‘Twenty six. But yer wastin’ yer time.’
‘I’ll take my chances. Give me the key card for that room. Please.’
She pushes a key card into the machine.
‘There you go. Have you got a warrant?’
‘Just open the doors so we can go upstairs. Please.’
We hurry upstairs and open the door. The room is bare except for a little girl sitting on the floor beside the bed. She isn’t crying now but her shoulders move up and down with the deep sobs she makes every now and again. She’s clutching a teddy bear. I pull out my ever-present protective gloves from my pocket and pull them on. The television has been left on the news channel and I see a close-up of myself and hear my voice loudly echo through the Travelodge corridors.
‘Get Petra’s team up here.’
Lauren calls Petra and I look at the girl. She’s about one year old and she starts to cry again as I pick her up. Steve comes over.
‘Thank God for that. I thought we weren’t going to find her.’
I look at him. The little girls grabs hold of my hair and pulls it hard.
‘Steve. This isn’t Maisie.’
He visibly pales.
‘Who the fuck is it then?’
I hand the little girl to Lauren and reach inside my handbag for a cotton bud. I wipe the bud on the side of her mouth where her soother has left a smear of saliva. I unwrap the plastic cup from the side of the sink in the room and use the plastic bag that covers it to contain the bud.
‘I’m going back to Central Park to get this tested. This little girl needs to be checked over in hospital. Lauren, can you arrange for that, please. This room needs to be sealed off. Where’s the woman who phoned this in?’
One of the officers leads Steve and I to the next room. A middle aged woman and a younger man are sitting on the bed.
‘Is it her? Is it that little Maisie?’
‘Unfortunately not. But we’ll need some information from you to find her mother. She tells us that she heard the door slam at around ten o’clock this morning and heard footsteps outside her door, then a fire door shutting farther up the corridor. Then the baby had started to cry. She had only seen the back of the woman the evening before as she went into the room. She was short and thin with a light blond ponytail.
We go to reception next.
‘So what did the girl say when she left?’
The receptionist is no more helpful than when we arrived.
‘Didn’t say anything. Just gave me the card.’
‘How did she pay?’
‘Cash. Upfront. For two more nights.’
Steve looks through the side window at the car park.
‘What car was she driving?’
She looks up now and stares at us.
‘How do I know?’
He leans over the desk.
‘Because you have a camera on the car park. Wind it back.’
‘I don’t know how. Not my job.’
He loses it. He jumps over the desk and she stumbles backwards. He’s operating the CCTV, running it backwards. A minute, two minutes go by and the woman picks up her phone. I face her off.
‘Put it down. Just leave it alone. Can’t you see how important this is?’
She puts the phone down and Steve beckons to me to come behind the counter. He runs the CCTV forwards and we see a woman carrying a child climb into the front seat of a silver Range Rover. The car’s parked under some trees, out of sight of the road. No one would see it there. He zooms in but we can only see the back of her, or, as she climbs into the car, her face sideways on, and there, in her arms, Maisie. It’s clear from the footage that she’s crying. It’s also clear that the woman can’t hear her as she’s wearing earphones. She straps Maisie into the front seat then gets out and opens the back doors. We both lean closer. She’s checking something that we can’t see.
We watch as she starts the car and every nerve in my body is on edge as she almost crashes into a bollard in the car park. It wouldn’t take much to cause a chemical reaction in the back of the car and Steve face contorts as she turns the car sharply in the car park. We watch as she follows the road to the roundabout, and then turns off and drives towards Oldham town centre. I get out my phone and call Keith.
‘It’s not Maisie. But we’ve seen the perpetrator. It’s a woman. Aged approximately twenty five to thirty years old. She’s in the car with Maisie on the move. She travelled towards Oldham at around ten fifteen this morning but she was still in the area we observed her in when she called us. She’s on the move so easier to find. Can you tell operations to focus their search please?’
‘Roger that, Jan.’
‘And can you get someone down here to get this CCTV. Apparently the staff don’t know how to work it.’
I end the call and go outside with Steve. One of the officers is guarding the door now and he briefs him on the position of the car in the car park for when SOCO turns up. The woman from social services leaves with the little girl and Lauren accompanies her. As she passes me I see the trace of a smile on her lips, but she can’t meet my eyes.
Steve goes outside and lights a cigarette. I’m immediately back in my old life, where I dank in expensive whiskey in expensive bars and smoked twenty a day. Where my motto was to always wake up and go to bed on different days. Where I light a cigarette at the traffic lights, sucking in the smoke as I throw my lighter on the dashboard. More traffic now, the air turns acrid and I drive a little faster to get home quicker, laughing at my concern over the London air quality when I’m smoking and rocking backwards and forwards to Red Hot Chilli Peppers Give it Away . It’s me though. Through and through. Late nights, loud music, cigarettes and alcohol. I remember thinking that I’d hold onto it as long as I could, no matter what happened. I try to hold onto the decaying memory by breathing in the smoke from Steve’s cigarette but, like everything else, it drifts away and I’m left alone with my new life.
Steve’s paler than before, even, and his hand shakes slightly. It’s not nerves. I’ve seen him like this before. It’s frustration. We all feel it when cases become more and more complex and every step closer means two steps farther away from the solution.
‘Who is she? Who is she, Jan?’
I’ve been asking myself the same question. Who is she and who is the little girl in the room? Surely she hadn’t left her own child?
‘My best guess is she’s someone who knows about Magellan. Someone’s sister? Girlfriend? But why would she attempt this on her own? It doesn’t make sense, Steve. But I’ve asked Pat to interview Glen Wright again. Maybe he’ll come up with something.’
Steve drives me back to headquarters and drops me off outside the lab building.
‘Give us a call when you’re ready to come back. I don’t want you walking around on your own.’
I nod and slam the door. I know he’s watching me until I pass the reception area. Until I’m safe. Like a dad dropping his daughter off at a disco, make sure she gets in OK, and no harm comes to her. But he can’t protect me. The people who are after me now are ruthless. I already know the length they’ll go to. And their reasoning isn’t like ours. It’s different goalposts, a rationale based on badness and point-scoring revenge rather than justice and fairness.
I carry on towards Petra’s lab and she’s waiting for me. I produce the cotton bud.
‘How long to compare it with the soother found at the scene?’
She takes the bag from me.
‘Couple of hours. Two, maybe three. I’ll mark it as extremely urgent.’
‘I already know the results. But we’ll need this to close the circle. Your team are up there, looking at the room. It’s a woman, Petra. With a baby. She’s ditched her baby in the hotel. A little girl.’
Petra puts her hand on my arm. She knows me well. She knows when my carefully pressed-down undercurrent of sadness is about to burst out. She tilts her head to one side.
‘It’s OK Jan. The little girl is safe with us. Now we must f
ind the other little girl. The original one. Maisie. Be brave, Jan.’
I’m trying. I really am. I leave the lab and stand in the hallway outside, wondering about the woman and Maisie. She was holding her tight, like she would her own child. There is no sign of cruelty. She appeared to put her in a child seat in the front of the car. I find myself wondering about the fumes from the chemicals and if they could affect someone so much that they made rash decision like abandoning their child. Then it strikes me that the child in the hotel might not be her child. She could easily be another child she has abducted.
I’m shocked to realise that I’ve made an assumption. I’ve let my emotions rule me, probably because of my disagreement with Lauren. I’ve worked on an unproven premise. I’ve no proof at all that the child is related to the woman who has Maisie. I walk out of the lab building and onto the concrete frontage to Central Park. It’s sunny day and I’m telling myself that I have to keep my eye on the ball, stick to the evidence I’m building. I see the press vans in the distance with their huge satellite dishes and the news anchors leaning against the lamp posts, smoking and drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups.
I carry on walking and think how Styrofoam cups are bad for people and how it would be better to serve coffee in paper cups when I suddenly realise I’m fully exposed in an open space. I see the clear blue sky above me and the line of trees in the distance and make for the main building. As I step onto the tarmac and go to cross the Gateway road I feel the whoosh of a car moving very quickly behind me and I jump backwards, toppling into a grass verge at the side if the road.
I look up and see a dark blue BMW speeding towards the Manchester Road. I get up and run to the main building, coasting past the news vans and fielding any queries. Once inside I pull out the comms phone to silence the urgent buzzing and read the inevitable text message waiting for me.
‘That’s a warning, Janet. Kill you next time.’
Keith appears in the reception area, all red and out of breath.
‘You OK?’
I try to recover. I’m not OK, but I have to carry on.
‘Yes. Just give me a minute.’
‘We got the reg. The text was from Central London again.’
My breathing slows a little.
‘They’ll just change cars. Nothing will stop them.’
He looks worried now.
‘Wouldn’t it be better, you know, safer for you, if you went off the case?’
I stand up straight. Like the Japanese proverb says: Fall down seven times, get up eight.
‘But where would I go? Last time they thought they’d got me. This time it won’t be over until it’s done. They’d just find me. So I might as well stay here.’
I see it slowly dawn on him what has happened and what I have to do now. He’s imagining being unable to go anywhere for fear of attack, of being unable to go home. In that split second I look out of the window and over the hills, towards the moors. The purple stretches of heather and the craggy outcrops that create sinister shadows at night. On the other side, the city I love.
It’s a varied landscape to my life. And although I can’t go out there now, not with total freedom, for fear of attack, I can still do my job as long as the team feel safe with me and fight my battle to the end. I think to myself, as I watch the tall clouds move over the hills and towards the city ever famous for its rainy days that I can’t think of a better place to die.
Chapter Sixteen
We go upstairs and, before we even have time to assess what just happened, Pat calls.
‘I’m just about to start interviewing Glen Wright. Seems he’s feeling a bit better. But before I do I heard…’
I move into a side room. I know what Pat in going to say.
‘Yes. You heard right. But it was inevitable, wasn’t it?’
There’s a long pause.
‘Look, Jan, I…’
‘Don’t Pat, just don’t. It was a total fuck up. We’ve had two years to think about it. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’ll all play out one way or another. So leave it. Yeah?’
A pause again. So I fill in for him.
‘The job, Pat. The job. That’s what’s important, isn’t it? We’ve got to find Maisie Lewis. Believe me; if this hadn’t originated in London and gone national I’d still be safe. Well, relatively safe.’ I know I’m rubbing salt into an old wound so I change direction. ‘You got the latest case info?’
‘Yep. Found a kid but not the kid we want. Yep.’
‘Great. So either Glen Wright or any of the other Magellan must know what who that is someone on the edge of their lives, and their motivation. What this is about. Then we’ll have some idea what they intend to do.’
This is the bit where he usually argues that it’s not his field, motivation. That he’s not a fucking mind reader. He doesn’t have a crystal ball. But instead he says just one word.
‘Sorry.’
I end the call. It’s too late for sorry. It’s too late for anything. I need to focus on what happened in the hotel to the exclusion of Pat and his walk down memory lane. It’s becoming clear that this isn’t what we think it is. It isn’t someone from Magellan with an environmental grudge kidnapping the child of a drilling exec and threatening to blow up and exhibition at an art gallery his company are sponsoring.
Instead, it’s a woman with a child driving a stolen car full of volatile materials. It’s unclear if she knows what’s in the back of the car and why she took a one year old from her bed. I leave the side room and find Steve.
‘Pat’s going to interview Glen Wright in a minute. Do you want it on the main screen or…’
He stares at me hard and pulls me to one side.
‘Keith told me what happened. You OK?’
‘Yes. I just need to get on with things. I just want to get on with the case.’
He’s turning his phone around in his hands, processing something in his brain. He looks stressed and tired. We all do.
‘You can’t just ignore what’s happening, Jan. We can only protect you to a certain point, you know.’
I speak clearly and quietly.
‘I’m not ignoring it. But there’s nothing I can do to stop it now. Nothing. From past experience they won’t take chances, won’t do anything drastic. Nothing to draw attention to themselves. No guns or huge gestures.’ I step closer to him. ‘Everything they do looks like a tragic accident. A robbery gone wrong. A fall from a balcony. A terrible…’
He holds his hand up.
‘I get the picture, Jan. But what about you?’
‘You mean is it going to affect my performance? No. Obviously there’ll be some changes to my personal life, but I won’t put the team in danger. The guys from Lando. They’re clever. They just want me, not you. Not Lauren. Just me. They’ll wait until I’m alone, until I’m vulnerable.’
He looks shocked, probably shocked that I‘m waiting around, knowing what to expect, and there’s little I can do to curb it.
‘Bloody hell. So what’ll you do after this? After we find Maisie?’
I smile. He still wants me on the team. He said ‘we’. I’m still on board.
‘Come on. Let’s go and watch Pat grill Glen Wright. Then we’d better go and update the Lewis’ in case someone from the Travelodge phones the tabloids.’
Before we reach the main screen, where Pat and Sally will feature in a second, Lauren appears.
‘The little girl’s been assessed. She’s come to no harm, she was just hungry. Hasn’t been harmed. I ran a check for missing reports but there’s nothing. I’m betting she’s the woman’s child.’
I look at her. She’s moved straight onto my theory and you can’t even see the apologetic seams.
‘Mmm. The woman has Maisie. We saw her on the CCTV. We’ve concentrated local resources in the area to look for the car.’
She stares straight ahead, at the screen. Her facial muscles are tight and I there’s a thumping pulse in her temple. She’s angry.
‘What
’s wrong with people, Jan? What’s wrong with them? How could she leave her child like that? Every morning when I leave the house I worry about my kids, being separated from them, anything happening to them. And when I get home I’m so grateful. I know, in the end, this job indirectly keeps them safe. That’s why I carry on.’
I touch her arm. It’s the nearest to an apology I’m going to get. The screen flashes into life. Pat and Sally are in the same interview room with Glen and his solicitor. Glen’s left hand holds a cup of tea and his right arm is in a sling. He’s no longer cocky and grinning. He slumps over, head lolling to one side. I see Sally look at Pat, who’s staring at Glen, and smile slightly. Of course. Why would they not be together?
Pat waits four minutes for effect then begins by naming everyone for the purposes of the recording. Glen looks up and he’s glassy eyed.
‘So, Glen. We need some more information from you.’
He interrupts. His speech is broken, fragmented.
‘I don’t have any. I told you everything. Just charge me so I can get bail.’
Pat sniggers.
‘Bail? You’re kidding. We need to know who else has been in your pad in the last month. In particular, any females. Anyone, Glen. We need to know everyone.’
He leans back on his chair and tilts it backwards.
‘Just Jane. And she’s fucking clueless. No one else. Just Frank Jones and Cary Miller. And you’ve got them.’
Pat thinks for a moment.
‘We’ve got them and they’re not women, are they, Glen?’
He pulls out two prints.
‘For the record, these photographs are of the woman who has taken Maisie Lewis from her home and who has been driving your car around. I’m showing the pictures to Glen Wright. Glen. Do you know who this woman is?’
He picks up the first sheet. His face changes immediately. His jaw goes slack and eventually his mouth closes. He looks closely at the picture and then at the other one. He places them back on the table.
‘Fucking hell. Oh my fucking God.’
Pat nods again. Sally is watching Glen and writes some notes.
‘So you know her then?’
Glen puts his good hand up to his eyes. He’s clearly exhausted. He rubs his eyes and looks again at the pictures.
What I Left Behind (The gripping prequel to the DS Jan Pearce Crime Fiction Series) Page 15
