Death Comes First (14 page)

‘That’s Mark, my grandson, Joyce’s eldest boy,’ said Henry. ‘Stephen you’ve already met. Next to him is my wife, Felicity, Fred’s gran. At the table, opposite Joyce and Molly, that’s Janet, our PA at Tanner’s, who damn near runs the place for us.’

Henry stretched his lips into a thin, forced smile as he gestured towards a tall young woman who was washing up cups and mugs at the sink.

‘That’s Monika. She helps Joyce out, and Felicity too. Don’t know what we’d do without her.’

Monika turned from the sink and contrived a nervous stretch of the lips that didn’t quite pass for a smile. She too looked as if she had been crying.

Henry waved one hand at a tall portly man in his sixties, who was sitting in the room’s one armchair but in a rather upright, uncomfortable manner.

‘And that’s Jim Grant,’ said Henry. ‘Dr Jim Grant, our GP and a family friend. He’s been looking after us for years. I thought it might be a good idea to get him over in case anyone needed medical assistance. The women, you know
 . . .
’

His voice trailed off. Vogel knew what Henry Tanner meant all right. Women were obviously the weaker sex in Henry’s eyes. To be diligently cared for, to be nurtured, but almost certainly never to be treated as equals. Vogel had learned enough about Henry from his morning’s research to have assumed that. The older man’s words merely reinforced his assumption.

Henry then pointed towards a small woman with a disproportionately large bust who was hovering around the room, even now there was a police presence, unable it seemed to settle anywhere. She was no chicken, as Vogel’s mother would have said, and was wearing far too much make-up for a woman of her years. Her top was too tight over her straining bosoms. Her hair was peroxide white. She looked completely out of place.

‘And this is Miriam Fox, our neighbour—’ said Henry.

Before he could elaborate, the woman leapt in: ‘Yes, I’m right next door. Came as soon as I heard. Dreadful thing. Poor little lad. Only yesterday I watched him playing in the garden. Such a sweet little boy. I had to come round, but if you don’t want me, well, I’d better be getting back. My Joe’s due home early today and I haven’t started on his dinner yet and
 . . .
’

Miriam Fox spoke estuary English with more than a hint
of Essex. And she was gabbling. It was Vogel’s turn to interrupt.

‘Yes, yes, Mrs Fox. As you’re only next door you can leave. It’s the family I need to speak to first. But we will need to talk to you again later. Perhaps you would be kind enough to give your details to PC Saslow here?’

Miriam Fox said of course she would.

Vogel turned his attention to Joyce Mildmay.

‘Right, Mrs Mildmay, perhaps we could have our chat straight away?’ he asked. ‘Is there somewhere private we could go?’

‘Yes, we can go into the sitting room,’ said Joyce, standing up.

‘Thank you,’ responded Vogel, turning to address the others. ‘And, please, would everyone else stay here. You may already have given interviews, but I’m afraid we do need to speak to you all again.’

The two police officers followed Joyce out of the room. In the sitting room she sank into one of the two big brocade sofas on either side of what Vogel assumed, somewhat uncharitably, to be a reproduction Adam fireplace. Well everything else about the house was fake. His wife would never have anything reproduction in their home. Antiques were Mary’s passion. She couldn’t afford to pay a lot, but she was an expert bargain hunter interested only in the genuine article.

Vogel sat on an upright chair, with Saslow on another alongside, looking slightly down at Joyce.

‘So, Mrs Mildmay, would you please take me through the chain of events which led to you discovering that your son was missing?’ he asked.

Joyce did so, in as much detail as Vogel could have hoped for in the circumstances. Once or twice, she seemed about to
burst into tears again, but she managed to hold herself together reasonably well.

‘So after you went up to Fred’s bedroom and discovered that he wasn’t there, after you, Molly, and Monika had been right through the house and made certain that Fred was no longer inside, what did you do then?’ he asked.

‘We checked the garden. And the shed down the bottom where Charlie used to mess about with bits of carpentry and stuff. He was always good at that sort of thing. He was restoring an old wooden sailing boat when we met
 . . .
’

Joyce paused for a moment, disappearing into a long-ago world.

‘Fred seemed to take after him in that,’ she continued. ‘They were building a model boat, the pair of them. They used to spend hours down there. When Charlie could spare the time, of course. He was always so busy
 . . .
’

Joyce swallowed hard. Vogel wondered what she was thinking.

‘We didn’t expect Fred to be there, though. Not at that hour in the morning. Likes his bed too much, Fred. And in any case I don’t think he’s spent any time in the shed since his father died. He misses his dad terribly. Anyway, we looked there, just in case. Then I rang Mum and she came over, and we phoned round anyone we could think of who Fred might have gone to. We didn’t really believe he would have done that, gone to any of the people we called, but we made ourselves go through the motions, tried not to panic too much, tried to think clearly. Molly joined in. She and Fred are at the same school, so she knows a lot of Fred’s classmates. She went on to directory enquiries and got the home numbers of anyone she could.’

‘And nobody had seen or heard anything of Fred?’

‘No. As soon as it was nine o’clock we called the school, just in case. But he wasn’t wearing his school uniform. Fred was never early, and even if he had taken off on his own he wouldn’t have gone to his school. I was pretty sure of that.’

‘Was that when you called us?’

Joyce nodded. ‘Yes. Mum, Molly and I were all positive Fred wouldn’t have taken off on his own. I think all three of us wanted to call the police earlier, but we were kidding ourselves that it was going to be all right, that it was maybe some silly prank. Somehow dialling 999 made it real. Brought home what we were all thinking. What we were afraid of. That somebody had taken Fred.’

Vogel nodded encouragingly.

‘We’d already called Dad. He, Mark and Stephen came straight back from the office, with Janet. They took Molly and Monika and some of the neighbours we’d contacted and set off to look for Fred. I don’t suppose any of us thought they were going to find him wandering around the estate, or nearby, but it was better than doing nothing. Mum and I stayed here, with Miriam from next door, in case he came back. Although by that time I’d stopped thinking he was going to. Not of his own accord
 . . .
’

Joyce’s voice tailed off again.

‘Mrs Mildmay, I noticed on the way in that you have a burglar alarm,’ said Vogel. ‘Do you normally switch it on at night, and was it switched on last night?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There’s an exclusion setting so that it operates only downstairs. I’m sure it was on. I switch it on every night. Dad had the alarm installed. He’s very keen on security. I didn’t think about it before.’ She paused. ‘It didn’t go off, obviously
 . . .
’

She let the words drift.

‘I’ll get it checked out, but these systems are not easy to tamper with,’ said Vogel. ‘So the likelihood is that if you switched it on, somebody must have switched it off in order for Fred to leave the house without activating the alarm.’

‘Oh my God,’ said Joyce.

She shook her head. ‘I can’t explain it, Mr Vogel.’

‘Did Fred know how to operate the alarm?’

‘Well, yes. We each have our own remote control, so we can switch it on and off.’

‘Do you remember if the alarm was on when you got up this morning?’

‘Yes
 . . .
’ She looked uncertain. ‘That is, I think so. I may not have noticed. I always push the button on the remote before I go downstairs. It could already have been off, I suppose.’

‘Or switched on again, having been switched off. This suggests that either Fred left of his own free will and deactivated the alarm in order to do so, or whoever took him was able to deactivate the alarm. Does anyone else apart from you and your children know the passcode or have a remote control?’

‘Mum and Dad
 . . . 
I can’t think of anyone else.’

Joyce had been looking down. She raised her gaze to meet Vogel’s. He could see the panic in her eyes.

‘Look, Detective Inspector, I can’t explain about the alarm. I really can’t. But Fred would never leave the house in the middle of the night of his own free will. Someone’s taken my boy, I’m sure of it.’

There was no doubt in Vogel’s mind that Joyce Mildmay’s distress was genuine. The woman was in pain. From the look in her eyes, the mental anguish she was suffering went far beyond anything she had ever experienced. There was also bewilderment there, and something else, something Vogel
could not quite put his finger on. Fear, perhaps, but not just the fear of a mother who dreads that she might have lost her son.

‘We don’t know that, Mrs Mildmay,’ he said, still trying to evaluate the woman’s response, and also trying to sound more reassuring than he actually felt. ‘We have to keep an open mind while we continue with our enquiries. Meanwhile, I know it’s difficult for people to think straight when something like this happens, but I want you to try to stay calm and think as hard as you can. To begin with, are you absolutely positive there is nowhere else Fred would have gone?’

Joyce shook her head.

‘Think, Mrs Mildmay,’ Vogel persisted.

‘I am thinking,’ responded Joyce sharply. ‘In any case, you don’t understand. Molly spent the morning going through every number on Fred’s phone. She called everyone on it – his school friends, his football team-mates and the coach, his cricket mates. Even people who live miles away. There is no one and nowhere else. There really isn’t.’

Vogel was blinking furiously behind his horn-rimmed spectacles.

‘Mrs Mildmay, you told the officers who came here earlier that Fred’s phone was missing, that he must have taken it with him. Indeed, you said that he never went anywhere without it. And you mentioned that Molly had to get on to directory enquiries to get numbers for his classmates. But now you’re saying that Molly went through every number on Fred’s phone.’

Joyce nodded. ‘We didn’t have Fred’s phone when Molly first tried to call his schoolmates. Nor when the two policemen came. But eventually we found the phone in the bathroom, in the pocket of his dressing gown. That was
typical Fred. He’s so attached to that phone, he would take it with him to the bathroom rather than leave it in the bedroom for a few minutes. But he’s also absent-minded. So he must have forgotten about the phone and gone to bed. We’re always finding it in odd places.’

‘But what if he planned to leave the house – he would look for his phone then, presumably. And he’d be reluctant to leave the house without it, wouldn’t that be the case?’ asked Vogel.

Joyce nodded. She was having real trouble holding back the tears now. Vogel gave her a moment to compose herself. The business of the alarm had led him to believe that, although allegedly so out of character, young Fred Mildmay must have taken himself off somewhere in the middle of the night. The fact that he’d left his phone behind was a totally contradictory piece of evidence.

‘You do realize the significance of this, don’t you, Mrs Mildmay?’

Joyce sniffed, swallowed and nodded again, almost imperceptibly.

‘Mrs Mildmay, I’m sorry to have to tell you this but I suspect this new information makes it far more likely that your son has been removed from this house by a third party, and possibly against his will,’ said Vogel.

‘I know,’ said Joyce, in a voice that was little more than a whisper. ‘Oh my God, I know. I realized it as soon as we found the damned phone.’

Vogel continued to stare at her. There was something about her that wasn’t right. Police officers are trained not to exclude the parents of a missing child as suspects. It is a statistical fact that in the majority of cases either the parents or somebody close to them, more often than not another
family member, is responsible for that child being missing. Vogel’s initial gut reaction had been that Joyce would not have harmed her son. He saw nothing in her behaviour to suggest that; her demeanour was unmistakably that of a caring, shocked and distraught mother. However, something was troubling him about Joyce Mildmay.

He cast his mind back over the case notes, including the first interviews conducted by PCs Yardley and Bolton.

‘You didn’t report it, did you, when you found the phone?’ he continued. ‘You must have realized how important it was. Why didn’t you call the police again straight away?’

Joyce looked puzzled. ‘We didn’t think,’ she muttered. ‘We were too busy hoping that now we had his phone we had a better chance of finding Fred. Molly just pounced on it. Later we knew you were coming, and obviously we would tell you
 . . .
’ She stopped speaking. Then began again after a brief pause. ‘I guess we didn’t want to dwell too much on what finding that phone might mean.’

Vogel changed tack. ‘Mrs Mildmay, do you know of anyone who might have wanted to take your son from you?’

Joyce appeared startled, as if she hadn’t expected that question. But again there was something else there. Vogel thought she was trying to avoid meeting his eye. She shook her head, leaning forward slightly at the same time.

Vogel decided to go for it.

‘Mrs Mildmay, is there something you are not telling me?’ he asked.

Joyce shook her head again.

‘Mrs Mildmay, have you heard of the golden hour period?’ Vogel enquired, and continued to speak without giving her time to respond. ‘It’s the twenty-four hours or so after a crime has been committed. That’s the period when we are
most likely to find a person who has been abducted. If you know anything that might help us take full advantage of the golden hour, you should tell me now. You seem certain that your son has been taken. If there is even the slightest chance that you know something that might lead to whoever could have taken Fred, then every minute you hold that information back you lessen the chances of his being returned to you safely.’