‘We’ve another week to go and I’m sick of bloody carols already,’ Tara said as a piped version of ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ began playing over the centre’s speakers.
There were two doors into the restaurant; the main one where the queue had formed and a second exit to the left, nearer the front entrance of the Foyleside itself.
‘You take the main entrance and join the queue,’ Lucy said, ‘I’ll take a look around the place, like I’m looking for seats.’
Lucy moved to the nearest door and pushed her way in. As she did, she phoned Cooper.
‘Is he still online?’ she asked quietly.
‘He’s switched accounts again,’ Cooper said. ‘I think he’s currently “Steven Burke”.’
Lucy ended the call and began weaving between the packed tables, looking for any single men. To her left was a harried family, four kids climbing on the seats while their father and mother tried to distribute their boxes of food. The youngest, a girl with tight curled hair, smiled up at Lucy who winked at her in return. Her three brothers, meanwhile, were fighting over who was getting the first strawberry milkshake.
Over to the right, a number of tables were filled with young girls, out shopping together, five of them crowded around one bag of chips and a drink. All had phones, probably sending texts to one another as they sat there, Lucy reflected. Then a little further ahead, she saw the actual recipients of their messages: a table of teenage boys, similarly clumped around food for one, watching across at the girls.
A man banged into Lucy, his tray held in front of him defensively.
‘Sorry,’ he managed. Lucy glanced at him, middle-aged, grey-haired, then checked his tray, three drinks, enough food for a family. Across to the right, at the window, she saw a man, mid-twenties, black hair, sitting alone. He had a phone in his hand, the crumpled wrapper of his burger lying on the table in front of him. As she moved towards him, she got a clear view of the table and saw a woman and child also sitting at it.
Suddenly, Tara’s voice crackled through her earpiece. ‘In the corner. The grey coat.’
Lucy glanced across to where Tara had indicated. A grey-haired man sat alone, staring intently across the restaurant. He had a coffee cup in front of him and the remains of a doughnut. He was holding his phone, raised off the table, glancing occasionally at the screen. He seemed to be holding it steady. Lucy followed the direction of the phone and realized it was pointing at the table of teenage girls.
The man looked up and, for a moment, caught Lucy’s gaze. He recognized her at the same moment she recognized him.
‘Gene Kay,’ she said. ‘It’s Gene Kay.’
As she spoke, Kay got to his feet, pushed his way through the gathered queue and made for the exit.
‘He’s moving,’ Tara said. ‘Middle-aged, grey coat. Can we pick him up?’
‘Mickey, pick him as he comes out,’ Burns ordered.
Kay had started to move towards the main door, then seemed to realize that the two men moving towards it from the outside were coming for him. He cut quickly towards Lucy, pushing past a young man, knocking over his tray.
‘Mr Kay, stop,’ she shouted.
Lucy reached out to stop him as he approached, but he rushed her, pushing through, shouldering her off balance and knocking her to the ground, then bolted for the second exit, the doorway Lucy had just entered.
There he must have seen the Tactical Support officers coming in through the Foyleside entrance for he turned and ran back down the concourse towards the escalators leading to the lower floors. Lucy glanced across to see that Mickey and the DC had come into the restaurant after him through the other door and were now trying to get back out again, having become caught in the middle of a crowd of school children being herded in through the main doors by their teacher.
Lucy pushed through towards the exit Kay had taken and, once on the main concourse, turned to see his retreating back as he reached the top of the escalators. He hesitated, then took the stairs instead. At least the second TS Unit would pick him up, she thought. But, if Kay had seen them on the lower floor down there, why had he willingly gone down?
‘Are the TSU in place on level three?’ Lucy breathed into the earpiece.
‘Can I get a location?’ she heard Burns snap.
‘Floor two, sir. We’ve been held up with three shoplifters coming out of Boots. We’re on our way up.’
Lucy weaved through the crowd, travelling seemingly against the direction of foot flow, as the rest of the team finally appeared through the other door.
‘Fucking pantomime trips,’ Mickey spat, rounding the last of the school children.
They took the stairs, two at a time, and reached the third floor, which opened out in four directions from the bottom of the stairs.
‘I’ll take straight ahead,’ Mickey said, taking control. ‘You go left, Tommy; Tara go right; Lucy check the shops. TSU will catch up.’ Then he set off before anyone could argue.
The first shop to her left was the book store, Eason. Lucy ran in then stood on tiptoe to better scan the shoppers. She couldn’t see Kay and left, moving towards the next shop. The neighbouring units were all similarly clear. The last store was a larger department store, and Tommy had headed in there. She cut across and began checking the shops along the opposite wall. She was just coming out of a clothes shop when she spotted Kay, his coat off now and hanging over his arm, as he walked out of the O2 shop. The central portion of level three had actually been cut away, allowing those on the level to look down to the one beneath. The shop from which Kay had come was on the opposite side of the gap from where she stood, meaning Lucy would need to move around it to get to Kay. He would undoubtedly see her approach. In fact, even now, he was glancing around, obviously looking to see where the police were.
‘He’s here,’ Lucy said.
‘TSU are on the level now. What’s your location?’ Burns snapped.
‘He’s outside the O2 shop,’ Lucy said, ‘moving towards the lower escalator.’
Kay must have spotted the two uniforms coming up the escalator he was about to take for he turned suddenly. Then he saw Lucy too, stood, holding her gaze, the space between them the ten-foot opening in the floor, surrounded by guard rails, giving way to a drop of about twenty feet down to level two. At the centre of the space below, a small water feature twinkled beneath the fluorescent centre lights.
Kay glanced to his left, where the two TSU officers were approaching, then to his right, where a team from above was likewise fanning out as they approached him.
He stared across at Lucy, placing both his hands on the rail, as if to brace himself for a jump.
Lucy shook her head. Don’t, she mouthed.
Kay paused a second, then lifted his leg and began clambering over the guard rail.
‘He’s going to jump,’ Lucy shouted. Glancing down, she saw Mickey and Tommy arrive beneath them.
Instead, the man pulled his phone from his pocket and flung it to the floor below. Looking down, Lucy could only watch as it shattered off the side of the tiled water feature below and slid beneath the water to rest on a bed of winking good luck pennies.
Chapter Eighteen
Lucy and Tom Fleming were sent to Kay’s house first to search for evidence that might connect him with Karen Hughes. There was no doubt that, like all abusers, Kay would have a collection of material somewhere in the house, most likely stored on his PC. The difficulty with abusers’ collections, however, was that they were not always obviously related to the abuse that had been carried out. Any officer would pick up a box containing obscene photographs straight away; a box of seemingly innocuous souvenirs might not be noticed. Burns reasoned that Fleming and Lucy would have a better sense of what to look for than CID.
When they entered the living room, however, the first thing Lucy noticed was the space on the table where the computer had been.
‘PC’s gone,’ she said to Fleming.
‘We’ll keep an eye out for it,’ Fleming commen
ted. ‘You do the upstairs rooms, I’ll do down here.’
There were three rooms upstairs. The first, a bathroom, was almost bare. The walls were blue, the paint bubbling and blistered in places behind the sink. A scum-ringed glass on the windowsill. Toothbrush, razor, a rolled tube of paste. A few bottles of cheap aftershave on the windowsill next to that, and a bottle of talc. There were no obvious hiding places. Lucy pulled the plastic front off the bath and peered underneath, illuminating the space with her torch beam, but there was nothing there.
The second room was a spare bedroom. The wardrobe was empty save for an old suit jacket, which, judging by the musty smell coming from it, had not been worn in some time. Lucy checked the room, under the bed, the dresser in the corner, but there was nothing of interest.
Finally, in Kay’s own bedroom, she found what she’d been looking for: a box on the top shelf of his wardrobe. She quickly checked the rest of the room then, when she was sure there was nothing else of interest, she took the box down to the living room to catalogue with Fleming present.
Fleming came struggling in through the back door carrying a black rubbish bag.
‘In the bin,’ Fleming explained, dumping the bag on the ground. ‘What did you find?’
Lucy laid the box on the table, opened it and began sifting through the contents. It contained mostly objects rather than pictures. Among them was a teddy bear, several pairs of ticket stubs, some to a local cinema, two pairs to the circus, though dated on different years, and a dried-out daffodil. At the bottom of the box were a handful of sea shells, a single glove, a doll. With each object, Lucy reflected on the child whom it represented to Kay. Trips to the circus and cinema suggested the family of the child had trusted him, known him well, had allowed him to inveigle his way into their home.
‘A bit careless of him keeping these in the house,’ Fleming said.
‘They don’t prove he did anything wrong,’ Lucy muttered. ‘He’s probably hidden his other collection much more carefully.’
She knew that there would be another collection, the one which, despite her time in the police, she knew would still make her stomach twist with revulsion when she saw it. But, strangely, she found these collections – the objects – to be equally disturbing, reflecting as these did the innocence of the ones Kay had clearly been grooming. In the bottom corner, beneath the glove, she found a bar of hotel soap and pointed it out to Fleming, who groaned.
‘Some of these stubs are years old,’ Lucy commented.
Fleming shook his head. ‘Anything you see there connect him to Karen Hughes?’
‘No,’ Lucy said. ‘If anything, if all this stuff is connected to his victims, they’re a little young in comparison with Karen. She was mid-teens, this stuff suggests that might have been too old for Kay.’ She gestured towards the black bag. ‘What was he dumping?’
Fleming lifted the black bag and emptied it. Pictures cut from newspapers and magazines spilled out onto the floor. One by one, they picked through them, examining each. While each image was of a child, none were of a sexual nature. The children pictured were predominantly pre-teen.
They worked through each image, but again, none related to Karen Hughes.
‘He must have other stuff somewhere,’ Fleming said. ‘Presumably on his computer. He’s stashed it somewhere after we called for the dog hairs.’
‘Would he have destroyed it?’ Lucy asked. ‘Or hidden it in the garden?’
Fleming shook his head, his breath sweet as he exhaled. ‘If Kay’s been building these collections for years, his real one will be massive. He’ll not just get rid of it. Someone’s keeping it for him or he’s hidden it somewhere. It’s not out back. I searched the shed, checked the lawn for signs of recent disturbance. Nothing.’
They had just finished bagging the collections to be transferred back to the Strand Road when Fleming took a call from one of the district teams to say that another fifteen-year-old girl, called Sarah Finn, had been reported missing.
Chapter Nineteen
Sarah Finn’s mother, Sinead, sat on the sofa in the living room of their family home in Fallowfield Gardens, in Gobnascale. She was in her mid-thirties, at most, dressed in a heavy white dressing gown over her pyjamas. She wore thick grey bed socks into which she had tucked the legs of her pink pyjama bottoms. Her legs were crossed, the foot of the upper leg jittering as she spoke.
‘The school phoned just after lunch to say she’s been off all day. I thought maybe she’d bunked off with friends.’
‘Had she bunked off before?’ Lucy asked.
Finn shrugged lightly. ‘A few times, maybe.’
‘And she’s not been in touch since?’
The woman shook her head. ‘I checked when I got in from the shops but she weren’t in her room. She normally gets herself back in from school and that.’
‘So when was the last time you saw her?’
The woman reached across to the pack of cigarettes on the table next to the sofa and withdrew one, shaking it free of the pack. She lit it, dragged deeply, then held it between the fingers of the hand resting on her knee. Lucy couldn’t help but notice that her nails looked freshly painted. She glanced across to where the cigarette box sat and, sure enough, a bottle of nail polish stood behind them. If she’d been concerned by the news of her daughter’s absence from school, it hadn’t affected her cosmetics routine.
‘Last night some time.’
‘Last night?’ Fleming asked, glancing at his watch. It was almost three. ‘What time?’
‘Before seven, maybe. She were going out with her friends.’
‘You didn’t see her come home last night?’
‘I went to bed early.’
‘And this morning? Was she home this morning?’
The woman shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She normally sorts herself out in the morning.’
‘Was her bed made or unmade?’ Lucy asked. ‘Had she slept in it?’
Again a shrug. ‘I don’t know. It was made, I think. But she always makes it.’
‘Has she ever run away before?’ Lucy asked.
‘Never.’
‘So you last saw her before seven last night. Almost twenty hours ago,’ Fleming said.
The woman laughed embarrassedly. ‘It sounds bad when you say it like that. She went out to the local youth club. I went to bed early last night.’
‘Did she?’
‘Did she what?’
‘Go to the club?’
‘I don’t know,’ the woman said, blankly.
Fleming moved from the window, finally, and sat on the armchair against the opposite wall. ‘You might be best to check,’ he said.
Sinead Finn dragged again on her cigarette, then folded it into the ashtray balancing on the arm of the sofa. She rooted through the pocket of her gown until she produced a mobile phone.
While she rang Sarah’s friend, Lucy glanced around the room. It was cramped, the three-piece suite on which she sat much too big for the room. An electric fire flickered on the hearth. Above it, on the mantelpiece, a small gold carriage clock squatted, the lower works spinning back and forth. It was framed on either side by two small pictures. One was of Sinead Finn herself and a man.
Lucy struggled out of the seat, went across to the mantelpiece and lifted the photograph. It looked fairly recent, judging by the appearance of Sinead Finn. The man was small, little taller than Sinead, his head shaved, though the shadow of stubble across his skull carried a reddish sheen. The buzz cut accentuated his ears, which seemed to protrude a little. His eyes were narrowed, his mouth frozen open in a laugh. He stood slightly behind Sinead, his right arm reaching around her neck and across her chest, the bicep flexed protectively in front of her, the hand lightly clasping her left breast.
Lucy put the photograph down and lifted the second. It was, presumably, Sarah Finn, for the person in the picture wore a school uniform. She sat in front of a bookcase, laden with red-spined leather volumes. Lucy guessed it was a screen backdrop used by th
e school photographer. Sarah was brown haired, her features soft, still carrying a little puppy fat on her face. She looked up at the camera from below her fringe, her mouth frozen in an embarrassed smile.
Lucy turned and handed the picture to Fleming, then returned to her own seat.
‘Linda? Sinead Finn again. Was Sarah at the club with you last night?’
Lucy sat, clasped her hands between her knees. Instinctively she stretched them out towards the fire, then realized it was electric and returned them to between her legs. She could hear the raised murmur of the other speaker for a second as Sinead adjusted the phone against her ear, reaching for another smoke.
‘Well she said she was going with you,’ Sinead said.
Linda obviously took exception to this last comment for her voice became loud enough for them to hear.
‘She said she was with you,’ Sinead countered, raising her voice too, as if in so doing, she could convince Linda that she was mistaken and that Sarah had indeed been at the club.
Sinead snapped the phone shut and, lifting her lighter, lit the cigarette.
‘She weren’t there at all,’ she explained, unnecessarily.
‘Has Sarah a phone? Have you tried calling her?’ Lucy asked.
‘I’m not bloody thick,’ the woman snapped. ‘Of course I tried. There’s no answer. I’ve left her a message to call me, but nothing yet.’
Fleming nodded. ‘So you didn’t notice that she hadn’t come home last night?’
Sinead Finn stared at him a moment, teasing out the implied criticism of his question. ‘Sometimes she’s home late,’ she explained. ‘The friends she runs around with and that.’
Fleming rose from the seat a little sullenly, crossed to the window and turned his attention again to the road outside.
‘Is this Sarah?’ Lucy asked, lifting the picture from the arm of the chair where Fleming had left it.
Sinead smiled. ‘That’s her. She looks so pretty.’
Someone You Know Page 8
