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Tom shook his head. ‘Not so wild. I just wish we had the means of proving what is simply experienced professional guesswork. Cases like this leave me unsatisfied. I suspect we'll never discover whether Carr's death was murder or an accident.'

‘One thing I'd bet a year's salary on is that it wasn't suicide. That guy runs but hasn't the nerve to jump.' Max reached for the telephone on his desk as it rang. ‘Captain Rydal.' He listened for a while without making notes, then said, ‘I'll come right away.'

‘Problem?'

‘The answers to some,' Max responded eagerly, sliding from his desk and grabbing his car keys. ‘Call Connie and tell her to wait for me in the hospital car park. Sharon's had a text telling her about Carr's death. She's hysterical and demanding to speak to me, no one else.'

The girl in the hospital bed looked plainer than ever with red-rimmed eyes and tear-stained cheeks. The nurse remained in the small side room, despite Connie's presence and Sharon's rude instruction to piss off.

‘Is it true?' she cried in anguished tones. ‘
Is
Johnny dead?'

‘I'm afraid the person you knew as John Smith drowned in the river,' Connie said at Max's nod. ‘Captain Rydal found the body himself, and it's been identified. We're sorry you learned about it by text, but you denied knowing a man with the initials J.S when Captain Rydal came last time, so we had no reason to give you the sad news.'

A fresh bout of sobbing halted conversation, and Max inched the nurse through the doorway to ask quietly, ‘Have you called her father? He should be here.'

‘She will not have him, Colonel. She is screaming when we say such. It is that she has the fear of him. The Herr Doktor says he will have talking with him before he can come in.'

Max frowned. ‘I'll see that someone at the base speaks to Sergeant Miller today. He has every right to see his daughter.'

‘And we have right to keep patients from harm,' she said firmly. ‘Please to go back and have speech with this angry child. It cannot continue, this tears.'

‘If you'd be good enough to leave us alone with Sharon?' he suggested. ‘Sergeant Bush is very good with young people. They respond to her. You see, the crying has now stopped.'

The nurse was not happy, but she gave a brisk nod and folded her arms purposefully. ‘I will be here outside for your meeting.'

‘Thank you.' Max turned back into the room to see Connie sitting on the edge of the bed, holding the girl's hand. He turned the chair around and sat facing Sharon over the back of it. ‘You asked to speak to me. About Johnny?'

‘It's all my fault,' she cried, threatening to lose control again.

‘That's not true, Sharon,' said Connie soothingly. ‘He had a lot of problems that were nothing to do with you.'

‘Why should you think his death was your fault?' Max asked.

Twisting the sheet in her hands, she spoke at the knotted material. ‘I lied about the baby. I was jealous of them all. They were taking him away from me. I wanted him to myself, so I told him I was pregnant.'

‘When was that?' Max saw light starting to dawn over the mystery of Carr's precipitate desertion.

‘The night I fell from the bridge. We was out with Zoe, Jake and the other two. The boys had a barney. Jake threatened to run it himself. Said he'd make a better job of it. Said he was sick of being one of Fagin's runarounds, whatever that meant.'

Max knew very well what it meant, and his interest grew rapidly.

‘Zoe was being bitchy, as usual. Said I'd drop my knickers for anyone just to score, so I walked away.' She glanced up at that point. ‘I thought Johnny wasn't going to come after me, 'cos he and Jake were really going at it. I hung around outside for a bit until the bouncer sent them all out with a warning. I hurried off and Johnny caught up with me, going on about how I'd got a lot of shitty friends. I was mad and went for him.' Her gaze returned to the sheet. ‘He said things, and that's when I had the idea about the baby.'

‘You thought it would make him concentrate more on you?' prompted Connie.

Sharon nodded.

‘But he was bound to find out eventually that it wasn't true.'

‘I didn't think,' she mumbled in a wobbly voice that suggested she would cry again soon.

‘What did Johnny say when you told him?' asked Max, seeing more clearly what Carr would have read into Miller's threat to sort him out. Small wonder he abandoned any careful plan he had had and just ran.

It was an effort for Sharon to answer that question, but she eventually said with quiet desperation, ‘He was shocked. Said I must get rid of it. Said my dad would kill him. It hurt me, that. I was reely, reely upset.' She wiped her eyes and nose with the sheet.

‘Go on,' said Connie gently.

‘We'd all been drinking. You know how it is, and I was
reely
upset. We was crossing the bridge, so I got up on the wall and told him I'd jump to get rid of it, if that was what he wanted.' She gave a twisted, watery smile. ‘Frightened the shit out of him, it did. He told me not to be crazy. He tried to grab me, but I started to walk along the wall to pay him back a bit for what he'd said. Then I lost my balance.'

She suddenly looked stricken. Lost and frightened. ‘When I came to they told me what had happened. I tried to call Johnny and text him, but his mobile was turned off. I couldn't tell him it wasn't true about the baby; that I'd made it up because I wanted him to myself. I couldn't tell him that and that's why he . . . why he went away. It's because of me he's now dead.' She ended on a wail.

As Connie repeated her soft assurances, Max thought that, indirectly, Sharon was probably right.

FOURTEEN

M
onday afternoon, and the Incident Room was buzzing with the energy that came with the winding up of a case. The heatwave was set to return to a lesser degree, and there was a chance of some free time to fill a few heady late summer days with pleasant pastimes, for once. Tom was relieved that he would no longer have the expense of preventing his girls from visiting Jake's club. In fact, he could possibly go on the three-day break to the Dutch resort and join in the fun with his family. The prospect mellowed him enough to view a smug-looking Piercey without irritation. They were all entitled to look smug over the resolution of this curious case.

Max was buoyant. Once he had done the paperwork he would take long leave and sort out the future with his fiancée – if that was what Livya was. He was not entirely sure. He would soon persuade her, chest strapping or not.

He opened the briefing by revealing what he and Connie Bush had learned from Sharon Miller. ‘She encountered Carr in a music store, appropriately enough, when she accidentally sent a stack of CDs cascading from a shelf. He helped her to pick them up, and one thing led to another. They went for a pizza and a coke. That's when she discovered a CD she thought must have dropped unnoticed in her bag. Carr then told her he had slipped it there himself. She had thought it a bit of a giggle and told him she wished it had been more than one.

‘It clearly gave Carr the germ of an idea a week later, when Sharon deliberately gatecrashed an elite group at the base disco to show off her new boyfriend. These were Jake Morgan, Scott Pinner, Tim Jackson and Zoe Rogers. Jake came over big about his career in the theatre; how he couldn't wait to get started. He was out of his skull with boredom, living with military tunnel vision and immature schoolkids. He couldn't take up his place at the Youth Theatre until September, and his parents insisted on his remaining with them until that time. The school summer holiday was about to begin and there was nothing on the base to occupy someone with his talent. He was going places; he had the nous to make it big once he could get started. Why should he faff around for four stifling weeks with all his energy and ingenuity going to waste? His sycophantic pals and girlfriend agreed. They were all bored and longed for some excitement.

‘That was when Carr put a proposition to them. He would take orders from squaddies for CDs, DVDs, iPods. He would then track down the stores stocking the things and give them the info. They would then go to town, spread out, and do a bit of shoplifting. Carr would give them sixty per cent of what he sold the goods for. Were they up for it?

‘Sharon told us they jumped at the idea, led by Jake. She didn't want to be part of it, but Jake and Co. had no intention of including her. They were a tight little group, yet they treated her with new respect because she was John Smith's girl.' Max grinned. ‘Gangster's moll, you'd phrase it, Piercey.'

Phil Piercey grinned back. ‘Right on the button, Boss.'

‘Well, as you've probably all deduced from your interviews this morning, the club was set up five weeks ago. The four kids went into town, split up and operated in different stores so successfully that they got hooked on it. It brought in spending money, but it was the thrill of stealing beneath the noses of German shop assistants that mostly appealed. The risk of being caught brought the frisson of excitement they had desired. As a result, when school ended they thieved every day and soon had more items than Carr had orders for.'

‘Hence the stack of new stuff in his locker,' put in Tom. ‘I suspect he created something that gave him not only a sense of belonging, but a respect bordering on admiration he had never before managed to inspire. Or buy. Jake got it right when he called Carr Fagin. Unfortunately,
his
gang of urchins began to run out of control.'

Max took over again at this point. ‘According to Sharon, Jake began to hustle Carr for their share of the money. When he confessed he hadn't yet sold the stuff, Jake demanded it back. He said
he
would run the operation from then on. Carr tried to act the big boss, but Jake called him a useless little creep and got nasty. They had a set-to that only stopped when the bouncer sent them from the bar. That's when Carr went after Sharon, who had left when insults began flying. It's not surprising he couldn't take it when she told him she was pregnant.'

‘Ya, the oldest trick in the book,' Piercey said scathingly.

‘Speaking from personal experience?' asked Heather.

‘It
was
a lie,' said Connie, ‘and Carr's reaction was also the oldest one in the book. His panicky instruction to get rid of it prompted her drunken walk along the bridge wall, with its drastic outcome. Carr was obviously the man seen running away by the German who went in the river to rescue Sharon.'

‘Add together the facts that Carr
believed
he'd made her pregnant, and that he had made no attempt to save her from drowning, and we have a pretty good idea of how Carr interpreted Miller's threat to sort him out at the end of that last day on exercise. Add the collapse of his Faginesque scheme and the prospect of going to a war zone, and escape would have seemed imperative,' Max concluded.

‘So there never was an outside supplier,' said Olly Simpson. ‘No wonder we couldn't find even a sniff of one.'

‘No outside supplier means no outside contact to aid Carr's desertion,' reasoned Staff Melly. ‘Which then leads to little likelihood of such a person clubbing him and chucking him in the river. So we're not looking at murder?'

‘
We're
not,' Tom affirmed. ‘The
Polizei
will be given the task of ascertaining whether it could have been an opportunistic mugging by a passer-by who grew too violent. We can only record it as death by drowning in unknown circumstances. Klaus Krenkel will inform us if they ever find evidence of foul play.'

Max nodded agreement. ‘I understand Carr's mother has been told just the bare facts. The poor woman will probably invent a heroic story to account for her son's desertion, as she did with his father.' He glanced around at his team. ‘We have to decide what to do about Jake and Co. Input, please.'

Derek Beeny, who had that morning interviewed Jake Morgan, put forward the results of that meeting. ‘The kid's clever and talented. He's also got a big mouth that betrays him when he puts on the “I'm an officer's son” act. He claimed he only knew J.S. as Sharon's guy; said he rated him a total waste of space. When I inspected the contents of the summerhouse, he bluffed an answer to my questioning the amount of unwanted presents. Muttered a superior comment about having contacts in the entertainment industry because he would soon be part of it.' He gave Max a frank look. ‘I can't see how we could prove any of his stuff was stolen, sir, even with Sharon Miller's statement about the shoplifting. One thing I did get him to admit was that he made the call suggesting someone had killed Carr. He said it was just a bit of fun because J.S. was such a piece of shit. We could have him on that.'

Heather had an opinion on that. ‘The Garrison Commander wouldn't wear it. That kid's off to the UK in a couple of weeks, which'll put him out of our remit. He shot himself in the foot, however, with that call, because it brought
us
in on Carr's disappearance, which has led to the discovery of his illegal business in Dad's garden shed. We can close the club down tonight and confiscate any goods still in shrink wrap. That'll ruin his credo with his mates and all the kids who've been using the place.'

‘His father will be told the full details,' said Tom with some satisfaction. ‘Maybe that'll stop him believing the sun shines from Jake's arse, although he'll probably admire the kid's enterprise. He struck me as that kind of parent.'

Beeny had one more point. ‘Jake couldn't have killed Carr. At the time of the storm he, with Tim Jackson and Scott Pinner, was camping in the hills with a school party.'