A Private Investigation Read online

  She had then done as she was told and called DI Terek directly. He took it in the main office, and waved Smith over towards him, indicating that DCI Reeve ought to be here as well, and Smith reached her on the internal phone. Terek still had Serena on the line when Reeve arrived, and he relayed what had taken place at the college to her.

  The chief inspector wasn’t new in the role anymore, and it showed.

  ‘Ask Serena to get in touch with the principal, then, and say I’m going to ring him in’, with a glance at her watch, ‘fifteen minutes. We have evidence now that the girl was wandering about alone after dark and that she may have gone into the town. We need those fifteen hundred pairs of eyes.’

  Then Reeve took the phone from Terek and said to Serena, ‘We want an appeal for information made to every pupil this afternoon but we don’t want panic. Tell the principal I’ll discuss the wording with him when I call, OK? And well done to whoever moved things on just now.’

  When that part was done, Reeve turned to them and said, ‘Does anyone know this railway place?’

  Terek looked blank but Smith said, ‘Yes, I know where it is – the south-west corner of Dockmills. It’s on the list of places we visit when we’re having a crackdown on misuse of drugs in public spaces.’

  Terek said, ‘A children’s play park?’

  Smith shrugged – just another one of those occasions when words seem inadequate.

  Reeve said, ‘Is it very big? Not acres of it, are there?’

  ‘No. Maybe half an acre and few trees and bushes. You can still get from there down to The Crescent along the old railway line. There’s an unofficial footpath.’

  One cannot download local knowledge like that. When the officer leaves, it goes with him or her, and the service that remains is a little poorer for the fact. The bobby on the beat is an endangered species but there is no campaign to prevent his final extinction.

  ‘Is this it?’

  Terek had the satellite view on his laptop. When he enlarged it at Smith’s request, the little oblong of green was visible, as was the course of the old railway running south towards the northern city centre.

  Smith nodded and Reeve said, ‘Oh, right, I know where that is. It’s tiny, isn’t it? We need someone to take a look straight away.’

  Smith resisted the temptation to take a theatrical look around the office because apart from the three of them, it was empty, and Reeve already had an important phone call to make. It was just a few minutes’ drive and-

  Terek said, ‘I’ll arrange for a uniform vehicle to get over there, ma’am. We’re not doing a full search yet. A couple of officers will be enough to confirm that she isn’t still there.’

  And the detective chief inspector agreed, giving the idea just a nod as she went off to her own office to wonder about how to word the appeal that needed to be made in every classroom at the college during afternoon registration. What was she thinking, though? A couple of uniforms? Smith had never shared the amused contempt of many CID officers for the uniformed branch of the service but the work they do is different, or there wouldn’t be any point in…

  Until very recently, he would have said something. But ever since that letter had passed across the desk of DCI Reeve, Smith had felt the sand beginning to wash away beneath him, as the tides of time flow on, and the waves of days come and go. The power he once had of making changes, of shaping events to his own will in this building and out there in the city, was ebbing away. It was almost gone.

  Terek was saying, ‘…so we’ll need to get a look at the girl’s phone records, DC.’

  ‘I’ve already emailed the details to you. It just needs a signature.’

  ‘Excellent. And we might need a recent photograph of her, I suppose so-’

  ‘There’s one waiting on Serena’s desktop, sir.’

  ‘Really? You see, I said you were the man to run the desk on this one. How are we going to manage without you?’

  But it seemed that Ann Crisp, who was the best family liaison officer they’d had in a long time, hadn’t got the message about Detective Sergeant Smith – she called him directly about half an hour later. She said she was outside the Johnson house, taking a break for five minutes, which meant she was having a cigarette. Smith asked her whether she’d picked up anything concerning the mother’s boyfriend, Roy Green.

  ‘Well, he hasn’t turned up. He’s a van driver, motor spares, but Penny Johnson has had a long talk on her phone with him, and from what I could gather he seemed concerned enough. He was asking the obvious questions. I know what you’re checking, DC. I’m pretty sure the two of them were out together last night, and that he stayed here. He seems to have left early before Penny realised that Zoe wasn’t in her room.’

  Smith said, ‘Fair enough, Ann. I can’t find anything on him either. Has anyone else turned up showing a bit too much interest or concern?’

  Ann Crisp understood this question, too. It seems bizarre but guilty parties will not infrequently try to involve themselves in the family’s distress and even the police investigation. Some might simply be trying to hide in plain sight; for others, the prurience is part of the warped character that has led to the offence in the first place. Suffice it then to say this – if you are unfortunate enough to find and report a body to the police, the first person they will be taking a close look at is you.

  Ann replied, ‘No. Mrs Johnson has had a couple of phone calls, so word is going around locally at least. Has this gone into the media yet?’

  ‘Not as far as I know but it will this afternoon. The DCI is organising an appeal for information at the school. There will be four thousand Facebook posts by 16.00.’

  He heard her take a draw on the cigarette and had a sudden longing for one himself. He was more annoyed about this than he had first admitted to himself. Nobody wants to retire from the game sitting on the bench, do they? When the final whistle blows, you want to be out there on the pitch.

  He said, ‘What about the neighbours?’

  ‘I’ve met next door, Maureen, the woman who was supposed to be keeping an eye on the kids. The youngest ones are round there now. Maureen is… Maureen might be a shilling short of a pound but she’s harmless enough, I’d say. Blaming herself, obviously, as women do.’

  No, Smith told himself, I’m not going there, not today. But he liked the reference to the old money, to sterling and the whiff of slower days and steadier times.

  He said, ‘And Zoe? Anything? What sort of fourteen-year-old is she?’

  ‘You mean, is she sexually active?’

  Smith blinked and looked at the phone as if he and Ann Crisp were on a video call.

  ‘Well, that’s one possible interpretation of the question. But I thought we might get there by degrees. Approach the matter with a little circumspection…’

  ‘If that’s how you like to do these things, DC, we can play it that way.’

  And surely in the old days before decimalisation, women didn’t make all these suggestive remarks, did they? Or maybe they did but not to him. Maybe he just hadn’t met the right kind of girls back then. Or the wrong kind.

  Ann Crisp must have got tired of waiting for a response. She said, ‘I know Serena Butler had a quick look around the bedroom – I had a longer look. Mrs Johnson was keen for me to do so. I didn’t find anything that made me think Zoe was there yet. Is that circumspect enough?’

  ‘Yes, perfectly, Officer Crisp.’

  ‘Mum is actually a bit protective. She told me about an older boy – well, a man – who was hanging around a few weeks ago. He lives a few doors up. Mrs Johnson knows his mother but when he started turning up for no obvious reason, she soon worked it out. She knows Zoe is going to attract attention but I think she made it clear he wasn’t welcome.’

  ‘How old? Did you get a name?’

  But he knew as he asked what the answer would be, at least to the second question.

  ‘He’s nineteen. Stephen Sweeney, 54 Nelson Road, the same road as the Johnsons’ house. I
thought you’d want that, it’s mainly why I called.’

  ‘Good stuff, Ann. I’ll have a look at him.’

  She was quiet then, and Smith began to wonder whether there was more to come.

  ‘And also, DC, I called because this is probably the last time, isn’t it? The next time I’m liaising, it’s not going to be with you, is it?’

  ‘No, not unless you start making a nuisance of yourself when I’m pruning the roses or taking an afternoon nap.’

  ‘Well, anyway, I wish you the best of luck.’

  He was waiting for something to signal that the call was over, when Ann Crisp’s voice came again.

  ‘Oh, I almost forgot. Zoe has a Facebook account. Has anybody looked at it yet?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I’ll get Waters onto it, he should be back here eventually.’

  ‘I glanced at it. Not much there at all. She seems to be more of a follower than anything. I think she’s a young fourteen, or younger than she thinks she is. I don’t think she’s found herself yet, if you know what I mean.’

  That was the end of the call. Smith sat and wondered for a moment whether there is a difference between not finding yourself and being lost. Had Zoe Johnson got herself lost because she was a bit lost? He hoped so. He hoped that’s all there was to it.

  Over the next half an hour, Terek was on his mobile several times but it was nothing that he needed to share. It might be Serena or Chris, or it might be John Wilson, still out at the shopping centre and saying they’d got enough for a football team now. Smith passed some of the time searching for Stephen Sweeney in records, but there was nothing – it seemed to be an unusual surname for Norfolk, but when he ventured into new realms and looked for him on Facebook, he found there were dozens. They were all over the world. He managed to narrow it down to the UK – though if you asked how he did so afterwards, he would not be able to tell you – but beyond that he could make no progress. Sometimes a profile said where someone lived and sometimes it did not. There was no rhyme nor reason to it, as far as he could see.

  If Stephen did have a profile, of course, Waters would be able to glance over it and say that he had sent a message to Zoe on the 3rd of this month, that they had eight friends in common and that Mr Sweeney’s dream holiday was a visit to Disneyland, Paris.

  ‘DC? I didn’t know you were on Facebook!’

  Terek was by his desk and Smith hadn’t seen him coming.

  ‘I’m not. I wouldn’t have a clue.’

  The detective inspector peered at the monitor over his rimless glasses.

  Smith said, ‘I’m on it but I’m not on it, if that makes sense. Just following up a name that Ann Crisp gave me.’

  ‘Ah, she’s reported in, has she?’

  ‘Yes. You were on the phone’ – which he probably was.

  ‘Anything useful?’

  ‘No, not that I can see. Just a name that came up in conversation.’

  Terek was looking more closely but Smith offered nothing more; he didn’t mind asking Waters to sort this out but he wasn’t giving DI Simon the satisfaction.

  ‘Alright. Well, I’ve just heard from the uniform team that went over to the play park. Teams actually, there were two patrols in the area. The place was empty, which isn’t surprising in this weather. They conducted a search and found no sign of anything untoward.’

  ‘We’ve made a start, then.’

  It was years since Smith had been out on the Dockmills but he could remember the play park being surrounded by hawthorn scrub and brambles – there was no way that a handful of uniformed officers had searched their way through all that in an hour. And had any of them found their way onto the footpaths that led away from it?

  Something in the sergeant’s manner seemed to have made Terek uneasy.

  ‘There isn’t much more we can do at this stage. The girl hasn’t been missing even twenty-four hours. The announcement to the school will probably produce some intelligence, something to get us pointed in the right direction.’

  The many Stephen Sweeneys of the social media universe faded to black as the screen on Smith’s ancient monitor went into power-save mode, and he made no move to restore them to the light. It was almost four o’clock. Had Waters and Butler been told to remain at the college to deal with the torrent of intelligence that was sure to result from form tutors having a word before Art or French or PE? Why was he even having to wonder? Why hadn’t he been told?

  Smith’s silence was worrying Simon Terek. There had not been time for the two of them to develop a proper working relationship, let alone any sort of friendship – remember that Smith had delivered his resignation to DCI Reeve on the very day that Terek joined the criminal investigations team at Kings Lake. Nothing personal, everyone had said repeatedly, but even so…

  Now, for some reason, Terek found that he could not walk away from Smith’s desk without saying something more. He knew none of the details, but of course he did know that his sergeant had more than once acted as the senior investigating officer on major investigations.

  ‘DC, I get the feeling that you would be doing things differently.’

  ‘Yes, I would.’

  ‘Would you care to elaborate?’

  And that was a better question than it might appear. Did he care enough this close to the end? Why should he care when it seemed clear to him that he was already being gently manoeuvred out to pasture? In this situation, and if it had been almost anything else – theft, smuggling of any description, fraud, even apprehending dealers – he might have thought to himself, no, take all the rope you want and go hang yourself.

  But it wasn’t anything else. It was this - a missing girl. Two things on occasion haunted his dreams, and this was one of them. Had history made him afraid? Was he over-reacting simply because it was a girl that was missing? Zoe Johnson had nothing in common with the others apart from a certain prettiness, and the man who had murdered them was locked up in a high-security unit at Long Hill, a hundred miles from here. Even so, there seemed nothing to be gained now by not speaking his mind.

  ‘Waters found out from the girl they interviewed that Zoe said she was going into town. We’ve had, what, a dozen officers in the town all day just watching the crowds and they don’t have a picture of Zoe yet. Or do they? I’m supposed to be managing the desk and I don’t know whether that has been done or even discussed.’

  Terek said quietly, ‘It hasn’t. Anything else?’

  ‘Zoe has mobile phone and Facebook accounts. Those should have been immediate priorities. I don’t have a clue about Facebook but I know two people who do. They’re both on my team but I don’t know where they are or what they’re doing. Two hours ago I emailed a request to get access to Zoe’s phone records, and so far I’ve had nothing back.’

  It’s not that he’s annoyed, thought Terek, even though he plainly is; it’s the way he translates that into arguments as cold and sharp as surgical instruments. And there is more to come.

  ‘We need a list of the names of Zoe’s other friends at school – there will be more than two – and we need to visit them in their homes, not in front of teachers. There are a hundred reasons why teenagers will not tell you what you need to know the first time you ask them. Maybe Serena has that list – again, I don’t know. I hope we’re not going to claim that we have searched the Railway play-park because we haven’t, not properly. I’m not blaming uniform, they did what they were told. But if Zoe Johnson is lying in the middle of a bramble-patch out there in the rain, they won’t have found her.’

  It was the first time anyone had voiced a possibility like that.

  Terek said, ‘Really, DC? It’s far too early to say that. We have no reason to suspect anything like that at this stage.’

  Smith got up from his chair, and Terek made a tiny movement, as if he thought this was about to get physical. But Smith went the other way, around to Serena’s computer. He clicked the mouse and everything came back to life. As he had hoped, the picture was still there.

>   He said, ‘Take a look. Ignore the silly expressions. Does Zoe Johnson look like a potential victim to you, sir?’

  Terek did as he was told, and then he shook his head.

  ‘DC, there’s nothing to go on here. It’s just a couple of schoolgirls.’

  Smith was silent, watching him, waiting for another answer.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The single raised eyebrow was infuriating, and never more so than now. Smith’s gaze went back to the photograph, and Terek said, ‘Well? Does she look like one to you?’

  ‘Yes, she does. She absolutely does, as they say these days.’

  Chapter Seven

  Dawn stood at the window of the Kings Lake Central canteen and watched the rain blurring the city lights. It was after six o’clock and she should have been home by now. The other two girls had left dead on time, and she couldn’t blame them, not after what they’d been told today. All the rumours these past few months had been true – the canteen was to close at the end of March. Vending machines would take their place, and these would be situated for convenience on the ground floor. The station services manager from Norwich had reassured them that the redundancy package would be a generous one.

  So, she would not stand here many more times and admire the view. The third floor always had been a daft place to have a canteen, of course, but they’d made it work, they had given the officers a proper service and there had been plenty of laughs over the years. She looked down at the rear car park of the station, and saw the lights of a car being driven to the entrance – a maroon-coloured Peugeot saloon. That was Detective Sergeant Smith. He was one of the good sort, a proper old-fashioned gent but naughty with it. Remember the time he caught that mouse in the kitchen for us, and we told him to kill it. But he put it in a plastic cup and took it outside, he let it go behind the mortuary. He said it wouldn’t matter if it frightened the technician to death as they wouldn’t have far to carry her. He got free bacon sandwiches for a week.

  The Peugeot turned left and headed north away from the centre of town. Dawn was sure he lived on the Millfield estate, so he wasn’t going home yet either. And then she remembered that he was finishing at Christmas as well, retiring. He hardly looked that old. But it’s all change these days, she thought, turning away from the window. A few more tables to be wiped down, ready for the morning rush.