‘Sorry, Mummy,’ she whispered again.
‘Chin up, YP.’ Julia stroked her daughter’s cheek with one finger. The nickname brought a wan smile to the little girl’s face, and, satisfied, Julia went around to the driver’s door.
The interior was hot and she caught a faint whiff of something animal, male, slightly acrid. She glanced in the mirror and saw that Lauren had wrinkled her nose, too. ‘Daddy left his stinky gym clothes in the boot again,’ Julia said.
‘Pooh!’ Lauren giggled, holding her nose. Her eyes still glistened with tears, but she was all right – back to her old self – her real self, as Julia saw it.
‘Daddy’s in Big Trouble, isn’t he, Mummy?’
Julia held her gaze in the mirror, widening her eyes and nodding, deadpan.
Lauren snickered behind her hand; she was a daddy’s girl, but once in a while she and Julia would share a moment of allegiance like this, and Julia’s heart would swell with love for her child. She swung the car out and they trundled along the row.
At the first speed bump, the car jangled and Julia’s stomach tightened. ‘That damn rattle,’ she muttered, peering into the mirror as if it would reveal the cause.
Instinctively, Lauren glanced over her shoulder. ‘Is something broke?’
‘Broken,’ Julia corrected automatically. ‘I hope not, sweetie,’ she added with a sigh.
She turned left out of Salford Quays, cutting through the back-way to avoid traffic, heading northward to Prestwich, and home, maddened by the faint-but-constant jangle of metal on metal. The exhaust, maybe? But they had that replaced only two years ago. The suspension? God, they really couldn’t afford that … As they approached the A56, passing a cluster of car dealerships on one side of the road and an abandoned furniture outlet on the other, they hit a pothole and Julia winced.
‘It’s getting worse,’ Lauren said, sounding anxious.
‘It’s just the road – makes it sound worse than it is.’ Julia forced a smile in the mirror. ‘Don’t worry, Daddy will look underneath when we get home.’
‘But, Mummy,’ Lauren said, and there was real fear in her voice now, ‘it’s not underneath … It’s inside.’
A trickle of sweat turned to ice on Julia’s backbone and she looked in the mirror just as the seat next to Lauren tipped forward. Something moved in the shadows – a black shape emerging from the boot of the car.
A dog? Jesus! How did—?
Julia gasped, twisting in her seat; the beast was crawling into the passenger compartment, its movements jerky, weird.
Lauren cringed, grappling with her seat-belt buckle. ‘Mummy—’
Julia focused on the road; she needed to stop, but the car behind was too close. Pull off into one of the car parks? She looked for an opening.
Lauren screamed.
Julia stared horrified into the mirror. The dog-creature metamorphosed. A hand shot out. It was a man. A man. There was a man in the car – and he had Lauren!
Julia reached back to grapple with the intruder. The car bumped the kerb and she corrected the wheel. A horn blared and through the passenger window she saw a car loom close; she swerved to avoid a crash. Gripping the wheel with both hands, she faced forward again.
A lorry. Yards away. Julia jammed on the brakes and the car shuddered to a halt. More car horns, the squeal of tyres on hot asphalt, but the man didn’t flinch. He kept a tight grip on Lauren’s wrist with his right hand as his left snaked around her neck. He was clothed entirely in black and he wore a black ski-mask. Julia saw the flash of a knife blade and then the man spoke:
‘You watch the road,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve got her.’
4
Informed betting is methodical. Guessing is merely desperate.
JON J. NORDBY, DEAD RECKONING
Aberdeen, Wednesday
‘Is that you, Professor?’
Fennimore halted mid-step; Joan. He’d hoped to sneak up to his office, but not much got past the forensic science department’s office manager unseen. Her office door stood open, and Joan’s desk was positioned so that, like Hecate, guardian of the household, she could see all that passed in her kingdom.
‘I wondered when you’d show your face.’ Joan dressed as she spoke: with femininity and care, but no frills. As for the occasional flounce – Fennimore guessed that she saw it as a special prerogative for having to deal with all the clever dimwits whose academic affairs she managed.
‘I’m guessing it’s been bad?’ he said, trying for conciliatory.
In answer, she reached down beside her chair and heaved a grey mail sack on to her desk.
Fennimore groaned.
‘Phone calls, too,’ she said. ‘Twenty requests for interviews. Notoriety does seem to seek you out, doesn’t it?’ Her precise Aberdonian tones sounded particularly clipped today.
He couldn’t argue. Instead, he peered into the sack; there was a disturbing number of black-edged cards and an even more disconcerting flowering of peach and lemon-yellow envelopes.
‘You’re all over the Internet.’ Joan clicked through her computer screens to an online newspaper. Here’s The Scotsman: ‘“Amateur Killer Still at Large,” says Forensic Expert.’ She clicked on another link. ‘“Police Stopped Thinking” – they’re not the only ones, are they, Professor?’ she asked tartly.
Fennimore sighed. The public lecture, intended to draw attention to the university and its work, had more than fulfilled its promise. The student who had asked about justice for Gail Hammond had video-recorded the exchange – every uncensored, disparaging word – and posted it on YouTube.
Joan’s phone rang, but she pre-empted his escape, raising a finger, commanding him to wait. ‘You again, Mr Lazko?’ She arched an eyebrow at Fennimore and he shook his head. The manager’s gaze didn’t waver. ‘As I told you earlier, the professor is not expected in today.’ A pause, then: ‘Very well.’ She added a note to her memo pad. ‘I’ll be sure to let him know.’
She handed Fennimore the note as she hung up. ‘He says you’ve to ring him urgently.’
Fennimore crumpled it without reading it and dropped it into her bin.
‘That wasn’t his first call,’ Joan said.
‘So I gathered. It won’t be his last.’
‘You know, it might be better to talk to him and be done with it.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t.’
Joan frowned. Still watching him, she began typing, her fingers rustling over the keyboard. She shifted her gaze to the screen to read and seconds later, she said, ‘Oh. I see.’
Fennimore doubted it, but he was grateful not to have to explain.
‘I’ll make sure he doesn’t get through.’
‘I’d appreciate it.’ Fennimore grabbed the mail sack, but she rapped his knuckles lightly.
‘I’ll deal with the condolence cards and the pastel-coloured billets.’ Fennimore began to thank her, and she sniffed. ‘Aye, well, you can thank me by keeping your head down – and you will have to sort through the pile in your office yourself.’
‘There’s more?’
She answered him with a look.
They were stacked in date order on his desk – fifty or more letters, postcards and notelets in the few short days since the YouTube clip had gone viral. The university’s spam filters had junked most of the crank emails, but he hadn’t thought that people would go to the bother of handwriting their unwanted messages and actually paying for a postage stamp.
The moment he sat down, his phone rang.
‘While you’re sorting that lot, you might think about getting to work on the mess up there.’ Joan again; she had timed his journey to his office perfectly. ‘It needs to be cleared by the end of July.’ The Andrew Street building was to become part of a luxury hotel chain and they wanted access by the beginning of August. ‘You’ll like it at Garthdee,’ she went on, her tone uncharacteristically cajoling. ‘It’s on the riverfront, overlooking the park.’
‘Joan, if I want a view, I’ll go
hiking in the Lakes – it’s the absence of view that helps me think.’
‘Well, that’s a pity,’ she said tartly, ‘because this building is sold, and if you don’t organize yourself, Estates and Property Services will.’
Fennimore glanced around at the clutter of bookcases, stacked two-deep with reference texts; the boxes housing case notes, coursework and periodicals; his comfy day-bed, buried under a pile of box files.
‘Tell them they’ll need a forklift.’ He hung up and slumped in his chair. He liked this building, with its nicotine-yellow lecture room, scarred by his more flamboyant demonstrations; his office with its spectacular winter sunsets; he liked overlooking granite buildings, stone walls and grey streets.
He sighed, turning his attention to the task. Joan had stacked envelopes stamped with university logos in a smaller bundle. A Post-it note stuck to the topmost commanded: ‘Read these first.’
He picked up his letter knife and obediently made a start.
There were two invitations to speak at conferences in the following year – and a call for papers for a third. These he set aside to read later. The next half-dozen were pastel billets the senders had smuggled through Joan’s spam filter by slipping them inside plain brown envelopes. He placed them in a fresh pile for shredding – a precaution against any of the crazier missives falling into the hands of the media. Then came a request from one of the broadsheets for him to write an opinion piece on miscarriages of justice. He junked it, feeling a slight pang of guilt: the university’s publicity department would kill for a full page in the ‘quality’ press. But press were press, and Fennimore had an ingrained suspicion of the lot of them. He continued for half an hour, until he came to a plain buff envelope. It began with an apology of sorts:
‘I was wrong about you – I know that, and I’m sorry for it – but you and me have a lot in common—’ Suspicious, Fennimore skipped to the signature. Carl Lazko. He tore the letter in two and tossed it. Sorry didn’t begin to make amends for what Lazko had done to him. He lashed out with his foot, sending the bin skittering across the floor to a corner, where it rattled against a stack of plastic tote boxes and came to rest.
He gripped the desk, his mind lurching back five – almost six – years to the last time he saw his wife and daughter. If he had been home that weekend – been there to protect his wife and child … Rachel and Suzie had disappeared from their rented house near the police training centre in Hampshire, where Fennimore was working on case reviews at the National Crime Faculty. That weekend he had arranged to meet Simms at a hotel – a conference, he’d called it. A ‘tryst’, Lazko had called it. Nothing happened – not then – but when the truth came out it had almost destroyed Simms’s marriage, and Fennimore had lived with the guilt in the years since.
Even after the national press moved on to other stories, Lazko always seemed to be on the periphery of Fennimore’s vision, dogging his steps. When they found Rachel’s body in the Essex marshes six months later, the reporter was at his door well ahead of the pack, in prime position to snap Fennimore being led to a police car. The detectives had been there to take him to identify his wife’s body, but Lazko’s newspaper ran a review of events and carefully positioned it under Fennimore’s picture. The implication was clear: Fennimore was a suspect.
He paced to his office window, resisting the impulse to hoof the bin and its contents on to the landing. The sun beat down on the grey pavement below, creating a shimmer of summer heat haze, rare in the cold stone streets of the Granite City, and he was transported for a moment to the United States’ Midwest, to the case he had just worked on with Kate Simms. Her placement with St Louis Police must be finishing soon. He hoped they could become friends again. He took a few breaths and felt better.
Yes, he thought – even thinking about Kate did him good.
Fennimore rubbed a hand over his face and got back to work: the next item had been sent special delivery. A document to sign perhaps, or a request for help on a case review. He picked up his letter knife and slit it open, glad of the distraction. It was just a single slip of paper, printed on one side:
‘Every contact leaves a trace – but what good is that, if you can’t find him?’
Him? This had to be about his lecture on YouTube. So this was to do with Gail Hammond’s killer – the real killer – the one who got away. Fennimore checked the postmark on the envelope: Manchester.
‘If he made stupid mistakes, why hasn’t he been caught? If you’re such a genius, why can’t you find your own daughter? What is it – five years? Are you stupid or did you just stop caring? Well, what goes around comes around. Everything – all of it – it’s all on your head.’
Fennimore crushed the letter in his fist and flung it across the room. Every day for nearly six years he’d been tormented by what Suzie might be going through. But he rejected outright the possibility that she was already dead, refused to accept the odds were stacked against her ever coming home. He was no fool – he knew he was no more worthy of a happy ending than the next man – and he would call any other man a fool for holding on to such self-deluding hope. But this was Suzie, his daughter – his little girl – and he wouldn’t let go of her until he had clear, cruel evidence that she was never coming back.
He logged on to his laptop and called up an image: a girl in her mid-teens walking down a sunny street, a high wall on one side, a cobbled roadway sloping down to her left. She was with an older man; she looked serious, perhaps even unhappy, striding out in heels and a knee-length dress. The image, attached to an anonymous email, had arrived in his university inbox only a month before. The message: ‘Could this be your daughter?’ He had waited for a follow-up that never came. There was no ransom demand, no ‘psychic’ medium claiming special knowledge of his daughter’s whereabouts, no taunts from the Internet trolls whose mission in life was to add to the pain and suffering in the world. All he had was the picture and a question he still couldn’t answer.
It could be Suzie – he had aged-up a photograph of his daughter, and there were several similarities – but, maddeningly, the subject’s hair concealed her left temple – which might otherwise have revealed Suzie’s one distinguishing feature: a small diamond-shaped scar from a skateboarding injury when she was ten.
He had turned once more to Kate Simms for help. Simms searched CEOP, ICMEC and Interpol’s FASTID databases and got a big fat nothing. She had worked her contacts in Interpol, and Fennimore did now know that the girl had been photographed in the eighth arrondissement of Paris.
Fennimore scrutinized the photo for the millionth time. The worst of it was, the man in the picture looked familiar. Fennimore was convinced they had met – had tortured himself with that possibility – but he would reach for a name and on the point of recognition, it was gone.
Fennimore had flown to Paris as soon as he got back from the States, had haunted the eighth arrondissement, pestering locals and tourists with the photograph, but it was hopeless.
He opened the Facebook page he had set up on Suzie’s behalf, checking through scores of comments and posts, vetting their content, filtering out the sad cases and the trolls. Finally, he gave up and did what he’d been wanting to do all along: he checked the time – it would be mid-morning in St Louis, not too early – and he Skyped Kate Simms.
She looked lean and tanned, her dark brown hair tied in a ponytail, revealing a face free of make-up and glowing with good health. Kate’s placement with St Louis PD had clearly paid off, adding another notch to her career belt.
‘You just caught me,’ she said, answering the question he didn’t dare ask. ‘I’m at the airport – my plane’s due to leave in less than an hour. I’m guessing this is about your YouTube debut. You’re quite the Internet sensation.’ She smiled, her brown eyes dancing with mischief.
‘Ah, you’ve heard …’
‘Becky told me.’
‘Well, it’s brought out the media hacks,’ he said. ‘It beggars belief – I mean how the hell does a for
ensic lecture go viral, anyway?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, teasing. ‘I guess you could piss off the police – and a load of journalists – call them incompetent for good measure, then upload your tirade on to the Net?’
‘They are incompetent, and I didn’t upload it – a student did. A media studies undergrad and blogger, keen to build a rep.’
‘Well, he did a bang-up job.’
Fennimore winced. ‘You watched it.’
‘Becky sent me the link, too – daughters can be very helpful that way.’
He ran a hand over his face. ‘I’m such an idiot – I had no idea he was recording me.’
‘Digital age, Nick – everyone’s being recorded – all the time.’
‘About that,’ Fennimore said. ‘I rang to tell you that Carl Lazko has called several times.’
Her face froze. ‘What does he want?’
‘The usual, I suppose.’
She took a breath. ‘What will you do?’
‘I’m thinking of heading back to Paris.’
‘The photo again.’ She looked more sad than annoyed. ‘You know, the Paris police checked it out—’
‘Kate, listen – I think I’ve pinpointed the photographer’s location.’
‘Nick—’
‘There’s a bridge about sixty metres upriver on the Seine; he had to be standing on that bridge. He’d need a telephoto lens, but it’s perfect – the angle, elevation, all of it.’
‘I don’t see how that helps,’ she said. ‘Neither do I, but it’s something.’
Truth Will Out Page 3
