Chapter Fourteen

Ipswich

15th August

DS Wildy

Alex Wildy is biting into a much-needed bacon sandwich when his mobile rings, the vibration alerting him through his jacket pocket. He’s barely eaten in the past twenty-four hours but nonetheless he drops the food quickly, presses the phone to his ear. A Northern accent, female, starts talking before he can even say hello.

‘DS Wildy? This is Jackie, calling from the Norfolk and Norwich hospital. Just calling to say we’ve got that CCTV tape you requested, sorry for the delay. One of our security lads showed it to me this morning and Mrs Grant is on there, fair and square, visiting her husband’s mother Margaret. August 10th, wasn’t it? Tape shows all three of them in the ward. Rick Grant was there most of the day and then Jenny came in that evening, stayed a few hours. I’m sorry we couldn’t confirm it before, we’ve been up to our necks, had a patient pass on this morning and it’s all been a bit…’ The voice trails off, then picks up again and Alex can almost imagine the woman on the end of the phone giving herself a mental shake. ‘I’ve asked the lad to drive it over to you lot, is that all right by you?’

Alex is nodding. ‘Yes, that’d be great. Jackie, did you say? Thanks very much. We really appreciate your help.’ He hesitates. The nurses were so good to Joanne over the latest miscarriage. The NHS always brings a lump to his throat. ‘Take care Jackie,’ he says, ‘I’m sorry to hear about your patient.’

He hangs up, replaces the phone in his pocket, his appetite forgotten. So the parents are in the clear. Heartbroken, frantic, but probably not responsible. He sighs, frustration bubbling through him. The search team looking for Eve Grant have been up all night, and still there is no sign of a body. A call in the early hours of the morning about blood spots found in an alleyway near the harbour had momentarily created a flurry of activity, but they had quickly turned out to be coming from the cut hand of a drunk man who’d wandered the wrong way home from Isaac’s Bar on the waterfront, clutching a broken bottle and a half-eaten kebab.

So far, the door to doors have turned up nothing – the PCs have been up and down Woodmill Road, knocking on doors, and the hotline published by the paper has had dozens of calls, none of which contain any viable information. Eve has been missing now for four days and already, Alex has begun to dream about her – that little blonde-haired face staring up at him from all manner of horrific places: the depths of a river, a disused building site, the boot of someone’s car. He feels sick at the thought of it, not that he’d ever let on to the team.

Alex can feel the tension settled in firmly across his shoulder blades; Joanne is forever on at him to visit a chiropractor but quite honestly, he doesn’t know when he would find the time. His priority now has to be finding Eve – and getting to the bottom of who put a knife into Caroline Harvey’s chest. The weapon, too, is missing. The wound in her chest would suggest a kitchen knife, non-serrated, but it is nowhere to be found. The PCs are searching the parks, the nearby drains, the lift shaft in Caroline Harvey’s block of flats.

Callum Dillon is flatly denying all involvement, and without any evidence, they can’t yet charge him with anything. But despite his claim that he was working in his studio all night, he has no concrete alibi, which doesn’t work in his favour. At least if Callum had been the one to kill Caroline, it would make a bit of sense. But why take the baby? It isn’t as if a one-year-old would ever be an incriminating witness. Alex thinks about the wife, Siobhan. Callum claims she was out at her book club on the evening of the 10th, but Alex still wants to check this out. He thinks it over – clearly, she’d be upset to learn of her husband’s affair, the betrayal of it. But would it lead to murder? Statistically, it feels unlikely that she’d have hurt baby Eve, but they cannot rule it out. Then there is the daughter, Emma, in the family home that night with only her father to verify her whereabouts. Just sixteen but by all accounts, a troubled girl. Could she be covering for one of her parents?

The only other option is a random attack – a kidnapping with Caroline as an unfortunate bystander who got in the way. But there has been no contact, no sign of a ransom. Jenny and Rick’s phones have been wired, in case whoever has Eve gets in touch, but as the clock ticks on, the possibility of it becomes more and more unlikely. DS Bolton has pulled up a list of sex offenders in the area, but so far all are still in prison, or dead. Best place for them, Dave had said unpleasantly. And then there is Caroline’s phone, missing from the scene and untraceable via the masts. Why take the phone unless it was something personal?

Alex flips again through the photographs of the scene, wincing at the splatters of blood, the angle of her body. The images are vivid and unrelenting. The fifth-floor flat, now sealed behind crime-scene tape and crawling with SOCOs, is very small. He imagines Jenny Grant pushing open the door to that awful sight, the panic she must have felt as she raced through the tiny rooms. Compared to what they’ve seen of Callum Dillon’s house, Caroline Harvey lived in a shoebox.

He turns to the photograph of the deceased. Shoulder-length brown hair, hazel eyes. Attractive-looking woman. Thirty-three. Lived alone; no siblings, one elderly father living alone in Stowmarket. They sent a family liaison officer over to the father – a Christopher Harvey, in his eighties now. His wife, Elsie Harvey, died in a car accident along the A12 years ago – one of the PCs pulled up the old report. Jesus, what a life. Alex feels a shudder run down his back. By all accounts, Caroline Harvey was pretty lonely – no children, no husband, no mother, no wife. They have considered the idea that it was some sort of break-in, or a planned abduction with Eve the target and Caroline as collateral damage. Now, Alex is wondering if it was the other way around. Nobody seems too heartbroken at the loss of Caroline Harvey, despite Callum’s claims of devastation.

Pissed off would be the overriding emotional state to describe him now – he’s a big-shot exec, used to getting his way, and being questioned about a messy murder case, not to mention a baby that seems to have vanished into thin air, isn’t exactly good for his profile. Alex doesn’t like him – doesn’t like the way he left the country the morning after Caroline’s death, doesn’t like the way he kept their affair a secret from his own wife for eighteen months, doesn’t like the angry way he’s reacted to being questioned. Someone like Callum could’ve had very good reason for wanting Caroline dead – perhaps she’d threatened to go to his wife, or worse, go to the press. Ultimatums are thrown around in love affairs more often than you’d think.

Alex thinks Callum Dillon might crack soon enough. In his experience, cases like this are often fairly cut and dried, more so than you’d imagine. He’s having an affair with her; she starts to want more than he can give. She gets obsessive, maybe – what was the word Rick Grant used to describe her – maybe a bit unstable. She puts pressure on Callum to leave his wife and daughter, break up his marriage. Maybe she starts threatening to tell Siobhan Dillon the whole thing. And Callum doesn’t want that to happen. So on the night of August the tenth, he walks over to her flat – it is only a twenty-minute walk, they have paced it out – and he tries to talk to her. She’s resistant. And then he loses his temper. He picks up a knife. A knife they still haven’t found.

Alex groans under his breath and runs a hand through his hair. It’s all fine, he thinks, it’s all fine, but what about the sodding baby? Where does little Eve Grant fit into the equation? And more to the point, where is she? They have to find her. Time is running out.

‘The press are onto Callum Dillon’s family. Someone must have leaked it.’

Alex is momentarily taken aback at Dave Bolton’s words. ‘What, they’ve named him?’ Callum is still in custody; they have applied for an extension. Soon enough, his lawyer will arrive – no doubt some expensive-looking twat in a suit that the TV exec is paying through the nose for.

David shakes his head. ‘No, course not. They’re not that stupid, not yet. But the Twitterati are catching on now too. They had the wrong end of the stick earlier, lots of folks saying we had Rick Grant in. Keen to pin it on a family member, like that Amy Willis case in Norfolk a few years back. Remember the one?’

Alex nods. ‘Course. Parents covered the whole thing up.’

‘Exactly. The good people of the internet want Rick Grant banged up.’

Alex sighs. ‘The CCTV puts him at the hospital, fair and square. Unless someone else was acting on his orders, I think we can rule him out. To my mind, anyway.’

David nods. ‘The search team have been out all night looking for Eve. A search of Christchurch Park has brought up nothing, and we haven’t got CCTV from the back of the Woodmill Road flats either – turns out the cameras were smashed by kids last year and nobody’s got round to doing anything about it. Council cuts, happens all the time in little old Suffolk. So anyway, I’m thinking it’s time to do an appeal from the parents. OK by you? The DCI is keen.’

‘Are they up for it?’

‘Seem to be. Jenny is, anyway. Rick less so. I think he knows he might come under fire. On that note, I’ve got the warrant here – finally – to search the Dillon house top to bottom. And I want to talk to the wife, as well. See how much she knew about her husband’s affair. In my experience, it’s pretty rare for the other half to be completely in the dark.’

Alex nods, pulls up the photograph of Siobhan Dillon that they have on file. A beautiful woman, there is no doubt about it – long brown hair, almond eyes, pale Irish colouring. He wonders how she must be feeling, now that the speculation about her husband is out there. Pretty shitty, he imagines. He glances to the door, back down the corridor to where Callum Dillon will now be ensconced with his lawyer, a London guy who David says arrived ten minutes ago. Callum Dillon doesn’t deserve a woman like Siobhan, and he certainly didn’t deserve poor Caroline Harvey as well. Why don’t women ever fall for the nice guys, Alex thinks to himself, then remembers Joanne’s smiling face, pictures her waiting for him back in their bed. Sometimes they do, I guess.