we have found the body of a young girl in close proximity to your daughter’s handbag.’

‘I need to see her,’ he said, standing. ‘I can identify her.’

Emma shook her head. ‘Given the condition of the body, any identification will have to be made using dental records.’ She glanced over at the WPC, who was stood in the doorway. She nodded. ‘PC Evans has gone to the family dentist,’ she said. ‘He’ll retrieve the records.’

‘Okay.’ She turned back to the family. ‘Mr and Mrs Stottart, I need to look in your daughter’s room. I need to find out if she left any notes behind, or any clue as to why she may have … taken her own life.’

Mrs Stottart’s fragile façade broke, and she buried her face in her hands. Her husband nodded numbly. ‘Anything …’ he said, brokenly, and Emma knew that the sentiment wasn’t so much ‘Do anything you need to’, but more of an agonised ‘Anything that might prove that it’s not my daughter out there.’

‘Thank you.’

She left the living room and headed up the stairs. More family portraits, diagonally aligned. On the landing there was a choice of four doors. One had a lock on it – presumably the bathroom. One was plain; one marked with a poster of a horse and a male pop star of some kind, and one had a large yellow and black sticker that Emma recognised as being the international biohazard warning symbol. So – parents, daughter and son, in that order.

She pushed open the door of Tamara’s room and went inside. Judging by the combination of posters, books and cuddly toys,
she’d still been on that cusp between childhood and adolescence. A laptop sat on a desk beneath the window, and Emma went across, sat in the rather undersized chair in front of the desk and woke it up from hibernation.

She’d done courses on how to search a computer. What with the increasing size of hard drives, along with the prevalence of external storage devices and USB sticks, it was critical that police had a strategy to follow under these circumstances. She checked the emails first, but it looked as if Tamara had deleted everything from her inbox, and her sent items folder. That was a telling sign in itself. A quick check in the My Pictures section of the hard drive threw up a lot of photographs of her and her friends at parties and out around Essex, but nothing remotely worrying or suspicious.

Remembering the sound file that had been sent to DCI Lapslie, Emma searched under the ‘All Programs’ tab, looking for some kind of sound-editing software, but there was nothing obvious. The geeks in the forensics lab could take a closer look, but Emma was familiar enough with programs like Sound Forge to know what she was looking for. And there was nothing. More out of duty than hope she did a search for any file with a ‘.wav’ or ‘.mp3’ extension, but the only ones she could find were music files downloaded from the internet.

She booted up the word processor, but the last five documents to have been edited were mostly homework, along with a note to a friend – a classmate of Tamara’s – inviting her to a sleepover.

Everything in the room seemed to spring into heightened colour and brightness, as if the sun was suddenly shining directly into the room.

The note was addressed to Gillian Baillie.

Surely, Emma thought, the same Gillian Baillie who was
currently the only member of her immediate family not to have been kidnapped.

Emma’s mind was racing, trying to sort through the implications of what she’d discovered. The two girls knew each other. That had to be significant. If Lapslie was right – if Tamara was somehow connected to the disappearances and the deaths – then perhaps Gillian had been chosen because she
knew
Tamara.

Downstairs was a grieving father who might, if Lapslie was right, be an accessory to the kidnappings and murders, if not the actual perpetrator. He had an alibi for the time Catriona Dooley’s body was dumped at the kids’ play area, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have an accomplice who could do the heavy lifting for him.

Emma had to tread carefully. If he was just a grieving father then she didn’t want to make things worse – especially as he was currently pushing through a complaint about her boss. And if he was a kidnapper and a murderer then she didn’t want to alert him to her suspicions in case he made a run for it, or tried to cover his tracks. Four members of the Baillie family were still unaccounted for.

She pulled her phone out from her jacket pocket and pressed the memory key for DCI Lapslie’s number. It rang for a few moments, then she heard his gruff voice: ‘Lapslie.’

‘Boss – it’s Emma.’

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m still at the Stottart house,’ she said. ‘I’ve discovered something.’

‘So have I,’ he interrupted. ‘The Baillie girl – the one who wasn’t taken with the rest of the family—’

‘Yes, that’s what I’m trying to tell you!’

‘She’s
mute
!’ he said.

Emma’s brain juddered to a halt momentarily while it tried to switch tracks. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked eventually.

‘The Child Welfare people have just been on to me. She hadn’t spoken to anyone since she was found in the house. We all assumed that she was in shock, that she’d seen something that drove her brain into a state where she just had to withdraw or go mad, but that’s not the case. Barnes’s people found a whole pile of medical stuff: leaflets, sign language posters, all kinds of things. She’s been mute since birth.’

‘Okay,’ Emma said cautiously, ‘that’s obviously a tragedy for her, but—’

‘Don’t you understand?’ Lapslie snapped. ‘
That’s why she wasn’t taken!
We already suspect that the kidnapper is taking people who are singers, and discarding the ones who fail some kind of bizarre audition. He deliberately focused on a family of singers, but he left behind the one who can’t sing, who can’t
possibly
sing.’

‘It makes sense,’ Emma agreed, ‘but does it help us find them?’

‘It confirms what we thought about the kidnapper,’ Lapslie said, ‘and that means we’re closer to finding him. Now, what have you got?’

‘The girl who was left behind, the mute girl. Her name is Gillian Baillie, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘The girl – Tamara Stottart. She was at school with a Gillian Baillie.’

Silence from the other end of the line. ‘Was she indeed?’ Lapslie said eventually. ‘That gives us a link, then. That ties the Stottart family in with the disappearances and the murders. Pull them in for questioning. Get them down to Chelmsford. I’ll meet you there, and—’

‘Boss, they’ve just lost their daughter. You can’t possibly question them now.’

Another long silence. Emma could hear Lapslie breathing.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Damn. Okay, get whatever you can from her room and her computer. If you can search the rest of the house discreetly, then do it. Let me know what you find.’

‘I will.’

She disconnected, wondering how she was going to search the house of a family who had just lost their daughter without agitating them even more than they were now. Stephen Stottart already believed that Lapslie had been hounding his daughter; it was only a matter of time before the paralysis of grief faded away and it occurred to him that her suicide might have been the inevitable result of that hounding. And then the shit would hit the fan, both for Lapslie and for their case.

Her eye was attracted by the shelves above Tamara’s bed. As well as the standard teenage fiction there was a shelf and a half devoted entirely to CDs. From where she sat, Emma could see that some of them were rock and pop, but others – the majority, in fact – were classical CDs. A lot of them were pieces for violin, symphonies and concertos and chamber pieces, by composers ranging from Liszt and Bruch and Beethoven to names she had never heard of, like Philip Glass and Michael Nyman. She let her gaze scan the room, and found the violin case by the side of the bed. Tamara was a musician. Yet another fact to add to the growing collection that connected the case to some kind of twisted, perverse music.

Something different caught her eye. She turned slowly to face the door.

Someone was standing there.

He was eighteen or nineteen; built like a rugby player, with hair the same colour as Tamara’s and with the same receding hairline as Stephen. He was wearing combat trousers and a
hooded top, with red Converse plimsolls. He watched Emma with unreadable grey eyes.

‘You’re Tamara’s brother,’ Emma said.

‘Gavin,’ he said. His voice was edgy, underpinned with tension. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’

Emma nodded. ‘It’s not confirmed for sure yet, but yes – we think Tamara is dead. We think it was suicide.’

‘It was that policeman, wasn’t it?’ There was venom in his tone. ‘The one who was hounding her? He drove her to it. She felt like he was watching her all the time. He even turned up at the concert hall last night when we were there. It was meant to be her birthday treat, but he ruined it for her. He’s been following her everywhere.’

‘That’s not necessarily true,’ Emma said carefully. ‘The circumstances of your sister’s death will be carefully investigated, and if anyone is to blame then there will be consequences.’

‘But that won’t bring her back.’

‘Nothing will bring her back, Gavin.’

‘She was a brilliant singer,’ he said out of nowhere. ‘I loved listening to her.’

‘Do you sing?’

He shook his head. ‘I can’t hold a note. My dad says the music gene never got passed on to me. I’m good with my hands: you know, repairing cars and computers and stuff. But Tamara – she could sing, and she could play the violin. She was amazing. Dad and Mum both said she was going to be a professional musician when she grew up.’

Emma got to her feet. ‘Look,’ she said awkwardly, ‘I have to go. But if there’s anything you ever want to talk about—’

‘I don’t think so,’ he said, and was gone.

Emma closed down the laptop and closed the door to the bedroom before giving it a quick but thorough once-over. Nothing
that you wouldn’t expect to find in any teenage girl’s bedroom. If Tamara was tied into the disappearances and the murders, if indeed the whole family was connected, then there was no evidence for it there.

She remembered what Lapslie had suggested about searching the house, but a sudden thought struck her. She checked her watch. Damn! She was meant to be seeing the IPCC investigator at Canvey Island! For a split second she thought about phoning him up and crying off, telling him that an urgent case had come up, but it would just be putting off the inevitable, and if she could help to get this thing off Lapslie’s back then it was the least she could do.