Running Girl

by Simon Mason

  Maltby was only twenty miles away but it came under the jurisdiction of another regional educational authority. Paul Johnson’s profile matched Naylor’s in every way and his years of employment fitted perfectly, but what really caught Singh’s eye were two details. Johnson’s employment at the school had lasted only four months, as if its termination had been sudden and unplanned. And his disciplinary record contained an allegation made against him by another member of staff – of assault.

  A little jolt went through Singh. Suddenly he was alert again.

  It was seven thirty.

  There was no photo of Paul Johnson in the records. He spent thirty minutes searching a variety of databases for contact details for the head teacher, finding her number at last on a free public directory. But when he called her she was unavailable, and all he could do was leave a message.

  He was tired again, but still he wouldn’t give up. He accessed the school’s website, and there found a section of photographs called ‘Golden Years at Maltby’, a large but disorganized collection of hundreds of random images of school life. Without a moment’s rest he began to search through them, one by one.

  Official portraits of staff, both individual and grouped.

  Formal portraits of tennis teams and soccer squads.

  Prize-giving ceremonies, theatrical productions and celebrity visits.

  Private photos posted by ex-students showing groups of friends talking and laughing in the canteen or walking through the yard or capering together on the grass.

  By eight thirty he’d found nothing at all and his tiredness was like a belt tightening around his chest. His eyes ached. Getting up suddenly, he went and stood, eyes closed, by the window, where, almost automatically, he began to recite the rehras. But after a minute he broke off abruptly and went back to his seat. Wiping his hand across his face and blinking, he concentrated on the screen again – and immediately found what he’d been looking for.

  In the photo two girls wearing navy-blue uniforms stood in front of a shed in the school grounds, smiling towards the camera, making comic gestures. They were tagged, Singh noticed, Jazz and Ellie. But he didn’t look at them. He looked at the shed in the background. Leaning against it, wearing green overalls and rubber boots, with one hand on the handle of a wheelbarrow and the other in his pocket, was the younger but still unmistakable figure of Naylor, watching the girls.

  At that moment his phone rang.

  ‘Singh.’

  It was the head teacher at Maltby calling him back. Before he could explain why he’d called her she interrupted him.

  ‘I assume it’s about the reason for his leaving.’

  Singh hesitated. ‘Why did he leave?’

  ‘He went to prison. But you must have known that.’

  Singh hesitated again. ‘I don’t have that information. Was it connected with the alleged assault against one of the teachers?’

  ‘No. That was never proved.’

  ‘Then what was he convicted of?’

  ‘Rape.’

  They were both silent for a moment. The whole building was silent around Singh.

  ‘Rape?’

  ‘Yes. A girl here at the school. But it must be in his records.’

  ‘His records have gone missing,’ Singh said after a moment.

  There was another long pause. Then the head teacher said, ‘Does this mean that something’s happened?’ And when Singh didn’t reply, she added, ‘What’s he done now?’

  As he left Archives he was already putting through calls to the others. By the time he was back at Cornwallis Way, Lawrence Shan and Darren Collier were waiting for him in his office with copies of the SOTP profile of Paul Johnson, aka Ben Naylor.

  He went over to his desk, sat down and began to read.

  It was a brief institutional record of a deprived childhood and violent youth culminating in a four-year prison term served for the rape of sixteen-year-old schoolgirl Livvy Warren, Johnson’s last recorded public act. On the Sex Offender Register he remained Paul Johnson, but for all other purposes he’d become Ben Naylor, free to start a new life after his release, conditional on his continuing participation in a variety of counselling programmes and with the knowledge that any future employer would automatically be shown his SOTP record.

  ‘But the record was lost,’ Singh said aloud. ‘So Marsh Academy never knew who they were employing.’

  ‘What now?’ Shan asked. ‘We don’t want to rush in like last time. The press had a field day.’

  ‘Where’s Mal?’

  ‘Still up at Froggett Woods.’

  ‘And Bob’s re-checking Naylor’s alibi?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Singh said, ‘Naylor’s record changes everything. I want to make the arrest as soon as possible. Darren?’

  Collier looked sour. ‘I was wrong about the man,’ he said. ‘I admit it. And we all know the re-offending stats for rapists. But there’s still the issue of his alibi.’

  ‘That’s why we’re waiting for Bob,’ Singh said.

  They waited.

  Dowell arrived ten minutes later. He came into the room without looking at any of them and threw himself into a chair.

  ‘How’s his alibi?’ Singh asked.

  ‘He doesn’t have one.’

  There was a sharp jolt in the atmosphere of the room.

  ‘What? You checked it before. Twice. You went back and talked to the landlord.’

  Half angrily, half apologetically, Dowell explained. Firstly, the man who’d originally corroborated Naylor’s story – that he was in the Jolly Boatman all Friday evening – had gone missing. Then the landlord who’d seen Naylor at last orders had admitted that for most of the evening he hadn’t been in the pub at all; he’d been taking care of business elsewhere. Then the bombshell: the bar staff had confessed that there’d been a power cut earlier on, the result of some japester behind the bar knocking out the fuse box with a fire extinguisher. They hadn’t dared tell the landlord, just patched it up by the time he got back. But while the power was out there was no one in the pub at all.

  ‘What time was the power out?’

  Dowell swallowed. ‘Five till nine.’

  ‘The exact window of the time of death.’

  ‘That’s what I said,’ Dowell said, avoiding Singh’s eyes. ‘He’s got no alibi.’

  ‘So if Naylor wasn’t in the Jolly Boatman, where was he?’

  At that moment Singh’s phone rang.

  ‘Mal? What’s the news?’

  Without preliminaries she said, ‘I’ve got a positive ID for the thirteenth. He was up here at Pike Pond.’

  A muscle jumped in Singh’s cheek. ‘What sort of ID? Will it stand up?’

  ‘Solid. One of the residents has just come back from holiday. She recognized his picture at once. He was at the side of the path tinkering with his moped at about four, and when she asked him what he was doing there he told her to get lost. It was definitely him.’

  Singh said, ‘We’re going round to get him now.’

  ‘Just remember,’ she said.

  ‘Remember what?’

  ‘He can be violent.’

  Singh put down the phone and looked at his watch. Ten o’clock. He said to Shan, ‘Come with me, Lawrence.’

  To Dowell he said: ‘You run things here. I want back-up at the school in half an hour. I’ll call if we need anything else.’

  As he went out of his office an alarm bell went off faintly in his mind. Naylor had a head start on them. Since Singh’s visit in the morning the man had known the police suspected him, and he knew also who had led them back to him. He was an emotional man prone to violent obsessions. What might he do to an interfering boy who had made himself such an easy target for revenge? But there was no time to think about this now, and he went at speed across the open-plan room towards the elevator, Shan close behind.

  39

  AS THEY PULLED out of the underground car park in Cornwallis Way they clamped on the siren and accelerated loud and
bright down Cornwallis Road, out towards the bypass. Shan drove, glancing occasionally at Singh sitting next to him in the passenger seat, agitated and brooding. His face was clenched. His turban was crooked. Every few minutes he looked at his watch.

  After a while he muttered, ‘Go faster.’

  Then: ‘What if he’s not there?’

  Shan stepped on it and said nothing.

  ‘We’ve given him enough warnings,’ Singh said, half to himself. ‘He knew this morning we were on to him.’

  ‘If he’s gone,’ Shan said, ‘we’ll find him.’

  ‘There’s a boy,’ Singh began, and hesitated.

  ‘What boy?’

  Singh shook his head. ‘Doesn’t matter.’ He sat staring ahead. ‘I’ve been stupid,’ he added after a moment.

  Shan said nothing to that, and they went the rest of the way in the screaming car without comment.

  At the school gates they were met by back-up and the vehicles went together, lights and sirens off, down the long drive through the grounds to Naylor’s bungalow. From a quarter of a mile away they could see it lit up against the darkness of the woods behind, every window in the building blazing.

  ‘Looks like he’s home,’ Shan murmured to Singh.

  Moving quickly across the light-striped shadows of the untidy lawn, the men took up positions and Singh went forward and rapped on the door.

  There was no answer and he rapped again.

  ‘Police!’ he called.

  Still no answer. He gave a nod, and a man on either side of the door kicked it down and they ran in together, weapons up, down the narrow hall, sliding on the loose lino, into the front room and beyond, kicking open doors, shoving over furniture and shouting.

  It took them no more than thirty seconds to realize there was no one there.

  In the middle of the chaos Singh stood staring around the tiny living room. The mess was even worse than before, and there was a smell, sweet and somehow dirty, like burned sugar. Crockery had been knocked off the little table and trodden into pieces, clothes were strewn across the floor. On a chair was a plate with a cigarette lighter on it and an empty cola can lying on its side.

  Singh picked up the can and turned it over. The bottom was blackened; round the side were several small puncture marks. He lifted it to his nose and sniffed.

  Shan, standing next to him, raised his eyebrows.

  Singh said, ‘Cocaine.’

  Before Shan could react, one of the men shouted urgently from the bedroom: ‘Sir!’

  When they went in, the policeman gestured at the bed. ‘Thought you should see this, sir.’

  A laptop lay carelessly on the duvet.

  ‘It wasn’t powered down properly,’ the man said. ‘I just restarted it, and ...’ He turned it to face Singh and there was silence in the room.

  Singh blinked once, as if in pain. On the computer screen was a photo of Chloe Dow.

  ‘It’s a slideshow,’ the man said after a moment.

  He pressed a button and new photos appeared. Chloe standing with a small group of girls in front of C Block. Chloe pushing open the fire door in B Block. Chloe sitting on the grass of Top Pitch with two boys, one of whom – Singh saw – was Garvie Smith.

  The policeman leaned over to pause it, and Singh stopped him.

  ‘Keep it playing,’ he said.

  One by one, more photos appeared. Chloe in the playground. Chloe in a corridor. Chloe by the school gates. There were dozens of them, perhaps hundreds. Many were blurry, scrappy, as if taken surreptitiously, but others were clear and close-up. In some Chloe was looking directly at the camera, her expression hard to read.

  ‘She knew,’ Singh said quietly. ‘She knew he was photographing her.’

  They watched for another minute, mesmerized by the apparently limitless number of pictures, until Singh said, ‘Wait! Stop there.’

  On the screen was a long-distance shot of Chloe. She was wearing a deep pink vest and pink shorts, and she was running, head up and springy-legged, in open countryside between fields of yellow rapeseed.

  Shan sucked in his breath.

  ‘Pike Pond,’ Singh said.

  Shan swore. ‘He’s our man. He was up there waiting for her.’

  Singh nodded, tight-faced. ‘But where is he now?’

  They left the room issuing orders, Shan radioing in to Central to get an emergency broadcast put out, Singh talking on the phone to Dowell, asking for more back-up and lighting equipment.

  ‘It’s him, then?’ Dowell asked.

  ‘Looks that way.’

  Dowell swore.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Singh said. Still holding the phone, he ran out of the house onto the litter-strewn grass and went here and there amongst the rubbish until he found a sheet of tarpaulin lying loosely on the wet grass.

  ‘His moped’s gone,’ he said into his phone. ‘Get the registration and put out an alert. He won’t be far: I don’t think he’s been gone long. I want every officer in the county watching out.’

  Then he ran back into the house, where Shan was waiting for him with a strange look on his face, holding out his phone to him.

  ‘The chief,’ he said.

  Singh took the phone and stood listening, suddenly isolated in his own zone of quietness while his men busied themselves noisily around him.

  ‘I hear you know who killed Chloe Dow,’ he heard the chief say.

  Singh began to respond, but the chief went on: ‘I also hear you’ve let him go.’

  Singh grimaced. ‘We’ll find him,’ he said. He began to explain the situation but realized after a few moments that he was talking to no one, and with a heavy feeling handed the phone back to Shan and resumed giving instructions to the men. They went out together, leaving three men to secure the house and await the Crime Detection Unit, which was already on its way.

  The Unit was slow in arriving. Singh stood upright by his car, pale and silent, and after a few minutes Shan gave up trying to talk to him. As soon as he was on his own Singh took out his notebook and withdrew from it a scrap of paper with a number scrawled on it. Taking out his phone, he made the call and waited anxiously, listening first to the ringing tone, then to the voicemail message. The boy’s voice was oddly unrecognizable. But what he said was completely typical: ‘Really can’t be bothered to answer the phone right now. Catch me later.’

  Singh clenched his jaw. He checked his watch and called another number, and waited impatiently while it rang. He was about to give up when it was finally answered, and he said in a rush, ‘Mrs Smith, it’s Detective Inspector Singh. I’m sorry it’s so late. Can I talk to your son?’

  He heard a snort. ‘There’s a whole queue of folks waiting to talk to that boy. And I’m in front of you.’

  ‘He’s not there? Where is he?’

  ‘Soon as I get to talk to him I’ll ask him.’

  ‘He didn’t tell you where he was going?’

  ‘Detective Inspector, I’m guessing you don’t have children of your own. I just came home between shifts at work to find a note on the kitchen table telling me he’s had to go out. Bit of an emergency, he says. Exclamation mark. I’ll exclamation mark him.’

  ‘Does he say who he went to meet?’

  ‘I’m only a mother, Detective Inspector. Confidential information like that doesn’t often come my way.’

  ‘And he doesn’t say where?’

  He heard her sigh. ‘Wait. Let me get the note.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘All right. I have it here. Sorry, Mum, had to go out. Bit of an emergency. Exclamation mark. I told you that. Ah. On the back of the note he’s written something else.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Badger Lane.’

  ‘Badger Lane?’

  ‘Don’t know it. Maybe it’s where a friend of his lives.’

  Singh said nothing. In the silence, Mrs Smith said, ‘Speaking of confidential information, are you going to tell me why you want to talk to him? Because if he’s been getting into tr
ouble again I’d like to know.’

  Singh hesitated. ‘He’s not in trouble, with us.’

  And before she could ask what he meant he hung up.

  Shan was looking at him strangely. ‘What’s the matter, Raminder? Who’s this boy? You mentioned him before. And what’s that about trouble?’

  Before Singh could answer, his phone rang and he answered it at once and stood listening in silence.

  ‘Yes?’ he said. ‘Good. Very good. Where are you?’

  The answer seemed to terrify him. He flinched, almost dropped the phone, and when he spoke again his voice was a strange hoarse whisper.

  ‘Pull everyone in. I want everyone there now. Everyone!’

  ‘What’s up?’ Shan asked.

  Singh’s face was white. ‘They’ve found Naylor’s moped.’

  ‘Fast work. Where?’

  For a moment Singh didn’t seem able to speak, and Shan stared at him in astonishment.

  ‘Where, Raminder?’ he repeated.

  Singh found his voice at last. ‘At the end of Badger Lane,’ he said. ‘Where the boy is.’

  40

  BADGER LANE WAS an old country road, broken and unlit, full of mud and dead leaves. Used by joggers by day and the occasional fly-tipper and dealer at night, it ran from the back of the new houses in Fox Walk past boggy grass fields and scrubland to peter out eventually at the edge of the Marsh Woods.

  Lit up in the beams of a stationary police car, Naylor’s moped lay on its side in rough gravel under ash trees where the road gave way to a footpath. Singh went forward and opened the pannier and saw there was nothing in it.

  Oblivious to the men waiting by the cars, he took out his phone and dialled, and listened once more to the voicemail recording: ‘Really can’t be bothered to answer the phone right now ...’ before turning at last, his face drawn and anxious, to address the others.