‘God, is this a man or an ogre?’ Khosa said.
Woakes nodded. Anna turned back to look at the rest of the team. Khosa was busy making notes, Trisha was shaking her head slowly. But Holder could only nod. He kept on nodding for several seconds, his eyes focused on the pen in his fingers. He could get a job with the manufacturers testing the longevity of the spring in the retractable mechanism the way he kept pressing again and again. Anna knew that look. These were difficult cases for her young team to deal with and did not make for easy listening. It wasn’t their first murder and it would not be their last. But child murders, and especially ones with this degree of planning and execution, were mercifully rare. She broke the uneasy silence in the room to bring them back to focus. ‘What about the recent input?’
Khosa sat up. ‘You already know that our Hi-Tech unit got flagged by the Belgian police. They carried out a raid on an illegal pornography site administrator a couple of months ago. They run everything child-related through new facial recognition software now and they got a hit on Rosie. Hi-Tech have now sent that image over, ma’am.’
Holder’s eyes snapped up and Trisha frowned.
Khosa shook her head and reassured them. ‘No, don’t worry, it’s not even category C, but they’re pretty certain it is Rosie.’
Sexual Offences Definitive Guidelines had been in existence since 2014 and related to indecent images of children. Categories A and B were the worst. Category C were often non-overt, so Khosa’s reassurance was a very welcome clarification.
Khosa punched her keyboard and rotated the screen for the others to see. It showed a little girl sitting on a blanket in a grubby vest, her tear-streaked face smeared with dirt, staring into the camera. Khosa was right, there was nothing at all suggestive about the image, but that did not make it any less disturbing. The lost and desperate look in Rosie’s eyes was difficult to look at. Anna concentrated on the accessory details. A concrete floor and an unplastered drywall, bottles of water and, in the corner, a bucket. Black plastic with a wooden handle.
‘Is this where he kept her?’ Trisha asked.
‘Probably,’ Woakes said.
On the image, a caption read, ‘PPV – Soon.’
‘What’s PPV?’ Holder asked.
‘Pay per view,’ Khosa said. ‘That’s what Hi-Tech said.’
Something cold and unpleasant uncoiled inside Anna.
‘We need the tech guys to help us with this and pronto,’ Anna said to Khosa.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Meanwhile, let’s see if there’s anything that gives us a clue as to location, any branding on the water bottles, a sales tag on the bucket. Was Rosie wearing the same clothes as when she was taken? Anything that might help.’ Anna turned to Trisha. ‘Get everyone a copy.’
Trisha nodded.
Anna sighed. ‘So, minimal forensics. No time of death. No clue as to where she was kept until now. And no one was arrested or interviewed?’
‘Lots of people interviewed. The dad, uncles, vicar at the church she went to, oh, and a doctor she’d seen. The one they thought was a nonce.’
Anna registered Woakes’ slang. Nonce was a prison term for a pariah within the prison community. A child abuser or a grass. Her preferred term was known sex offender, but she let it slide.
‘What about the family?’
‘Small family unit. Mother, father and grandmother. Rosie had a sister who was seven at the time. No interfering uncles or neighbours. Everyone was interviewed and checked out. CCTV at the school showed her teachers leaving and they were all traced.’
‘Father?’
‘Worked in the bearings factory. Day shift. They had to go and fetch him when they found out what had happened. Clean as a whistle.’
‘What about this suspect with the rucksack?’ she asked.
Woakes nodded. ‘Rosie was 47.5 inches tall. She weighed 33 kilos. A big rucksack can have a 150-litre capacity.’ He put an open laptop on the nearest desk and clicked a few keys.
Anna watched as a 4-foot replica dummy – folded, knees bent, arms restricted across the chest, mouth and eyes taped – was fitted into the huge backpack with ease. They threw in 30 kilos of weight, and the uniform in the demo lifted the pack onto his back and started walking. It looked heavy. But it also looked very plausible.
No one spoke as the film ran.
‘So, he was fit enough to be able to carry one of those with a 33-kilo load,’ Khosa said.
Woakes killed the video.
Anna opted for magnanimity. Rainsford would be proud. ‘OK, Dave, lines of enquiry?’
Woakes had a checklist and copied it to the board. ‘Divvy up the reports: witness statements, interviews, etcetera. Go down to the abduction site and the discovery site, and see them for ourselves. Re-run what little forensics there are. See if any of the new tech can squeeze anything from the few samples they had. The plastic bag or the bones. And get Hi-Tech to tell us what they know about the images.’
Anna nodded, but it all felt a little rushed and insubstantial. Almost as if he knew this would lead nowhere.
‘Worth asking anyone any more questions?’ Khosa said. ‘There is a witness list. People came forward after the appeal. Two people said they’d seen a man carrying the rucksack leave the park. Two others said they saw either him getting into a van or a van leaving the area at that time, and an off-duty special constable confirmed the sighting.
Anna nodded. Direction of travel for a perpetrator was always useful. ‘See if anyone is still around.’
Khosa nodded. ‘Trisha’s already started tracing them, ma’am.’
Cold cases suffered from the real possibility that witnesses had moved away. Sometimes even abroad after this length of time.
‘I’ve traced one so far,’ Trisha said.
Anna nodded. ‘Great, I’ll take that. Oh, and can you find out if the special who saw the car is still on the force?’
Trisha nodded.
Woakes, realising he’d dropped the ball, chipped in. ‘Yeah, of course. Tick all the boxes.’
Holder said, ‘What about reinterviewing the family?’
The frown lines on Woakes’ head deepened. ‘I’d stay away from them for now. We don’t have anything new to talk to them about and I don’t think showing them the Belgian images would help. If something comes up, we’ll get a FLO to link up.’
Anna nodded. A family liaison officer was always needed in these instances.
‘But given this new image evidence, I reckon this doctor the previous team interviewed might be worth a shout.’ Woakes looked down at the file. ‘Name of Hawley.’
Anna narrowed her eyes. ‘In what way worth a shout?’
‘Pretty obvious, isn’t it? Whoever did this is no fool. She was taken on her route home – he knew where Rosie went to school. Knew how big a rucksack he’d need. The other suspects all had tight alibis accounting for their whereabouts at the time of the abduction. But his was iffy. Claimed to be asleep in his room after a night shift with no witnesses. I’m a great believer in low-hanging fruit, ma’am. Especially when it’s easy to shake the tree to see what falls off. Bish bosh.’
Anna could spot a scattergun when she saw it. Woakes had his finger on the trigger of one here and it grated. It wasn’t her style to make assumptions. Apart from reviewing what already existed, the one concrete piece of new evidence was the image found by the Belgian police. The logical thing to do was prioritise that and analyse the outcome.
But Rainsford’s words rang in her ears. She didn’t want to be accused of not letting her team take the weight. It was also useful to reinterview suspects – as long as it didn’t scare them off.
‘OK. Set it up for Monday,’ she said, already regretting it. Something told her that Woakes’ ‘bish bosh’ approach was going to lead to trouble.
‘But we also need to start doing the legwork. Once we’ve interviewed this Dr Hawley, you and I need to visit where all this started, Dave. Get a feel for the case.’