Кара Хантер - In the Dark

She’s done her homework. I’m beginning to think we should get this woman into CID.

‘Boiler suit?’ says Gislingham. ‘One of those plastic sheets garages put on the seat?’

I turn to Quinn. ‘Call Challow and tell him we need to search the Frampton Road house for a possible body. And for anything Harper might have worn to cover his tracks.’

*

As people are filing out I catch Baxter’s eye.

‘I want you to look for any unsolved disappearances of young women and small children in the last ten years.’

He shoots me a glance and I see his brain working, but he doesn’t say anything. He knows when to keep his mouth shut; it’s one reason why I like him.

‘Focus on Oxford and Birmingham to start with, then widen the search fifty miles at a time. And then go back another ten years.’

He nods. ‘On the kids, is it boys and girls you want, or just boys?’

I’m halfway out of the room but the question pulls me up short. I turn, still thinking.

‘Just boys. For now.’

***

When I take a seat opposite Bryan Gow half an hour later I can tell at once he’s read this morning’s news. We’re in the café in the Covered Market. Crowds are pushing past outside, stopping to look in the coffee merchant’s opposite and at the rack of vintage postcards outside the shop next door. Dig for Victory , Guinness is Good For You , Keep Calm and Carry On. God, I hate that bloody thing.

‘I was wondering when you’d call,’ says Gow, folding his paper. ‘You’re lucky to catch me – I’ve got a conference in Aberdeen tomorrow.’

I wonder in passing what the collective noun for profilers would be. A ‘composite’, perhaps.

He pushes his plate away. He never could resist a full English, especially if I’m paying.

‘It’s this man Harper you want to talk about, I take it?’

The waitress plonks two cups in front of us, slopping coffee into the saucers.

‘It’s a difficult one,’ Gow continues, picking up his spoon and reaching for the sugar. ‘The Alzheimer’s – it’s going to make getting a conviction very tricky. But I assume you know that.’

‘That’s not why I’m here. When we found the girl, it seemed fairly straightforward –’

Gow raises an eyebrow, then goes back to stirring his coffee.

‘What I meant was that the motivation seemed fairly straightforward. And we initially assumed the child was born down there – like that case in Austria – Josef Fritzl.’

‘In fact, the woman Fritzl imprisoned was his own daughter, so that case would actually be very different. Psychologically speaking, of course. Though I don’t expect such nuances from mere policemen. But from what you say, you’ve decided it’s not so straightforward after all.’

‘It was something Hannah’s husband said. He asked me if Harper had a thing for abducting young women with their children. Whether that’s why he targeted Hannah. Only for some reason he changed his mind and decided to dump Toby. Possibly to put us off the scent. But if that’s true, it would put a completely different timeline on the cellar case – we’ve been assuming the child is Harper’s, but what if the girl was kidnapped with the boy?’

‘I imagine you’re doing a DNA test?’

I nod. ‘It’s a bit more complicated than it’d normally be, but yes.’

Gow puts down his spoon. ‘So in the meantime what you want to know is how common it would be for a sexual predator to do that – to abduct young women with small children.’

Over Gow’s shoulder I can see a family looking in the window of the specialty cake shop. Two little blond boys have their noses pressed against the glass, and their mother is clearly trying to get them to decide which one they want. The chocolate dragon or the red Spider-Man or the Thomas the Tank Engine. We got Jake’s ninth birthday cake from that shop. It had a unicorn with a golden horn. He loved unicorns.

‘I’ve never come across one.’

I turn back to Gow, my head still full of unicorns.

‘Sorry?’

‘A sexual predator who targets both women and children. It’s almost unheard of. I can do some digging about in the published case material, but I don’t think I can recall a single instance. When women have been abducted along with a child it’s because the child was in the wrong place at the wrong time: it was the woman who was the target. You know as well as I do that paedophiles are often married or in long-term relationships, but they don’t abduct women. They abduct children. In fact,’ he says, picking up his coffee, ‘there’s only one possibility I can think of that would make any sense.’

‘And that is?’

‘That you’re not looking at the same man. Two different predators, in other words. One of them a paedophile, the other a sexual sadist. But working together. Sharing the risk, dividing the spoils.’

As if they were so much carrion. It’s enough to make your blood run cold. But so many of the question marks would disappear if William Harper had an accomplice. It would explain why no one saw an old man alone with a buggy that day. In fact, it might even mean Harper was never there at all. The person who dumped the buggy could have been someone else entirely. Someone completely under the radar. Nameless. Faceless. Unknown.

Gow puts the cup down. ‘Is there any evidence there was someone else in the house? Someone who could have visited, even if they didn’t live there?’

Derek Ross, I think, before pushing the thought away.

‘Not so far. Most of the neighbours claim they never saw anyone.’

Gow makes a face. ‘In that part of Oxford? I bet they bloody didn’t. I wouldn’t take that as any kind of proof.’

‘There was one old lady who insisted there was someone. But we’ve dismissed it because she said it was Harper’s son and we know he doesn’t have one.’

Gow picks up his cup again. ‘I’d check that out again if I were you. The old buzzard might not be as gaga as you think.’

***

Challow gathers the forensics team together in the kitchen. ‘Looks like the to-do list just got rather longer so I hope no one has a hot date planned for later. CID, in their infinite wisdom, now suspect there could be a link between this house and the disappearance of Hannah Gardiner in 2015. So until we’ve completely eliminated that possibility we have to work on the basis that we could be standing in the middle of a murder scene. Or a burial site. Or, indeed, both.’

Nina takes a deep breath. She remembers the Hannah Gardiner case. She did the search on the car. The packet of mints in the glovebox, the juice stains on the child seat, the screwed-up petrol receipts. All the detritus of life that becomes so unbearable when someone has gone.

Challow is still talking. ‘If we’re looking for a grave, the cellar’s a non-starter. You couldn’t take up the concrete down there without some pretty hefty tools and there’s no sign of that sort of disturbance. So where next – the garden?’

‘Actually, I don’t think so,’ says Nina. ‘It’s too exposed – too dangerous. You couldn’t get away with digging a hole that big without risking one of the neighbours seeing.’

She walks over and pushes through the bead curtain to the conservatory. The glass inside is greened and the only thing alive is the creeper growing through the breaks in the windowpanes. The shelves of pots hold nothing but decay. Fossilized geraniums. Yellowed tomato plants. There’s a smell of damp and old earth. The rush matting on the floor is black with mildew and coming apart.

She goes up to the window and wipes a space in the murky glass, then stands there for a moment, looking down the garden.