Peter Robinson - Aftermath

On the evening of the twenty-sixth of February, Samantha attended a poetry reading in a pub near the university campus and left alone for her bed-sit at about eleven-fifteen. She lived just off Great Horton Road, about a quarter of a mile away. When she didn’t turn up for her weekend job in the city center Waterstone’s bookshop, one of her coworkers, Penelope Hall, became worried and called at the bed-sit during her lunch break. Samantha was reliable, she later told the police, and if she wasn’t going to come in to work because of illness, she would always ring. This time she hadn’t. Worried that Samantha might be seriously ill, Penelope managed to persuade the landlord to open the bed-sit door. Nobody home.

There was a very good chance that the Bradford Police might not have taken Samantha Foster’s disappearance seriously – at least not so quickly – had it not been for the shoulder bag that a conscientious student had found in the street and handed in after midnight the previous evening. It contained a poetry anthology called New Blood; a slim volume of poetry signed “To Samantha, between whose silky thighs I would love to rest my head and give silver tongue” and dated by the poet, Michael Stringer, who had read in the pub the previous evening; a spiral notebook full of poetic jottings, observations, reflections on life and literature, including what looked to the desk officer like descriptions of hallucinogenic states and out-of-body experiences; a half-smoked packet of Benson amp; Hedges; a red packet of Rizzla cigarette papers and a small plastic bag of marijuana, less than a quarter of an ounce; a green disposable cigarette lighter; three loose tampons; a set of keys; a personal CD player with a Tracy Chapman CD inside it; a little bag of cosmetics; and a purse containing fifteen pounds in cash, a credit card, student union card, shop receipts for books and CDs and various other sundry items.

Given the two occurrences – an abandoned shoulder bag and a missing girl – especially as the young DC who was given the assignment remembered something similar had happened in Roundhay Park, Leeds, on New Year’s Eve – the inquiry began that very morning with calls to Samantha’s parents and close friends, none of whom had seen her or heard of any change in her plans or normal routine.

For a brief time, Michael Stringer, the poet who had been reading his work at the pub, became a suspect, given the inscription he had written in his book of poems for her, but a number of witnesses said he carried on drinking in the city center and had to be helped back to his hotel around three-thirty in the morning. The hotel staff assured the police that he hadn’t seen the light of day again until teatime the following day.

Inquiries around the university turned up one possible witness, who thought she saw Samantha talking to someone through a car window. At least the girl had long blond hair and was wearing the same clothes Samantha was when she left the pub – jeans, black calf-high boots and a long, flapping overcoat. The car was dark in color, and the witness remembered the three last letters on the number plate because they formed her own initials: Kathryn Wendy Thurlow. She said she had no reason to believe that there was any problem at the time, so she crossed over to her street and carried on to her own flat.

The last two letters of a car number plate indicate the origin of its registration, and WT signifies Leeds. The DVLA at Swansea were able to supply a list of over a thousand possibles – as Kathryn hadn’t been able to narrow the search down to make or even color – and the owners were interviewed by Bradford CID. Nothing came of it.

All the searches and interviews that followed turned up nothing more about Samantha Foster’s disappearance, and rumblings were starting on the police tom-toms. Two disappearances, almost two months and about fifteen miles apart, were enough to set off a few alarm bells but not a full-blown panic.

Samantha didn’t have many friends, but those she did have were loyal and devoted to her, in particular Angela Firth, Ryan Conner and Abha Gupta, who were all devastated by her disappearance. According to them, Samantha was a very serious sort of girl, given to long reflective silences and gnomic utterances, with no time for small talk, sports and television. She had a level head on her shoulders, though, they insisted, and everyone said she wasn’t the type to go off with a stranger on a whim, no matter how much she talked about the importance of experiencing life to the full.

When the police suggested that Samantha might have wandered off under the influence of drugs, her friends said it was unlikely. Yes, they admitted, she liked to smoke a joint occasionally – she said it helped her with her writing – but she didn’t do any harder drugs; she also didn’t drink much and couldn’t have had more than two or three glasses of wine the entire evening.

She didn’t have a boyfriend at the moment and didn’t seem interested in acquiring one. No, she wasn’t gay, but she had spoken of exploring sexual experiences with other women. Samantha might appear unconventional in some ways, Angela explained, but she had a lot more common sense than people sometimes imagined on first impressions; she was just not frivolous, and she was interested in a lot of things other people laughed at or dismissed.

According to her professors, Samantha was an eccentric student with a tendency to spend too much of her time reading outside the syllabus, but one of her tutors, who had published some verse himself, said that he had hopes she might make a fine poet one day if she could cultivate a little more self-discipline in her technique.

Samantha’s interests, so Abha Gupta said, included art, poetry, nature, Eastern religions, psychic experiences and death.

Banks and Ken Blackstone drove out to The Greyhound, a low-beamed rustic pub with Toby jugs all around the plate racks in the village of Tong, about fifteen minutes from the crime scene. It was going on for two o’clock, and neither of them had eaten yet that day. Banks hadn’t eaten much in the past two days, in fact, ever since he had heard of the fifth missing teenager in the wee hours of Saturday morning.

Over the past two months, he had sometimes thought his head would explode under pressure of the sheer amount of detail he carried around in it. He would awaken in the early hours of the morning, at three or four o’clock, and the thoughts would spin around his mind and prevent him from going back to sleep. Instead, he would get up and brew a pot of tea and sit at the pine kitchen table in his pajamas making notes for the day ahead as the sun came up and spilled its liquid honey light through the high window or rain lashed against the panes.

These were lonely, quiet hours, and while he had got used to, even embraced, solitude, sometimes he missed his previous life with Sandra and the kids in the Eastvale semi. But Sandra was gone, about to marry Sean, and the kids had grown up and were living their own lives. Tracy was in her second year at the University of Leeds, and Brian was touring the country with his rock band, going from strength to strength after the great reviews their first independently produced CD had received. Banks had neglected them both, he realized, over the past couple of months, especially his daughter.

They ordered the last two portions of lamb stew and rice and pints of Tetley’s bitter at the bar. It was warm enough to sit outside at one of the tables next to the cricket field. A local team was out practicing, and the comforting sound of leather on willow punctuated their conversation.

Banks lit a cigarette and told Blackstone about AC Hartnell giving North Yorkshire the PC Taylor investigation, and his certainty that it would go to Annie.