Bring Them Home (Detective Karen Hart Book 1)

by D. S. Butler

  He laughed and shook his head. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve fallen for this loopy cow’s theories, have you?’

  ‘Right, that’s it. You’re coming with us,’ Karen said.

  ‘You’re arresting me?’ Jasper wiped his hands on a rag and then chucked it back into the cab of the tractor.

  ‘No, Jasper,’ Karen said. ‘We’re not arresting you. But I’d like you to accompany us to the station. We can ask you questions, and you can have your legal representative present if so desired. If you don’t come in and talk to us now . . . Well, that looks bad for you, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Pull the other one. I am not stepping foot inside a police station unless I have no choice. Why should I? You’re just out to get some easy pickings and piss off down the pub with your colleagues and talk about how you solved the case. Well, detective, you’re barking up the wrong tree. I have no idea where those girls are, and you’re wasting time with me. Why don’t you talk to Emily’s father? Dennis Dean, he’s got his fingers in an awful lot of pies around here.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ DI Morgan asked.

  ‘Ask anyone. Even she knows.’ Jasper jerked his chin in Karen’s direction. ‘He’s a nutter. If you want my opinion, he’s probably pissed off the wrong bloke, who’s decided to teach Dennis a lesson by taking the girls.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense, Jasper,’ DI Morgan said. ‘If that were the case, they’d only take Emily.’

  Jasper shrugged. ‘Maybe something went wrong. Anyway, as lovely as it’s been talking to you, I need to get back to work, and I suggest you two do the same. Stop wasting taxpayers’ money. And go catch some real criminals for a change.’

  Blood boiling, Karen watched him climb back into the tractor.

  She was angry. Furious with Jasper Palmer, but also annoyed that DI Morgan hadn’t backed her up and demanded Jasper accompany them to the station. But that was unfair on DI Morgan. It was her own fault for pushing too hard too soon. What was it about this case that had turned her normally level-headed nature upside down? Was she sliding back to that dark, paranoid place she’d inhabited after the accident?

  She couldn’t dispute the facts. They didn’t have enough evidence to charge him. They needed to get a proper identification and build the case step by step.

  But right now, all she really wanted to do was lock Jasper Palmer up and throw away the key.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Karen and DI Morgan spent the afternoon following up endless futile leads and checking in with the search parties. They weren’t getting anywhere. It was almost as though the girls had vanished into thin air.

  Back at the station, Karen tried to work out how the girls could just have disappeared. Maybe they’d been taken away by road. Karen pulled up a map of the local area on her computer. Vehicle access in the immediate area surrounding Moore Lane School was limited to two roads: Moore Lane itself or Longwater Lane at the back of the woods. There were numerous houses along both roads. Someone should have seen something at that time of day.

  On the other hand, if the girls had wandered across the open farmland, they could have walked unspotted for some time. But the school had been quick to alert the police, and the search had been initiated in less than an hour. It took time to organise an official search. But there were uniformed officers and local people searching the farmland before the hour was up.

  DI Morgan had checked in with both girls’ families, and Karen was glad she didn’t have that job this afternoon. It was always difficult to see the harrowing after-effects of crime in victims and their families, and in this case Karen felt it particularly keenly. Although her own daughter had been just five years old when she’d died, had she been alive now she would have been the same age as Emily and Sian.

  Karen refused to let her mind wander. She couldn’t bear imagining what Tilly’s face would look like now if she hadn’t been so cruelly taken away.

  Instead, Karen leaned forward at her desk and opened the folder containing the screenshots of the CCTV images. If she looked at the images in a certain way, there was a definite resemblance to Jasper Palmer.

  Karen had caught up with Tessa Grimes earlier, but unfortunately, Tessa told her she hadn’t seen the man long enough to say whether it had been Jasper.

  Karen hadn’t wanted to ask Rachel. It would leave the case open to criticism. Children were never looked on as the most reliable of witnesses, and it was always preferable to get an adult, someone who could sign a witness statement and understand the gravity of what they were saying when they made an identification.

  But two girls’ lives could be at stake, so reluctantly, knowing that it could cause a lot of trouble, Karen had shown Rachel a picture of Jasper Palmer. She’d held her breath as she waited for Rachel’s response, ignoring that little voice in her head telling her she was pushing too hard again and losing perspective. It had all been for nothing, though. The little girl shook her head and said she couldn’t remember. Karen had given her mother her contact details again and asked her to get in touch if Rachel remembered anything else.

  Outside, the sky had clouded over and rain had started to fall, steady and relentless The people manning the search would be drenched through to the skin as they carried on, hoping that against all the odds they’d find something to help them track the girls. But there had been nothing since Sian’s glove. No trace of the girls at all.

  The case already weighed so heavily on the officers involved that it was hard to believe it was only the second day. Rick Cooper’s usual banter in the office had come to a complete halt as he sat frowning down at various sheets of paper detailing leads that had come in from the general public and filtered up to the main CID room. You never knew which tip-off was going to be a promising lead or which one would be a waste of time and have you running around in circles while the real perpetrator got further and further away.

  Sophie was looking down at her desk just as intently as Rick, her cheeks flushed as she read through some printed notes and then reached for the phone.

  Karen pushed her chair back, intending to grab another coffee, but she paused to stare again at the image of the red-haired man outside Washingborough Primary School.

  Was it him? Was it Jasper Palmer? She frowned at the image, willing something to jump out at her, something they’d missed, but it was no good. She just couldn’t be sure.

  A few hours later, DI Morgan had noticed his team were flagging, and when the night shift came on, he insisted they all left by ten p.m.

  Karen hated to admit it, but it seemed like this case could go on for a while. It was looking more and more likely that they wouldn’t find the girls alive.

  There were some terrible statistics about child abductions. The most worrying to Karen was that they were on the increase. Most cases didn’t end in murder, though. Many of the children were targeted, abused and released quickly.

  A larger percentage of the reports that came in were the result of parental abduction. A parent, often born in another country, would take the child abroad without permission and not bring them back. There wasn’t much the police in the UK could do about that.

  The most horrendous cases, the stuff of parents’ nightmares, were the abductions followed by murder. In some instances, the child was killed very soon after they were taken.

  Karen hated to think about that. The idea that Emily and Sian were out there somewhere, still alive and hoping to be rescued, kept her going.

  At ten thirty p.m., Karen pulled into her driveway. She took a careful look around to make sure nobody was hiding in the shadows tonight, but the driveway was empty. She returned her empty bin to its usual spot at the side of the house and then headed inside.

  She took her jacket off and washed her hands, staring out of the dark kitchen window into the garden. In the distance, the mast at Donington-on-Bain was glowing red. The Belmont transmitting station was twenty miles away but dominated the skyline at night with its aircraft warning lights. Some years ago proud loc
als had unsuccessfully campaigned against a decision to shorten the mast.

  When she was four, Tilly had asked about the strange red object in the sky. Karen had tried to give a lesson on perspective and distances but failed miserably. Her husband had chuckled at her long-winded attempt to explain that it might not look very big, but that was because it was a long way away, and if they stood next to it, it would be very big indeed.

  She left the kitchen and went into the small room at the front of the house that used to be Tilly’s playroom. Karen now used it as a study. From the bottom drawer of the desk, she pulled out a blue A4 ring binder. She took a deep breath and opened it. Inside, there were pages and pages of research into the road traffic accident that had killed Josh and Tilly. Sentences had been marked with a bright yellow highlighter and rings from coffee cups decorated some of the printed sheets from the nights when Karen stayed up until the early hours of the morning, poring over her findings, desperately looking for answers.

  She didn’t find any answers because there was nothing to be found. There was no conspiracy, no patterns, no justice to chase. Just death. Just a tragic accident. She flipped through the sheets, feeling guilty. At one of the last sessions she’d had with Amethyst, Karen had told her she’d destroyed the folder and put her investigations to bed once and for all. She’d told Amethyst what she wanted to hear. It wasn’t a big lie. Karen understood she’d been way off course but couldn’t bring herself to get rid of the folder. Not yet.

  With a lump in her throat, Karen put the folder away, went back into the kitchen and looked at the miserably bare contents of the fridge. She should have picked up a takeaway on the way home or had some of the pizza Rick had ordered at the station, but when it arrived her stomach had still been churning from the run-in with Jasper, and she’d turned down a slice of spicy pepperoni.

  She pulled a chunk of cheddar out from the back of the fridge and checked it for spots of mould. After a quick sniff, she decided it would probably be okay. She’d had the foresight to freeze a loaf of brown bread earlier in the week and she took out a couple of slices and chucked them under the grill before slicing the cheese.

  As the toast cooked, she leaned against the cupboard next to the oven, enjoying the warmth of the grill. She had the heating set to come on at five o’clock and go off at nine, so the house was already cooling down. She nipped into the utility room and punched a few buttons to change the timer. While this case was running, it was stupid to have the heating come on at five when she wasn’t here. She set it to come on earlier in the morning too, knowing she’d have another early start.

  She made her way back into the kitchen just as the toast was starting to turn golden brown and quickly turned it over on the grill. She piled the top half with cheese and then pushed the grill tray back under the heated red bars until it began to bubble.

  To her surprise, her mouth watered as she cut the toast in half and melted cheese pulled away in stringy sections. She added a dollop of Lincolnshire chutney, handmade by Christine, and sat down to eat at the kitchen table. Karen found dinnertime unbearably lonely. Maybe she wouldn’t have minded so much if she’d always been on her own, but she didn’t like the silence of sitting there and had taken to watching TV while she ate. Of course, there were other times when she missed Josh and Tilly keenly. Even now, five years later, she’d turn over in bed and be surprised when her arm reached out and encountered nothing but the cold side of the duvet. It was that moment between waking and being asleep that hurt the most, the few seconds when she forgot all about the accident.

  When Karen first started seeing her counsellor, she’d been surprised when Amethyst had told her seeing other families and children might bring back painful memories, but Karen found the opposite was true. She loved to see happy children.

  Six months after she lost her family, Karen had been standing in line at the Tesco checkout when the woman queuing behind began to shout at her little girl until she cried. Karen had wanted to shake the woman until her teeth rattled. Thankfully she’d had the presence of mind to move her basket and go to another checkout.

  The child didn’t look neglected, and the mother was clearly just at the end of her tether after a stressful shop with a three-year-old prone to tantrums, but Karen wanted to shout at her, to say to her, ‘You’d miss this if it were taken away. It’s driving you crazy right now, but you’d miss it so much that it hurts. You’d give anything for another tantrum.’

  Lost in a daydream, Karen was surprised when she looked down and saw her plate was empty. She brushed the crumbs from her hands and put the plate in the dishwasher.

  Then she grabbed the washing from upstairs, stuffed it into the machine and set it to run on a quick cycle. Deciding she really should stay awake long enough to hang the washing out, she walked into the sitting room, sat down on the grey sofa and reached for the cream throw to cover her legs.

  Feeling sleepy, she opened the messenger app on her phone, tapped on the family group and felt a twinge of guilt when she scrolled through a whole day’s worth of messages from her mum, dad and sister. She smiled at a photo of her niece, Mallory, grinning widely and showing off the gap in her front teeth. It was captioned:

  Tooth Fairy tonight!

  She tapped out a quick reply. She’d give her parents a call tomorrow. She knew they worried about her.

  Easing herself back on to the cushions, she switched on the television and muttered to herself, ‘Just don’t fall asleep.’

  It didn’t work. Karen was asleep within seconds, but the shrill ring of her mobile broke through her hazy dream, and she sat up. Grabbing her phone, she blinked at the screen and saw it was an unknown number.

  ‘Hello?’ Karen’s voice sounded thick with sleep, even though she was sure she’d only closed her eyes for a few seconds.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you so late. This is Sarah Macintosh, Rachel’s mother.’

  ‘Right.’ Karen got to her feet and clamped the phone to her ear.

  Walking back into the kitchen, she glanced at the digital clock on top of the oven. It was after eleven p.m. What could be so important that Sarah needed to call her now?

  ‘It’s not a problem,’ Karen said. ‘I’ve not been home long actually. Is there something wrong?’

  Sarah let out a shaky breath. ‘Yes, I think there is. I’d have waited until morning, but it’s just that Rachel was so upset, and I know it could be important because of those two little girls that went missing.’ Sarah sounded on the verge of hysteria.

  ‘You did the right thing by calling me. Now, tell me what’s happened.’

  ‘Well, it was Rachel. She couldn’t sleep, you see. I just thought she was upset because of today and everything. So I insisted she go back to bed, and then when I went to check on her, I noticed she’d been crying. So I went in and told her she needed to tell me the truth, tell me what was bothering her. She wouldn’t, though. She kept telling me that she couldn’t, that she wasn’t allowed.’

  ‘Did you manage to find out what was upsetting her?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sarah said. ‘Look, it’s really difficult to explain on the phone. Do you think you could come to our house?’

  Karen’s mind was spinning as she jotted down the address. ‘I’ll be there soon, Sarah. Try not to worry. We’ll get to the bottom of this.’

  ‘Thank you. I do appreciate it. I know it’s really late and this must be your personal time.’

  ‘Really,’ Karen said, grabbing her jacket and folding it over one arm while looking around for her keys, ‘it’s not a problem.’

  ‘I don’t know what to think. She’s never behaved like this before. It’s completely out of character.’

  Karen was almost at the car when something Sarah said made her pause.

  ‘I’m so terribly sorry, but it seems Rachel wasn’t telling the truth when she spoke to you earlier. She fed us both a pack of lies.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Fifteen minutes later, Karen pulled up outside the Macintos
h family home. Constructed from sand-coloured stone, it was an old detached building at the end of a narrow country lane. There were only four other houses on the lane, which overlooked fields on both sides. During the day, the residents would have a lovely view of arable farmland and sweeping skies, but at night it felt isolated. There were no street lights, and Karen shivered as she switched off the engine.

  She’d parked beside a large ash tree. When she shut the door, a tawny owl gave a ke-wick call. The noise startled her, and she looked upwards, but despite repeating its call, she couldn’t see the owl in the dark branches. She locked the car and hurried towards the Macintoshes’ front door. She wasn’t superstitious, she told herself, just on edge.

  Rachel’s mother answered the door before Karen even had a chance to knock.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ she said, opening the door wide.

  ‘No problem.’ Karen stepped into a brightly lit hall. The warm wooden flooring and pastel wallpaper made the house cosy and inviting.

  ‘Rachel’s in her bedroom,’ Sarah said over her shoulder as she began to climb the stairs. ‘My husband’s away on a business trip in Prague. I haven’t told him about any of this yet.’

  Karen followed her upstairs.

  Rachel was sitting propped up against the pillows in her bed. The room wasn’t small, but it seemed so due to the vast number of toys crowding every surface and the oversized wardrobe that dominated the room. Rachel’s bed was set back against the wall, covered with a swirly-patterned pink duvet.

  The little girl looked up at Karen. Her eyes were red, her skin blotchy, and it was obvious she’d been crying.

  ‘What do you have to say to the police officer, Rachel?’ Sarah Macintosh said sternly to her daughter.

  Rachel’s lower lip wobbled, and her eyes grew glassy as she shook her head.

  ‘We talked about this, Rachel. You need to tell the truth.’

  Karen felt her stomach tighten and her skin prickle in anticipation. If Rachel positively identified Jasper Palmer, it could be the breakthrough they needed. She held her breath as she waited for Rachel to answer.