Detective Lucy Harwin 01-The Lost Children

by Helen Phifer

  ‘OK, I’ll try not to cry.’

  ‘That’s a girl; you have to be tough and brave if you don’t want to be crying every five minutes because of her.’

  * * *

  Alice turned away from Lizzy and lay on her side. She knew that whatever the kid had done must have been pretty bad. She probably wasn’t going to be getting out of here soon, but Alice didn’t have the heart to tell her that. The girl was so young – too young to be in here. Alice was going to have to break her rule of only looking out for herself and help the kid out, at least until she found her feet and could stand up for herself.

  9

  Alice Evans pulled the coffee shop door shut and turned the key. The coffee machine had broken along with the till, and the manager had told her to shut up shop and go home. The security alarm wasn’t working and she was glad, because it was such a struggle to remember the right sequence of numbers to set it. Her memory had improved a lot over the years, but it was still not as sharp as it had been before she was taken into hospital. It still amazed her that she’d actually got a job in the coffee shop, although she knew that it was more down to luck than talent – the manager was a friend of her daughter’s, and a kind girl. She must have felt sorry for Alice after she’d been fired from her last job. Alice could make the coffee OK, but she’d had to practise a lot to get the lattes and cappuccinos of a drinkable standard. As long as she didn’t look at the length of the queue she was all right; when she did, it would send her into mild panic. Today had been quiet, thankfully.

  Her daughter was waiting for her in the car, along with her gorgeous granddaughter, Gracie. Alice could drive, but she found it a struggle. Traffic lights and roundabouts confused her, so usually Beth would pick her up. She got into the car now and breathed out a sigh of relief.

  ‘Hi, Mum, busy day?’

  Alice nodded. ‘Not too bad, how are you?’ She began to dig around in her handbag, bringing out a paper bag filled with cakes. ‘I got you both a present.’

  Beth glanced at the bag. ‘Mum, I told you not to bring cakes home. I end up stuffing my face with them all.’

  Alice chuckled. ‘Sorry, I forgot. I hate to see them go to waste. It’s such a shame; they just throw them in the bin.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask Charlotte if you can give them to the homeless people that hang around the pier?’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that dear. It’s not right, all those youngsters sleeping in that abandoned bingo hall. It would break my heart to see them; I hate to think of them living like that.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right. You’d end up inviting them all back to your house for tea and a warm bath! You’re far too trusting. Are you coming to my house for tea, or do you want to go home and sort yourself out?’

  ‘Well, if you’re offering, that would be nice. I can bath Gracie and put her to bed for you.’

  Beth reached out and patted her mum’s hand. ‘That would be great, thank you. She’s been a little terror all day.’

  They drove past the turning to The Moore and Alice shivered. There were police cars everywhere. A van was parked blocking the turn-off to the hospital. Beth craned her neck to see what was going on as her mum looked the other way. ‘Oh dear, that doesn’t look good, does it? Look at all the police cars. I wonder what’s happened? It must be pretty bad.’

  She glanced at her mum, then reached out to pat her hand. ‘Sorry, Mum. I know how much you hate that place.’

  Alice turned to look at her. ‘It’s a bad place, Beth; it always has been.’

  They drove the rest of the way in silence, until they finally reached Beth’s house on the outskirts of Brooklyn Bay. It was one of the new houses on an estate which had been built when they’d knocked the old grammar school down. Alice was very proud of her daughter. Beth was a clever girl, and Alice had done her best to make sure she’d had far more chances than Alice herself had ever been given. Beth had gone to college, then to university in Edinburgh where she’d got a first-class law degree. It was also where she’d met her husband, who was now a barrister. Alice wasn’t keen on him. He reminded her of a doctor she’d known a very long time ago.

  She shuddered. Just thinking about that man and how he’d ruined her life made her cold to the bone. It wasn’t right, how he had justified what he’d done to those poor patients. Even though there had been a scandal a couple of years later, he’d still got off lightly. And it didn’t change the fact that those poor kids had been injected with all sorts of drugs. Alice often wondered what they were doing with their lives now. Had they moved on? She hoped that most of them had managed to put it behind them, like she had.

  The car door slammed, jolting her away from those awful dirty white walls of the hospital. She still couldn’t bring herself to call it by its proper name. The only way she had coped over the years was by trying not to think about it, and when she did, by referring to it as ‘the hospital’. She had never forgiven her mother for putting her in there and leaving her to rot. Alice would never have done that to Beth.

  Beth, who was cradling her sleepy daughter in her arms, opened Alice’s car door. ‘Come on, Mum, you can put the kettle on. I’ll have a plain old mug of tea please, no more fancy-coffee making for you today.’

  Alice smiled; her daughter was such a good girl and Alice would never let anyone hurt her. She never had, even making her husband leave after one argument too many when Beth was a baby. She had decided that she’d rather struggle on her own than put her child in any danger. Getting out of the car now, she followed her daughter up the steps to the shiny oak front door. Walking inside, she kicked off her shoes. The house was full of cream carpets, which if you asked her was a huge mistake with a toddler, but who was she to tell them that? Beth could afford to have them professionally cleaned if they needed to.

  Alice walked into the lounge, which still looked like a show home. Nothing was out of place. It was a lot different to the cramped council flat that they’d lived in when Beth was a baby. Walking into the large, open-plan kitchen, Alice filled the kettle. She took some tea bags from the cupboard and put them into the fancy teapot on the worktop, then perched herself on a bar stool. Beth walked in and Alice smiled at her. ‘Where’s Gracie?’

  ‘I put her to bed, Mum. She fell asleep in the car.’

  ‘Oh, wasn’t I going to do that?’

  ‘It’s OK, you’re making the tea instead. You can go and give her a kiss goodnight if want to.’

  Alice nodded. ‘That’s all right, I don’t want to disturb her.’ She poured the tea into two matching mugs, adding the milk and passing one to her daughter. She cradled her own mug, forcing herself to watch the television that Beth had switched on. Anything to take her mind off that place where she’d spent the best part of her teenage years. That was the thing with that hospital: once you let it into your head, it was hard to push the memories out. They threatened to take over. It had been a godforsaken place. It had done nothing except inflict needless pain and suffering onto the innocent souls within it, who had only needed some love and attention.

  10

  Lucy and Mattie arrived back at the station, cardboard coffee cups in hand. Lucy had a paper bag containing a huge slice of lemon cake, which Mattie had declined but was now eyeing up wistfully. Lucy went into her office and shut the door. It was a small room at the back of the open-plan CID office, with floor-to-ceiling glass walls . She set about closing all the blinds, needing five minutes to think to herself about what she wanted before heading up the briefing. As she closed the last blind, she noted that Mattie was perched on the corner of Col’s desk, deep in conversation and sipping his hot drink. Browning was sitting at the desk opposite Mattie’s. He was doing that awful typing/poking thing he did to input information into the computer. On a good day, people would put up with him, but if they were stressed Browning’s typing made them even more so because it echoed around the entire building. The beauty of the old station had been that CID had been made up of an assortment of smaller offices, and usuall
y they would leave Browning in one on his own so that he didn’t annoy the fuck out of everyone. This new station was nice, but there were few places to go if you wanted some privacy.

  Lucy took out a notepad and wrote down a list of enquiries that needed following up to be dished out at the briefing. A knock on the door made her elbow her latte, almost sending it flying as Tom walked in.

  ‘You’re back,’ he said. ‘Are you ready to do a briefing in five minutes?’

  ‘Yes, sir, as ready as I’ll ever be.’

  ‘Did you find any more bodies up there?’

  She shook her head. ‘The good news is none – well, not on the ground floor anyway. The upper floors aren’t really safe enough to search until we’ve had confirmation from a building inspector that they’re not going to collapse.’

  ‘Bollocks; it’s never straightforward, is it? How much is that going to cost?’

  She shrugged. ‘There’s no suggestion that there are more bodies up there. And it looks pretty safe to me. I’m quite happy to do a walkthrough of the upper floors; Mattie said the same.’

  ‘Well, that’s very good of you, but if they collapse whilst you’re up there… Oh, Christ, I can’t even contemplate the complications.’

  ‘Apparently the estate agent who is dealing with the sale of it has been up there and said it was OK. Robbo didn’t want a mob of coppers up there just in case.’

  ‘Do you really think there won’t be any more bodies up there?’

  ‘Who knows? I’d like to say there won’t be. I ventured halfway up and couldn’t smell anything untoward, but until someone has checked each room it’s impossible to say.’

  Tom ran his hand over the stubble of his shaved head. ‘Can we have a word with the estate agents, see if they know if a building inspector has certified it safe?’

  ‘I’ve already asked; they’re looking into it.’

  ‘Thank you, Lucy. You’re good and it’s great to have you back.’

  For a moment, she thought he was going to ask her if she was OK. He paused for a second and must have read the look on her face before turning around and walking back out. Lucy ate her cake. She needed the sugar rush to give her some energy to carry on, before she had to stand up in front of a room full of coppers and support staff. She’d had no lunch and had skipped breakfast; her stomach had been a churning mass of knots at the thought of having to sit opposite Sara Cross this morning. She was so relieved the session had been cut short – although this was an almighty mess, it was a hundred times better than that.

  She brushed the crumbs from her top and realised, horrified, that she was still wearing her casual clothes and smelt bad. The briefing would have to wait a few minutes longer; she wasn’t going to stand at the front of that room looking like this. She looked like she was about to go undercover on a drugs bust, not head up her team for a murder investigation.

  Dashing out of her office, she went down to the locker room where she kept a spare suit and blouse in case of emergencies. She didn’t have a spare pair of shoes, but at least if she stood behind the wooden lectern that all the sergeants leaned on when they briefed the shifts, she could hide her feet. She took the clothes into the ladies and did a quick change, ran a brush through her hair to neaten up her ponytail, then spritzed herself with someone’s perfume they’d left on the sink. It wasn’t her usual choice, but it didn’t smell too bad.

  By the time she reached the briefing room it was full: standing room only at the back. She squeezed past the crush to make her way to the front of the room, hoping no one would notice the bright yellow Converse on her feet. Just at this point, Tom came rushing in, managing to knock the mug of coffee he was carrying all over one of the student officers and causing a commotion, which allowed Lucy to take her place without so much as a second glance from anyone. It was a good job, she thought, that Tom’s coffee was only lukewarm, or that would have been another bunch of forms for him to fill out.

  ‘Right, are we all here then?’ She looked around. Task Force were here, along with everyone from CID. Browning was glaring at her and she smiled at him. If he thought he was going to make her crack he’d have to try a bit harder than that. She’d thought he’d be jealous that she’d got her DI position before him, and it looked as if she might be right.

  She coughed, and began her briefing. ‘As you know, at eleven forty-five this morning, Cheryl Tate was showing a potential buyer around the old mental asylum. They discovered a body. However, we still have no means of identifying the victim. He was murdered in situ and left there. Dr Maxwell has suggested the cause of death is by lobotomy.’

  There was an assortment of gasps and sighs from around the room.

  ‘It’s pretty horrific, to be honest,’ Lucy said. ‘Apart from that, we don’t know much else.’

  Tom, who had mopped up his coffee with a bunch of paper towels, made his way to stand next to Lucy. ‘We agreed a forensic strategy with CSI and cordoned off what we deemed were the appropriate evidential areas. Then Task Force, along with some of yourselves, went in and searched the ground floor. Nobody found anything else, anything suspicious or that you thought was worth looking at?’

  Every head in the room shook from side to side.

  ‘The upstairs hasn’t been searched,’ Tom continued, ‘and won’t be until we have clarification that it’s safe to do so. Lucy, what are our main priorities?’

  She looked down at the notes she’d scribbled earlier. ‘Obviously we need an ID on the victim. Browning, can you focus on that? Go through the missing persons’ reports, locally then countrywide. I have a feeling that the victim is local though. The hospital is not something that’s really talked about much, so I have an instinct that there is a personal connection to the hospital – perhaps the patients were treated badly in the months before it closed. Colin, have you made a start with the staff and patient lists?’

  ‘Yes, boss. Well, I’ve been in touch with the health authority to request the information. From a general search on information about the asylum when it was open, I’ve discovered that at any one time there were around 2,400 patients and 453 staff.’

  There were lots of sighs and murmurs around the room. Lucy felt her heart sink. This was going to be a long job.

  ‘The good news is that because of the phasing out of mental hospitals back in the seventies, there were only children housed inside The Moore when it shut down. So looking at the timescale and taking into account the ages of the patients, we’re not looking at thousands – maybe less than a hundred. It had become a sort of a dumping ground for kids with problems; some of them were in there just because they had special needs or couldn’t read or write.’

  ‘Wow, thank you for that, Colin,’ Lucy said. ‘Let’s focus on the area the body was left in. Why ward thirteen? There must be some reason for this particular part of the hospital.. So I need to know who worked on it. This might narrow things down significantly. Of course, we might get lucky and get prints from the victim that have a match on the system. Failing that, hopefully someone will realise they’re missing a husband, brother, dad, friend – and report him missing. Meanwhile, I want all the builders who are in the process of digging up the cemetery across the road questioned. Seeing as how there are no houses nearby, they are our only potential witnesses at the moment. I want to know if they’ve seen any vehicles coming to or from the asylum that don’t belong to the estate agents, and I want CCTV enquiries done as soon as we finish in here.’

  Browning lifted his hand. ‘There are no cameras on the outside of the hospital, and the dead people in the cemetery don’t have any, either.’

  ‘No, I appreciate that. However, I want the houses checking along the stretch of road that leads to the asylum in both directions. Some of those are big, fancy houses and it’s more than likely they have cameras. If we’re very lucky, they might have captured a vehicle coming to and from there.’

  Browning muttered. ‘And we might as well be looking for a needle in a bloody haystack.’

>   There were a few sniggers that stopped as soon as Lucy stared at the offending officers.

  ‘I think that’s it for now. When we get confirmation from the estate agents about the safety of the second floor then the search teams can go back and check the rest of the hospital. Thank you all for your efforts; this is a difficult one and I do appreciate it, but let’s do our best to find out who our victim is and get some justice for his family.’

  She watched as they began to file out of room, knowing that they were all thinking that this job was going to last forever. She didn’t blame them. It didn’t look to her like this was going to be case closed any time soon.

  11

  Lucy and Mattie arrived back at the asylum, which was now lit up with portable lights that were being run by the noisiest generator Lucy had ever heard. The dog had done a good job; not only had it found the point of entry into the asylum itself, it had also discovered a smaller rusted gate on the narrow service road that had been used to drive in and out of the grounds. Jack had found traces of tyre tracks and had taken mouldings.

  By now, Lucy had swapped her Converse for her old pair of Magnums. They didn’t really match the suit she was wearing, but at least they would stop her shoes from getting ruined. She waved at Jack, who had popped his head out of the building to speak to Amanda. He looked knackered. He nodded at Lucy, and she felt terrible for him and Amanda. This was a huge, nightmare of an area to search for clues.

  Lucy and Mattie walked across to the main entrance where Amanda was dusting for prints. She looked at Lucy, then stared down at her feet.

  ‘Mattie, did you bring some more shoe covers?’

  He nodded, and pulled some out of his pocket, handing them to Lucy. Once they’d both covered their feet he fished in his other pocket and pulled out a handful of blue latex gloves. He passed her a pair and she began to tug them on.