Now he watched an oversized TV screen clinging to the wall of one of the Major Crime briefing rooms, knowing that it really did represent their last chance. It was the same room where he and Maddie had stood just a few days earlier while Jarod Logan’s gruesome end was projected onto the wall. The projector screen was rolled up now and put neatly to one side — just like that whole investigation. Harry tried to put that out of his mind. He would always prioritise the living over the dead and he had to believe that Rhiannon was still alive.
The television was tuned into the BBC News channel. The screen was busy, there were two talking heads split into two smaller screens and a blood-red banner running along the bottom: Breaking news — Lennockshire Police update on possible kidnap incident. The newsreader looked stern as she sat behind a desk. The talking head in the box next to them was suddenly replaced by the image of a longer desk with three empty seats. There was a cluster of microphones in front of each and the occasional flash as a member of the gathered paparazzi got their eye in. A graphic appeared showing that someone was turning the volume up.
Harry rubbed his top lip and his finger came away damp. The box with the empty desks suddenly expanded to fill the screen and the flashes became constant. DCI Julian Lowe emerged. Harry’s hands were fists that he squeezed tighter and his chest felt almost too tight to breathe. He knew this was it. If they came out with their original, dry appeal asking for witnesses on a deserted seafront at 6 a.m., the pressure was off the people who had taken Rhiannon and it was all over. They would never find her — not alive. Harry had never been more convinced of anything. He’d sent off his script like the DCI had asked, he’d tried to type out a reasoned justification too, but had deleted it all and replaced it with simply, trust me. It was just fifteen minutes since he had ended a call with a superintendent when an appeal to trust him had been not nearly enough. This had to be different.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming.’ A woman was seated in the centre. Harry didn’t recognise her but she went on to introduce herself as the Head of Media Operations for the force. She introduced the man to her right as the Deputy Chief Constable and then to her left DCI Julian Lowe as the Senior Investigating Officer for the case. The Deputy Chief then took his turn to give a stern and generic, pre-prepared statement, in which he appealed for the help of the general public and thanked them for their assistance to this point so far. He handed over to DCI Julian Lowe to provide the specific requirements. The camera had been taking in all three officers but now moved to focus on the DCI. He thanked both persons who had spoken already, shuffled a paper and pushed his glasses back up his nose. When he finally looked up to the room, he was immediately flashed a hundred times.
‘Thank you for being here today. You, as the gathered press, are our mouthpiece to the people of the UK in our time of need. The reports are correct . . . Lennockshire Police have a missing police officer. But she is more than just a member of the police family . . . she is a member of her own family. She is also a friend and decent member of the community who spends her days trying to make Lennockshire safer for all of us. We are asking for that work to be repaid.’ Harry ran his tongue between his lips as DCI Lowe paused. So far, nothing he had said was part of his script, but he hadn’t got to the appeal yet. This was it.
‘The circumstances of her disappearance mean that we cannot rule out foul play.’ The DCI looked up again and his glasses reflected another glut of flashes. Harry tensed his jaw. He felt a run of sweat on his temple; he was burning up in there.
‘Unfortunately, for operational reasons I cannot reveal these circumstances or any more details just yet. What we are asking for is very simple and any members of the public who live in, or have travelled through the county of Lennockshire may be able to assist us — specifically, anyone who has a functioning dashcam who has travelled the A20, Ashford Road between Ashford and Langthorne — any part of it. We would like for you to get in touch. It might just be that your dashcam’s memory is storing a vital piece of information, the sort of information that can assist us with finding this young woman. The number is on the bottom of the screen. This goes directly to the incident room, but you can also call us on 101, come into any of our stations or make contact with us in any way you know how. Please . . . get in touch and do it as soon as possible. Thank you.’
The room erupted into a cacophony of voices as the camera pulled back out.
Harry exhaled and looked around the room. They had used his script — some of it at least — but the key message was delivered. There were puzzled expressions among his own staff; it wasn’t what they’d been expecting. He’d not had the chance to brief them. He would have to now. He would speak to the force control room, too. He wanted to be sure they were ready to field the calls.
On the screen, the Head of Media had her hands up, to refuse questions at this time. Harry knew why. It was simple: they had more questions than answers themselves and they had taken a risk. Harry had a sudden sense that he had to be right. This was all on him now.
Chapter 26
When Harry looked up this time he was just about out of detectives. The response to the media appeal had prompted a lot of work. Experience told him that most of the enquiries would be a waste of precious time. The FCR were sending everything they were getting through to him, even stuff that was very obviously irrelevant. Harry had ensured his script was deliberately vague. He wanted to be the one ruling out what wasn’t relevant rather than members of the public doing it for him. Only the public liked to help — or at least they liked to feel that they were helping — so he was getting everything from sightings of cars ‘never seen in our road before,’ to ‘suspicious noises last night’ — whatever that meant.
The response to the request for dashcam footage had been far larger than he had expected, too. Their use was far beyond what he had hoped, with some insurance companies now insisting on their use. Harry had wanted to pick up his keys and respond to every lead himself, but he had to be restrained. His most important job now was pulling in all the information coming in from his team and prioritising what they followed up on first.
Right now he needed to step away from his screen and his phone for just a moment. He didn’t think he’d done that for two hours solid. He stood and stretched, aware that his eyes were heavy and dry. He made for the coffee pot. It was darker outside. The cloud cover had thickened as the day had gone on and now threatened rain. The kettle was cold to touch as he clicked it on.
‘Hey, you needed one too.’
Harry turned to Maddie. She was smiling but it was fixed, as if she had suckered in a breath and held it since pushing through the door to Major Crime.
‘Yeah. How are you getting on?’ While everyone else was out chasing shadows and dead-ends, Harry had asked Maddie to find out all she could about Rhiannon’s investigation into their blood-soaked boy. It was still a relevant line of enquiry — that someone linked to that boy was targeting the police officers working the case. That didn’t make sense to Harry, given the circumstances of Rhiannon’s disappearance, but he couldn’t ignore it as a possibility. He had also needed to give Maddie something to do, something that allowed them to work apart for a while.
‘Good. Rhiannon was all over it, it would seem. She was pretty certain he is Alex Thompson from Reading. She had done a lot of work with Social Services and got a lot of information around him and his family. Seems they were well known to the Social. All except the stepdad — or the dad in the case of Alex. She was struggling to get any information on him. Not even a name yet.’
‘Anything standing out?’
‘It seems they’re a family who have their issues but they certainly don’t like interference. They seem to have done their best to resist it. Alex’s mother engaged with Social Services to an extent but the older siblings definitely didn’t — the brother in particular . . . Mark Garner. He has his issues. A few run-ins with the police, too. Rhiannon did a lot of sound things . . . She’s put the blood up fo
r comparison against Garner. He was nicked for some public order stuff and criminal damage at the family home.’
‘Any confirmation?’
‘Not yet. She fast-tracked her request and it was couriered. I’ve put in a call to the lab, I was worried there might be results sat on her email. They haven’t sent them yet. It might not be today, which means it’ll be Monday. I’ve made sure they know to copy me in to any emails, just in case . . . in case Rhiannon can’t pick up hers.’
‘Can they work quicker?’
‘It’s four thirty on a Friday afternoon. I got a lab assistant. I asked to speak to someone higher and I was told no one was available. You know how these places work.’
‘They’re at home already?’
‘Or in the pub more likely.’ Maddie stood straighter than looked natural, her shocked smile still in place.
‘You okay?’
‘Not really, Harry. I just keep thinking about how lapsed I was. It’s like I got comfortable down here. You were right, I didn’t even think—’
‘I was frustrated, not at you. It wasn’t fair for me to say that.’
‘What if they’ve hurt her? What if—’
‘Then they hurt her. Not you. You can’t be beating yourself up about this. Not now. We need you sharp. A sharp Maddie Ives is quite something.’
Her shoulders dropped a little, some tension released, perhaps.
‘Thanks.’
‘Dream team!’ Harry turned to the sound of a booming voice. Vince’s raucous greeting was accompanied by the door crashing off the wall as he strode through. ‘I thought I’d come in early. Solve this shit for you. Only took me an hour! You can thank me later, Mads.’ Shaun Wilson appeared from behind Vince’s bulk. Harry knew him as one of the CID detectives normally based in Thanet. He wore a creased shirt and an unruly beard. On another day Harry would have sent him home until he could come back looking presentable. Today he needed every pair of hands he could get.
‘What are you talking about?’ Harry said.
Vince inclined a thumb at Shaun. ‘Your shiny-arsed detective mate here got a bit excited — unearthed what you might be looking for. I turned out on blues to go get him. He’s got something you need to see.’ Shaun held up a USB stick.
‘What’s on it?’ asked Harry.
‘Footage from a work’s van,’ Shaun said. ‘Shows a truck pulled over, right where you said and at the right time. Some fella’s getting out as he goes past. The van has to swerve!’ Shaun was breathy, his words tumbling out on top of each other. ‘I couldn’t make out the registration, but I only watched in on the little camera screen. I thought you might manage to see it better in here. It just plugs in. We seized the camera too.’
Maddie had already got to a desk and thumped a keyboard to wake it up. She booted up her media programme and snatched the USB from Shaun. A circle did somersaults in the middle of the monitor to announce it was loading. It seemed to take forever. Harry broke the tense silence.
‘You’re nights, Vince, right?’
‘I was boss. I heard about Rhiannon so I came in. Little Maddie I call her! She’s a scrapper, too, you can tell the sort. Wherever she is, she’ll be giving them shit ’til we turn up and bring her home.’ He grinned. It was aimed at Maddie. She smiled back, tired-looking but still more genuine than Harry had seen her all day.
‘There’s no overtime code, Vince. There—‘
‘Overtime?’ Vince turned on him and pulled his lips back in a snarl. All his warmth dropped away in an instant.
Harry lifted his hands. ‘You didn’t let me deliver my punchline, Vince. I know you’d work for free. I know why you’re here. It’s all been a bit tense is all, I figured a joke might help.’
Vince looked more at ease and shook his head. ‘Honestly, boss, I have two days off, I come back and Maddie’s lost her shadow and Harry Blaker’s making jokes! What the hell happened here?’
Harry smiled. Vince was the sort of bloke you wanted around you in a crisis.
The computer screen changed to a bright blue with the force crest in the middle — the standard media player. Maddie’s fingers blurred over the keys to get past a password request. When she plugged in the USB, the screen changed again. A few more clicks and a small window showed movement that was visible through a windscreen of a view ahead. It filled the screen. The van passed a parked car. Harry couldn’t read the registration number; the camera was too central. He was disappointed. This didn’t look like getting them the result they needed. He leaned in a little closer. ‘This isn’t the A20,’ he said.
‘Not yet.’ Shaun lifted a handwritten note. ‘Less than a minute. You can fast-forward it but it runs away with itself.’
Sure enough the camera showed a junction approaching. The van slowed but didn’t stop completely. It turned right, giving a sweeping view of the road it was now joining. Harry recognised the A20 now. The general direction was towards Langthorne — and the phone box. The van picked up speed. Harry tried to pick out what was in the distance.
‘Can we slow it down?’
‘No. It only pauses, but it’s tricky to time it right.’
The van was still accelerating. The scenery was becoming more and more of a blur. A parked car flashed past on the left side, Harry made out the last two digits of the registration this time. He could see a junction in the distance and a red smear on the nearside bank: their phone box. They were approaching it quickly, too quickly. The junction flashed past, the red box did too. Harry could see something a few hundred metres further up. It was a dark, square object, a truck or a small lorry he reckoned. The camera was still moving too quickly and the scenery was mainly a blur. It moved out, already starting to overtake, there was nothing coming the other way. It was too fast. Harry leaned in. He was already certain they would have no chance of reading a registration at this speed.
Suddenly the dark shape changed: the driver’s door pushed open. The van reacted; it slowed quickly and lurched further out to the right. A figure stepped out of the door. He was in a long, dark coat with the hood up. The van must have been close to hitting him but he didn’t seem to react. Harry’s attention had been on the figure; he hadn’t checked the registration plate. The van’s speed was slower now, much slower.
‘Anyone get the reg?’ Harry snapped. Maddie didn’t reply, no one did. A few more clicks and the footage moved backwards to where the truck was just a solid shape. She started it again and clicked to pause it. She muttered under her breath as it rolled too far again. It took a few goes but finally the footage was stopped at the optimum time. The registration number was a block of yellow, the letters and numbers within it looked to be running together. To the right of this, a figure was halfway out of the door, his front leg planted, his back leg trailing into the truck. The footage was blurred, his face nothing more than a block of dark grey with a hood rounding off the top.
‘I think it starts GN,’ Maddie said. She stepped back and ran her hand roughly through her hair, her voice close to breaking. ‘It’s not good enough is it? To get an ID? Jesus, Harry, are we staring right at whoever took her?’
Harry’s eye flicked to the digital display on the footage. It showed 11:15:20s. This was less than a minute before the phone box was used to make a call to the police control room, the call that summoned Maddie and Rhiannon to a café, to a meeting that never took place. Harry knew that it had served its purpose, however. The man on their screen, with his hood up on a clear day, with his lack of awareness to the speeding van, was exerting signs of someone distracted maybe, someone who was there to do something that was important to him — something that was consuming him entirely. There wasn’t much that could make you focus like that. An abduction of a police officer might just do it.
‘We need to know who that man is.’
‘There’s systems out there,’ Vince said. ‘I’ve heard of them used — stuff that can make pictures and videos clearer. They use it on CCTV, right?’ Vince was gruff, as if his throat had dried up.
Harry stepped away. The rest of the office suddenly seemed darker as he moved from the brightness of the screen. He was still turned away when he spoke, talking to himself almost.
‘There are. I’ve used them a few times, but it’s a Met resource. It took a week. I had an urgent request once that still took three days.’
‘Then call them,’ Vince said. ‘Tell them what’s at stake here! This isn’t an ordinary case, this is one of us, Harry.’
‘I know what it is!’ Harry snapped back.
‘The GMP might have one.’ Maddie was digging in her pocket for her phone. ‘There’s a programme that can clear up footage. Our covert teams used it when their footage wasn’t great.’ She already had the phone to her ear and it must have been answered on the first ring.
‘Sir, I need your help!’ she barked.
Harry paced further away to rest on a table next to the window. The clouds outside seemed darker still. There was a strip of whiter cloud and some sunlight getting through, but it was some way in the distance. It gave the sense that the darker clouds were gathering over the station. His attention stayed fixed on the sky while Maddie spoke down the phone. She explained hurriedly and it was obvious that she was doing all the talking. It sounded positive but she was frustrated too, as if any offer of help wouldn’t be quick enough. There was no such thing as quick enough, not in a case like this. He waited for her to finish then turned back into the room. Maddie was staring over at him; all the tension was back in her face.
‘It’s not a GMP function. They use the NCA. That was Ian Jackson, my old superintendent. He has a senior contact over there. I need to send the file to him and he will see what he can do. He’s going to try and get someone to look at it now. He carries a lot of weight in the police but the NCA don’t have to lift a finger for him. He made no promises.’ Maddie was running her fingers frantically through her hair. ‘The file’s huge, too. I’ll need to send it as a zip file . . .’
HE WILL FIND YOU an absolutely gripping crime thriller with a massive twist Page 27
