Keep Her Close

by M. J. Ford

  And if she could go so spectacularly off-piste in her personal life, what did that say about her professional one? Maybe DCI Stratton actually had a point when he’d questioned her judgement. The depressing thing is, you’re letting it happen.

  She was just wondering what Dr Forster would make of it all, when sleep finally overcame her.

  * * *

  Four short hours later, Jo was back on the road and heading in. This close to the solstice, the sun wouldn’t appear until well after eight am, but the sky was finding its colour towards the horizon, a perfect clear azure in which the stars were still visible. She opened the window, letting the frigid air blast away the cobwebs. A skiing trip sounded sort of cool, if a little terrifying. She’d probably end up in a beginner’s class. Perhaps it would be good to contact the place herself, and see what was on offer. The last thing she wanted was a holiday where Lucas had to watch her repeatedly fall over with a group of toddlers.

  She was driving along the Banbury Road when she noticed flashing blue lights down a side street. And more than one set. An accident? She pulled over under a streetlight that was flickering on and off, not sure whether to give up for the day, and proceeded on foot. A uniformed officer, fixing tape across the end of an alleyway, recognised Jo.

  ‘Morning, ma’am.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Not clear, ma’am. Looks like a bike accident of some sort, but Detective Dimitriou wants us to take all precautions.’

  Jo continued along the alley, which was partially illuminated by a single working streetlight. It ran behind a churchyard and a tall wall that backed onto the tree-filled gardens belonging to a row of Edwardian three-storey terraced houses. Dimitriou was crouching on the ground, a pen in his hand and turned at the sound of her footsteps. ‘Wasn’t expecting you.’

  ‘I was just driving by. Saw the lights.’ Beyond him on the ground was a mountain bike. Jo could make out the front wheel, which was twisted out of shape. Black spatters a little further on became a trail then a pool. Blood. ‘Someone take a fall?’

  ‘We’re not sure what happened to her.’

  ‘Her?’

  He stood up. ‘Come this way.’

  He led her to the other end of the alley, where he had parked. Andy Carrick had pulled up too. He and another uniform were speaking to a middle-aged man in running gear, partially wrapped in a space blanket. Laid out on the bonnet of Dimitriou’s car was a small rucksack and several other items that Jo guessed were the contents – a purse, a phone, and a water bottle, plus a jumper.

  ‘Jo?’ said Carrick, coming over.

  She explained the circumstances of her arrival.

  ‘The witness found the bag just up from the bike,’ said Carrick. ‘No sign of the girl.’

  ‘May I?’ said Jo, gesturing to the items.

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Andy. He offered her some sterile gloves. She opened the wallet. A student ID card had a picture of a young Asian woman. Rita Prakash. Somerville College.

  ‘Holy shit,’ said Jo. ‘Another college kid.’

  ‘Undergrad,’ said Dimitriou. ‘Nineteen.’

  ‘You notified them?’

  ‘Pinker and Williams are over there now, just in case she’s shown up. There’s been nothing to emergency services, and no admissions at the local hospital.’

  Jo looked around at the buildings either side of the alley. It was a dark spot, not overlooked by anything but the church. She couldn’t help the quickening of her pulse.

  ‘So she fell off for one reason or another,’ said Jo. ‘Maybe banged her head. Wandered off in a daze.’ It already sounded unlikely. It would have to be a serious knock to make you leave all your things behind. ‘No idea of the time?’

  ‘Jogger came past at seven-thirty,’ said Dimitriou. ‘We’ll go door to door. See if anyone saw or heard anything. Looks like she might have been going to the gym or something like that.’

  ‘She would have been wearing the bag,’ said Carrick. ‘Why leave it?’

  ‘Maybe it fell off her back?’ said Dimitriou. ‘If she was wearing it on one shoulder?’

  He didn’t sound convinced either.

  On the bonnet of the car, the phone began to ring. The caller ID said ‘Nabil’. No one else touched it, so Jo picked it up and answered.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Who’s that?’ It was a male voice.

  ‘This is Detective Sergeant Jo Masters, Thames Valley Police.’

  ‘Police? Is Rita okay?’

  ‘Nabil, is it?’

  ‘That’s right. What’s going on? Is Rita there?’

  ‘Nabil, where are you?’

  ‘Why have you got Rita’s phone?’

  Jo paused, looking at the blood, then at her colleagues, wondering what exactly to say.

  * * *

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Nabil Chakarabani had uttered the same form of words several times since he’d met them, alone, at the gates of Somerville College. He was a slight young man with thick-rimmed glasses just the right side of stylish, and a huge mop of side-parted hair that half-fell across his forehead. He studied Physics, he told them, like Rita. At the direction of the college staff – a young female welfare officer – they used the wood-pannelled dining hall for the conversation. They sat at the end of a long table, overlooked by a stained-glass window and the staring eyes of austere college luminaries, all captured in oil paints. The welfare officer sat alongside Nabil, Carrick and Jo opposite, on one of the benches.

  ‘You’re a couple?’ asked Andy.

  ‘Not officially,’ Nabil replied. ‘Her parents are strict, you know? Traditional?’

  ‘Religiously?’ said Carrick.

  ‘That as well,’ said Nabil. ‘They wanted her to go to St Hilda’s, because it’s girls only.’

  ‘But for the record?’ insisted Carrick. ‘She’s your girlfriend.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nabil, nodding definitively.

  ‘And everything’s okay between you?’ asked Andy. ‘No arguments?’

  Nabil’s tightening features suggested he resented the implication. ‘We’re in love.’

  They’d learned already that Rita was supposed to be attending a weekly army-themed fitness class in the University Parks to the north east of the city at 7.30 am that morning, but that she hadn’t shown up. She was due to have breakfast with Nabil back in college at 8.45. She cycled everywhere, Nabil told them, and always wore a helmet. They hadn’t mentioned the blood to him yet – though they weren’t treating him as a suspect officially, it sometimes paid to control the flow of information and to see if people slipped up and said something incriminating.

  ‘Is there anyone who could verify your whereabouts this morning?’ asked Carrick.

  ‘I was speaking with my brother’s family in my room from about six-thirty until seven-thirty,’ said Nabil.

  ‘Early bird?’ said Carrick.

  ‘They live in Mumbai.’

  Jo looked up at the large clock on the wall, which read 09.15. There had still been nothing from the hospitals, and the uniforms doing the road had drawn a blank so far. As the minutes passed and the bleak winter sun rose higher, Carrick’s theory that Rita was wandering about in a catatonic state was looking increasingly shaky.

  Jo had another idea, and tried not to let it run away with her. When you jumped to conclusions, mistakes got made. But what if …

  What if someone had been waiting in that alley, maybe parked at the end? Waiting for the right victim. And they had taken her?

  ‘Did Rita have any enemies?’ said Carrick.

  The welfare officer’s eyes widened in alarm.

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Nabil. ‘Everyone adored her.’

  ‘So no threats recently?’

  Nabil shook his head. ‘Her parents are going to be so scared.’

  ‘We’ve called them,’ said the welfare officer. ‘They’re on their way.’

  Mr and Mrs Prakash lived in Moseley, south of Birmingham city centr
e. Jo guessed they’d arrive within the hour.

  ‘Nabil,’ she said. ‘We have to ask, was Rita involved with substance abuse or drugs?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Nabil. ‘She didn’t even drink. I’ve told you, she was from a traditional background.’

  ‘You said her parents were traditional. She won’t be in trouble – we just want to find her.’

  ‘No, she was sensible. Obeyed the rules all the time.’

  ‘But not her parents’ rules?’ said Carrick gently. ‘You two were …’

  ‘That’s not the same,’ said Nabil, riled. But he quickly calmed down. ‘I’m sorry. I just want you to find her too.’

  Jo smiled. ‘We’ll do our best, Nabil. We need to establish what her life looked like. If our questions come across as blunt, it’s just because we need to be quick. If there was anything out of the ordinary you can think of …’

  He nodded at her gratefully, eyes moist, then his irises shifted to one side. ‘Wait! I do remember something!’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right! About three weeks ago, she said she thought someone was following her.’

  Jo’s skin prickled. Like Malin. ‘Go on, Nabil.’

  ‘Actually, it was after the circuit class, I think. She took a different route home because she thought there was a car moving slowly behind her.’

  Jo swallowed. ‘A car, or a van?’

  ‘A car,’ he said. ‘A dark one.’

  Jo noted it down, though a good sixty per cent of vehicles on the road fell into that category. ‘This is very important, Nabil. Did she say anything else about the car? The exact colour? The make? Number plate? Who was driving?’

  ‘A man. That’s all she said.’ He stared at Carrick, then Jo, beseechingly. ‘You think this is the same guy? That someone took her? Why?’

  ‘It’s too early to say,’ said Carrick, but Jo knew he was feeling exactly the same chills as her.

  Chapter 17

  While Jo headed back to the station, Andy Carrick decided to wait at Somerville College, to bag any evidence from Rita’s room, and to wait for her parents to arrive.

  Ross Catskill was still in a cell when Jo arrived at St Aldates. She’d already had her doubts about any real connections to the disappearance of Malin or the fate of Natalie Palmer, and the fact that he was actually in custody for the latest incident confirmed he wasn’t directly involved with Rita Prakash. Alex Maynard had been released on conditional bail when the footage at his gym confirmed his presence there on the afternoon of Natalie Palmer’s disappearance, and he was kicked out at three in the morning to make his own way home. There seemed no reason to bring him back in following the latest development. Until they found Qadir Suleiman, and established exactly the sort of enterprise he ran, any further link to Natalie was guesswork. Certainly a two hundred quid street-level drug debt with Susan Palmer seemed a petty excuse to kill, or even harm, her daughter.

  The mood at the station had changed, and it wasn’t just because the central heating was functioning once more. The whole atmosphere was grimly focused. Stratton wanted everyone to drop their work to concentrate on the girls. Despite the chronic lack of sleep, Jo was wide awake.

  Heidi had a map up on the board, with two locations marked – ‘O’ for Oriel, ‘S’ for Somerville, accompanied by pics of Malin and Rita.

  Stratton sat on the corner of her desk. ‘Two students, two colleges.’

  ‘Three if we include Natalie,’ said Heidi.

  ‘Natalie wasn’t a student,’ said Stratton.

  ‘Maybe whoever did this didn’t know that,’ said Heidi.

  ‘Plus, we already have a link between Malin and Natalie,’ said Pryce. ‘Ross Catskill.’

  Stratton shook his head. ‘Tenuous at best. Both Malin and Rita went missing from their colleges or nearby. Natalie’s a different kettle of fish. God knows what she was doing out there.’

  ‘I don’t think we should discount the possible connection,’ said Pryce.

  ‘Agreed,’ said Stratton, with an icy glare. ‘But we can’t pursue it as a priority. The colleges are one of the major employers in the city. It could easily be coincidence. The MO is completely different too. Our two girls were taken, violently.’

  Our two girls? What did that make Natalie Palmer, Jo wondered – hers? She’d kept quiet so far, but a new thought occurred. ‘Maybe, sir,’ she said, ‘but what if the hit and run wasn’t an accident? The driver might have deliberately knocked into Natalie with a plan to kidnap her. The road’s straight there. The driver would likely have seen her.’

  ‘But he didn’t kidnap her, did he?’ said Dimitriou. Jo wondered if he was deliberately sucking up to Stratton, or just annoyed that she’d arrived on his crime scene earlier.

  ‘Perhaps she fell in the water before he could,’ put in Heidi. ‘It would have been a hell of a job to get her out again. Too risky.’

  Stratton sighed. ‘It’s a theory, but I don’t buy it. The road’s quiet, but it still gets traffic. Only a madman would try to kidnap someone by running them over first.’

  Maybe that’s what we’re dealing with, thought Jo.

  ‘No,’ continued the DCI, ‘until we find any real evidence linking Natalie to the others, I think we have to follow the most obvious interpretation. Hit and run. Where are we on the Rita Prakash scene?’

  ‘There’s no CCTV anywhere nearby,’ said Dimitriou, ‘and all the house-to-house enquiries haven’t turned up a thing. We’ve got sweet FA.’

  ‘Not quite,’ said Jo. She explained what Nabil had told them about the car Rita had said was following her, and wrote ‘Dark car?’ beneath the victim’s blown-up picture.

  ‘That narrows it down,’ said Dimitriou.

  ‘It makes sense though,’ said Heidi. ‘Malin was being followed, too. Whoever took them knew their movements. It looks like he was planning this for weeks at least.’

  ‘Heidi,’ said Stratton. ‘I want you to get a full staff manifest from the Oriel and Somerville colleges for cross-reffing. All employees, going back three years. Dimi, look into this fitness group, check out the males. Maybe this was someone who knew Rita’s routine. Jo and Jack, you can drop Palmer for now. I think it’s a dead end, and this is going to draw more heat. Contact other colleges. Try to keep it subtle. We don’t want to start a panic. It’s quiet this time of year, thankfully, students mostly at home, but it means that the colleges are going to be on a skeleton staff. I want anything suspicious flagged.’ Jo had never seen him so fired up. Seeing him actually do some work was novel.

  ‘We are going to have to handle this sensitively,’ Stratton continued. ‘The press haven’t linked Natalie or Malin, but even they can’t miss this. I’m going to talk to external comms and work out a plan. We’re going to be looking at some silly headlines when it gets out. I don’t want anything coming from you guys. Push it all to comms. Got it?’

  So that explained his sudden fervour. Damage limitation. Made sense after all the cock-ups with the Dylan Jones case.

  They all nodded or mumbled agreement, and Stratton headed from the room, no doubt to begin arse-covering.

  ‘Do you think it’s worth getting a profile drawn up?’ said Dimitriou to rest of the team. ‘I mean, if there’s some psycho killing students specifically …’

  ‘Hey!’ said Heidi. ‘We don’t know they’re dead.’

  ‘No?’ said Dimitriou.

  ‘We don’t know it’s a guy, either,’ said Pryce.

  Dimitriou rolled his eyes. ‘I thought you were supposed to be the numbers fella. How many women serial killers are there?’

  Pryce smiled. ‘Okay, it’s probably a male. But Heidi’s right – he might not be a murderer.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Dimitriou. ‘But if he’s not murdering them, and he’s not demanding money, then what are we looking at?’

  Jo could think of some pretty horrific alternatives. Cases of imprisonment and rape were rare, and she’d been lucky enough never to work on one. All i
t took though was a psychopath with the right opportunity. When a person was unencumbered by a moral compass, they really were capable of anything.

  ‘Come to think of it, professor,’ said Dimitriou. ‘You own a dark car. Where were you between the hours of say, seven and eight this morning?’

  ‘In bed,’ said Pryce. ‘Waiting for your mother to bring me breakfast.’

  ‘Touché!’ said Heidi.

  Dimitriou looked impressed. ‘He’s learning! Right, I’m off to see about this fitness group.’

  They got back to work, making calls, liaising with uniform patrols, gathering intelligence where they could. Carrick returned just before midday, having logged the evidence from the alley. He’d spoken to Rita’s parents, who were understandably in pieces, and completely in the dark about any possible hostility towards their daughter. A search of Rita’s room had told them nothing new. She was by all accounts an exemplary student.

  At one pm, they heard the first story on the local radio news. The comms team must’ve worked their magic, because the coverage was muted indeed. Malin Sigurdsson wasn’t even mentioned, and Rita was officially a missing person rather than a victim of any sort of assault. Her parents led an appeal for their daughter to get in touch as soon as possible. The Natalie Palmer hit and run didn’t make the programme either.

  They’re trying to hide any connection at all.

  And why wouldn’t they? Oxford was its colleges in many ways. The streets were named after them, visitors flocked to them, half the city’s economy was geared to serving them. Jo saw the logic of not spreading panic, based on a theory that was as yet distinctly shaky to say the least. Even if they were dealing with one kidnapper, it might simply be that the colleges had offered him the easiest pickings. And until they spread the word, that would remain the case. There were thirty-eight colleges in all, the majority clumped within a square mile, with a few satellites on the roads out of the city. Far too many to effectively monitor. But each would have staff and students spread out much further afield anyway.