Baby Love (8 page)

Was it lack of time? Or inclination? The Baldwin Street terrace didn’t feel like home, but if she didn’t do the unpacking and have her things around her it never would. Maybe she needed a housemate. Or a wife. How good would it be to come
home to dinner in the oven and slippers by the fire?

She slammed a piece of granary in the toaster and checked the answer-phone. Frankie. Shit. Bev had forgotten to call that morning to put off their fun for another day. Seemed like a lifetime ago.

“Thanks a bunch, sister.” Not a trace of Frankie’s Italian accent. Not good, then. Bev closed her eyes. Her mate, Frankie Perlagio, was closer than a sister. And she’d let her down. Again. It was too late to call now.

Her mum’s voice was next: Emmy. “Can you make lunch tomorrow, love? Roast beef and Worcesters. I’ll even do you a treacle pud.” The pause was deliberate. And the lowered voice. “Sadie misses you, Bev. She’d love to
see you.”

Bev clenched her fists. Another stick to beat herself with. Sadie, her gran, was scared of her own shadow since a vicious battering nine months back. An intruder connected to a case Bev was working had broken into the family home. The bastard smacked
Sadie round the face before hacking off her lovely long hair. Bev doubted her gran would ever fully recover.

She sighed. The chances of making lunch – even Emmy’s signature Worcester puds – were as good as Bin Laden doing Big Brother. The bread popped up, burned to a crisp. She slung it in the swing bin and headed for bed. Ten minutes later
she was sprawled fully dressed on top of the duvet, snoring for Europe.

The Baby Fay case files lay open across the pillow next to her.

It was twenty-two hours since Baby Zoë had last been seen alive.

Bill Byford was gazing at the sprawl of city lights glittering like diamonds and ice in the indigo distance. Sleep was a long way off too. He’d got up, made tea, brought it back to the bedroom. He’d been looking out for
twenty minutes, looking back nearly twenty years.

The superintendent didn’t need the case files to remember Baby Fay. He’d been a uniformed sergeant when she’d been snatched in ’88. He and another officer had found the body. Byford had come close to a career change. Only the
thought of watching a sick pervert go down for the rest of his life had kept him going. And the loving support of his wife. Margaret had died six years ago. Byford still missed her like a limb.

An anonymous letter had told the police to search a building site over in Chelmsley Wood where the foundations for a new school were being laid. Without the tip-off they’d probably never have found the baby. The tiny body had been stuffed into
filthy sacking; covered in concrete dust, she’d resembled a miniature mummy. The pathologist recorded twenty-three broken bones, eleven cigarette burns and indications of sexual abuse. Fay lived in Byford’s head now. Always would.

The baby had been snatched from her cot in the middle of the night from a white, middle-class family in Northfield. Fay was six months old and the parents’ only child. Within a year of burying her, they’d separated. The father took off to
America, if Byford remembered right. The mother took an overdose. She died three weeks later without regaining consciousness.

He pressed his head against the window, welcoming the cool on his clammy skin. It took three long weeks to find Fay. After eighteen years, they still hadn’t caught the evil monster who’d killed her.

“Brought you a stick of rock.”

Bev looked up from a desk that was in imminent danger of collapse from paper-fatigue. Oz’s smiling face was the last thing she expected to see poking round the incident-room door. She hoped, very much, that the rest of DC Khan was present in the
corridor. It was. He strolled in, looking considerably tastier than the proffered stick of sugar and E-numbers. Man in black, today: fitted linen trousers, torso-hugging t-shirt. Lucky t-shirt. It was easy to forget how staggeringly fit Oz was in the
flesh: classic bone structure, big brown eyes and first-degree brain. What more could a girl want? A peck on the cheek would be good. No one else was around. Not this early on a Sunday.

Bev had been in since 6am. Apart from a quick no-can-do-lunch call to her mum, the time had been spent going through the Baby Fay case files. Oz was a sight for extremely sore eyes. She was glad she’d made more of a sartorial effort herself this
morning. As usual, Bev was woman in blue; her entire working gear was blue, blue and a touch of blue. But the skirt was new, fitted and knee-length. When she was on her feet.

She casually crossed her legs and, just to show willing, tugged at the rock’s sticky wrapping before taking a lick. “Thought you weren’t back till tomorrow?”

“Pining for you, sarge.” So why was he riffling paperwork? “Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, wasting away I was.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I wish. A year ago, maybe...

He grabbed a chair, turned it and straddled. “I saw the story on the news about the missing baby. Hands-on-deck job, isn’t it? Thought I’d get up to speed on the reports.”

She bit off a chunk of rock. “How’d the wedding go? Did the bride blush? Did you lose the ring?”

“Did I what?” Oz winced as she crunched and swallowed.

“Best man always loses the ring.” She flashed a grin. “Traditional, that is. Like the groom’s hangover and the mothers bawling their socks off and...”

He was studying her closely. “What’ve you been up to, Bev?”

“Nothing!” How come he could see right through her?

“You’ve got that glint in your eye. And you’re babbling like a brook. In flood.”

Apart from a word in DC Carol Mansfield’s ear, Bev had intended keeping it quiet. But Oz soon had edited chapter and verse of her midnight recce at the crime scene.

“What’s the guv’s take on it?”

“Ah. That’s a long story, Oz.” She walked round the desk, slipped an arm through his. “Come on, I’ll fill you in. Breakfast’s on me.”

“It’s not the only thing, Sergeant Morriss.” His smile was heart-stopping. “Come here.”

Stay mean, keep ’em keen. “Best not, mate.” She went for coy. “The others’ll be in any time.”

He handed her a virgin-white cotton handkerchief. “Wipe your mouth, sarge. It’s covered in pink gunge.”

They nipped to a greasy spoon just round the corner from the nick. Oz was getting the full works: a verbal update from Bev on both inquiries. It was littered with one-liners and caustic comments but as an up-sum it was fast,
professional and incisive. She did a mean wheat-from-chaff and it beat written reports into a cocked helmet. Oz was digesting details and ingesting eggs: two, soft-boiled. It was sixteen minutes before the guv’s brief and Bev was ploughing her way
through a full English. If an army marched on its stomach, she’d be well ready to join up.

And judging by the WAR posters that had appeared overnight in the streets of south Birmingham, maybe the whole force should consider enlisting. Women Against Rape had plastered almost as many notices as those pasted up by uniform about the missing
baby. Every other lamppost carried signs about the mass protest and candlelit vigil. Those that didn’t showed Zoë Beck’s picture and a plea for information from the public.

Oz broke a yolk with a soldier. “If the baby’s not found soon, the guv’ll have to re-organise the squads, won’t he?”

Bev nodded, took a slurp of tea. “I’m already off Street Watch.” Registering his wide-mouthed surprise, she waved a reassuring fork. “I’m cool with it now. He’s made me SIO on the search.” She dabbed at a
cluster of beans soaking into her shirt. “Anyway...”

“Hold on. If you’re off the case, what were you doing at the scene last night?”

She thought she’d slipped that in but it snagged on Oz’s radar. No point in diversionary tactics now. She leaned in, lowered her voice. “I needed to see it, Oz. I’m off the case but...I can’t just drop it. I want the
bastard behind bars.”

He could barely hear her but was in no doubt how strongly she felt. “We all do, Bev.” He took her hand. “You have to let it go. DI Powell’s...”

“A plonker.” She snatched her hand back.

“...a good officer,” Oz persisted. “Have you told him? About finding the earring?”

She sighed, shook her head. “That’s something else I’m really looking forward to.”

Oz opened his mouth to speak but changed his mind. He knew when to leave it. Bev hoped the guv’d leave her and Oz as a team as well. They knew each other’s ways, didn’t always see eye to eye but in a tight corner... Oz had covered
her back more times than a duvet. He was the only man in the entire universe who knew it sported a tiny rose tattoo. Though they hadn’t shared the bottom sheet much recently. Not since she’d beaten the shit out of the psycho-killer
who’d attacked Sadie. It hadn’t been a pretty sight – and Oz had seen it. Now, apart from on shift, he saw a lot less of Bev.

“There’s a limit to what the guv can do.” Oz was back on safer ground. “He can switch people round, but it’s all a bit Peter and Paul.”

Bev nodded. Oz was spot on. Whatever Byford said to the media in the public domain, privately he’d told Bev that West Mercia police were already on standby, should he have to call in more bodies. It went against the grain, implying an
inadequacy, an inability to cope. But two high-profile on-going operations, constant high-alert security status and normal run-of-the-nick crime were enough to stretch any force to its limit. Maybe beyond.

Sunday, 8am, day two of the search and it was standing room only. Huge blow-up photographs of the missing baby dominated the briefing room where more than eighty men and women gathered, many – like Oz – turning up on a
day off. About a third had been temporarily re-assigned from Street Watch, which explained Mike Powell’s presence – a sort of two-briefings-with-one-stone scenario.

Bev was seated next to the DI behind a metal desk up at the front. She’d attended hundreds of similar meetings, couldn’t recall an atmosphere remotely like this. It could power the national grid, no problem. Every officer was focused; many
were grim-faced. There was no slouching posture, no irreverent asides, no black humour. Most of these people had kids. All were acutely aware that the first twenty-four hours following a crime were important; in the case of a missing child they were
crucial. Baby Zoë hadn’t been seen for twenty-nine.

“We’re extending the search parameters.” Byford was on his feet, centre stage, an impatient hand jiggling keys in a trouser pocket. An enlarged street plan of Balsall Heath and surrounding suburbs had been pinned to one of the
incident boards. The map was dotted with coloured markers showing the places teams had already covered. The guv waved a pointer over the areas to be added, plus special-interest sites such as wasteland, derelict buildings, allotments and a recreation
ground. Sniffer dogs and handlers were already out there; divers would shortly be dragging further stretches of the canal.

“Back here,” Byford said, “we’ll continue phone-bashing and putting in the checks. As of now, Jack’s control room co-ordinator.”

Inspector Jack Hainsworth lifted an arm like a leg of pork. Early forties, thinning ginger hair, he was admired and respected by everyone in the building, not necessarily liked. He was chunky, bull-necked and had the look of a nightclub bouncer
wearing uniform for a bet. A Yorkshireman who loathed cricket, he’d read classics at Cambridge and was into campanology. He suffered neither fools nor fuck-ups gladly; in fact, not at all. Hainsworth’s sharp beady eyes would scan every sheet
of paper, assess every piece of data; he’d then prioritise and point the inquiry in the right direction. He had a brain like a computer and a mouth like an open sewer. It was currently running through state of play and future activity.

Notes were taken, questions posed. It was donkeys-at-desks stuff, methodical and tedious. Bev wasn’t big on routine plod-work but appreciated that just one call, one follow-up, could give them the breakthrough. And she reckoned it was more
likely to come via the backroom players than anyone on the ground.

Widening the hunt, though logical, was an almost certainly futile step. They all knew, even if no one would say, that without a steer locating the baby was virtually impossible. It made a needle in a haystack look like a piece of piss. If Zoë was
still alive, she and the abductor could be holed up anywhere. If it was a body they were looking for, the list of places it could be buried or dumped was endless.

Point was, they had to be seen to be doing something; a big police presence was vital. They had to keep Zoë uppermost in the public’s mind. If they were out there in strength, the media would be out there in force. A powerful weapon, if a
two-edged sword.

In an apparently motiveless crime, with no forensic evidence and a lack of quality witness reports, the police were almost entirely dependent on the community’s help. Tip-offs leading to arrest were the top end of the informants’ market.
More commonly people saw stuff but didn’t realise its significance, others forgot what they’d seen, still more were reluctant to come forward and needed a shove. Emotionally powerful footage could even prompt confessions. A kidnapper’s
not likely to pick up the phone but his wife/daughter/mother might cough on his behalf. It had happened before. Look at Michael Sams and
Crimewatch
. Although, Bev conceded, there was still any number of upstanding citizens who wouldn’t piss
on a copper in flames.

She glanced at Mike Powell, reckoned she’d need to be desperate for a wee. Powell’s appraising gaze was directed downwards. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, clipboard in lap, hand tentatively waving in the air, was DC Sumitra Gosh.
She’d only been in CID a month and Bev still wasn’t used to seeing her out of uniform. Not that Goshie didn’t look equally stunning in mufti. Every inch of her was elegant, and at nearly six feet tall, that was a lot of elegance. She
had a river of blue-black hair and eyes like toasted almonds. There was nothing remotely plain about Ms Gosh. And neither was she just a pretty face.

“What about the baby’s mother, sir?” Gosh asked. “Is she prepared to do an appeal?”

“Good point,” Byford acknowledged. “Time’s not right yet. We’ll almost certainly get round to it.”