When Mariner got home late that night, he realised he still hadn’t contacted his mother, but when he tried, the phone just rang on and she had no answering service. She’d probably got the TV on too loud to hear it. He thought about calling one of her neighbours but he wouldn’t want to risk getting anyone out of bed, so he didn’t bother.
Chapter Thirteen
Next morning, the lab report on Yasmin’s phone had come back, along with the analysis of the calls made, and Mike Finlay, the technician who would be able to clarify anything that didn’t make sense. Mariner asked Knox and Millie to sit in on it. Most of the fingerprints on the handset matched with those taken from Yasmin’s room at home. A couple of larger, smeared prints were as yet unidentified. ‘But could belong to the parents,’ Finlay said. ‘We’re re-checking that.’
A transcript of all the saved messages was attached. Mariner had never signed up to the text message culture, continuing to use his own mobile like a traditional telephone, and to his unfamiliar eyes the calls read like the Enigma Code.
‘These are all messages?’ Mariner asked the technician, feeling ignorant.
‘It’s on a save cycle of about a month,’ Finlay told him. ‘But this is quite a sophisticated phone and works a bit like e-mail, automatically saving the messages sent, too.’
‘So we’ve got everything she sent and received over the last month?’
‘Not quite. Some messages have been deliberately deleted. I’m not surprised, either, given the content of some of the others.’
‘Oh?’
‘A bit on the racy side.’ Confirming that Yasmin wasn’t quite the innocent they’d first thought her to be. ‘Where we can, we’ve linked the phone numbers to Yasmin’s phone book, so most of the messages, though not all, can be attributed. Messages to and from her parents and sister were easy to identify, especially as there aren’t that many. Some of them also have only an initial or what looks like a nickname to identify them.’
‘And the hot ones?’ Tony Knox asked.
‘They all appear to be to or from someone known as Lee.’
Lee. So Amira was right. Yasmin could have been seeing someone after all. The contraceptive pill wasn’t just trying to be grown up in front of her friends. She really needed it. But why had none of her friends mentioned Lee?
‘The one you’ll be most interested is this one. It’s the last message sent, on Tuesday at around lunchtime.’
‘CU @4 things 2 TL U’
‘What does it mean?’
‘It makes more sense if you read it out loud: “See you at four. Things to tell you.”’
‘That was what she said to Suzanne. I’d thought that Lee was the something. Maybe she was telling him that she was on the pill, so it was all systems go.’
Finlay nodded sagely. ‘It looks as if Yasmin had arranged to meet this Lee at four o’clock on the day she disappeared. I think you need to speak to him.’
‘Do you reckon?’ Knox was straight faced.
‘There’s one other message received after that, in the middle of the afternoon, but she’s deleted it.’
‘Christ, how can you tell that?’
‘It leaves a trace, a bit like the imaging you get on a computer hard drive. Perhaps she deleted it because it was a bit strong for her parents’ eyes again.’
‘Thanks,’ said Knox. ‘We’ll bear it in mind.’
‘Can we be sure from this that Yasmin had her phone right up until Tuesday afternoon?’ Mariner asked.
‘Somebody did. The prints would indicate that it was probably her, because those are the clearest. The rest is for you to find out.’
‘Thanks,’ said Millie quickly, before Knox could get in. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’
‘OK,’ said Mariner, when Finlay had gone. ‘At least we now have the boy Yasmin was seeing, and we know it wasn’t Ricky.’
‘Unless he was using an alias.’
‘Let’s not complicate things for the sake of it. We should go and talk to her family about this.’
‘I think we’d be better off talking to her friends, sir,’ Millie suggested. ‘They’re more likely to know who she’s been texting, especially given the content of some of these. It’s not the kind of stuff she’d want to share with her mum and dad.’
On their return to the school, Mariner took with him photographs of Akram and Pryce. A cluster of girls was gathered outside the school gates. ‘Isn’t that Suzanne?’ said Millie.
‘Yes, let’s get her on her own. She may be more inclined to talk.’
Millie was driving, so pulled over to the kerb to let Mariner out of the car.
‘Suzanne. Can I have a word?’
The girl turned and gave her friends a knowing smile before breaking away from them and sashaying over to Mariner, obviously pleased to have been singled out for special attention. ‘What can I do for you, Inspector?’ The suggestion in those few words made Mariner’s skin crawl.
He pretended not to notice. ‘You’ve probably heard, we’ve found Yasmin’s phone. There are several text messages on it from someone calling himself Lee. Do you know who that might be?’
‘I might.’ Suzanne shrugged and raised her eyebrows at her friends, eliciting a bout of giggling. Another one playing hard to get. Mariner snapped. ‘Suzanne, a boy has been murdered. And not far from where we found his body we also found Yasmin’s phone. You need to tell us everything you know. Loyalty to friends is commendable but it’s not going to help Yasmin. At the very least, she may be in serious trouble, so we need to find out where she is.’
His tone shocked her out of her complacency. ‘Lee is a boy Yasmin knows,’ she pouted. ‘And it’s not really Lee. That’s just his tag.’
‘What is his real name?’
‘Lewis Everett. He just calls himself Lee.’
‘Are you sure about that? Did Yasmin know a boy called Ricky Skeet?’
‘Is that the boy who—’ The veneer of confidence was all but gone now.
‘Yes. Did Yasmin know him?’
‘I don’t think so. I’ve never heard that name before.’
‘How well does Yasmin know this Lee?’
‘They sort of went out for a while.’
Finlay had been close to the mark. ‘Why didn’t you tell us about him before?’
She wrinkled her nose. ‘It’s history. Yaz hasn’t seen him for weeks.’
Except, thought Mariner, that he was still texting her as recently as the day she disappeared. And Yasmin had recently gone to the doctor’s to go on the pill.
‘He goes to the boys school up the road. We met them on a school trip, to London.’
The tickets in Yasmin’s treasure box.
‘Them?’
‘He’s mates with my boyfriend, Sam. We all met up on the same trip. Yaz and Lee started it, really. We all went off to see the London Eye, then we couldn’t find our way back to the bus. We got on the wrong Underground train. It was wicked. All the teachers were going crazy because me and Yasmin had gone off with “boys”. They were worried about what her parents would say.’
‘What about your parents?’
‘Mine don’t give a toss. It was Yaz’s they were worried about. Pretty rich coming from them.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Darrow and Goodway. They were all over each other. It was disgusting. Mr Goodway’s wife had only left him a couple of weeks before, but she couldn’t keep her hands off him.’
Was this a further example of teenage fantasy? ‘But surely Mrs Darrow is—’
‘Ms, actually.’ The self-satisfaction crept back. ‘She’s divorced.’
‘How did Yasmin’s parents react to what happened?’
‘They never found out. In the end Yaz persuaded the teachers not to tell. She promised that she wouldn’t see Lee again so she had to meet him in secret, after school.’
‘But you said she isn’t seeing him now.’
‘She isn’t. It’s over.’
‘Who finished it?
’
‘Lee did.’
‘Why?’
‘Yasmin hadn’t got the guts.’
‘For what?’
‘What do you think? What do all boys want? You’re all the same.’ She looked Mariner up and down with eyes that were experienced beyond her years. ‘Eventually, Lee got the message that it wasn’t going anywhere.’
‘That Yasmin wouldn’t sleep with him.’
‘Yeah. She was “saving herself” for the right man, the one her parents were going to choose for her. Silly cow.’
‘When did all this happen?’
‘Ages ago.’
‘Was Yasmin upset about the split?’
‘Yeah. She wanted me to come out in sympathy and finish with Sam, too.’
‘And did you?’
‘No. It was totally unreasonable.’
‘So you’re still seeing Sam?’
‘Yeah. He rocks.’
‘Do you think Yasmin could be jealous of you and Sam? Did she think she was missing out?’
‘It was up to her, wasn’t it? She’d made her choice between her parents and Lee. She chose her parents.’
‘Do you and Sam have a full relationship?’
‘Do you mean sex? Of course we do.’ Treating the question with the disdain it deserved. ‘Sammy’s hot. But I’m not stupid. I’ve been on the pill for months.’
‘Did you ever suggest to Yasmin that she should go on the pill?’
‘We talked about it, sure: we all know guys don’t like skins, but it was too late for that. Yaz blew it.’
‘What would you say if I told you that Yasmin was texting Lee as recently as the day she disappeared, and that she’d asked her GP to prescribe the pill?’
Suzanne’s eyes widened. ‘I’d say fucking good for you, Yaz. She finally decided to do it. That must have been what she was going to tell me.’
‘That’s what we think, too. But why would Yasmin suddenly change her mind about sleeping with Lee? Has anyone been putting her under pressure?’
‘Yaz doesn’t need anyone else to do that. She’s well good at doing it for herself.’
‘If Yasmin was going to meet Lee again, where would she have met him?’
‘I don’t know. When they were going out he sometimes used to meet Yaz from school, or they’d meet down near the station where she gets her train. Lee gets the train home too. He lives in this big posh house in Barnt Green with a pool and everything. There’s a pub down by the station called the Bridge. Yaz used to talk about seeing Lee at the Bridge.’
Except Yasmin could have meant another bridge. Maybe it was she who had dropped her mobile phone there. But was it before or after Ricky had been attacked? And did the two occurrences really have anything to do with each other?
Millie had parked the car, so Mariner caught up with her outside reception, and reported back on the conversation. ‘So perhaps that’s what it’s all about: Yasmin trying to keep up with her friends. The status of being on the contraceptive pill.’
‘Better than the status symbol of being landed with a baby at seventeen,’ said Millie. ‘Like Finlay said: we need to go and talk to Lewis Everett.’
‘I’d like to get the official take on what Suzanne told us too. Let’s see if Ms Darrow is around.’
The deputy head was in her office, and they were shown in just as Mr Goodway was leaving. Mariner couldn’t help but see them in a new light, though it was hard to tell if what Suzanne had said was true. As Ms Darrow herself had said, teenage girls could be prone to overactive imaginations.
‘Can you tell us anything about the Year 12 trip to London in the spring?’ Mariner asked, when they were settled.
‘That was months ago,’ said Ms Darrow. ‘Some of the girls went on an art trip to the Tate Modern with students from the boys school. Mr Goodway and I took them, along with a teacher from the boys school. We run quite a few joint trips. It cuts down on the expense and also allows the youngsters to mix, which is an important part of their social development.’
‘From what I understand, the trip certainly enhanced Yasmin’s social development.’
‘Ah. You know about the incident, then.’
‘We’ve heard one version but would be interested in your account of events.’
‘It’s very simple. When the time came to leave, all the girls were accounted for except Yasmin and Suzanne, and two of the boys were also missing. They eventually turned up at the coach, almost two hours late. People were beginning to get worried.’
‘Where had they been?’
‘Sightseeing. It was all perfectly innocent. They simply got lost and had to get the Tube back to the meeting place. London’s a big place, Inspector. I wouldn’t be taken in by any embroidery that might have been added.’
‘Why didn’t you tell us about this before?’
‘As I said, it was months ago. Why would it be relevant? It seemed unnecessary to drag it all up again.’
‘Did you tell Yasmin’s parents about what happened?’
The smile went and the defences went up. ‘We didn’t think it necessary.’
‘Because you knew how they would react.’
‘We didn’t want to jeopardise Yasmin’s education because of one foolish episode.’
‘Or jeopardise the generous donations Yasmin’s father was making to the school.’
‘That’s a very cynical view, Inspector. The truth is that it was just one of these passing crushes girls have: completely normal and harmless, and over before it had begun. It had run its course so there seemed no need to rock the boat.’
‘It wasn’t quite over, though.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Yasmin was still in contact with the boy in question, Lee, up until last Tuesday. And she had begun taking the contraceptive pill. Her father found all this out shortly before Yasmin disappeared. I wonder how he would feel if he knew that you had been responsible for introducing Yasmin to her lover and had let things “run their course”?’
The colour drained from Ms Darrow’s face.
‘Thanks, Ms Darrow. That’s been helpful. We will naturally have to discuss this with Yasmin’s parents. You may want to prepare for the fallout.’
Subdued by the revelations, Ms Darrow showed them out into reception again, where Mariner’s attention was caught anew by the body art sketches. This time though, they triggered a recent memory. He’d seen some of those designs somewhere else, only yesterday afternoon.
Digging it from his inside pocket he held up the picture of Shaun Pryce in front of Ms Darrow. ‘Has this young man been here, to the school?’
‘Sorry? Oh, yes, he’s an actor. He came and did some modelling for us about a year ago. We try and include life portraits in the syllabus where we can. It was a mistake though, really.’
‘Why?’ Millie was surprised. ‘The pictures are very good.’
‘The young man in question liked to flirt with the girls. He seemed to get them rather excited.’
‘I’ll bet he did,’ murmured Mariner. ‘Did he model for Yasmin’s class?’
‘He might have.’
‘Think!’ barked Mariner. ‘Did he?’
‘Yes. I think so.’
‘So Shaun Pryce has a link with the girls school and may have known Yasmin. Now why the hell didn’t he tell us that?’
‘Do you want to go and talk to him again?’
‘Not yet. Let’s get Lee out of the way first.’
Built during the same era, the boys school was structurally a mirror image of the girls, but there the similarity ended. Less well cared for, soft greenery gave way to show cases full of competition trophies, and raw testosterone hung in the air. Mariner identified himself to the matronly receptionist. ‘We need to speak to one of your students: Lewis Everett.’
‘I’ll just need to check with Mr Blyth. One moment, please.’
Head Teacher Gordon Blyth, a small man with thinning black hair and a voice from the valleys of South Wales, came out to speak to th
em in person. ‘I’m afraid Lewis isn’t here at the moment,’ he said. ‘He’s doing work experience. ’
‘Where?’
Blyth had to go away and consult with the person responsible for organising these things. He was back moments later. ‘At a place that makes kitchen units, on Birch Close. It’s—’
‘I know where it is,’ said Mariner. He looked at Millie. ‘Now we are going round in bloody circles.’
Within a few minutes they were back on the small industrial estate, four units down from TMR Reprographics. The manager of Dunhill’s Kitchen Design was not a happy man.
‘Work experience, is that what they call it? Little bugger hasn’t turned in for work again today. He cleared off last Tuesday afternoon and I haven’t seen him since.’
‘What time on Tuesday afternoon?’
‘About half one. The kid’s a waste of space. He’s hardly put in a full day’s work since he started here. I ask you. What kind of a worker is he going to make?’
‘Have you rung the school to find out where he is?’
‘I haven’t got time to go chasing round after him, I’ve got a business to run. It’ll just go on his report at the end of the week. He wasn’t much use, anyway. He’s a spoilt little rich kid who doesn’t like getting his hands dirty.’
Outside, just a few yards away were the refuse bins that concealed the gap in the fence.
Mariner put through a call on his mobile to the head of the boys school. ‘We’re at the kitchen workshop, but Lewis isn’t. In fact, he hasn’t been here since last Tuesday. I trust you didn’t know that.’ The pause at the other end of the line confirmed it. ‘I’d like Lewis’s home address, please.’
Lewis Everett’s daily train journey home terminated at the exclusive hamlet of Barnt Green that nestled complacently at the foot of the Lickey Hills. The Everetts’ house was ‘big and posh’ as Suzanne had described it, hemmed in on all sides by woodland on a private road that wasn’t even graced with a proper street name. Hawthorns here had rather more to do with the shrub than it did the home of West Bromwich Albion. Mariner tried to picture the Akram family living round here. He couldn’t. Number 5, Hawthorns, consisted of five room widths of 1950s mock-Georgian with a broad double garage, behind impressive wrought-iron gates and a paved drive. Burgeoning ten-foot leylandii divided the property from its neighbours. A side gate was unlocked and they pushed through and approached the building. Mariner stepped over a dark stain that marked the otherwise flawless drive, but closer inspection revealed only engine oil. Pushing the button on the studded oak front door prompted nothing more than the jangle of a bell deep inside the house. Millie peered in through the window to see a neat and tidy sitting room, plush carpeting, gleaming antique reproduction furniture, everything in its place.
Blood of the Innocents Page 18
