The Depths

by Catriona King

  “No answers from the photo-agencies yet, chief, if that’s what you were going to ask, but I did manage to get back into the mums’ chat-room.”

  Bullet point number three appeared.

  “I tracked back to the date Bella was born and there was nothing on her other than that photo I already found, so Nicola Westbury obviously wasn’t that into social media.” He shook his head in despair. “Honestly, you should see the kids’ photos that people post there.”

  Craig’s eyes narrowed. “Nasty?”

  “No, not that. Just innocent ones of their kids asleep, in the bath, swimming, but if a perve managed to hack that chat-room they’d be in bloody paradise.”

  Craig made a mental note that no images of his child were ever going to be posted online.

  The analyst paused to take questions but when none came he moved on. “OK, Davy, join in on this bit when I get to it.” A fourth bullet point appeared - ‘Abduction’.

  “So Davy and I went right back to the beginning and we think we’ve worked out the steps to the girl getting taken out of the country.”

  Davy tapped his smart-pad and a timeline of Bella Westbury’s disappearance appeared. Both analysts began typing on their copies of the slide simultaneously and projecting the additions onto the LED screen.

  When he got some free time Craig planned on asking them how just they’d done it, but for now everyone just sat in silence and watched as, ‘Playing in garden’, ‘Mother enters house’, ‘Bella snatched’, right up to, ‘flies out of Italian, Swiss or Greek airports’ appeared.

  Ash walked across to the screen. “This was where things got tricky.” He tapped on the word ‘snatched’.

  “Davy?”

  The senior analyst remained where he was and added a text box containing some technical language that made Craig shake his head.

  “Explain.”

  Davy did so with a smile. “OK, the French hotel’s CCTV, which you were right did cover the W…Westburys’ house, was being viewed by the hotel’s under-manager that afternoon but the gendarmes checked and he was clean. S…So then we got lucky. The hotel never deletes anything; they just back it up digitally to an off-site archive. I asked to view it, and I guess the gendarmes must have missed it but there was definitely the footprint of an unknown computer on the CCTV system.”

  Andy’s eyes widened. “Their CCTV was hacked!”

  “Yes. From the outside. It had been since the end of March that year.”

  March twenty-fifteen? Craig frowned. Something at the back of his mind had just shouted for attention but he couldn’t work out what it was.

  Andy saw his perplexed look and offered up. “Stuart Kincaid left home in March last year.”

  Craig considered the information and shook his head. “Thanks anyway, but it’s something else I’m looking for. What date in March twenty-fifteen, Davy?”

  “It was a randomer. Wednesday the twenty-first. No idea why someone started watching the Westburys then.”

  After a minute’s more fruitless wracking of his brains Craig shook his head and moved on. “OK, so someone watched Bella Westbury for five months until they spotted their chance to take her.”

  The analyst nodded. “The old traces showed that the hacker was s…somewhere to the east of the hotel and within five miles of it. Sorry, but I can’t be any more accurate than that without a live signal. They would’ve been able to view everything at the Westburys’ house, which means the scenario you and Liam suggested w…was possible.”

  Someone had watched the house for likely opportunities to arise when Bella might be left alone, and then sent a man there ready just in case.

  Craig sat forward urgently. “Can we prove it was Pierre Galvet who took her or is this all still just theory?”

  Davy allowed himself a satisfied smile. “We can prove it now. After the girl’s abduction the gendarmes seized all street, business and private CCTV and mobile phone footage in the surrounding ten miles, as well as everything they could already access from the hotel, motorways, border posts, airports and ports. I’ve had access to everything s…since this morning and here’s the relevant clip. Just a warning to everyone; it shows the girl’s abduction.”

  Craig scanned the group to check that they were ready and nodded to start. They watched as Bella Westbury played innocently with her mother in the back garden of their house in France and then as a silver Renault, later confirmed stolen from an area called La Gaude, parked in the street opposite. Ninety minutes later, and just seconds after Nicola Westbury had left to enter the house and get her daughter a drink, a man exited the car, sprinted the short distance to the garden, and left it again almost immediately with the girl wriggling in his arms and his hand clamped hard over her mouth.

  The next image showed the boot of the Renault opening and closing and then it accelerating east in the direction of the French Italian border. After another few seconds’ viewing, Davy paused the tape and darkened the screen.

  “The next clip shows the car on the A8 east and then it pulls off and loses the cameras on the back roads.”

  There was silence for so long that Liam was tempted to swear just to break it, but Craig got in just as his deputy was opening his mouth, not daring to look at the faces of his team when he spoke because he knew their expressions would magnify the horror that he was feeling himself.

  “Questions, Davy. You’ve ID-ed the kidnapper as Galvet?”

  “Yes. Face match from his arrest records.”

  “And the car?”

  “Stolen that morning from La Gaude, a village close to the fruit farm. Galvet must have left the farm, nicked it and driven it close to the house to park.”

  Liam nodded. “But not nicked too far in advance of the snatch, in case the police had been alerted to look for it.”

  Craig sighed. “Galvet must have got a call from the hacker watching the girl, saying that today was the day.”

  Liam shook his head. “Not likely, boss, they couldn’t have known they’d strike lucky that particular day. Galvet had probably been called to wait loads of times before and just not got the chance to take her. Or maybe they had other paedos on alert other days and it was just his turn. The thing that this does tell us is that the Westbury girl was targeted.”

  Craig met his deputy’s eyes and nodded. Bella Westbury had been chosen for some special purpose, and the attention paid to her said that purpose was very unlikely to have been transient, like abuse or porn.

  “Agreed. The options for why are: abuse, but that would probably have resulted in her death and there’s been no body found; porn, but Ash has almost ruled that out; trafficking, but she’s too young to have been of use to anyone for physical labour-”

  Their ex-Vice D.C.I. shook his head solemnly. “It doesn’t rule out trafficking for abuse, Guv. Just because her images aren’t out there doesn’t mean she still wasn’t taken by a paedophile ring to be passed around. I’ve seen it happen before.”

  It made Craig shudder and shake his head violently.

  “No! No, I can’t believe that.”

  “No-one wants to, but we can’t rule it out.”

  Craig hit back vehemently. “And I say we can!”

  He took a deep breath to calm himself before going on.

  “This was too careful, Aidan, and that tells me this specific child was important to someone, even if we look at the fourth possible option, that she was stolen to order for someone to adopt. If someone had just specified that they wanted a blonde, blue-eyed girl then one could have been snatched much more easily. There must have been lots of families on holiday in Nice that year.”

  He shook his head slowly. “This targeting was too patient, and the attention to detail… hacking a CCTV feed, watching and waiting for months? No. There’s something else going on here that we’ve missed.”

  Liam nodded. “They wanted Bella Westbury and no-one else.”

  “Yes, yes, and we need to find out why. Why her? What was so special about that little
girl?” He turned urgently to his analysts. “Davy, was there anything that stood out on her background or medical history?”

  A quick check of his screen brought a shake of the head. “Nothing, chief. Normal health, she had all her vaccinations, no hospital attendances except the ED…” As he gazed at Craig his eyes widened in horror. “You’re not thinking organ donor, are you? That someone stole her to order for that?”

  It brought gasps from even the most cynical members of the team and they waited breathlessly for Craig to deny it, growing more horrified when he took his time to speak and then responded with a question of his own.

  “Did she ever have blood taken, Davy?”

  A speedy tap brought the words that Craig had wanted to hear.

  “No. Never.”

  The detective eased out a sigh of relief. “Then I don’t think we’re looking at organ donation. To be truthful I was thinking more of pre-adoption screening. Organ donation hadn’t occurred to me until you mentioned it.”

  Liam was first out of the gates with, “You’re a ghoul, son.”

  The analyst muttered defensively, “I saw it in a movie last week.”

  Craig nodded. “And it was an important suggestion that thankfully you’ve now been able to rule out. To make her a viable donor they would’ve had to have tested her blood group at a minimum and more likely had her tissue typed, but as she hadn’t been tested she would have been pot luck as a donor, therefore why not just snatch any girl?”

  He shook his head again. “No, I’m more and more convinced that Bella was stolen because of who she was and not what she was, although her physical appearance might have influenced what her kidnappers did with her after she was taken.”

  Andy had been frowning since the end of the video so Craig thought it was time to ask him why. He was one of the brightest people on his squad so he had a feeling that the reason would be good.

  “You’re looking troubled, Andy.”

  Liam snorted. “After what we’ve just been talking about? I wonder why?”

  The arty D.C.I. shook his head. “Yes, that bothered me of course, but it’s more what you first said about her being abducted to order, chief, and now that it was because of who she was. What if all of this was about the parents rather than the girl herself? What if someone wanted to destroy the whole Westbury family? Maybe because of a grudge?”

  Liam’s jaw dropped in surprise. “What sort of-”

  Just at that moment Alice returned to the squad-room carrying a page and Craig raised a hand to halt the discussion. The PA hurried across the floor and handed him their witnesses’ agreed sketch of Mister X.

  “Davy, display Blaine Westbury’s photo, please.”

  Westbury’s driving licence photograph appeared on the screen and Craig walked across to it with the page in his hand, glancing repeatedly from one to the other. After a moment he passed the sketch around for everyone to look. Opinion was united; the man in the sketch was Blaine Westbury.

  “We still need to be certain. Davy, call Edgar Westbury now and check his brother’s height. Ryan, arrange a photo array of males the right age and insert a photo of Blaine Westbury, then take it downstairs and do a witnessed ID with both of hotel staff separately. I want this identification airtight. Do that right now, please, while we carry on.”

  He motioned the rest of the group to focus and continued as if the interruption hadn’t occurred.

  “We’ll come back to what Andy just suggested, but let’s take Mary while the ID’s being sorted out. You were looking at the protest CCTV, the funeral coverage and Pierre Galvet, Constable Li.”

  For once the D.C. did her job without any backchat, taking everyone by surprise. It seemed that even Mary had finer sensibilities when it came to an abducted child.

  “The funeral coverage didn’t show anything unexpected, just the Westbury family en masse with no sign of Stuart Kincaid being there. The CCTV of the quarry protests didn’t reveal much either. I checked for Arthur Norris, Stuart Kincaid, Derek Morrow and Blaine Westbury, and none of them were in the crowd. The protestors were mainly environmentalists, people linked with national and international Green groups. In the end the gold yield was so small the place closed down after three years anyway.”

  She displayed a few slides of people carrying placards, and one of some diehards camping outside the quarry’s gates.

  Liam gestured at the image.

  “Here, when did those gates come down? I didn’t notice them when we were there.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It must have been before Kincaid got killed, boss, otherwise how did he get in? And his killer. But they should put them up again now if the local kids are using the place as a paddling pool.”

  Craig nodded. “Good points. Check when they came down, someone, and sort out getting them re-erected with the local sergeant before somebody falls to their death.”

  As Liam scribbled himself a note the constable changed topic to Pierre Galvet, and an image of the man from his criminal records appeared on the screen.

  Liam glanced up for long enough to give his verdict

  “Ugly looking bastard. My granny would have said that his black soul had chewed its way through to his outside.”

  Craig burst out laughing and almost spat out his mouthful of coffee. When he’d stopped spluttering he shook his head.

  “That’s brilliant! And thinking at some of the criminals we know it seems pretty accurate. I wish I’d met your grandmother, Liam.”

  It brought a nostalgic smile to the deputy’s face. “Aye. She was a fierce woman, I can tell you. She used to put the fear of God into every kid for miles around.”

  Craig turned back to his constable, still chuckling. “OK, Mary, tell us about Galvet.”

  “I know where he is now. He’s in a nick in Manchester doing two years for indecent exposure.”

  Aidan wanted the details. “Spill.”

  “He exposed himself on an express train between stations.”

  “Thereby giving himself a captive audience for a while. It was well thought out at least.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Yes, well, part of that audience was male so he got pinned to the floor pretty fast. Dirty devil.”

  Craig was still on Manchester. “Why is he serving his time in England? Didn’t the French want him back?”

  “I queried that. It seems they were quite happy to be rid of him for a while so he stayed put.”

  Liam gave a guffaw. “He’ll be in nick a lot longer than two years when they see Davy’s CCTV footage. Child abduction will end him up in the Bastille.”

  Craig smiled. “The Bastille hasn’t been a prison for two centuries, but I take your point. We’re obliged to share Davy’s findings on Nice with the French now that we have them, but we’ll need to speak to Galvet before they get hold of him or we could be wading through red tape for years before we find out what happened to the girl.”

  He tapped his chin thoughtfully for a moment and then shook his head, defeated.

  “OK, let me think about that for a while. The solution will come to me. ”

  Just then Ryan reappeared with a broad grin on his face.

  “We’ve got him!”

  He held out two signed statements to a startled Craig.

  “Both of them ID-ed Blaine Westbury from the photo array?”

  “Not a single doubt. They picked him out separately and instantly.”

  Craig waved him to take a seat and turned to his senior analyst. “Davy, what’s the word on his height?”

  “His brother’s just told me Blaine was between six-three and six-four. That’s what the hotel people said too. Easily big enough to have pushed Stuart Kincaid under the w…water and held him there.”

  Craig stared at the floor, his mind racing.

  Biddy Evans had seen Blaine coming from the direction of the quarry around the time that Stuart Kincaid was murdered, and now they’d confirmed that Blaine had attempted access to Kincaid’s possessions. There
was no doubt in his mind that Blaine Westbury had killed Stuart Kincaid, but what had he been looking for in his bags? And why had Kincaid been at the quarry at all?

  He looked up to see everyone gazing at him expectantly, something he’d had to get used to since becoming a boss but something that still always surprised him. He knew that people believing that he had all the answers should make him feel good, but the day it did was the day that he would quit.

  “OK. It looks pretty certain that Blaine Westbury killed Stuart Kincaid, but before we start cheering we need to know why.” He turned to Andy. “Andy, get down to forensics after this and find out what was in Kincaid’s luggage and phone. Everything.”

  Davy interrupted. “Remember I’ve already got a list of his calls, chief. And his card purchases. Nothing exciting there, just petrol, hotels and meals.”

  Liam frowned. “If Kincaid was buying petrol he had a car, so where did that go when he disappeared?”

  “I looked into that too. He drove an Audi and it seems to have vanished, so it’s probably in a scrap yard s…somewhere now. I’ve a call out to every single one in the country.”

  Craig shook his head. “Don’t waste too much energy on it, Davy. It’s probably crushed or burnt out by now. Right, let’s finish up the reports and then we can list what needs to be done.” He turned back to his junior analyst. “Ash, have you got anything more for us?”

  The response was the hacker crossing to the LED screen again, this time to display images of three small hands bearing flower motifs.

  “OK, so thanks to my mate we now have photos of the distinguishing marks. Remember, these weren’t listed on the kids’ passports but were noted at the airports they travelled from.”

  He tapped on an image that was obviously a transfer tattoo, its black ink flaking around the edges.

  “You can see that what was described as a flower tattoo definitely wasn’t in this case. The border guard was just too stupid to spot it was fake and ask the parents to rub it off.”

  The image was discarded, leaving only two.

  “I wanted to be sure of my ground so I contacted Edgar Westbury and got him to resend the photo of the girl’s daisy scar that he gave the chief.”