Friday, March 30
16 Lonely Crescent, Wells-Next-The-Sea, Norfolk
Sally Bowker woke up with a start when she heard her mother and father on the landing outside her bedroom door.
They were whispering.
Then her father’s deep voice echoed around the house. ‘Who’s down there?’
Nobody answered.
The wooden floorboards creaked on the landing. She knew they were going downstairs.
‘I’ve got a gun,’ her father said.
As far as she knew her father didn’t have a gun – he was an accountant. She sat up in bed scrunching the quilt between her hands. Her heart raced. There was a thumping in her ears. She didn’t want her parents to go downstairs. ‘Oh please . . .’ she pleaded, too soft for anyone else to hear. ‘Please don’t go.’
The fourth stair from the top creaked. She remembered her father replacing the tread. When the creaking became worse, her mother and father had laughed.
It creaked a second time as her mother stepped on it.
Sally wondered how long she had been holding her breath, and slowly exhaled. Shadows played on the wall as the sea breeze sneaked in through the barely open window and rustled the curtains.
Then she heard two loud bangs that made her jump . . . Were they gunshots? Maybe her father did have a gun after all.
A ringing had replaced the pounding in her ears, but that was all she could hear.
She waited.
Her mum would come in soon to check on her, to make sure she was all right. Her dad would follow her mum in and smile. He would say he tripped going down the stairs and knocked the hall table over. They would all laugh. Her mum would stroke her hair until she fell asleep again.
A man’s voice slithered through the open door like spilled treacle. ‘I’m coming for you now, Sally.’
Oh please no . . . Pressing the quilt against her mouth she stifled a scream. Tears ran down her face. She couldn’t stop herself shaking.
The fourth stair creaked . . .
Oh please . . . She needed to hide . . . but where? Her breathing came in short gasps as she slid out of the bed and tiptoed to the cupboard.
‘Where are you, Sally?’
Oh . . .
There were slats in the pine doors of the cupboard. Above her on the rail hung her clothes. On the floor lay an assortment of shoes, some toys and her micro scooter, which her mum and dad had bought for her sixth birthday. It had been months since she’d played on it. Now she was eight she had new toys.
In the half-light from the full moon knifing through the crack in the curtains, she saw the bedroom door open slowly.
‘Are you hiding in here, Sally?’ the man whispered.
Pressing her hands over her mouth she closed her eyes, but she knew she had to see . . . and opened them again.
The man crept into her bedroom.
She saw his legs and large hairy hands.
He stood next to the cupboard and dragged his fingernails over the slats:
Clickety clack, clickety clack, clickety clack.
‘Come out, come out, wherever you are.’
Sally couldn’t help herself. A sob forced itself out of her mouth and trickled through her fingers like sand.
‘Ready or not, here I come.’
The cupboard doors flew open.
Sally Bowker screamed . . .
***
Monday, April 16
‘Please help me.’
‘What’s your name, darling?’ a woman asked.
‘Sally.’
‘Is your mother or father there, Sally?’
‘No.’
‘Why are you ringing the police?’
‘He’s done bad things to me.’
‘Who?’
‘He told me to call him daddy, but he’s not my real daddy.’
‘Do you know where you are?’
‘He keeps me in a special room in his house.’
‘And where is the house, Sally?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What . . . ?’ the woman began to say.
‘Oh! He’s coming . . .’ Sally sounded terrified.
They heard a man’s voice.
‘What the fuck are you doing here? How did you get out? Who are you phoning?’
There was a smacking sound.
Sally squealed and then began sobbing. ‘I’m sorry,’ she cried.
‘You’re not fucking sorry at all, bitch.’ He must have picked up the phone. ‘Who is this?’
‘Can I speak to Sally again, please?’ the despatch officer said.
‘No. Who are you?’
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m the guy who’s going to kill the little bitch.’
The phone call ended.
Kowalski ejected the disc from the computer DVD drive and slipped it into a plastic cover that had been sitting on his desk.
‘Oh God, Sir,’ Richards said. ‘Tell me she isn’t dead?’
‘I’m sorry, Richards. I can’t do that. A woman walking her dog found eight year-old Sally Bowker hanging from a tree at approximately six-fifteen this morning in Hangman’s Wood, Little Thurrock.’
Parish shook his head. ‘When was the call made?’
‘Three days ago.’
Richards strangled a sob.
‘Two weeks prior to that, in the middle of the night on Friday 30th March, she was taken from 16 Lonely Crescent in Wells-Next-The-Sea, Norfolk. Both her parents were killed during the abduction. He leaves a plain white business card with the name . . .
THE REMOVAL MAN
‘. . . on it and an infinity symbol made up of tiny butterflies in the bottom right-hand corner. And this is not the first child he’s taken The fact that Sally was abducted in Norfolk and found in Essex makes this a joint operation, so you’ll need to liaise with DI Lily Gold from the Major Incident Team at Norfolk.’ He passed Parish a post-it note with a telephone number written on it. ‘I know you both hate child cases, but you’re it, I’m afraid. As you know, Blake’s still in hospital, DS Gilbert and DC Koll are doing some groundwork on another child case for CEOP until the Chief Constable sorts Shrub End out, sick leave, maternity leave, annual leave, a pilgrimage to Lourdes, suspensions . . . the list goes on. In fact, sometimes I think we just pay people not to come to work.’
‘We’ll take it – won’t we Richards?’
Tears welled in her eyes. ‘Yes, we will. I’m going to . . .’
‘. . . Work very hard to bring the killer to justice?’
‘If you say so.’
Kowalski passed Parish the disc. ‘And seeing as you’ve left Toady sunning himself in Cyprus, Di Heffernan has taken a forensics team out there. I’ve told her you’re on your way.’
‘What about Jerry?’ Parish said.
‘I’m just tidying up a few loose ends here and then I’m out of here. The Chief Constable will appoint someone later today to stand in for me.’ He looked at Richards. ‘And don’t go causing any trouble, Richards.’
‘Me, Sir? I don’t even know what trouble is.’
‘Yes, you. I’d like to know I have a fully-functioning team to come back to once Jerry is safely returned to the bosom of her family.’
‘You can rely on me, Chief,’ Richards said. ‘I’ll be as good as gold.’
‘If you need any help whatsoever,’ Parish said. ‘You only have to ask.’
‘I know, and I appreciate it. I’m glad you’re both back.’
Parish grunted. ‘And don’t worry about Richards, I’ll make sure she toes the line.’
Outside, Richards walked past Carrie as if she was invisible, but Parish stopped to chat and arrange to pick up his daughter Melody on Sunday morning.
‘How long are you going to keep that up?’
Richards rubbed her chin between thumb and forefinger and screwed up her eyes. ‘Keep what up? As usual, I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘You know exactly what I’m talking about. Right, you’d better arrange for one of the mechanics to bring a pool car from the garage. I suppose I’ll have to drive.’
‘Unless you want to spend the day upside down in a ditch.’
When they’d arrived at the station at eight o’clock, Richards had made a detour to the toilet.
‘Make sure you wash your hands afterwards,’ he called after her. ‘And then make me a coffee.’
She laughed. ‘You have some strange ideas.’
‘I’d also like the mug of coffee to be full by the time it arrives here, please. Try not to spill it all along the corridor.’
The Cypriot plastercast had been removed at King George Hospital yesterday, and she now wore a plastic cast walking boot held on tight with Velcro straps. Her ankle was still slightly swollen, but it meant she was now able to hobble short distances without crutches.
‘You’ll be lucky,’ she said with a laugh.
His desk was like the lost property store. It was hard to imagine that he’d been away for less than a week. He had an in-tray on top of a stack of four, but nobody had used it, preferring instead to fill up the empty spaces on his desk. In the centre was a cardboard box with “Smith” written on the top – he lifted the lid and peeked inside. There were four files – one on top of the other – also with “Smith” written on the cover of each of them. He riffled through the papers contained in the two-inch thick file on the top and noticed that inside the newer outer file was the original discoloured file. His heart jumped into his mouth when he saw what was written on the cover:
TOP SECRET
Epsilon 1
St Winifred’s Hospital
Epping
Dr Orvil Lorenz
‘What’s in the box?’ Richards asked as she returned with a mug of coffee for him and a bottle of water for herself.
He replaced the lid and slid the box under his desk. ‘Files from an old case.’
‘Which old case?’
‘Before your time.’
‘Someone called “Smith”?’
‘That’s right, nosey. Haven’t you got things to be getting on with?’
‘Huh!’
What the hell was he going to do with that box? Where had it come from? Who had put it on his desk? Should he tell Richards about it? Should he read what was inside the files? Or, should he destroy whatever was inside before it destroyed him?
Richards dropping her phone back in its cradle jerked him out of his reverie and brought him back to the present.
‘The car is on its way,’ she said. ‘Do you want me to take a look at those old case files while we’re waiting?’
‘No. I want you to find out everything you can about “The Removal Man” before we set off.
‘Okay.’ She switched on her computer. ‘We could take those old files with us, and I could read them in the car on the way to Hangman’s Wood.’
‘Will you stop going on about those old files? They’re nothing to do with you. They’re not relevant to the case we’re dealing with, and if I find that you’ve touched that box – never mind looked inside – I’ll get myself another partner.’
‘Mmmm . . . you only use that tired old threat when you’ve got something you don’t want me to see.’
She would find out what was in that box one way or another. Maybe he should just hand it over and have done with it. What he had noticed before he’d had to hide the contents of the box from her, was that there were only four files inside – there was no Epsilon 5 file. Was he really Epsilon 5? If he was, where was his file? And why was it missing?
***
Stick and Koll were searching 12 Old Ferry Road in Wivenhoe, Colchester – the home of the late Mathew Pitt – Senior Administrator at the Essex University Medical School – who had been tortured and killed by one of Dr Martin Wulff’s personalities – Viktor Kreuger – a serial killer from Louisiana in America.
When they’d come to search for clues previously, which might have led them to Pitt’s killer, they had discovered a hidden underground room containing six cages and three blonde children – a boy and two girls – aged around five or six in three of the cages.
Having caught Pitt’s killer, they’d been seconded to CEOP – Child Exploitation and Online Protection – Headquarters in London to conduct initial investigations into how the three children had come to be in those cages.
Stick had questioned the three children while they’d been waiting for the ambulances to arrive. He’d asked them how they’d come to be there, their names, where they lived and what Pitt had done to them. Their answers surprised him. The children had no recollection of how they’d come to be in the cages; as far as they knew they only had first names and their mother was called Anna; they lived in a big house surrounded by a metal fence but they had no idea where it was; and Pitt hadn’t touched them.
And there had been at least another two children – that he knew about – who had been kept in the cages, but were taken sometime before they arrived and never returned.
‘We’ve not got a lot to go on, have we, Sarge?’ Koll said.
The building was an old three-bedroom townhouse located on the waterfront. There was a wooden table and two chairs outside the front door where a person could sit and watch the boats on the estuary as the sun fell into the sea.
The ground floor consisted of a cloakroom, a toilet, a utility room and a large open plan kitchen/dining room. Beyond that, there was a conservatory with a piano and a small well-tended garden bounded by a wooden fence that had been painted green. The second floor contained the living room and one of the bedrooms. On the third floor there were two bedrooms, one of which was the master with en suite where Mathew Pitt appeared to have slept.
‘That’s why we’re here,’ he said. ‘You start at the top and work down. I’ll start at the bottom and work up.’
Forensics had already been in and picked over the place like locusts. They had found nothing of any interest in the house, but in the room where the six cages were located they had identified at least sixty-three DNA samples – none of which produced either an individual or familial match on the UK National Criminal Intelligence DNA Database.
He’d asked if the DNA samples were those of adults or other children and was told that a DNA fragment called a TCR excision circle (TREC) is exported from the thymus and can be detected in the bloodstream. TREC levels are an indicator of thymus function, which begins a life-long decline shortly after birth and thus allows an approximate age to be determined.
He was sorry he’d asked. They also said that the cages were too small for adults, which together with the TREC levels made it a ninety-nine percent probability that the sixty-three DNA samples belonged to children.
He started off in the cellar and crawled into the room where the cages had been located on shelves. The first time he saw the children in the room they had reminded him of chimpanzees locked in cages at an animal research laboratory. Not that he’d ever seen such a place, except maybe on the television, or as photographs on vivisection leaflets passed out by activists with dreadlocks and draped in charity clothes at the town centre.
Where had the children come from? What were they doing here? Where were they going? Why did the three that he’d seen all have blonde hair? Was it merely a coincidence or did it mean something? There were so many questions that they had no answers to. He had the feeling this was going to be a difficult case.
The cellar was completely empty. He moved up to the ground floor and closed the trapdoor. When they’d searched the house before they’d found nothing, and Stick didn’t expect to find anything this time either. The house was minimalistic. Pitt had very few personal possessions to tell them who he had been. He had no family, friends or relatives. There were no clues in his phone or bank records. He was an average person leading an average life – but he wasn’t.
They had one lead – a picture of a woman that had been in Pitt’s wallet: Shirley Bridges – dated on the reverse as June, 1983. She lived in the small village of Steeple Bumpstead at number 12 Winston Churchill Way, and that’s where they were going after they’d finished ransacking Pitt’s townhouse.
Koll was waiting for him in the living room. ‘Nothing, except . . .’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘Except?’
‘Except the letters and numbers.’
‘Letters and numbers?’
‘Remember, I told you I could see patterns?’
‘Yes.’
‘Somebody has written tiny letters and numbers all over the house.’
‘Show me.’
They started on the top floor and worked their way methodically down to the cellar. Koll showed him the numbers and letters she’d already spotted – in the corner of door frames, behind radiators, on the base of lamps, underneath a handrail on the stairs – and wrote them down in her notebook. When they began actively searching for them, they discovered others as well. Eventually they collected all those they could find:
FO3RAN4AGM9AAT6
‘What do your pattern-making abilities make of that?’ Stick asked.
‘A password, identification key, pin number something like that.’
Stick pulled a face. ‘You’re guessing.’
‘Of course. Did you think I had the answer up my sleeve?’
‘That would be excellent.’
‘I don’t.’
His brow furrowed. ‘Also, it might have absolutely nothing to do with our investigation.’
‘Maybe we should give it to forensics and see if they can work out if it’s relevant.’
‘Good idea. Give Di Heffernan a ring.’
Koll made the call and passed on the alphanumeric characters. ‘Di Heffernan is out at Hangman’s Wood in Little Thurrock dealing with a dead child, so I had to pass it to Dawn Mines.’
‘I don’t know her.’
‘She said she was new, but that she’d get right onto it as soon as she’d finished doing her nails.’
‘Very funny.’
‘No, that’s what she said.’
‘She was obviously joking.’
‘Maybe . . . although she sounded serious enough to me.’
Outside, the blustery wind blew them every which way as they fought their way to the car.
Stick had the idea that the world had forgotten the seasons. The weather was unpredictable, you never knew what to wear from one day to the next, you couldn’t plan your life beyond a couple of hours.
As they set off, he dozed. He was still trying to recoup Thursday’s lost eight hours of sleep. His mind drifted to Saturday morning. Jennifer had been called in to do overtime because Southend United were playing local rivals Colchester United in a testimonial match for one of their players, and wasn’t going to be home until the early evening, so he’d gone to visit Xena in the hospital . . . Of course, that was after he’d been to the station to right a wrong that he’d committed some months previously.
Following the publication of government top secret files on the WikiUK site, he knew that he had to give Parish the box of Epsilon files that he and Xena were given by Holly Morgan and then hidden under the name “Smith” in the evidence store.
He smiled at the thought of Xena’s reaction when he’d told her.
‘YOU DID WHAT?’
‘I signed out the “Smith” box and put it on Parish’s desk.’
‘I heard you the first time, numpty. You’re trying to give me a relapse, aren’t you?’
‘You can’t have a relapse with nothing left to have a relapse with.’
‘You really know how to make a girl feel special.’
‘Sorry.’
‘You had to go and do it, didn’t you? You couldn’t let sleeping elephants lie, you . . .’
‘. . . Dogs.’
‘If I want to say elephants – I’ll say elephants. When Parish finds out that it was you who put those files on his desk, what are you going to say?’
‘I’ll say we came across them during the Smith case.’
‘Keep going.’
‘Well, that’s it really.’
‘You’re a total numpty, Stickadoo. He’s a detective, he’s not going to be satisfied with a measly statement like that. He’ll want to know where you came across them, who had them, why you signed “Top Secret” files into the evidence store in an attempt to hide them, and what he’ll really want to know most of all . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘. . . Is how come you knew to put the box on his desk?’
‘Ah!’
‘You might very well say, “Ah”, numpty. It was months ago that you heard Richards mention Epsilon – he’ll want to know why you’ve been keeping the files from him all this time.’
Stick screwed up his face. ‘Well . . .’
‘I’m waiting.’
‘I’ll just tell the truth.’
Xena had a fit of coughing, and had to sit up and press down on her stomach with both hands to stop the stitches keeping the two halves of her together from unravelling.
He stood up and put his hand on top of hers.
‘What the hell are you doing?’
‘Helping.’
‘You pervert. Get your hand out of my knickers.’
‘I never would . . .’
‘You already did. If you’d gone down any further you would have needed an oxygen mask and flippers to get back out.’
‘I had to do it. I had a guilty conscience.’
Xena rolled her eyes. ‘I knew I could never trust you to keep schtum. You’re too nice and honest by far.’
Staff Nurse Louise James came in dragging a trolley behind her. ‘Time to change your dressing.’
‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I have a visitor.’
‘Your boyfriend can stay and watch, if he wants.’
‘For one – he’s not my boyfriend. For two – he’s not staying to watch anything that involves me hefting up my nightdress. And for three – can’t you do this after visiting hours are over?’
She put a finger up to her temple. ‘Mmmm, let me see – no.’
‘You’re a bitch. Is it part of your training? Do you have bitch sessions on the timetable? Do you practise being bitches on each other? Do you stand in front of the mirror practising your bitch look?’
‘Oh yes, all of those. Most of the time though, I never have to use it, but sometimes a patient comes in who makes all the training worthwhile . . .’
‘I hope you’re not referring to me, bitch?’
‘I don’t see how you could possibly think that when everybody knows you’re a model patient – pleasant, kind, always a happy smile for the nurses . . .’
He’d left them to their verbal sparring. Neither had seen him slip out through the door.
Yes, if Parish tracked him down, he’d tell him the truth – it was always the best policy.