by GJ Minett
‘Yes.’
‘And whose idea was it to stop?’
‘Hers,’ he said. ‘She said she needed to go to the t-toilet. I went inside to buy her some m-mints and –’
‘No, no. Let’s back up a little. Where exactly did you stop?’
‘Just past the petrol pumps. Over by the tyre-pressure gauge.’
‘Are you sure? Only, we’ve seen footage of you getting out of the car. There’s no sign of her.’
Hall stopped and thought about it for a moment. ‘No, that’s right. I d-dropped her off first, on the way in and she pointed over to the p-pressure gauge and told me to p-park over there.’
‘So you’re saying she got out somewhere round the back?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that was her suggestion or yours?’
‘Hers, I think. Yes. Hers.’
‘OK. So what happened then?’
Hall told them about the queue at the checkout and the long wait until he decided it was time he went to look for her.
‘So what did you think when you couldn’t find her?’ Holloway asked.
Hall bowed his head and ran his fingers through his hair.
‘I d-didn’t know what to think. I looked everywhere and she’d just v-vanished. Then I remembered this car.’
‘What car’s that?’ This was new. There had been no mention of any other vehicle before now.
‘I thought it was f-following us all the way from Bognor. I t-told her about it and she said I was probably imagining it and when we stopped at the petrol station it k-kept on going so I thought she must be right. But then, when I couldn’t find her anywhere, I thought . . . what if the car d-doubled back while I was inside? What if it was someone f-following us and they’d taken her?’
‘This car . . . tell me a bit more about it. What sort was it?’
‘Dunno. I’m not very g-good with cars. And it was dark.’
He shrugged apologetically.
‘I got the number plate though.’
Holloway looked up in surprise. ‘You did?’
‘Part of it anyway. The last three letters were RCA. I remember because of the record label – RCA Victor.’
‘You’re sure of that?’
‘Yes. And it was a p-prime number. Fifty-three.’
‘Fifty-three. So that makes it September 2003, right?’
‘No – I mean the total’s fifty-three.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Holloway, looking to see if Horgan was any the wiser. His eyes were locked on Hall as they had been since the start of the interview.
It was Mitchell who stepped in to explain. Horgan took this as an invitation to take over the questioning for a while.
‘So let’s see if I’ve understood how this works,’ he said. ‘You noticed this car behind you and did all the calculations in your head, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Even though you think you’re being followed and you’re worried you might be in some sort of danger, you find time to sit there and do all these calculations.’
‘I don’t do calculations. It just comes to me.’
‘It just comes to you. Like some sort of epiphany, you mean?’
‘I don’t know what an epiphany is.’
‘A revelation.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘OK. So if we take my car, which is HN61 NRT, that would mean –’
‘One hundred and thirty-five,’ said Hall, before Horgan had even finished writing it down, let alone started the calculations. ‘Multiple of three and five. Safe. Happy.’
Horgan paused and looked at him, then continued transcribing the numbers and letters. H = 8, N = 14, 6, 1 . . .
‘No,’ said Hall, putting his finger on the offending digits. ‘Sixty-one. Not six plus one.’
Horgan nodded, crossed out his mistake and continued. He finally came up with the total. A good twenty seconds later. One hundred and thirty-five.
‘How do you do that?’ he asked.
Hall merely shrugged his shoulders. ‘I just do,’ he said.
‘And what did you mean just now when you said safe and happy?’
‘Owen takes comfort in numbers that are a multiple of three,’ explained Mitchell. ‘Either three on its own or in combination with five. Conversely, he is easily distressed by prime numbers. You and I are influenced by a number of factors when we look for patterns in life. With Owen it’s numbers.’
‘I thought three was a prime number. So is five for that matter.’
‘Apparently Owen takes comfort in the way they interact,’ said Mitchell, a quiet smile playing at the corner of his lips. ‘I’m not sure we need to become unduly concerned with the logic underpinning it all.’
Holloway had been watching this exchange closely, leaning back in his chair, tapping his front teeth with a biro as he processed this new information.
‘So what you’re telling us is that this car, whatever make it was, had a number plate where the last three letters were RCA, and when the numerical value of those three letters is added to that of the other two letters plus the two numbers, they’ll come to a total of fifty-three? Have I got that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘So we can rule out September-registered cars altogether, can’t we? They all start with fifty or sixty something and the total will be too big.’
‘Yes.’
Holloway and Horgan looked at each other, wondering just how much help that would actually be in practical terms. It didn’t do much to narrow down the number of possible combinations.
‘And you can’t help us out with the car itself? Make? Colour?’
‘It was dark,’ said Hall. ‘And I told you – I’m not good with c-cars. I like trucks.’
Holloway decided to leave it and get back to the one point that was still niggling away at him.
‘OK, Owen,’ he said. ‘I need to ask because this is what we’re having difficulty understanding here. You think you’re being followed and this Julie disappears so you understandably think she might have been abducted, right?’
‘Right.’
‘And yet you drove off instead of waiting for the police to arrive. Why? I mean, if that happened to me, my first thought would be to get as many people out there looking for her as possible. Why didn’t you stay there and report it if you thought she might be in some sort of danger?’
And here comes the rocking again, he thought as Mitchell got out of his seat and put an arm on Hall’s shoulder to reassure him. In other circumstances it would have been difficult not to laugh at the strange juxtaposition. Even when sitting, Hall seemed to tower over his mentor somehow.
‘I didn’t want to b-be there cos I knew how it would look,’ he said eventually. ‘The only reason we were g-going to Worthing in the first place was to meet this woman who was supposed to help me c-clear my name. The last thing I n-needed was to get caught up in another m-mystery. It would be in the papers and you’d think it was my fault just like before. I knew I didn’t want that so I panicked and d-drove off.’
‘But you didn’t even call it in when you got home, did you?’ Holloway said. ‘You still haven’t. If we hadn’t got your registration details from the CCTV footage, no one would know the first thing about it. This girl could have been in serious trouble. You want to tell me why you just left her to it?’
This time, Hall sat upright and looked him in the eye for the first time, as if challenging him in some way. He looked on more solid ground now than at any stage of the interview so far.
‘Because I knew it was a trick,’ he said. ‘Even before I got back home, I’d worked it out.’
‘Worked what out?’
‘She was lying. Had to be.’
Holloway shook his head. ‘You’ll have to explain that to me, Owen,’ he said. ‘I don’t see how you . . . reached . . . that . . . conclusion.’ The last three words came out hesitantly – even as they were leaving his mouth he realised he knew where the problem lay, alt
hough the calculations buzzing around his head were still in inchoate form. It was the timing. The timing was all wrong.
How long would it have taken the girl to walk round the back and find there were no toilets? Fifteen seconds? Twenty at most. The moment she realised her mistake, she’d have come round the front and checked inside the store, because that was the only other place they could be. And that meant she’d have been in there at more or less the same time as he’d been buying the mints. In fact, they’d probably have bumped into each other on the way in.
But she didn’t go inside – everyone was adamant about that. And given that she couldn’t possibly have been snatched outside on the forecourt, in full view of everyone, it meant she had to have been taken in those twenty seconds while she was out of range of the cameras . . . where she herself had arranged to be. But for that to happen, the car would have had to follow them in and it hadn’t because Hall had seen it drive straight on. And yes, it could have doubled back but that would have taken at least a couple of minutes or Hall would have seen it. The maths simply didn’t work. Unless . . . unless she’d walked back out the way she came in while he was parking the truck. And why would she have done that unless she’d arranged to be picked up?
Hall had worked it all through in his own mind and come up with the same conclusion. He’d been set up. He slipped his hand inside his trouser pocket and produced a small rectangular card. Holloway took it from him, holding it by the edges as he opened a drawer in the desk. Julie Mowbray, it read in bold print. Investigative journalist. An email address and a mobile number.
‘I rang the m-moment I g-got home,’ he said. ‘The mobile doesn’t exist. The e-mail b-bounced back.’
Holloway slipped the card into an envelope he’d taken from the drawer, then looked at Horgan. He merely sat there, his expression giving nothing away.
‘So tell us what you think,’ Holloway said after a while. ‘You said you thought it was a trick. What did you mean by that?’
Hall flashed a glance at Mitchell who nodded his encouragement. Then he reached into a bag he’d brought with him and pulled out a brown A4 envelope which he placed on the table. Holloway opened it and spread the four photos out on the table in front of them.
The first was of a tall Georgian house with a number of expensive-looking extensions that had been added over the years. Holloway turned it over to see if there was any clue as to where this was or when the photo had been taken but there was nothing. Parked in the drive was a flashy-looking car – BMW maybe – but there was a stone wall obscuring the number plate.
The second showed the forecourt of a petrol station which Horgan immediately recognised as the one where Hall had been the previous evening. This photo was taken during the day though and there were several cars dotted around.
The third was easiest to place but no less mysterious. He had countless variations on the same theme in a file on his desk, taken from every conceivable angle. There was no one in this particular shot although, if he looked closely, he could just make out the crime-scene tape in the far corner of the field, the car itself having been removed.
And the final photo, just in case the link had not already been established, was a full-length shot of a good-looking man in his early twenties, holding a trophy in one hand and a squash racquet in the other.
Holloway looked at each photo again, then slid them back inside the envelope.
‘What are these?’ he asked.
Hall shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘They were in my t-truck.’
‘In your truck?’
‘Last night. At the petrol station. Someone must have put the envelope through the window while I was trying to find her.’
Holloway and Horgan exchanged a quick glance. They’d watched the CCTV footage a couple of times and had commented on the fact that Hall had leaned in through the window and rummaged around inside the truck for a few seconds before driving off. They’d dismissed it as unimportant.
‘How?’ asked Horgan.
Hall took a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose.
‘How what?’
‘If someone walked up to the truck and lobbed an envelope in through the open window, we’d have seen it on the CCTV. No one came near the truck at any stage.’
‘That was my initial reaction too,’ said Mitchell. ‘But if you look closely at the photo of the petrol station . . .’ He reached inside the envelope and carefully removed the one he was referring to. ‘. . . you’ll see that just the other side of the tyre-pressure gauge there is a bush which separates the petrol station from the A259. Now if someone were to come at the car from that direction . . .’
He spread his hands to invite the detectives to join the dots.
‘It was dark so I don’t imagine it would be very easy for you to see from the opposite side of the forecourt whether someone stepped out of the bush and slipped the envelope through the open window.’
‘They’d have needed to know the window was going to be open.’
‘. . . which would have been easy to arrange if they were in league with the young lady in the car.’
Holloway looked again at the photo and conceded reluctantly that Mitchell had a point. It could be done. And they wouldn’t have picked up on it when looking at the CCTV footage. Their focus then, understandably, had been Hall and the missing girl. There was no reason to look for someone trying to leave a calling card. One thing was for sure though – they’d be all over that video like a rash first chance they had.
‘The house in the photos,’ he asked Hall. ‘Do you recognise it?’
He shook his head.
‘You’ve never seen it before? Don’t know where it is?’
Another shake of the head.
‘So when you saw these photos, what did you make of them?’
‘I didn’t know,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t m-make any s-sense of it. I thought maybe it was you.’
‘Me?’
‘The police. I wondered if maybe you were trying to make things d-difficult for me. Stir things up a bit.’
‘I explained to him the police aren’t allowed to do that sort of thing,’ offered Mitchell. ‘It’s called entrapment. There are codes of behaviour they have to abide by.’ He looked meaningfully at Holloway in a way that suggested he wouldn’t be entirely disappointed if it turned out they had tried something underhand.
They called the interview to a halt a few minutes after that. Hall gave a detailed description of the girl for the record and agreed to come back in the following morning to put together a photofit image. He didn’t sound too hopeful though. ‘Not that good with faces,’ he explained.
Holloway thanked them both for coming in ‘voluntarily’ and asked if he could keep the photos. He didn’t imagine for one minute that he would find any prints other than those belonging to himself and Hall but you never knew – sometimes Lady Luck decided to smile on you. He escorted them to the front desk, then came back to rejoin Horgan who hadn’t moved.
‘You ever see anything like that?’ asked Holloway, taking his jacket from the back of the chair and slipping it on. ‘That number-plate business?’
‘One–nil to him,’ said Horgan with a rueful smile. ‘Thought I was going to score a point or two there and he shoved it straight back down my throat. With interest.’
‘So what did you make of it? Change your mind at all?’
Horgan shook his head.
‘Nope.’
‘You don’t think what he said makes some sort of sense?’
‘On the contrary. I think it makes perfect sense. I just don’t buy it.’
‘Because . . .’
‘Smoke and mirrors, boss . . . remember? I told you he’d have a cover story – he’s too clever not to. But if you pare it all back and focus just on the things we know to be true, what’s he actually given us apart from a shedload of work? The photos? He could have taken them himself. This card he gave you – we’ll send it
off to forensics and I’ll bet you what you like any other prints we find on it will belong to people who have nothing to do with this. And the card itself is one of those DIY jobs – he could have knocked it out himself on one of those machines in town.’
‘What about the girl?’
‘What girl? We still don’t have anything other than his word for it that she even exists. There’s nothing that puts her in the car or anywhere else for that matter. So on his say-so and with naff all else to support it, we’re going to sink valuable man hours into canvassing his neighbours to find out if anyone else has seen her and he’s already prepared us for that by saying they met outside Butlins . . . And all the time we’re doing this, not to mention sorting out photofits and working our way through every number plate ending in RCA and adding up to fifty-three, who’s going to be working the South Mundham case and trying to find ways to tie him to that? Like I said, we’re being played – big time.’
‘You ever think there might be a touch of the sceptic in you, Neil?’ asked Holloway, pushing his chair back under the table.
‘Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails,’ quoted Horgan.
Holloway sighed and picked up the envelope from the table.
‘If I’ve got my Bible straight, Doubting Thomas got it wrong, didn’t he?’ he said.
Horgan smiled wearily.
‘No. He just needed convincing, that’s all. And at least he got off the fence, boss,’ he added. ‘No splinters in his backside.’
7
EARLIER: TUESDAY, 26TH AUGUST
HANNAH
She was woken by the alarm at 7.00 – an alarm she had absolutely no recollection of setting. Flapping a hand in its general direction, she missed completely with her first attempt to shut it off, then succeeded only in knocking it to the floor, where it continued to gnaw its way into her brain like a buzzsaw through knotted wood. She rolled over and snatched it up from the floor, seriously contemplating hurling it across the room until sanity prevailed. It wasn’t the clock’s fault her head hurt like hell and her throat felt like a furred-up pipe.
She’d held off the alcohol for as long as she could. Even after the first unanswered call to his home number, she hadn’t grabbed the nearest bottle just yet because there was always a chance he’d ring any minute and suggest she get into her car and pick him up somewhere. How could she do that if she was totalled?
