Joanna stopped in front of Madeline’s Easter egg. It was, as the teacher had said, a mass of purple, red and orange stars carefully coloured-in in felt-tip pen. Looking closely Joanna could see that the teacher had pencilled in Madeline’s name for the child to imitate on top. The heavier line was wavy and at times not precisely over the pencilled in letters. And Madeline had added little touches of her own - freehand - without the teacher’s guidelines. Something that looked very like a magician’s wand tapped the top of the egg. And a few of the purple stars span from its top, their shapes obviously drawn freehand. Joanna had drawn inspiration before from pictures and pieces of music, from photographs and pottery figures. And this picture, in its simple crudity, had a message all of its own. The trouble was it was one she did not have the insight to read.
They passed on.
Sunshine slanted in through the dusty windows to dance around empty desks, play with tiny chairs, books, playmats, pictures.
“We’ll start with Madeline’s classroom.”
It was small and square, crowded with furniture. Formica topped tables instead of single desks.
A plastic slide stood in the corner, two large buckets of huge Lego either side. There were pictures of a man riding a camel, a sunglassed woman sitting in a Porsche, some climbers on a craggy, Alpine mountain, a still from the Tour de France all underneath the general heading, Travel.
There was nowhere to hide in the classroom except behind a movable bookshelf. Two seconds and they knew for sure Madeline was not here.
They moved to the next classroom, a similar one except the times tables were pinned up on the walls. Older children. And here again there was nowhere to hide except in one large cupboard with a bolt very high up on the wall. And there was nothing here either except some rolled up wall charts and boxes of paper. A few text books and some pencils. It was a shallow cupboard, no more than a couple of feet deep and shelved from top to bottom. No child, not even one as small as Madeline could have hidden here.
The next classroom was locked but luckily Sally Thompson had left them a bunch of keys. And when they opened the door they saw why this classroom was kept locked. Inside were computers.
They searched the two remaining classrooms quite quickly and realised Madeline could not be here. The school was single storey. The headmistress’s office and staff room yielded nothing else. And neither did the kitchens, the cloakrooms or the toilets. Madeline was not here. They walked back along the long corridor, Joanna sensing Mike’s jubilance. He had been right, she had been wrong.
But halfway along the corridor the tables turned.
The window-sills were wide. Wide enough for a small foot to fit front to back. Maybe it was the way the sunshine played around the dust and the absence of dust in a footshape.
“Oh, Mike,” Joanna said softly. “Mike.”
He looked at her. Then stood behind her so he caught the same shape picked out by sunshine, the paintwork more shiny where it lacked dust. “That wasn’t there,” he said. “It wasn’t. We searched the entire building. Do you really think a gang of officers hunting for a little girl would have missed something as obvious as a footprint?”
Joanna chewed her lip. He was right. She wasn’t particularly sharp-eyed. It wasn’t difficult to spot. While the sun shone. But Friday afternoon …
“Somehow we’ve made a mess of this,” she said.
And for once Korpanski had no words to cheer her.
In the same moment they both looked up. There was a small trapdoor into the roof-space. Too tiny for official access. Knowing the footprint must be preserved for the SOCOs to lift it they spent valuable minutes locating a ladder and a flashlight. Joanna ascended first. And as she climbed the rungs she acknowledged that she was frightened of what she would find. Ifs skidded through her brain and collided with her reason. If Madeline was here, had been here all along her head would roll - her career tumble - and rightly too - for incompetence.
If the child was up here she faced humiliation. She flashed the light around. And saw nothing but rafters. The attic was boarded for the short space between purlings and roof supports. But it was quickly apparent that no one was here. She climbed right into the roof-space, flicked on an electric switch. And knew. Madeline had been here.
Hee hee hee You can’t catch me. You can’t find me - ever.
And then she was relieved that they had taken Baldwin straight into custody. That then he had been watched and that the child couldn’t have run to him.
Most of the time. Not quite all of the time. Huke had got to him.
These days most SOCOs were civilians - not police officers. But Barraclough had been a SOCO when most of the young PCs had been sucking lollipops. Joanna would have no other particularly on such a sensitive and potentially destructive case. If there was a hair of Madeline Wiltshaw’s head in this attic Barraclough would find it. And preserve it as legal evidence.
She didn’t want some cost-conscious civvy up here. She wanted “Barra”, whose talent at finding trace evidence was unsurpassed.
He took some locating. It was a Sunday afternoon but once he had absorbed Joanna’s terse request you could almost hear him crank back into gear.
He lifted the footprint with the care of a surgeon carving away the years for a facelift. He found some fingerprints on the upper window frame - and part of a second small footprint on the bar of the skylight. Within an hour his head was sticking out of the trapdoor, plastic specimen bags dangling from his fingers.
Containing hair for the comparison microscope. “Didn’t you say your little girly had very dark, straight hair to her chin?”
She nodded, her eyes fixed on the contents of the bag. It wasn’t much in the way of trace evidence. But then Barraclough produced the second bag. And Joanna knew. Because it contained one felt-tip colouring pen. Bright green.
“Well, someone’s been here, Jo.”
“When?”
He started descending the ladder. “Come on, Jo,” he said. “You know I can’t even guess at that. We don’t even know that she’s been here. Not until we’ve got a match on the hair or lifted a fingerprint from the pen. And we certainly don’t know that Madeline’s been here since she’s been reported missing.”
“The footprint,” she said.
“Be careful,” he warned. “Be very careful. This is a big find. Although didn’t you say the teachers reported she was reluctant to go outside in cold weather? This might have been her hidey-hole. After all - it’s just out of view of both classrooms, isn’t it? And I bet a little imp like that would easily get up there, using the windowsill and then the pelmet to yank herself up. So even if we do get a match it’s probable that she was here before Friday.”
“Let’s hope so,” she said. “Otherwise my head is lying beneath Madame Guillotine.”
She and Mike walked back along the corridor to study the children’s pictures again. Plenty of red, orange and purple, but no green at all.
It wasn’t exactly evidence but it gave her the tiniest fragment of hope.
She was beginning to understand the child, to know her. And knowing her meant she could anticipate her actions. Madeline was a little girl who loved to hide. Who loved secrets. Who kept secrets.
She took a deep breath in and held it. “I think I’d better have a word with Colclough.
It was Easter Sunday afternoon. And, as befitted his senior rank, Chief Superintendent Arthur Colclough was to be found at home - letting his dinner go down. As Mrs Colclough went to fetch him she could picture the aged bulldog, whiskers trembling, as she related her story.
There was a moment’s awful silence down the phone. Then a shocked expletive followed by a swift apology. “Piercy,” he barked. “Where is the little girl now?”
“I don’t know, Sir. Except that this isn’t a normal case of a little girl being abducted. She was hiding, Sir.”
“Well find her.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“And report to me first thing Tuesday mornin
g.”
“Yes, Sir.”
A quick harrumph then. “And I’ll be on the end of the telephone all weekend.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Korpanski’s brows met in the middle. “It’s all right for him telling us to find her. Where do we start looking?”
“I don’t know. I mean - the whole thing’s turned on its head, isn’t it? She could be wandering anywhere.”
“And the damned farmers aren’t going to let us roam all over their land.”
She felt vicious then. “They’re just going to have to let us. They’ve no choice.”
They had a few more hours of daylight and Joanna gathered up the entire investigating force and told them their findings. Explained to them that Madeline Wiltshaw had been a child who would hide. From them. That there was even a possibility that she had remained in the school after the other children had gone and after she had been reported missing. She watched them all sag as they realised that there was a chance they could have found her alive. The major investigation then would have been minor - a simple problem of a child who didn’t want to go home. Work for the Social Services - not the police force. And they would have been able to spend Easter with their families. She understood all their emotions, their puzzlement, their frustration, their disappointment - and lastly their determination.
It felt as though they were being outwitted by a five-year-old child.
Even more than before Joanna was searingly aware of the personality of the little girl they were all so intent on finding. She had hidden. Why?
Because she hadn’t wanted to go home with her stepfather.
Why? Easy to answer - because he was a violent bully and she was scared of him.
But the question that was not so easy to answer was where was Madeline now?
What had she intended to do on Friday?
Had she had a definite plan or had she thought she might simply wander?
The answer came back as certain as before. A definite plan? To meet someone.
And strong in that line fell Mr Baldwin, children’s magician. Parties a speciality. Magic a talent. He could make eggs vanish, people disappear. Produce flowers from inside your ear, crayons and stars. He was a clown, a wizard, a person who could change things. She had coloured in her picture to give to him.
Joanna stood very still, an icy wind stroking the back of her neck. It was not possible. A breathy voice that seemed to come from inside her whispered. So soft she could have imagined it.
He can make me invisible. And then no one can see me. No one can hurt me. I am here. I am there. But nobody knows.
She felt her jaw ache with tension.
How had Baldwin done it?
As though the surround was an orange she divided the area immediately around Horton into pointed segments, teams of officers detailed to scour these segments, to leave no square millimetre of ground unexplored. No blade of grass undisturbed.
“You’ll have to take precautions against foot and mouth,” she warned. “Wear disposable suits when you enter any farmland. Take full advantage of the buckets of disinfectant and let the farmers see you douse your boots. Don’t take vehicles on and off farmland. And if you do, get the farmers to spray your wheelarches with disinfectant. Drive slowly over the straw mats. If you enter farm buildings do so with the attendant farmers. Any problems use your phones. The last thing we want is for one of you to be blasted with lead shot by some farmer overprotective of his animals.”
They dispersed with tension. Knowing they would meet confrontation and maybe aggression. The farmers would protect their herds. To the death if need be. They had all seen the dreadful cattle pyres, pathetic hooves sticking up through palls of smoke. It was for most of them brought up in a rural community a terrible vision of destruction, loss of income, obliteration of generations of toil and care.
And it was hampering their search for one small child in acres of farmland.
She and Mike took the shallow valley between Horton and Rudyard, one of the most beautiful and unspoilt areas of Britain. Small green fields, greystone farmhouses, dry stone walls. It spoke of Staffordshire. And yet this valley had a microclimate quite unlike the high moorlands between Leek and Buxton. At this lower level even so early in spring wild flowers already proliferated: rose bay willow herb, cow parsley, campion, dandelions, wild forget-me-nots. But there was a downside in this area marked by rushes hiding treacherous bogs. Not deep and life threatening like Carver Doone’s Dartmoor. Nothing here was as vicious as other parts of the country. This part of Staffordshire was never extreme, this southern side of Leek, containing the villages of Longsden and Rudyard, Horton and Dunwood, Endon and Stanley.
She and Mike tramped silently along the path, their eyes straining for any sign of the missing child, Joanna trying to picture the terrain from a five-year-old’s perspective.
Hours later they were back at the school. Nothing.
Nothing.
The trail had run cold.
Chapter Thirteen
Easter Monday.
Should be a day of hope, of optimism, of rebirth, an opportunity for forgiveness, everlasting life. Heaven. But even in the moment that she awoke she felt none of this.
The trail was cold.
She was losing sight of the little girl as though she had vanished round a corner. And however hard she tried to catch up she was always lagging behind. Somewhere locked deep in her mind was the certainty that, whether he was innocent or guilty, Baldwin held the key. If anyone had inched close to Madeline he, in some mysterious way, had. More than her mother. More than her teachers. There had been an undoubted bridge between the two - the disaffected, lonely conjuror and the frightened little girl. Nothing he had said or implied suggested it was in any way a sexual bridge but, as Mike had pointed out, this was the way these people worked.
She lay and stared up at the ceiling and believed the child was dead.
Joanna rolled over in bed and felt Matthew move towards her. Felt his arms slip around her, tightly, as though he would prevent her from rising. She would have stayed. But the child tugged at her conscience.
She nuzzled his shoulder. “When this is over,” she murmured, “we’ll spend some time together. Alone.”
But her suggestion seemed to annoy him. He drew away and folded his arms underneath his head while he stared up at the ceiling. “We don’t have much of a life together, Jo.”
She felt the familiar prick of conscience - of fear - and protested. “We do.”
“You’re always working.”
“Not always. And anyway - so are you.”
Matthew continued staring upwards at the angled corners of the ceiling. His profile was a noble one, straight nose, chiselled, well-shaped mouth. His hair tousled, curly, honey blond. Michelangelo’s David. “Will there ever come a time, do you think, that we really will spend time together?” The strain made his voice gravelly and hostile-sounding. She could feel alienation behind it.
She was disturbed by the discontent in his voice. He had left Jane - and Eloise - for her. For some bright promise of a happy lovenest with his mistress. They had been together for less than a year. Because of his involvement in police work he knew that during major investigations all police worked flat-out. And he would want Madeline found as much as she. He just didn’t want her to be the one to have to do the work.
Without speaking again she got up and stood under the shower, trying to quell the thought that men were inherently selfish, as her mother had always warned her. That basically they wanted their mothers in their wives. Only a younger version. And like many of her generation Matthew’s mother had been home more than she, a part-time worker with his father the main wage-earner. But even Matthew had commented that his parents’ relationship had soured since his father’s retirement and their increased time together.
She dressed and went downstairs, still uncomfortable at the ground being dug up between them. She brought him up a mug of coffee and they sat quietly drinking until Joann
a leaned over and fished something out from under the bed.
“Happy Easter,” she said. “And I hope you’ve got me one. Or I’ll scoff half of yours.”
It was the biggest Toblerone Easter egg they had had in the entire shop. Matthew’s absolute favourite. He grinned at her, his sulky grumbles forgotten. But they would return. She could not keep the relationship buoyant all the time.
They munched chocolate until half of the original egg had disappeared and then Joanna rose with a sigh. “Time I was off.”
She slipped some square-heeled short leather boots underneath her black trousers and scarlet fleece. It felt like a day she and Korpanski would be traipsing the moors. She needed practical, comfortable clothes.
Matthew threw his Parthian shot as she was halfway out of the door. “You spend more time with that ruddy Pole than you do with me.”
It was not worthy of a reply.
There are many days like this one in a police investigation. When nothing seems to be bearing fruit. She and Korpanski checked statement after statement, collating the results of the entire investigating force’s interviews. By the end of the day they were no further forward.
Worse - when she rang the hospital she got the unwelcome news that Baldwin had discharged himself which gave her something else to worry about on two counts. Firstly she didn’t quite trust he was innocent. Even though he would have had to trick time itself she couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that he had had something to do with Madeline’s disappearance. And secondly she could not convince herself that Huke’s vengeance was spent.
She put out a ‘locate and observe’ call.
Then she returned home again to a cold, empty house but this time there was no bottle of wine and no friendly note.
Endangering Innocents Page 11
