Killing Time

by Mark Roberts

  ‘Stay on the line, Gina,’ said Clay. ‘My mind’s racing.’

  The call from switchboard had come as she dropped her four-year-old son Philip off at St Swithin’s Catholic Primary School. Marta Ondřej had been discovered in Wavertree Mystery Park.

  As she passed through the red light at Penny Lane, two lines of city-bound traffic parted to the left and right to make a channel for her as she raced towards the junction of Smithdown Road and Grant Avenue. Drivers stuck at the red light there edged forward nervously and she was forced to slow down to make it through safely.

  Marta’s face – the image Clay had circulated from the child’s passport photograph following her disappearance and abduction – filled her mind: fourteen years of age, thick dark hair, olive skin, large brown unsmiling eyes, and a distinct air of vulnerability. Clay wondered with mounting dread what had happened to her in the eight days since she had gone missing.

  An oncoming bus squealed to a sudden halt as Clay turned sharply into Grant Avenue and saw the black railings of the Wavertree Mystery Park. She slowed down and examined the green space behind the black railings, vast and empty and swathed in mist.

  ‘Jesus wept,’ said Riley. ‘Are you OK?’

  Clay had left Philip at the doors of the infant department with his reception teacher’s classroom assistant, explained it was an emergency...

  ‘I think I can see someone, Gina, but I can’t tell from here if they’re male or female. Call the translator, please.’

  ‘Translator’s already on her way. Kate Nowak.’

  Good, thought Clay. The translator they’d used since the day of Marta’s disappearance was efficient and discreet.

  ‘See you there,’ said Riley.

  Clay turned off her siren and parked on the pavement alongside a gate into the wide-open park. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a brown robe, head-dress and sandals on the back seat: the costume her son was supposed to wear for the rehearsal of the nativity play today. He was Joseph, but she’d forgotten to hand it over to him as she dropped him off.

  Frosted grass crunched like breaking glass beneath Clay’s feet as she sprinted in the direction of the lone figure. A gang of seagulls erupted into the air as she hurried into their space and, with each step nearer, Clay saw the figure shift from its feet to its knees.

  It placed its hands in front of itself, pressed its face into the earth and appeared to be eating snow and ice.

  Sirens advanced from three directions and cold air overwhelmed her senses as the figure beyond her breath became a small, thin female. The black anorak, green skirt and black ankle boots that she had been dressed in on the day of her disappearance had been replaced by a pair of pyjamas.

  She lifted her face from the snow and smacked her lips.

  The girl’s thick black hair was gone and her head was covered with rough patches of stubble. Clay’s heart sank further when she read deadness in the girl’s face and a mesmerised glaze in her eyes. You look like you’ve just come out of a concentration camp, thought Clay, sickness hitting her hard at the core.

  It was Marta Ondřej, a child Clay believed she would never see alive.

  Clay slowed down and stopped, maintaining a distance from the child. A wave of pure relief swept through her as, double-checking the face, she confirmed to herself that she was metres away from the missing girl they’d been searching for.

  ‘Marta,’ said Clay with kindness, as she edged closer, her hands held up in semi-surrender. ‘Marta Ondřej.’

  Her mother had confirmed that her daughter had almost no English.

  ‘Marta.’ Clay smiled as she stooped down.

  Slowly, Marta stood up and turned her back on Clay.

  As she walked around Marta, Clay held out her hands and summoned up all her strength to smile. ‘Marta? Marta Ondřej? It’s OK, Marta. I’m a policewoman.’

  Clay recalled the second statement that Marta’s mother had made about her daughter. Marta is simple, a retard, not full in the head. She is fourteen in years but four in the head. She is a child.

  She indicated herself, smiled and spoke the words of Czech she had learned for this eventuality. ‘Policistka.’

  She checked Marta’s features against the photograph that had been circulated within hours of her abduction. The child shivered in the morning cold and continued to look through Clay in silence. Marta turned her head slightly at the sound of footsteps heading towards her, then looked round at Clay with terror.

  ‘Keep back!’ said Clay.

  Detective Sergeant Karl Stone and Detective Sergeant Gina Riley stopped at a short distance. Clay looked down at the child’s fists, clenched at the sides of her body, and saw a silver foil at her feet.

  ‘Eve?’ Riley whispered through the mist. ‘Central switchboard has the mobile number of the woman who found Marta and called 999. But she’s switched her phone off.’

  ‘Do we have a name for her yet?’ asked Clay, reaching a hand out towards Marta, imagining her own son in a foreign country, abducted and missing for a week and approached by the police. ‘Please don’t be frightened, Marta. Please, Marta.’

  The child held out her left hand, touched Clay’s fingers.

  ‘The caller’s name is Lucy Bell. No one by that name’s known to us in Merseyside. There are some on the National Police Computer. That’s all we’ve got for now. We’re tracking her down via O2, her mobile service provider.’

  ‘What the hell was Lucy thinking of?’ asked Clay, bottling the anger and frustration inside her, digging deep to glaze her voice with as much sweetness as she could muster. ‘OK, Marta?’ She smiled and covered the girl’s frozen hands with her own. She waltzes off, thought Clay, leaving you unattended.

  ‘Lucy?’ Clay directed the question at Marta.

  Marta didn’t react. DS Stone picked up the foil and placed it into a small evidence bag.

  Did Lucy give you chocolate? thought Clay, looking at the distance to the shops on Smithdown Road, and deducing that if Lucy Bell had given chocolate to Marta she’d had it on her.

  An ambulance turned the corner from the Picton Sports Arena and travelled across the grass towards them, the siren stopping as it drew closer.

  ‘Want me to go with Marta, Eve?’ asked Riley.

  ‘Please, Gina,’ replied Clay. ‘Call Kate and tell her to meet you at Alder Hey in the Park.’

  ‘How long do you want me to stay with her?’

  ‘Until she talks.’

  Riley presented herself to Marta and smiled, ‘It’s OK, love, I’m a policewoman. Look!’ She showed Marta her warrant card. ‘Policewoman.’

  ‘Policie Žena,’ confirmed Clay.

  Marta’s face creased into a mask of fathomless sorrow and her eyes filled up with tears.

  As the ambulance slowed to a halt, Riley placed an arm around Marta and held her closer to her side. Clay took a discreet series of pictures: shaven-headed face full on; a whole picture of her front; head to toe; her profile as she turned; the back of her head as she walked with Riley towards the ambulance; a head-to-toe view from the back.

  ‘Come on, Marta,’ said Riley. She found the girl’s hand and folded her fingers around hers. ‘My goodness, I can feel your ribs poking out.’

  Clay noticed the way Marta walked, her feet flipping up as if she had to think through the process, step by painful step. Taking a deep breath, she composed a brief email to Detective Sergeant Barney Cole, the team’s anchor man in the incident room at Trinity Road Police Station, and fired it off with a boulder-like heart.

  In her hand, Clay’s phone rang out; she saw it was from Detective Sergeant Bill Hendricks.

  ‘Where are you, Bill?’ asked Clay.

  ‘It’s shaping up to be one of those days, Eve. I was on my way over to the Mystery when I got a call from switchboard. I’m on my way to 682 Picton Road. It looks like an arson attack. The woman who reported it said there were two men living in the flat.’

  ‘I’ll meet you there,’ said Clay, running back to her
car, an invisible vice tightening around her skull as a vision formed of a child-abducting monster whose cruelty knew no bounds.

  2

  9.14 am

  In the incident room at Trinity Road Police Station, Detective Constable Barney Cole stood up from his desk and walked to the large plate-glass window, feeling that the muscles in his buttocks were about to spasm into cramp after long days sitting in front of his laptop and waiting for the phone to ring with some good news.

  In spite of a massive campaign in the media for public help, there hadn’t been a single sighting of Marta. A dedicated team had looked at hours of CCTV footage within a one-mile radius of Marta’s house, and not one image of her had emerged. A bitter conclusion had been reached and generally accepted: the perpetrator or perpetrators were wise to the CCTV in the neighbourhood.

  Cole recalled his first visit to Marta’s house, accompanied by Kate Nowak, and his conversation with the girl’s mother, Verka. Just over three weeks after landing in England from the Czech Republic with her mother, Marta walked out of the shared house on Smithdown Lane that she had lived in since she’d arrived in Liverpool. Of her seven Roma Czech housemates, three were women, two were men and two were children under the age of ten. All had been quickly ruled out as suspects in the abduction case, their rage and sorrow at Marta’s abduction as genuine as their unshakeable alibis.

  Waking up from a catnap that had turned into a two-hour sleep, Verka Ondřej had reported her fourteen-year-old daughter missing at Admiral Street police station, twenty metres away from her home at 101 Smithdown Lane.

  Cole turned his back on the mocking fog and went back to his desk where he remained on his feet, and called up the slide show on his laptop of the three available images of Marta supplied by her mother.

  Marta the new-born baby, wrapped in a white blanket with several holes in it, her face the only part of her body visible, brown eyes as large as saucers set in soft and perfect olive skin.

  In the next image, Marta, aged three, was walking down a road in a village that looked like it had come through the fiercest battle in a medieval war of attrition.

  Not for the first time, Cole did the maths, and rechecked his sums on deprivation. The picture was from 2009. The toddler-sized Manchester United top and shirt looked fifth-hand and was the Red Devils’ official home kit in the 2001–2002 season, making Marta a child born at the bottom of a barrel.

  As he paused on her passport photograph, Cole heard the incident room door open and looked up as Detective Constable Clive Winters entered the room.

  ‘How was your leave in the Lakes?’ asked Cole.

  ‘Great food, shit weather. Wrong time of year to go but Mae insisted. It was her fortieth, after all, so I just said Yeah.’ Winters fell silent, the smile on his face fading. ‘What’s up, Barney?’

  ‘Marta Ondřej.’

  ‘I just heard. Brilliant news. She was found alive.’

  ‘That’s the good news.’

  ‘What’s the bad?’

  ‘We don’t know what’s happened to her in the last eight days.’

  ‘Where is she?’ asked Winters.

  ‘She’s on her way to Alder Hey with Gina Riley.’

  ‘Gina’s great with kids. She’s in the best hands, Barney.’

  ‘I know that. Eve emailed me from the Mystery. She wrote, She’s silent and traumatised. I fear the worst. I phoned Eve and asked for clarification.’

  Winters pulled up a chair and asked, ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Eve said they shaved her head and dressed her up like she’s just come out of Dachau. She’s pretty certain there were racial dimensions to the abduction, so she’s asked all the duty superintendents to put out an instruction. Any reports of racially motivated violence on Merseyside get reported back to me.’ Cole shook his head and remembered a second visit to Marta’s home to show solidarity to her mother Verka, in spite of the frustrating news that there was no sign of Marta.

  ‘Are we still searching the Williamson Tunnels?’ asked Winters. ‘There are loads of ways in for a nosey kid.’

  ‘We called our subterranean search off – manpower issue. But both Williamson Societies have got volunteers down there as we speak. Shit!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I have to tell them to stop searching. Marta’s mother was sure she wasn’t down there – she doesn’t like enclosed spaces and is scared crazy of the dark, but we had to search just in case. Given the complete lack of CCTV sightings, it seemed like a possibility.’

  On his desk, Cole heard the ping of an incoming email, picked up his iPhone and saw there were images attached to the incoming message. Barney, please circulate the attached images of Marta Ondřej to the whole team. Eve.

  Cole opened the first image and again muttered, ‘Shit!’

  Winters moved to Cole’s side and looked over his shoulder at a close-up of Marta’s head and face, her scalp littered with rough patches of stubble.

  ‘Why would they do such a thing?’ asked Winters.

  Cole moved to the next image, a full shot of Marta, head to toe.

  In profile, Marta’s face had an air of defeat that made Cole recall his own teenage sons, smiling past themselves because being alive was such a wonderful thing, and he hoped that they’d never have cause to look as forlorn as this girl.

  Beneath the stubble on the back of her head, there were natural bumps and hollows that gave her skull the appearance of an alien planet created by a sick and twisted god.

  Taking a deep breath, he sent the images to the whole team.

  Cole felt the weight of Winters’s hands as he patted him on either shoulder.

  ‘Come on, mate,’ said Winters. ‘She’s still alive, right?’

  ‘Right,’ said Cole, with as much positivity as he could muster.

  ‘Where there’s life there’s hope and all that jazz, eh?’

  3

  9.15 am

  Clay looked up and down Picton Road, from the sealed-off end at the junction of Rathbone Road and Wellington Road to the Picton Clock Tower at the other. An airplane sobbed above her, and the noise drew her attention to the open window on the first floor of the Polish delicatessen. The deadness of the blackened glass made her shudder.

  She scanned the shop fronts stretching away from the delicatessen and saw a single CCTV mounted above a mini-market, pointing directly at her.

  Footsteps approached, and DS Karl Stone walked towards her.

  ‘What’s happening?’ asked Clay.

  ‘Mr Zięba, the deli owner, is at the crime tape by the clock tower. He confirmed to me that the flat above the deli is his property and that the people who live in it are his tenants. He understands that he can’t cross the line but he’s understandably rattled. I’ve got his full contact details.’

  ‘Karl, tell him he’ll be the first civilian to come back into Picton Road when we’re done here and we’re working hard to make that sooner rather than later. Go back and ask him about his tenants and see if you can get him to spill the beans on them, please.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘There’s one CCTV camera working in our favour.’ She pointed. ‘Track down the owner of the mini-market and pull all the footage from the last twenty-four hours. Send anything from it to Barney Cole and ask him to get Sergeant Carol White to drop what she’s doing and focus on what that camera comes up with.’

  As Clay walked to the back of the stationary fire appliance, a pair of firefighters stepped out of the narrow front doorway leading to the flat above the deli.

  ‘Eve?’

  She recognised the voice: Steve Doyle, a senior firefighter, who beckoned the two scouts towards him.

  ‘Beat me to it, did you, Steve?’

  Steve Doyle indicated the fire appliance. ‘When it comes to clearing traffic...’

  ‘Yours is bigger than mine. I know, you’ve told me many, many times.’

  As the firefighters walked towards them, they lifted their visors and Clay was surprised at t
he contrast between the youth of the woman and the maturity of the man: two people at opposite ends of the career spectrum.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Doyle. ‘Thank you for going in.’

  Clay saw the distress on both their faces, the sweat in their hair and on their foreheads. She showed them her warrant card.

  ‘Was the window open when you went into the building?’ she asked.

  ‘I opened it,’ said the man. ‘The fire’s burned out. It’s contained to one room, the room with the open window. It’s a bedroom. There are two bodies in there. There’s also a kitchen, a bathroom and a box room. No other bodies in those rooms. There’s some evidence of graffiti on the wall of the bedroom. It looks like whoever’s killed these people has tried to burn out any evidence leading back to them.’

  ‘What’s your hunch on the fire accelerant?’ asked Doyle.

  ‘Petrol,’ said the young female firefighter. ‘But we won’t know for sure until the fire investigator has a chance to look inside.’

  ‘Are you sure it was murder?’ asked Clay. ‘Not a case of joint suicide or an accident?’

  ‘Wait until you go inside,’ said the woman. ‘It’s so strange. You’ll see how the bodies have been arranged.’

  Clay nodded and said, ‘Thank you for that.’ She focused on Doyle. ‘How long before I can go in?’

  He pointed at a firefighter setting up a large red fan in the main doorway to the flat and replied, ‘Once there’s a channel of air running through the building and I’ve filled in the incident handover form, you’re in charge, Eve, but we need to make absolutely sure that it’s safe for you to go in first.’

  Clay looked around and noticed a tall, dark-haired woman standing on the pavement four doors down, staring into space.

  ‘Is she our 999 caller?’ asked Clay

  ‘Yes,’ said Doyle. ‘Her name’s Aneta Kaloza. She’s Polish.’

  Clay heard the chopping of the silver blades inside the red fan’s cage.

  ‘Does she speak English?’