Keep Her Close

by M. J. Ford

  * * *

  They sat either side of the breakfast bar in the kitchen. Paul regaled Jo with wistful tales of Caribbean luxury; seas as warm as bathwater, unlimited buffets of jerk chicken and melon juicier than anything you could buy at home. Jo indulged her brother. Anything was better than forensic backwaters, number-plate tracking, and door-to-door dead-ends. She drank the first glass of wine quickly, already mentally deciding to take a taxi back later.

  ‘Did you see Mum while we were away?’ asked Paul.

  ‘Just the once. She seemed okay. Everyone’s happier now the cash is being monitored. Apparently there’s a new cook at the home, and she’s a “foreigner”. Given that all she eats is cheese sandwiches and tinned soup, I told her it probably didn’t matter who made it.’

  The house phone rang, and Paul left the room.

  ‘Will seems okay,’ said Jo quietly. Drawing finished, he was watching cartoons in the living room.

  ‘He does, doesn’t he?’ Amelia replied. ‘We’re thinking of stopping the counselling sessions. Paul’s not sure what they’re good for.’

  Jo thought back to her own. It was hard to know if they’d helped or not. She’d not contacted Dr Forster yet, but she really had no intention of continuing. Drinking with Harry Ferman was just as therapeutic.

  ‘I’d go with your instincts,’ she said.

  ‘He’s stopped having nightmares. No more wetting the bed. The holiday was great, y’know – just spending time as a family.’ She was stirring gravy. ‘How’s work?’

  Where would I even start? Almost got choked by a bouncer on a night out? ‘Oh, same old.’

  ‘And that new guy? The weird one?’

  Jo wished she’d never called Pryce that. It was in his first few weeks, when he was still settling in, trying to please, and when Stratton had been in his full-on adoration phase. ‘You know what, I misjudged him. He’s actually a really sound copper. Nice guy.’

  Amelia looked sideways with the tiniest smile.

  ‘What?’ said Jo. Damnit. She knew she was blushing.

  ‘Is he handsome too?’ said Amelia.

  ‘Hey, I have a boyfriend, remember?’

  Amelia’s smile broadened. ‘You don’t have to get defensive.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m—’

  Paul came back into the room. Somehow, the tan on his face had faded a few shades.

  ‘It’s Em,’ he said. ‘Something’s happened at the hockey pitch.’

  ‘What?’ said Amelia, dropping the spoon into the saucepan. ‘Is she okay?’

  ‘She is,’ said Paul, ‘but a girl’s been hit by a car.’

  ‘That’s awful!’ said Amelia. ‘How bad?’

  ‘Em’s not sure. There’s an ambulance there now. I’d better go and get her.’

  Jo’s own phone vibrated in her pocket. It was Carrick. It must be about Anna Mull. She moved out of the room into the hallway.

  ‘Jo, we’ve got another one. Girl snatched at a school this time.’

  It took Jo a moment to make the connection – she could hear Amelia and Paul talking in the kitchen.

  ‘Is this connected to the auto accident?’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It’s my niece’s school. She’s there now. Okay, I think.’

  ‘That’s good. Area’s secured. We’re still talking to the kids, but looks like a man in a balaclava tried to snatch a girl, and another friend got clipped by the vehicle as he escaped. We’ve got every available squad car out on the streets. More coming in from Swindon and Reading.’

  ‘It must be the same guy.’

  ‘Looks likely. But these are kids, Jo. Sixteen, max.’

  Paul was on his way to the front door, hopping as he pulled on a shoe.

  ‘What’s happening?’ asked Amelia.

  ‘We don’t know yet,’ Jo said.

  As her eyes fell on the wall behind her sister-in-law, sudden sickness churned in her gut. The wine on an empty stomach didn’t help, but it wasn’t that. She’d noticed the letter when she came in, about an upcoming school trip to Coventry, as part of Emma’s World War II syllabus.

  ‘Jo?’ said Carrick. ‘You still there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Jo moved past Amelia, eyes fixed on the letter.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ she said. ‘No.’

  She felt her brother and his wife staring at her.

  Because this wasn’t just another missing kid. Myers, Catskill, Cranleigh. None of them mattered. None of them ever had. They’d been chasing shadows. Connections that meant nothing.

  She didn’t want it to be true, but it was undeniable.

  Wasn’t it?

  She’d told Dimitriou that no one called her ‘Josephine’ apart from her mother, but plenty of friends and family called her Josie.

  ‘Jo, what’s the matter?’ said Carrick.

  Four girls gone.

  Jesus, Oriel, Somerville, and now Emma’s school.

  The Iffley Road Academy.

  J.O.S.I.

  ‘Andy, I think Dimi was right,’ she whispered. ‘I think the link is me.’

  Chapter 19

  By the time Jo and Paul reached the playing fields on the edge of the Iffley sports complex, parents had arrived, friends and boyfriends too, and they stood in tearful clumps, with girls wrapped in blankets, the occasional flash of police hi-vis moving between them. There were several police cars; Carrick and Dimitriou were chatting to an adult man in sports gear. An ambulance was parked up beside them, two worried-looking parents peering in.

  Emma, standing with her other friends, broke off and ran into her dad’s arms. He muttered in her ear.

  ‘It’s okay, darling. They’ll find her.’

  Jo was caught for a moment between being an aunt, and being a police officer. She stroked her niece’s arm, then went across to her colleagues.

  Carrick introduced her to the coach, Pete Anderson.

  ‘What’s the timeline?’ asked Jo.

  ‘The girls finished practice at one-twenty,’ said Carrick. ‘Most of them come to this car park to get picked up, but our victim, Sophie Okafor, lives on Bedford Street, a ten-minute walk south of here. They take a footpath. It looks like he was waiting on one of the cul-de-sacs that back onto the path. About one twenty-five, he jumped Sophie. It happened that her friend Carla had accidentally taken Sophie’s phone after practice. She was following Sophie to return it and was about a minute back when she saw the abduction. Tried to stop it.’

  ‘She’s in the ambulance?’ said Jo.

  ‘Looks like a broken wrist. Brave kid, but she’s shaken up. Heidi’s in there with her.’

  ‘And Sophie Okafor’s parents?’

  ‘It’s just the mum,’ said Carrick. ‘She was at work at the hospital. We’ve asked Jack to go and get her on his way in. They’ll be at her house by now, I think. The boss is there too.’

  ‘You think this is connected to the other girl who went missing?’ asked the coach. ‘That student?’

  Dimitriou and Carrick both looked at Jo, minds obviously still processing what all this meant. Jo felt her cheeks colour. On the way over her thoughts had lurched wildly from one extreme to another: on one hand, this had to be related to her. On the other, that was utterly preposterous.

  ‘It’s really too soon to tell,’ said Carrick. ‘But it’s one theory we’re pursuing. We need you to stay here, if that’s all right. To make sure all the girls get home, and just in case there are further questions.’

  ‘Of course,’ said the coach.

  Jo gazed at the other girls. The lucky ones. He took the one that strayed from the herd. It didn’t matter who it was. An Iffley girl was all he wanted. Four out of five.

  One to go.

  She told herself again not to get carried away. Not to miss something. If they threw normal protocol out of the window, they might regret it later. Ask the most pertinent questions. Was there a boyfriend? Where was the dad? Had Sophie reported anything unusual to her friend
s over the last few days? Was she happy?

  Even as her training kicked in, the unstoppable wave of instinct smashed against it. J.O.S.I. Four girls she’d never met, four females of different ages, different backgrounds and ethnicities, connected in one outlandish but compelling way.

  Me.

  She saw Pryce’s Honda arrive and it snapped her out of her swirling thoughts. He climbed out and came over to them. He was dressed in casual clothes rather than his usual suit and tie.

  ‘I dropped Mrs Okafor at home with the DCI,’ he said. ‘What have we got on the perp?’

  ‘Not much,’ said Dimitriou. ‘He was wearing a balaclava. Chose a spot out of the sight of most of the houses.’

  ‘What about a reg on the van?’

  ‘Heidi’s doing what she can with our witness.’

  Jo left Carrick and Dimitriou to fill him in, and wandered across to the ambulance. Heidi was climbing out of the back, manoeuvring her unwieldy form. Jo offered a hand to help her down. A girl in hockey kit sat on the gurney, her arm in a sling. Her parents were comforting her.

  ‘She’s a tough cookie,’ said Heidi. ‘Grabbed onto the van door and didn’t let go.’

  ‘She give us much?’

  ‘Not really. Our guy is over six foot, medium build, black balaclava. She’s pretty sure he was white. The van turned right out of the bottom of Bedford road, so heading away from town.’

  ‘Plates?’

  ‘She’s not sure. She thinks it’s ’09. We’ve got patrols on all the main roads out to the south of Oxford, stopping anything they can, but if this is as targeted as it looks, he’ll be way ahead of us. There was a good twenty minutes between the snatch and us getting word out on the vehicle type.’

  ‘Might be worth checking the road cameras though,’ said Jo. ‘And CCTV on any shops further out of the Iffley Road.’

  ‘There’s only one petrol station with a road-facing camera,’ said Heidi. ‘I’ll get over there. If he went straight out, he’d end up on the 4074.’

  ‘Towards Little Baldon,’ said Jo.

  Heidi lowered her voice. ‘You really think this is connected to you?’

  Jo still felt like she was suffering from vertigo. The car park seemed to spin. Something else had occurred to her on the drive over.

  ‘Natalie turned up after Malin,’ she said. ‘But she was the first to go missing. If it was just the college names, I could just about put it down to coincidence, but it’s the order too. J-O-S, now I.’

  ‘It’s crazy,’ said Heidi. ‘I mean, why?’

  ‘I’ve got no idea,’ said Jo. And even though she’d racked her brains, it was true. Who the fuck had she wronged this much? The girls had nothing to do with her – they were completely innocent victims, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  ‘We need to get that profile drawn up,’ said Heidi. ‘And look back at your collars, see if there’s anyone in there capable of something like this.’

  Jo nodded, though she’d already thought the same thing and dismissed the idea. Most of her career had been in narcotics. Plenty of low-level burglary in the early days. A task force on people trafficking a couple of years ago. There was no one other than Sally Carruthers who might hold any sort of serious animosity towards her, and she was in the secure wing of a psychiatric hospital. Jo’d put enough people away, and some for several years, but nothing extraordinary, and no cases where she would have been singled out. The sheer level of planning and balls to pull four kidnaps was something else entirely.

  And using her familiar name, ‘Josie’. Only her closest acquaintances called her that, really. It spoke to something truly psychopathic. A need to punish her. ‘Jo’ wouldn’t have been enough to get the message across. ‘Josephine’ was even further beyond the realms of possibility. But ‘Josie’ let her know for certain. It stuck a dagger in her heart and twisted it.

  And it begged an obvious question.

  Who was ‘E’?

  Who was next?

  * * *

  There was a solitary journalist and a cameraman in front of St Aldates when she arrived back just after three pm. She looked ahead stoically as her picture was snapped through the windshield of her car as she pulled in to the car park.

  Don’t get paranoid. They can’t know yet.

  The putative connection between the victims was clearly top of Stratton’s mind too. ‘Under no circumstances is this name crap getting out,’ he said. ‘We’re not even sure it’s valid, but until we get clarification, I don’t want the press running with conspiracy theories relating to this police force.’

  His eyes passed over everyone in the room, but they paused on Jo. It was a look she’d never seen before. Not disapproving, so much as wary. He appeared stunned, as though he were encountering a wild and unpredictable animal for the first time. His look said, What am I dealing with here?

  Jo wanted to tell him she felt exactly the same way.

  ‘I spoke to Sophie’s mother at length,’ he continued. ‘She said there was a boyfriend sniffing around in the summer holiday. A local scaffolder, Jermaine something. She’s not sure what happened, but Sophie was upset afterwards. We’re going to question all the friends, and the local firms, see if we can track this guy down. We’re also drafting in a couple more detectives from Aylesbury. Detective Tan, get in touch with HR, brief a forensic psych to work up a profile.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Heidi.

  ‘I think we should draw up a list of schools and colleges beginning with the letter “E”, sir – just in case,’ said Pryce. ‘He seems to be picking up the pace. Two in two days.’

  ‘Andy’s on that.’

  ‘No schools sir,’ said Carrick, ‘but we’ve got two colleges. Exeter and St Edmund Hall. Suggest we get at least four officers on each, plain clothes. Two on the street outside the main entrance, and two more inside.’

  Stratton looked troubled. ‘We can’t afford a panic,’ he said. ‘This is about deterring our man, not public reassurances. Two officers on each, but uniform. Liaise with the college security, but make it clear it’s precautionary. It’s need-to-know.’

  ‘Andy,’ said Jo. ‘Anything else on Anna Mull?’

  ‘Negative,’ said Carrick. ‘I’ve asked Surrey to call us as soon as they get anything.’

  ‘She’s not our problem,’ said Stratton. ‘Surrey are leading. We’ve got enough missing girls of our own.’

  Jo wasn’t quite so sure. The fact she’d vanished off the face of the earth a few days after her friend was troubling, to put it mildly.

  Pryce raised a hand timidly. ‘As an alternative, sir – we use the press.’

  Stratton frowned. ‘I hope that’s a joke,’ he said. ‘They’d eat us alive.’

  ‘Sir, there’s one outside already. They’ll come like flies to shit. I’m not suggesting we mention the connection to Detective Masters, just that we’re clear this guy is out there and might strike again. Urge vigilance, set up a line for information. If he takes another girl, it could reflect very badly if we haven’t been seen to do all we can to warn people.’

  Stratton appeared to mull it over. ‘All right. I’ll talk to comms. I’d like Dimitriou to monitor the team at Exeter College. Jack, take St Edmund Hall. Let’s make it impossible for this bastard. Okay, team?’

  Everyone nodded or muttered affirmation.

  ‘What about me, sir?’ asked Jo.

  ‘Engage with the profiler, Detective Masters. If your theory is right, you’re the key to all of this.’

  The tone was accusatory. He blames me. Jo felt the urge to make amends, even though she’d committed no wrongdoing.

  ‘And after that?’ said Jo. ‘I could cover one of the colleges too.’

  The other detectives were filing from the room. Stratton waited until they were gone, then closed the door. Jo could already tell what was coming next.

  ‘I don’t want you exposed,’ said Stratton. ‘If this guy really has it in for you, you might be in danger.’

  You mean I migh
t embarrass you …

  ‘I can’t stay behind my desk when the rest of the squad are out there,’ said Jo.

  ‘I spoke to the Chief Constable,’ said Stratton. ‘He’s in agreement. Work with the profiler. Don’t leave any stone unturned.’

  ‘Sir …’

  ‘Dismissed,’ said Stratton.

  * * *

  The forensic psychologist brought in to draw up a profile was a dour, bloodless man of around fifty, rake thin, with a set of rimless, round reading glasses hanging from his neck. His name was Dr Vincent Stein, and he set up his laptop in IR1, coming out occasionally to ask Heidi for particular case files. He also had the board, pinned with the four crime scenes so far, wheeled in. He barely spoke to any one of them, instead choosing to sit quietly and drink from a thermos flask.

  After almost an hour, he came to the door, looking into the room.

  ‘Detective Masters,’ he said, then went back inside.

  ‘Some people skills,’ muttered Heidi.

  Jo obeyed the summons, feeling like a naughty schoolchild as she entered the interview room. Or a patient about to get some very bad news.

  ‘Take a seat,’ said Stein.

  Jo did so. The case folders were set up on the table in a patchwork. For about a minute, Stein’s attention was back on his computer as he tapped away periodically.

  ‘I’ve been over and over in my mind,’ she said. ‘I can’t think of anyone clever or mad enough to carry this out.’

  Stein looked up sternly, as if her interruption had broken his chain of thought. ‘You’ve had a stressful few months, I imagine,’ he said. ‘Since Detective Coombs was murdered.’

  Jo had no idea why they were talking about Ben. ‘It was hard at first,’ she said.

  ‘But you’ve been seeing a clinical psychologist at the behest of Thames Valley Police.’

  He made it sound as though she’d been an unwilling participant. Maybe that was fair.

  ‘It seemed sensible.’

  ‘Indeed.’ He made a few notes. ‘How was your relationship with Benjamin Coombs at the time of his death?’

  His tone rankled.

  ‘What’s my personal life got to do with this?’ she said. ‘It’s got to be something related to the job, right? Someone I’ve put away, or pissed off.’