by Alison James
‘Looks like she’s gone away. Given what’s happened, I can’t really blame her.’
‘Would’ve been nice to know that before sitting in traffic for over an hour…’ Brickall vaulted over the side gate and disappeared towards the back of the house, re-emerging a couple of minutes later shaking his head. ‘Nada. Not a fucking sausage.’
‘Good job I brought the file with me, then. Her number will be on the contact sheet: I’ll phone her.’
As soon as the call was picked up, she recognised the defensive tone from the emergency call.
‘Who is this?’
‘Michelle, this is DI Prince, from Investigation Support at the National Crime Agency in London. I’m at your address, hoping to have a quick word. Are you around?’
There was a brief pause.
‘I’m out shopping.’
‘When will you be back?’
‘No idea. An hour maybe?’
After telling Michelle that they would wait, Rachel and Brickall parked at the nearest parade of shops and found a café. Brickall ordered his usual: a full English with the works. Rachel took the file out of her bag and continued reading it.
‘Just double-checking for more info on the father,’ she told Brickall as he dipped a sausage into egg yolk. ‘Want to get the facts before we ask Michelle about him.’
Gavin Harper had been named as a person of interest at the start of the enquiry into Lola Jade’s disappearance. After her phone call to Leila, Rachel had checked the PNC nominals file, and sure enough, earlier that year he had been cautioned for violating a court order relating to shared custody, following an allegation made by Michelle Harper.
‘He’s got to be the most likely culprit,’ she told Brickall. ‘Gavin Harper. He tried to snatch her before, apparently.’
‘Divorced dad syndrome,’ Brickall observed through his mouthful of fried food. ‘Using the kid to get at the ex. It’s classic stuff.’
Other than that, there were just a few traffic offences and a very minor Public Order Offence when Gavin Harper was a teenager. According to the file, a blue notice had been issued on Interpol’s database, requesting any information about his whereabouts, along with the statutory yellow notice aimed at locating missing minors. If he had left the country after the notice had been issued, then his name would automatically have been flagged up at border crossings, airports and anywhere else where passports would have been checked. The notices had been issued on the morning of 20 October after local officers had attempted to re-interview Gavin Harper and been unable to find him. If he had been travelling with his daughter, the chances of no one spotting them and reporting it were virtually zero. Not now that Lola’s face had been on the front page of the papers for months.
Among the raft of paper statements was an alleged sighting of Lola Jade in Brussels, and another in Portugal, both around a week after her disappearance. Officers from the Surrey force had flown to Belgium and to the Algarve to investigate these claims, but had drawn a blank. A few more such sightings were reported in the weeks that followed, but it had been decided that they would only be actively pursued if substantial evidence came to light. It did not.
Local sightings had also failed to throw up any concrete leads. Sniffer dogs and divers in the local quarries and reservoirs had drawn a blank. After twenty days with no sightings of the child, a cadaver dog had been through Lola Jade’s home, but found no evidence that she had died there. Inevitably, as weeks had turned into months, Lola was demoted from front-page headlines to the inside pages as the fickle public started to move on.
* * *
When Brickall had finished his breakfast and they had both drunk their coffee, they returned to Willow Way. This time, there was a white BMW hatchback parked outside the house. The front door opened after the first ring. When Brickall held up his warrant card, the woman pulled the door fully open and stepped aside, indicating that they should come in. They followed her into the living room.
Michelle Harper wore tight white jeans and a T-shirt with a designer logo. Her toenails and fingernails were immaculately painted, and her hair – no longer blonde but a nut brown – looked as though it had recently been professionally blow-dried. She did not offer tea or coffee, but indicated that the two of them should sit on the armchairs that matched the cream sofa. The room was tidy to the point of sterility, and although photos of Lola Jade still graced the wall, there were few other reminders of her in the room.
‘I’m DI Rachel Prince, and this is DS Mark Brickall. As I told you over the phone, we’re from the National Crime Agency. We—’
‘National?’ Michelle interrupted, ‘So you’re nothing to do with Surrey Police?’
‘No. I’m… we’re part of the investigation support team reviewing your daughter’s case.’
‘So Surrey Police aren’t bothering with Lola any more?’ Michelle blinked hard, reached for a tissue and gave her eyes a quick wipe. ‘Sorry, can’t help getting emotional when I talk about her.’ She pulled a packet of cigarettes from her bag, lit one and then cast around for an ashtray. Unable to find one, she took the plastic saucer from under a fake orchid and used that to collect the accumulating ash. ‘They’ve given up on her: I knew it.’
‘It’s not that they’re not bothering. It doesn’t work like that,’ Brickall explained. ‘They’ll pass on any new leads, of course, and we’ll liaise with them in return. But they haven’t got officers out there looking for her at the moment, no.’
Michelle’s face wore an unreadable expression. ‘They reckon she’s dead. It’s obvious. And I keep telling them: how can she be when it’s Gavin that’s done this. He’s organised it somehow. I don’t know how, but he’s done it. It would be absolutely typical of him.’
Rachel attempted what she hoped was a reassuring smile. ‘Nobody’s suggesting Lola Jade’s dead; we’re very much working around the possibility of finding her alive. We wouldn’t be getting involved if that possibility didn’t exist. And obviously we will be looking very closely at your ex-husband.’
Michelle nodded, and even managed a brief smile, as she pushed out a stream of smoke through collagen-plumped lips.
‘That’s all well and good but – no offence – Surrey Police have been telling me the same thing, and five months down the line we’re no closer.’
Brickall leaned to one side to avoid the plume of smoke. ‘What makes you so sure it was your ex-husband?’
‘Because she didn’t cry out. If she’d woken up and there was a stranger in her room, she’d have screamed the place down. She made a racket even if she had a bad dream. But there was nothing. Whoever took her, she went with them willingly. So it has to be Gavin. Who else?’ She flicked a tube of ash from her cigarette. ‘And by the way: he’s not my ex, we’re still married. That’s the point: he was afraid of losing custody of Lola Jade in the divorce.’
‘Can you think of anyone else who might know where Gavin’s gone?’
Michelle pursed her lips. ‘Well, his family – his dad and his brother – they say they don’t know, but…’
She let this hang for a while, then stubbed out her cigarette and pressed her hand to her forehead. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to go. I’m getting a migraine. Talking about Lola Jade brings them on: it’s the stress.’
Rachel started to speak, but Michelle buried her face in her hands, drooping like a flower. ‘Sorry: I can’t. I just can’t.’
‘Talk to the hand!’ sniggered Brickall as they headed back down the drive. ‘Bloody Nora, she’s a fragile little thing, our Michelle, isn’t she?’
‘Hardly,’ scoffed Rachel. ‘But there’s no point badgering her at this point: we need to try and find Gavin Harper. Who sounds a right piece of work.’
‘So: you’re up to speed on the file,’ said Brickall as he swung out of the housing estate and rejoined the London Road. ‘D’you think he did it?’
‘I’m going to go back and reread his statement, that’s for sure.’ Rachel’s tone was careful
, but Brickall knew she was forming a hunch. ‘Think about it: he’s the one with a motive for taking Lola. Plus, he previously violated a custody agreement, in effect abducting his own child, however briefly.’
‘But?’ Brickall persisted.
‘If he managed to take her out of the country with him when he left, then where has she been since May? And would they not have been spotted, given her face has been on the front page of every paper?’
‘He could have managed it if he snatched her and handed her straight over to someone else before Michelle raised the alarm. Someone who took her abroad for him and kept her hidden there until he could join her. Or what if Gavin Harper’s taken her but hasn’t gone abroad? They could be hiding somewhere in this country.’
‘Assuming she’s alive,’ pointed out Rachel. ‘But you know the statistics. Ninety per cent of missing kids are found within seventy-two hours. Of the remaining ten per cent, the vast majority turn up within three weeks, most of them in body bags.’
‘Either way, we’ll need to speak to Michelle again at some point,’ said Brickall firmly. ‘We were only just getting warmed up.’
‘Agreed.’ Rachel nodded. ‘We’re definitely not done with the lovely Michelle.’
Four
Howard Davison lived boxing.
When he wasn’t hitting a punchbag, he was teaching other people to hit it, and when he was at home, he watched boxing on TV as often as his wife would allow it. It showed in his body, which was top-heavy, with a thickly muscled neck and shoulders. Sweat was gathering on his sun-bed-browned face, and soaking through the back of his vest.
‘Stand with your legs apart like this; arms at shoulder height. Then shoot out your right arm…’ he thwacked the punchbag, ‘…like this.’
He stepped off the mat. ‘Your turn,’ he told Rachel.
She shuffled forward on her injured knee, twisted awkwardly and landed a feeble punch on the bag, losing her balance as she did so.
‘You have to get the stance right, or you’re not going to have enough power. Legs apart, with right leg back. Keep the tension in those legs, like you’re about to kick a football.’
Rachel grimaced at him. ‘Difficult when one of your legs isn’t working. And comparing stuff to football is never going to help. My sergeant’s obsessed with it; I know nothing.’
Howard grinned, creasing the corners of his piercing ice-blue eyes. His buzz-cut hair was an indeterminate mousy colour not quite short enough to hide the beginnings of grey round the temples. Rachel had signed up for some personal training with him when she realised that swimming was making her knee worse. She calculated that a sport where you kept your lower body largely still and moved your upper body would work for someone with a torn ligament, but it wasn’t proving that easy. She still needed to move her feet. And she’d had to sweet-talk Howard into taking her on at all in her current condition.
‘Okay, Rachel, keep your chin down. Chin up is just begging to be hit.’
‘By a punchbag?’
‘The stance should be the same even with no live opponent. Now try a double jab – one, two.’
Rachel flailed ineffectively at the bag.
‘Problem is what you’re wearing.’ Howard indicated the baggy sweatshirt, hanging loosely over equally baggy tracksuit bottoms. ‘It’s getting in your way. Next time try wearing a vest and shorts: it’ll be much better.’
Rachel raised an eyebrow. ‘Really. You want me in school PE kit?’
Howard laughed. ‘Hey, it doesn’t matter what you look like. I train people of all shapes and sizes, and I’d say you’re in better shape than most of them… Now try it again. I know your right knee’s an issue, but try keeping the tension in those legs, both arms shoulder height. That’s it!’
Rachel landed a couple of more convincing punches on the bag. Then again. Adrenaline coursed through her body, just as it used to years ago when she was a cop on the beat. It felt good.
‘When you mentioned your sergeant…’ Howard said, as she eventually collapsed breathless on a weights bench. ‘Does that mean you’re in the military?’
‘Police. I’m a detective.’
Howard raised his eyebrows a fraction. ‘The boxing will come in handy then. When you come up against a villain.’
Rachel was about to explain that the NCA’s role was mainly one of oversight and intelligence-gathering, and that she spent the majority of her time driving a desk, but thought better of it and buried her sweaty face in her towel. After all, she was a trained firearms officer and very occasionally took part in tactical operations. ‘I think we ought to stop now: I don’t want to overdo it and make my leg worse.’
Howard smiled. ‘To be honest, I’m still not sure you should be doing this at all. But if you build up strength in your quads and your abs, it will help your injury in the long run.’
‘That’s the plan.’ Rachel gave him a sweaty high-five. ‘You don’t get rid of me that easily.’
* * *
Back in the office, she flicked a rubber band at Brickall, who was engrossed in checking Premier League results on his computer terminal.
‘Oi, deadbeat! I’ve been thinking.’
‘Careful: you know how dangerous thinking is.’ He didn’t look away from the screen, but flicked the rubber band back at her.
‘I think I should go and talk to Michelle Harper on my own. Maybe I’ll get more out of her woman to woman.’
Brickall made a scoffing noise. ‘Whatever.’ He pointed at her knee. ‘What about your gammy leg? Thought you couldn’t drive that far?’
‘I’ll get a bobby to drive me. But ask the questions on my own.’
Brickall shrugged. ‘Worth a try, I suppose. Only make sure she’s in: save wasting everyone’s time.’
* * *
Two hours later, WPC Wendy Nicholls parked outside number 57 Willow Way and cut the engine. A council refuse truck was lumbering its way round the street, with the bin men snatching and tipping the contents of wheelie bins. Michelle’s bin wasn’t out, Rachel noted.
‘You want me to wait here, ma’am?’
Rachel nodded. ‘Shouldn’t be too long: I phoned to say I was coming.’ Once she’d struggled out of the passenger seat, she stuck her head back into the car and said, ‘And while I’m inside, go into the back garden and see what’s happened to the bins. Take some photos. Oh, and hold on a sec…’ She took Wendy’s empty paper coffee cup. ‘I’m going to need this.’
Michelle Harper opened the door wearing a grey velour tracksuit and sheepskin boots studded with diamanté.
‘Come in, Rebecca.’
‘Rachel.’
‘Yes. Sorry.’ She hovered as Rachel lowered herself into an armchair, placing the takeout cup next to her on the side table as though she was still drinking from it. Michelle perched herself on the very edge of the cream sofa, not acknowledging Rachel’s injury, so that she felt she had to.
‘Running accident.’
Michelle ignored this. ‘Look, I’m obviously going to do all I can to help you.’ She hesitated, checking her own attitude, and added: ‘But I’m going out of my bloody mind with the stress. It’s still literally giving me migraines. I’ve already told Manners and the Asian girl everything I can remember. Multiple times.’
Rachel gave her best professional smile. ‘Just a few more questions if you don’t mind. We didn’t exactly have a proper chat last time.’
‘Sorry, but like I said… the migraines. I can’t help it.’ Michelle adopted a self-pitying expression, as she reached into her bag for her cigarettes and lit one.
‘We’ll take it slowly…’ Rachel decided the best approach was to ignore the histrionics. ‘Let’s start by talking about your life before this happened. How long was it since you and your husband had split up?’
‘A year and a half, roughly. Bit longer maybe.’
‘And what was your relationship like during that time?’
‘Things were okay, to start with. But he started bringing Lola back lat
e on his access days. And then he abducted her.’ Michelle’s tone was oddly impassive.
Rachel nodded. ‘I’ve been wanting to talk to you about that… What happened exactly?’
‘He was supposed to bring her back one Saturday evening and he didn’t. Wouldn’t answer his phone. Kept her all day Sunday, without a word. I was going out of my mind: literally losing it. I ended up calling the police.’ Michelle puffed smoke at the ceiling.
‘And how about when you were together? How were things between you then?’
‘Well. You know.’
‘No, I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.’
The self-pitying look appeared again. ‘He used to knock me about.’
‘And this was reported to the police?’ Rachel had read the whole file, so she already knew the answer to this question.
Michelle shook her head. ‘No, it wasn’t. No point. You know how it is: you lot aren’t interested in domestics.’
‘And what did he used to do exactly?’
Michelle picked up her phone, opened her photos app and started scrolling through the pictures. When she found what she was looking for, she thrust the phone in Rachel’s face. ‘Look!’
The photo was of the inside of a forearm – or wrist; it was hard to tell – swirled with bruising in shades of vivid magenta and lemon yellow. She flicked to another close-up of what looked like a neck and shoulder, smeared with livid scratch marks.
‘Can I see?’
Rachel reached for the phone to get a closer look, but Michelle snatched it away and put it back on the side table.
Rachel let this go. For now. ‘And how was he with Lola Jade?’
‘Pretty good, on the whole. She was a real daddy’s girl. Adored her dad. Like I said last time, that’s why she’d always have gone with him without question. She’d have thought the whole thing was a bit of a game.’
‘So where do you think Gavin could be now?’
There was a pause while Michelle subjected her cigarette to a long, intense drag. There was a clean ashtray on the table this time. Rachel was longing for a drink, but no offer was made, presumably because of the empty coffee cup.
