‘Yes.’
‘People work here alone?’
‘Sometimes. At quiet times I know there is one person here.’
‘So you need security. You need CCTV.’
‘There are cameras. Maybe they do the trick. Maybe she tells people they are working if there’s any trouble, but this is not that sort of place. At night there are tired truckers until the early hours and then nothing really.’
‘She?’
‘The waitress. She does the nights. Sometimes she is here in the day, too. I do not know her pattern. She seems to be here a lot.’
‘Anyone else?’
‘Else?’
‘She can’t be the only person covering this place?’
‘No. There are other girls. Young girls, they come in at the weekend. And there is an older lady who I think has worked here for a long time who does the mornings.’
‘But today, is it just you?’
‘Right now!’
‘And your name? I assume you know that?’
His expression hardened a little. ‘This is good for me. I do not find job easy here in England. I find it harder if I speak too much to the police.’
Harry stepped back. The people who had joined the queue were gone. He took a moment to look around the café, his attention moved to the outside, to where a lorry was turning slowly onto the hard standing.
’What is it that you source for these lorry drivers? Because I’ve been a detective for a long time. I’ve heard of a few different scams that seem to do the rounds. We know it goes on. A lorry driver with a small budget for repairs? That’s not something that is too difficult to take advantage of if you know what you are doing. You just need a driver who can be sold an opportunity and a man who can print a receipt for work completed. Am I right?’
‘About what? What is this you are saying?’
‘And you said you can source what they need. Is that just parts for lorries? A man on the road may have other needs. Do you get yourself involved in that too?’
‘You know nothing! You are making this up on spot! This is how I earn a living. I am honest man, making honest living and this is not easy. I work hard.’
Harry slapped his hands back down on the counter, loud enough to attract attention. ‘So do I. I can assure you of that. I work tirelessly, and when I get hold of something, even just a scrap of something, I don’t let it go until I’ve dug out every stinking detail. Do you understand? You do not want me crawling all over this place, over your receipts, your tax records, sitting with the Department of Work and Pensions who have an office next to mine at the station . . .’ Harry let his words sink in for a moment. ‘I assume you are claiming benefits?’
The man shrugged. ‘This is not a job. This is a service to help. Sometimes they pay me for my trouble, but this is not a job!’
Harry’s face twisted into a wide grin. He could feel the pulse in his temple and the counter pressing against his waist. ‘You are a man stood in a café, in an apron, serving me a black coffee, extra strong. Maddie here will have a white coffee. We’ll be sat over there. And seeing as you’re not getting paid for your trouble, I wanna see you doing it for the love.’ He turned away to sit down and Maddie followed him.
‘Sit on the same side,’ he muttered. She did as she was told. They both sat facing the counter at the closest table. Some people stood up from a table nearby, the same people who had been stood behind a few minutes earlier. They walked back to place their order. The man took it, but his attention remained with the two detectives in the form of hurried glances. Harry watched his every move. He was far from fluid in his actions; he didn’t seem to know where much was. It was a couple of minutes before he brought their coffees over.
‘Extra strong. The Italian way!’ He tried a chuckle. Harry fixed him with a stoic stare and he hurried away.
They sat in silence. Harry had nothing to say and Maddie must have got the message. He sipped at his coffee. It was stronger than his usual even, at least three shots. The man fidgeted behind the counter for a while before taking a final glance in their direction, then disappeared through the door to the kitchen. Harry resisted standing up and following him in. He narrowed his eyes as he took another sip of his coffee. The door pushed open again a few minutes later. The same man reappeared and fidgeted some more behind the counter. Harry still stared.
When he finished his coffee he stood suddenly, his chair scraped loudly. Maddie stood too. He walked back to the counter.
‘You enjoy the coffee?’ the man said.
Harry pulled his card from his pocket and slapped it down on the counter between them.
‘My card. I expect a call from your nameless waitress. If I don’t get it, I will be back — and by then I will be in a bad mood. Do you understand?’
‘I will pass on your message,’ he said, but the grin was gone.
Harry was aware of Maddie’s voice calling after him the moment they made it out of the café.
‘We’re leaving?’ Maddie said the moment they were outside.
He didn’t answer her until they were back in the car with the doors shut and the engine started. ‘We are.’
‘That waitress was there. It was written all over his face.’
‘It was.’
‘And we’re leaving? She was avoiding us. Why would she do that? She knows something — something that can help. We’ve got nothing else, Harry. We can’t walk away now!’
‘We have to. We were getting nowhere and we don’t have time to waste. We need to keep the pressure on. I don’t know how just yet.’ He pulled the car forward. The ground was bumpy and one of the front wheels clunked into a deep pothole.
‘The CAD — the call that came in to arrange your visit here . . . it came from a phone box?’
‘It did.’
‘Close to here?’
‘Not far. A couple of miles along the road — towards Lympne.’
Harry turned right out of the car park and onto the A20. They were silent again. Maddie’s frustration was obvious, palpable even — close to boiling over. It was better that they didn’t speak. The road was fast and straight so the village of Lympne was only a five-minute journey. The long, straight road also meant that he could see the red outline of a phone box from some distance away. He slowed, taking his surroundings in as he approached. The phone box stood on a junction. Both sides of the road at this point were fields. He could see some houses in the distance. All the places he had passed so far had been large and with a good amount of ground around them. When he reached the junction he could see some smaller houses, closer together and further up the road that turned off the main A20 and shrunk down to a single-track very quickly. He could see a sign labelling it as Thorn Lane. The phone box stood out against the greenery. He couldn’t recall the last time he had seen a traditional style phone box like this; the shiny red colour and the rounded roof were both present and correct, as were the slatted windows on all four sides. He could see the handset was hanging down as he stood out onto the road.
A car sped past and he turned to it. There was a 40mph speed limit here, it dropped from 60mph just long enough to take in this tiny cluster of houses and the junction and then it was back to the national limit. Harry didn’t reckon that most people would slow at all. The road was just about wide enough to warrant the national speed limit, but the banks holding back the fields were a few feet high and butted up against the road. He moved away from the phone box, stepping past Maddie, who had got out of the car but hadn’t moved any further. Her arms were folded. He walked to the other side of the road and peered left and right.
‘What’s the matter?’ Maddie asked.
‘If you wanted to use the phone you would have to drive here. Unless you lived in one of these houses.’
‘Okay.’
‘You wouldn’t park in Thorn Lane. It’s too narrow. So you’d park on the main road.’
‘You would.’
‘It’s a quick road. You’d want to park somewh
ere you could get your vehicle out of the way.’ Harry started back the way they had come and walked a hundred metres or so. Maddie called out something but he didn’t hear what she said. Another car whooshed past — it had to have been doing more than sixty. He stopped where a car could pull in. It was an area where the steep banks levelled out enough and vehicles had pulled up. He could tell they had from the long grass that was flattened in a thick line — a tyre track. It looked to Harry like it had been driven over a few times at least. But a car parking here would still stick out in the road a little. Maybe it was enough to give them an opportunity.
‘You think this was where he parked?’ Maddie said. ‘The man who made the call?’
Harry was squatting down and didn’t answer straight away. He pushed the wild grass to one side to see the mud bank underneath. There was no chance of a tyre print; the grass flattened down to form a layer that would prevent an imprint in the mud. He stood back up.
‘I do.’
‘So we do some house-to-house. We knock all the doors in a mile radius and we ask if anything was parked up. We have the exact time he made the call on the CAD.’
‘I agree. But I need to make a call. I need to get someone to speak to the media. They might be our best chance.’
‘I heard the DCI was already planning on doing that. The press have got wind of a missing police officer somehow. They’re going to use the interest around it to see if anyone’s seen her.’
Harry stiffened. A car swept past in a roar of white noise. He waited for it to pass. ‘Soon?’
‘That was the impression I got. Why waste time?’
‘What are they saying?’
‘What you would expect. That Rhiannon was snatched from Sandgate seafront and appeals for any information.’
Harry ran his hand over his head. ‘That might be a mistake.’
‘A mistake?’
‘A missed opportunity at least.’
‘You’re not making any sense.’
‘We need to keep the pressure up. Putting an appeal out like that makes us sound clueless . . .’ Harry fumbled over his phone.
‘We’re not clueless then?’
He put the phone to his ear. ‘We might not be as clueless as they would like.’
‘Surely we shouldn’t reveal too much, either? Not if you’re talking about a hunch. Doesn’t that put Rhiannon at risk?’
‘It’s more than a hunch!’ Harry snapped. Then he murmured as the phone rang out to voicemail. He hung up and dialled again immediately. This time it was answered on the second ring.
‘Harry, I’m in the middle of something if this isn’t urgent.’ Julian Lowe’s voice was a hissed whisper.
‘Are you speaking to the press?’
‘Not right now. But soon. I’m with the SLT discussing it now. They want me to do the speaking — we’re just working out who will be sitting next to me. Is this urgent?’
‘What are you telling them?’
‘What? What do you think? That we have a missing officer! We have a picture of Rhiannon to put out and we want to know if anyone saw or heard anything that can help us find whoever took her.’
‘Find whoever took her? What about actually finding Rhiannon? Before she comes to serious harm.’
‘Well obviously! That’s what I . . .’ The DCI huffed. ‘Look, Harry, you and I both know the odds when someone’s been missing as long as she has—’
‘She’s not dead. And I can give you an alternative that still uses the media and might be more effective.’
‘How do you know she’s not dead?’
‘Because he would have killed her there, if that was the intention. It was early in the morning. A wooded area. Nobody about. If the motive was sexual or a violent assault, we’d have found her body on that path or close to it. The tide wasn’t right to dump a body, either. She would have just washed up on the beach a little further up.’
‘Jesus, Harry,’ the DCI exhaled.
‘And the card left at the scene . . . It’s a message. To us. I think we still have some time.’
‘And you have a media release that solves all our problems?’
Another car sped past. Harry had to wait for the noise to pass.
‘Dashcams. I want all people with dashcams that used the A20 within a two-hour time period to make themselves known.’
‘Dashcams?’
‘A lot of people have them now. Someone made a call from a phone box on the A20. They arranged to speak with our officers at a nearby café. I think it’s linked to Rhiannon’s disappearance. I think this call was to lure police officers — I just don’t know why. I’m at that phone box now. It’s pretty remote. They would have needed a vehicle. I’ll send you exactly what I need you to say.’ Harry stopped talking. Two more cars whooshed past in the silence that followed, a silence that had started with a clearer sigh from the other end of the phone. ‘Please boss, you have to trust me on this one. Someone took her. They did it before six o’clock in the morning and from a remote location that they had the chance to choose carefully. And they knew they were planning on taking a police detective — they would be extra careful. There’s no way they would have taken her anywhere where they could be seen by members of the public. We have an opportunity to put a bit of pressure on them here. I visited the café today. We need to keep up the pressure on that place and this is the only way to do that.’
‘Do we have any definite link to this café? I haven’t heard one yet.’
‘No. Or I would be signing up a search warrant. But someone there knows something. With enough pressure we might get to know what. People under pressure make mistakes.’
‘And sometimes they kill victims, too, Harry.’
‘Sometimes they do.’
‘That isn’t what you mean by a mistake is it?’
‘Of course it isn’t. I need them to know that I’m not going to go away, that there are other ways of getting answers and they are better off helping me now.’
‘I don’t know, Harry. The SLT had already signed off on the release. It goes out in forty minutes. You want me to tell them to put the emphasis on a stretch of road that is — what, ten miles from where Rhiannon was last seen to put pressure on someone at a nearby café that might be linked?’
‘We have house-to-house going on down in Sandgate. That covers any sightings of her or of any offenders. You don’t need to put that out as an appeal. It’s doubling up.’
‘I thought the call from the phone box was just some crackpot after police attention?’
‘I don’t think it was.’
‘You don’t think? You want me to brief this out, to change our whole appeal on the back of something you don’t think?’
‘I’ll call the Chief direct if you need me to.’
‘I wouldn’t do that. If I go with this, I may need to make it more palatable.’
‘I’ll send what I need you to say in a script. You’ll just need to read it out. Please. You have to trust me on this one.’
Another sigh — deeper this time. ‘I can’t make any promises, Harry. I’d go as far as to say it’s not likely. If I’m struggling to see your viewpoint on this, I can’t see the SLT being convinced easily. Get me your script in the next ten minutes, or sooner. I’ll need time to consider it.’
The call ended. Maddie was standing close.
‘What did he say?’
‘Bring up the details of the call that was made from here. I need another look.’
Chapter 25
Forty minutes later, just before 14:00 hours, Harry was back at the police station. Maddie was with him among a gaggle of detectives. Most of Major Crime and CID were back in and the nervous energy was tangible. They were all desperate to be tasked, desperate to help, just desperate to do anything.
The immediate response actions and subsequent searches were coming to an end and the house-to-house in key areas was just about done. Uniform colleagues were still knocking on doors but they had branched out. Just about every do
or in Sandgate would be knocked on by the end of the day, notwithstanding a long list to try again where they had found no one at home. Harry knew it was frivolous; when Rhiannon Davies had disappeared, the world had largely been asleep. But they had to do all they could.
This media appeal was their last hope. Harry was sure of it. But the subject matter was key and Harry had no idea if his pleas with the DCI had fallen on deaf ears and the agreed script had remained unchanged. He still had an unshakeable feeling that the call that had prompted Maddie and Rhiannon to visit that café was linked to the disappearance, a feeling that had only deepened since he had attended the place himself and talked with a man who had looked decidedly out of place in an apron. He was so convinced in the involvement of that café that he had even found himself calling the superintendent to discuss surveillance authorities. But he was unprepared and had made a fool of himself. That wasn’t something he did often. He had wanted something set up on the Ports Café, on the staff going to and from. The superintendent had listened to the request, readied a pen, and then asked for the justification. Harry had applied for surveillance authority before; he knew how it worked. It was one of the most intrusive policing tactics available. The justification required was colossal and you had to demonstrate how you had considered future court processes and legal challenges from the highest courtrooms in existence. Surveillance was a breach of a person’s human rights, no less. And yet Harry had nothing more than a feeling. He tried to put that into words, into something tangible, but he had failed. He was unprepared and desperate, and he couldn’t help but sound like it. The superintendent was someone he had known a long time, he felt like there was a mutual respect, but it wasn’t enough — not nearly enough. The subject was quickly moved to how he was doing since his ‘time off’. It was humiliating. Harry knew what he meant; he knew that he was being questioned for even making the call in the first place. The superintendent had finished the call by asking how this might play out if the situation was reversed. ‘Would you give me authority, Harry? With what you have presented and knowing that it’s in your name as the authorising officer?’ It was the worst end possible: Harry effectively calling a superintendent to refuse his own permission.
HE WILL FIND YOU an absolutely gripping crime thriller with a massive twist Page 26
