Mark Pearson - Hard Evidence

Morgan's Garage was about half a mile from the Waterhill estate in a run-down stretch of mainly commercial real estate, a no-man's-land of lockups and storage facilities within a brick's throw of the Harrow Road. Wire fences protected weed-polluted tarmac and graffiti-sprayed warehouses. At the end of the street stood a few houses that had been built in the fifties in the hope of an urban renewal for the area that never came. Morgan's workshop was an extended garage that his father had fitted out sometime in the early sixties and that hadn't been touched since. Red bricks and a concrete floor. A bare bulb overhead, a 1972 Ford Escort stripped back beneath it, yellow, rusting and in need of serious loving attention.

Inside the garage Delaney moved a grease-covered spanner to one side of the cluttered worktop as Morgan picked up a photo frame and carefully replaced the original of the photo that was now pinned to the briefing room wall back at White City police station. Jenny still looked out at the camera, her eyes giving nothing away. Sally took the frame from his callused, stained and shaking hands.

'This is definitely the most recent photo you have of her?'

'She don't like having her picture taken.'

Delaney held his gaze. 'Why's that?'

Morgan shrugged and looked off to the side. 'She just don't.'

Sally smiled sympathetically. 'What about boyfriends?'

'What do you mean?'

'Does she have a boyfriend?'

Morgan shook his head angrily. 'Of course she doesn't.'

Sally continued gently. 'It's possible. Someone from school, perhaps?'

'I would know!'

'She's a very pretty girl.'

'She's my girl. I would know!'

Delaney considered the fury that shone in the man's eyes with an almost religious fervour. He listened to the body language and met Morgan's defiant gaze with a look that held as much anger, and more, in check.

'You didn't know she was missing for nineteen hours, though, did you?'

Sally flinched, startled at the aggression in his voice, as Delaney stepped forward, getting into Morgan's space.

'What else don't you know?'

Morgan rubbed his left arm, up and down, as he stepped back a pace. 'I didn't know she was gone. I look after her.'

Delaney snorted. 'You do a great job. Does she have a computer?'

Morgan didn't answer, and Sally prompted him gently. 'Does she have her own computer, for schoolwork?'

'In her bedroom. She has one in her bedroom. I don't know how to use it.'

For the first time, maybe, Delaney felt a twinge of sympathy for the man.

Sally continued to smile encouragingly at Morgan, good cop to Delaney's bad. 'Do you mind if we take the computer, Mr Morgan?'

'Why would you do that? She needs that. She told me she needs it for her homework. All the kids have got them.'

'I know.'

'When she comes home, she'll want to know where it is. She'll be home soon, won't she?'

'We hope so.' Sally had a soothing voice, like soft honey. Delaney found himself thinking that she'd probably make a good mother some day; Howard Morgan was just like a child in a lot of ways.

'Sometimes people use their computers like diaries, Mr Morgan,' she said. 'They write things in them.'

'I don't know. She never showed me.'

'It might help us find her.'

'Take it then. I just want her home. She should be home.'

Delaney considered Morgan for a moment or two but could see nothing in his eyes that he hadn't already seen in his own. The thought didn't reassure him.

There are all sorts of places where the dispossessed and the helpless of London gather. Abandoned warehouses, filthy underpasses, old churchyards tucked away in shameful Victorian decay right in the heart of the city, although the city, of course, has no heart. Bob Wilkinson knew that for a fact. This was a city that killed people. Literally. You could kill a person with a building as easily as you could with an axe – he didn't know who said that, but he agreed with the sentiment. Bob would have liked to take an axe to some of the people he had to deal with in his job on a daily basis. He watched as Bonner sniffed disdainfully and looked down at the inert body of a young girl. They were in an underpass, a late-night drop-in for the substance- and alcohol-abusers who had nowhere else to go. In the winter it would probably kill them, but in the summer it kept them out of the rain and out of the noses of late-night theatregoers on Shaftesbury Avenue. Didn't keep them out of Bonner's nose, though, and it was a smell he clearly didn't much care for.

He toed the young girl roughly with his shoe, looking at the picture of Jenny Morgan that he held in his hand.

'Easy, Sergeant.' Bob's disapproval was clear in his voice, but Bonner ignored him and kicked the sleeping girl again.

'Wakey, wakey.'

The young girl turned her head and blinked angrily up at Bonner.

'Why don't you fuck off?'

It wasn't Jenny. Bonner nodded at her and put the photo back in his pocket.

'All right, princess. Back to your beauty sleep.'

Bonner and Wilkinson walked on through the subway that led from the hospital to where their car was parked. The girl called after them.

'Hang on, copper, you got any change?'

'Yeah,' Bonner called back and carried on walking.

Bob looked at him and shook his head. 'You're a piece of work, you know that.'

'That's a piece of work, Sergeant, to you.' Bonner grinned.

'And you can kiss my arse,' Wilkinson muttered, not quietly.

Bonner pretended he hadn't heard it. 'We haven't got time to fuck about, Bob. That little girl needs to be found; it's about getting the job done quickly.'

'I bet your girlfriend loves that approach.'

'My women love everything about me.'

'Course they do, sir.'

Bonner strode quickly up the subway stairs as Wilkinson followed behind, thanking Christ on a bicycle that he was getting out of the job soon.

Delaney looked around Jenny Morgan's room. It was sparse, neat. No posters of boy bands on the wall. No pink furry ponies or glittering costume jewellery. No Keep Out signs. No notebooks with doodles on the cover and I heart this or I heart that. No photos of horses, or best mates hugging each other in photo booths designed for passport pictures. No jewellery boxes or musical boxes or clothes strewn on the floor. No books lined up carefully or artlessly on shelves, no CD player or DVD player. Just a bed, a couple of cupboards and a rug arranged neatly on the floor. It could have been a hostel room, or a nun's room. Nothing to show it was the bedroom of a twelve-year-old girl. On a desk that stood in front of a small window overlooking her father's yard was a small laptop computer.

Delaney opened the cupboards and looked through the drawers. Clothes, old birthday cards. Project folders from school. But no letters, no diaries, no real clue to the missing girl's personality. Maybe she didn't have one. Maybe she was as blank a canvas as her bedroom seemed to be.

He turned on the computer. As he expected, her desktop was clear. No documents or pictures left carelessly, everything ordered into its proper folder, its proper file. He heard voices from downstairs, switched the computer off and picked it up, looking around the room to see if he had missed anything.

He hadn't.

Downstairs, Sally was talking to Jake Morgan, Howard Morgan's older brother. He was in his late forties, as heavily built and dark-browed as his sibling but a few inches taller, and the oil stains on his face looked as ingrained as a tattoo. He was wearing a filthy T-shirt under a pair of dungarees, his massive arms hung loosely by his sides, and as Delaney looked at the slack expression on his face, the tune of duelling banjos ran unavoidably through his mind.

Jake frowned as he looked at what Delaney was holding. 'What you got there? That's Jenny's.' His voice was slow, as if framing the simple words was an effort for him, but Delaney could hear the menace in it.