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‘Clearly,’ says Quinn, ‘this doesn’t exactly narrow it down very much. Which makes all our lives a whole lot harder, not least when it comes to checking with schools in the Hescombe area –’
‘They’re on summer break,’ says one of the older DCs; he has ‘Dad’ written all over him.
‘I am aware of that,’ says Quinn heavily.
Asante clears his throat. ‘At the risk of stating the obvious, the fact that the grave site was in that area doesn’t necessarily mean she’s been living there.’
‘On the other hand,’ says Gis, with maybe just the faintest hint of DS-to-DS jockeying, ‘that bit of woodland is pretty remote. I bet it’d be hard to find if you didn’t already know about it. My guess is our perp was local.’
‘He could be,’ agrees Quinn, stepping in. ‘Or he could just have struck lucky and been told about the place down the pub.’
Now that’s a first: Quinn the conciliator – it’s about as improbable as Conan the Librarian.
‘But like you said, sir, she’s sixteen now,’ says Chloe Sargent, looking towards me and then Asante. ‘How do we know she’s evenatschool? She could easily have left.’
‘That’s clearly possible,’ I say. ‘But this girl was extremely intelligent and, as Dr Gow has pointed out, socially ambitious. She could have dropped out of the school system voluntarily, but personally, I doubt it. If she’s still alive, and not under duress, I think she’d see further education as an obvious first step to what she wants out of life.’
‘But she may not have had the choice,’ says Stillwell, with surprising firmness. ‘If she was abducted by a predator, even one she knew, she may never have been in schoolat all –’
‘Which I’m not discounting,’ says Quinn evenly. ‘Not at all. Just covering all the bases.’
Gis glances at him and he nods. More pictures now.
‘Next up,’ says Quinn, ‘Sharon Mason, who was convicted of killing her daughter, but always insisted – rightly, as it’s turned out – that she didn’t do it.’
The picture must be her arrest photograph. She seems defiant but wary, like someone who can’t quite believe what’s happening to them but doesn’t have a clue what to do about it. Her skin looks sallow and she’s wearing too much make-up, as if she’s trying to hide a bruise. Though if there was domestic abuse in that household, it wasn’t the physical kind, and she wasn’t the one on the receiving end.
Quinn points to the photo and looks round, his hand still on it. ‘Thirty-nine at the time. More prickles than a spiny bandicoot, and as you’ll see from the case files, definitelynoton anyone’s shortlist for Mother of the Millennium. The way she interacted with her kids was downright weird, and probablywent a long way towards convincing the jury she must have done it.’
He’s right. I know – I was there. It was excruciating, hour after hour as the prosecuting barrister wound out the rope and watched her hang herself in it. She had no idea the impression she made.
‘Sharon is still in HMP Heathside,’ continues Quinn. ‘And is going to take some very sensitive handling, so I’ll be dealing with that with the boss.’
I see Ev mouth, ‘Natch,’ and then suppress a smile when she catches my eye.
Quinn turns back to the board and writesBARRY MASON.
‘Next up, Barry. Who was obviously hiding something right from the start. Kept wittering on about how much he loved his “princess” and then did everything humanly possible to avoid a TV appeal. Well, it turned out hedidhave something to hide: a girlfriend. In fact, a whole string of fuck-buddies he was picking up on dating sites.’
Stillwell does an eye-roll, and she’s not the only one.
‘And that wasn’t the only thing he was up to. Later on in the investigation, we found kiddie porn on his mobile phone. Hard stuff.’
Gislingham pins up another photograph. Another mugshot. Not the cocky sod-you Barry I first encountered, but someone who just looks furious. But at least that irritating hipster hair of his has sagged.
‘He was sentenced to three years in March 2017,’ continues Quinn, ‘and served thirteen months in HMP Mornington. But he’ll still be on the Sex Offenders Register, so we should be able to track him down fairly easily.’
‘Was he abusing her?’ asks Morris. ‘I mean, given the porn – it’s the obvious conclusion –’
‘We looked at that,’ says Quinn, ‘but we never found any evidence, certainly nothing you could take to the CPS. Sharon accused him of it, but only after she found out he’d been shagging around, so that had Hell Hath No Fury written all over it. And then, of course, we found the evidence incriminating her.’
‘Even if he didn’t kill her, he could still have been abusing her,’ says Stillwell quietly.
‘I know,’ I say, turning to her. ‘But as DI Quinn just said, we had no evidence. Without Daisy as a witness, there was nothingwe could do. And for the record, it never rang true to me. Not knowing Barry’s “preferences”.’
Asante clears his throat. ‘Though if Daisywasbeing abused, she could have told someone else about it – someone who decided they needed to intervene.’
Ev makes a face. ‘Wouldn’t a predator have justlovedhearing that. The perfect opportunity.’