Rose and Adam almost run into the building at Cobalt Square. DCI Mortimer is heading towards them, his face grave. He winces when he looks at Rose.
‘Christ, you look terrible, Rose. Should you be here? I heard you fell?’
‘I’m all right,’ says Rose. ‘Really. I’m okay.’
‘If you’re sure,’ he says. ‘Anyway, I’m holding a briefing right now so you’re just in time.’
‘Okay, everyone,’ says Mortimer and a hush falls over the room.
‘So,’ he says, ‘during a search of the Fuller property this morning, an envelope and some letters were found partially burned in a barbecue in the garden.’ An image appears on the whiteboard, blown up, showing the inside of a barbecue, with the charred remains of some paper. The image changes to the remains of an envelope. The words HMP Edgefield are at the top.
‘Several other letters have been burned beyond any hope of reading them,’ Mortimer continues, ‘but we have two we can still read. It looks as though someone – maybe Gregory himself – panicked and put the lid down, starving the fire of oxygen before it had done its work.’
The image changes to a picture of one of the letters, which is written in blocky, childish handwriting.
‘This is the first one, dated six months ago,’ says Mortimer, zooming in so everyone can read it.
‘Here’s the other letter,’ says Mortimer, swiping the white screen to change the picture.
‘Christ,’ says someone.
Mortimer’s eyes are hooded with stress and exhaustion as he turns back to the room.
‘Heather Doyle is not at her property and it looks very much like she’s done a runner,’ he says. ‘Now, it goes without saying that she’s now a major suspect in the disappearance of Gregory Fuller. Any possible motive is unclear as yet, but while female paedophiles are rare, they are not unknown.’
A few people, including Rose, grimace at these words.
‘There’s something else too,’ says Mortimer, posting the image on the board initially snapped by Rose’s phone. ‘This looks like a bloodstain on the side of the kitchen cabinet. We’re fast-tracking a test on that to see if it’s Doyle’s or, more worryingly, Gregory’s.’ He pauses for a moment before continuing. ‘So I want every possible detail on this woman. Most recent movements, habits, financials, phone use – we’re already looking into that and there’s nothing, so I think she would have another burner. Anything we can get. She hasn’t had a tag for a few weeks now but I wanted a renewed focus on all her movements. We’re going to have to rely on the usual methods. Where Gregory was between the day he disappeared and the last time Heather was spotted is one big question, so I want a renewed search of anywhere he might have been hiding or kept out of sight in the area around her house. I want a full intelligence package on Doyle. I want to know every single person who ever visited her in prison, every possible location she might have, any remaining family, every bit of correspondence that came in and out over the years she was there. I’m getting an immediate recall to prison authorized, which means when we get her, she’ll be off the streets straight away and we won’t have any issues with custody time limit.’
He starts giving out jobs.
Rose and Adam are tasked first with finding out how Doyle got the letters to Gregory without the distinctive envelopes being recognized by his parents.
Rose starts with Gwen, who is hopeless, and she is almost on the verge of giving up when Anton, in the background, remembers the partwork magazine on space that Gregory has been collecting for ages. It comes in a cellophane wrapper and would be easy for someone to slip something inside and reseal, before posting on again to the Wyndham Terrace address.
Heather’s Probation Officer is a man called Frank Stenson, who, he tells them as he clears space to sit in his small, cramped office in Camden, has been in the job for thirty years and is counting down the days until retirement.
‘It was never an easy job at the best of times,’ he says, absently scratching his grey-flecked beard, ‘but with all the cuts and the creeping privatization of the last few years, it’s been a bloody nightmare.’ He pauses. ‘It’s terrible to think a lack of contact with this Heather Doyle may have played a part in what’s happened.’
He points to a photograph of a caravan stuck to his computer. ‘That’s what I’ll be doing in six months’ time,’ he says. ‘I’m going to attach the van to the back of the car, and me and my wife are going to spend the whole winter in Cornwall, working out where we’re going to buy.’
Rose and Adam make polite noises and he scans each of their faces.
‘I’m waffling on,’ he says. ‘Sorry, but the point is that under the old system I’d have seen Heather Doyle every week since she was released, but the fact is I’ve probably spoken to her about twice since she got out. I wish I’d had time to build a bit of a relationship with her. But if you’ve met her a couple of times you know her about as well as I do.’
‘What sort of prisoner was she,’ says Adam, ‘according to your notes, I mean?’
Frank pushes his glasses up his nose and turns to his computer screen, where he taps with two fingers for a few moments in a way that reminds Rose sweetly of Mack.
‘Just refreshing my memory,’ he says, ‘but it seems she was a model inmate until the violent incident in prison. The woman concerned had, let’s say, a certain reputation and there was undoubtedly a self-defence element to this but she still slashed open a person’s face and we only had her word for what happened. After that, she reverted back to being a very quiet presence. Became a library orderly after two more years and worked very closely with the librarian there.’
‘Can you get the librarian’s name and number?’ says Rose, leaning forwards in her seat. ‘And see if you can find out about any visitors she had?’
They ring the librarian, who is called Sanjita Warren, from the car.
She speaks quite fondly of Heather but says she was always very quiet and she never really got to know her in the way she does the other library orderlies.
‘She liked books about the supernatural,’ says Sanjita, ‘now I think about it. Anything remotely factual – using the term loosely there – was her preference, although I remember she read The Amityville Horror novel – which has been in the library for about thirty years – and then borrowed it again and again.’
‘Sanjita,’ says Rose, ‘I have to ask you something, I’m afraid. Did you ever post letters for Heather to anyone outside of the prison?’
Sanjita’s shocked sucking in of breath transmits loud and clear down the line.
‘Oh my God, no!’ she says. ‘Is that what someone was doing?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ says Rose. Sanjita could be lying but it is Rose’s very strong instinct that she isn’t.
‘I had to ask, I’m afraid,’ she says. ‘Also, do you know if she had many visitors?’
‘Now that I might be able to help with,’ says Sanjita. ‘There was only one in all that time, which I always found awfully sad, but I guess when you kill your whole family you aren’t going to be getting a lot of love.’
‘But she did have one?’ Rose prompts.
‘Yes,’ says Sanjita, ‘she would mention this one lady who apparently had known her a long time. I think her name was …’ she pauses for a moment ‘… something like Jane? Janet? Oh, no, I’ve got it. It was Jeanette! No idea of her surname, but I’m sure we could get the details to you.’
Rose feels a stir of excitement that takes her mind off her aches and pains for a moment at least.
Fifteen minutes later they have a number and address for a Jeanette Peters, the only visitor Heather had in her thirteen years in prison.