That idea lasted until mid-morning when she finally gave in to that part of her brain that would not stop thinking about Rosie Dawson. She fetched the file from her briefcase and, dressed in a pair of shorts, a strappy vest and flip-flops, took her coffee outside. Trisha had made summaries and photocopies of crime scene photos that had no right being looked at on a furnace-hot day with the sky untroubled by a whisper of cloud above. She read the reports but, as always with cold cases, had no feel for it yet. One of the difficulties she always encountered was getting a handle on the geography. She’d only ever been to Clevedon, the town where Rosie was abducted, to walk on the pier. Didn’t know what sort of place it was. It soon became too hot to sit out, and after twenty minutes Anna could feel her skin tingling. It matched the frustration she felt for the need to get on with things.
Though the plan was for them to visit the abduction site after speaking to the doctor that Woakes had the hots for on Monday, Anna gave in to her need to act. It had dawned on her early on in her career that at some point in any investigation she would need to be alone at the scene. Take in what the photographs didn’t show. Smells, noises, things that the perpetrator and the victim would have been aware of. She changed into jeans, kept the strappy top on, and a little before midday, eased herself into the greenhouse her car had become and hoped that it wouldn’t take too long for the air con to kick in as she headed, ironically, back towards her place of work.
Clevedon sat almost halfway between Bristol and Weston-Super-Mare on the estuary. Victorian in design, with its renowned pier, Clevedon looked across the Bristol Channel at industrial Wales. This was a leafy haven where kids could go to a seaweed-striped beach to kayak and crab, while Dad did the half-hour commute into Bristol. It was not a place where people got murdered or kids stolen. Everyone knew that. Yet the estate agents couldn’t emblazon those facts all over their brochures in big bold letters because they’d be had up by advertising standards. Bad things could happen anywhere, even in Clevedon. And what had made it so much worse was how it had taken place under Avon and Somerset’s very noses. Clevedon was only six miles from police HQ in Portishead. You could walk it. Indeed, the point of abduction had been no more than two hundred yards from the old Clevedon nick on Sunnyside Road as the final, crowning insult. People had taken it very hard.
She parked in the new station at Castlewood and walked towards the path where Rosie had been taken, stood on a mini roundabout and stared at the trees in the wood. Fir wood. Odd name; most of the trees looked deciduous to her. No one had seen anyone in combat fatigues enter the area in 2008. She looked at her map. Up to her right was the B3124 and stretching to the east, Court Wood, a much bigger area, full of leafy paths and narrow trails. Plenty of room for someone to wait and cross over at the narrowest point. At All Saints Lane, perhaps?
She took the path behind the houses on Highdale Avenue, noting the marked section; a bend just behind St Nicholas’s school. When she arrived there, she looked around. The perpetrator had chosen well. A quiet spot. Not overlooked by the nearby gardens, at a point where the bend in the path hid walkers from other users in both directions. This was a very devious and very planned attack by someone who’d scoped the area and bided his time. He was organised. May even have waited for the ideal moment over the course of more than one day. What did that tell her about him? That he was local? Unemployed? That he wouldn’t have been missed from work on a sunny afternoon at around 4 p.m.?
From the abduction point she walked the path again, leaving at the Hill Road end. It took her ten minutes to reach the point where they believed he’d parked his car. She walked back, fetched her own car and drove back to the same place on Hill Road. From there, it was a five-minute drive around the town over a couple of roundabouts to the M5 junction, and a major motorway that stretched from Birmingham to Exeter. A corridor running north–south through countryside and cities where someone could hide a small girl in any one of thousands of locations.
But Anna needed to find just one.
In all the time she’d been in Clevedon, she’d passed only a half-dozen people. Sleepy wasn’t the word for it. And on a weekday, the only people around at the time Rosie was taken would have been parents and children. Whoever had done this would know that and planned it very carefully. This was not an opportunistic crime. The abductor knew his entry and leaving points and had a quick and clean exit strategy. Anna felt the tingle that had driven her out of the flat that morning kick up a notch.
She looked through her windscreen at the quiet road, knowing that something heinous had taken place here nine years ago. People who took children did so to feed a need. An urge. And that urge was rarely assuaged by doing so only once. Reoffending rates amongst child sex offenders was high with almost 20% doing so within a year. It wasn’t unreasonable to assume that whoever had done this to Rosie may well have done it to someone else. That thought alone was more than enough incentive to fuel her conviction that this murderer needed to be caught.
Anna gunned the engine, pleased with her morning’s work and feeling, for the first time in weeks, the satisfaction of knowing she was back in the hunt.
Seven
Khosa was sipping a lime and soda, Holder half a shandy. The sandwiches were home-made, but they’d skimped on the pickle in the ploughman’s. Khosa looked around at the decor, unimpressed. Framed photographs of team captains stared down from the walls. Above Holder’s head, a glass case containing a club presented by someone called Jacklin took pride of place. There were wheel-back chairs and round wooden tables. In a bar next door, lots of men in brightly coloured sweaters sat talking loudly and laughing in leather club chairs. The waitress who’d brought their food was a pasty-faced seventeen-year-old string of beans with acne. Behind the bar, a ruddy-faced husband-and-wife team ran the ship.
‘So, this is golf, then.’ Khosa said.
‘Don’t know,’ Holder replied. ‘I’ve only ever been in one other club. That was with my dad at a municipal course down in Devon. This is a private club. In fact, I’m surprised they let you in.’
Khosa’s eyes flashed.
Holder laughed. ‘Women and golf clubs. Didn’t I read somewhere that some club or other in Scotland has only just voted to let women in?’
‘Oh good. Pass me the application form.’ Khosa made big eyes at the ceiling.
It was one thirty-five in the afternoon and they’d been sitting in the lounge bar of Camber Hill Golf Club for thirty minutes. They’d chosen a table near to the players’ bar so they could watch Dominick Morton walk in from the eighteenth hole and were now waiting for him to appear. They might even have to buy another drink each. Holder was contemplating suggesting it when Khosa said, ‘Your three o’clock,’ and dropped her gaze.
Morton walked into the bar with three other men. All portly, all dressed in chinos and polo shirts, tanned from hours spent outside searching for balls in the rough. Morton ordered a round of beers and took the tray over to sit with his fellow foursome to dissect the round.
Khosa and Holder couldn’t hear what was being said, but the occasional peel of raucous laughter spelled banter. Ten minutes after he’d walked into the bar, Morton got up and walked through the lounge towards a bifold door leading out to a patio with wicker chairs under umbrellas. Holder followed, reaching into his pocket for his prop e-cigarette.