The Lying Kind: A totally gripping crime thriller

by Alison James

  ‘You all right, DI Prince? You look like you’ve seen a fucking ghost.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ She shoved the phone to the bottom of her bag. ‘My knee’s killing me, that’s all. See you tomorrow.’

  Before he could say anything else, she grabbed her coat from the chair where she’d left it and hurried out of the room and down the stairs, the four words still jangling in her brain.

  This is Stuart Ritchie…

  Outside the building, she leaned against the wall for a few minutes, catching her breath and waiting for the shock wave to subside.

  Two

  There was no going for a run this morning, Rachel reflected miserably when she woke up. Her knee was still swollen, and so stiff that she hobbled around her stylish kitchen – all exposed brick and brushed-steel finishes – like a pensioner. Yet she managed to jump every time her phone buzzed.

  Exercise. She needed exercise to settle her jangling brain; if not running, then something else. She grabbed a swimsuit and a towel and drove to the nearest municipal sports centre to join the early-morning lap swim in the chlorine tank that posed as a swimming pool. I’ll just do ten lengths and then get out, she told herself. She ended up doing forty, and her head felt better for it. The mindlessness of it was soothing, but her knee joint was now screaming, and she’d probably done even more damage to it.

  On her way out of the building, she stopped and peered through the glass panel in the gym door, even though she was emphatically not the gym-going type. Everyone looked so busy and at the same time so vacuous, churning the pedals on their static bikes. The gym bunnies seemed universally bored, with the exception of the ones using the boxing punchbag hanging from a bracket in the far corner of the room. Now that did look like fun. A lot more fun than the physio her consultant had suggested. Rachel watched them for a couple of minutes before heading back to the car park.

  * * *

  As she sat down at her desk, wincing with the effort, her phone pinged. Hesitating, she checked the screen, wondering if it would be Stuart again. But it was a message from Mark Brickall.

  Sorry, got hauled into Bogdhani case conference. Will have to do the Harper mother thing tomorrow.

  The Bogdhani case was an Albanian drug-trafficking ring he had been investigating for the past three months. Sighing, Rachel composed a reply. Normally she would carry out an initial interview alone, but she was fairly confident that her knee would not permit her to drive to Surrey and back in heavy stop-start traffic.

  Any excuse, you lazy git. I’ll get reading, and see what my Spidey sense tells me.

  She hobbled to fetch coffee, then picked up the Lola Jade Harper file and started to read through it again. Looking for detail this time, and for whatever lay between the lines. Details were her detective lifeblood: the stuff that spoke to her instincts. Things other people didn’t even notice.

  She began with the initial missing person’s report, filled out on a standard pro forma dated 10 May 2016. It gave the complainant’s details as Michelle Harper, 57 Willow Way, Eastwell. Lola Jade was described as being 48 inches tall and weighing 58 pounds. Her hair was blonde, her eyes hazel and her skin fair. She had no distinguishing marks, but her ears were pierced. There were no significant medical conditions, and her blood group was O positive. She was left-handed. When last seen, at 9.15 p.m. on 9 May, she had been wearing lilac pyjama bottoms and a pyjama top printed with pink and purple butterflies. A photocopy of her birth certificate had been appended to the report, along with a copy of her registration as a pupil at St Mary’s C of E Primary, Eastwell.

  The ‘Further Remarks’ box stated that Michelle Harper had phoned the emergency services at 6.47 a.m. on Thursday 10 May. She had gone into the child’s bedroom to wake her for school and found the room empty. Lola Jade had no siblings, and her mother was currently living apart from her estranged husband.

  Rachel put in her headphones and listened to the 999 call.

  ‘Operator: which service do you require?’

  ‘Police, please.’

  ‘Hello, you’re through to the police.’

  ‘My name’s Michelle Harper. My daughter’s gone… she’s been abducted.’

  ‘And how old is your daughter?’

  ‘She’s six, nearly seven.’

  ‘Okay, can you tell me exactly what’s happened?’

  ‘Right, I put her to bed as normal last night, but when I went in to wake her this morning, she wasn’t there. The bed was empty and the French window downstairs was open.’

  ‘And you’re sure she’s not in the house: you’ve looked for her?’

  ‘Of course I have, I’ve looked everywhere. Inside and outside.’

  ‘Are you at the property now, Michelle?’

  ‘Yes: where else would I be?’

  ‘Okay, I want you to give me the address, and an officer will be with you as soon as possible.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘As soon as we can get a unit there; I’m contacting dispatch now.’

  ‘Can’t you give me a rough idea?’

  ‘I don’t have an exact time, but it should be less than half an hour.’

  Rachel listened again, then a third time. It was unusual, she thought, that Michelle had stated straight away that Lola Jade had been abducted. Not that she couldn’t locate her, or that she had disappeared, but that she had been abducted. Past publicity surrounding missing child cases had probably put that word into her mouth. That and watching too many TV crime shows. Her tone was tense rather than hysterical. But then Rachel knew from her years as a beat officer that there was a huge spectrum of reactions to grief and trauma.

  She looked at the photo of Lola Jade that Michelle Harper had supplied when the missing person’s report was filed. It was a standard school headshot, and showed a plain, stolid child with long, mousy-blonde hair, staring down the lens with a blank expression.

  In a more detailed statement given after Lola Jade had been missing for two days, Michelle outlined how she had put Lola to bed as usual the evening before she disappeared, and checked on her once after she had fallen asleep and before Michelle herself went to bed, sometime around 9 p.m. There was no one in the house but Michelle, her daughter, and the family Pomeranian, the unfortunately named Diva.

  ‘I went to bed at 10.30 p.m. At around 3 a.m. I was woken by a loud banging noise followed by a scuffle coming from outside somewhere. I opened my curtains and looked out of the window. I saw a man standing there a few yards from the front of the house. He was average height and build and wearing a hoodie pulled up. I couldn’t see his face. I got back into bed for around ten minutes, then looked out of the window a second time. The man that I had seen was gone. It was quiet, so I got back into bed and fell asleep until 6.30.’

  Elsewhere in the file, among the statements taken from neighbours during the door-to-door, a Mr Steven Arnold had said that he had seen two men, one of whom was short and of slight build, the other bigger, hanging around the close earlier on the 9th. He described their demeanour as ‘shifty’. Another neighbour, Anna Wozniak, reported seeing a white Transit van with its engine idling, parked around the corner from Willow Way. It was too dark for her to read the number plate.

  Michelle’s husband, a self-employed builder called Gavin Harper, had been cooperative when police first spoke to him, but adamant he knew nothing about his daughter’s disappearance. But fast-forward a few months and he had vanished, with no one – including his own family – apparently knowing where he was. If they were telling the truth. The behaviour seemed too unusual to be mere coincidence. Yes, after such a stressful period anyone might want to take off for a while; gain some distance, clear their head. But not without telling their nearest and dearest where they were going.

  Questioned further, Michelle had admitted that Gavin could be aggressive, although he had no criminal record other than petty motoring offences. There was a statement from Sonia Kenny, Michelle’s mother, corroborating her daughter’s claims but being vague about the deta
il; only able to offer that Gavin had shouted and thrown stuff on a few occasions, and after one argument – she couldn’t remember exactly when – he had pulled Michelle’s hair so hard that some of it had come out in his hand. From the look of Michelle’s elaborate extensions and hairpieces, that could easily happen, Rachel concluded.

  After standing up and limping around the perimeter of the office to ease the stiffness in her right leg, Rachel read through the forensic report and looked at photos the SOC officer had taken at Michelle’s house. Lola Jade’s bedroom was an explosion of sugar pink and stuffed toys, exactly as you would expect for a girl her age. There were DVDs on a shelf on the wall, a small TV and a CD player, but no books in evidence. The bed was slightly rumpled, the duvet in its Frozen-themed cover folded back. On the rug next to the bed was a white stuffed bear wearing a garish pink Lurex dress that Michelle had said was Lola Jade’s favourite. Apparently she’d never go anywhere without her Katy Bear – named after Katy Perry. Tiny spots of blood were found on the pillowcase, and this was confirmed to be Lola’s when compared with the DNA from her toothbrush, although puzzlingly the amount was not enough to be consistent with a significant injury.

  There was also a trace amount of blood found on the rug and, significantly, DNA that was a familial match to Lola Jade but did not belong to Michelle. Following a search of the property where Gavin Harper had been living, detailed in a statement by a DS Rajavi, a second forensic report confirmed that the DNA in Lola Jade’s bedroom belonged to her father. This made Rachel’s hackles rise, and she highlighted the relevant paragraph in the file.

  Without reading further, she put in her headphones and played the video file of the original press conference held by Surrey Police. Michelle Harper sat between a heavy-set woman with dyed pink hair and DCI Clive Manners, Katy Bear clutched on her lap, shifting in her seat. Shock had finally set in, and her demeanour was quite different to that of the assertive woman on the 999 call. She seemed shrunken, cowed. But not pale, thanks to the copious fake tan and bronzer she was wearing. Her fingers were tipped with acrylic talons, and her eyelashes were as heavy as a pantomime cow’s. She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue and turned frequently to glance at the pink-haired woman for reassurance. Checking through the transcript and some of the press cuttings, Rachel discerned that Pink Hair was Michelle’s older sister, Lisa Urquhart, who lived in the Eastwell area.

  DCI Manners had emphasised how his force were doing everything in their power to find Lola Jade, and appealed to people in the local area to come forward with information. ‘No matter how unimportant it may seem to you, it could help the investigation.’ The usual guff.

  Then Michelle herself spoke. She did not make eye contact with the camera, choosing instead to hang her head and look down at her lap. ‘Whoever’s got Lola Jade… please, please, just bring her back. That’s all I want. I just want her brought back safe.’ She rubbed her eyes with the tissue, then Clive Manners shepherded her away with his hand on the small of her back.

  There was also footage of an interview with Michelle filmed in her home a few days later by the local independent news channel. Her make-up was freshly done, her extensions artfully arranged, and she seemed calmer. Rachel paused the VT and scrutinised the living room. Michelle was seated on a squashy cream leather sofa and there was a matching cream armchair to her right. In between the two was a gilt side table with an ashtray containing a few lipstick-stained butts and the ash from the cigarette that Michelle was smoking during the interview. The wall behind her was covered with a montage of family photographs – mostly babies and toddlers – and its centrepiece was a huge gilt-framed studio portrait of Lola Jade aged about three or four, wearing a shiny white dress that wouldn’t have looked out of place at a gypsy wedding, and leaning awkwardly on a plastic Doric column in a white satin landscape.

  Rachel pressed play.

  ‘… Lola’s my absolute world. She means everything to me.’

  She’s going to use the P word, thought Rachel. Women like her couldn’t help themselves.

  ‘She’s just my little princess. My angel. Princess Angel, that’s what I call her.’ Michelle dragged greedily on her cigarette, her fingers trembling. In only a few days, she had lost some weight. The not-quite-pretty face was drawn, and her clothes were loose.

  ‘I know this must be terribly hard for you,’ the interviewer said, dropping her voice to the hush of professional concern.

  Michelle dropped her face into her hands to cover her sobs, sending a flutter of ash onto the carpet. ‘I just want things back to how they were, you know? No one can be expected to cope with this, it’s literally like being in a nightmare.’

  She gathered herself, and went on to talk about how a group of friends and neighbours had been organising their own search efforts locally, working through brownfield sites and open heathland. Someone else had started a ‘Find Lola Jade’ page on Facebook. Rachel booted up her desktop monitor and immediately found the page online. The profile picture was the same studio shot of Lola in the white satin dress. The most recent post was by someone called Tanya Dickerson.

  Our Lola Jade still missing, even though Surrey Police have randomly decided to downgrade the case!!!!

  So wrong, babes! a Stacey Fisher had commented.

  There was a link to a JustGiving page. Rachel clicked on it. The total raised stood at £47,963.

  Returning to the paper file, she flicked through the sheaf of witness statements taken during the investigation. They represented a lot of footwork on the part of uniformed officers, but had thrown up precisely zero new lines of enquiry. Nobody had seen or heard anything unusual at 57 Willow Way the night that Lola Jade disappeared, and family, friends and neighbours all claimed they knew nothing. A brick wall of silence, despite the substantial reward offered by one of the tabloid newspapers.

  Rachel flicked back to the description of the hoodie man that Michelle claimed to have seen, and sat staring at that paragraph for a few seconds. Then she phoned the main switchboard for Surrey Police and asked to speak to DS Leila Rajavi.

  ‘Did you ever meet Gavin Harper?’ Rachel asked, once she had introduced herself and the professional niceties had been dealt with.

  ‘Yes. I did the first interview with him.’

  ‘And his alibi for the night Lola Jade went missing?’

  ‘Said he was at home in his flat all night. There was no one who could corroborate either way. Also…’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, Gavin Harper does have form. He once failed to return his daughter after a routine access visit. Couldn’t be contacted for around twenty-four hours.’

  ‘A bit of a dry run, perhaps? Testing the waters?’

  ‘In retrospect, it does look significant, yes.’

  Rachel absorbed this. ‘And how would you describe him? Physically.’

  ‘Hmm, hard to say. Ordinary-looking… average height, average build.’

  In other words, exactly like the man on the street the night Lola Jade was taken.

  The second she had hung up, Rachel’s mobile rang in her hand. An unknown number. The same unknown number. Stuart’s.

  She snatched it off her desk, switched it off and hurled it into her bag as though it was a grenade. Then, for a few moments, she sat with her head dropped and her face buried in her hands, telling herself that if she didn’t look, it wasn’t happening.

  Three

  ‘So who is he?’

  Brickall hit the horn of the pool car hard as he negotiated one of London’s overused A roads, attempting to head south. It was morning rush hour, and the lanes were snarled with buses, vans, bikes and jaywalking pedestrian commuters.

  Rachel, right leg propped awkwardly in the angle of the seat well, pretended she hadn’t heard him. Instead she reached into her bag and pulled out a blister pack of tramadol, swallowing a couple with the cooling takeout coffee in the cup holder.

  Brickall persisted. ‘Whoever phoned you at the party – who is he? Or she. I mean, your
face! You went white as a sheet.’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘Must be someone if you were that freaked out.’

  Rachel gave a wry smile. ‘What are you – a detective?’

  He cruised to a stop at another of the interminable traffic lights and turned to face her. ‘So?’

  She kept her head turned away. ‘Just an ex, that’s all.’

  Brickall raised his eyebrows slightly, but before he could ask any more questions, Rachel had inserted her headphones and closed her eyes.

  * * *

  Willow Way was one of a handful of roads on a private estate to the south-west of the dormitory suburb of Eastwell. They were all named after trees – Birch Close, Ash Crescent, Sycamore Drive – and when construction had taken place in the early nineties an abundance of trees had been planted to reinforce the point. The buildings now looked dated, but the trees had matured to give an air of suburban comfort. They were modest houses in linked pairs and small terraces – blocks of three or four homes aimed at young families and junior executives. Tidy, but not aspirational. Brickall parked outside number 57, and they both took in the property before getting out of the car. The front garden was laid to lawn, and it looked as though it could do with the attentions of a mower. Most of the neighbours had added hanging baskets and large pot plants; Michelle had none. There were no children’s bicycles and toys as there were in front of the other houses. But the house seemed well maintained, and the windows were clean. They walked up the path and rang the bell.

  Silence. No dog barking, no footsteps, no sound of a radio or television. Rachel rang again, then peered through the window into the open-plan living and dining room. No signs of life, no lights on. In the kitchen, which she could just glimpse through the arch at the back of the room, the countertops were clear of any of the detritus of daily life.

  ‘What d’you reckon?’ asked Brickall.