by Louise Voss
Alice opened the door a crack. Eileen stood there frowning at her. ‘What’s all that racket?’
‘Just having a laugh with my mates, Nan.’
‘And don’t call me Nan. You know I hate it!’ snapped Eileen. Alice looked pained and blushed. All her friends called their grandmothers ‘Nan’, but Sean, Helen and Eileen insisted on ‘Granny’. Why did they have to be such snobs? Fake snobs at that. When Granny wasn’t concentrating she sounded like she was off The Only Way is Essex. Alice turned and glanced over her shoulder to see Georgia and Larry making faces at each other.
‘What is it you wanted, Nan?’ she said, through the gap in the door.
Eileen put her hands on her hips. ‘It’s not right, Alice Philips, you and your friends messing around and laughing when your sister’s been kidnapped.’
Alice rolled her eyes. ‘For God’s sake. Do you expect me to sit in silence all day? Am I not allowed to try and take my mind off it for a bloody second?’
‘Don’t you use that tone with me, madam.’
Eileen was working herself up into a righteous frenzy, but Alice banged the door shut in her face. She pulled the iPod from the dock and grabbed her denim jacket, purse and mobile. ‘Come on, let’s go. I’m not sticking around to be harassed by that old bag.’
‘We’ll go and see Jerome down the estate,’ said Larry. ‘Got a bit of business to do – you two can come with me.’
‘Jerome? Do we have to?’ Georgia said.
‘Yeah,’ Alice agreed. ‘And I’m sure he shags that dog. He’s totally in love with it.’
Georgia giggled and Larry pulled a face. ‘You’re sick.’
‘Thanks,’ said Alice.
He swiped at her. ‘Not that kind of sick. But he wants to see me. Can’t not go, can I?’
Georgia and Alice exchanged a look. Alice said, ‘I suppose not. You go, then, Laz, and we’ll catch you this evening. I’ve totally got enough stress in my life without having to deal with that freak on top of everything else. Let’s go to your place, Georgia, yeah?’
Alice opened the door and barged past her grandmother.
‘Awright, Nan?’ asked Larry, in a neutral tone that could either have been just barely polite, or downright mocking. Alice saw him look Eileen up and down, taking in her man-made fibres and bad perm. Eileen was definitely far more of a Nan than a Granny.
‘How dare you talk to me like that, young man?’ Eileen’s already red face was puce with rage.
‘Hiya Mrs Philips,’ muttered Georgia, trying to be conciliatory, but it was too late.
‘You’re grounded!’ Eileen shrieked, pulling at Alice’s sleeve.
Alice turned and faced her. ‘You’ve got to be fucking joking! Call yourself my granny? You’re a stranger to me! We don’t want you here. None of us do ‒ not me or Helen or Dad, so why don’t you just sod off back to your Essex caravan site or estate or wherever that horrible place you live is, and leave us alone?’
The three of them ran down the stairs, out the back door, and through the garden gate into the back alley, to avoid the two bored photographers still hanging around at the front.
‘Laters, Lazzer,’ Alice said, hugging Larry round the waist. He kissed her deeply, as Georgia averted her eyes and lit a cigarette. ‘Don’t get eaten by Rihanna, will you?’
Larry hesitated in the doorway outside the dirtiest of the tower blocks that littered the estate, as though they’d been dropped there randomly from outer space. The wire-reinforced glass doors were so filthy that even he, who could hardly describe himself as fastidious, didn’t want to touch anything. Heart in mouth, he reluctantly slipped into the lobby just as the lift doors pinged and slid open.
Jerome stood there, looking equally intimidating and ridiculous in huge gleaming metallic trainers, freshly shaved head, a silver leather jacket, and jeans of such thick, new stiff denim that Larry thought they would stand up by themselves if Jerome’s short legs hadn’t been in them. The dog had a matching silver collar and lead and was snarling softly.
Larry’s mouth went dry and he felt suddenly preppy and immature in his OBEY sweatshirt and Vans, even though he wouldn’t be caught dead wearing the sort of gear Jerome was sporting. ‘Alright Jerome?’
‘What are you doing here?’ He gestured threateningly towards him and the dog upgraded its snarl to a sudden growling bark, straining towards him on its designer lead.
‘You texted, said you wanted to …’ but Jerome didn’t let Larry finish.
‘I hope you ain’t brought me no more phones. I ain’t doing phones no more, so don’t pester me with that shit. I’m upgrading into something much fucking bigger.’ He looked around to check no-one was listening, then dropped his voice. ‘Got a contact for some really good shit. Skunk. And as it goes, I might need a few more kids who can spread the good news around the local colleges an’ that. You interested? Better cut for you than for the phones, innit.’
‘Maybe. I’ll need to think about it.’
‘Whatever,’ said Jerome, making a face to imply that only pussies ever thought about anything. ‘I’ll give you ten minutes to think about it, since I’m in a good mood, so I’ll let you come with me while I take RiRi for her morning constitutional, and we can talk business. Let’s go.’
Larry followed Jerome meekly as they processed around the estate, stopping at every corner for the dog to sniff and squat. Eventually it took an enormous crap, which Jerome of course left in a steaming pile on the ground near the estate’s pitiful excuse for a playground – one rusty swing and a roundabout with most of the railings snapped off it. Despite his nerves, Larry had to suppress a grin at the idea that Jerome would ever have pulled a roll of poo bags out of his silver leather jacket, picked up the dogshit and disposed of it in the nearest bin. As if!
‘What are you smirking at, you tosser?’ Jerome snapped at him.
‘Nothing!’ Larry said hastily.
Jerome came right up to him, so close that he could see the tinge of his pallor and the open pores on his nose. ‘You disrespecting me?’
‘No, Jerome.’ Suddenly Larry really wished he’d gone with the girls back to Georgia’s place.
Something caught Jerome’s eye over Larry’s shoulder and he jerked his head up, laughing cruelly. ‘Oh man. My day just got a whole lot better. Look who it is – the Crazy Baby Lady.’
Larry glanced behind him to see a very small, very wide old lady swaddled up, despite the heat of the day, in so many layers of drab clothing that she could hardly walk. She had dirty silver gaffer tape holding her shoes together, and her scalp showed through a few remaining wisps of candyfloss hair. The lady was pushing – or, rather, hanging on to – the handle of a very old-fashioned rusty pram that was full of something Larry couldn’t quite make out at first.
‘She’s well old,’ Larry commented. ‘Why’s she got that pram?’
‘Cos her “baby” ’s in there, innit. All her babies.’ Jerome laughed meanly and a shiver ran up Larry’s back. What sort of babies would that homeless-looking woman have? Dead foetuses? Mangy old cats, perhaps. Frankie’s innocent face flashed through his mind, and he shivered again. There were so many weirdos in the world.
But at that moment, he’d have chosen the Crazy Baby Lady over Jerome, any time.
Jerome pimp-rolled over to the old woman and her hooded red eyes flashed with fear and fury.
‘Git aways from me!’ she screeched, trying to turn the heavy old pram. She pointed at him with a shaky finger. ‘You’re a bad man!’
Jerome mimicked her in a high-pitched mocking voice. Then he stuck his face close to hers and dropped his voice two octaves. ‘You is right. I is a BAD man.’ He was showing off, thought Larry with disdain.
Jerome darted his hand into the pram which, Larry saw with a brief shock of cognizance that he felt physically in his belly, was full of dolls. Dirty, charity shop sad cases, rag dolls with stuffing spilling out, naked Barbies with matted hair, blank Bratz dolls wearing nothing but stilettos and bras. They w
ere all piled on top of each other, reminding Larry of when they studied the Holocaust in Year Nine, the unforgettable images of naked gassed bodies in unspeakable heaps that, although he never admitted it to anyone, gave him nightmares for weeks afterwards.
But Jerome seemed to know exactly what he was looking for in his sinister lucky dip. He grabbed at the doll on the top, a slightly cleaner, better-cared-for one in a stained pale blue Babygro. They were supposed to be able to blink, those dolls, although this one had one eye stuck open, and the other stuck shut.
The old woman wailed, a heartrending screech of pain.
‘Give it back, Jerome,’ said Larry, without much conviction.
‘Fuck off, you little twat,’ Jerome responded, waving the doll around by its foot, like a lasso, taunting his dog with it as though the doll was a juicy steak. The woman clutched at Jerome’s arm and he batted her away in disgust. ‘Get your filthy claws off of me, you old hag.’
‘Give me my baby!’ she screeched in a cracked voice. RiRi the dog was working herself up into a frenzy, sensing the tension and aggression in the air, which was doubtless Jerome’s intention, as he kept smiling down at the dog and barking back at it. Then he somehow activated the doll’s crying mechanism, and its thin mechanical high-pitched wail could be heard above the rest of the commotion. Jerome found it hilarious. Larry had had enough.
‘I’ll do it,’ he said abruptly, ‘but in a couple of weeks, yeah? Got a lot on right now. Catch you later.’ He started walking away as more kids gathered, at a safe distance, watching the entertainment with blank faces.
Loud screams broke out behind him and when Larry turned around he saw the old woman on her knees trying to reach into RiRi’s jaws, where the dog had hold of the doll and was violently shaking it into several separate bits, limbs flying, the head rolling off and bouncing on the tarmac.
Jerome stood by with his arms crossed, laughing as though it was the funniest thing he had ever seen. Then he kicked the pram over, scattering all the other dolls.
Oh man, thought Larry. What have I let myself in for?
Chapter 18
Patrick – Day 3
Patrick gathered together all the members of the team in the incident room, with a couple of notable exceptions; Winkler was missing – no one was sure where he was but Patrick was hardly cut up about it – and the DCI, as he was trying to think of her, was in a meeting with the Deputy Commissioner. But everyone else was here, all focussing intently on the large square photograph pinned to the centre of the board.
‘Denise Breem,’ Patrick said. ‘Everyone recognize the name?’
Mike was first to respond. ‘Caspar Doyle’s missus.’
The name Caspar Doyle sent a shudder of revulsion through the room from both sexes. Seven years ago, Doyle had been convicted of abducting and murdering ten-year-old twins, Lucy and Kelly Draper, who had been on their way home from school. He had brutally raped them before stabbing them to death and attempting to bury them in the back garden of his terraced house. Fortunately, a neighbour had heard him digging up his lawn at midnight and called the police. Two days later, after refusing to speak in interviews and threatening to go on hunger strike, Doyle had hanged himself in his cell.
The police had always suspected that Doyle’s girlfriend, Denise Breem, had helped him abduct the girls by luring them to the house. She, or someone matching her description, had been seen hanging around the school in the days immediately before the two girls were murdered. But there was no evidence, she denied everything and, with Doyle dead, it was impossible to make a case against her. To the sickened frustration of every officer involved, they’d had to let her go. With no charges, she wasn’t on any registers and her record was clean.
‘What do we know about her?’ Patrick asked. ‘She was twenty-four at the time, so she’s thirty-one now. Brought up on the Kennedy Estate, both parents on long-term sick, her dad, by all accounts, a violent, drunken scumbag. Denise left school at sixteen, no qualifications, a couple of convictions for shoplifting to her name.’
‘Wasn’t there some … incident with her sister?’ Carmella asked.
‘Well remembered. Yes, when Denise was fourteen, her ten-year-old sister was taken into care after social workers discovered that a friend of her parents, a guy called Steve McLean, had sexually assaulted her. McLean was living with the family at the time as their lodger. According to the reports from the time, the whole family blamed the little girl, as if she was some kind of Lolita and he was an innocent victim.’
Heads shook and voices murmured darkly around the room.
‘But the social workers didn’t think Denise was in any danger after McLean was put away, and Denise denied that he’d touched her too. When questioned about it when she was being interviewed about the Boyle case, Denise said her sister was “a little slut who was asking for it” … But none of that matters right now. All that matters is that Denise is the only person with any kind of record we can find on the list from the Eleven O’Clock Club that all three of our abducted children attended.’
‘What the hell was she doing there?’ Mike asked.
‘I’ll come to that in a moment,’ Patrick replied. ‘First, this afternoon I interviewed Bowie Hollister—’
He ignored the sniggers.
‘—a seven-year-old boy who says he saw Liam McConnell being taken from his mum’s Audi … by a woman.’ He explained the rest of what Bowie had said and as he spoke he could feel it: that buzz in the air, as it seemed that finally they were getting somewhere. ‘Bowie has been with a sketch artist here this afternoon. And this is what he came up with.’
Enjoying the theatricality of it, Patrick lifted the enlarged sketch from where it lay face down on the table and pinned it to the board beside the photo of Denise.
‘Fuck! It’s her,’ Mike said, as most of the other detectives in the room made similar noises.
‘It could be her,’ Patrick corrected him. ‘The woman in the sketch appears to have the same dark, frizzy hair, the same shaped face, similar features.’
‘The same cruel lips,’ Carmella interjected.
‘Very poetic, Carmella. Perhaps. But there are a lot of women who look like this.’
‘I’ve been out with a few of them,’ wisecracked a DC from the back of the room.
‘I need a detective to go through the CCTV from Sainsbury’s again, looking for Denise. Preet, can you do that please?’ He made a mental note also to ask Preet Gupta if she knew where Winkler, her supposed partner, had got to.
‘Also,’ Carmella continued, ‘Zoe McConnell said that she thought a man bumped her on her way into the supermarket, which was how we assumed she lost her car key.’
Patrick said, ‘Mike, can you talk to Mrs McConnell again, find out if she is certain the person who bumped her was a man? I don’t think she’d be mistaken about that though – in which case we can assume there were two of them working together. The man bumped Zoe, then passed the key to his female accomplice.’
Mike was deep in thought. ‘If McLean is out of prison now, which I guess he would be if it was ten years ago, maybe he and Denise have hooked up – he has a hold over her from when she was a kid. And now she’s helping him procure other kids … a cycle of abuse.’
‘It’s a theory,’ Patrick agreed.
With the room buzzing, Patrick explained what Denise had been doing at the Dads’ Club. He caught Carmella’s eye. ‘Let’s go and find Denise Breem.’
The Helping Hands Agency was based in a cramped, dingy office above a KFC in Whitton, the smell of fried chicken hanging in the air and making Patrick’s stomach growl. He told the woman who ran the agency, which provided temps for manual work – cleaning, menial factory work, jobs on building sites, and so on – who they were looking for and watched her press her lips together until they turned white.
‘Hounding that poor woman, are you?’ The owner, Sarah Mason, was in her early fifties with dyed pillar-box-red hair.
‘You know about her past?’
‘Yeah, of course. She told me all about how the police tried to stitch her up.’
‘And you sent her to work as a cleaner at a club for children?’
Sarah Mason’s eyes were full of contempt, a look that bounced off Patrick like a bullet off Kevlar. ‘She loves kids. Just because she made the mistake of going out with a scumbag.’ Her eyes watered, and Patrick understood why this woman felt empathy for Denise Breem. She saw them both as women who’d been let down by men, nothing more.
Carmella leaned in. ‘Ms Mason, we don’t have time to chat about this all day. We need to know where Denise is right now.’
‘And before you argue,’ Patrick added, ‘and start going on about rights and privacy and whatever, save your breath. This is a murder investigation. You might be the one in a million who thinks Denise is Snow White, but if the tabloids find out you tried to protect her, I don’t think you’ll have many clients wanting your helping hands any more.’
Walking out, Patrick felt no pride, just grim satisfaction. This, right here, right now, was the point in the investigation where the ends justified the means. The only thing that mattered was finding those kids.
They pulled up outside Freshtime Foods, a hangar-shaped architectural carbuncle based on the edge of an industrial estate in nearby Feltham. Patrick took off his sunglasses as he got out of the car, sweat prickling his armpits, the air thick and chewy. Carmella followed him into the building, appearing cool and fragrant as always, even as they pushed through the hanging plastic slats across the doorway into the stifling heat of the factory. Patrick had worked in a place like this once, during the summer holidays when he was a sixth-former, back at the height of his Goth days, when he always went out wearing make-up. He’d made the mistake of forgetting to remove his eyeliner before coming in to work one day. The meatheads who staffed the factory had loved that, giving him the nickname Rambo. Leaving that factory after a summer picking black cornflakes off a production line had been one of the happiest moments of his life.
A man wearing a foreman’s uniform approached immediately.
