From the Cradle (5 page)

Chapter 4
Patrick – Day 1

Sean and Helen Philips, the couple who had reported their child missing, lived in Teddington, in a street of large Victorian houses with
a pro
bable combined value greater than the GDP of Luxembourg, a stone’s throw from Bushy Park. Not, Patrick mused, that people round here would throw stones. What would they throw – teacups, dirty looks, barbed comments? Patrick rubbed at his eyes, feeling slightly delirious. The truth was that he felt more comfortable in places like the Kennedy. At least there he knew exactly what people would throw, would be too busy ducking to enjoy the luxury of a muse.

He and Carmella approached the house, a chunky double-fronted red brick with a wisteria-covered portico over the door, and a neatly landscaped front garden. It was one of those houses that looked too smart to live in, gleaming glossy paintwork on the front door and around the windows, and not a pebble out of place on the gravel driveway. He would put money on them having a weekly organic ‘vegbox’ delivered, and that there’d be skis in the garage and a Polish cleaning girl coming in twice a week.

When Isabel was taken, Patrick had initially been convinced that a ransom demand would imminently follow, but none came. The same with Liam. When a child is taken from a well-off family, the first assumption is that money must be the primary factor. But so far there was no evidence of that, which made these cases not only less fathomable but more frightening. Over the past week, the people in this part of south-west London had become jittery, as though the local branches of Starbucks had been accidentally serving up coffees containing quadruple shots. More than
jittery
. The people of the borough of Richmond-upon-Thames w
ere terrified.

And the pressure on the police, on MIT9 in particular, was like nothing Patrick had experienced before, even when there’d been a serial rapist-and-murderer slicing lives apart in Sutton, or during the James Lawler case, when a gang of white kids had beaten a black schoolboy to death at 4:30 in the afternoon. With intense media and public interest, this case had immediately been classified as a critical incident, the most high-profile investigation Patrick had been involved in. This was the kind of pressure Bowie and Queen sang about, and the last couple of nights Patrick had gone to bed with that insistent bassline bouncing inside his skull.

He checked his watch. 00:29. As he knocked on the door, his body tapped into its adrenaline reserves.
Here we go
, he thought.
Here comes the rush
. He closed his eyes for a second, let it wash over and through him, like a blast of minty air that made his veins tingle and his skin prickle. He cast off his tiredness like a snake sloughing its skin. He was ready now.

Beside him, Carmella yawned.

He shot her a look. ‘Whatever you do, do not yawn in front of this family.’

‘Sorry, sir.’

A uniform opened the door, an expression of mixed recognition and relief passing across her tired features at the sight of Patrick and Carmella.

‘Evening, sir. PC Sarah Hayes, and this is PC Viv
Mortimer
. . .’ She looked as though she was about to say more, then stopped, embarrassed. For a moment, Patrick thought she was going to thank him for coming, as though she was hosting some sort of grim drinks party. PC Mortimer was lurking awkwardly in the hallway, and Patrick hoped that the pair had displayed more confidence than this in dealing with the Philipses. From the living room he could hear the low rumble of a man’s voice, the rising and falling tremolo of a woman’s.

‘I asked them to stay in there, sir,’ said PC Hayes. ‘Till we had a chance to brief you.’

He gestured for the uniforms to accompany him back through the front door, out of earshot of the family.

‘Brief away.’

PC Hayes had a notepad in her hand, but didn’t refer to it. ‘Sir, we have Sean and Helen Philips. They went out for the evening, leaving their daughter – actually, she’s Sean’s daughter and Helen’s stepdaughter – to babysit. The daughter is called Alice.’

‘How old?’

‘Fifteen, sixteen in August.’

‘And what about the other child, or children – who was she babysitting?’

‘Just one, sir, the abducted. Three years old; Frankie. She’s the daughter of both Sean and Helen. Like I said, they went out, for a meal at a restaurant called Retro.’

‘Very nice,’ said Carmella.

‘They got back here at 23:25 and found Alice asleep on the sofa. Mrs Philips says she went straight up to check on Frankie – and she wasn’t there. The first thing they did was wake Alice up, who had no knowledge of Frankie’s whereabouts. They searched the house, then Sean went out and looked in the gardens, front and back, and the immediate street, then called us. That was at 23:35.’

‘Any sign of a break-in?’

‘We haven’t touched anything in the house, sir, but the
Philipses
told us the back door was unlocked. Mrs Philips is sure the door was locked when they went out – and she says she told Alice to lock it again if she let the cat out. Alice swears that she didn’t see the cat all evening and hasn’t been near the back door.’

Patrick gestured to the front door. ‘This door was locked?’

‘That’s what they say.’

He groped in his inside jacket pocket and produced the electronic cigarette he always carried around with him. He’d been quitting and re-starting smoking for a decade, and this was his latest attempt at giving up. Unfortunately it was a bit like having sex with a blow-up doll – he imagined – or eating quorn bacon. Still, it delivered a hit of nicotine and he needed one now. He sucked on it, noticing that PC Hayes smirked slightly at the way the end lit up green.

He exhaled a cloud of water vapour and said, ‘OK, I want to talk to the family. Carmella.’

She followed him into the living room.

The three family members were occupying separate parts of the three-piece suite. On the left, farthest from the door, Sean Philips perched on the edge of a cream armchair, casting anxious glances at his wife, who sat on the far right, in another armchair. Between them, the teenage daughter was collapsed on the sofa, slumped back into the cushions, a stunned expression on her face.

Both Sean and Helen stood up as he entered the room, Helen moving closest to him, Sean just behind.

‘Good evening, Mr and Mrs Philips, Alice. My name is
Detective
Inspector Patrick Lennon and this is my colleague
Detective
Sergeant
Carmella Masiello. You must be frantic with worry, so let’s not waste any time.’

The first thing Helen Philips said was, ‘Is it him? The man who took Izzy and Liam?’

She was shaking, her fists clenched tight by her sides, and she was giving him that look, the one he knew so well. The kind of look dying people give surgeons – desperate, hopeful. He couldn’t help but think that she was going to look great on TV, that the papers were going to love putting her picture on the front page. The beautiful, haughty mixed-race woman, huge brown eyes, sharp cheekbones, Cupid’s bow lips. And there, on an antique sideboard, were rows of framed photographs, among them a solo picture of a little girl, a photo that must have been taken in a studio by a pro. A gorgeous kid with her mum’s huge eyes and soft wispy dark brown curls. The papers were going to love putting her on the front pa
ge too.

Patrick crossed to the sideboard, fingers hovering over the picture. ‘May I?’

Helen looked away from the photo as if it burned her eyes, but Sean nodded.

Patrick held up the picture. ‘This is Frankie?’

‘Yes.’

Sean’s voice was flat and low. There was a trace of Estuary in his voice, Essex or north Kent. He was a few years older than Patrick, late thirties, and he looked like he kept himself fit – slim with a firm jaw. He seemed to be trying very hard to keep it together right now, as if even being in this room was killing him. He wanted to be out there, searching for his little girl.

Tears rolled down Helen’s cheeks and Sean tried to put his arm around her but she shrugged him off.

‘You didn’t answer my question,’ Helen said. ‘Is it him?’

Patrick replied in a voice that was firm but with a velvety nap of softness. ‘We have no way of knowing that yet, Mrs Philips. Right now, we’re keeping all options open. It’s only just over an hour since you discovered that Frankie wasn’t in her bed. We need to keep an open mind.’

‘No!’ Helen shook her head vehemently. ‘She hasn’t just wandered off. She’s been taken.’

Sean joined in. ‘Shouldn’t you have roadblocks up, helicopters out there, search teams? I should be out there searching. Not standing around here chatting.’

He took a step towards the door. Carmella moved into the centre of the doorway, blocking the exit. Sean made an exasperated sound in his throat.

Patrick said, ‘Mr and Mrs Philips, the first thing we need to do is talk to you, establish exactly what happened.’

‘We got home, our daughter was gone. That’s what happened,’ Sean said.

Helen was chewing her index finger, staring at the floor. She looked up at Patrick. ‘At least she’s got Red Ted with her.’

Patrick waited for her to continue.

‘She’s had it since she was born,’ she said. ‘She never sleeps without it. Ever. I searched her room and it’s not there.’ The last few words were stifled by a sob.

Patrick gave her a few moments, during which she allowed her husband to put his arm around her. A thought of Bonnie and her grubby Peppa Pig flashed into his mind. Peppa was his daughter’s Red Ted equivalent. ‘Mr and Mrs Philips, I need you to come to the station.’

‘No way,’ Sean interjected. ‘What if someone brings her back? We need to be here.’

‘We’ll have officers here. But we need to examine the house, look for evidence.’

‘Forensics?’ Sean said.

‘Among other things. We can’t do that with you in the house, I’m afraid. And I would appreciate it if we could talk to you tonight. While it’s all fresh in your heads.’ They stared at him, unblinking. ‘I promise you – we are going to do everything we can to find Frankie.’

They acquiesced. As Carmella prepared to lead them from the room, Patrick turned his attention to the girl who had thus far remained silent. She had stood up and slipped her hand into her dad’s. She kept her head down, and her hair fell around her face so he couldn’t see her properly. But while he’d been talking to Sean and Helen he’d sneaked glances in Alice’s direction. She’d been watching him too, wide-eyed, staring at the tattoos visible on his forearms, although he couldn’t tell if it was with approval or disgust. Above all, she looked worried and scared. But her body language, the way she hugged herself and flinched whenever her father and stepmother spoke? That told him that of the three of them, she almost certainly had the most useful story to tell.

Once Carmella had left to escort the Philipses to the station, Patrick checked that the SOCOs were on their way, along with the other members of the team. There would be a lot of disgruntled spouses left sleeping alone tonight. That was one of the good things about being single – to all intents and purposes at least. No one to make him feel guilty.

He trod through the silent house, going into the kitchen first, thinking about how the media were going to go crazy when they heard about this one, about the panic that would ensue. And the pressure on his team, which was intense already – it didn’t seem possible that it could get worse, but he knew it was about to. It was like going from 2-0 to 3-0 down in the first half of a match you couldn’t afford to lose.

Three children in one small area of London within a week. A living room, a car and now a bedroom. The person the press were calling the Child Catcher was getting braver, daring to go upstairs now, like the urban fox that had caused almost as much hysteria when it crept into someone’s house and tried to drag their baby out. Of course, he shouldn’t assume that it was the same person in all three cases. But unless it was a copycat – and Patrick had never actually come across a copycat criminal in over a decade of police work – or some kind of insane social phenomenon, this had to be the work of the same person. A person whose need to commit these crimes was escalating rapidly.

He slipped on a pair of disposable gloves and examined the back door, peering through into the darkness of the garden.

Something thumped against the glass and he jumped. It was a cat, a ginger specimen, jumping up at the door, trying to get in.

‘Better catch yourself a mouse tonight, mate,’ he said.

The keys were in the lock. He made a note in his pad and looked around the kitchen. A lone wine glass stood on the draining board. A takeaway pizza box poked out of the bin. There was a very faint smell of cigarette smoke. Was that what had happened? Alice had opened the back door to have a crafty fag while her parents were out? And she was too frightened to admit it? Patrick could understand that if it was the case. He still didn’t smoke in front of his parents – not even his fake fag.

He left the kitchen and, after a brief look round downstairs, went up to the first floor. Frankie’s room was the second door on the left, immediately identifiable from the picture of a cartoon fairy on the door. Pushing it open gently, he went inside and looked down at the bed. Unmade, a small dent in the pillow, a pair of teddies at the foot of the quilt, presumably neither of them the treasured Red Ted. Forensics would need to do a thorough examination of this room – assuming Frankie didn’t turn up in the next few hours – so he didn’t want to disturb anything, but his eyes were drawn to a little desk beneath the window, with an equally miniature chair. An art desk, piled high with crayons and felt-tips and a big pile of colouring books.