Corn Dolls

by K. T. Galloway

  The deep local accent startled Annie into fight or flight mode and her heart thumped in her chest. All the training she had completed to work in probation; the personal safety training, how to get out of a choke hold, how to manage in volatile situations…gone. All gone. If she was pressed on how to de-escalate an angered client right now, she’d be stumped. And for the first time, Annie wondered what the hell she was doing here in a missing girl’s house, masquerading as someone who had any idea of what they were doing.

  “Sorry, didn’t mean to make you jump. Awful thing isn’t it? Poor little Orla.” A head popped over the garden fence. It belonged to a grey-haired old man, who looked as though he’d spent all his years looking head-long into the salt water spray from the sea.

  Annie stepped through the weeds towards the fence that separated the two gardens, being careful to avoid the nettles.

  “Hi,” she said, waving in lieu of not being able to offer her hand. “Do you know the family well? I’m Annie, by the way.”

  “Harold Bishop,” the old man said. “You with the police?”

  “Yeah.” It wasn’t exactly a lie.

  Harold nodded.

  “I know them to say hi to. Lovely little girl is Orla, so sweet. Very talkative. I sometimes wonder how her mum copes with the non-stop chatter. But it’s nice having a bit of life around here, you know what I mean? The wife and I aren’t exactly spring chickens.”

  Annie nodded, she knew exactly what he meant. The area felt bleak and vast. With only the two houses, she imagined it could get very lonely out here.

  “How long have they lived here?” she asked, kicking some more weeds out of the way so she could lean her arms on the rickety fence.

  “‘Bout two years I think,” Harold said. “Give or take.”

  “And do you know why they moved out here?”

  “Maggie told me once it was because of Tim’s job,” Harold said, his hand stroking the raspy stubble on his chin. “But Tim told me otherwise. I haven’t seen him around for a while, he must be offshore again at the moment?”

  Annie squinted at the sun. “What did Tim say?” she asked, ignoring Harold’s probing question about Tim’s whereabouts.

  “He said he needed to get away from where he used to live because he didn’t trust himself with the drugs. He was in with a bad crowd, was Tim. He thought Orla and Maggie were going to be his new start. And with the new baby coming, it looked like it might have been. But then he got himself banged up in prison.”

  Annie backtracked Harold a little.

  “You said Tim wanted to get away from where he used to live because he didn’t trust himself there?”

  Harold grunted in agreement. “Said there were people there who would turn him back to his old ways. I think he was talking about drugs, he’s got that look about him. Skinny chap. Very sunken eyes. But maybe that’s me being judgemental.”

  Annie held off confirming his suspicions. It wasn’t up to her to tell the neighbours about Tim’s past. Not when Tim had divulged so much to them already.

  “Did he say where that was? Where he was escaping from?”

  “Ipswich.” Harold spat it out as though it was a rotten fruit.

  Annie gave him a look.

  “My blood runs yellow and green. I can’t say the word without saying it like that!”

  Football!!

  Annie laughed. She thought she’d better stop quizzing Harold now, or she might get into trouble with Swift. But one little thing was playing on her mind, so she pressed on, ignoring the voice in her head screaming at her to stop.

  “The day Orla went missing, my boss said you and your wife were indoors?” she asked.

  “Uh huh,” Harold agreed. “Yup, we were watching Homes under the Hammer. It’s got Dion Dublin in it now, ex-Norwich City player. I like to watch him looking around the awful houses to see if he can hide his disgust.”

  “Okay,” Annie went on, feeling a trickle of sweat run down between her shoulder blades. “If you don’t mind me saying, Harold, your hearing is perfect. Is your wife’s just the same?”

  Harold laughed. “Hers is better than mine. She can hear me open the biscuit tin from the bottom of the garden.”

  “So, you’re not one of those couples who has the television up really loudly?”

  “Nope, not us.”

  “And you didn’t hear anything?”

  Harold’s eyebrows knotted together.

  “No,” he said, his tone changed. “I told the police that. If we had seen or heard anything we would have helped. It breaks my heart what’s happened.”

  “I know you would have, Harold,” she said. “We’re doing our best to bring her home.”

  Annie had reacquainted herself with the lingo faster than she imagined she would. But it wasn’t any easier to say than it was to hear.

  “Last thing,” she added, shifting her weight off the fence and back onto her feet. “Did you ever notice anyone else hanging around? Anyone you didn’t recognise. Or anything weird that made you double take or question what it was?”

  Harold’s face softened. He stood back from the fence too, treading carefully over the bright blooms he had covering the borders, and wiping the beads of sweat lining his forehead with a handkerchief from his top pocket.

  “Now that’s a very interesting question, young Annie,” he said, smiling, studying her face. The hairs on Annie’s arms stood to attention. “There haven’t been any unknown visitors recently, not that I am aware of. We don’t get many people around here. Normally it’s just people passing from one posh coastal village to the next. They don’t stop and admire the inconvenient blot on their landscape all that often.”

  Annie thanked Harold and hoped she hadn’t overstepped the mark with her questions. As she picked her way over the knee-high grass to the back door, Harold leant over the fence and called out one last thing to her.

  “Have a look at the post though, Annie,” he said. “Your question just reminded me that I saw a young man out delivering leaflets not that long ago. We don’t get leaflets around here because only the postman can normally be bothered to stop, and that’s only because it’s his job.”

  “Thanks, Harold,” Annie waved, taking out her phone and jotting in the notes what he’d told her, so she could go over it with Swift when he’d finished with Maggie.

  Steeling herself for what was going on inside the house, Annie stepped back in, enjoying the shade of the kitchen for a beat despite the stuffiness. Annie could hear the low rumble of Swift, and the rhythmic crying of Maggie, carried through the walls from the living room. The shrill of a phone cut through the sounds and Annie heard Swift excuse himself. He came into the kitchen, his phone by his ear as he barked his name into it.

  Annie left him to it and went back through to the living room. Maggie wept gently into a tissue that was disintegrating in her hands, while specks stuck to her fingers and around her nose. Aila poured herself another cup of tea.

  “Maggie,” Annie said gently, going to sit back on the sofa. “Can you tell me where you keep your post?”

  “In the box on the wall in the hallway.” Maggie nodded her head in the general direction of the front door.

  Aila sipped her tea and rubbed at Maggie’s back.

  “Do you want me to show you, love?” she asked Annie.

  Annie shook her head; she didn’t want Maggie to be left on her own in the state she was in. As it was the box was easy to find, hanging off the plasterwork by a nail that wasn’t quite flush to the wall. Lifting out the piles of post and paper, Annie started to rifle through it. There were bills, more bills, red-topped letters from the gas company, pencil drawings of houses and cats, and envelopes that were still unopened from Norfolk County Council. About halfway through the pile, a lone leaflet almost fell to the floor. Annie pulled it out and put the rest of the mail back where she found it.

  It was pretty nondescript. A3, white background, a single figure of an angel rising from a wave of water. She turned it over in
her hands, sweat forming on her palms and sticking to the glossy picture. On the back it simply stated ‘Angels of the Water’, with an address that was a bit further up the coast. She took it back though to Maggie.

  “What do you know about this place?” she asked, proffering Maggie the flyer.

  Maggie took it with a shaking hand, turning it over once, twice, shaking her head.

  “Nothing,” she said, handing it to Aila’s outstretched hand.

  “It’s one of those new-fangled churches,” Aila said, giving the flyer back to Annie with a scowl. “They think they can come along and change God’s word. I don’t know what kind of upbringing these people had but I pray for them, and all the other heathens, every night. There’s something not quite right about those people.”

  Maggie nodded at Aila’s words. “Heathens,” she said, dabbing at her nose with what was left of the tissue.

  “O’Malley?” Swift was back in the room. “We need to get going.”

  He addressed Maggie and Aila as Annie gathered herself to leave. “Thanks so much for your time. Please know that we really are doing our best to bring Orla home. A family liaison officer will be with you in the next hour. You have my number, call me if you hear anything.”

  Swift bustled Annie along and they headed out the front door. Annie turned back, about to tell Swift everything she had learned while she had been there. She was proud of herself for the information she had and only a little nervous that she had overstepped every boundary that was in place to protect the public from a psychotherapist acting as detective. But before she could get a word out, Swift had bundled her in the car.

  “There’s been another abduction,” he said, and Annie’s blood ran cold.

  Nine

  Annie hung on to the handle above the car door for dear life as Swift took the winding country lanes faster than she normally took the motorway. He’d taken the driver’s seat without being asked and Annie hadn’t argued. Now she just feared for the paintwork of her trusty Golf.

  Another missing child?

  What did it mean? Where were they going? Annie had no idea if she should even be in the car anymore, a new case was very different to a two-day-old case where she knew the possible suspect. She felt in the way already.

  “Do you want to drop me at home?” she asked, squealing a little as Swift took them out onto the dual carriageway of the bypass around the city.

  “There’s no time,” he said, undertaking a BMW whose driver’s salute told them exactly what he thought about that.

  Annie felt a rush of excitement. Her skin rippled as Swift pushed his foot further down on the accelerator. Soon they were taking the slip road south of the city, heading towards a large, new build estate on the edge of a village that used to be further away from Norwich. A row of police cars lined the pavement of one of the identikit roads. Swift turned the car and pulled into the driveway of a semi-detached with a neat front garden. He barked instructions at Annie.

  “You have two choices,” he said. “You can stay in the car, or you can come in and keep your mouth shut.”

  Annie was out of the car before he’d even stopped talking.

  Tammy Carter answered the door before Swift had even rung the bell. Dressed in a Kappa tracksuit, with her hair scraped back and gelled down, she looked no older than a teenager herself. Annie followed Swift and Tammy Carter into the house as the woman lit a cigarette. From the smell, Tammy had a forty-a-day habit that she liked to mask with supermarket plug-ins. Annie gagged and stood as close to the open window in the lounge as she could. The room was magnolia, with a feature wall of large pink flowers. Two pristine leather sofas sat at right angles, but Tammy wasn’t sitting down, nor had she offered her two visitors a seat. A giant television took up most of the wall where Annie thought a fireplace might have been and it blazed out a bright but silent newsreel. There were silver photo frames dotted around the room and a slight, blonde-haired girl smiled cautiously out from them all.

  Annie’s instinct to make people feel at ease by asking the first question almost caught her out. But Swift was in there and making his own mark before the tension in the room was as thick as the cigarette smoke.

  “Our foot patrol is out there now, doing door-to-door and searching the area,” he said, and Annie could see his face go pink with the lack of oxygen as he spoke. “Could you tell us a little bit more about what happened? What time did Jodie go missing? Was she with you? Anyone else around?”

  Tammy Carter looked like a rabbit in the headlights as she took in Swift’s questions.

  “How old is Jodie?” Annie asked, unable to help herself as she picked up one of the framed photos, ignoring Swift’s death stare.

  “Nearly four,” Tammy replied, looking relieved. “She’s a little shit quite a lot, but I love her. Terrible twos carry on until they’re adults, I suppose.”

  Annie’s poker face was working overtime, the millions of hours she’d spent biting back the eye-rolls was paying off. “And when did you notice she was missing?”

  Tammy bit her lip and looked down at the immaculate vinyl floor that was supposed to depict wooden floorboards.

  “I guess it was maybe a bit after lunch,” she said, taking a long drag on her cigarette, her fingers shaking.

  “And when did you last see Jodie?” Annie was on a roll now, she had completely forgotten Swift was there and that she wasn’t supposed to be talking.

  If Tammy could flush through her vapid skin, Annie imagined the girl’s face to be bright pink.

  “Probably about breakfast time.”

  Swift cleared his throat and the two women looked at him as if they were wondering why he was there.

  “Breakfast time, probably?” he asked, unable to contain his own judgment.

  “Well, yeah,” Tammy continued, the end of her cigarette burning red in her mouth. “She brought me up a glass of water at about ten. Well trained, that one.”

  She gave a half laugh, half sob, then hacked up her lungs for a moment. Swift took the opportunity to give Annie a look that could send her back to the car if she was less thick-skinned.

  “And before that?” he probed.

  Tammy shook her head sadly. “Dunno, I was asleep. But she normally gets herself up and watches cartoons until coffee time.”

  “And where is Jodie’s dad, Mrs Carter?”

  “It’s Miss, I’m not married.” Tammy stubbed her cigarette out on a crystal ashtray then immediately took it out of the room.

  “What’re you doing?” Swift hissed at Annie, but Tammy was back in the room before she had the chance to reply. The ashtray was sparkling again and a new cigarette hung from Tammy’s lips.

  “Jodie’s dad could be anywhere by now,” Tammy said. “He was probably a waster I met in a club, or someone I knew through friends, I don’t bloody know. Whoever it was didn’t even know I was pregnant, so there’s not a chance her dad has anything to do with her vanishing—” She broke off and fell silent.

  “Are there any friends that Jodie might have gone to visit on the estate? Does she have family close by she could walk to?”

  Tammy looked as though Swift had just asked for one of her kidneys. “Jodie knows not to leave the house without me. And I’ve called all of my family, what do you think I am, a monster?”

  “Well,” Swift started to say, and Annie interrupted, not quite sure of where Swift was going to take his answer.

  “What family do you have nearby, Tammy?” she asked.

  “Me mum,” she said, grimacing. “She lives in the next estate over, moved here after I did. She likes to be close to me.”

  “And you’ve spoken to her already?” Annie asked.

  Tammy nodded and Swift moved so he was standing in between Annie and her quarry.

  “We’ve had our officers speak to your mum too, she was out at the bookies from nine this morning. Hasn’t seen young Jodie.”

  Tammy nodded again and her face crumpled, white as a sheet. Annie thought that the amount of nicot
ine cursing around Tammy’s body right now probably wasn’t helping, but she guided the young mother down to one of the pristine sofas and sat holding her free hand.

  “We’re going to do everything we can to bring Jodie back to you, Tammy,” she said, trying to breath out the side of her mouth. “Can we have permission to go and look at Jodie’s room?”

  Tears trickled down Tammy’s cheeks and fizzed onto the cigarette.

  “Yeah, okay,” she sniffed. “It’s up the stairs, first door on the right. Be careful, she has more teddies than we know what to do with.”

  Swift was out of the room and halfway up the stairs by the time Annie had extracted herself from Tammy’s side. She skipped up the last few stairs and was right behind him when he pushed open the door from a landing that was as clean and sparkling as the rest of the house.

  Jodie’s room was the epitome of girliness. As though someone had set off a bomb filled with pink and glitter and fluff and it had exploded, covering the walls. The bed was in the shape of a princess crown, the bedding dotted with what looked like matching crystal crowns sewn into a hot pink poly-mix. The white-cream carpet felt squidgy underfoot, a huge, heart-shaped, hot pink rug right in the centre of the room. A wardrobe was bursting from the seams with pink clothes of all shapes and sizes.

  It was the total opposite to Orla Finch’s room, yet Annie felt less comfortable here.

  “I don’t get it, why are we here?” Annie asked Swift as he stood pulling on a pair of blue gloves and taking in the room in silence. “Kids must go missing a lot, this doesn’t look as though it’s the same MO as the Finch family. The set-up is totally different.”

  Swift shook his head as though he was trying to shake out Annie’s voice, so she kept quiet and wandered over to the window, checking the squeaky-clean glass for etchings. There was nothing. Annie watched as Swift strode over to the girl’s bed, throwing back the covers to reveal hot pink sheets.

  “It’s a rarer occurrence than TV would have you believe,” Swift said, pulling open the wardrobe doors. “Children of this age don’t tend to just vanish like this. We get first dibs as we’re on a similar case.”