Tuesday 23 October, 4 p.m.
Joanna had anticipated this. Call in the frogmen and the press come scarpering behind them, sniffing out a potential story, the chance for pictures and headlines.
As they’d returned to the station her mood had been gloomy.
One of the frustrations of this case was that none of the usual avenues was appropriate. No mobile phone to track (didn’t have one), no car number plate to feed into the ANPR (didn’t have one of those either). No relatives to interview (deceased), no friends (all dead). The town CCTV had not shown him, and dragging in the general public had brought in nothing fruitful, although a couple of elderly gentlemen had been accosted, insulted at being mistaken for an inmate of a residential home.
To all intents and purposes, Zachary Foster really had vanished into thin air.
The uniformed guys and gals had done their best, poking into streams and skips with equal thoroughness and vigour, but there was no sign of him, his teddy bear, slippers, overcoat or pyjamas. And so far, the feedback from the frogmen at both Tittesworth and Rudyard was that nothing more than an old bike, a shopping trolley and a car number plate had been found. She sensed the team’s frustration and irritation matching hers.
The helicopter had done a sweep of the surrounding moorland using heat-sensitive equipment but that had turned up nothing but two dead sheep.
7 p.m.
Sister Joan Arkwright was the first of the night staff to arrive at the station. Out of uniform, wearing ordinary clothes, well-fitting black trousers and a cream-coloured fleece, she had a little more colour in her cheeks and looked ten years younger. She even managed a smile for Joanna. ‘I thought I’d better get down here and not waste time,’ she said, ‘though I’ve told you everything I know.’ She stared at the wall of the interview room. ‘I can’t believe he hasn’t been found.’ She pressed her lips together, still frowning in puzzlement. ‘It doesn’t make any sense, does it?’ Her grey eyes held no guilt, only puzzlement. It was as though she was allying herself with the police.
‘No, it doesn’t,’ Joanna responded frankly, keeping her eyes trained on the nurse.
‘I’ll be honest with you. The only way that Mr Foster could have left Ryland’s is through the day-room door. Which, in turn, implies that it was left unlocked and unbolted.’
Joan Arkwright’s stare didn’t waver. ‘I am absolutely certain I locked and bolted the day-room doors just after the evening staff left.’
Joanna let her eyes linger on hers before asking in a voice as soft as velvet, ‘So how do you think he left?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ Her voice tailed off until she lifted her eyes again. ‘Unless someone let him out.’
‘Why would they do that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘And where would he have gone? Why haven’t we been able to find him?’
The nurse hesitated before speaking slowly. ‘Perhaps he was picked up by a car.’
‘By whom?’
The nurse shrugged. ‘I don’t know, Inspector.’
‘So why mention a car?’
Joan Arkwright was frowning. ‘Oh, I don’t know.’
Joanna waited.
‘Sometimes I don’t know whether I’ve dreamt something or imagined it.’
Joanna waited for her to continue.
‘Lack of sleep, you know?’ She was frowning at the wall. ‘It does funny things to your mind.’
‘Like what?’
‘I wonder whether I heard a car sometime in the night.’ She was biting her lip as though the pain of it might force her mind to separate reality from imaginings.
Joanna’s response was blunt. ‘Did you?’
‘I don’t know.’
Joanna shelved the possibility for now. She would return to it later. For now, she continued with her line of questioning. ‘I’m still surprised,’ she said, ‘that at some point in the night, time as yet unclear, in spite of having limited mobility, Mr Foster apparently gets out of bed – having had his sleeping tablets – opens the wardrobe door, slips on a coat and walks downstairs. Unseen and unheard by any of you. It’s unlikely no one would have heard him unless you were all fast asleep yourselves.’ She waited for a response but there was no denial. Just a blank look.
She continued, ‘He then crosses the hallway to the day room, drags a chair to the French windows, shoots back a bolt, reaches for a key, unlocks the door, steps outside, closes the door behind him …’ Here she held up her hand. ‘And don’t even try telling me he locked and bolted the door behind him, putting the chair back against the wall, because you and I both know that’s impossible. My PC struggled with this manoeuvre. I’m pretty sure Mr Foster dragging his leg would have found it impossible.’
The night sister was staring at her. ‘Maybe he didn’t leave by that route?’
‘The other doors were also locked and bolted, the keys with you, and the fire doors were practically jammed up with dirt and debris.’
Joanna left the solution to the nurse who was sitting dumb and puzzled. As was she.
‘OK,’ Joanna said wearily. She was really tired. She wanted to be home and in a hot bath. In this case she was going round and round.
She had a vague, distant, rare memory of her father. ‘Round and round the garden, like a teddy bear. One step, two steps, tickle under there.’
She was regressing, turning into a child herself. That was what pregnancy did to you. She put her hand on The Bump and for once it was still.
She focused on Sister Arkwright. ‘Have you anything more to add?’
‘No.’
‘OK. Do you know when the other two are calling in?’
She shook her head. ‘I haven’t spoken to them. I guess they’re still asleep.’
Joanna sensed she would not extract any more. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘You’re free to go.’
And this, she thought as she watched the nurse file out, is Mr Foster’s third night out in the open – or not. It was increasingly likely that his body was somewhere, his death due to exposure.
A swift phone call confirmed that the two HCAs would attend the station first thing in the morning, and Joanna heaved herself into her car, glad now she wasn’t on her bike, and headed for home. It was almost ten when she finally arrived. Matthew was slumped on the sofa peering at his tablet screen. He sighed and switched off as she entered. But his grin was warm as he stood up, put his hands around her face and kissed her hard on the mouth before moving back and studying her face. ‘You look all in.’
She didn’t respond at first but drank in his presence. She loved the feel of him, the tangy, male smell of him, the taste of his mouth, the touch of his hands. Those competent hands she’d watched work with such skill, uncover secrets concealed in the dead. Would he soon be uncovering the death story of Zachary Foster? She ruffled his honey-coloured hair because she loved that too, and watched as it sprang back into its own style. ‘I am all in, Matt,’ she confessed. ‘My brain is going round and round,’ like a teddy bear, she added mentally, ‘and coming up with nothing but a blank canvas. None of this case makes any sense at all. And the sillier it is, the more frustrating that I can’t find this one, old, confused bloke who, let’s face it, is probably already dead. If he’s not, if we don’t find him very soon he will be, and his death will be yet another one chalked up to police failure.’ She knew she was handing him a cue to persuade her to ease up for the remaining weeks before the baby was born, but for once she didn’t care. She felt safe here, comfortable, happy in his arms, and she didn’t want to move.
‘Hey,’ he said, searching her face. ‘Let me make you a cup of tea and you can tell me all about it.’
It was her dream, to return home to a friend, a loving friend. A husband who cared, and for once she dropped all her defences, took the tea he offered her, sank down on to the sofa and, when he settled beside her, laid her head on his shoulder. ‘Thank you for this.’
His answer was another grin wider than the first. His eyes were bright, his manner friendly, open, inviting her to confide in him. So she did, confessing this little mystery which was defeating her and she didn’t know why. She asked him the questions that rumbled round and round in her head. ‘Why haven’t we found him, Matt? I haven’t even solved the first part – how he got out. Someone who’s never made an escape attempt before. Where is he? What is dementia like? Is it cunning? Could he have plotted a complicated escape plan? Who helped him?’
Matthew shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Frankly, he’s just more likely to have found an open door and stumbled through.’
‘What about searching for his lost toy, one he’d had since a child?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, thinking about it carefully. ‘That would be almost an instinct, to find it.’
One of the things she loved about her husband was, when posed a conundrum, he gave it grave and proper consideration. ‘I take it your guys have done a proper search of the surround?’
‘They’re good.’
‘But if all you tell me about Foster’s limited mobility is true, he has to be within half a mile of the home unless someone’s picked him up.’
She told him then about Joan Arkwright’s ‘dream’.
‘We all know we incorporate actual senses or sounds into our dreams, so maybe she did hear a car, Jo.’
‘It would make sense as to why we can’t find him. But it also makes no sense. Why would anyone abduct an old man who has no relatives, no money, no contacts, and lives in the past?’ She thought for a moment before adding, ‘And if they did pick him up, why haven’t they brought him back when they realized he had dementia? And if he was picked up and they didn’t bring him back, why not? And where would they keep him? What would be the point? No one’s going to pay a ransom for his return.’
Again Matthew was silent, thoughtful, as he ran through various possibilities. Then he looked up. ‘Who took the missing teddy bear?’
She stared at him. ‘You think there’s a connection?’
‘I’m just asking. It’s another … Aren’t you always telling me that no fact, however seemingly small and insignificant, should be ignored? Don’t you always search for a logical explanation for everything?’
She shrugged. ‘The explanation given by the nursing staff was that it might have been put in the wash, thrown away, somehow discarded.’
‘When all the people at the home, from residents to staff, had seen him dragging it around. Didn’t you say like Christopher Robin? It’s a very clear image. Your man and his teddy bear were inseparable.’ He paused. ‘And another teddy was substituted?’
She laughed. ‘So, follow the bear like the White Rabbit – down the rabbit hole?’
‘How long’s he been in the home?’
‘Eighteen months.’
‘And did you say he’s never even tried to abscond before?’
‘What are you suggesting?’
‘Cause and effect, my darling.’
‘Sure you’re not applying too much logic, thinking too hard?’
‘Isn’t that what you’ve asked me to do?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘It’s your case, Jo.’
She was silent.
‘You’ve checked his old address?’
‘PC Spark went round.’ She smiled and brushed his hand with her own. ‘Jason Bright Spark. No sign of our missing man there, and the woman who lives there now hasn’t seen him either.’
Again Matthew was silent, staring into the fireplace. A log burner was on their list of Things We Want to Do to the House. Maybe by next winter they would be sitting round the comforting warmth of their own log burner while upstairs … She could almost hear it. Upstairs a child would be wailing. Screaming for attention.
She moved her attention back to Matthew’s profile, almost aquiline, long straight nose, eyes perceptively sharp enough to miss nothing. She dropped her study to the full mouth, the stubborn chin, finally noting, with a smile, his hair: thick, wiry, like its owner with a will and a style all of his own, honey-blond, always tousled; hair that should have belonged to a poet or a musician – not a pathologist.
She smiled. But Matthew wasn’t. He was still frowning, tussling with her questions. And when he looked at her, Joanna could already guess what his next sentence would be. He would persuade her to take her maternity leave early.
‘I understand you want this case cut, dried and dusted.’ She held her breath, anticipating. But now he was grinning. ‘I’d be the same, Jo,’ he said, mischievously diverting. Then he kissed her. ‘I’d be exactly the same.’ And she realized she’d never been more wrong. She finished her tea.
‘You know what, Matt?’
His response was a raise of his eyebrows. ‘I’m not really hungry. I think I’ll have a bath and an early night.’
‘Me too.’
So the rest of that evening was spent soaking in bath oil, scrubbing each other’s backs, Matthew soaping her belly as gently as though he was massaging a newborn. As soon he would. The evening ended up with them dropping between clean sheets.
A perfect end to an imperfect day.