four

A cursory tour of the house was sufficient to tell Andy Vaslik that nothing had been left behind. A pity, but not unexpected. Not every crime scene dripped with clues like a television drama. Some were almost clinical in their absence of evidence, with no more signs than were left by a passing breeze.

He’d seen it many times before.

As a member of a specialist police unit in New York, he’d been to more scenes of crime—especially kidnappings—than he cared to remember. Many of the houses and apartments had been trashed by ignorant and drugs-fuelled invaders looking for an easy score. In his experience, while these criminals—mostly from eastern European or Latin American gangs—were overly ambitious in scale and reach, they were rarely the hottest cards in the deck. They never imagined getting caught, so did little to bother hiding their tracks.

Which was both good and bad.

Good meant they usually got caught. Bad meant they didn’t really care.

It was a measure of how they saw the miserable trajectory of their lives and most did nothing to break the pattern. They’d go in hard and brutal, prepared to kill regardless of consequences because to do it any other way simply never occurred to them. If the authorities were lucky, the perpetrators left enough forensic matter and sometimes personal crap that linked them as tight to a crime as a full reel of studio-quality photographic evidence.

This, though, was different.

No clues, no crap, no handy little personal belongings dropped in their haste. Whoever had snatched the little girl had come in clean and left the same way. In, lifted and out again, no damage, no fuss.

Unless they had performed the lift on the outside and the house left open was to confuse the investigation. It wasn’t uncommon and the pick-up wouldn’t have needed much; a van or large car stopping on a quiet street, the driver smiling to ask directions of an unsuspecting woman and child.

Then wham—all gone.

Professional.

There was always the other possibility: that the woman, Tiggi whatever her name was, had not been so unsuspecting; had in fact been complicit in the abduction.

He sniffed at the pillow on her bed, picking up a trace of perfume to get a feel for her. It wasn’t a sexual thing; he was simply rolling through a database of smells and matching them to other women he had come across in years of criminal investigations. Sometimes the perfume a woman wore told you a whole lot more about her character and the people she mixed with than any other details.

This one told him cheap but with some taste. A boyfriend, undoubtedly, but not over-generous or rich.

Her room had been cleared. There should have been something left behind: underwear, wash gear, a change of clothes, lipstick, face-wipes—even something accidental like a bus ticket or a shop receipt. But the place had been sanitised, as devoid of character as a motel room.

Strike one against the nanny.

He moved into the main bedroom. Although shared by a man it was mostly a woman’s space, personal, soft and colourful with cushions and the light touches no man would ever consider. Well, most men. He’d known a cop in New York with ambitions as an interior designer whose apartment was like a repro of the Ziegfeld Follies. But he’d been a one-off.

He listened to make sure the Hardman woman wasn’t going to come up after him, but all he could hear was Ruth’s voice, probing for information and clues. He hadn’t got the measure of her yet, only that she didn’t seem too keen to have been selected to show him around. Maybe it was the result of a previous pairing. There were partners he’d be pleased never to see again; it was always a danger in their line of work, being in close proximity to an opposite for several hours a day or night. Most of the time you got on and did the job because that’s what you had to do. Sometimes, though, it was easier to hope for a transfer out.

He moved around the room, checking the dressing table, bedside cabinets and wardrobe, quickly flicking aside the corners of the carpets. He wasn’t sure why he did this here, only that in the past it had yielded results out of proportion to expectations. Some had revealed letters, recreational drugs, bank documents, even large amounts of cash where there should have been none.

He’d even found a body once. That had been something none of them had expected—least of all the householder who’d claimed his wife had been kidnapped.

The fact was, everybody lied about something. Some were light and white, concealing embarrassment or personal failings; some carried darker lies in the way of stored secrets they preferred to hide close by where they could touch them or take them out occasionally to pore over them in the dark hours.

This room didn’t tell much of a story and yielded no useful clues. The man had little in the way of clothing, most of it casual and functional in muted colours of green and brown. Perhaps he was a closet camouflage nut. In fact there was so little, he probably carried more with him than was left behind.

The woman had more, but much of it was not new although of good quality. Not a shoe freak, which was refreshing, but she seemed to favour lacy underwear. He wondered if she kept it for the husband’s rare visits home or if she had a friend with benefits on the side.

Not relevant? Maybe.

There was a phone extension by the bed. He unplugged it as he passed by and took it with him. From here on in they would control all calls in and out. He’d deal with the inevitable fall-out later. Some people were OK with it, others saw it as an infringement of their personal liberty, apparently oblivious of the fact that having a relative snatched was pretty much the biggest infringement you could get.

The little girl’s room was a wreck—but the wreckage of all little girls who haven’t got someone clearing up after them. Toys, fluffy and plastic, games, picture books, posters and clothing, scattered indiscriminately yet possessing an order he recognised. Ask this child where anything was, and she’d know instantly. Take something away and she’d probably scream the place down until it got put back.

The teddy on the mat downstairs told its own story.

He lingered over the open drawers but didn’t touch. They told their own story. Someone had selected a change of clothes—maybe more than one—for the little girl.

Strike two against the nanny.

He used a chair on the landing to flip the roof hatch and check inside the loft space. It was small and cramped, the roof pitch angled down sharply, with no boards across the joists. It left little room to do much more than store a few lightweight items. It, in this case, a single empty suitcase sitting on a thin layer of insulating material that tickled his nose when disturbed, and some faded Christmas decorations in a cardboard box which he guessed had been left by a previous resident.

He closed the trapdoor and replaced the chair, then went back downstairs and joined the women. When Ruth looked up he gave a minute shake of his head.

Then he headed for the other rooms.

The study felt underused, cool and dark. It reminded him of his parents’ front room, kept for best and cold as a morgue; the last place anyone would choose to sit in comfort. This one held a desk and a filing cabinet, two armchairs and a small sideboard which was empty.

He flicked through the drop files in the cabinet, walking his fingers across the title cards for insurance, banking, car details, legal and a host of other tags that make up the average family life story. No surprises except that all the correspondence was in the wife’s name, as were the bank account and credit cards.

Now there was a thing.

There was nothing for or about the husband.