Page 10 of Making a Killing (DI Fawley #7)

Adam Fawley 25 July 2024 15.25

The door closes behind Gow, and they all turn to look at me.

‘So where do we start, sir?’ says Sargent.

‘By reviewing the evidence from 2016. Find out what we got wrong. But, and this is an important but: I don’t want any of you who worked that case to start blaming yourselves, or thinking you messed up. You did a fine job based on the information we had at the time, and if anyone messed up it was me, not you. So that’s the task for this team: review the original case, with the aim of establishing where Daisy went, and with whom, be that a stranger, or someone she already knew. Meanwhile, in parallel, South Mercia will run the murder inquiry at the Hescombe end. And if anyone’s wondering about conflict of interest – and I wouldn’t blame you, I certainly did – it’s officially Detective Superintendent Renshaw who’s the SIO on this, so I’ll be reporting to him. On a day-to-day basis, acting DI Quinn will be in charge here, and DS Asante will be temporarily stationed at the Gloucester HQ. I need someone up there to act as liaison between the two teams and to make sure I’m in the loop.’

All of which is true, but moving Asante to Gloucester has the added advantage of giving Ev a chance to shine here.

‘Acting DI Quinn is now going to take you through the operational side.’

I nod to Quinn, who stands up a little straighter, then comes to the front. He’s taken his jacket off and loosened his tie, so there are no more catcalls. In any case, I think we’re past that. This is serious now.

‘OK,’ he says, ‘I had a nice little work programme all mapped out before we started this meeting, but safe to say I’ve had to do a few fast adjustments in the light of what we just heard.’ He holds up a sheet of paper and even from where I’m sitting I can see the crossings-out. He allows himself a wry smile. ‘Best-laid plans, eh?’

There are some laughs around the room.

‘So, we have two work-streams. One to cover off any sex offenders we might have missed back in 2016, possibly because they’d only just become active at the time. And the other, much bigger task of talking again to Daisy’s family and friends. They may remember something now that they didn’t then, and even if they don’t, if Daisy did know her abductor, someone in her circle must have known something about it: eight-year-olds just don’t have “private lives” the way teenagers do – they’re monitored 24/7, or as good as. Though it’s worth remembering that this is Daisy we’re talking about – she was seeing her half-brother right under her parents’ noses back then and neither of them had any idea.’

I look round. ‘The other point, of course, is that this mystery person almost certainly “disappeared” around the same time Daisy did, which will significantly narrow the list of potential suspects.’

I see Morris open his mouth to speak but I get there first. ‘I suppose it’s possible they could still be in the area living some sort of double life and have Daisy in hiding, but I think it’s unlikely.’

Quinn now: ‘So, what we have in the room is a pretty good mix of officers who worked the case in 2016, and those with no knowledge of it at all. Which is why you’re going to be working in pairs.’

There are a couple of grins, a few knowing looks.

He smiles drily. ‘Holmes and Watson, Morse and Lewis, Starsky and bloody Hutch, whatever floats your boat. The point is, one of you will be from the original team and the other will be coming at it with no preconceptions. Anyone who can’t see the point of that see me after and I’ll draw you a diagram.’

He turns to the whiteboard and starts writing. ‘So, first up, the stranger-danger scenario. I’ll oversee on this, but it’ll be managed by DC Morris, who’s been assigned to us from Newbury. If and when we identify a potential suspect, we can obviously draft in more resources.’

This is neat footwork by Quinn – he’s clearly got Morris’s number already and worked out he’s best used where he’s out of everyone else’s hair doing something that feels important, even if what it looks like to me is a shed-load of work with next-to-zero prospect of success. Then again, there’s that thing Alex always says – that the reason most people miss opportunities is because they turn up wearing overalls and looking like work. I may be wrong yet.

‘So let’s start by reviewing Daisy’s family and friends,’ says Quinn, nodding to Gislingham, who joins him at the board and starts sorting through photographs and pinning them up.

‘First up, Daisy Mason herself. Though, as discussed, she’s almost certainly been living under another name.’

Gis pins up the missing poster we issued in 2016. The blonde hair, the little gap between her front teeth, that smile. She was a newspaperman’s dream.

‘For those new to the case,’ continues Quinn, ‘this picture went nationwide, we had sightings pouring in from all over the place –’

‘I remember,’ says the new female DC. She looks so like Somer I had to do a double-take when I first saw her. ‘I was still at training college. It was in the papers for weeks.’

‘Right,’ says Quinn, slightly irritated at being interrupted, but less so than if it had been one of the men. ‘Which, looking back now, raises the possibility that her appearance was changed very early on. Or – as I said – that she and her “abductor” left the area within a few days.’

‘Or even the country,’ says the DC.

‘Right,’ he nods. ‘And you are –?’

‘DC Stillwell,’ she says. ‘Sarah Stillwell. Seconded from Reading MissPers.’

‘Right. Good. That might be useful.’ He turns to the rest of the room, and then back to Gis, who starts putting up another series of pictures.

‘We’ve put that original photo of Daisy through age-progression software and it came up with these. How she’d look now if she had red hair like what was found in the grave. But as you can see, we’ve also done a variety of other hair colours, hair lengths, glasses, coloured contacts, the whole nine yards, given that she could quite easily have changed her appearance yet again since that grave was dug. Especially if she’s in some sort of cahoots with the perp.’

Ev nods. ‘It’s been all over the papers – whoever killed that woman must know the body’s been found.’

‘Right.’ He looks at the board again. ‘And bear in mind these images are only an indicative range – she may look completely different, even to these.’

The mood in the room dampens a little, and I can see why. Even though the basic features are the same, the girls on the board bear almost no resemblance to one another. A spiky blonde gamine cut, dark plaits, red curls, a mid-brown ponytail. Make-up, no make-up; glasses, no glasses. The possibilities are depressing.

‘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 even at school? 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 school at 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, definitely not on anyone’s shortlist for Mother of the Millennium. The way she interacted with her kids was downright weird, and probably went 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 writes BARRY 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 he did have 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 nothing we could do. And for the record, it never rang true to me. Not knowing Barry’s “preferences”.’

Asante clears his throat. ‘Though if Daisy was being 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 just loved hearing that. The perfect opportunity.’

Sargent frowns. ‘It didn’t have to be a predator, though, did it? Like Dr Gow said. Just someone who cared about her.’

Ev’s shaking her head. ‘I don’t buy that – any decent person who’s told about abuse would go to the police. You can save kids from that without absconding with them and leaving their parents accused of murder.’

Sargent looks a little awkward. ‘True. To be honest, I was just thinking out loud.’

Quinn turns to the board again and writes DS GISLINGHAM next to Barry’s name. Then DC STILLWELL .

‘Got the short straw there, eh, Sarge?’ someone quips to Gis. ‘That Mason bloke sounds like a real tosser.’

‘Certainly used to be,’ says Gis. ‘And I can’t imagine a stint in chokey will have improved him much.’

‘Next up,’ says Quinn, ‘Daisy’s brothers. First, Leo Mason, who the last we heard had reverted to the name he was originally given by his birth mother, i.e. Gary. There was a time, back in 2016, when we actually thought he could be our perp – every scrap of attention in that house went on Daisy, especially where Barry was concerned, so the kid had a lot of pent-up anger ready to blow. There’d also been some pretty violent altercations between him and some of his schoolmates – poor little bastard was being bullied, so at one level it was understandable, but trying to ram a pencil in another kid’s eye counts as extreme in my book, whatever the provocation.’

The photo Gis puts up on the board is a still from the TV appeal. Leo wedged between his parents, barely looking up, Sharon’s hand tight on his wrist.

‘But you were able to rule him out?’ asks Stillwell.

Quinn turns to her. ‘It was more a case of ruling Sharon in –’

‘Could Leo have been the one who helped Daisy get away?’ asks Morris. ‘I mean, if he wanted to get shot of her, that would’ve been a much less messy way of doing it.’

Quinn nods. ‘Right. And yes, obviously he’s a person of interest now, for that very reason. Though back then, he deffo wouldn’t have been anyone’s obvious choice to organize a quick getaway. He was only ten himself for a start, and he was a pretty challenged kid. As before, more on that in the file.’

‘Do we know where he ended up?’ asks Stillwell.

‘He was put in foster care when Sharon was arrested.’

‘Poor little sod,’ says Ev, under her breath. If anyone cared about Leo back then, it was her.

Which Quinn must be remembering too, because he turns and writes DS EVERETT on the board and then DC SARGENT . Someone behind me murmurs ‘Cagney and Lacey’ and somebody else stifles a laugh.

‘And at least we should be able to track him down,’ continues Quinn, ‘Social Services must know where he is. Next up, the half-brother, Jamie, Barry’s son by his first marriage. Brought up by his mother and long-suffering stepfather in a five-million-pound pad by the river in Henley. Not that you’d have known it, from the way he acted out.’

Another picture goes up. A third arrest shot, and this is a lot more recent than the others.

I haven’t thought about Jamie Northam in years, but the image brings it all back. The attitude, the swagger. Barry’s mini-me, even though Barry had walked out when Jamie was still a toddler. Nature sure beat nurture on that one.

‘We looked at him pretty hard at the time,’ continues Quinn, ‘and though he was a pretty nasty piece of work for a thirteen-year-old he had a cast-iron alibi for the day Daisy went missing. But given what we know now, we need to look more closely at his associates, on the basis that she could have met someone else through him. Someone who subsequently abducted her. Either way, he needs checking out. And for the record, he’s been in and out of juve three times in the last eight years. Shoplifting, vandalism, some low-level drug dealing. All depressingly predictable if you ask me, but there you are.’

He nods to Gis. ‘You get the short straw on this one too.’

Gis grins drily. ‘Gee, thanks.’

Quinn turns back to the room. ‘And finally, we need to reinterview Daisy’s friends, teachers and fellow pupils at Bishop Christopher’s, AKA – for the out-of-towners in the room – Kit’s. There’ll be a lot of legwork in this one – they all need tracking down, for starters. Hence –’

He turns and writes DC BAXTER on the board. There are a couple of muted cheers and someone slaps Baxter on the back.

Quinn allows himself a grin. ‘Yup, the one and only Andrew Baxter, who keeps on digging, whether he’s in a hole or not.’

That’s pretty rich, if you ask me, coming from Quinn, given how enthusiastically he’s excavated his own shit in the past, but no one else seems to have noticed.

‘He’ll be supported by DC Roberts on the tech side, who’s been seconded in from Digital Forensics.’

A lad at the back looks up and pushes his glasses up his nose. I say ‘lad’ because he looks all of seventeen. I must be getting old.

Quinn looks round the room. ‘Questions?’

‘What about witnesses and potential suspects not on that list?’ asks Morris, gesturing at the board.

This guy is almost as dogged as Ev. But there’s a value in that, and if Quinn’s going to be a good DI, he needs to appreciate it.

‘That’s precisely why we need to interview all these people again,’ he says evenly. ‘To find out who we missed.’

‘What about someone she could have met online?’ says Sargent. ‘All my friends’ kids have iPads now.’

I turn to her. ‘They didn’t then. Eight years is a long time in tech. We did check out the family computer and there was nothing, not even buried in the hard drive. And Daisy didn’t have a phone of her own.’

‘Not, at least, as far as you know.’ It’s Asante again, giving me one of his cool, serious stares. But fair enough; like Quinn said, we know we missed something – maybe it was that.

‘Could have been a burner phone?’ offers Morris. ‘Wouldn’t have needed a contract –’

‘But someone else would still have had to get it,’ says Ev. ‘She couldn’t have just rocked up at Carphone Warehouse and bought one, could she? Not at eight.’

But Morris is right: if Daisy knew her abductor, they could have given her a phone. And she was good at keeping secrets, better than any child her age I’ve ever come across.

‘OK, point taken. DC Roberts – perhaps you could take the lead on that. Maybe there’s a way to track mobile phone calls made in the vicinity of the Mason home. See if there’s a number that can’t be accounted for.’

He looks a little startled. ‘But like you said, sir, it’s eight years ago and I’m not even sure –’

‘Well, let’s just ask, shall we?’

He’s about to say something but evidently thinks better of it. He looks down at his phone and his dark hair falls over his eyes and I have a sudden, impossibly vivid image of Leo Mason, here, in this station, when I sat and interviewed him, the social worker at his side, in that over-small, over-hot interview room, in shorts and the same oversized Chelsea shirt he always wore, even though it was too heavy for the weather and way too big for him. After we discovered that Daisy was the Masons’ biological child but Leo was adopted, and he didn’t even know, and Barry had another son by his first marriage and neither of the kids knew that either.

The fissures in that supposedly happy family were opening like canyons before our eyes. I remember reaching forward and gently, very gently, pushing back those long concealing sleeves and seeing the silver lines across his flesh, the healed and the not so healed. I’d suspected it for a while by then, and I was pretty sure the doctor knew, and the school too.

But the two people who were supposed to love and care for him the most hadn’t even noticed. Poor little Leo. Poor abandoned lonely boy.

***