Кара Хантер: In the Dark

‘And he couldn’t tell you anything?’ asks one of the DCs. ‘Did the kid not remember what happened?’

I shake my head. ‘He wasn’t even three, he’d had a blow to the head. He was completely traumatized. Nothing he said made much sense.’

‘So we still have no idea how he ended up in that Pit place?’

‘Our theory was that Hannah took him up there for a walk after she got the text from Jervis’s PA saying he’d been delayed.’

I used to do that with Jake when he was that age. When he couldn’t settle or he’d had a bad dream and didn’t want to go back to bed. He loved the motion of the stroller. I’d walk the empty streets in the middle of the night. Just him, and me, and the odd prowling silent cat.

But I push that memory away.

‘And we know she definitely got that text, do we?’ Quinn; and on point.

‘Well,’ says Gislingham, ‘we know it was definitely sent but we never found her phone so there’s no way of knowing whether she opened it or not.’ He sighs. ‘To be honest, the whole thing was a nightmare. All the usual loonies came out of the woodwork – you can imagine – psychics, mediums, the whole bloody nine yards. There was even some old bat who got herself into the Oxford Mail – said the bracelet had a pagan design on it – some sort of three-pointed star thing. Kept on and on that the number three was the key to the whole case and, just you wait, she’d be proved right in the end –’

His voice tails off as he catches sight of the photo of the house. ‘Shit. It had to be sodding thirty-three, didn’t it.’

‘There was one other thing we didn’t tell the press,’ I continue. ‘The Gardiners’ home life wasn’t nearly as idyllic as that programme would have you believe.’

‘I remember,’ says Gislingham. ‘There’d been a lot of tension with Rob’s ex – she obviously resented Hannah for breaking up the relationship. There’d been some pretty nasty stuff on Facebook.’

‘Did she have an alibi?’ asks Quinn.

‘The ex?’ I say. ‘Yes, she checked out. She was in Manchester that day. Lucky for her – we’d have been all over her otherwise.’

Gislingham looks thoughtful. ‘Looking at that video again after all this time, the one that stands out for me is Beth Dyer. Didn’t she drop some pretty heavy hints in interview that Rob might have been having an affair?’

‘She did. But she didn’t have any actual evidence. Just him “looking a bit odd” or “like he had something to hide”. There were no unexplained phone calls, nothing like that – we checked. And his alibi was rock solid. His train left Oxford at 7.57 that morning, and we knew Hannah was alive at 6.50 because she left a voicemail for the childminder. And she used the landline so we knew she was in Crescent Square. So there simply wasn’t time for Rob to kill his wife, take the car to Wittenham, dump it and get back to Oxford in time for that train.’

‘But in any case,’ says Quinn, ‘even if either Rob or the ex had a motive for getting rid of Hannah, what about the kid?’

‘Which is exactly the conclusion Osbourne came to. Even if the timings had added up, it was hard to see Rob Gardiner leaving his son alone up there.’

‘So that’s why everything pointed to Shore?’ says Quinn.

There’s a pause. They’re all looking at me. They expect me to say how we did our best to make the case stick but the CPS wouldn’t go with it. How we still believe we got our man.

But I don’t.

‘So,’ says Quinn eventually. ‘You had your doubts, even then.’

I look back at the TV screen. At the freeze-frame of the Clumps. Black birds against a pale sky.

‘We interviewed everyone who was at the protest camp that day. No one mentioned seeing Shore until after his name came out in connection to the Warwick assault, and that was months later.’

‘Doesn’t mean he wasn’t there.’

‘No, but we couldn’t prove he was either. Not definitively. He claimed he was miles away at the time, but couldn’t produce any witnesses to back him up. We know he was at the camp that summer, and the bracelet we found in his house definitely was Hannah’s –’

‘– but you don’t think he actually did it,’ says Quinn.

‘Osbourne was convinced he was guilty. And he was in charge of the case.’

There’s a silence. He’s retired now but Al Osbourne was one of the legends of Thames Valley. Great copper, and a genuinely nice bloke too, and believe me those two things don’t always go together. More than one person in this station owes a crucial leg-up in their career to him, me included. And even though we never convicted Shore for Hannah Gardiner there’s always been a tacit understanding that the case was closed. Reopening it now is going to make a lot of waves.

I take a deep breath. ‘Look, I’ll be honest with you. I did have my doubts about Shore. He never struck me as a killer, and on top of that, this was a very organized crime. I’m not saying it was planned – Hannah could have been a completely random victim. But it was certainly covered up very carefully afterwards. No forensics – no DNA – nothing. I just couldn’t see Shore doing that. He isn’t bright enough, for a start. That’s why he got caught in Warwick. I always thought we were missing something – some fact or clue we overlooked or didn’t uncover. But we never found it.’

‘Not till now,’ says Gislingham softly.

‘No,’ I say, looking back again at the screen. ‘Because that’s the one possibility we never really considered – that Hannah never left Oxford at all. That whatever happened to her, happened here.’

‘But in that case, how the hell –’

‘I know. How the hell did Toby get to Wittenham Clumps?’

‘Right,’ says Quinn into the silence. ‘I’ll warn the press office. Because if we’ve made the connection with the Gardiner case, the hacks soon will too. We need to get out ahead of this one, guys.’

‘Too late,’ says Gislingham grimly, looking at his phone. ‘They’ve got there already.’

***

The young woman opens the window and stands there a moment breathing the warm air. The honeysuckle growing up the wall is already in flower. Behind her, she can hear the little boy chattering away to his teddy bear as he has his tea, and, turned down low, the sound of the early evening news on the TV in the kitchen. Somewhere further away, a man’s voice talking animatedly on the phone.

‘Pippa!’ calls the little boy. ‘Look at the TV! That’s the house with all those bikes outside!’

The young woman goes back into the kitchen, picking up a discarded panda on the way, and joins the little boy at the table. On the screen, a reporter is standing in front of a police tape, gesturing backwards towards the scene behind him. There are several police cars with their lights flashing, and an ambulance. The headline running along the bottom of the screen says: BREAKING: Oxford cellar girl: New questions raised about the Hannah Gardiner case . No, she thinks, please no. Not after all this time. Not now that things are finally working out. She puts an arm round the little boy, smelling the sweet artificial shampoo scent of him.

‘Shall we show Daddy?’ says the little boy, twisting to look up at her. There’s a dark pink scar on his temple.

‘No, Toby,’ says the young woman, her face anxious. ‘Not yet. We don’t want to disturb him. He’s happy where he is.’

***

Oxford Mail

1st May 2017

OXFORD’S OWN ‘FRITZL CASE’:

HOW COULD IT HAPPEN HERE?

By Mark Leverton

North Oxford residents are still in shock after the discovery earlier today of a young woman and a toddler in the cellar of a house in Frampton Road. It’s not yet clear how long she had been there, but parallels are already being drawn with the infamous ‘Fritzl case’, in which an Austrian man imprisoned his daughter for 24 years in the basement of his home and raped her repeatedly, resulting in the birth of seven children. Elisabeth Fritzl was only discovered when one of her children fell dangerously ill. Josef Fritzl had constructed a sophisticated underground prison for his daughter, behind eight locked doors, but there is no suggestion yet of any such construction in Frampton Road. Many concerned residents are already asking how the girl could have been concealed down there without anyone knowing.