In Barrow, DI Craig Lockwood scanned the CCTV footage he’d been sent by Preston police station, taken around the time when the sighting of Lisa Lau had been reported. He’d spent over two hours on it and he hadn’t seen Lisa at all. Then, just as he was about to give up, an image caught his eye and he paused the tape, rewinding it.
He stared at the image of the woman on the platform, who appeared to be waiting impatiently for a train. He checked the time and it matched the sighting, give or take half an hour. He zoomed in and took in her body shape, as much as he could of her face and her mannerisms.
The woman was East Asian, but she was not Lisa Lau. Of that he was sure.
He got the file up on his computer system and read the entry from the officer who’d interviewed the witness. There was a marker attached and he opened it.
It read: Possible sighting at same time in Ambleside? It was a tag that had been added a week ago, after the case was handed to Preston, but he still hadn’t been notified. He read the officer’s name and sighed. The guy was experiencing some issues at home and hadn’t been on the ball lately. He sat in an adjacent office and Craig went to see if he was on shift. He was.
As soon as Detective Constable Mark Diamond saw Craig’s face, he knew that something was up.
‘The Lisa Lau case, Mark?’ Craig left the implied question in the air.
‘Yes, sir? The one that went to Preston?’ the junior officer replied.
‘Yup, the same. You added a tag last week about another sighting, but this time in Ambleside?’
‘Ah, yes, sir. I did,’ said DC Diamond, looking relieved to have a ready answer.
‘And you didn’t think to inform me?’
The DC’s face fell as he realised Craig was unimpressed. ‘Erm, the case had already been moved, sir. I thought Preston would act upon it.’
Craig stared at him.
‘Sorry, sir.’
Craig sighed. ‘Do you know any details of the supposed sighting in Ambleside?’
DC Diamond’s face went pink. ‘No, sir, I…’
‘You assumed Preston would act upon it? Christ, if their witness turns out to be unreliable, then we have to have that case back here in South Cumbria.’
The DC looked down and rubbed his eyes. Craig patted him on his shoulder and sighed again.
‘Look, don’t be leaving loose ends. I know it’s tempting, because it gets another case off our hands, but if we miss something, it could mean we ignore an opportunity to find her.’
‘I thought she’d gone down south, sir.’
‘We only thought that because of that damn sighting at Preston train station, which, I’ve just discovered, was not her,’ Craig said.
The officer opened his mouth.
‘Which leaves the question: what if she never left?’ Craig added before walking away.
He knew there was no point disciplining the lad harshly; the young DC looked worn out and distracted. Many on the force wore the same look. A lot of them were overworked, and the slightest opportunity to offload work was taken gladly.
Back at his desk, Craig called the missing persons desk in Preston. They told him that no new leads had been forthcoming but the case was still open. He asked about the tag and the officer sighed and rechecked.
‘Ah, yes, a woman said she saw her in a bar in Ambleside and she knew her personally, so it’s a reliable lead.’
‘And you didn’t contact me?’
‘The officer handling the case makes those decisions. I’m guessing, looking briefly at the notes, that she was sighted in Preston afterwards, so it’s not your remit.’
‘It wasn’t her in Preston. I’ve reviewed the footage.’
‘Oh.’
Missing persons cases could stay open for years. One hundred and eighty thousand people are reported missing in the UK every year, and many are never heard of again; around four thousand of those are in Cumbria. It was widely accepted in the police force that the figure was unsustainable: in other words, the police didn’t have the resources to dedicate to so many cases, and errors were inevitable.
Craig was determined that Lisa Lau’s disappearance wasn’t going to be one of those cases. He asked to get the case transferred back. The Preston desk sergeant sighed down the phone at the extra admin. He was probably thinking how incompetent Cumbria Constabulary was, but Craig didn’t have the time or the will to argue. The legwork had been done by uniforms from Barrow to Penrith, and Kelly Porter knew as well as he did that if no one talked to each other, then nobody was actively joining any dots. As soon as the witness statement on the sighting in Preston came in, everything had stopped. Sure, it had taken up until last week to transfer the file, but Preston police had taken over straight away. He scanned HOLMES, looking for evidence that progress had been made.
With the phone under his chin, he scrolled through the file and realised that nothing else had been inputted until his colleague’s marker last week, which had obviously fallen through the net. He closed his eyes and rubbed them. The sergeant was banging on about something to do with signatures and senior officers. Craig said all the right things in response, but inside he was seething. Finally, he replaced the phone and went back to the beginning of the report on Lisa Lau. He noticed that the Home Office had sent a letter of information to the Chinese embassy – a detail he already knew – but he decided to read every word of the file. The response had come from the Chinese embassy in London. He read that Lisa Lau was estranged from her family in China, but they were known to be extremely influential and wealthy. The embassy was looking into their own investigation and Craig wondered why he wasn’t aware of that. Politics probably. The Chinese embassy had also put a marker on Lisa’s passport the day she was reported missing so it would flag up with the police if she left the country. Craig worked out the time frame in his head. Lisa had been reported missing after failing to show up for a shift at the Glenridding guest house where she worked. The proprietor had reported her missing as some kind of revenge act intended to teach her a lesson not to mess him around, as she was allegedly on her last warning. Craig jotted down the name on a fresh piece of paper. She’d worked a shift at a bar in a pub in Patterdale before that, which checked out, so she would not have had time to leave the country.
Patterdale was where the body in the bin had been found.
He carried on reading. Every single statement had been taken by different squads on the ground. Kelly had relied on information from uniforms the whole length of Cumbria. Sometimes it just worked out that way. To be honest, they’d both been relieved when she was sighted in Preston and it added weight to the story that she was an independent, wayward girl, who made her own mind up about where and when she worked. But now, red flags were popping up like apples in a bucket on Halloween.
He began reading every statement and realised that some of them weren’t on HOLMES. He hung his head. It was looking like a clusterfuck and Kelly wouldn’t be happy when she found out. He had to call her. Between them, they’d relied too heavily on each other to manage the case that spread over both of their remits. Now, Craig realised that neither of them had appointed a duty officer to watch over the case: nobody had been assigned the case because, firstly, adults aren’t treated as in danger when they go missing unless there is evidence to the contrary, and secondly, they had both assumed it had been done by the other. After all, Lisa Lau was a foreign national, with a soon-to-expire visa, who by all accounts could look after herself. He questioned whether Kelly was letting her profiler friend lead her to waste valuable resources on a simple case when she had a murder to solve. Perhaps he was being harsh.
They’d discussed it so many times over the phone, and had thrown ideas around as they chewed over the leads and names, but neither of them had got a handle on the case before it was simply whisked away to Preston, where, they assumed, a detective would be given the task of bringing the case together.
Kelly would kick herself, as was he doing now. But he had to tell her. She’d want to investigate herself, he knew that much.
Especially when she found out that the Chinese embassy might beat her to it.