A Private Investigation

by Peter Grainger

  Smith went back to his summary page, noting that Terek had now received a phone call and was in conversation with someone. All the data one could ever need was a matter of a few clicks away, and Smith was not such a dinosaur that he couldn’t acknowledge its value. He looked at the UK homicide statistics for 2015 and found that of 54 victims under the age of sixteen, 60% had been killed by a parent or step-parent. There was no surprise here – he had only looked at these numbers to confirm what he already knew from too much experience. ‘Killed’ would be seen by some as too much of a leap this early on but as in so many aspects of life, whilst hoping for the best, cases are actually solved by assuming the worst. 60% is too high to ignore, and someone would have to go over everything that Mrs Johnson and Roy Green had said with a toothcomb – neither had yet been formally interviewed. In fact, had any officer actually met Mr Green? He made a note to call Ann Crisp.

  Terek arrived at Smith’s desk, apparently back in one piece and ready to resume.

  ‘John Wilson will be here in a moment, DC. He’s left the rest of them finishing the check of premises with CCTV and showing Zoe’s picture around but they’ve already got something. He’s bringing it in. They have some footage of her in The Crescent on Monday night.’

  Wilson said, ‘The more I look at this, the more iffy it gets. It doesn’t square with what the bloke told us before we noticed he had the camera.’

  They were all gathered around John Wilson’s desk and watching the CCTV through for the third time – although the teams shared the same large office, this was not a space Smith had occupied much for the past couple of years.

  He said directly to Wilson, ‘What did he tell you?’

  ‘Said he couldn’t really remember a particular girl, said he has loads of kids in and out. When Mike showed him the picture he shrugged a bit and said maybe she had been one of them this week but he couldn’t be sure. Then we spotted the camera but we had to ask about it, he didn’t volunteer it up. Then he buggered about, saying his nephew had put it in and he – this Mehmet Sadik who owns the kebab place – didn’t know how to get the card out. He reckoned he’d never checked it since it went up. Anyway, Mike slots it into his iPad and bingo, there she is in his place on Monday night.’

  Wilson had pressed pause and all could see the image of the girl sitting on her own at the solitary table by the window of the kebab shop. The quality was better than usual, and there was no doubt that this was Zoe Johnson.

  Terek said, ‘This is a real bonus, John. It ties in perfectly with what the two girls told us this morning. What’s the time stamp in the corner?’

  ‘21.14. It tells us more than that, though. Tells us she doesn’t like kebabs, for a start. She sits in there for a while but then she goes across the road to a burger van.’

  Smith said, ‘It tells us a lot more. John, go back to the beginning, before she comes in, and play it again.’

  Wilson gave him half a nod and a look that wasn’t unfriendly for once; perhaps the knowledge that Smith was leaving soon had finally cleared the air between them. Whatever the reason, Smith was sure that someone of Wilson’s experience would already have noted what had caught his own interest.

  The camera had been positioned to show the entrance to the kebab shop, the serving area and most but not quite all of the counter. The till was visible but someone working behind the counter occasionally disappeared into the bottom right corner of the screen. They watched as Zoe bought a drink from the vending machine and sat by the window, and Smith thought how visible she would be then to anyone out on the dark street. She took out her phone, looked at the screen and laid it on the table. Wilson said, ‘She checks the phone a few times, as if she’s expecting a text or something. Then this bloke comes in.’

  A man in his forties or fifties crossed from the door to the counter; white, medium height and build, clean-shaven, but not wearing a coat or jacket, just a sweatshirt, so on a night like that was, he must have had a car outside. Mehmet Sadik prepared some food for him, only taking a couple of minutes. The man stood at the counter, looking back out of the window, the girl directly in his line of vision. Then as he left the shop, the man clearly spoke to the girl and she to him – just a few words on each side before the man glanced back at Sadik, smiled and left the shop.

  Wilson pressed pause and said, ‘There’s a taxi rank outside, so…’

  Smith said, ‘If he is, and if you can get me a good still out of that, I can probably find him pretty quickly.’

  Dolly Argyris knew the name of every driver in the town, having employed and sacked most of them over the years.

  ‘Will do. But there’s more. I’ll fast forward a bit – she sits there for several minutes after he goes out, not doing much at all. And then… Here we are. Then this Sadik character is at the table, talking to her. Watch this. He points behind him, to the back of the shop. Why? What’s he saying? The girl takes a good look at whatever he’s pointing to and shakes her head. Is she saying no thanks to whatever he just suggested? She gets up and goes out then. He goes across, shuts the door and then watches her go. He stares out of the window for a while. A couple of minutes later an Asian kid comes in and picks up an order. Then our kebab man closes the shop.’

  They watched Mehmet Sadik locking the shop door from the inside before disappearing again bottom right. After a few seconds, Terek said, ‘When you first spoke to him and showed him Zoe’s picture, he said she might have been in but he couldn’t be sure. But all this took place less than forty-eight hours ago, and he wasn’t overrun with customers. He had some sort of conversation with her.’

  ‘And,’ Wilson said, ‘he closed up early. Mike spotted that when we were watching this again in the car. The sign in his window says he closes at 22.30 weekday nights but he was locking up before ten on Monday. I think I need to get back out there today, see if I can jog his memory, sir.’

  Terek nodded, still looking at the final image on the screen.

  ‘Yes, agreed. Get this copied and get the stills of the other character while I brief DCI Reeve. She’ll want to see this before we act on it. I’ll do that now. But you and Mike should see him again today.’

  Smith said, ‘While you’re there, ask if he minds you taking a look around his premises. You know, the girl might have got shut in a storeroom or some such nonsense. See how he reacts. He can say no, in which case you might need to find a reason to arrest him.’

  Terek was in the process of thinking that over when Alison Reeve entered the office and made straight for them. She had her serious look on and Smith thought, now you’re feeling it, the weight of that crown you wanted for so long. She looked at the picture on Wilson’s screen and said, ‘Got something?’

  He said, ‘Yes, ma’am. Good footage of the girl and more besides.’

  ‘Alright. I’ll take a look. But I’ve some news for you all as well. In a meeting with Superintendent Allen just now, we decided to instigate a search. All uniformed officers on non-urgent duties are being brought in now and we will have a coach party from Norwich arriving early this afternoon. The area of the Railway playpark south to The Crescent is to be swept. There’ll be a helicopter, and that will help to target the search to anything out of place and to the more impenetrable areas.’

  This was all happening more quickly than Smith had expected, and his was not the only surprised face around Wilson’s desk. When an operation goes as public as this one was about to do, there are upsides and downsides – the exact information given out to the media must be selected with great care. Already someone needed to be thinking at least several months ahead to a possible court case.

  Chris Waters spoke for the first time.

  ‘What about the burger stall? Was it there this morning?’

  Disguised sarcasm wasn’t one of Wilson’s strong suits.

  ‘No, as it happens. If it had been we’d probably have had a word.’

  But Waters had developed a thicker skin these days, and everyone here had seen his apparently inn
ocuous musings lead to sudden advances in more than one case. He said, ‘Just evenings, maybe. It would be useful to know if it’s a regular pitch for him.’

  Smith said, ‘Well, not every evening. It wasn’t there last night, either.’

  DCI Reeve and John Murray exchanged a knowing look but no-one else picked it up.

  Then Reeve said, ‘None of you will be deployed in the search. We have leads already and I want these thoroughly worked today. I want everything passed back up the line, however insignificant it might seem. My next job will be to go and speak to Mrs Johnson before the news of this search gets out – you can imagine how frightening this is going to be for her and the family. Serena, you can brief me on your contact with her before I go.’

  Smith thought about Chris and Serena then, their eyes on the senior investigating officer, waiting for her to finish – in their situation, would he be convinced by DCI Reeve? He was, but then he ought to be, having taught her almost everything he had learned himself over the years.

  ‘OK,’ she said, ‘let’s look at this CCTV. No, all of you stick around – five minutes isn’t going to make any difference. I want to hear what everyone thinks.’

  Bravo.

  During a few minutes’ break at lunchtime, Smith stood at the canteen window and watched uniformed people from other stations arriving in the car park. Some stood in small groups and talked. It wasn’t raining then but was likely to later on, making the job they had to do yet more miserable. It isn’t an afternoon out in the countryside or a break from the daily routine – everyone hates it because it’s an admission of something. Not of failure as such, but an admission that things have got serious for the missing person and their family. Think back – how many times have we seen a report in the news telling us that after an extensive search of city streets or woods or damp, dismal fields, the missing person was found alive and well? And, of course, it’s worse when it’s a child – everything is worse when it’s a child.

  Back at his desk, Serena told him that Stephen Sweeney was unemployed, which, if he was able-bodied and nineteen, was a sort of crime but not one that has a high conviction rate. Was his employment status relevant? The unemployed are much more likely to be convicted of certain crimes than those who make a contribution – for blindingly obvious reasons – but only slightly more likely to be convicted of serious sexual crimes. Nevertheless, Smith told Serena to assemble full details for Sweeney because he would be interviewed at some point, if only for the purposes of elimination.

  When Smith reached Waters’ desk, the laptop screen suggested that he was still fiddling around with Facebook but a two-word question – ‘Roy Green?’ – confirmed once again that the young detective’s laid-back manner concealed an increasingly effective and organised approach to the job. Without taking his eyes from the screen and without pausing in the pressing of keys, Waters said, ‘He works for NK AutoParts. They’re based in Peterborough. I spoke to his line manager and told him it was a query related to a possible traffic offence. Green has been at work as usual this week. They have trackers on the vans, so if we need to we can check his movements, or at least the van’s movements in plenty of detail. The manager was a bit concerned and asked some questions – Roy is one of his best drivers. All the details are on the pad.’

  Waters had taken to using a reporter’s style notepad. As a purist, Smith couldn’t fully endorse this – on the other hand, given time a proper notebook might follow. He could hand over his unused Alwyches as a sort of reverse leaving present… He picked up Waters’ pad and read the top page. There were additional details about the work that Green did and how long he had been employed at the company – four years. To the uninitiated, these are irrelevant details, but not so. Driving jobs generally have a high turnover of staff, and four years is a long time to stay with one company. And the manager had said that Green was one of his best, suggesting he did not want to lose him over a traffic offence. Smith was no profiler but experience and common sense had taught him that reliable, hard-working men don’t often commit offences against young girls. Roy Green slipped a few places down the as-yet-invisible list inside his head.

  He flipped over that page of the notepad, glanced at what came next and concealed a smile, not that Waters was watching what he was doing. Then he said, ‘The answer to your next question is yes, all fast-food outlets require a licence from the local authority. My guess is that would be dealt with by the district council. Are you going to follow it up when you’ve finished liking pictures of puppies or whatever it is you’re doing?’

  ‘Will do… I’m just searching messages for mentions of Railway parks and playparks. There are several in the USA.’

  ‘Oh, good. Have a word with Allen if you think we’re about to search the wrong one. He might suggest that a couple of us fly out there.’

  Waters smiled and carried on tapping away. Of course, Smith thought, I could get your attention by mentioning what’s written at the top of this page. In pencil, Waters had put down a personal reminder – ‘Text Janie tonight’. That had to be Janie Cole, Sam Cole’s niece from Barnham Staithe. It was months since they had been up there, closing down the investigation into Sokoloff’s murder, but the sly young dog had stayed in touch with her. At uni, wasn’t she? If we had a tracker on Water’s motor, would that show some weekend trips to the midlands?

  Smith returned to his own desk. His role was now somewhat unclear. Terek had clearly been told to let Smith do more of his own thing, and there had been no mention of his being deskbound since; on the other hand, what he was actually meant to be doing, Terek had not said. That was probably deliberate, and Smith could understand how his detective inspector was feeling.

  He opened his Alwych, found the latest page and the latest list and crossed off “list of licensed burger stalls”. Murray had gone back out with Wilson, back onto the streets where he belonged. Terek was checking recent reports of missing girls in Norfolk and neighbouring counties over the past few months – routine procedure these days, we no longer wait for newspapers to point out that there might be a serial offender on the loose. DCI Reeve was on her way to see Mrs Johnson, which might turn out to be a little awkward when she gets back to the station, he now realised. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, DC.

  Dolly Argyris answered the phone herself and recognised his voice immediately. In the past he might have pretended to be concerned at that but now, with the growing feeling of fin de siècle that accompanied everything he was doing, he found it both reassuring and sad – the next time he spoke to her might be as a paying customer, and nothing more.

  She said, ‘Must be trouble, I know this. You only come to Dolly when is trouble. But you arrest no drivers, please, very short of drivers now. What you want, sergeant? Maybe you just need a cab for a change, yes?’

  Smith explained that he had a picture of a man who might be a taxi driver, and he told her the area where it had been taken. Yes, she said, that was an unofficial rank and parking area used by all the Kings Lake firms, with room for four or five vehicles at most. Her drivers did use it sometimes. When he said he would call in to her office shortly, Dolly made the usual protests about not being in a fit state to be seen by her favourite policeman, suggesting instead that he call round to her rather grand house in Oaklands at about eight o’clock that evening when she would have a nice meal waiting for him. It was a game they had played many times, but what she then said surprised him.

  ‘OK then. If you not come to me like that, just send the picture to me. You got my personal number. I take a look at it, tell you if he is one of my men, sergeant. You know I have many men…’

  The whole world is going digital, even Dolly Argyris. Send the picture as an attachment and wait for an electronic answer? Quicker, obviously, and saving fuel as well as time, but think about what is lost. Control of the image is lost – he would not know then to whom it had been shown. He would not see the reactions of those who saw the picture, the frowns, the sideways looks, the blin
ks of people who might have a hundred different reasons for saying no, they did not know the identity of the man who had spoken to Zoe Johnson as he left the kebab shop last Monday night, when in fact they did. Smith doubted that Dolly would lie to him, but she wasn’t trained to spot the tiny uncertainties in others that he might see for himself if he was there in the room. You have to be in the room.

  He went across to Waters, told him where he was going and to keep him up to date with anything regarding the search and the inquiries going on in The Crescent. Then it was time to see whether his right to roam really had been fully restored – he went to Terek’s desk with his waterproof jacket over one arm. The inspector’s screen showed that he was still on some sort of missing persons database.

  Smith said, ‘What do you think? It’s not obviously part of anything bigger, is it?’

  Consciously or unconsciously, he had dropped the ‘sir’; there didn’t seem to be any point in it now.

  Terek leaned back in his chair and folded his arms.

  ‘If it is, I’m not seeing it yet. Superintendent Allen is concerned that there might be a racial dimension to it, but it doesn’t fit with any of that, not that I can see. Girls have been exploited and abused but not abducted. Or worse.’

  Terek looked directly at him for the first time.

  ‘What about you? What’s your gut feeling?’

  Only Smith’s eyebrows gave away his momentary surprise.

  Terek said, ‘DCI Reeve said I should take note of them – your gut feelings.’

  Put like that, it sounded medical and faintly unpleasant.

  Terek went on, ‘Not the way that I work – hunches and half-guesses. Policing needs to be rational and scientific, in my opinion. Protocols. But I’m under orders, DC. Besides, it’s only…’

  ‘For three weeks.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He could choose to be insulted at being humoured in that way; instead, he chose to tell the truth.