by Lee Weeks
‘I know you can. . thank you.’
‘If this is too difficult for you, Ebb. . you say. No one will think any less of you. This is your first case on the squad. There’ll be plenty more. If you’ve had enough, you say. I’ll take someone else to the kids’ home.’
‘I’m fine, Sarge. It’s not personal.’
They arrived at the home just before lunchtime. Mrs Warrell the manager greeted them.
‘So the kids catch the school bus from here.’ Carter let Ebony take over the questioning whilst he was busy looking at the place: the kids’ rooms had posters on the walls; he remembered the hassle it took to be allowed to put posters up when he was a boy. He had one of Chelsea football team and another of Pamela Anderson from Baywatch in her red bathing suit and with a sort of floating device in her hands. No one seriously ever looked at what was in her hands. Carter had shared the room with two of his brothers, one older, one younger. No privacy to admire Pamela. He had longed for his own room. Now these kids had privacy in this home but they didn’t have their family. Carter couldn’t imagine a world without family, so why was it so hard to think about starting one of his own? Maybe he just wasn’t ready. But would he ever be?
‘Here is where they do their homework.’ Mrs Warrell showed them around on each level. Ebony had gone quiet. She was looking at the locks on all the doors. . big locks everywhere. That was the bit she never minded. She liked being locked into her room, locked into the building. She knew she was safe.
‘How does any kid manage to run away from a place like this?’ Carter followed Ebony’s gaze to the locks.
‘It was the last day of the term. . Easter holidays. Shannon just didn’t get on the bus to come back here after school ended. We cannot be with the children twenty-four seven and we try and give them as normal a life as possible.’
‘Of course. . I can see that. Did Shannon have any hobbies? Did she support any football teams? Did you ever see her wearing an Arsenal top?’
Mrs Warrell shook her head. ‘I never saw her watch or play any sport really. She was a girly girl: a bit too much. We had to confiscate makeup. Her mother sexualized her way too young. . I expect you know.’
‘She had problems on the last home visit?’
‘Yes, her stepfather hit her. Her mother blamed Shannon, accused her of bringing it on herself — same old story really. We stopped all home visits and we were waiting on the court case when she disappeared.’
‘Did you see any problems leading up to Shannon’s disappearance?’
‘She hadn’t been the same since her stepfather assaulted her. She became withdrawn.’
‘Is there someone she confided in?’ asked Carter.
She shook her head. ‘She floated around at the edges of friendships but never really got close to people.’
‘What about the social worker assigned to Shannon? Can we speak to them?’
‘I’m sorry to say she was killed in a hit and run within days of Shannon disappearing. Someone just mowed her down near her home. The police never really came close to solving it. I guess that’s the problem with being so rural. There are no cameras, no CCTV.’
‘Did Shannon have access to outsiders?’ asked Carter.
‘What do you mean?’
‘She ended up dead in a house where there was a trafficked pregnant woman. She didn’t get there by accident. She was vulnerable, she was troubled.’
The care home manager was flustered and looked as though she suspected a hint of accusation in Carter’s tone. She replied curtly:
‘Shannon was a difficult child, Sergeant, who needed watching like a hawk — that’s why she was sent to a rural location. The only contact she had with the outside world was on organised outings.’
‘What kind of outings?’
‘To the zoo, the museum. We even took her to Thorpe Park as a treat paid for by our sponsors, the Chrissie Newton Foundation.’
On the drive back Ebony phoned Robbo. She had two missed calls from him.
‘I tried to reach you.’
‘Sorry. . there’s no signal out here. . We found out that there’s a connection to Martingale here. The Chrissie Newton Foundation sponsored trips for Shannon.’
‘I was just about to say that.’
‘Okay. . we’ll be back in a couple of hours.’
‘Okay, but if you’re looking for something to do on the way back I have Martingale’s home address if you want to ask him about Shannon Mannings? I checked at the hospital; he’s not due in today. The receptionist Ivy says he takes Mondays off.’
‘Okay, thanks. . text it to me and I’ll talk to Carter.’
She hung up and turned to Carter.
‘I have Martingale’s private address.’
‘Ahh?’ Carter looked interested.
‘But is it harassment, Sarge? Davidson’s keen for us to avoid upsetting Mr Martingale.’
‘Is it on the way?’
Ebony looked up the postcode on her phone.
‘I guess we could go back into London that way. It’s North London. . Hampstead. It could be on the way.’
‘No problem then. . it’s only polite to keep him informed. Let’s go and see what he can add to the story.’
‘Do you need me to put the sat nav from my phone on loud speaker?’
‘No I don’t. . Christ almighty, Ebb, you are gadget girl with that thing. Can it make us a cup of tea? You know, something I would really find useful? My dad was a cabbie. He read me the Knowledge instead of nursery rhymes. I know every road in and around London.’
‘Really, Sarge?’
‘No of course not bloody really.’ He smiled. ‘Keep it to hand, Ebb. If we get lost you can ask the oracle for directions.’ Ebony sat looking at it in her hand. Carter glanced across. ‘You don’t need to hold it; I’ll let you know if we get lost.’
‘It’s not that, Sarge. . It keeps turning on by itself.’ She looked across at Carter. He was alternating between looking at the road, at her face and then her phone.
‘What do you mean?’
‘It means someone could have put spyware on it.’
‘What would someone do that for? Hack your bank account?’
‘My bank texts me if any sum of money goes out of my account that’s more than a hundred quid. It can’t be that. Anyway, I don’t have any overdraft facility and I never have any money in the bank. It must be to do with the investigation.’
‘How does someone put spyware on your phone?’
She was still holding the phone in her hand and staring at it. ‘It would have to be loaded on manually. It can be done in a few seconds.’
‘At home then. . who do you live with?’
‘Tina from the canteen. Two other girls, one’s a nurse, the other’s a teaching assistant. I’ve never had trouble before. It doesn’t seem likely they would start it now. Tina would need to go on a course to be able to do it and she wouldn’t bother anyway. The others? Just can’t see it.’
‘Did you take that phone up to Carmichael’s?’
‘Yes. But I never left it anywhere for a minute. I made sure of it.’
‘You sure?’
‘The only time I didn’t have it on me was when I was helping him sew up his dog after a fox tried to tear it apart.’ She looked across at Carter. ‘He wouldn’t do it then?’
‘Take the battery out and the SIM card. Use my phone; ring Robbo back now — he’ll know what to do.’
Carmichael was still reading through the latest from Micky whilst tracking Ebony when he lost the GPS signal, but he already knew that she was in the car with DS Carter and they were driving away from the children’s home where Shannon Mannings had gone missing at Easter seven months earlier.
Carmichael had known it couldn’t last for ever. He’d known that at some point he was going to be shut down. He’d already downloaded all the case files and much more. But now he knew he was on his own.
Chapter 52
Ebony was still chewing things over — she had
a sinking feeling about the phone.
Carter looked across at her.
‘You can’t do anything about the phone now, Ebb. Robbo will tell us the damage when we get back. You forget about it now and concentrate on the job in hand. James Martingale.’
Carter parked a little way up the street and they walked back to a large detached house. It took a few minutes for Martingale to answer. A cat stopped to wind around Carter’s legs. Carter bent down to pet it.
‘Don’t touch her,’ Martingale said. ‘She pretends she likes you and she wants you to pet her, but if you do, she bites.’
Carter looked down at the cat, still meowing up at him and arching her back as she purred. ‘Story of my life. .’ He smiled at Martingale. ‘Would you mind if we talk to you for a few minutes? We tried the hospital but they said you didn’t work Mondays.’
‘Of course, come through, and do you mind if I carry on with what I was doing while we talk?’ Martingale held gardening gloves in his hand.
‘No. . of course not. . thought it was a bit cold for gardening?’
‘Not in my garden. Follow me.’
They walked through the kitchen at the back of the house then into a room floor-to-ceiling with orchids. The room was a blaze of tropical colour and heady scent.
‘Wow. .’ Carter said. He smelt the air and closed his eyes. The mist settled on his face. It reminded him of a holiday he’d had in Thailand. When they got off the plane he had felt that same humid air settle on his face. Funny. . he hadn’t thought about that holiday in a long time. It would be ages till they could go away again, especially with a baby. . maybe not. . maybe her mum could look after it. Or maybe Cabrina would never come back to him.
‘Thank you. I think of it as my piece of heaven.’
‘You’ve done well.’ Carter pointed to a wall full of framed certificates for first place in orchid shows around the world. ‘Fascinating. . I watch those programmes on the telly sometimes — about when to cut this back, dig up that. . don’t know why. . haven’t even got a window box. But this is sophisticated stuff. .’ He knelt down to have a look at the timers on the misting system.
‘Maybe you’ll get a garden one day. . then you’ll be ready.’ Martingale smiled and picked up his secateurs to start pruning.
‘Do you mind if I take a photo to show my mum?’ Carter got out his phone.
‘Please. . go ahead. I’m very proud of my orchids. I keep striving for perfection. They are wonderful survivors in nature. They don’t need soil. They can grow on moss, tree fungi or on the jungle floor.’
‘Are they like parasites?’ Carter started taking photos.
‘Not parasites. They are survivors. What is it you want to talk to me about?’
‘We didn’t get to chat much the other day. How is the kid, by the way? The one with the appendicitis?’
‘Doing well, thank you. How can I help?’
‘Can we just go through some of the events thirteen years ago? You weren’t in this country at the time?’
‘That’s right. I was working in Europe.’
‘Poland.’
‘Poland. . yes, in a hospital out there. I flew back as soon as it happened.’
‘Can I ask you something about Chrissie’s mother Maria?’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘It would be helpful to have an insight into her life. Start with how you met?’
Martingale gave a look of curious amusement.
‘I met Maria when she was travelling and came to South Africa. She was a friend of a friend. We met at a dinner party; she’d already been in Africa a few months. She was an artist. I invited her to stay at my family’s lodge near Kruger National Park and our romance began there.’
‘The marriage only lasted a short while, didn’t it?’ Ebony asked.
‘That’s right. She was pregnant when we married and we were divorced by the time the child was born. A whirlwind romance, you might say. .’ He smiled.
‘Chrissie was born in South Africa?’
‘Yes. . It was important to me to be there at the birth; to make sure everything went okay. It was just as well because the birth didn’t go as planned and Maria almost died. She was very poorly afterwards. She needed to stay in hospital and I took care of things. As soon as she and the baby were well enough she left me and sadly I did not see my daughter grow up. I visited her when I came over to work. I made sure she had the best of everything but I was denied a relationship with her.’
‘Seems strange that she didn’t want that relationship when she was older. She followed in your footsteps, after all.’
‘Yes. . in some ways. She was more of a general practitioner than a surgeon. She followed a different, no less worthy, but different path to me.’
‘And she didn’t decide to come out and stay with you in South Africa? Or maybe she could have joined the family business and been part of your hospital empire,’ said Carter.
Martingale smiled, flattered.
‘An empire is kind of you, but it’s still small in the world. I want nothing more than to do some good on this earth. I see so much suffering, especially in the poorer countries. You can’t just allow these killer diseases to remain unchecked. You can’t stop trying to wipe them out. I may not be any good at curing the common cold but I hope to be one step closer to curing cancer.’
‘You must have made many sacrifices in your life for the sake of your career in medical science?’
‘Yes, I suppose I have. I believe it is what I was meant to do. My massive regret is sacrificing my relationship with Chrissie. It was only after her death that I realized she had no one.’
‘What about her mother? Were Chrissie and her mother close?’ asked Ebony.
His eyes lingered on her.
‘No. Anything but.’ He half laughed. His teeth perfectly veneered.
‘Even though she had no other children? Maria didn’t marry again, did she?’
‘No she didn’t and yes. . even though she only had one child Maria was an unloving mother.’
‘I come from a massive family,’ Carter chipped in. ‘Always wanted to be an only child. . get some attention. . we had to fight for it. So many of us we were given numbers not names. . you know how it is?’
Martingale smiled. ‘As I told you last time. . I have many regrets. Chrissie went from boarding school to university. She was a scholarship kid, very bright, not brilliant, but I was immensely proud of her achievements.’
‘So what happened to her mother?’
‘She died in a fire. Very sad. Mental illness is a great shame. It’s a hard thing for any of us to understand. It’s an awful thing to be afflicted with it; it’s even worse to have to live with someone who has it.’ He held Ebony’s gaze. She looked away. ‘She was dead before Chrissie’s body was released. I had to bury them both. I always thought it could have been Maria who killed Chrissie. Maria got harder and harder to control and she turned psychotic.’
‘Yesterday we discovered another body buried in the garden of the property in Totteridge Village. It’s an eleven-year-old girl. Her name is Shannon Mannings. Does it mean anything to you?’
‘No, sorry.’
‘She was one of the children that the Chrissie Newton Foundation helps. She’s from the Lea Vale children’s home in mid-Wales.’
‘Sorry. Her name doesn’t mean anything to me. What a terrible shame. How did she die?’
‘We don’t know. Whoever did it tried to dispose of her body by burning it.’ Ebony watched Carter; he had lost interest in the flowers and now was much more intrigued by the complicated timing devices for climate control. ‘We identified her by the operation she’d had to put a pin in her broken arm. Don’t suppose you did that for her, did you?’ Carter turned back from examining the humidifying system.
Martingale shook his head again. ‘No.’ He turned reluctantly from Carter and smiled at Ebony.
‘Okay. . well. . worth asking.’ Carter stood up. He turned one of the pots around to g
et a better look and took a photo.
‘Please. .’ Martingale turned it back, a flash of anger flitting across his face. Carter smiled.
‘Beg your pardon.’ He put his phone away.
‘It’s just that I have them all perfectly placed for maximum growth and light, according to their type.’
‘Wow. . that’s what you call a perfectionist. Isn’t it, Ebb?’
She nodded.
‘I try.’
‘Do you have a garden in South Africa?’
‘I don’t tend to it. It’s more structural. It’s not ornamental.’
Martingale began walking them back towards the front of the house. He was getting bored by the conversation. He was getting irritable. At the front door Carter paused.
‘Sorry. . I forgot to ask. Can I have the number of your daughter, Nikki?’
‘Yes. Of course. . wait. . I’ll get it for you.’
Martingale came back with a number written on a piece of paper. ‘Can I ask you why you want it?
‘It’s just that she and her husband run the Chrissie Newton Foundation, don’t they? I wonder if they would know the name Shannon Mannings? Apparently they’ve accompanied the children, including Shannon Mannings, on trips from the home paid for, very generously, by the foundation.’
‘Yes, of course. . Nikki will be very sad and shocked by this news, I’m sure. She and Justin are very active in their role as directors of the charity.’
‘Well. . thanks for your time, Mr Martingale. Thanks for your understanding. Hopefully we won’t have to bother you many more times. Now I can picture you tending to your orchids. . so beautiful. Amazing.’
‘Thank you.’ Martingale opened the front door for them.
‘Sorry. . Can I just ask. . one more thing?’ Carter stopped in the doorway. ‘How do you manage the orchids when you go away?’
‘That’s what the expensive machinery’s for.’
‘You can check things remotely?’ Martingale nodded. ‘What, you just sit at your PC in Africa and check the humidity levels, set the timer, that kind of thing?’
