Woakes glared back, mouth open, ready to object.
‘Do it,’ Anna said through gritted teeth. She didn’t know what this was yet, but having Woakes in the room was suddenly a liability. She watched the emotions rage on the sergeant’s face. Anger, distrust, they were all there. Finally, after several seconds too long, he turned and walked away, slamming the front door in his wake.
‘I’m going to let you go now,’ Anna said to Hawley.
She did and stood well back, giving him space to recover his dignity and his breath. He turned, panting, his lips thin and angry. ‘You have no right. No bloody right.’
‘I know.’ He was right. If it ever came to it, they’d have all sorts of problems justifying being there because they should not have been searching his property.
Even though Woakes would probably say that the door was open and the painting already on your bed.
Hawley glared.
‘And I am sorry for what just happened. There’s no excuse.’
‘You people.’
‘Wait a minute. We’re here investigating a serious crime.’
‘It’s not a crime to keep newspaper cuttings, is it?’
‘No, but it raises suspicion.’
Hawley was still trembling from the altercation with Woakes, his face sour and hostile. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong,’ he muttered, jaw clenched.
‘OK, I hear that. But it’s obvious you’ve been keeping tabs on things,’ she used her hand to indicate the cuttings, ‘and I would like to know why that is and what you think you’ve found, if anything. In my experience, when it comes to cold cases, the best information still comes from those involved from the outset.’ She was being deliberately reasonable, still unsure of exactly what was happening here.
Hawley looked out of the window and Anna followed his gaze. Outside the day was shaping up nicely. Overnight rain had given way to blue sky and wispy clouds. A breeze shifted the leaves on a copper beech hedge, making them move up and down as if they were waving.
Gradually, his breathing steadied and Hawley shook his head. ‘He had no right to go into that room.’
Anna waited, letting him vent.
‘I’ll talk to you. But I won’t talk to him again, is that understood?’
‘Fair enough,’ Anna said.
Hawley walked around the bed to the second painting and removed it. He carried the cumbersome frame out to the living room and fetched the one already on the bed. Anna followed to find he’d placed them neatly next to one another, leaning against the wall.
Hawley stood for a moment, assessing his handiwork, and then went to the kitchen. ‘Water?’
‘Fine,’ Anna said, absently.
She heard a tap running, but it was white noise as her eyes tried to assimilate what it was that sat propped against the living room wall in a spinster’s bungalow. There were five images in total, three on one board, two on the other, beginning with Rosie and ending with Blair Smeaton. They were reminiscent of the boards Trisha set up for them regularly in Portishead, though much more haphazard in their layout.
Hawley came back into the room with two glasses.
‘Can you talk me through this?’ Anna asked.
‘I didn’t want anyone seeing this.’ He gestured towards the boards. ‘That’s why I hide them.’
‘Hiding it looks twice as suspicious, you must know that. Why, Dr Hawley?’
‘It’s Ben.’
‘Alright, Ben, why?’
Hawley sighed. ‘I suppose I couldn’t let it go. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, about her… I kept watching the news, reading the papers. Anything to do with missing children. I don’t know if that’s normal, but when you’re caught up in it, trying to understand, you read and research and watch. Sometimes until your blood runs cold. And then, when something else happened, I began to wonder if there might be some sort of link. I tried to look for patterns.’
Anna sat up. Patterns were most often what solved serial cases. Patterns that the perpetrator sometimes did not know he or she followed. She believed in patterns. But she had seen no evidence from the previous HOLMES searches so far that Rosie Dawson’s abduction had been replicated in any way.
‘And?’
Hawley held both hands up, palms open. ‘Some threads, but…’ He laughed softly. ‘But I don’t know if they mean anything.’
‘Let me be the judge of that, Ben. Please, tell me.’ She wanted him to keep on talking. If this was genuine, she wanted to know. If it wasn’t, if he was a narcissist documenting his own sick triumphs, thinking he was better than everyone else, the police especially, this was an opportunity to give him as much rope as he needed.
‘I’m not a detective. All I can access are press reports and the internet. But when I was being interviewed, they kept on about the fact that I was in a unique position. I knew where Rosie lived. I knew her family. I knew where she went to school, her background. It was all in the notes, in the history the triage nurses took.’ For a moment, Hawley lost himself in the recollection. ‘They kept on and on about how many other little girls I’d invited onto my lap in the clinic.’ Hawley sighed. ‘It’s why they kept coming back to me. Me knowing all about Rosie.’
‘It would be a natural line to take.’
Hawley nodded. ‘So, what you see on the boards is my attempt at trying to rationalise that. These five cases are all girls of a certain age, between ten and twelve. All missing. Rosie you know about; the others are from all over the country. Manchester, Devon, the Midlands and now Scotland.’
‘So, what’s the pattern?’
Hawley shrugged. ‘I thought a lot about what the police were asking me. There is a lot of information on children in hospital notes. From what I learned from snippets in the press, these five kids all had some kind of illness that meant they’d had recent hospital attendances.’
Anna frowned. ‘Surely, most kids will have been to hospital for something or other?’
‘Not really. GP, yes. Hospital, not so common.’
‘What you’re saying is that their illnesses are the link?’
‘I know how it sounds and it’s mad because they all have different conditions. Rosie I saw in A and E, Katelyn Prosser had asthma, I think Lily Callaghan might have been diabetic, Jade Hemmings had eczema. There are probably a load of other kids missing without illnesses. It doesn’t make any sense because most of these conditions require different specialist input. Doctors move around, especially when they’re training. But I can’t think of any one doctor who’d work in all these different specialisms in so many different areas of the country. It doesn’t add up. I know that the abductions – where and how they were taken – all have different features, but perhaps that’s deliberate. Perhaps the bloke knows to not have a pattern. I don’t know.’
It was something of a stretch, Anna had to agree. ‘And you do not know any of these victims personally?’
‘Of course not.’
Anna stood and used her phone to take photos of the two boards and then wrote down the names in her notebook.
‘Do you have anything else?’ she asked.
‘Is this where you take my laptop?’ Hawley remained sitting, looking up at her with that same mistrust.
‘Should I?’
‘There’s nothing on it.’
‘Then I don’t think it’s necessary.’
Hawley nodded. Anna sensed that she’d met with some sort of unspoken approval when he said, ‘I do have something else to show you though.’
Hawley reached into a magazine rack at the side of the leather sofa and removed a silver MacBook. He went to the table and fired it up, his fingers quick on the keyboard. His hands looked soft, the fingers long, like a piano player’s or a surgeon’s. Anna had a thing about hands. She hoped that they were not going to reveal something that would incriminate Hawley here. That there would be no way back from.