‘I can understand that must have been quite a shock to you,’ Kim said, once Adaje had taken a couple of sips of water.
Travis’s quick thinking had prevented the woman suffering a nasty tumble to the ground. He had held her firm until she had come back around.
‘I know everyone says this but my father wouldn’t hurt a fly. He was a quiet, unassuming and very gentle man. He was softly spoken, never got ruffled or stressed or angry and, believe me, I tested that in my early teens. He would always walk away from an argument. He hated conflict of any kind.’
‘Was there anything at all that you can remember from the days immediately before he went missing?’ Kim asked again.
Adaje shook her head. ‘The day before he disappeared he’d been out job hunting. He’d run into “the boss” as he still called him.’
‘The boss?’ Kim queried.
‘Yes, the man for whom my father was working when he had his accident. My dad said he’d been offered five hundred pounds to drop the case,’ she said, nodding as the memory cleared in her head.
‘He had politely refused the offer. The solicitor had told him to have no contact with his old workplace. The sad thing is, if they’d offered him his job back, he would probably have accepted, even though they were at fault.’
‘Wait a minute, Adaje, your father was suing the company he worked for?’ Kim clarified.
She nodded. ‘Well, company is a bit of a stretch, but yes, they were negligent. Gave him a pair of faulty ladders to climb onto a barn, and he fell and badly injured his knee.’
‘A barn?’ Kim asked, stealing a look at Travis.
‘Yes, my father was a labourer on a farm.’
‘And the boss’s name?’ Kim asked, fighting the dread in her stomach.
‘Oh yes, I’ve never forgotten. The boss’s name was Mister Cowley.’
FIFTY
‘Bryant, don’t you think our time is better spent heading for Nexus?’ Dawson asked, wishing he’d never given his colleague the keys. Had he been working on his own, he wouldn’t have allowed himself to be baited or sidetracked by Frost, and he’d be on his way to Stourbridge to talk to Bubba’s boyfriend. They were going to talk to a young girl who had no physical injuries, instead of the partner of a man whose head had been severed from his body. He wasn’t getting the priority.
‘We’re two minutes away. It can’t hurt to have a quick word,’ Bryant answered, exiting the shopping complex. ‘You don’t find it strange that this closing your eyes thing has come up twice now?’
‘Just coincidence,’ he muttered, as Bryant turned into Hollytree.
It didn’t help that Dawson had not been back to the Hollytree estate since that night.
He felt a slight tremble as Bryant drove further into the belly of the estate. The council houses around the perimeter were like a skirt. Inside them were the maisonette blocks like a petticoat, covering the flesh which was the row of tower blocks at the centre.
‘You just missed the turn,’ he advised Bryant.
‘Bloody place is like a maze,’ Bryant said, taking the next left.
Bryant had been driving around this estate for more than twenty years but his little ‘mistake’ would mean they would not drive past the exact spot where Dawson had been attacked. The place where he’d thought he was going to die.
An image flashed into Dawson’s mind. Curled on the floor, trying to protect himself from the four pairs of feet pounding him. The shame brought colour to his cheeks. Yes, there had been four of them, and yes they’d had a knife.
And yes, he was eternally grateful that Tracy Frost had come along when she had, saving him from further injury, but still he couldn’t look at the woman without remembering that night.
‘You do know I’m not as stupid as I look,’ he said to his colleague.
‘That’s a bloody relief.’ Bryant said, parking the car. ‘So, which one is it?’
Dawson nodded towards the end property and headed towards it.
The door was opened by an Indian woman, of slight build, whose hair was tidily encased in a yellow headscarf.
‘Hello, Mrs Gupta,’ he said, showing his identification. ‘We’re here about Aisha. May we speak with her?’
Mrs Gupta hesitated for a minute, and then nodded and stepped back, away from the staircase that led up to the second level of the property.
Both he and Bryant shuffled in past a collection of coats fighting for space on two hooks.
‘Please, go through,’ she said, before calling her daughter.
A colourful picture of Guru Nanak above the fireplace told him he was entering a home that followed the Sikh faith.
Dawson knew a little about the religion: that it hailed from the Punjab region of India and followed the teachings of eleven gurus. A couple of years before he had accompanied his girlfriend to the wedding of one of her colleagues and had made it his business to disabuse himself of his ignorance.
‘You are not the men we spoke to at the police station,’ Mrs Gupta said, suspiciously.
Dawson lowered himself to the sofa, even though he had not been invited. He felt imposing towering over her petite frame.
‘We are from another department, Mrs Gupta. We’re detectives.’
‘I asked to see detectives on Friday,’ she said, as Aisha entered the room.
Dawson guessed the girl to be sixteen or seventeen. She was dressed in jeans, a plain jumper and a bright red headscarf.
He knew that women did not have to wear turbans but were urged to cover their heads. Unlike her mother, Aisha did not have her hair tied up. Instead it flowed over her shoulders and peeped from beneath the scarf, uncut as a symbol of her faith.
‘Are you from Brierley Hill?’ Mrs Gupta asked.
‘Well, no, we’re from Halesowen but we all do the same—’
‘I don’t understand why you are here,’ she said.
‘We think what happened to your daughter may be linked to an investigation of ours,’ Bryant offered.
‘So, now you want to listen to her?’ Mrs Gupta asked. ‘Instead of dismiss what happened to her as a prank.’
Her voice had risen and the words were shooting from her mouth.
‘May I ask Aisha some questions, Mrs Gupta?’ he asked quietly, hoping his low tone would bring down her agitation.
She pursed her lips but nodded.
He turned to the young girl and spoke gently.
‘Aisha, can you tell me where exactly the incident happened?’
‘The car park at Asda. I’d finished work and was on my way home.’
Dawson knew the area. ‘Main road or shortcut?’
‘Shortcut,’ she said, apologetically. ‘It was cold.’
Dawson smiled. The overspill car park was poorly lit and deserted at ten o’clock.
‘Go on,’ he urged.
‘I never even heard the footsteps behind me,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘He turned me around—’
‘To face him?’ Bryant butted in.
She nodded but then lowered her eyes. ‘He was wearing a hoody, and it all happened so quickly.’
‘Aisha, did the man touch you in any way inappropriately?’ Dawson asked, resuming the interview.
She shook her head.
‘Did he try to grab any… part of you?’
Again she shook her head.