The West Midlands Police’s Missing Persons team was housed in Harborne Police Station – a 1980s redbrick building not far from the neighbourhood’s high street, and only a few miles south of the centre of Birmingham. Dani knew the area well. Not more than a couple of hundred yards away, the other side of the high street, was the Victorian terrace that she and Jason had bought together less than twelve months ago. Not home. Not any more. Not after Damian Curtis had so horrifically invaded that space.
The Harborne house – Dani and Jason’s first together, a place that should have helped cement their commitment to each other, a place where they had wanted to start a life together – was now rented out to a South African professor at the nearby university, and her husband and son. Dani had no intention of ever going back there. Today was the first time Dani had even been back to Harborne since she’d moved out, and there was a sickly sensation in her stomach as she stepped from her car, the earlier conversation with Gemma for now a distant memory.
‘I’m getting bored of this cold,’ Easton said as he shut the passenger door and cupped his hands to his mouth.
The temperature on the car’s thermometer had peaked at minus two on the journey over. They were certainly experiencing a stark welcome to winter.
‘It’s only early December,’ Dani said. ‘We’ve a way to go yet.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘And aren’t you glad you’ll be enjoying Christmas surrounded by your family this year?’
Easton shot her an unamused look and she had to hold back her smile. They edgily traipsed across the frozen pavement to the police station.
‘Having the kids around will be nice, actually,’ Easton said, shrugging. ‘Brings back memories.’
Dani said nothing to that. She’d not experienced a Christmas with kids since she herself had been one. While she could imagine it added extra wonder and excitement to the day, and while it was true those years at home with Ben and her mum and dad still evoked a huge fondness in her mind, it simply remained impossible to reconcile those memories of Ben, the boy she’d grown up alongside, with the man who was now behind bars. And it also seriously grated on her that she’d never been invited to spend a Christmas with Gemma and the kids. Would she ever?
A few minutes later they were seated in an ageing office space that housed four detectives from the Missing Persons team. Hot tea and coffee was steaming away on the table and would, hopefully, do the job of warming Dani through.
‘I have to be honest with you, this case isn’t familiar to me at all,’ DS Carr said.
In her early thirties, with long, straight red hair and a face that was dominated by freckles, Dani knew Jane Carr to be an eager and competent detective. Her boss, sitting next to her, DI Gregory, was a portly man in his forties, nearly bald on top but with an ever-thickening goatee.
‘And you know I wasn’t on the team that long ago,’ Gregory said, his words sounding like a lame excuse. Dani didn’t know Gregory well, but what she did know of him was that he was always happy to push responsibility away from himself.
‘But you were here then, DS Carr?’ Easton said.
‘I was,’ she said, ‘but I was only a fresh-faced DC. Liam Dunne’s case was run by DI Calvert.’
‘She left before I joined,’ Gregory said.
‘Then what can you tell us from the records?’ Dani asked, even though it was likely to be little more than she or Easton could have gleaned themselves from the HOLMES 2 system.
Carr shuffled the papers in front of her for a few moments as her eyes flicked across the pages.
‘Liam Dunne. Thirty-three years old. Went missing sixth of June 2015. He was born in southern Ireland, but held dual UK citizenship due to his mother. He first moved to the UK to attend university at Loughborough, studying economics.’
She frowned now as she stared at the information.
‘To be honest, there are some oddities here. His history after university is very patchy, in terms of jobs, taxes, addresses.’
‘We think that’s because he was using aliases,’ Easton said.
Carr raised an eyebrow. ‘I don’t see anything about that in here,’ she said.
‘So it’s not in his profile that he worked for Ellis Associates?’ Dani said. He’d used the alias James Alden for that job and had very possibly lost the job because of the false name and history.
Carr shrugged. ‘Doesn’t seem to be.’
‘What about the circumstances of him going missing?’ Dani asked.
‘There was very little to go on, by the look of things. His sister, Clara Dunne, reported him missing. That was the sixth of June, but actually it seems we never pinpointed the actual date he disappeared. She’d not had contact with him for a couple of weeks by that point.’
‘A couple of weeks?’ Easton said, as though it was unusual for siblings to not talk for that long. He would surely wish to be in that position right now.
‘What about family?’ Dani asked.
‘They have no other family alive in the UK. Their mother lives, or lived, at least, outside Cork, but the extended family weren’t close. It looks like we did get help from the Garda to check for proof of life in Ireland, but it didn’t turn up anything.’
‘And no proof of life in the UK either?’ Dani asked.
‘Nothing when we last did our checks,’ Carr said. ‘But it’s not an everyday thing when someone has been missing for five years.’
‘And it’s going to be seriously clouded if you’re suggesting this man potentially used different identities,’ Gregory said.
Which was a fair point.
‘We can give you what we have of his profile. Addresses, the like,’ Carr said.
‘Please,’ Dani responded. ‘But do you actually know anything concrete about when or how he went missing?’
‘Honestly, no. His last recorded employment, at least in his real name, was way back in 2009. He had only one bank account, which was last used twenty days before his sister contacted police. We were told he regularly changed his phone number, likely because he was using prepaid SIMS.’
Dani and Easton shared a look. Why would Liam do that?
‘And when was the final phone number last used?’
‘Again, it was a few days before Clara contacted police, from what I can see. We also did searches on CCTV around his home. The address we were given as his home, that is. But we never managed to pick up anything of him at all, never mind pinpointing his last whereabouts. Neighbours didn’t know him. Landlord had no contact with him. The last and only person found who’d had anything at all to do with him for months before his disappearance was his sister.’
Which altogether was painting a picture of a very strange life indeed.
‘Maybe he was James Bond,’ Easton said. ‘Secret lives and all that.’
His quip elicited a chuckle from Gregory, though a similar thought had already crossed Dani’s mind. Could he have been a deep undercover policeman even? But then surely his disappearance would have by now been clarified.
Regardless, it looked like there was a lot more work to do in order to figure out what had happened to Liam Dunne. Would more thorough searches for James Alden, Michael Marin and Patrick Beatty turn up any clues?
But then was it even the job of the Homicide team to do those searches? There was no body for Liam. No evidence at all that he had been murdered. Clara Dunne was Dani’s case, but her brother was still just a missing person.
‘If we give you the details of the aliases, we’d really appreciate your help in trying to track any proof of life,’ Dani said.
Gregory looked a little uncertain, like he thought it was a waste of time. She’d had similar conversations with him in the past along these lines. She could understand there was only so much his team could do to trace people who had simply disappeared, but sometimes it seemed like he wasn’t even that bothered about trying. Like he’d already made his mind up that there was nothing he could do to help certain people.
‘We can do that,’ Carr said. ‘You said this had something to do with his sister?’
‘Clara Dunne,’ Dani said. ‘Her body was found yesterday.’
The curious look Carr now gave her boss suggested she hadn’t known that.
‘Her death set us onto Liam because we think she was here, in the area, looking for him,’ Easton said. ‘It’s also notable that, like her brother, she was using an alias.’
‘So she was killed?’ Gregory asked.
‘Well, that’s what we’re trying to figure out.’