by Alison James
Philip led Rachel up to the smallest of the spare rooms, no bigger than a box room, which housed a child-sized single bed and a small desk with a computer monitor and an upright hard drive underneath it. He showed her the active monitoring pictures in real time, then found the relevant file in a folder on the computer’s desktop.
‘There was a spate of break-ins at the beginning of the year, and my parents were understandably worried about it. I told them they should sell the house and move nearer to Sally and me in Morden, but they wouldn’t countenance it.’ He didn’t attempt to hide his disapproval of this decision. ‘So I set up this security system.’
‘And I’m very grateful for your expertise,’ said Rachel smoothly. She’d been accused of acting cool and over-analytical in the past, but let it never be said she didn’t know how to schmooze a witness.
‘Yes, well…’ He cleared his throat. ‘My youngest is around the same age as the little girl, and you can only imagine… so, obviously, anything I can do to help find her.’
He clicked on the file labelled 9/5/17_backup and pressed play.
The night images were black and white, but very clear, and Philip explained at tedious and self-important length why this was the case, with a lecture on image resolution and pixels. The lens of the camera picked up the shared driveway between numbers 57 and 55 and the shot also covered the front door of the Harpers’ house, the pathway that led to the side gate and garden, and a section of the road in front. In short, anyone entering or leaving the house would have been picked up by the Lewises’ camera.
Philip fast-forwarded through all the footage for that night, but there was no activity bar an urban fox rooting around the bins.
‘Interesting, isn’t it?’ he observed with evident smugness. ‘Mrs Harper claims someone must have come into the house via the patio door, but that’s not possible, given the only access to the gardens of number 57 and 55 is through the houses themselves.’
‘Hmm.’ Rachel was non-committal. An intruder could potentially have climbed over the top of the garage block and jumped down into the garden. It was doable, by someone fit. To return the same way carrying a young child would be a lot harder, though; impossible for a single intruder. If indeed Lola had been stolen to order, there had to have been more than one person involved.
The next day’s footage, in colour, showed the arrival of a police squad car at 7.12 a.m., then the comings and goings of Michelle’s family. This pattern continued for the next few days, with Michelle only leaving the house, accompanied by Clive Manners, to attend the press conference. Then on 18 May, at 13.11 p.m., Michelle left on her own, wheeling two huge matching purple suitcases – the type with rigid polycarbonate sides – and loading them into the boot of her white car. 18 May. The day after she had withdrawn £30,000 in cash from Lola’s fund.
Philip was observing Rachel’s reaction to this. ‘Do you need me to keep going?’ he asked. ‘I could, only it’s going to take me a while to go through five months’ worth of tape.’
Rachel, thinking of Marjorie and Norman hovering obediently in their garden, stood up. ‘No, that won’t be necessary, but obviously this constitutes evidence in the case, and as such, could be removed.’
Philip looked affronted.
‘Perhaps for now you could just send me copies of all the files.’
‘All of them?’
‘All of them, yes. From when you first installed the camera. I’m afraid that’s how this works.’
He gave a theatrical sigh. ‘Of course, Detective Inspector. As I said, I’ll do anything I can to help.’
* * *
Rachel drove south for another twenty miles to HMP High Down, where Gavin Harper was detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. He walked slowly into the visiting room in prison-issue sweats, his face pale and unshaven.
‘I thought you’d got the message,’ he said belligerently. ‘I don’t sodding know where my daughter is.’
Rachel ignored this. ‘I’m about to head back to Albufeira,’ she told him pleasantly. ‘Thought I’d give you the chance to tell me where to look – save me wasting any more police time.’
He gave her a mulish look. ‘I’ll tell you what’s wasting police time: you going back out to Portugal to look for Lola Jade. I’ve told you: she’s not there. One hundred per cent. You’re not going to find her.’
Rachel was not about to tell him that she privately agreed with him, and that the return trip to Albufeira was Patten’s idea, not her own. ‘Okay, then… maybe you’d like to tell me how your seminal fluid ended up on the carpet in Lola Jade’s room?’
‘I never touched her. I’d never do anything like that. Michelle must have set me up.’
‘Set you up how?’
Gavin flushed slightly. ‘Look, I’m not proud of this, but even though we weren’t officially together any more, Michelle and I did still occasionally have sex. We always had a… fiery physical relationship. So I’d go round to see Lola or drop her off, we’d have a glass of wine and end up… you know…’
‘Screwing?’
His face reddened further. ‘Like I said, I’m not proud of it.’
Rachel leaned forward and placed her elbows on the table, getting into his space. ‘Even if you did, how the hell did your ejaculate end up in your daughter’s room?’
‘We’d use a condom and Michelle would deal with it after. I wouldn’t put it past her to tip it – the contents – onto Lola’s floor.’
‘And she’d do that because?’
‘I tried to tell you before: she wants people to blame me. That’s why I took off. She lied to some of her mates that I’d been touching Lola Jade, you know… in a sexual way. So this would be her twisted way of proving it. Now that I think about it, she was probably only up for a jump for that reason. She was always very quick to produce the rubber johnny.’ He rubbed his hand wearily over his forehead, as though he had been through this explanation countless times in his mind. ‘Like I said, it was because of all that that I panicked after they didn’t find Lola. It was stupid; I realise that now.’
‘And Michelle’s allegations that you were physically violent to her?’
His eyes widened. ‘Seriously? It was more the other way round. She was the one who would chuck things at me. Had a vicious temper on her.’
‘So how do you explain this?’
She opened the photos she had snapped from Michelle’s phone, of her bruised arms, and shoved her own phone across the table at him. He looked at the images, then something resembling a smile crept across his face.
‘The date they were taken. Didn’t you notice it?’
He pushed the phone back and Rachel looked. She’d snapped them hastily and the images were a bit blurred, but the date in the tag could just about be made out.
‘28 October 2016. I’d been in Albufeira about a week by then. And Michelle’s arms are a lot skinnier than that. These pictures aren’t even of her.’ He sneered. ‘I mean, what kind of a person does something like that just to discredit their kid’s dad. She’s not fit to be a mother.’
‘Is that why you were suing for custody?’
‘Bloody right it is. And I want you to ask her. Ask her why she’s made me out to be a child molester, and why she’s given you faked pictures.’
‘Oh, I intend to; don’t worry.’
‘And while you’re at it, ask Michelle what she did to Olly. Ask her what she did to our son.’
Part Two
You may give them your love, but not your thoughts
For they have their own thoughts
You may house their bodies, but not their souls
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow
Khalil Gibran, ‘On Children’
Seventeen
You see your own home through new eyes when someone visits it for the first time, Rachel thought.
Howard was at her flat for a personal training session. The consultant had not yet signed her off as fit, but the improvement in her knee was
so great she wanted to try running again. The purpose of Howard’s home visits was, they both agreed, to make sure she didn’t undermine her progress so far.
Brickall had once categorised the decor as ‘axe-murderer chic’. The walls were plain off-white, the furnishings functional, the overall look completely impersonal. True, Brickall’s most recent visit had prompted her to order a few things online: a vibrant rug with green and magenta swirls on a cream background, and some framed pop art for the walls in the hallway. She had also brought back some colourful ceramic pots from Portugal and filled them with herbs. As a result, the overall result was less stark than it had been a few weeks ago. And with a concession to the approach of Christmas, she had put up some fairy lights, although she was not really a fairy-light sort of person.
‘This is nice,’ said Howard heartily when she let him in, though his face registered faint disappointment. ‘Convenient. The location, I mean.’
Rachel laughed. ‘It’s okay, I know it looks a bit like a corporate rental. But hey…’ she gestured round the room, ‘it’s now a corporate rental with fairy lights.’
Howard put her to work doing some basic stretches. She groaned at her lack of flexibility. ‘I haven’t had a chance to work out in weeks. I’ve been away on a job for most of November.’
‘I thought I hadn’t seen you in the gym for a while.’ He knelt down beside her and grappled her left leg into a hamstring stretch. They made eye contact and he stood up abruptly. ‘Right, let’s try some sumo squats: see how your knee handles it.’
‘I was in the Algarve,’ Rachel told him.
‘Fab – bit of winter sun. I thought you were looking tanned.’
‘It wasn’t fab at all, as it goes. It was a three-week exercise in frustration… But the less said about that, the better.’
After she had worked on stretching and warming up, Howard said, ‘How about we do a test run? Just a short one: see how you get on.’
‘What, now?’
He nodded. ‘Why not? It may be almost December, but at least it’s dry.’
‘And you’ll come with me?’
‘Of course. All part of the personal training package.’
Rachel put on a jacket and a woollen hat, and they headed out into the darkening streets, past sparkling street decorations and festive shop windows. They jogged gently along Jamaica Road and into Southwark Park, completing a circuit of the lake before Howard said she shouldn’t push her right leg too far, and insisted on her walking back. He came up to her flat with her, which struck her as strictly unnecessary.
‘I really need a hot shower,’ she told him, peeling off her jacket and hat. ‘So let’s pencil a couple more sessions in the diary now, then you can go.’
‘It’s okay, I can wait. I’m not in a rush.’
Rachel let her mind play out the sequence: her emerging fragrant and glowing from the shower, dressed in nothing but a towel, to find Howard waiting for her on the bed… Okay, stop, stop, stop! The image had degenerated into a scene from a generic seventies porn movie. She held up the calendar app on her phone. ‘No, let’s do it now, then you can get going.’ Their eyes met and she held his gaze just long enough to send him the message that she was tempted. Very tempted.
* * *
After she had showered and changed into clean sweats, Rachel phoned Brickall, eager to receive a debrief. For over a fortnight she and a handful of officers hand-picked from the Polícia Judiciária had combined forces with a specialist search team from Lisbon. This hastily assembled force had combed every back alley of every coastal resort, every waste tip and patch of scrubby ground, and questioned every local or tourist who had seen something suspicious or thought they had sighted Lola Jade. The press had inevitably got wind of their activity, and she had spent a lot of her time fending off a stream of calls from journalists. With no concrete news to report, the tabloids had jumped in anyway, with headlines along the lines of UK COPS IN RESORT SEARCH FOR LOLA JADE BODY.
On the couple of occasions she had flown back to London for the weekend, she had spent most of the time doing laundry and catching up on her sleep, and there had never been a chance to touch base properly with her sergeant.
His phone went to voicemail, but he phoned back half an hour later. ‘All right, tart?’
She crooked the phone against her shoulder while she poured herself a glass of red wine, then settled herself on the sofa. ‘I definitely drew the short straw, Detective Sergeant. Portugal’s lovely and everything, but weeks spent combing out-of-season resorts in the rain…’
‘I hear you.’
‘So where are Surrey Police with Lola Jade now? Give me an update before I get stuck in again.’
‘Good thing I checked up for you, eh? Seeing as I knew it would be the first bloody thing you asked me. They pulled the surveillance unit. After less than two weeks, apparently.’
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing: that’s the whole point. They had a unit sat outside Jubilee Terrace round the clock, watching Michelle and Lisa. Michelle came and went from the house, all perfectly above board. She works in a nail salon a few hours a week, but apart from going there and to the shops occasionally, there was nothing suspicious. Before the FSU was abandoned, they got another warrant and did another full search of the Urquharts’ house and Willow Way, but again: nothing. NCPA.’ He quoted the acronym for ‘No Cause for Police Action’. ‘So, the unit was stood down. I think CEOP followed up on a couple of leads, one in France and one in North Africa somewhere: one a kid who had actually been trafficked, but both negative for the Harper kid. Patten’s calling a combined team meeting soon, but I expect it will just be a formal wind-down.’
Rachel sighed heavily and pressed her hand to her forehead. ‘And – as I suspected would be the case – we found nothing at all in the Algarve. This could be the end of the road.’
‘Maybe. Or then again, maybe not.’
* * *
‘I can’t believe we’re doing this. Tell me we’re not doing this.’
‘We’re doing this.’
Rachel and Brickall were in his car, parked opposite Lisa Urquhart’s house. They both wore dark hats and gloves, and were equipped with sleeping bags and a Thermos of hot coffee. Every so often Brickall would fire up the engine as discreetly as he could, and briefly fill the car with a blast of hot air from the heater. Even so, it was very cold.
They had begun their stakeout at 8.30. There were lights on in the upstairs window, and children’s clamour punctuated by raised adult voices. Normal family stuff. A smell of fried food wafted from a part-open downstairs window, mingling with cigarette smoke. At 9 p.m., Kevin Urquhart returned from his shift as a baggage handler at Heathrow, parked his light blue VW Passat and went inside. There was more shouting, then the light from the upstairs room went off. Lisa emerged a few minutes later, bundled up in a fake-leopard-skin coat.
‘Shall we follow her?’ Brickall asked.
Rachel shook her head. ‘Nah, look – she’s in her slippers, and she’s only got a purse with her. She’ll be after fags or booze.’
Sure enough, Lisa shuffled to the corner shop at the end of Jubilee Terrace and returned a couple of minutes later with a packet of cigarettes and a six-pack of beer cans. There was no sign of Michelle Harper.
‘How are we going to stay awake?’ Brickall grumbled, as the digital clock ticked past midnight. ‘I can feel myself nodding off.’
‘We’re going to have to talk.’
‘As in have a conversation?’
‘Afraid so.’
‘Okay then…’ Brickall took a swig of coffee from the neck of the flask, even though Rachel had asked him to use the cup. ‘How’s your love life? Still making eyes at your hunky personal trainer?’
Rachel let this one go, pulling her fleece jacket up round her neck and rubbing her hands together. ‘I’ve got a party coming up. A “girls’ night”.’ She wagged her fingers in quote marks, simultaneously pulling a face.
‘Oh Christ,
that sounds crap.’
‘I know.’
‘Anyway, Prince, do you actually have any female friends? I’ve never heard you mention any. Not one.’
‘Not many,’ Rachel admitted. ‘I was never a girly girl.’
She thought back to her younger self. She had been overweight, and bullied, which accounted for many things. Her preoccupation with health and fitness, for one. Her wariness of commitment. There was one female in particular whose persecution had made her swerve her own gender: Lorraine Grassmore. A girl who had pretended to be her friend and to sympathise with her weight struggle, but had really been laughing at her behind her back the whole time. Thinking about her now could still make Rachel inhale forcibly, and she did.
‘What?’ asked Brickall.
She wasn’t about to launch into a sob story about her miserable adolescence: not now, when she was tired and disorientated. ‘Let’s just say I was never part of the popular crowd at school and then, as you now know, I married very young, and my career took over. There’s never been time for the girly stuff.’
‘Because you’re always too busy with men stuff.’
She swatted at him with a gloved hand. ‘I’ve nothing against going out for a drink – you know that – but there’s something about a bunch of women en masse…’ She shuddered.
‘So you’re looking forward to it then?’
‘It’s going to be awful.’
The final light went out on the top floor, and the house lapsed into silence. A cat howled menacingly, followed by a volley of screeches as a fight broke out and a dustbin was knocked over. A dog barked persistently for a couple of minutes, then fell silent. A couple of pub-goers wove their way home down the middle of the street.
Brickall fished out a tube of Smarties and swallowed a handful, offering them to Rachel. ‘I need to tell you something.’
‘Go on.’
‘You know Amber Crowley.’
‘The hot lawyer?’
