Long Time Lost (7 page)

DS Jennifer Lloyd shunted the rusted bolt aside with the heel of her hand and shouldered the ill-fitting door, stepping out on to the flat roof of the National Crime Agency. It offered a spectacular view of St James’s Park and The Mall, but Lloyd headed in the opposite direction, leaning her forearms against the sooty masonry, looking over office buildings and rooftops towards the Thames, Waterloo station and beyond. London was a collision of murky greys and browns, splintered by the mirror-gleam flare of distant skyscrapers.

‘So this is where you sneak off to.’ Foster cupped a hand round her lighter and sparked a cigarette. ‘Young has a pool going. My money was on Commissioner Bennett’s office.’

‘Bad bet.’

‘Except your route up here takes you past Bennett’s office. Perfect for telling tales.’

Lloyd let the barb go, mostly because it was accurate.

‘About Young . . . ’ she began. ‘There’s a reason he’s pushing the theory that Connor Lane is behind whatever just happened on the Isle of Man.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Foster took a draw on her cigarette. ‘It’s because it’s the obvious theory to push.’

‘Maybe. Maybe not.’

‘Seriously? Lane has form for this. The only question is whether we can prove the link.’

‘Which we won’t.’

‘Way to build morale, Lloyd.’

‘I’m just saying what we all already know. Lane wouldn’t take a risk like this unless he was insulated from it.’

‘Just like four years ago.’

Lloyd hummed noncommittally and looked down twelve storeys to where a red double-decker was pulling into a bus stop. Commuters weaved along the pavements, checking phones, carrying coffee cups.

‘I read the file,’ Foster continued. ‘Think what you like about this team but I don’t just rely on hearsay. Young had his version. I wanted to make up my own mind.’

‘And did you?’

‘I did. And I agree with him.’

‘Based on the file.’

‘That’s right.’

Foster’s smoke was getting in Lloyd’s eyes. It was hard to tell if it was deliberate or not.

‘The thing is, the file was incomplete.’

‘I don’t think so. The name Nick Adams cropped up more than once.’

‘But not in one crucial respect.’

The file Foster was referring to was a report compiled by an outside investigation team that Lloyd had been part of four years ago. The team had been tasked with evaluating what, if any, mistakes had been made by the witness protection unit of Greater Manchester Police that might have contributed to the murders of Sarah and Melanie Adams. Nick Adams and his wife and daughter had been scheduled to be taken into witness protection on a temporary basis the morning after Sarah and Melanie were killed. The plan had been to relocate them to a safe house until the conclusion of the rape trial against Russell Lane.

At the time of the family’s planned inclusion in the scheme, Nick Adams had been second-in-command of the witness protection unit run by Greater Manchester Police. This was in the era prior to the co-ordinated, UK-wide approach to witness protection now being undertaken by the National Crime Agency.

DS Young had also been part of the Greater Manchester team, though he’d been a detective constable back then. He’d stayed loyal to his boss, even when Nick Adams had disappeared in the wake of the killings.

‘So what was missing?’ Foster asked.

‘Arguments. Lots of disagreements.’

‘Between you and Young?’

‘Between Nick Adams and his wife. She didn’t want her daughter to testify against Russell Lane. She didn’t want the family to enter witness protection. Adams insisted.’

‘And you know this how, exactly?’

‘By interviewing witnesses. Their neighbours. And I had a handwriting expert take a look at the consent document the family signed. He agreed, on the balance of probabilities, that Nick Adams faked his wife’s signature.’

‘So why wasn’t this in the file?’

‘Good question.’

‘And the answer is?’

‘Sometimes evidence can be unwelcome if it doesn’t tally with an accepted theory. Even if we’re talking about a report by an outside investigative unit.’

‘And you accepted that?’

‘Not for one second.’

‘So what happened?’

‘My additions to the file were excised. And I was exiled. All very neat. Until Commissioner Bennett gave me another chance.’

Foster closed one eye and gestured at Lloyd with her cigarette. ‘You seriously believe there was a cover-up? Isn’t it more likely that Adams vanished because he was broken? That he blamed himself for placing his family in danger? Maybe he began to see that his wife had been right and his daughter shouldn’t have agreed to testify. Or maybe he knew he should have got them protection sooner.’

‘Look, I’m no conspiracy theorist. I get that Connor Lane had plenty of motivation. He had the means. And everyone – including Young – was at pains to tell me that Adams was a good man, that I was crazy for even suggesting he might have cracked and murdered his wife and daughter before using all the skills he’d acquired, and maybe even certain loyal members of his team, to arrange his own disappearance.’

‘But you still believe that’s what happened, don’t you?’

Lloyd pursed her lips and moved her head from side to side, as if there were other arguments to be weighed up. Which, as far as she was concerned, there really weren’t.

‘Doesn’t mean I want to believe it. That’s the part Young doesn’t get.’

Foster took a final hit on her cigarette. ‘So what do you want from me?’

‘I want you to think some more about Kate Sutherland. I want you to consider that issuing an arrest warrant for her might be the way to go.’

‘And if I don’t agree with you?’

‘You will. Eventually. Because I’m going to prove to you that I’m right.’

‘You’re ready?’ Miller asked.

Kate nodded, watching as he fixed himself a coffee and slid on to the stool next to her. His shirt was damp at the collar and twisted a little. Kate fought the impulse to reach out and straighten it.

‘OK, we let you keep your first name, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Well, that’s about all you get to hold on to. That’s rule number one.’

‘That’s a pretty sweeping rule.’

‘Lawyers. Nearly as bad as actresses.’ He tried a smile that didn’t seem to fit him quite right. ‘Rule two is you don’t contact anyone from your old life. You sever all ties. Family. Friends. Passing acquaintances. They’re all gone. Like they never existed for you.’

‘My family are gone anyway.’

Miller raised an eyebrow and Kate worried that she’d sounded flippant and crass. Then he looked at her some more and she began to sense something behind it. There was a queasy turning in her stomach.

‘We know you’ve been looking, honey.’ Becca stepped closer. ‘We know what we’re asking you to give up.’

‘You were getting close,’ Hanson added.

Kate felt the room begin to tilt and spin. They couldn’t know. Nobody did. She hadn’t told anyone about the search for her birth family – not even the police who’d hidden her before.

‘We’re sorry for you,’ Miller told her. ‘Truly. If there was any other option, we’d offer it to you, Kate. We understand how badly you want to find them.’

She closed her eyes.

‘How do you know?’

‘We’re careful. We know everything there is to know.’

No, not everything, Kate thought. No one but her could know how much it hurt.

Kate had been abandoned by her birth parents outside Cheltenham General Hospital when she was almost nine months old. Soon after, she was taken in by her foster parents, James and Caroline. When Kate turned five, they adopted her, and she grew up happy and privileged in the idyllic setting of their Cotswolds farm estate, but from the day they first told her the truth, shortly after her thirteenth birthday, she’d been plagued by questions about who her real parents might be and why they’d left her. Then, when her adoptive parents were killed in a small-plane crash two years back, she discovered that she’d been willed half their fortune.

Suddenly, Kate was wealthy beyond all reason, but she was grief-struck and rootless. It was only in the past year that she’d summoned the courage to begin searching for her birth parents. Until recently, her attempts had proved fruitless. Then the specialist agency she’d hired had given her one fragment of information to hold on to. Kate had a brother who’d been left at the same time as her. His name was Richard and he was three years older than Kate. But Richard hadn’t been so fortunate. He’d grown up inside the care system, shuttled between a succession of foster parents and children’s homes until, at the age of sixteen, he became a blank. As far as the records were concerned, Richard simply ceased to exist.

Where had he gone? What had become of him? Did he even remember Kate?

She’d spent countless hours thinking about him, speculating about what he might be like, wondering if he knew of her existence, and if he didn’t, whether he somehow sensed her absence from his life, in the same way, she believed, she’d always known that a piece of her was lacking; a hole she couldn’t fill.

Finding her parents had been one thing. There was always the possibility they wouldn’t want to meet with her if she tracked them down because they’d abandoned her once before. But Richard hadn’t made that choice. Neither of them had.

She wanted so much to find him. She had ample money to throw at the problem, and yet a solution had so far eluded her. Now, she was being asked to walk away from the search before she had the answers she craved. She was being asked to walk away from Richard.

‘I’m sorry,’ Miller said again.

And damn if she wasn’t starting to cry.

‘You said I was getting close to finding them?’ She looked up at Hanson.

‘I think so, yes. To your brother, anyway.’

‘Well, that could be dangerous, couldn’t it? Connor Lane could get to him. He could threaten him to get to me.’

‘We don’t think that will happen,’ Miller told her.

‘Lane doesn’t know about Richard,’ Hanson put in. ‘I had to do some serious digging to find out myself. The agency you hired have a first-rate security system. But I’ll monitor the situation. If a crack appears, I’ll fill it. And you should know that I haven’t been able to locate your brother. I’ve tried. If I can’t find him, then Lane can’t either.’

Becca put an arm around her and Hanson smiled awkwardly, looking very young all of a sudden. Kate blinked at Miller, pressing the heels of her hands to her eyes.

‘Where will I live?’

‘Europe.’

‘Do I get to pick a place?’

‘That’s rule number three. I choose. At least to begin with.’

‘But not England?’

‘No.’

‘You don’t ask much, do you?’

‘You’ll also need to work. We can’t allow you to access the majority of your funds for the first year. And then we’ll drip feed them. We have to make sure the money’s not being followed. That’s how Hanson found you in the Isle of Man, by the way.’

‘So place me somewhere with an international law firm.’

‘Not an option. You can’t work as a lawyer. You’d be too easy to track. Menial jobs are best. But not anything where you’ll meet lots of people. Being a waitress is bad. Working in a bar or a coffee shop is worse. We’ve had clients work as late-night cleaners in factories or stockrooms. Data input is OK. Basically anything that keeps you away from the public or your face behind a computer terminal.’

Hanson glanced up from behind his laptop. ‘I’m going to choose not to take offence at that.’

Kate had excelled as a lawyer. She’d been on the partnership track at her firm. And now she was being told she had to turn her back on eight years of hard work. To become a cleaner. Or a factory worker. To live in a strange place that was not of her choosing, leaving without saying goodbye to any of her friends or colleagues, giving up the search for her brother and her birth parents.

‘When this is over, I’m going to find Richard. You can help me to do that, can’t you?’

‘Kate,’ Miller told her gently, a look of regret on his face, ‘this will never be over. Not for you. Not like that.’

‘But I still testify. Right? I’m going to give my evidence against Russell Lane. You agreed to it.’

‘Whoa.’ Becca stepped back. ‘You did not tell her that.’

Kate looked between them, bewildered.

‘You promised me I’d testify. I told you that was non-negotiable.’

‘It’s complicated, Kate.’ Miller was looking down now; at his coffee, at his hands, anywhere but at her.

‘Then forget it. Forget all of it.’ She jumped off her stool. ‘Richard is my brother. Understand? And Helen was my friend. She was a good person. She didn’t need to volunteer at that shelter but she did it because she wanted to help people. And now I’m going to help her. I’ll walk out of here into the nearest police station in order to testify if I have to.’

‘Er, Kate.’ Hanson had gathered up his laptop in a hurry and was hustling over to the kitchen counter, angling the screen for them all to see. ‘You might want to reconsider.’

Despite herself, Kate looked, then immediately wished she hadn’t.

Hanson had called up a news article from the BBC website. The report concerned the discovery of a man’s body among the foundations of a building site in Greater Manchester. Early indications were that he’d been killed in unexplained circumstances, possibly involving a fall. The dead man had been identified as a Patrick Martin Leigh.

‘This can’t be real. Tell me this isn’t real.’

‘Oh, it’s real,’ Miller said. ‘It’s like I told you at the beginning – there’s no going back.’

Kate was still staring at Miller, speechless, when Becca grabbed the laptop and took her by the hand to the apartment across the hall. She guided her on to the sofa and sat beside her with the laptop on her knees.

Kate looked blindly about the room. This situation wasn’t just bigger than her, it was swallowing her.

A man had plummeted to his death. He’d been murdered, Kate was sure. And all because, like her, he’d been willing to testify in the trial of Russell Lane.

‘Listen to me,’ Becca was saying. ‘You’re hurting. You’re scared. And I’m sorry for you, I am, but I think maybe you needed this. Your situation is real, Kate. It’s terrible but it’s happening. Now is the time to commit to it.’

But Kate didn’t feel capable of committing to anything. She felt powerless and disconnected, as if all of this was happening to someone else. Even the room around her had an unreal quality to it – the decor so dated it might have been a museum exhibit.

‘I have something to show you. Look.’

Becca circled her fingers over the laptop’s trackpad and clicked several times until a video began to play.

Kate took a moment before gazing down, then did a double-take. The video featured colour footage of the apartment next door, shot from an angle that suggested a camera had been fitted to the corner of the ceiling. It showed Kate sitting down to eat breakfast, talking with Hanson and Becca.

‘You’ve been filming me? You didn’t ask.’

‘Honey, until we know that you’re safe, you have absolutely no privacy. You’d better get used to it.’ She tapped a nail against the screen. ‘See what you’re doing here? The way you tilt your head? How you bite your lip? You do it all the time when you’re listening. Especially when you’re about to disagree with something.’

The Kate in the footage seemed oddly fake, as if she was watching an impostor. Her movements had an abrupt, doll-like quality.

‘When you argue, you lead with your chin. You scratch your temple when you’re flustered. And you constantly tuck your hair behind your ear. It’s a habit from when your hair was longer. If you can’t break the cycle, we’ll use clips or a hairband.’

Kate drew a fast breath and looked away but Becca cupped her chin and turned her face back to the screen. Another thirty seconds of footage elapsed and Kate saw herself push her hair back twice.

‘It’s the small tics that define you. You have to find new habits. And we really have to work on your walk. You spring forwards from your toes. It’s an athlete thing, but it’s distinctive. I have insoles for you to try.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘You’re kidding.’ Becca frowned, mimicking her. ‘We’ll soften your accent. Shift the emphasis you place on certain words. We’ll change all your markers.’ She tapped the screen with her nail again. ‘Some juicy stuff coming up.’

Kate studied her onscreen responses as Miller appeared and stepped around behind the breakfast counter, his hair tousled, the top two buttons of his shirt undone.

‘Girl, you have it all going on. There’s the hair-touching, the raised eyebrows, the fidgety lips. And the way you lean in. Do you even know how many times you almost touched him?’

‘That’s not true.’

‘Oh, relax, honey. Most of this stuff is instinctive. There’s not a lot we can change or really need to. Mostly we’re watching this for my own titillation. Besides, so much of what we’re seeing depends on the other person’s responses.’

Kate hated herself for it, but she couldn’t help glancing at Becca for more.

‘Mirroring.’ She nudged her. ‘He likes you, too. I haven’t seen him look at anyone that way in a very long time.’

Lloyd and Foster rode the elevator down to the NCA basement in an awkward silence. Lloyd was embarrassed and frustrated. She’d still been working on Foster up on the roof when Young had telephoned her mobile to say that a street kid called Patrick Leigh had decided to go high diving without a swimming pool in Manchester on the same night Kate Sutherland had been targeted. In itself, it might have meant nothing, except that Patrick had also been due to give evidence in the trial of Russell Lane. Aside from Kate, he was the last person to have seen Helen Knight alive – he’d been due to testify that he’d watched her climb into Russell’s BMW on the day she disappeared in the alley behind the Fresh Start Shelter. Coincidence was one thing, but this had to be something more.

Worse, there’d been a breakdown in communication with Greater Manchester Police and the news had hit local media before it reached the NCA. So far, the national press hadn’t made the link to the Lane family, though Lloyd guessed it was only a matter of time.

The elevator pinged, the doors parted, and Lloyd followed Foster along the basement corridor, already dreading the smug look on Young’s face when they entered the incident room. But they were intercepted before they got there by a uniformed officer.

‘DS Lloyd?’ The officer was flushed and out of breath. ‘This came in for you upstairs.’

He handed Lloyd a padded brown envelope. The words
URGENT: FAO DS JENNIFER LLOYD ONLY
were printed in marker pen across the front. There was no postage stamp and no delivery details.

‘Who gave this to you?’

The officer winced. ‘He had a bike helmet on. I’m sorry. There was a queue at the front desk and he just sort of walked up and dumped it. I didn’t see what it said until he was gone.’

Lloyd shot a look at Foster, then tore open the envelope. There was only one item inside. It was a glossy photographic print that looked as if it had been taken with some kind of night-vision equipment. There was a blurred, blackish corona around the edges while the details in the middle were picked out in varying shades of green.

Lloyd recognised the glass-fronted exterior of the clifftop house where Kate Sutherland had been living. The image showed a man stepping out through a sliding door.

‘Tell me I’m not going nuts,’ Foster said, ‘but isn’t that Nick Adams?’

‘You’re not going nuts. And be honest now – do you really still believe he has no questions to answer?’