It was the hour before dawn when I ducked under the Do Not Cross tape we had put up at the entrance to the private estate, early summer but bitterly cold, and I stood there for a moment, still waking up, watching the search team moving up the hill on their hands and knees like some slow and silent multi-backed beast.
Flanked by silver birches, the small road rose sharply and briefly to its summit, where a brand-new car was now a crime scene. A cluster of blazing spotlights lit it up, brighter than daylight. All the doors were thrown open and the white-suited CSIs moved through it and around it with their tweezers, cameras and plastic evidence bags, faces anonymous behind their blue nitrile masks. Above the trees, the night pulsed with the blue lights of our response vehicles.
Two women came out of the darkness, looking like a librarian and a supermodel, and on the frosty night air there was the vaguely metallic scent of vodka. Because the call comes in and you go, I thought. That’s the job. They don’t ask you if you have been drinking. They don’t ask you if you have taken a sleeping pill. They don’t ask you if you have adequate childcare. They call in the middle of the night and tell you a woman has been taken from her car. And so you go.
The women were my boss DCI Pat Whitestone – slightly built, her eyes squinting sleepily behind John Lennon glasses, her fair hair streaked with grey at just forty – and TDC Joy Adams – young, black, extravagantly tall, her hair in tight cornrows. Joy was only a year out of Hendon police school and, I guessed, still up for a few shots of vodka on a work night.
‘You see her picture?’ Whitestone asked me. ‘The woman they took? She’s beautiful.’
I had looked at the photograph that had been sent to my phone when I got the call. It had been pulled from the driving licence of Jessica Lyle, twenty-two years old. Long, dark hair framed a pale face. Her expression was photo-booth serious but her eyes were smiling, almost blazing with life. And even in the sterile mugshot that was the only photo ID we had so far, I could see that Whitestone was right.
Jessica Lyle, the woman they had taken, was beautiful.
‘Her parents have arrived,’ DCI Whitestone told me. ‘They’re taking their grandson home with them as soon as the doctor has signed off on the kid. Have a word before they leave, Max.’
I nodded. An unwanted suitor was the most likely reason for this kind of abduction. Having a word with the next of kin of a kidnapped woman meant finding out if the parents were aware of any bitter ex-partners or lovesick stalkers hanging around their daughter who wouldn’t take no for an answer and who could not tell the difference between loving someone and hurting them.
And the other reason for this kind of abduction was that it was like being struck by lightning, totally random, the worst bad luck in the world.
Whitestone shivered. It was June, but you would never guess it in this dead zone between night and day.
‘The father was one of us,’ Whitestone told me. ‘Frank Lyle.’
‘A cop?’ I said. ‘Still serving?’
‘Retired after thirty years in the Met,’ she said, her pale eyes weary behind her spectacles. ‘That never makes this stuff any easier.’
Thirty years, I thought. How many enemies do you make in thirty years?
Across the street a private security guard was standing by his van, sucking hungrily on a cigarette. His military-style uniform was several sizes too big for him.
‘What about Clint Eastwood?’ I said.
‘He claims he didn’t see a thing,’ Adams said. ‘Missed it in his toilet break.’
‘That’s not good.’
‘I haven’t finished with him yet.’
Whitestone and I stood in silence, watching Joy approaching the security guard as she pulled out her notebook; not exactly the silence of old friends, but the silence of two professionals who had worked together for years.
Whitestone took off her glasses to clean them on her sleeve, giving her face a vulnerable, owlish look. You would never have guessed it from her bookish appearance, but Pat Whitestone was the most experienced detective in West End Central’s Homicide and Serious Crime Command. She put her glasses back on, nodded briefly, and we started up the tree-lined road towards the car. It felt like it could be in the middle of the countryside. There was a sign by the side of the road:
Whitestone was carrying a small stack of transparent stepping plates so she could build an uncontaminated path to and from the crime scene. When we reached the top of the hill, she had me hold the stepping plates while she pulled blue plastic baggies over her shoes. The car was so new that it still had the showroom smell of new leather, polished chrome and fresh paint. It smelled like money. Baby, I’m Bored said a sign in the rear window. One of the CSIs was photographing the empty baby seat on the back seat.
Whitestone took the stepping plates from me and pressed her glasses to the bridge of her nose.
‘And talk to Jessica’s flatmate,’ she said. ‘Snezia Jones. This is her car.’
The road levelled out and as I walked towards the pulsing blue lights surrounded by silence I could sense that this was one of the highest points in London. The air was almost alpine-sweet up here. I inhaled deeply as the road opened up on to Eden Hill Park estate. It felt like a secret that had been hidden from the city. You would never guess it from the modest entrance, but the estate was large, consisting of a block of luxury apartments and a variety of houses that ranged from huge modern buildings with two-storey glass walls to a line of tiny ancient cottages that had somehow survived the wrecking ball of the property developers. All over Eden Hill Park the lights were on as the residents stared out at the convoy of police vehicles parked outside their homes. I took the lift to the top floor of the apartment block. Doors were open all along the corridor. The news had spread fast. There was a uniformed officer standing outside the apartment I was looking for. The doctor was leaving.
‘The kid all right, doc?’ I asked him.
‘The baby is about the only one who is doing well. The parents are in a state of shock. So is the young lady. Miss Jones. The flatmate. Keep it as short as you can.’
Inside the apartment, two women were embracing on the sofa and a man was holding a sleeping baby. Jessica Lyle’s parents and her flatmate. They all turned to look at me as I walked in.
Frank Lyle was a tough old ex-cop with cropped steel-grey hair, assessing me with cool, unimpressed eyes as he gently rocked his sleeping grandson.
Mrs Lyle was still stunning in her fifties, the image of her daughter three decades from now. If she survives, I thought, then pushed the thought away.
The flatmate, Snezia Jones, was perhaps thirty, tall and thin and almost albino-pale, her hair so blonde it was just this side of white.
Both the women had been crying. I told them my name and showed them my warrant card.
‘I just have a few questions about Jessica,’ I said.
But the parents had questions for me.
‘Why would anyone take Jess?’ Mrs Lyle said. ‘Are they hurting her? What are they doing to her?’
‘Stop it, Jen,’ Mr Lyle quietly told his wife. ‘Please stop.’ He smiled gently at her then turned to me, lifting his chin, the smile fading away. ‘Anything you find show up in IDENT1?’
IDENT1 is the police database containing the fingerprints of ten million people who have ever had contact with the law.
‘We haven’t got that far yet, sir. I just wanted to ask you—’
‘But do you have any prints?’ he said, flaring with impatience, and he rocked his grandson a bit harder as he turned his face away and coughed – the hawking cough of a lifelong smoker. The baby whimpered in his sleep. ‘Fingers, shoes, tyres? Come on. There must be tyre prints, at least. I can’t believe you’re so incompetent that you can’t even find tyre prints!’
I took a breath. Whitestone was right. Dealing with old cops never made our job easier.
‘Our forensic people are still working on that,’ I said. ‘As you know, Mr Lyle, any tyre marks will have to be cross-checked against the cars of the residents. We assume the assailants were wearing gloves. Our search team has been out there all night and if they dumped gloves, we’ll find them. We’re going to find your daughter, sir.’
His mouth twisted with hard-earned wisdom. He knew as well as I did that every minute that passed without us finding his daughter, the less chance there was that we would find her alive.
‘Spare me the slick PR spin, son. Just do your fucking job.’
‘Frank,’ his wife said.
‘Has your daughter been threatened by anyone?’ I said, looking from the mother to the father and back again. If Jessica Lyle confided in either of them, it would more likely be her mother. ‘Any ex-boyfriend, or someone stalking her, or—’
‘Everyone loves Jess,’ the flatmate said.
Snezia Jones had an East European accent. Mrs Lyle squeezed her hand.
‘Has she been dating—’
‘Jess doesn’t date,’ Mr Lyle said. ‘She had a fiancé, OK? Lawrence. And he died, OK? Sweet, sweet boy. An English teacher. Lawrence was killed in a hit-and-run accident six months ago. Some bastard knocked him off his bike. Never stopped. Never caught. You lot couldn’t help us there. OK, Detective?’
I looked at the baby in his arms and I nodded.
‘I can tell you now,’ he said, ‘my daughter doesn’t have bitter ex-boyfriends or lovesick psychos hanging around.’ For the first time, the old man’s voice broke with emotion. ‘Her life is her child. And her work. This makes no sense. This has been done by some stinking pervert—’
‘It’s just as Snezia told you,’ Mrs Lyle said. ‘Everyone loves Jess.’ She stood up and indicated her grandson. ‘We really have to get Michael home. I’m sure you can imagine what we’re going through.’
They went off to another room to collect their grandson’s clothes and I sat down on the sofa next to Snezia.
‘How long have you and Jessica lived together?’
‘Two years. We’re both dancers. We met at an audition in the West End. Neither of us got the job but I saw her again in the shoe shop we all go to. Freed of London. You know it?’
I nodded. ‘Covent Garden. Where they sell dance shoes to the pros.’
‘That’s it. We went for coffee. Her fiancé had just died. I think she was lonely. And I was lonely too.’ She looked around the apartment. ‘And it’s hard to afford a place like this on your own.’
‘We will need some recent photographs.’
For the first time, she smiled.
She reached for her phone. ‘I have many lovely photographs of Jess.’
And Snezia did have a lot of photographs of the pair of them, together and apart. Snezia and Jessica looked like two young women enjoying life in London. At the gym and a dance studio. In restaurants and bars. In the park and on Hampstead Heath. And Jessica Lyle smiling her secret smile on quiet nights at home, curled up with a book and the baby.
‘Everyone loves Jess,’ Snezia said again, dreamy with exhaustion, stunned with shock.
And then there was a different kind of photograph. Snezia in a bikini and high heels, upside down on a silver pole.
‘Oh, that’s just me at work,’ she said, scrolling quickly on.
‘You said you’re both dancers.’
‘We’re different kinds of dancers. Jess was a ballet dancer until she tore her cruciate ligament in her knee. Now she teaches – the little ones, you know. I’m more of an exotic dancer. Or is it erotic?’
I shrugged. It was probably both.
I could hear the parents in the next room. Their voices were raised in argument.
The mother was wrong. I could not imagine what they were enduring. I believed that I would tear my own skin off if someone took my daughter Scout.
But some things you can’t truly imagine until they happen.
‘Anyone threatening Jessica?’ I asked Snezia. ‘Harassing her? An ex-boyfriend who didn’t want to move on? Just some guy in the neighbourhood who took a shine to her?’
‘As Jess’s mum told you, she had a fiancé. Michael’s father. He died. And my friend – well, she is still in mourning.’
I handed back the phone.
‘She borrowed your brand-new car? You must be very good friends.’
‘Her car is in the garage. I lent her my car. That’s nothing. We are more like sisters than flatmates.’
‘Did she send you any message on her way home?’
She showed me.
Coming home. Please wait up xxx
‘Why did she want you to wait up?’ I said.
‘Jess hated entering a quiet house.’
I stared at the message for a long moment, trying to find meaning in the five words and three kisses. But when nothing came I thumbed the button at the bottom, taking the screen to the home page.
And under the time and date at the top of the phone’s screen, there was a photograph of Snezia with a man whose face I knew. A much older man. Perhaps sixty to her thirty. Arm in arm, as if pretending to dance. Grinning for the camera.
Harry Flowers.
What I knew about Harry Flowers was what everyone knew.
He was the Henry Ford of the drug industry, starting out in the Eighties, one of the first career criminals to see that recreational drugs were going to move away from middle-class bohemia – students, musicians, artists – and enter the mainstream, and that the popularity of methylenedioxymethamphetamine – MDMA for short, commonly known as Ecstasy, or E – meant that every kid in every provincial club was going to be getting off their face on a regular basis.
‘Is this you and your boyfriend?’ I said. I could not keep the hardness out of my voice.
She nodded.
‘Harry is a legitimate businessman,’ she said, as if repeating a line that she had been taught, and with just a trace of defiance. ‘Waste management. Recycling old cars.’
And maybe it was even true. Nobody deals drugs for forty years. They get done in or banged up long before then. Perhaps Harry Flowers had made his money and changed his ways. But I struggled to believe it.
The parents came out of the bedroom with bags of clothes and a sleeping baby.
‘Do you have children, Detective?’ Mrs Lyle said.
I stood up to face her.
‘Yes, ma’am. Just the one.’
‘Boy or girl?’
‘I have a little girl, ma’am. Eight years old. Scout.’
‘Like the girl in To Kill a Mockingbird?’
‘That’s where we got her name.’
‘Then you understand how we feel.’
She gave me a hug.
‘Find our daughter for us,’ she whispered. ‘Please.’
The old man looked at me as if I had done nothing yet that deserved a hug.
And as I was walking back to Whitestone I remembered the most famous story about Harry Flowers.
Back in eighties, height of the second summer of love, Harry Flowers had a business partner he fell out with. The friend became a rival. They both saw how big E was going to be, and how it was going to change the drug industry, and the kind of money there was to be made. Harry Flowers went to visit his rival with one man and a can of petrol. The rival was sitting down to Sunday lunch with his extended family. Harry Flowers and his man tied the rival to his chair at the head of the table and then they emptied the can of petrol over the rival’s family.
All of them.
The wife. The grandparents. The four children.
Then Harry Flowers lit a match.
He didn’t burn them. Because he did not have to.
And that was how Harry Flowers became the Henry Ford of the drugs industry.
Whitestone was waiting for me at the top of the hill. The brand-new car was being loaded on to the back of a lorry.
‘Jessica Lyle’s car is in the garage,’ I said. ‘So the flatmate, Snezia Jones, loaned her this one for the night. And Snezia, who is some kind of stripper, is dating Harry Flowers. If dating is the right word.’
She stared at me for a long moment. ‘The Harry Flowers?’ she said.
‘And it seems serious,’ I said. ‘She has Harry Flowers on her phone wallpaper.’
Whitestone’s eyes were wide behind her spectacles. ‘Let’s hope Harry’s wife doesn’t find out how serious they are.’
‘Who hates him?’ I said.
‘That would be a long list built up over many years,’ Whitestone said.
I filled my lungs with that sweet Hampstead air.
And I smelled the vodka again and I understood that I had got it wrong. It was my boss who had been drinking vodka on a work night.
No dogs, said the sign at the entrance to the Eden Hill Park estate, but I could hear the dogs barking beyond the trees, our dogs, the K9 unit; they were out there now and all over the unbroken darkness, looking for a body.
‘You know what happened here, don’t you?’ Whitestone said.
I nodded.
‘Someone took the wrong girl,’ I said.