Mark Sennen - Touch

‘Sorry, ma’am, you’ve lost me.’

Savage realised she was rambling, but she did her best to explain the nursery angle, how the victims had something to do with caring for young children. Collier said he didn’t like it. He didn’t want to generate a load of new actions around hunches.

‘We don’t know these new mispers are victims yet,’ he said. ‘We are stretched enough as it is and this will simply generate more and more threads to follow. We will be wasting precious resources on girls who might turn up tomorrow. We will have officers out on wild goose-’

‘Shut it, Collier,’ Savage said, angry with Collier’s focus on silly administrative details. ‘If the girls turn up alive and well then that is a result in my book. If, God forbid, they turn up dead then we will have done some useful groundwork. And anyway, I might remind you the Olivarez girl is very much dead.’

Collier shrugged. He didn’t dare argue with his superior, but Savage saw he was riled. His office system was in danger of being overloaded now he was going to have to insert material from Leash into operation Zebo. All his careful planning was being blown out of the water. That couldn’t be helped though. Every piece of data would need to be re-evaluated in the light of the new evidence. It was going to be a mammoth task. Savage attempted to placate him by placing an arm around his shoulders.

‘Come on, I’ll get some fresh coffees and we will see how we are going to handle the new data. And then I will go and see Hardin and persuade him to get me some extra bodies in here.’

Savage had got the coffees and Collier began to explain about the problems of not letting Zebo get overloaded by the sheer quantity of data that had been gathered during the Leash inquiry.

‘Leash has been going on for twelve months flat out,’ he said. ‘Zebo has been going a week. There must be a hundred times more material in the Leash case.’

Savage didn’t have time to address his concerns because DI Davies and DC Jackson had come in. Their faces wore glum expressions, like little kids who had opened all their Christmas presents at once and didn’t have anything else to look forward to.

‘It’s that little prick, Dickie boy Trent,’ Davies scowled. ‘He retracted his confession. He is now saying Mitchell carried out all the rapes and he just drove the car. He fingered Forester too. Told us Forester supplied the GHB and took the videos. Says he was too scared to tell us before.’

‘He knows Mitchell and Forester are dead?’

‘We had to tell the bitch Bradley, yes.’ Davies looked downcast. ‘Disclosure of evidence and all that fucking crap.’

‘Very convenient.’

‘Yeah. With those two out of the way, him and the bloody lawyer can concoct whatever story they like.’

‘So you are here about Forester?’

‘Clever girl!’ Davies beamed, a smile spreading like the Cheshire Cat just got the cream. ‘We need to get into his network and find out what connections he had.’

‘Have you threatened Trent?’

‘What with? Having charged him with the nine rapes he is going down for life even if he tells us where Elvis is living.’

Savage could imagine Trent had worked everything out. Once he had admitted the rapes he would have known his situation couldn’t get any worse if he kept his mouth shut. He had been right because the other two suspects were dead and by changing his story he now had a way out.

‘We’ve got Forester’s mobile phone logs, they might be some help.’ She nodded at Collier and he went off to get a printout.

‘Great. We think Trent had a Pay As You Go contract, because we can’t find anything in his bank statements and we can’t locate the bloody phone. If we can get Trent’s number from Forester’s phone we can go to the mobile operator to get the complete record set.’

‘So where did the phone go?’

‘Little wifey,’ Jackson said. ‘She seemed so sweet and put upon, but we reckon she grabbed the phone while we were running around securing the house. If you remember she refused the offer of a FLO and went off to a friend’s for the night. Must have ditched the thing because she is denying all knowledge.’

‘Wait a minute…’ Savage paused ‘Can’t you put it to him the wife must have known?’

‘And she goes down as well? We tried, he just shrugged and said “prove it”.’ Davies tapped his head with his forefinger. ‘Mr Know-All. He’s got an Excel bloody spreadsheet up here filled in with all the possibilities. His wife going down for any more than being a pain-in-the-butt isn’t one of them.’

‘Here you are, sir,’ Collier had returned and he handed a printout to Davies. ‘All the numbers Forester called in the month before he went missing, ordered by frequency.’

‘You gone through these yet?’ Davies asked.

Savage sighed and was aware of Collier looking at her with a little smirk on his face.

‘No, it’s on the to do list.’

‘That’s Trent’s direct line at the university.’ Davies pointed to a number in the middle of the sheet. ‘We will need to get a reverse look up on the other landlines.’

‘Do that. If you could get the results back to us that would save another job. And if you find any numbers on the list to do with nurseries then let me know as a matter of urgency.’

Davies looked puzzled, his head tilted on one side like a squirrel with a nut it couldn’t crack.

‘Nurseries? What, you mean geraniums and stuff?’

‘No, babies. Child minders, nannies, day-care staff. There’s a bit of a shortage of them around here at the moment.’

*

Thursday afternoon at Cotton Socks nursery and DS Darius Riley was bricking himself. A little girl had toddled over to him and introduced herself as, ‘Lisa and I’ve got a big poo in my nappy.’ Riley hadn’t had much experience with children; as an only child and thus with no nieces or nephews he didn’t have a clue what to say or do. A druggie rushing at him full of ketamine and armed with a knife he could deal with, but an infant in possession of a hazardous substance? Way too scary.

Thank goodness Enders was covering him and, being a family man with three of the little brats under seven, he knew how to handle the incident. He bent down, held the girl’s hand and took her across to one of the nursery staff. Simple when you had done the training.

‘Thanks mate,’ Riley said. ‘Thought I was a goner for a moment.’

The nursery in Ivybridge was the third they had visited so far that morning, but Riley still hadn’t got used to the stench of urine in the baby and toddler rooms.

‘Don’t know how you manage at home, the smell from the shit and piss makes me gag.’

‘Oh, once you’ve got past the thousand nappy milestone you get used to it. The first poo they do is the worst. Long, black, sticky and stinks like you wouldn’t believe.’

‘One would be bad enough, but a thousand! Never going to happen to me for sure.’

‘I can see Ms Meadows looking lovely with a couple of kids in her arms.’ Enders winked. ‘And I hear she was in town last night at that new tapas bar. With a handsome black guy. Now I wonder-’

‘How did you…?’

Enders dropped out of Riley’s line of sight onto his haunches to talk to a little boy hugging a big pink teddy bear. Riley smiled to himself. Enders was right, and not just about the fact he had been on a date last night. Julie Meadows would look beautiful holding a baby, his baby. Then he shook his head. Broody, him? Mr notch-em-up-on-the-bed-post-new-girl-each-month Riley? Yes, quite possibly. Still, he reckoned he could do without the smells.

Alice Nash worked at Cotton Socks so the nursery had been visited before, but not by members of the Zebo team. Savage had insisted the work places relating to the four dead and missing girls should be visited or revisited. This time by the same people.