Читать книгу Critical Incidents - Lucie Whitehouse - Страница 12

When Robin was in her final year of junior school, a local woman was kidnapped. Stephanie Slater was twenty-five, an estate agent, taken from a house she’d been showing in Great Barr, only a few miles away in the north of the city. It became a major national news story, one of the biggest manhunts in British history. Christine and Dennis whispered about it in the other room, waited ’til she’d gone to bed to watch the news, but the details had been in the air, all anyone could talk about: the ransom money snatched from a railway bridge, the coffin-sized box inside a green wheelie bin in which Slater had been locked in darkness for eight days, told that if she moved she’d be electrocuted. After she was released, she described how she’d talked to Michael Sams, and kept talking, so he’d be forced to understand that she was a person, a human being. Her bravery and presence of mind probably kept her alive.

Michael Sams, badger-faced, wooden-legged Michael Sams – by the following year, when Robin started at the grammar school and met Corinna, he’d become a playground bogeyman, the shadowy figure who offered you the bag of sweets, who shoved you into the back of a van as you walked home from the corner shop at twilight. Michael Sams’ll get you.

And then, two years later, barely fifty miles away in Gloucester, came Fred and Rose West.

She and Rin were twelve turning thirteen by then: prime-time adolescence. It had gone on for weeks, the systematic taking-apart of the house at Cromwell Street where, over decades, Fred and Rose had together raped, tortured and killed young women, including their own daughters. White forensic suits on the news, day after day, week after week, another set of remains and another and another, in the garden, in holes dug in the cellar floor. Again her parents had tried to shield her but away from Dunnington Road, she and Rin had followed the news with a horrified fascination, reading the papers, watching the news at Rin’s place when Di was at work and Will, babysitting, was doing his homework in the other room. There were few stories, thank god, as depraved as that. Rose was found guilty on ten counts of murder; Fred, charged with twelve, never stood trial. He committed suicide while on remand at Winson Green, HMP Birmingham, just a handful of miles up the road. Robin remembered: it was New Year’s Day.

Two of the biggest crime stories of the decade, both local, both sexual violence against young women, a double whammy that happened just as she and Corinna became aware of the news, aware that they were – or soon would be – young women, and that monsters were not just in books but opening their car doors to offer you a lift in the rain.

It started with Stephanie Slater, her bravery as she lay alone in the dark, injured and terrified. To Robin, she became a hero, a symbol of strength, and when the Wests and their house of horrors came to light, Robin had an epiphany: that was what she wanted. She wanted strength. She wanted to be a hero. She wanted to break down the door and rescue the next Stephanie Slater. She wanted to be the one who followed the Wests home, kicked Fred in the bollocks, and pulled the girl away from the car, the teetering edge of the void.

That was what she told anyone who asked why she’d decided to go into the police. Over the years, she’d made it sound more and more ridiculous – Behold the high-kicking, karate-chopping teen ninja girl! Marvel at the self-importance, the naivety! – but it was true; it had been the first reason before she had another.

Maggie hadn’t followed the Slater case in the news: she’d worked on it. Not immediately, on the original core team, but as soon as the investigation started to expand. Unsurprisingly, it loomed large in her memory. She’d kept quiet at Valerie’s, of course, but in the car on their way here to the office, she’d brought it up.

‘Kidnap for ransom? Really?’ Robin was dubious. Nothing about the Woodsons’ set-up said money, and Valerie’s only real savings, she’d told them, were in a small private pension that wouldn’t mature for another seventeen years.

‘Remember the Slater case?’ Maggie said. ‘It was her employers, the estate agents, that Sams went after – he wanted their insurance money. Valerie might not have much but Becca works for a silversmith.’

Hanley’s. Battered floral address book in hand, Valerie had given them the number. ‘They make photo frames and candlesticks,’ she said. ‘Hip flasks and the like. Corporate gifts.’

‘They’d have had a demand by now, wouldn’t they?’ said Robin. ‘Thursday to Tuesday – five days?’

‘Yes. Unless …’ Maggie had glanced across. ‘Julie Dart.’

Mentally shafted as she was, it had taken Robin three or four seconds to connect the dots. Then she did.

The investigation into Sams had expanded beyond Stephanie Slater. Based on similarities in the two cases, West Yorkshire Police believed that a year earlier, in Leeds, he had abducted another woman – if woman was the word. Julie Dart had been just eighteen when he’d taken her, a kidnapping ‘dry run’ that went wrong; she’d managed to escape from the coffin-sized box and he’d returned to find her desperately trying to get out of his workshop. He’d killed her.

‘If there’d been a demand, we wouldn’t be on the case, obviously – the police would be all over it,’ Maggie said. ‘But if something went wrong, he – or they – might not have got that far. He might have killed her, jettisoned the plan, like Sams did.’

‘But if it is abduction, don’t you think a sexual motive’s more likely?’

‘I do. But all lines of enquiry at this stage – everything’s on the table until we get something solid. What else? There’s a new notebook in the glovebox there; let’s get some of this down.’

The list was on the table in front of Robin now, a spiral-bound page of parental pain from basic heartbreak to worst nightmare: she’d met someone and run away, upped and left; had an accident; overdosed; killed herself; been killed. The only good-news scenario, really, was that she’d needed to get away and had taken a break somewhere to clear her head. But then why not tell her mother, especially when they were so close? Why put her through this? And wouldn’t she have taken something with her – a few clothes, her washbag? The only things she could see were missing, Valerie said, were the clothes she’d walked out in that morning.

And then there was her phone.

‘Anything in her online stuff?’

Robin clicked back onto Facebook as Maggie stood and came around the table. The picture she’d been looking at was a social-media classic. Taken the Christmas before last, fourteen months ago, it showed Becca and Lucy with their heads together, big living-our-best-lives grins. Slight over-exposure made their lineless skin near-perfect. They were both wearing beanies – Becca’s navy and studded with little silver beads, Lucy’s dark burgundy with a scarf the same colour – and both had long wings of hair protruding from their hats like Afghan ears, Lucy’s light brown, Becca’s darker. In their hands were red cardboard cups, presumably the hot chocolate for sale at the stand behind them, beyond which, just visible, were the Palladian columns of the Council House in Victoria Square. Christmas Market with my bestie! Becca had written. Love winter!

Besties, BFFs – the terms hadn’t existed when she and Corinna were that age. Not that they would have used them anyway – they didn’t make a thing of their friendship like that. Even if she hadn’t been up to her ears in nappies and revision when she was twenty-two, Robin doubted she would have been slinging her arms around her anyway, huddling in for photo after photo. Corinna might have made her do it occasionally – she was more of a cuddler.

She moved sideways to give Maggie a better view. ‘Nothing that rings alarm bells,’ she said. ‘It’s what you’d expect – pictures of her and her mates at parties and pubs, a couple of weddings, the occasional cat video or viral thing of someone doing something stupid. Nothing provocative, no bikini pictures or underwear-posing. I’ve been through all the comments for the past two years and there’s no one creepy or over-keen, nothing that struck me as dodgy. Almost everyone appears in pictures from several different occasions, and I cross-referenced the less regular ones, who all seem bona fide, friends of friends, etc. I found Nick.’

‘Show me?’

Robin scrolled back to September and a picture of a man in jeans and a maroon Adidas top. He was about thirty with curly hair cut short at the sides, left longer on top. Possibly – local pride – he’d been going for the Peaky Blinders look but it came off more Gilbert Blythe in Anne of Green Gables. The darkness of it made his skin look slightly vitamin-deficient by contrast but he was attractive, tall and fit, muscle visible round the shoulders under the burgundy nylon.

‘Hm. Is there just Facebook?’

‘No, Instagram too.’ Robin toggled to @BeccaWoods95’s curated vision of the world. Birmingham, UK. Food, books, fashion, design. 152 posts, 95 followers, 241 following.

‘The last thing was this, four days before she disappeared.’ She moved the cursor over a picture of a bowl of spiced chickpea soup reposted from a cooking blog. ‘About half of the posts are food-related, mostly photos of things she made, with little comments.’ She clicked on a square captioned ‘Sacher torte – worth every one of the 174,329 calories!’

The rest was books and arty shots of silhouettes and trees, a few bits of interior design – nice chairs and rugs and kitchens – and then fashion, all pretty standard stuff. A woman in a green backless evening gown on a moonlit terrace was hashtagged Goals but the handful of reposts from fashion blogs were down to earth otherwise: women in superior combinations of boots, skinny jeans and enormous cardigans. It was a sort of rose-tinted, better-dressed version of real life. ‘And only three solo selfies – nothing by prevailing standards.’ A couple of weeks ago, in Shepherd’s Bush, Robin had seen a woman pouting into her phone by the green veg at Tesco.

‘Hm. What time did she say, again – Lucy?’

‘Four.’

‘I’ve just had an email from Roger Hanley; he can do four thirty at his office.’

The Jewellery Quarter. ‘You take him, then; I’ll take her?’

Maggie looked at her. ‘I thought – just for now – we could work together.’

‘Don’t worry, I’m fully trained.’

‘That wasn’t why I—’

‘It’s fine. I’m fine. I’m not going to fall apart.’ Brooking no argument.

Maggie hesitated, then sighed – All right, against my better judgement. She reached for her coat. ‘I’m going to run down and get a sandwich. What can I get you?’

‘Nothing. I’m okay for now.’

‘Robin.’

‘Something simple then – cheese and tomato. Thanks.’

Maggie shrugged the coat on. ‘Will you be all right here?’

‘For ten minutes, while you buy a couple of sandwiches?’

The door closed and Maggie’s boots clomped down the steep wooden staircase towards the street door. The office took up two rooms on the third floor of a red-brick building at the nether end of Cannon Street, above a hairdresser, opposite a bridal shop and the entrance to the parking garage where they’d left the car. Coming in, Robin had seen the city centre shops she remembered of old, Poundland and Coral bookies, multiple outlets selling cheap sportswear, but just down the street, apparently, there was now a large branch of Jigsaw.

‘Oh yes,’ Maggie had said, ‘we’re getting proper posh. We’ve got a Jack Wills and a Muji within a two-minute walk now, get us. I’m very partial to the Japanese stationery, I’ve got to admit; I’ve bought all sorts of bits and bobs – little staplers and notebooks and what have you. Can’t resist it.’

Downstairs, the door slammed shut. Robin stood up. Her eyes were dry from lack of sleep and the hour and a half she’d just spent staring at Becca Woodson’s life online. She stretched her neck and did a circuit of the dining table that dominated the main room. This was where Maggie took meetings, she said, and also where she did her desk work. The office had two laptops, one exclusively Maggie’s and an ageing Dell, which Robin would share with Lorraine, the woman who came in two days a week to do the billing and other paperwork. She was currently halfway through a fortnight in Lanzarote, Maggie said; she took a break in February every year, to help with her SAD.

A desk and a bank of filing cabinets were housed in a second, smaller room that led off this one and got its only natural light from the glass panels along the top of the dividing wall. A handful of large leather-leaved plants dotted here and there and that was it, her new place of work.

She took the kettle from its tray on top of the filing cabinets and carried it out to the miniature kitchen shared with the temp agency in the rooms across the landing. With some difficulty, she got it into position under the tap in the tiny sink and filled it.

Back in the office, she brought up the West Midlands Police’s Twitter feed. She’d been checking it every ten or fifteen minutes, skimming over cycle safety and community policing notices to the frequent ones about serious crimes – another stabbing in Handsworth, a fatal hit-and-run in Balsall Heath, a slavery charge brought against two brothers in Lozells. There’d been a run of tweets with photos hashtagged MISSING. ‘Have you seen Bill Scott? He’s missing from West Bromwich and we’re really concerned for him. Please call 101 with any information.’ She’d scrolled through them looking – hoping – for Josh; instead, with a jolt, she’d seen Corinna’s face. Murder enquiry launched following Edgbaston fire. Corinna Legge (pictured) sadly passed away yesterday. Heart in her throat, Robin clicked on the link and read the short post on the police site but there was nothing new, still just the barest details of the fire, the search for Josh Legge (pictured), believed to have been at the scene when the blaze broke out.

All the local news sources had the story – the Birmingham Post, the Mail and Midlands Today – but again, none of them had a single new detail. Either the police were keeping information back or they didn’t have anything.

Corinna Legge sadly passed away yesterday. She read the words again. They were ungraspable, completely surreal. Aliens land in the Bull Ring; Elvis spotted at Villa Park; Corinna Legge sadly passed away yesterday.

Yesterday – it was only technically still true. It was one o’clock, already almost thirty-six hours now since the neighbours had sounded the alarm, a day and a half. Rin was falling further and further behind, slipping away.

Robin reached for the notebook and turned to a new page. ‘Assuming arson’, she wrote, and underlined it. Quickly, she put down everything that came into her head, the earliest ideas – botched burglary; extortion attempt; feud with a third party; the road rage she’d mentioned off the cuff to the police – and the ones that, as the hours had started to stretch, she’d begun to have to entertain: someone Josh had crossed in business; something at Corinna’s work; someone obsessed with one of them – a man or woman scorned, a bunny boiler; the partner of that person.

Revenge.

She read the list back. Burglary was still the only thing on it that seemed plausible. Rin and Josh woken in the small hours by a noise downstairs, investigating and confronting whoever it was they found, refusing to stand down. They would have tried to fight back, defend their home – yes, they would.

The rest made no sense. Josh’s factory manufactured metal springs, and it had been going steadily for decades, probably a century at this point. People he did business with became family friends. Once, years ago, she’d been at theirs just before Christmas and he’d brought home six bottles of Scotch, all of them gifts from customers or suppliers. He’d shared another six between his sales manager and tool-maker. He was an old-fashioned manufacturer, making things that people needed and selling them, not some dodgy property developer, kicking tenants out of their homes, stiffing people on contracts.

And for another woman to feel scorned enough, Josh would have to be involved with her, surely. He was kind, a gentleman – what if someone had mistaken his kindness for attraction? If he’d been pursued, caught at a moment of weakness …

No. Robin would stake her worldly goods – the boxes behind the bedroom door and the ones now moved to the garage – on him being faithful.

You moved yesterday?

She remembered the look Thomas had given Patel. They were right, of course – she would have been all over that, too. There were such things as coincidences, but they were suspicious until proven otherwise, every time.

Her stomach turned over. No. She stopped herself. Just think: how else could that be connected?

Could Hinton be involved somehow? Was that possible? He was at large, whereabouts unknown – he could be in Birmingham. And he certainly had contacts here. But she was the person who’d let him go – she’d been fired for it, plastered all over the sodding Mail and the Evening Standard. Even if it hadn’t been crystal to him that day, he’d know now. So – who? The person who had actually killed Farrell? An enemy of his?

No – it was too intricate, too massive a leap. Even if it was Hinton himself, which was unlikely enough, or Farrell’s killer, why would they harm Corinna? And how would they even know she and Rin were friends? No one would find them posing together on social media. Plus, there’d been no threat, no claim afterwards – what would be the point of doing it if she, the target in this scenario, wasn’t even aware? No, this was crazy stuff.

She bent her head, dug her nails into her scalp. What the fuck was going on? How could she find out?

Picking up her phone, she opened Contacts. Last night, she’d rung Di, Corinna’s mother. She’d been ashamed of how relieved she’d felt to get voicemail. She’d left a message saying just that she was heartbroken, and heartbroken for her. ‘If I can do anything, Di, anything at all, please let me know.’ Just words, however much she meant them.

Will’s number was underneath his mother’s. Robin had it from group texts – photos of Peter, details for birthday parties and dinners – but she hadn’t actually called him since the old days, when she and Rin were sixth formers and he’d used to pick them up from parties, sober as a judge in his little Peugeot. Will didn’t drink, never had. ‘Just not my thing,’ he said but Rin told her it was deeper than that. He was afraid that if he started drinking, he’d never stop.

‘Does he think that for a reason? Does he feel like he’s an alcoholic?’

‘No, but it runs in families; alcoholics quite often have alcoholic kids. He says he can’t risk it.’

Will had been an adult since he was twelve, responsible and reliable as bedrock. While they’d been out getting smashed, he’d been studying. He’d done medicine at Edinburgh and he was a consultant neurologist now, at the Alexandra in Redditch. His wife, Lily, was an anaesthetist and they lived with their son and daughter in a snazzy barn conversion near Henley. Not bad for a bloke whose nickname at the boys’ grammar, where irony was king, had been Thrill. But was he ever actually that boring? He was no Sean Harvey, tearing the place up with his delinquent tendencies and come-to-bike-shed eyes, but when you could hear what he was saying, Will was funny, which had become more apparent as, with the advent of Lily, he’d become more confident and thus more audible.

He answered almost immediately. ‘Robin?’

They spoke at the same time. ‘How are you?’

‘I don’t even know,’ he said. ‘Stunned.’

‘How’s your mum?’

‘She’s … not good. She’s with Peter at the hospital, she was there all night.’

‘The police came to talk to me yesterday – you probably know. They said he broke a lot of bones.’

‘Yes, but the real issue’s the lung. They keep calling it a puncture but it was more of a tear – the end of the broken rib tore the lung. They’ve operated, obviously, but now it’s a waiting game. If he gets an infection, it could all just …’ He trailed off into silence.

‘What happened, Will? What are the police saying?’

‘I don’t know. Nothing. The same as yesterday.’

‘You don’t think Josh did this, do you?’

‘No. I don’t.’ He paused. ‘But I don’t know what else to think, either. If he didn’t, where the hell is he?’