Lucie Whitehouse - Critical Incidents

With a screech on the rail, Maggie pushed things to one side and took out a black body-con dress. She held it up to the light.

‘She bought that in the sales last month.’ Valerie appeared in the mirror behind her. Robin jumped, and turned around.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to … She and Lucy – her best friend – they got up at four o’clock to go. The trousers she was wearing when she … She got them sixty per cent off – she was so chuffed. She bought me a cardigan, too. That’s Lucy.’ In a second, Valerie was at Robin’s side, pointing to a photograph tucked into the mirror-frame of a pretty girl with light brown hair twisted into a top-knot. She wore a strappy, gym-type T-shirt and her face was flushed and shiny with sweat. ‘They did a 10K run last April, the three of them.’

‘He being the third?’ Robin pointed at the man with his arm around the girl’s shoulders, same age, mixed race. Eyes closed against the sun but grinning, a near-empty water bottle hanging between the fingers of his other hand.

‘Harry, yes.’

‘They look close – are they together?’

‘Lucy and Harry? No. Lucy’s going out with Cal – Calvin. They’re just friends, the three of them. I always worried about that – three’s a crowd – but it works. They’ve been friends for years, since they all started at Grafton House.’

‘Grafton House?’ said Maggie. ‘The private school?’

‘Graeme had a life-insurance policy. That’s what I spent it on. We talked about it before he died. She went to state school until she was eleven, then Grafton.’

‘Do you have Lucy and Harry’s numbers?’

‘I’ve got hers – she’ll be able to give you his.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Becca and Harry were never involved?’ said Robin.

She shook her head. ‘As I say, it’s always just been platonic.’

Missed opportunity, Robin thought; he was fit. She heard Corinna’s voice suddenly, dust-dry, ‘ For god’s sake, Rob. I’m dead, you’re trying to find someone who’s probably dead as well – a little focus, perhaps? ’

The pain – longing, loss, a desperate urge to laugh; it was sheer luck that she didn’t yelp. She caught her own eye in the mirror – steady, steady – then Valerie’s. She looked away, took a deep breath. A little focus . ‘Yesterday,’ she said, ‘when you told us you checked in with her work because her bed hadn’t been slept in – was that unusual? If she doesn’t have a boyfriend. Does she stay over with friends? How often doesn’t she sleep here?’

There was a pause, small but marked. ‘It was when I found the phone as well that I started worrying, not just the bed. Rebecca’s twenty-two. She can stay out, can’t she?’

‘Of course.’ Maggie, soothing.

‘But just to be clear, you mean with men?’ Robin pressed.

‘She’s an attractive girl, she’s never gone short of attention. She has flings, yes. One-night stands.’ Valerie locked eyes with her, as if daring her to be shocked.

You’ll have to try harder than that, Robin thought. ‘Has she been doing it lately? Staying out, I mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘Would she go home with someone she’d never met before? A stranger?’

Valerie turned to the window, biting a piece of dry skin on her lip between her eye teeth. ‘I don’t know. No, of course I do. She would. Yes.’

When Robin was in her final year of junior school, a local woman was kidnapped. Stephanie Slater was twenty-five, an estate agent, taken from a house she’d been showing in Great Barr, only a few miles away in the north of the city. It became a major national news story, one of the biggest manhunts in British history. Christine and Dennis whispered about it in the other room, waited ’til she’d gone to bed to watch the news, but the details had been in the air, all anyone could talk about: the ransom money snatched from a railway bridge, the coffin-sized box inside a green wheelie bin in which Slater had been locked in darkness for eight days, told that if she moved she’d be electrocuted. After she was released, she described how she’d talked to Michael Sams, and kept talking, so he’d be forced to understand that she was a person, a human being. Her bravery and presence of mind probably kept her alive.

Michael Sams, badger-faced, wooden-legged Michael Sams – by the following year, when Robin started at the grammar school and met Corinna, he’d become a playground bogeyman, the shadowy figure who offered you the bag of sweets, who shoved you into the back of a van as you walked home from the corner shop at twilight. Michael Sams’ll get you .

And then, two years later, barely fifty miles away in Gloucester, came Fred and Rose West.

She and Rin were twelve turning thirteen by then: prime-time adolescence. It had gone on for weeks, the systematic taking-apart of the house at Cromwell Street where, over decades, Fred and Rose had together raped, tortured and killed young women, including their own daughters. White forensic suits on the news, day after day, week after week, another set of remains and another and another, in the garden, in holes dug in the cellar floor. Again her parents had tried to shield her but away from Dunnington Road, she and Rin had followed the news with a horrified fascination, reading the papers, watching the news at Rin’s place when Di was at work and Will, babysitting, was doing his homework in the other room. There were few stories, thank god, as depraved as that. Rose was found guilty on ten counts of murder; Fred, charged with twelve, never stood trial. He committed suicide while on remand at Winson Green, HMP Birmingham, just a handful of miles up the road. Robin remembered: it was New Year’s Day.

Two of the biggest crime stories of the decade, both local, both sexual violence against young women, a double whammy that happened just as she and Corinna became aware of the news, aware that they were – or soon would be – young women, and that monsters were not just in books but opening their car doors to offer you a lift in the rain.

It started with Stephanie Slater, her bravery as she lay alone in the dark, injured and terrified. To Robin, she became a hero, a symbol of strength, and when the Wests and their house of horrors came to light, Robin had an epiphany: that was what she wanted. She wanted strength. She wanted to be a hero. She wanted to break down the door and rescue the next Stephanie Slater. She wanted to be the one who followed the Wests home, kicked Fred in the bollocks, and pulled the girl away from the car, the teetering edge of the void.

That was what she told anyone who asked why she’d decided to go into the police. Over the years, she’d made it sound more and more ridiculous – Behold the high-kicking, karate-chopping teen ninja girl! Marvel at the self-importance, the naivety! – but it was true; it had been the first reason before she had another.

Maggie hadn’t followed the Slater case in the news: she’d worked on it. Not immediately, on the original core team, but as soon as the investigation started to expand. Unsurprisingly, it loomed large in her memory. She’d kept quiet at Valerie’s, of course, but in the car on their way here to the office, she’d brought it up.

‘Kidnap for ransom? Really?’ Robin was dubious. Nothing about the Woodsons’ set-up said money, and Valerie’s only real savings, she’d told them, were in a small private pension that wouldn’t mature for another seventeen years.

‘Remember the Slater case?’ Maggie said. ‘It was her employers , the estate agents, that Sams went after – he wanted their insurance money. Valerie might not have much but Becca works for a silversmith.’