Jessica Lyle’s parents were waiting for us in the lobby of West End Central.
They got up as we came through the door, steeled for the worst.
‘What have you got?’ Frank Lyle said.
‘Please,’ Whitestone said, ushering them through the security gate and into a lift. I hit the button for the first floor.
‘A jiffy bag was left outside West End Central an hour ago,’ I said. ‘It contained items of clothing that we believe your daughter may have been wearing at the time of her abduction.’
‘There’s CCTV out there,’ Frank Lyle said.
‘Items? What items exactly?’ said Jennifer Lyle.
Again I saw her daughter thirty years from now in the face of the mother. And again the thought – if Jessica Lyle lived that long.
‘We are looking at the CCTV,’ Whitestone said. ‘But we suspect the bag may have been left beyond the reach of the cameras.’
The old man cursed. ‘Typical! Bloody typical!’
‘Three items of clothing,’ I said, answering Mrs Lyle. ‘But let’s give you a chance to look at them.’
The lift stopped at the top floor.
Jessica Lyle’s mother did not move.
‘What items?’ she repeated. ‘I want to know.’
‘A sweatshirt. Yoga trousers. And a pair of pants.’
She sank into her husband’s arms. Whitestone and I held the lift door while they took a moment to recover. Then they followed us down the corridor to Major Incident Room One where Joy Adams was waiting with a young female CSI.
There were three transparent evidence bags on three separate workstations. Two big, one small. Each contained one of the items.
Black sweatshirt, black yoga trousers, black pants. The only splash of colour were words written in hot pink on the sweatshirt.
Last Chance to Dance
The parents stared at the evidence bags. They could not take their eyes from them. The mother nodded.
‘It’s her,’ she said. ‘That’s the name of her company: Last Chance to Dance.’
‘It was always a standing joke in our family,’ Frank Lyle said, dazed now, as if talking to himself. ‘I’m not a dancer – never been a dancer; two left feet – and at family weddings, parties, Jess would always say to me, Come on, Dad, this is your last chance to learn how to dance.’ He looked at his wife and he almost smiled. ‘So that was what she called her dance studio, wasn’t it?’
Mrs Lyle cried out like an animal that had been kicked, reaching for the evidence bags, clawing at them. Whitestone, Joy, the CSI and I all made a move to stop her.
But it was her husband who gently restrained her.
‘We can’t touch any of it,’ he said. ‘There could be evidence we can’t even see, Jen. Some defence lawyer could get it thrown out of court if we go anywhere near it. OK? We can’t give the bastards that chance. There could be all sorts of things on there, Jen. Fibre transfer. DNA.’
Whitestone glanced at me.
He had left out blood and semen.
His voice broke. ‘It’s ripped,’ he said, indicating a tear in the seam of the sweatshirt. ‘They ripped it.’
Whitestone nodded at Adams.
‘Mr Lyle,’ Joy said. ‘Can you confirm that, to the best of your knowledge, these items of clothing belong to your daughter, Jessica Lyle?’
‘Yes,’ he said, his voice hoarse.
Then he took his wife in his arms as the CSI deftly gathered the three evidence bags and quickly left.
Whitestone nodded her thanks.
Frank Lyle’s eyes drifted to the massive HDTV on the wall.
It contained a dozen mugshots of known MDMA dealers. Someone in the Met had told someone in the media that we were looking at convicted drug dealers in connection with Jessica’s abduction. The men – and they were all men – were of every race and creed on the planet but they all stared at the camera with exactly the same dead-eyed defiance. The brotherhood of drug-dealing scumbags. Frank Lyle kept staring at them until I hit a key on my computer and the image disappeared.
He helped his wife into a chair. And then he turned to face us. Because the former cop had a theory of his own.
‘Did you ever think that Harry Flowers is playing you?’ he said.
He indicated the blank TV screen.
‘I imagine your initial investigation is, inevitably, into any drug dealers who might possibly have business problems with Harry Flowers. But did you ever think that all this could be set up by Flowers himself? Think about it. An innocent young woman gets abducted and the full weight of the Met comes down hard and fast on all of Harry Flowers’ rivals.’
His hard old face twisted into a savage grin.
‘That would be convenient for him, wouldn’t it?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Whitestone conceded. ‘But we have absolutely no evidence that suggests that Harry Flowers was involved in the kidnapping of your daughter. We think that whoever did it was after Jessica’s flatmate because of some grievance with Flowers – possibly from years back. We also believe that Flowers got out of the recreational drug market some time ago.’ She indicated the blank TV screen. ‘And those men on the screen? Yes – they are all known and convicted MDMA dealers. But we don’t know if they are or have ever been Flowers’ rivals. It would be remiss of us to not look at these guys. But it is a case of trace, interview and eliminate.’
‘Were you aware that Snezia was involved with Harry Flowers?’ I said.
Mrs Lyle raised her tear-streaked face.
But her husband answered.
‘Do you honestly think we would have let our daughter share an apartment with her if we had known?’ he said. ‘Do you think we would have let our grandson anywhere near her? We thought Snezia was just some good-hearted girl from a poor country who was trying to earn an honest crust however she could. We knew she danced in some dodgy joint. Jess laughed about it.’ He shook his head. ‘But not this. We knew nothing about Harry Flowers. And I want him arrested now. Do you understand me? I want him brought in and I want that bastard charged and I want it done today. The petrol-can man. Oh yeah, I know that story too.’
‘We can’t do that, sir,’ I said. ‘Harry Flowers is not a suspect. He claims to be a legitimate businessman. Waste disposal. He recycles old cars.’
Lyle’s face twisted with contempt. ‘And you believe all that crap, do you?’
‘Until we get evidence to the contrary, we have to believe that’s exactly what he is. And I will tell you why, sir – because we can’t waste time and resources chasing Harry Flowers if he had nothing to do with Jessica’s abduction.’
Lyle stood up and faced me.
‘Then I’m taking over,’ he said. ‘I’m going to call a press conference. I—’ he looked at his wife. ‘We are going to tell the world about our daughter and what’s happened to her. We’re going to get her story out into the world. I want the newspapers all over it, candlelit vigils, marches, social media saturation – the lot. I want the world watching.’
‘Sir,’ I said. ‘We have Jessica’s clothes. There is still a chance she’s alive.’
‘Still a chance?’ Mrs Lyle said. ‘Still a chance?’
‘We have to give our forensic people time to see if they can find anything.’
Then I tried speaking to Frank Lyle like a cop. Because talking to him like a father just wasn’t working.
‘You know how it works, sir,’ I said. ‘If you go public right now then every sick nutjob in the land is going to crawl out from under his stone and contact us. And that will make finding Jessica almost impossible.’
He took a step closer to me and for a moment I thought he was going to strike me.
‘Yes, I know how it works,’ he said. ‘I know exactly how it works, son. I know that two hundred and seventy-five thousand people go missing every year in this country. And I know that a thousand unidentified bodies are found every year. And I know that the only missing the public give a flying fig about are the beautiful ones. Because they can’t care about everyone who goes missing – there are too many. An army of missing people. The public only care about the special ones. That’s right, isn’t it? A beautiful missing woman, exactly like my daughter. A beautiful little child. People care about them and we have to exploit the fact that they care about the beautiful ones. Because my daughter, son, was the most beautiful of them all.’
I took a breath and held it. He was right. The missing have to be beautiful before the public gives a damn. But publicity could also explode in your face.
‘Just give us a chance to do it our way for a little longer,’ I pleaded. ‘Before you go public.’
He shook his head. ‘There’s no time,’ he said. He lowered his voice but I think his wife was beyond listening to him. ‘Because I know that if we do not get her back quickly then we are not going to get her back at all,’ he said. ‘At least, not alive. She’s my daughter and we’re doing it my way. For you, she’s just another job. But she’s my flesh and blood. She’s my life. And if we get a ransom demand, then we’re paying it – whatever it is, understood? I don’t care. I – we – will find the money. I – we – have got the money.’
‘If you start talking like that in front of the cameras then we are going to have every scam artist in town calling,’ Whitestone said, her voice cold and unsweetened.
‘I don’t care,’ Lyle said, his eyes still drilling into me. ‘And I don’t give a monkey’s how busy you get. I just want Jess back. That’s the only thing in the world that I care about. And when I’ve got her home, and Jess is safe and sound, and she has her baby in her arms, then I am going to find the men who did this and I am going to kill them.’