Tuesday 30 October, 9 a.m.
Perhaps it had been over-optimistic to hope that the two spurious leads might lead to any progress. They’d even commandeered the chair from Ryland’s and dusted it for footprints, which appeared to reveal that a multitude of different shoes, makes and sizes had stepped on it but nothing that looked remotely like an old man’s slipper print.
The newspaper headlines just about summed it up.
Police Admit They Are Baffled!
Who’d leaked that particular line, she couldn’t know. Maybe, having nothing else helpful to say, the hacks had made it up. But it was uncomfortably close to the truth. She didn’t want the fate of this vulnerable old man to remain a mystery, but it was definitely heading that way. She knew she shouldn’t, but she’d read through the article on her tablet and felt even more fed up.
DI Piercy, assigned to the case, seven months pregnant (unflattering photograph) was quoted as saying ‘the police are baffled’ and so on …
It might be the truth but it wasn’t what she had said. She’d actually said that investigations were continuing behind the scenes. How they’d translated that to the ‘baffled’ line was beyond her. OK, she hadn’t been able to add the fable that the ‘police were following leads’. It wouldn’t take much of a brain to know that there were no leads. Not really. A couple of dreamt-up clues that might or might not exist, the possible sound of a car, the whispering.
She’d had the uniformed guys look at the drive just in case there were tyre tracks on the gravel, but the drive was used by all the visitors to Ryland’s. They had two lines of enquiry but nothing concrete, nothing to go on. Nothing real.
She sat, glaring at her screen.
Any poor show by the police could be used as a political football and prove that the lack of funding had resulted in this pathetic failure.
And it felt pathetic. Outwitted by a ninety-six-year-old with dementia. She had to agree with the papers. It didn’t exactly make her look like Albert Einstein. The question that was beginning to haunt her was: was someone else involved in his disappearance? If so, who and why?
Tuesday 30 October, 2 p.m.
That afternoon, feeling that she couldn’t justify two officers, she went alone to Ryland’s and re-interviewed all three members of the night shift who’d been asked to attend again. Sister Joan Arkwright initially insisted she’d spent much of the night in her office writing reports, checking drugs. But when Joanna questioned her more closely about hearing the car, she looked upset. ‘I was exhausted,’ she said. ‘When I’d locked up and we’d settled everyone off, I thought it best if I had forty winks in the coffee room.’
‘OK,’ Joanna said. ‘What sort of time?’
‘Eleven-ish. I just dropped off.’
‘And the others?’
‘Everywhere was quiet, settled. We left the door open. We would have heard if Mr Foster had come downstairs and left. He would have been asking us about his teddy bear. All day, they told us, and all the night before he’d been upset so …’ Her voice tailed off.
Joanna waited but sensed nothing was about to be forthcoming. ‘So?’ she asked delicately.
‘We gave him an extra sleeping tablet. He was upset and we’re allowed to use our discretion.’
Joanna thought about this. ‘So he would have been very drowsy.’
‘Yes.’
‘Perhaps had trouble managing the stairs … alone?’
The night sister nodded.
Joanna tucked this little fact into her brain.
Next she spoke to the two HCAs, again together. She wanted to bounce their stories against one another and find the truth. They had been much more involved with the residents, hands on, taking them to the toilet through the night, checking the rooms periodically. Though their shortcomings in this department had been exposed, Joanna was convinced they did do the rounds at intervals. What the intervals were was open to doubt. But she couldn’t shake their stories. Susie Trent was clinging to her version that she had found the French windows unlocked and unbolted but had locked and bolted them on her re-entry from her fag break. ‘I hung the key back on the hook and put the chair in its usual place with its back against the wall.’
‘Can I just check? When you found the door unlocked, did you look outside to make sure no one had wandered out?’
‘I didn’t exactly look,’ she said. ‘I stood on the terrace. I would have noticed if there was anyone around.’
‘Was there a car in the front drive?’
‘I wouldn’t be able to see from there. It’s round the corner.’
‘OK.’
‘Our cars are always parked round the back,’ she explained. ‘It’s only visitors who park at the front.’ She smiled. ‘It makes the place look nicer.’
‘Did you see any lights around the front?’
Susie Trent looked puzzled at the question. ‘We-ell, through the trees you can see the lamplights from the road.’
‘OK.’ She addressed her next question to them both. ‘When you were doing your rounds through the night, did you notice any other residents wandering around?’
‘No.’ Both shook their heads.
‘Was anyone particularly restless that night?’
This produced a second negative.
Joanna looked from one to the other. ‘Have you thought of anything else since we last spoke?’
Both women shook their heads.
‘OK, you can go.’
She wandered back into the day room and looked at the chairs standing around the perimeter of the room.
Plain wood stacking chairs with a solid seat, similar to the one currently in the crime-scene forensic department. This time, after studying it for a few minutes and seeing nothing new, Joanna tried to mount it. Her pregnancy might be making her awkward and unbalanced but apart from that she was relatively fit. It was no easy feat to climb on this chair and reach the bolt. She was now even more certain that it hadn’t been Zac Foster who had opened this door. Not by himself. Which meant that if the night sister was telling the truth and she had locked it, then someone else from the inside must have shot back the bolt.
Perhaps the same someone who had had a car waiting, headlights probably switched off.
It was a game changer.
She returned to her office with a huge sigh. Mike Korpanski surreptitiously watched her and sensed something in his colleague’s attitude was shifting. She shared her thoughts with him and watched his face darken. ‘Can I just run stuff past you?’
He sighed but couldn’t resist the appeal in her eyes.
‘What if our elderly man was abducted?’
‘By whom? One of the night staff?’
‘Well, they were the only ones around.’
‘It makes sense,’ he agreed, ‘and at the same time it makes absolutely no sense.’
‘Yep.’
Then he saw that look in her eyes.
‘You all right there, Jo?’
‘No, Mike,’ she said. ‘Frankly I’m not. I’m sick of being portrayed as a woman who’s lost her marbles because she’s pregnant. I’m sick of being the Aunt Sally for the underfunding of the entire police force and I’m also sick of being haunted by this story of a confused old man who’s apparently fallen down a rabbit hole in a quest for his lost teddy bear, probably helped by one of the nurses in a fairly pleasant residential home.’
He started to speak but she interrupted him. ‘Have you read any of the headlines? And the cartoons are even worse. I’m drawn, in a uniform I don’t even wear, chasing Christopher and his …’
Korpanski held up a warning hand. ‘Careful, Jo, you’ll be owing money to the swear box.’
That drew a smile which in turn calmed her down. ‘If I’m right, he must either be dead or someone is sheltering him.’
He opened his mouth to speak but again didn’t get the chance.
‘And, by the way, to add to the list, I’m also sick of my stepdaughter needling me about my failures as a detective inspector. Will that do for you?’
Devoid of an answer, struggling not to smirk and knowing she would see through any attempt at appeasement with a wild guess, Korpanski simply shrugged, tempted to return to his computer screen and finalize the figures for violent crime in Leek for the year …
‘Mike,’ she appealed, ‘how can I make sense of this? If, as seems probable, a member of staff helped him to escape, someone else must have been driving a car.’
Korpanski gave a cautious nod.
‘He has no obvious contacts, no friends or relatives to shelter him. The manager said he doesn’t have any visitors. We’ve covered the moors and the town is well populated, so someone must be sheltering him or holding him against his will.’
‘Have you no clues, Jo?’
She shook her head.
‘What shoe prints did they get from the chair?’
‘Plenty,’ she said. ‘Too many, if anything. It seems anyone and everyone used it to reach that top bolt. No discernible slipper prints,’ she added.
She was silent for a moment, going over known facts. ‘And I can’t completely rule out the possibility that the door was not locked in the first place. After all, Joan Arkwright has admitted she was dog-tired after a run of nights. She might have forgotten to lock it, thinking that she had, in which case I can’t exclude the fact that Zac wandered outside and was locked out when Ms Trent returned from her fag break. But it still doesn’t explain why we can’t find him.’
Korpanski simply nodded.
‘The night staff told me no one was wandering around the home when they did their rounds, so somehow he sneaked downstairs and out of the home right under the noses of three members of staff.’
‘Who were probably or possibly fast asleep.’
‘I don’t think so. Not all three. Not at the same time. Not deeply asleep. Maybe just dozing. And he had had an extra sleeping tablet.’
‘They didn’t do a proper check on the residents, though.’
‘No.’
And the explanation for the door being unlocked?’
‘Susie Trent said she just thought Joan Arkwright had forgotten to lock up properly.’
‘But now you think it’s possible someone let him out?’
She nodded.
‘That opens up some strange possibilities.’
But she ploughed on. ‘What possibilities? He’s hardly a candidate for a Getty-style kidnapping, is he? No one’s going to pay a bean for his release.’
‘Agreed.’ The muscles in his neck twitched. He was now desperate to return to his computer screen.
But she hadn’t finished. ‘There’s been no reported sighting, so either we’re still failing to find a body or someone is harbouring him.’
Korpanski shook his head. ‘Come on, Jo,’ he said, subconsciously echoing Matthew’s words. ‘This is an old man who’s gone walkabout. He’ll be found dead, possibly from exposure, somewhere hidden, out of town.’
But her eyes still held that tenacious flame. ‘No, Mike. That is not what has happened. Even with more than a nine-hour head start alone, he wasn’t going to get very far walking, I guess, at a snail’s stumbling pace.’
He was grinning with his next remark. ‘I don’t think snails stumble, Jo.’
Her lips twitched too. ‘You know what I mean. We’ve all seen elderly folk taking an age to cross a road, stumbling, slow steps. Someone must have helped him. And my money’s on a member of staff.’
Sensing she still hadn’t finished, Korpanski waited before offering, ‘He might still be somewhere obscure.’
‘You think our uniformed guys aren’t savvy enough to search wheelie bins and derelict, empty buildings, or cars carelessly left unlocked?’
He shrugged. ‘There’s always some place, Jo.’
But she was shaking her head. ‘Not within four hundred yards there isn’t.’
He grinned. ‘Maybe he had a sudden spurt of energy from somewhere.’
She held up her hands and shook her head. ‘There’s another dimension to this. I don’t know what it is but …’ She glanced across at her sergeant and knew he wouldn’t appreciate her thoughts. That there was an undercurrent here which she sensed but could not articulate.
Korpanski was growing fidgety; an avalanche of crime figures needed collating and he couldn’t see where this conversation was going. ‘So, you want to run anything else past me?’
‘Yeah,’ she said decisively, ‘I do. This isn’t about a ninety-six-year-old man who is so confused that he’s attached to a teddy bear his mother probably gave him when he was about five and has absconded to search for it.’
Korpanski shrugged. ‘So what is it about?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’
When he greeted this with silence she added waspishly, ‘You’re not being a lot of use to me at the moment.’
‘Sorry, Jo. I’ve got other things on my mind.’
‘Like what?’
He lifted his eyebrows. ‘Crime figures mean anything to you?’
‘Yes, but live crime is what we’re all about.’
‘Sorry,’ he said again.
To which she retorted, ‘If you’re so sorry, why are you smirking?’
Korpanski did his best to wipe the smirk from his face and look serious.
‘Jo,’ he said, an idea forming. ‘If he’s attached to his old teddy bear which you think he might have had for around ninety-odd years, what about trying somewhere familiar? Maybe his old school?’
Now she was smiling. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Unlikely but not a bad idea. Although I doubt the schools he went to in the twenties and thirties will be in the same buildings. But it was half-term last week so no one around. It’s a long shot, but I’ll send some uniforms round to all the schools, check them out. Mike.’
Korpanski waited.
‘Thanks.’
He grinned at her and for a moment they both simply savoured the friendship.
Korpanski screwed up his face, recalling something in his past. ‘I have to say, Jo, this doesn’t sound like the dementia I always imagined. Not like my grandma, who reverted to speaking Polish and thinking the Nazis were coming.’
She smiled and shook her head. ‘No.’ Then she started to giggle. ‘I was just thinking, it’s almost as though two brains planned his escape. Mr Foster and his teddy.’
They both laughed out loud at this, Korpanski doing a teddy bear impersonation, paws held up to his face. But as she gathered her papers up on the desk and stood up, she felt an overwhelming sense of dejection.
‘Come here, Jo,’ he said. ‘Let me give you a hug.’
‘Difficult with …’ and she indicated The Bump. He did it anyway and she took comfort from the powerful musculature of Korpanski’s shoulders, built from hours at the gym.
And it did make her feel better.