Endangering Innocents (7 page)

Saturday afternoon 14th April.

After the elation of collaring a suspect right away there was inevitable deflation as she and Mike faced each other across the desk.

“So - we’re back at the beginning.” Joanna was tucking into a cheese and pickle sandwich. She rarely lost her appetite - even in the throes of a major investigation. “Colclough’s got a point. We’ve lost time fingering Baldwin. We should have spread the net wider.”

“We haven’t lost time.” Korpanski was on the defensive. “Plenty’s been going on all the time we’ve been questioning Baldwin. Searches, interviews.”

“OK,” she said dejectedly. “It’s just that…” She crossed to the window. “I thought we were so close. I thought we had him.” She clenched her fist. “Right here, Mike. I thought there was a good chance we’d find Madeline alive. We got him so quickly. It all seemed so obvious.” She chewed her sandwich. “Too obvious. And now it’s just as much of a mystery as ever.”

He patted her shoulder. “Come on, Piercy,” he said, chummy to the extreme.

She stared out of the window at the blank, brick wall. “I wonder where she is.”

Mike didn’t even try. “Let’s get back over to the Incident Room,” he said. “Briefing at four.”

She wished she could cycle over there. The fresh air and exercise would be the perfect catalyst for working out what had happened to the child. While her body worked
her brain could be thinking right from scratch. Back to the classroom, to the teacher, hassled as she tried to button the children into their coats. Suppressing the excitement. Good Friday, the last day of school.

Not such a good Friday.

She tried to picture Madeline buttoning up her own coat, her flat, solemn face and then the few slow steps across the linoleum floor, towards the front door.

Unseen in the throng of excited children leaving the safety of the school and their teachers. Vulnerable for short moments until their parents stretched out their arms.

Not for Madeline.

She and Mike drove through the dull grey to Horton, alongside lush, green fields, the grass already too long to have been recently grazed. The scene was illuminated by a sudden and rare burst of sunshine. She glanced across and wondered that the entire valley, rich green pastureland, tiny fields, hedges, stone walls - was empty. She could see not one tractor working and not a single animal in the fields. As Mike manoeuvred the car along the tight bends towards Rudyard she reflected that the sight of animals grazing had always been one she had taken for granted. She knew now she never would again. The empty fields depressed and worried her almost as much as the missing child.

They turned left at Rudyard Lake, climbing the steep hill at the side of the stretch of water to drop over the ridge into Horton. More a hamlet of scattered cottages than a traditional village with a centre, post office, shops and pub. Mike inched his way along the single track lane as dark as night from overhanging leaves, its sides grey rock smothered in dripping moss, the road slippery
beneath their tyres. The school lay ahead of them, a neat, low, red-brick village school.

Four police cars were pulled onto the playground. More vehicles lined the road, parked where only yesterday the mothers had been waiting for their children, Carly Wiltshaw among them. The school doors were propped open. They passed through, turned left and made their way along the picture-lined corridor to the reception class and met up with Will Farthing outside. He’d been waiting for them, anxiety etching lines between his thick eyebrows.

“We’ve had to let Baldwin go,” she said quietly. “We didn’t have the evidence to hold him. We’ll keep an eye on him and rearrest him if anything crops up. But for now…”

She felt like apologizing. But she was doing her job. Properly. Innocent or guilty Baldwin must be assessed according to the letter of the law. Anything less would be thrown out by the Crown Prosecution Service. Yet she knew as Farthing broke the news to the waiting officers that this would be a savage blow. Many of those present were parents themselves. Leek was not a large town. Horton was an idyllic location. Not some inner-city squalid place where children were on their guard. Superimposed on the investigation of this crime was that fact that the police had been called in before the child had gone missing. It was inevitable that they all wondered what they could have done differently to have prevented the little girl’s disappearance.

There was a tension immediately apparent as Joanna and Mike walked in. All eyes were fixed on her as though she could provide inspiration, answers. An explanation. What had gone wrong? She knew how important it was
to keep morale up in an investigation like this when each hour that slipped away represented fading hope for finding Madeline alive and the officers’ accumulated lost hours of sleep. Even when they should sleep she knew they wouldn’t. Like her the image of the small girl with the solemn face framed with straight dark hair would imprint on their eyelids the moment they closed them. It was the way an investigation as poignant as this intruded into their minds. Day and night. Asleep or awake it would be there. And as she relayed to them the news of Baldwin’s release she felt she had, in some way, let them down. Again she felt she should apologise.

Each officer reported the results of the interviews with the parents and it was instantly obvious that no one they had spoken to had seen what happened to Madeline.

DS Hannah Beardmore put it into words in her soft, clear voice. “The classroom assistant remembers seeing her struggling with her coat. She was about to give her a hand but was distracted by another child. When she turned around Madeline had slipped away. She assumed she’d either returned to the classroom to wait or that her mum or Darren - or someone had - been waiting outside and had picked her up.”

“Or someone?” Joanna frowned.

“Quite a variety of different people seemed to pick her up from outside school.”

“How would Madeline know who was waiting to pick
her
up?”

“Oh - apparently she seemed to know.”

“Only that wasn’t what happened, was it?”

Hannah Beardmore shook her head. “Not this time. Carly was waiting outside but she didn’t see Madeline. Neither did she return to the classroom after buttoning her coat. She just disappeared.”

“You’ve interviewed
all
the parents?”

“Except the Owen family. They went straight from the school to Manchester airport. According to neighbours they’re expecting to be away for a week in the south of Spain.”

“In a hotel?”

“No - camping. And no one seems to have an address for them.”

“Right. Well - we’ll just have to wait until they get back.”

“Let’s go over Baldwin’s movements yesterday again. Dawn?”

WPC Dawn Critchlow spoke up from the back. “He was working out of town in Brown Edge, putting a shower in an old lady’s bungalow. According to her he was fidgety all day, kept glancing at his watch and saying he’d have to leave early with it being Easter. About three o’clock he suddenly shot off.”

She continued. “His story was that he’d forgotten some tool.”

Joanna took over. “He admits he went to the school. Then home, to pick up a spanner and then we picked him up.”

Korpanski spoke in her ear. “But we didn’t pick him up until nearly five. That leaves about forty-five minutes unaccounted for. He claims he decided not to return to the bungalow in Brown Edge but drove around. There was an adjustable spanner in the back of his van and he would have needed one to plumb in the shower. I’m only surprised he’d managed without it all day.”

She met his eyes, nodded slowly, then turned back to the room.

“Is there anything else?”

They all shook their heads.

“And the search?”

“Again nothing.”

She detailed PCs David Timmis and Eddie McBrine to visit local farms, spiralling out from the small, village school. The farmers were tetchy towards visitors at the best of times. Now their gates were padlocked shut. The threat of foot and mouth had made them paranoid. There were reports of farmers lifting shotguns to defend their animals against intruders who might carry the invisible virus which could destroy generations of livelihood. But the two constables had worked for the Moorlands police for years. They were locals - their names and faces familiar. If anyone could gain access and accompany the farmers’ searches without provoking aggression they could. The farmers trusted them. So did she. She could have used the option of warrants to search the farms with force and sent entire teams in. When a child was missing it was easy to gain access anywhere. But she knew if the alternative was put to the locals, they would make their own choice and accept Timmis and McBrine, together with their team of junior officers which they would take full responsibility for. So the barns and outbuildings, land and cowsheds would be searched as thoroughly as though it was their own child who had slipped away.

She watched the officers file out with a sense of impotence and futility. They were scurrying around, looking busy. Like rats in a nest. But they were achieving nothing. And they knew it. In their hearts they were switching their question from whether Madeline was dead to the question of when they would find her body.

See me. Find me. Play my hide and seek. But you will never find me until I allow you to. Because I - am - invisible.

And now came the part she had been dreading.

She had to explain to Madeline’s mother and Huke why they had released their prime suspect and she anticipated running the gauntlet of their fury and prejudice. They had both already been interviewed at length and their hostility and blame towards the police force had simmered all the while, bubbling away as their home had been searched by a couple of officers.

The child had been brought up in a neat home; small, semi-detached, modern, sporting three UPVC windows and a matching door with a brass knocker. The red Nissan Micra stood outside. Madeline’s home was on the Southern outskirts of Leek, on a development shaped like a horsehoe consisting of thirteen or so houses. There were no garages and it was eerily quiet for a Saturday afternoon. No children played outside. The tiny, open-plan front gardens were empty, the grass sodden and still sparkling with dew. Apart from the Nissan not one car was on the road.

“Does anybody actually live here, Mike, or is it a ghost town?”

Korpanski shrugged and said nothing. Even the car door slamming echoed round the road, like a futuristic post nuclear war movie. All it needed was a bouncing ball of dead vegetation lashed like a hoop and whipped by the icy wind to complete the illusion. They covered the few feet to the front door of Number Twelve, the Sanctuary. And still there was no reaction. No curtains twitched. No faces appeared at the window. No doors opened. This was a street where people kept themselves to themselves. They valued privacy.

She listened for a moment, realising she could not even hear a radio thumping out bass. This was a rare and uncomfortable state of silence. She gave an uneasy smile. “Does anyone live here, do you think?”

Mike grunted. “Saturday afternoon. They’ll all either be shopping in Hanley or watching the footie.”

“Kids too?”

He nodded.

The door was flung open at the first knock.

“Have you …?”

Carly Wiltshaw was there, her face tear-streaked, hands covering her mouth, her eyes wide and frightened. Huke towered behind her. “No sign of her then?” He, at least, had not lost his self control.

She shook her head.

Huke moved back to allow them to file past. Off the step, into the house. “So what have you done with the guy you was holding?”

“We’ve had to let him go. I’m sorry.”

“You’ve what?”

Behind her Korpanski took a small step forward. Had it been in other circumstances she might have enjoyed the sight of Huke measuring up to the burly Sergeant. It would have been a clash of the Titans. Now she could feel no pleasure in it. She ignored Huke and addressed Carly. “We had no evidence, Mrs Wiltshaw. He didn’t have Madeline. She wasn’t there. We searched his house. We couldn’t find any evidence that she ever had been there. We’ve taken some items for scrutinising but …”

Huke’s chin was practically in her face. “What items?”

“I’m not at liberty to tell you, Mr Huke.”

“Is he a fuckin’ paedo or what?”

“We have no evidence.”

“Bloody evidence.” Huke’s face was ugly enough without the distortion of hatred.

Again Joanna directed her comments to Carly Wiltshaw. “We need another photograph of your daughter,” she
said gently. “And a fuller description of everything she was wearing.”

Joanna could feel Madeline’s mother’s ripple of shock. “You mean her underwear, don’t you?” she said hoarsely.

Joanna regarded her steadily. “Yes. Everything. Underwear, hair ribbons or elastics, slides, jewellery. Knickers, socks, coat, skirt. Can you write a list?”

Carly nodded. She was too worn down to speak. Her face was white as she stood up very slowly. It hit Joanna that she must have taken something to calm her down. She was zombie-like - white and dead from the neck up. Totally unable to think.

“And don’t forget to mention the contents of her schoolbag,” Korpanski added.

Huke was glaring at her.

She was anxious to get Carly away from her minder. “Can I see her bedroom?”

For a tense moment she thought Huke would follow his partner upstairs but he sank back into an armchair and contented himself with watching Carly very very carefully until she disappeared from view up the stairs.

The little girl’s bedroom was neat and bare, bordering on spartan. One Barbie doll dressed in crop top and baggies was tossed across the bed. There were no other toys. The one picture on the wall was a cutout from a magazine of a horse. A beautiful bay mare. Joanna looked around. The emptiness seemed to be telling her something. Certainly Carly seemed to feel an explanation was needed. “Darren don’t believe in spoiling kids,” she said with a harsh, apologetic laugh. “He was brought up strict himself. Army Dad. Spare the rod. And all that. Rattled
her a bit. She’d hide under the bed from him. Only playin’, you understand.”