She got to her feet. ‘Let’s forget everything we’ve read and heard, and pretend we were on duty when the call came in. It’d be nice to have at least a white board to jot everything on, but in the absence of anything else at least we’ve got our iPad and our brains.’
Mark laughed. ‘You mean literally thinking on our feet? Why not? You lead. I’ll type.’
For a moment she put her hands to her temples, as if that would help her visualize what happened, then she touched the notes she’d made to try to bring them to life. ‘To the person taking the nine-nine-nine call – a middle-aged woman called Joanne Aitken – it’s clearly a report of one, perhaps two, missing persons. She despatches the nearest rapid response team. Or is it as simple as that? She hears there’s a dead baby involved. She picks out what she can from the deluge of information and wonders if perhaps it’s a suspicious death. So, having called an ambulance just in case there’s any hope for the baby, she now sends CID in the form of a DI and a DC out on blues and twos. Well done, Joanne. She’s someone I’d like to talk to. She’d add atmosphere to start the narrative, as it were.’
‘Just a despatcher? Would you bother in a live case?’
‘I suppose not. No, forget that.’
‘So if the police vehicles beat the ambulance to it, theoretically the scene should be preserved from the outset.’ He checked his own notes and pulled a face. ‘The first officers arrive rather later than current target response-time guidelines would require. CID are really very slow. They get there several minutes after the ambulance. But they all have to deal with thick fog. Everyone makes that point. The woman who called in the incident is definite that visibility is very bad indeed. Marion Roberts. Another one to talk to.’
‘This is her witness statement: it’s written down by an officer, of course, but she’s had a go at it herself, correcting spelling and punctuation.’ She waved it at him. ‘She’s adamant the baby was dead when she made her call. She also said that it wasn’t just a normal healthy baby. She could tell that from outside the car. There were problems with its hands – she’s very specific about that – and its face was deformed. The paramedics confirmed all that and agreed that there was nothing they could do. One of the paramedics suggested the child was suffering from some obscure syndrome. Have you come across the PM reports yet?’
‘Nope. Now, I’ve got the report from CID here: Mrs Roberts insists that the child seat beside the baby’s was warm when she arrived. The Forestry Commission worker she flagged down says the Range Rover engine was still warm too, and that the key was still in the ignition.’
‘Did they try calling out: Hello, anyone there? That sort of thing?’
Mark frowned. ‘They must have done, surely. Except that fog does funny things to you, doesn’t it? Like making you drive faster and faster because you’re desperate to be able to see again – at least that’s what some psychologists say. Perhaps they tried. There’s nothing in Mrs Roberts’s statement?’
‘Nothing. But it’s all written in our dearly beloved flat anonymous wordy police-ese. Come on, of course you’d yell. You might even try to look for them – maybe not a woman dressed for visiting someone, but an estate worker? Surely you’d crash around shouting, making a huge amount of noise. Unless this Mrs Roberts was busy having hysterics – again it’s not recorded. What do the notebooks of the officers on the scene say?’
‘That they started to search. Except they use the passive voice, not the active. A search was duly undertaken and—’
‘Pedant!’
Mark sniffed. ‘No one can fault them on the search. A lot of volunteers, including Forestry Commission workers, and those dogs, of course.’ He jerked a thumb in the direction of the window. ‘But after less than an hour, things went badly wrong. The fog cleared – momentarily. Then the weather really came in. Torrential rain turning to sleet and then to snow. And the snow didn’t stop for twenty-four hours. And it lay for six weeks.’ He shuffled papers. ‘It’s all here, meticulously logged. You can tell how frustrated the officer in charge was when the snow started – he knew that as every minute passed there was less chance of finding anyone alive. Chief Inspector Blount. Another on our To Interview list.’
‘And by now, I presume, they had a name for the driver and the missing child? We know she’s Natalie Foreman, WAG or otherwise. The child’s Hadrian. That’s right. Hadrian, not Adrian. And the poor dead baby was Julius, God help it. Who in their right mind calls a child Hadrian?’ she demanded.
‘Someone who drives the poshest Range Rover you could buy? A man called Philip Foreman. Foreman plays for a Midlands side, West Bromwich Albion, it says here. He’s their striker.’
‘The striker’s the one who scores goals, right?’ Fran asked deadpan.
‘Right,’ he agreed ironically. ‘He played for England at one time, I think. But I follow football like you follow greyhounds, so this is one area we may need to pick someone’s brains.’
‘Is there at least a photo of him?’
‘I couldn’t find one in any of the boxes, but then, he wasn’t a suspect. But there must be one of him in here.’ He patted the iPad. ‘Shall we look? OK.’ It didn’t take him long to bring up an image of a young man in action, both feet off the ground, one muscular leg outstretched as he kicked a ball.
‘A fine-looking lad,’ Fran said. ‘Is there an image where we can see his face, rather than his quads?’
‘Only some team photos where he looks as wooden as you’d expect.’
‘But quite attractive. Really nice thighs, Mark.’
‘You and your thighs fixation … Anyway, Foreman’s baby son is dead, and his wife and other son missing. A high-profile case if ever there was one. And, because of the weather, it’s pretty well stalled after sixteen hours. The volunteer searchers either drift home or are sent home because the weather’s so awful and the forecast even worse. The press cover the weather and probably other crises like our own in Sandwich. And no one ever sees Natalie or Hadrian again. Or,’ he adds pensively, ‘anything that could be their remains.’ He looked at the sky again. ‘Any other day I’d say we should go and look at the scene. But I honestly don’t think we’d see anything helpful.’
Fran nodded. ‘The trouble is, we don’t even have a map here. Do you think Mr Mole would let us borrow his technology for a bit?’ She waved a pen like a magician’s wand, as if she could conjure up visual display screens with their clever electronics. The wall remained predictably blank. No miracle for them, technological or otherwise. ‘OK, let’s see what the iPad will do.’ That was sufficiently miraculous anyway.
Mark leaned over, wrapping his arm round her shoulders. ‘It’s not a huge area,’ he said, tracing the green patch with his forefinger. ‘Surely someone as determined as that guy Blount seems to have been would have made sure it was thoroughly searched. Come to that, couldn’t Natalie have found her own way out?’
Fran had found another screen. ‘According to Wikipedia there’s more than ten square miles of it. And it sounds even bigger if you go metric – nearly twenty-six square kilometres. And although there are lots of paths – they are paths, aren’t they, not roads? – there are hardly any houses. Apart from that village about a mile from here, Buttonoak, human activity’s mostly to the south, the other side of the A456. So what do you do if you get lost? In rain like this, let alone thick fog, it’d be hard to know if you were going in a straight line, unless you managed to come across a path. You’d have to set off on a path, wouldn’t you?’
‘I’d have thought so. Now, she’s got a toddler. Here he is.’ He picked up a photo from the file: curly blond hair, chubby cheeks, chubby limbs – Hadrian might have been a model for the cherubs in Webster’s room. ‘He’d dawdle if you made him walk and if you had to carry him he’d be heavy. Rain, then snow …’
Fran drew her hand across her throat. ‘Wouldn’t take long, hypothermia. Is that any consolation?’
‘But with his mother protecting him? And there’d be snow to keep the
m hydrated.’
‘But you don’t necessarily drive in warm, bulky clothes. Not if your car’s got a good heater. Did you find a picture of her?’
He held one out – a head and shoulders view of a woman barely out of girlhood, with large blue eyes dominating a fine-featured face. ‘Looks like a puff of wind would blow her over.’
‘Is there a mention of outer clothing for either of them?’
‘None. Though with this sort of record-keeping that doesn’t mean much. But even if they were wrapped up to the ears, would they survive in weather like this – and worse?’
THREE
‘We ought to unpack and settle in,’ Mark said without enthusiasm. ‘Snowdrop Cottage. Hmph. No wonder the Satnav didn’t want to bring us here.’ They’d made several passes up and down the road before they’d spotted a tight turn into their lane, narrow and sodden.
‘Well, we’re here now. And there’s nothing wrong with the place. Not really. When the sun shines it’ll be perfect – a picture-book cottage!’ She tried another tack. ‘I know the other bedroom’s prettier, but—’
‘But we need to be able to stand up in it. I know you think it’s all fairy-tale and romantic but I draw the line at sleeping in a room with a ceiling so low that neither of us can walk around except in the dead centre.’
‘So we’ll use this one. Come on, by the time the central heating’s done its job it’ll be fine. And as Webster implied, the sooner we’ve done the job the better – and we can just head for home.’
‘What do you reckon the smell is?’ he asked with a suspicious sniff.
‘Damp,’ she said briskly. ‘I used to get it in my cottage if it had been unoccupied for a week. That fan heater will help. I’d throw open the window except the rain’s driving straight at it.’
‘OK. We’ll put the central heating on and light the fire.’
‘I’ll tackle the fire, shall I? Assuming there’s some kindling and some dry wood.’ She led the way downstairs, careful to miss a low beam. ‘Mind your head!’
Mark didn’t.
Neither could he work out how to make the central heating work. Technically he knew he was pressing the right buttons on the control panel. In practice, nothing happened. He was just about to suggest Fran take over when she emerged from the living room, slamming the door behind her and looking anxiously at the smoke alarm. There were no firelighters and both kindling and wood were so damp the fire wouldn’t draw. All she’d achieved was billows of smoke so thick she’d had to open the windows, and bother the rain.
‘Time to call the letting agent,’ Mark said through gritted teeth. He was even less happy when he found the only place with a mobile signal was the bathroom, which opened off the kitchen. ‘Bugger gingerbread houses!’
Meanwhile in the chic little kitchen, Fran tackled the welcome pack, which included a strange mixture of poor basic items and quite recherché luxuries. Thank goodness they’d brought their own essentials. It was better to sort things out in the dry, however, so she ferried the lot from the Audi, parked on the far side of the yard, currently awash with rainwater.
Mark’s face as he emerged from the bathroom was blacker than the sky. ‘The agent closes at five on Mondays. So I used the emergency number – turns out it’s the mobile of the woman who owns the place. And where is she? On holiday in Portugal. She said the likely cause of our problems was a lack of gas. The tank’s supposed to be topped up at the end of each letting. She suggests I go and have a look. There’s a gauge on the far side of the tank, which is apparently the far side of the yard …’ In silence they looked at the rain. Fran, who was after all still in her waterproofs, headed out to do the deed …
No one would have placed Ted Day as an ex-cop, unlike those at HQ. He simply merged with his surroundings, in this case the snug of the Bull. The pub embraced them: it was worth the drive just to thaw out. Like their own local in Kent, it was obviously at the heart of what seemed to be a very flourishing community: football matches, quiz nights, charity fund-raisers.
The girl behind the bar pointed him out immediately at a table near the fire.
‘You look like two drowned rats. Cold, too,’ he added, shaking first Fran’s hand and then Mark’s. ‘No, you two sit that side: I’ll watch you steam! What’ll you have? No, come on: you don’t come to the Midlands and buy your own, not first time round. While you make up your minds, give me those brollies – I’ll put them with mine so none of us can forget them. Not that the weather will let us.’
He ordered a bottle of Merlot, but stuck to the pint he was nursing. It didn’t take him long to find out the problems of Snowdrop Cottage.
‘The trouble is it’s heated by LPG. If it was oil, I might find someone willing to deliver a load for cash,’ Fran said. ‘But I bet the letting agency’s tied into some contract.’
‘And the gas people will be tied into some delivery route. How about a few nice dry logs?’ He knew a guy who would produce a load at eight the next morning. ‘As for firelighters, I’ve got some spares at home you can have if you don’t mind leaving here when I do: Iris likes me back for ten so she can lock up.’
‘That’s more than kind, Ted. Thank you.’
‘Heaven knows why you chose the cottage in the first place,’ Ted said. ‘Why not simply check into a decent hotel?’
‘We thought we ought to save West Mercia some money,’ Fran explained. ‘But no one told us we should have brought our ark.’ But she had an idea she’d said the wrong thing. Or that Ted had simply taken a dislike to her.
On the other hand, over their meal – the chips were as good as Iris had promised, so good they vowed to be more strong-minded next time – Ted seemed to enjoy the wide-ranging conversation. He’d taken an OU degree after he’d left the force, and was a volunteer teacher at a local primary school; not bad, he said, for a lad who’d never wanted to do anything at school except scrape the minimum qualifications for joining the police. Once safely recruited, however, he’d got more ambitious. ‘Sergeants’ exams; inspectors’ exams – oh, ah, I was a keenie-beanie all right. Even acting chief inspector before I reached my thirty years and scarpered with my pension.’
An opening if ever there was one. Mark took it. ‘So how were you involved in the Natalie Foreman case?’
‘Officially only as a constable on the search party. I was attached to Bewdley in those days, before everything had to be rationalized,’ he added bitterly. ‘First off, I want to make it clear how hard we worked that first evening and night. As soon as word got round a kid was missing, there was no question of being off duty or off sick, not unless you were at death’s door. Every bit of that woodland was searched, as best we could. Even in daylight, with all that undergrowth, it was tough – brambles and nettles and such. But it was dark …
When the weather really came in, just torrential rain at that point, anyone not officially on duty was ordered off. The rain turned to a blizzard which unleashed itself about three in the morning. At that point the chief inspector—’
‘That’s a guy called Blount?’ Fran put in.
‘Yes. A really sound cop – pulled everyone out of the furthest reaches of the forest and made us concentrate on the most likely areas.’
‘Did you know then you were looking for the family of someone in the public eye?’
He stared at her in disbelief. ‘Fran, have you ever lived in the country?’
‘We still do. So we can safely assume that everyone knew who owned the Range Rover?’
‘More than that: for God’s sake, people had known Natalie since she was a little girl. Natalie Garbutt she was then. Dad ran the local garage. Mother helped out at a market garden. You probably saw in the files, Natalie’d been visiting her mum in a local village—’
‘Buttonbridge,’ Mark supplied. ‘More of a hamlet.’
‘Wrong Button. Buttonoak. OK? She never came back to live once she’d left for university. But she kept in touch with her mum and when the babies came she visited a lot.’
> Fran raised a finger. ‘But according to the file, Mrs Garbutt denied her daughter had been in Buttonoak that day.’
The temperature dropped several degrees. ‘Why else should she be there?’
Did he genuinely believe the police theory or was he just selling them the party line? Mark didn’t want to challenge him on anything yet – needed to keep the meeting friendly and with luck productive. It seemed Fran did too.
‘She was a footballer’s wife: lots of money. A WAG,’ Fran said. ‘How did local people feel about that?’
Ted sank the last of his pint, but waved away the offer of another. ‘She was never a WAG. Never. Not in the media sense. She had a good head on her shoulders, that wench. She passed her A levels, went to uni—’
‘Any idea which one?’
‘Leeds, I think. Anyway, she got a degree. Languages, as I recall. But for some reason she decided to do a business and accountancy postgrad course – following the money, people said. After a couple of years she started to work for one of the big London football clubs – Arsenal, I think. Which is where she met Phil. Big tough Yorkshire lad, though he spent all his footballing life further south.’
Mark reached for the jug of water, gesturing the rest of the wine to Fran, who responded by screwing the top back on. He said slowly, ‘But Arsenal’s one of the biggest, richest clubs. Why should a guy playing for a team like that want to move?’
‘He’d move because he wasn’t playing for Arsenal. Not on a regular basis. So they transferred him. I’ve no doubt the Albion’s admin team would have been glad to have the services of Natalie too, but she was already pregnant with Hadrian.’
‘So they moved to West Bromwich?’ Fran’s voice betrayed her disbelief. ‘I mean, it’s not exactly—’
‘It’s part of the Black Country, cradle of the Industrial Revolution,’ Ted said sharply. ‘OK, it’s not the most beautiful part of the world, any more than Sheffield, but since when did footballers have to live over the shop? There’s some posh properties in spitting distance, I can tell you.’
Green and Pleasant Land Page 3
