Cat smiled. ‘Sounds like a plan,’ she said.
‘I’ll round them up.’
Maria watched Cat walk away through the trees towards the toilets by the café, then turned back to watch their children playing. It had been more than chit-chat, because she would certainly miss Cat when she moved, miss seeing her as often. They were unlikely friends. They said as much to each other all the time. Maria was five years older and lived in a nice house in Muswell Hill, while Cat’s place in Archway was somewhat . . . rough and ready, much as she was.
The odd couple, she’d heard people say that.
Best friends, however much they might seem mismatched to others. Well, Cat was probably Maria’s closest friend, at any rate, and Maria found herself becoming a little jealous if Cat talked about any of her other mates for too long. Maria had lost touch ages ago with the girlfriends she’d met at university and she wasn’t particularly close to anyone at work. Most of the women she’d thought of as friends up until a few years before had mysteriously melted away after the divorce. Almost all had been one half of a couple, so perhaps they’d simply wanted to avoid any awkwardness, though Maria preferred to believe that they could not really have liked her very much to begin with, so told herself she was better off without them.
That she still had time to make new friends. True friends.
Now, Josh and Kieron were racing one another around the playground perimeter. They pulled faces at her as they flew past. They reached the far side, then stopped to get their breath back, before Kieron whispered something to Josh and went tearing away into the trees.
Maria shouted across, warned her son not to go too far, then watched him run off to follow his friend.
She and Cat had met five years earlier, at a mother and toddler group in Highgate, no more than a mile or so from where she was sitting now. Each of them had remained immune to the charms of the po-faced ‘group facilitator’. Both had laughed at the petty one-upmanship of some of the more competitive participants. They had agreed that, as far as refreshments went, wine – or better yet whisky – would have been far more conducive than herbal tea and Hobnobs, and had quickly made arrangements to remedy the situation in their own time.
They had been equally delighted to discover just how much they had in common. The important stuff at least. The pair of them single, for a kick-off, if for very different reasons.
Maria glanced up and saw Josh moving quickly through the trees behind the playground; a flash of his bright yellow coat. She smiled, remembering the look on his face when she’d brought it back from the shop.
‘I’ll look like a big banana, Mummy.’
Cat had been right, of course – she usually was. The brave one, the sod-it-who-cares one, the one whose glass was always half full. There was no reason why anything should change, nothing that mattered, anyway. There was no need to worry. So, the four of them might not be able to come to the wood quite as often as they did, as they had been doing for the last couple of years, but it wasn’t as if Cat and Kieron would be miles away. And, of course, there was always the possibility they might not be moving at all; hadn’t Cat said that herself? However things panned out, the most important thing was that the boys stayed close, saw each other as often as possible.
Important to Maria, too.
She reached into her bag for cigarettes and lit one. She never smoked in front of Josh, but could not resist seizing the opportunity for a quick one while he was out of sight. A habit she’d quit at her husband’s insistence, taken up again when he became her ex-husband.
One with a glass of wine in the evening. Several with several glasses.
She sat back, closed her eyes and let the smoke out slowly, then looked up when she heard one of the boys shout from somewhere in the wood. She couldn’t hear what he was shouting, and it was hard to tell which one it was anyway, but then they were alike in so many ways. Same size and shape, same colour hair. Maria had lost count of the times she’d taken Kieron’s hand by mistake, walked away with him.
‘You’re welcome to take both of them if you really want to,’ Cat had said, the last time. She’d laughed, even though she’d made the same mistake herself, several times. ‘I’ll hop on a plane to Majorca for a couple of weeks.’
As soon as she glanced around and saw Cat coming back towards the bench, Maria stubbed the cigarette out, but the look on her friend’s face made it clear she had not been quite quick enough.
‘Thought you were going to pack those in.’
‘Trying,’ Maria said. ‘It’s been difficult, you know.’
‘I’ll pretend I didn’t see it if you give me one.’
Maria reached into her bag again and offered the Silk Cut across. Cat took a cigarette and turned to look for the children. ‘Where are the boys?’
‘They’re messing around in the woods,’ Maria said, pointing. ‘I just saw Josh . . . ’
Without waiting for a light, Cat began walking towards the playground.
Maria stood up. ‘I heard them shouting—’
Cat moved quickly through the playground towards the exit on the far side, calling her son’s name, oblivious to the stares of other parents whose kids stopped what they were doing to watch. Maria hurried to catch her up and they both stopped dead when Josh appeared suddenly and came running from the trees towards them.
His yellow coat was streaked with mud and he burst into tears the instant he laid eyes on his mother.
‘Josh?’ Maria leaned down and took her son’s face in her hands. ‘You OK?’
‘Where’s Kieron?’ Cat asked, looking towards the trees. ‘Josh, where’s Kieron?’
The boy began wailing and buried his face in his mother’s stomach.
The unlit cigarette fell from Cat’s hand and she began to run.
TWO
When it came to the more traditional superstitions, Thorne had no truck whatsoever with any of that walking under ladders or lucky/unlucky black cats nonsense, but like most coppers he knew, like almost anyone working in one of the emergency services, he was extremely serious when it came to never saying the Q word. There were not too many rules he swore by, but that was certainly one of the few, unwritten though it might be. It was a word only ever uttered by masochists or mental cases and would usually earn any idiot stupid enough to say it a light thumping or at the very least something nasty in his tea.
You said ‘Q’, simple as that. Just . . . Q.
You never said . . . the word.
Which was why, half an hour before, sitting in the Oak, when the shit-for-brains DC – with whom he’d been happily discussing what kind of team Terry Venables was likely to send out – leaned across, rubbing his hands, and said, ‘Lucky it’s a nice quiet shift, eh?’, Thorne had known his chances of actually watching the England game live had just gone down the toilet.
True to form, his pager had bleeped within five minutes.
He’d downed what was left of the Guinness he’d been about to top up, then used the phone behind the bar to ring through to Control. Scribbling down the details, he’d glared across at the DC who was now getting it in the neck from everyone else at the table and wondered if he could possibly make it through what was suddenly sounding like a very long day without hearing the result. It would be like that episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads.
Thorne parked behind a line of marked squad cars on Muswell Hill Road and walked back up the hill to the entrance at Gypsy Gate. He was stopped by a PC who looked even less happy to be there than he was, and told, in no uncertain terms, that the wood was currently closed to the public. Thorne showed the man his warrant card and trudged inside, along a path baked hard by a week or more of fairly constant sunshine. Walking past one of the Keepers’ Cottages and cutting left towards the playground, he could imagine an overexcited John Motson saying, ‘Perfect playing conditions this afternoon, here at Wembley . . . ’
Thorne knew Highgate Wood a little, had been here once or twice with Jan. He had never been any g
reat fan of walking, unless there was a pub at the end of it, and on those unfortunate occasions when Jan had managed to drag him out of doors, they’d usually gone to Highbury Fields which was close to the house, or ventured across to Waterlow Park, a mile or so south between here and Archway.
Maybe her lecturer liked walking, Thorne thought.
He swatted a branch aside.
Maybe that had been the big attraction.
Perhaps the spineless arsehole was a rambler.
Thorne exchanged a nod with a DC he vaguely knew who was lugging around one of the top-of-the-range portable telephones that were now being issued to select squads, usually for use in remote locations. The thing looked like something a metalwork student had cobbled together: a misshapen grey box with a rudimentary handle, a rubber aerial and a handset attached. Thorne could see why they were a good idea, because they were certainly handy in an emergency if the nearest phone box was miles away, but on the few occasions he’d had cause to use one he’d been unable to get any sort of signal.
Recently, he’d started to see more of the genuinely portable ones. He’d spotted several ageing yuppies braying loudly into what looked like giant walkie-talkies, and he’d been in a few cars in which a phone had been wired into the centre console. He could see that these things were likely to become increasingly commonplace – smaller too, probably – but having clocked the price of one in a Dixons window, he seriously doubted that anyone pulling in less than several hundred thousand a year would ever be able to afford one.
A fancy toy for twats and the seriously minted, that was all.
By the time Thorne could see the top of the climbing frame ahead of him, he’d shown his ID to another half a dozen PCs or WPCs and spotted at least three times that number moving slowly through the trees or pushing their way through dense undergrowth. It was no great surprise. He knew that the immediate response from any uniformed officers first on the scene of a missing child would be to draft in as many of their colleagues as they could possibly summon up. It would only be if the child stayed missing for more than half an hour or so that CID would be brought in.
Unless that had been because of something the other kid had said, something he’d seen.
The kid who wasn’t missing.
Coming out onto more open ground, and skirting the edge of the cricket pitch, Thorne could see the crime-scene tape that had been wound around the playground’s perimeter and now criss-crossed both its entrances. He raised a hand, seeing one or two more faces he recognised, and thought that, however many bodies had been drafted in to help look for the missing boy, they would have their work cut out – middle of June or not – to search the entire wood thoroughly before the light went.
A child who felt like it could stay hidden a long time in seventy-odd acres.
A body, even longer.
‘Tom . . . ’
He looked up to see his senior officer urgently beckoning him across. Thorne nodded acknowledgement and picked his pace up. In over five years as a detective sergeant, he had worked under a good many DIs, but Gordon Boyle was the one he liked the least, and not just because of his intransigence over the football. The Scotsman was a little too fond of pulling rank when a job went well and of passing the buck when it didn’t. A little too fond of himself, truth be told.
Five years . . .
Depending on who you talked to, Thorne had been too lazy to take the inspectors’ exam or too worried that he might fail. Too scared, perhaps, that he might actually pass it. If he were being honest with himself, Thorne would have admitted that there was something in each of those theories, but Jan, thank goodness, had given up nagging him about it, once she’d seen that the increase in pay had not been incentive enough.
‘I’ll get round to it,’ he’d said, the last time it had come up in conversation. Back when they’d still been having conversations.
Thorne walked past DC Ajay Roth, who was talking to an old woman holding a small dog, pen poised above notebook. He threw Thorne a look which suggested it was not the most productive of discussions.
‘In your own time,’ Boyle shouted over, then went back to the conversation he was having on his radio. Half a minute later, when Thorne arrived at his side, he leaned close to mutter, ‘Glad you could join us.’
Thorne said, ‘Sir,’ like he meant it, like there wasn’t beer on his breath, though he knew that Boyle could not have beaten him to the scene by very much.
The DI led him across to the edge of the playground and Thorne shook hands with a uniformed inspector named Bob Docherty he had met once or twice before, who was clearly there to coordinate the search. ‘Could do with another fifty bodies, if I’m honest,’ Docherty said, quietly. He sucked in a breath, then the three of them walked across to the bench a few feet away, where a small boy in a yellow coat was sitting between two women.
Boyle looked a little uncomfortable, as though unsure which expression was needed. Serious, but not too serious? Relaxed, as if there was no reason to panic? Stick the man in an interview room with an armed robber and he was right as ninepence, but dealing with members of the public, especially those who were scared or suffering, had never been his strong suit.
‘Right you are, then,’ he said.
These days, Thorne tried not to think too much about whether it was his strong suit, either. Empathy, or his own version of it, had done enough damage ten years earlier. Still, it was at least fairly obvious which of the women in front of him was the mother of the missing child. She was shaking her head and crying, knuckles wrapped around the edge of the bench, while the other woman stared straight ahead and the boy looked at his feet, swiping a broken branch through the sandy ground in front of him.
Boyle made the introductions.
Maria Ashton, the older of the two women, looked up, the ball of sodden tissues still pressed to her face. ‘I only took my eyes off them for a few seconds, I swear.’ She lowered her hand and turned to her friend. ‘A few seconds, that’s all.’
Thorne saw immediately that he’d read it wrong, that the younger of the women was actually the one whose son they were currently combing the woods for. She said nothing, her face a mask, though now Thorne could see the terror barely held in check, and a hint of something else around her eyes. A fierceness.
‘Nothing to be gained by blaming yourself,’ Boyle said.
‘Absolutely not,’ Docherty said.
Thorne stepped towards Maria Ashton and nodded at the boy. ‘Did your son say anything when he came back?’ He leaned down close to the seven-year-old, but the boy kept his eyes fixed on the ground, on the stick with which he was now poking it harder.
The woman stifled a sob and shook her head.
‘Nothing at all?’
‘Josh was upset.’ She reached to take hold of her son’s hand. ‘He was hysterical.’
‘And he’s said nothing since? Maybe—’
Boyle raised a hand to cut Thorne off. ‘Let’s leave the uniforms to do their job.’ The inspector nodded his agreement. ‘We need to interview Mrs Ashton and Mrs Coyne as quickly as possible. Highgate station’s obviously our best bet.’
Instantly, the younger woman became animated. She looked up at Boyle as though he was insane and snapped at him, ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
‘Right,’ Boyle said.
‘I mean it.’
Boyle raised his hand like he was surrendering. ‘Obviously you’re upset, but it’s important to get your statements while the memory’s fresh in your mind.’
Catrin Coyne shook her head. ‘No way. Not until every inch of this place has been searched.’ She looked up at Docherty. ‘Why can’t I go and help them?’
‘We could both help,’ Maria said.
Cat was still staring at Docherty. ‘I know the wood and I know which bits of it Kieron likes the best.’
‘You’ve already given us that information,’ the inspector said. ‘It was hugely helpful.’
‘Trust me.’ Boyle leaned forward and laid a han
d on her shoulder. The woman looked as though she’d been scalded. ‘The best thing is if we get you down to the station. I promise you’ll be the first to know if we find anything.’
Thorne saw the shadow pass across Cat’s face and watched the hand fly to Maria’s mouth. He glanced at Boyle and saw that the DI had realised exactly what he’d said. How it sounded.
‘Anything’ did suggest something . . . inanimate.
‘We’ll take my car,’ Boyle said, quickly. He turned to Thorne. ‘Tom, you can follow on with DC Roth. I’ve radioed through and the guvnor will meet us there.’
A few minutes later, they were all walking slowly in a ragged group towards the gate through which Thorne had come in. There seemed to be even more uniforms on display than before, though several seemed to be doing very little and he glimpsed one having a sneaky cigarette behind a tree. Lagging ten yards or so behind Boyle and the women, Thorne was talking quietly to Ajay Roth.
‘They’d have found him by now.’ Roth eased a finger beneath the edge of his turban and scratched. ‘Don’t you reckon?’
‘It’s a big place.’ Thorne was watching the trio ahead of him. He saw that Gordon Boyle was doing his best to keep the two women moving forward; that Maria Ashton and Catrin Coyne exchanged a long look before staying a good distance apart from one another.
‘Even so,’ Roth said.
They were no more than a few yards from the gate and Thorne had already got his car keys in his hand when the group in front of him stopped suddenly. He watched Catrin Coyne spin on her heels, turn back to the wood and shout out her son’s name. Before the echo had died, Josh Ashton planted his small feet and began to do the same, screaming for his friend until it sounded as though his lungs were about to burst, and his mother began to cry again.
THREE
With cases such as this – like the one it could well become – taking the necessary steps as quickly as possible would always be the top priority at this stage of the game. Boyle had suggested Highgate, next door to Haringey Magistrates’ Court, as it was the nearest station to the scene.
Cry Baby Page 2
