From the Cradle (7 page)

Then she cries for a bit, sucking her thumb. ‘Red Ted,’ she says. ‘I want Red Ted.’

That’s about the hundredth time she’s mentioned her teddy bear. I should have brought the bloody thing with me.

I suppress my irritation, helped because the flies have stopped bashing themselves against the windows, and tell her it’s time for bed. I lift the quilt cover and she slips under, facing away from me, her hair splayed on the pillow.

I slip under the quilt with her, though there’s barely enough room for both of us.

‘Come on,’ I say, and I put my arms around her.

Chapter 6
Patrick – Day 2

The first thing Patrick wondered when he woke up was why his pillow felt like it was made of wood. He opened his eyes at the same moment he realized he was still in the office, asleep at his desk. A stream of dribble trickled towards the framed photo of his girls. In it, Gill was gazing joyfully at the baby, back when Bonnie still had milk spots and a tuft of blonde hair that was as soft as kitten’s fur.
It was probably
the last time he remembered seeing Gill truly happy and, like some kind of weird karma, the picture scraped at his heart like fingernails on a blackboard. He kept meaning to put it away, to replace it with a solo portrait of Bonnie now she was almost two. But he couldn’t bear to.

He tilted his head from side to side, listening to his neck crunch. He poked the space bar on his keyboard and the screen sprang to life. If only he could wake up as quickly as the computer. It was 8:
07
A.M
.
He must have fallen asleep at around 5
A.M.

‘The guv wants to see you.’

He turned to see Carmella, looking fresher than a daisy on a dewy spring morning, holding out a Starbucks cup.

‘You’re an angel,’ he said, before burning his top lip on the scalding coffee.

He texted his mum on the way to DCI Suzanne Laughland’s office, and she replied with her customary swiftness, telling him that Bonnie was fine, that she’d slept through the night and was at this very minute carpeting the dining room floor with
Weetabix
. Bonnie was eighteen months into her messy phase and the thought of his mum stooping yet again to scrape soggy cereal off the floor, lift the toddler out of her seat and keep her entertained, change her nappies and deal with her tantrums, made him flinch with guilt. But Mum insisted she enjoyed it – as did his just-retired Dad.

It was not a conventional set-up, living with his parents at thirty-five, with his little daughter and without his wife, but right now it was the only thing that worked. The only way he could continue to do this job.

‘Patrick, come in.’

He entered DCI Laughland’s office and took a seat.

‘You look knackered,’ she said.

‘Don’t you start. I’m going to brave the shower in a minute.’

‘Rather you than me.’ The office shower was a pathetic, hastily installed addition to the unisex toilet, with water temperature that veered straight from scalding to freezing and back again. It was only ever used in times of dire need.

‘And you’ve got a pink mark on your face that looks like the edge of a mouse mat.’

He rubbed his cheek. Suzanne Laughland and Patrick had worked together for a long time, stepping up ranks in tandem over the last ten years, Suzanne always one rung above him. She had ash-blonde hair, tied back neatly, and huge blue eyes that made her look years younger than her true age, despite the worry-lines on her brow and the deepening crinkles around her eyes. She wore the lightest touch of make-up, no jewellery apart from her
wedding
ring.

She had a picture on her desk too: of her and her husband, Simon. They had no kids. Patrick had never asked her why she’d chosen not to be a mum, or if she had indeed chosen it.

‘I need you to give me an update,’ she said, ‘before we go in and brief the team.’

He told her about the interview with Helen Philips, and the subsequent interview with her husband, Sean.

‘Any conflict in their testimonies?’

‘Hmm. Not really. They both described the evening very similarly. They only disagree when it comes to Alice, the teenage
daughter
.’

Patrick watched Suzanne push a strand of hair from her face.

‘Helen thinks there’s a strong possibility that Alice had her boyfriend round – one Larry Gould. Carmella says that Sean is adamant she wouldn’t do that without telling them. I should mention that Helen is Alice’s stepmother.’ He briefly described the family history.

‘So Dad thinks Alice is a little angel who can do no wrong?’

‘Exactly. I’m talking to her this morning. Their neighbour’s agreed to come in and be her appropriate adult.’

Suzanne’s mobile beeped and she glanced at it, her face creasing with irritation. Simon, Patrick hoped, enjoying the thought that his boss would be in a grump with the smug git.

‘Alright, good,’ she said. ‘Keep me posted on that. I assume the FLOs are with the family now?’

‘Yes. Sandra Godden and Li Chen. They’re the most experienced FLOs we’ve got left. The others are with the Hartleys and the McConnells. The Philips family are staying with the next-door neighbours until the SOCOs are done.’

Suzanne came round the desk and perched on the edge of it, Patrick avoiding looking at her legs.

‘Find out what you can from Alice. But don’t spend too much time on it.’

He bristled. ‘You don’t need to tell me how to do my job, guv.’

‘I know.’ Her tone softened. ‘But we are surely thinking this is connected to the other two abductions, which means the Philipses are not suspects.’

‘I haven’t ruled anything out yet.’

‘But surely—’

‘Yes, I know. It’s either the Child Catcher—’

Suzanne winced. This was what the tabloids had started calling the unknown offender after a child at Sainsbury’s who’d seen
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
had reported seeing a man with ‘a long nose’ in the supermarket the day Liam had been taken.

‘Sorry. Or it’s a coincidence. Either way, Alice Philips is our most important Sig Wit and if her boyfriend was there, he’s one too.’

‘Let’s go and talk to the team.’ She paused before the door. ‘We’ve got three missing kids now. Three! If we thought the public were panicking before . . . This is like a pandemic.’

‘No, it’s not.’

‘What?’

‘A pandemic is when a virus crosses international borders. All of these crimes have occurred within the same borough. It’s an
epidemic
.’

She rolled her eyes and sighed. ‘You’re a fucking smart-arse, Patrick Lennon. Go and have your bloody shower and I hope it freezes your nuts off.’

But he was sure a smile flickered on her lips as they left the room.

As Patrick stood naked under the ridiculous trickle of alternately tepid, boiling and freezing water, he felt the ball of tension growing in his belly. Even now, after being the lead detective on a baker’s dozen of cases, he still experienced an icy dread whenever he had to face the team, ten pairs of eyes on him. A psychologist he chatted to at a party once had told him that the feeling you get when you do something that scares you – like public speaking – caused the reptilian part of your brain to scream ‘fight or flight’, releasing all that intoxicating adrenaline into your system. The feeling he got when he stood up to talk to a crowd was, apart from his enduring love of The Cure and Brighton and Hove Albion, the last thing that linked him to his schoolboy self. He dismissed the memory of himself as a schoolboy by glancing in the mirror above the basin – the shower wasn’t nearly hot enough to cause it to steam up. If he’d had those tattoos and muscles when he was fourteen, he doubted he’d have had the sort of problems he’d suffered at school when he’d been a skinny white misfit.

He replayed Suzanne telling him he was a smart-arse and the little smile that had appeared on her lips. It was the kind of exchange they would never have in front of anyone else, when they were strictly professional. It was difficult for men and women to be friends at work without rumours spreading about them, especially when one of them had authority over the other. It was irritating, just as it was irritating that some Neanderthals in the Force were resentful of women with higher ranks than them. Gill had asked him once if he minded that his superior officer was a woman and then joked that he liked to be given orders by powerful women. He smiled to himself. Maybe there was some truth
in that.

He just about managed to get enough water over him to clean off the grime, and stepped out of the cubicle, drying himself with the tiny towel he’d had in his gym bag. It was hardly rejuvenating, but it was enough to make him feel halfway human again. He couldn’t help glancing nervously at the toilet door to make sure it was locked – the last thing he needed before a briefing was one of his team to walk in and catch him naked, muscles or no muscles. Old habits died hard. Besides, they’d never take him seriously again.

Five minutes later he was in the incident room, aware that his team were staring at the damp hair curling onto his collar as he wrote the names on the whiteboard – Sean, Helen, Alice, Frankie – and described to the team what they already knew. He had to dismiss a brief uncomfortable thought that they would all know he’d been so recently naked at work, chiding himself for the moment of self-consciousness when there was so much else at stake.

Someone had already hung an enlarged photo of Frankie alongside the pictures of Izzy and Liam, and Patrick let his gaze linger on it for the moment, inviting everyone to do the same.
This
was their focus. These children, their families. Sometimes, in the din that reverberated around cases like this, it was easy to
forget that.

MIT9 was one of the Met’s twenty-four Murder Investigation Teams, all coming under the Homicide and Serious Crime Command. Despite their name, the MITs were not only responsible for investigating murder, but much of the other nasty shit that made Patrick wish his fantasy career as a rock star had got beyond a handful of terrible gigs in south-coast pubs. Manslaughter, serial rapes, infanticide, mass disaster – and missing persons cases where there was, to use the official language, ‘substantive reason to suspect life has been taken or under threat’. This was one line he would never repeat to the parents of the missing kids.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘You all know the drill by now.’ He nodded at DS Staunton. ‘Mike, I want you to coordinate house-to-house. Remember, we want any suspicious or strange activity over the last week – anyone seen hanging around, checking out the Philipses’ house, anyone spotted sitting in a car or van outside the house. I don’t even need to tell you this.’

Mike said, ‘If it’s anything like the other two, no one will have seen a bloody thing.’

‘We might get lucky,’ piped up DI Adrian Winkler. Six-foot-two, with shoulder-length black hair, longer and thicker than
Patrick’s
own, and good-looking enough to complete the set of what most women were supposed to be interested in, Winkler was one of the other DIs on the team. His nickname was, inevitably, Fonzie, although it was more a sarcastic reference to the fact he thought he was the coolest man on earth than because he shared a surname with the actor who played the Fonz. ‘There might be a curtain-twitcher living next door. Nice shower, by the way?’

‘Better than nothing, thanks, Adrian,’ Patrick said flatly. ‘I want you coordinating the search teams, along with Preet.’

Winkler shot him daggers. ‘Oh come on, Pat, not the fucking
search teams
. All those do-gooders tramping through the park looking for clues when you know most of them would rather be forming a lynch mob. DC Gupta and I have a lot better things to do with our time, you know.’

Patrick almost smiled, until Winkler added, ‘When a lynch mob would actually be a much better idea. Help clear out some known sex offenders, get the nonces off our patch.’

‘No problem, sir,’ said DC Preet Gupta, stepping in before things got too heated. ‘Come on, Adrian, they’re just jealous we’ll be out in the fresh air.’

But even the prospect of spending time with Preet, easily the prettiest of the detectives in the room, couldn’t appease Winkler. Patrick had heard whispers over the last few days that Adrian was unhappy with how he, Patrick, was conducting the investigation. They’d had run-ins before, usually over Patrick’s methodical way of doing things. Winkler was the kind of cop who preferred to drop bombs then sift through the fall-out. Patrick knew he was going to have to watch him.

Patrick continued dishing out responsibilities. CCTV for DC Sarah Trentner, DC Martin Hale checking social networks and phone records. The third DI on the team, Leanne Cornish, had the job of continuing to eliminate known offenders, not just in Richmond but all surrounding areas, including the parts of Surrey that came outside the Met’s jurisdiction. None of it was a surprise. On day one of the investigation, after Isabel had vanished, the energy in the room was fizzing, like a team of hounds straining at their leashes. Now, though, everyone was tired, concussed through banging their heads against the brick wall of this case. The truth was, they had no leads. No idea at all what had happened to these children.