Years later, when he became a special constable stationed in Clevedon, he’d seen the terrible things people did to each other for the most banal of reasons, and for the most venal. But he’d been interested in the work. Preoccupied, some might say. He’d studied it. Watched the TV documentaries, read the books. Knew more about the psychology of the idiots who stole and hurt and abused other people than most of his colleagues. He knew, too, how most of the time there was no planning in any crime. Miscreants bumbled into it and the police simply stumbled around as well, depending upon the fact that the average criminal was a fool and would make mistakes they would pick up on.
Starkey got out of the car and walked towards the building where his life had begun. Across the patch of rutted ground in front with the fields and hedgerows beyond that had shaped him into the adult that he was. Someone brighter than he appeared. Someone who knew about police work and what the review team in the Rosie Dawson case must be going through, searching for a trail that had long since died.
He hadn’t lied to them. He had seen the vehicle that Rosie’s abductor had used on the day. Despite that, despite searches and enquiries, they hadn’t been able to find it.
But now, on this summer’s day nine years later, Special Constable Starkey knew exactly where it was.
Thirty-Six
Anna waited outside the entrance for Hawley while he said his goodbyes, trying to beat down her disappointment over not finding anything concrete in the visit. Yes, she was wiser as to the practicalities of how information was gathered and stored and the need for patient confidentiality. And of how fragile that was in such an immense organisation as the NHS. But nothing she’d seen there brought her any closer to knowing what happened to Rosie. Nor had it bought her any respite from the sleep-depriving anxiety of knowing that if she was right, then Blair Smeaton might well, at that very moment, be suffering the same fate as Rosie had suffered. Was Blair going to end up a pile of bones in a plastic bag?
Anna squeezed her eyes shut in an attempt at banishing her thoughts but all that did was send them off in another direction.
As a schoolgirl, she’d watched an enthusiastic science teacher set up an experiment to simulate a cockroach’s severed leg with DIY batteries made of a slice of potato between aluminium and copper sheets. The cockroach, the teacher assured the class, would grow a new leg within four months. Sure enough, the tiny voltage produced by the potato batteries caused the cockroach’s severed leg to jerk. She remembered how it had polarised her classmates. Some, the usual assembly-fainting crowd, were more concerned for the welfare of the cockroach. Others, full of blasé bravado, wondered out loud if the same thing might work with a rat’s leg, or even a human’s. Only a handful saw beyond to the incredible eighteenth-century leap in neuroscience the demonstration illustrated.
She’d come here with Hawley to see if there was any electricity left that might jerk the cockroach’s leg. She’d hoped there’d be a spark or a bolt that might have brought Rosie’s case to life. Pointed her in the direction of what had happened to Jade and Katelyn. Some inkling as to who might still have Blair Smeaton. But there’d been nothing; it remained dead and inanimate. Still cold.
She checked her phone. Nothing from Holder or Khosa other than to confirm Woakes was at work and wading through the paperwork Trisha had furnished. Holder didn’t comment on whether or not Woakes was happy about that and Anna surprised herself by not caring. She didn’t consider herself vindictive but knew Woakes would be seething. Try as she might, she could find no empathy for him. She had no idea what he wanted and what he was trying to achieve. What she did know was that he had no place on her team. Besides, she was too caught up in her own thoughts and they were sucking all the energy out of her.
Hawley emerged after ten minutes and they walked back to the car together and got in. ‘So?’ he asked, cutting to the chase. ‘Any use?’
‘Maybe.’
Something in her tone made him frown. ‘At least you now know I was telling the truth, right?’
She didn’t answer him directly. She pulled out into traffic and pointed the car back towards the south, weaving through the town towards the motorway. After a while, she asked, ‘How about you? Did you find it useful?’
‘Cathartic, you mean?’ He nodded. ‘Yes. Surprisingly, yes. Much more than I expected it to be. Seeing Coleen helped.’
‘I’m glad.’
‘But it’s not why we came here, is it?’
‘No. Sometimes it’s best to see.’
‘Me, you mean?’
Anna shook her head and accelerated through some traffic lights they’d been stalled at. ‘We, or at least I, look for unusual things in these cases. Something small that goes unnoticed.’
Hawley sighed. ‘Perhaps I’ve been fooling myself. Perhaps there isn’t a link. Is it possible that what happened to Rosie could have been, I don’t know, spontaneous? Someone spotting her in the park in Clevedon and acting there and then?’
‘No, it wasn’t spontaneous. It was too well organised. He’d seen her and targeted her.’
‘How do you begin to try and find someone like that?’
‘You begin with the small things. Like her visit to you. Her contact with you made you a suspect. A sad reflection on today’s society maybe, but still a suspect. And it made you think all this through.’
‘But has it been useful, my thinking it through?’
Anna shrugged.
Hawley blew out air and shook his head. ‘What a mess, eh? And all because we’d used a different room.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that if we’d had our usual examination room available when Rosie walked through the door, none of this would have happened. The eye room had a different kind of desk. U-shaped. It meant the slit lamp was fixed in position. Rosie would not have been able to physically climb up on me. Sod’s Law the service engineer chose that day to come.’
Anna threw him a glance and saw him react to whatever expression was in her own face. He looked quizzical, alarmed and genuinely ignorant. He hadn’t realised the significance of what he’d said. Hadn’t felt the earth shift on its axis.
But Anna had.
A tingle, a static burst, flickered in her head. This was what was bothering her. Something small that goes unnoticed. Not Rosie stolen from her grandmother’s arms, not even the prospect of Blair’s bones in a plastic bag. What bothered her was something exactly like this.
She felt the cockroach’s leg quiver and jump as the tingling charge rippled over her skin, electrifying her thoughts, solidifying them into a concrete idea that finally slotted home.
What a fool she’d been. They’d all been. Shaw’s voice was instantly in her head.
‘Abbie had a hearing aid, like Blair. She was always breaking the bastard thing, too.’
Shaw, seeing beyond the terror of Blair’s expression to the truth that they’d all ignored.
She picked up her work phone and speed-dialled Khosa.
‘Ma’am?’
‘Ryia, I need you to contact the FLO in the Blair Smeaton case. In the image we have of her, the first one of her in the hole, she’s wearing a hearing aid.’
‘OK…’ Khosa sounded confused.
‘In the image, it’s been repaired. Ask the FLO if it was broken before she was taken.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Do it now, Ryia, and ring me back right away.’
Khosa rang off.
Hawley was looking at her, waiting for her to say something. ‘You know something, don’t you?’
But she didn’t answer him. Not yet. She drove, her mind spinning, willing the phone to ring. After four long minutes, it finally did.
‘Ryia?’
‘Ma’am, Blair’s mother has seen the photograph. The FLO said it nearly broke her. But she did comment on the hearing aid. It hadn’t looked like that before, with the black tape. She said it must have broken and been repaired. Blair, or someone, must have fixed it.’
Fixed it.
The tingle she’d felt moments before became an electric charge. The cockroach’s leg began jerking madly.
‘Ma’am?’ Khosa’s voice on the phone again, breaking the silence, but triggering a memory in Anna of other things the DC had said in the pub the previous evening. What was it?
‘But if it was all planned, how could he possibly know this information about the victims unless he knew the families?’
Anna breathed out slowly, trying to remember something else, something Hawley had said. She turned to him.
‘When you showed me the cuttings the first time, you said something. Why the original investigators kept coming back to you.’
Hawley frowned and shook his head.