Читать книгу The Forgotten Child - D. E. White - Страница 16

‘Do you want a glass of water?’

She could hear someone running a tap, an arm around her shoulders, but she was still miles away, years away, crouched alone in the flat with a dead woman. It wasn’t until the emergency services arrived that the other body had been discovered. A three-month-old baby girl had been suffocated where she lay, and hidden under the pile of blankets. At last she sat up, blinking away tears. ‘Sorry. I tried not to think about it and I’ve managed to shut it all away. But now …’

‘It’s all right, you’re doing well. I’m sorry to have to ask and upset you, but this could be really important.’ DC Marriot leant across the kitchen table again. ‘Can you manage to finish for us, do you think?’

Holly took a gulp of water and nodded. The shame flooded her, as she had known it would. But she had admitted all this in court, there was no point in denying it now. ‘The ambulance call handler told me to start CPR, and I … I told her I was doing compressions, but I wasn’t. I just froze, and I couldn’t bring myself to press down on her chest. I just stared at her all that time …’

‘I read the coroner’s report, Holly, and you must know what it said. Larissa died of strangulation. Going by the estimated time of death, by the time you arrived there was probably nothing anyone could have done. She was dead already,’ DS Harlow told her.

‘I know …’ But there might have been a chance, a chance she could have saved her, and nothing anybody said – then or now – could convince her otherwise. Holly bit her lip, and continued slowly, ‘I was terrified they would find Jayden outside somewhere, dead too, but later the police said he was a suspect. There was so much blood, I was sure it had to be at least partly his. There was never anything mentioned about another child, though. There wasn’t!’

‘No, we reviewed the files, and it appears that Larissa was never officially registered at any doctor’s surgery or hospital, and her child, or children, weren’t either. In fact, legally her baby didn’t exist. I’ve double-checked, and it looks like – if I had to hypothesise – perhaps if they had another child, they slept on the sofa-bed? It does seem odd that there was no evidence at all of a boy.’

‘They would have been so near in age that perhaps any baby clothes, supplies and toys would have been assumed to be the dead girl’s.’ DS Harlow shrugged. ‘If this boy was living there with his parents and sister there was nothing obvious to suggest his existence. In fact, the few possessions they owned were already packed up, as though a move was imminent.’

The other woman nodded. ‘It was assumed that once he had the money, your brother and his family were going to run. But after Larissa’s murder, Jayden never got back in contact at all? Not even to collect the money you were bringing him?’ DC Marriot was tapping the table idly with one hand now. Her fingernails were short and colourless.

‘No. The money he took from Lydia wasn’t in the flat, and his bank account hadn’t been used for months.’ Holly looked directly at both police officers. Her voice flat, she said, ‘The investigation was pure hell for my family, with police interviews and then dealers from the Seaview being arrested. The other families blamed us for bringing police onto the estate; my dad had a fight with DI Harper …’

There was a glimmer of amusement, quickly hidden, in DC Marriot’s glacial eyes, and even Holly, torn between emotions and fighting hysteria, felt her lips quirk.

Steph continued, ‘But the evidence showed the blood in the flat belonged to Alexi and Roman Balinta, the men who eventually confessed to killing Larissa and her baby girl. There was no sign that Jayden had harmed either his baby or his girlfriend. Yet both men denied seeing your brother. It was Larissa who attacked both men with a knife, obviously defending her children.’

Holly nodded, fiddling with her phone. ‘Yes. I still remember how in court they said Larissa fought back.’ Her voice shook precariously but she carried on, ‘But Jayden was gone again, and then just before Christmas, the police came round to say that some random dealer, a real small-time player, had confessed to helping get rid of Jayden’s body. He said he dumped it off Rydden Bay soon after Larissa was murdered, and that he did it on Roman’s instructions.’

Holly choked a bit. ‘As you know, his body has never been found, and Roman wouldn’t say anything at all about the dealer’s claim. As far as I remember he just kept saying no comment. I suppose I almost hoped Jay was dead by then. The waiting for the court case and seeing Lydia and my dad struggling to get by … It was all in the papers about Jayden’s past, and our family got dragged through the dirt. They made it sound like we were pure evil. It was a really shit time, but we just about got through it.’

‘Larissa was one of the girls trafficked by Joey and Gareth Nicholls, wasn’t she? I saw on the files that Gareth was charged with several offences, but he only served three years because of a technicality. There’s been nothing on him since.’

Again, that change of tone when the Nicholls brothers were mentioned. Nicholls Transport were still doing their thing, all these years later, and the police still couldn’t touch them. ‘Yes. It came out that Larissa originally thought she was engaged to some bloke up in Yorkshire – that’s where she came from – but she was only fourteen, and he turned out to be part of a scheme to round up girls arranged by Joey. Larissa’s mum was a junkie and Larissa had been skipping school, hanging around the town. I suppose she was an easy target, and when you lot looked for her, she’d just vanished. She apparently told her mum she was moving away with her fiancé.’

‘They call it the “lover boy” sting, or the “Romeo game”,’ Steph volunteered. ‘These men find vulnerable girls, sadly often those who have fallen through cracks in the care system, and present themselves as romantic interests. Once the girl is hooked, they slowly draw her away from any friends or family, and then when she runs off to “get married” it comes out that girl is a frequent runaway, skips school, maybe has a history of petty crime already … In reality of course she is then sucked into a system of abuse and is exceptionally difficult, if not impossible, to trace. We do our best, and naturally missing children are a priority, but I’ve worked on cases where a teenager has been missing for weeks before anyone starts to take notice.’

‘I never could understand why Jayden didn’t mention Larissa and the baby when he asked for money,’ Holly said. ‘We never even found out how they originally met, but I suppose it might have been when he was dealing. The boys used to deliver to the clients at these special houses, and then eye up the girls who were working there. But if Jay had fallen for Larissa so much that they’d not just had a baby, but had two children, why didn’t he tell me?’

‘Your brother knew you were friends with Cathryn Davies, so perhaps he thought you might be angry he had left her, and his other children, for Larissa,’ DC Marriot suggested. In her mind’s eye Holly could see the boy, Jayden’s boy, lying helpless and unconscious under his white shroud of hospital sheets. Another child.

‘Yeah, maybe. Roman and Alexi were high, weren’t they, when they went to collect Jay’s debt? Mason was always bigging up his sons, even Niko, the baby of the family, saying they were going to inherit the business, going to be millionaires … But they were always losers, and violent with it. They didn’t have to kill Larissa, or her baby.’ Holly felt empty now, hollow and sick. She still had nightmares about the baby, even though she hadn’t discovered the tiny body.

‘Supposing the boy in hospital is Jayden’s … He would have been around a year old when his mother was murdered, so perhaps your brother took him to safety? We aren’t saying your brother is definitely alive, but I would say it’s a possibility. The other possibility, of course, is that Jayden did escape that night, with his other child, but was later murdered, and the child has been raised by someone else.’

‘If he is alive … Fuck, I can’t even think …’ Holly shook her head, scraping back her hair with all ten fingertips. ‘I just can’t imagine it, but my dad is going to go mental when you tell him it’s a possibility.’

The two women stood up to go, and DC Marriot turned back at the front door. ‘Holly, be careful, won’t you? This isn’t just about the boy, and his possible identity. We also have to consider who left him in your car.’

Holly sighed. ‘I’m hardly going to forget, am I? But yeah, thanks, I’ll take care.’

***

Holly watched the two policewomen get into their car and head off to her dad’s flat. He still lived next to the betting shop, but one of her cousins ran the bookies business now. Most of the time her dad was too pissed to remember his own name, so good luck them getting anything coherent out of him. They’d probably get the wheels nicked off their car too, just for going onto the Seaview.

What a mess. Her head was buzzing, and she wandered around the house picking things up and putting them down. Jayden’s son? If he was alive why had he never been in touch? Larissa had had another child – given the timeframe, it fitted. Either that or they were wrong about the age of the boy in hospital and Jayden had survived, and got over Larissa pretty quick. Perhaps they were right with the second theory. Maybe her brother had given his baby son to someone he trusted to look after him, but then got himself in trouble with the wrong people. Again.