Page 74 of No Safe Place
Saturday | Evening
Field
Andy’s mother’s house was a tired two-up two-down in Thamesmead. The grass in the front garden was dead and brown, and tall weeds below the front window provided the only greenery.
They were parked two hundred metres up the road.
Field was in the Territorial Support Group vehicle, air-con blasting.
They’d been watching the house for an hour, and a plainclothes TSG officer had already done a reccy.
So far there were no signs of life. She had Wilson on one side, the TSG inspector on the other.
Bellamy, and every DC the super could call in, were waiting in buses further up the road.
Field’s phone vibrated, and she snatched it from the dashboard. It was hot from the glare of the late-afternoon sun, and the email loaded slowly.
‘Is that the green light?’ Wilson asked, hand on the door.
‘No,’ Field said. ‘Riley’s forwarded the statement from Paige’s parents.’
Phrases from the email jumped out at her, and Field’s head swam.
David Moore gave us our daughter back
The helplessness of watching your child suffer with mental illness
The work he did with those kids was transformational
Beside her, Wilson huffed. ‘Obviously he didn’t bother CCing me in.’
Then both of their phones buzzed, and it was the go-ahead.
‘Let’s go,’ Field said, opening the car door and stepping out.
In under a minute, the small house was surrounded.
Field and Wilson hung back, thumbs looped into their vests, as the inspector gave the signal, and the door was smashed in on the first try with an enforcer.
Shouts of “Police” ripped through the night.
Faces appeared at windows up and down the street. A few doors opened.
Field tapped her foot, waiting for the inspector to reappear – either dragging Andrew Levey along in cuffs, or totally deflated.
The radio crackled constantly.
Living room clear.
Kitchen clear.
Bedroom clear.
The front door was still hanging on by one hinge when Field entered the small house. It sagged into the hallway at a drunken angle.
Field was surprised by the décor. She’d been expecting to step back in time, into an old person’s house with flocked wallpaper and a musty body-odour smell. But the hall was painted white, with thick cream carpet.
A white sideboard, probably from IKEA, was the only piece of furniture downstairs. There was nothing on the top. Field opened the first drawer. Inside were a few framed photos and a trinket dish, which presumably had stood on top of the sideboard at some point.
Field picked up one of the photographs. It was of Andrew in his mid-twenties. He obviously didn’t like having his photo taken. His shoulders were high about his ears, and the shadow of the camera had fallen across one half of his face. His closed-mouth smile looked like a grimace.
He probably wasn’t a bad-looking lad, in person. Mothers did tend to love terrible photos of their children. But, if they did need to circulate a photo of him to the press, Field knew it would get picked up. In the case of two brutal stabbings, Andrew’s face just fit.
The first room they checked was the kitchen, but there were no kitchen knives. In fact, there was no anything. The cupboards were empty – her second empty house of the day.
The living room was bare, with a TV-sized patch of brighter wallpaper on the chimney breast.
The PolSA team were on the way, but Field couldn’t wait for them to get here.
Field, Wilson and Bellamy went room to room. Upstairs was tidy, sparsely furnished, and free of clutter. The master bedroom was empty, and had been stripped of wallpaper, scarred walls waiting to be finished.
Bellamy called to them from the second bedroom. It was blue and had a single bed rather than a double – probably Andrew’s childhood bedroom.
Bellamy pointed to two cardboard boxes stacked on the bed. ‘Stuff he was planning to save, maybe?’
Field pushed her sleeves up. ‘Let’s take a box each.’
‘What’re we looking for?’ Wilson asked, heaving the first one down, and lifting the lid. It was stacked with books.
‘Anything that might give us a location,’ Field said. ‘Or an idea of where he might go.’
Bellamy carefully removed bubble-wrapped figurines from his box.
Wilson rummaged through the books. ‘He doesn’t have any other family, does he?’
‘Not that we know of.’ Field pulled a red photo album from her box and started to flick through it. ‘It must’ve been hard for him. Losing her.’
Lily didn’t speak to her family. Field wasn’t sure where Callum’s parents were, and he’d lost his nan a decade ago. Andy was alone now, too. But Sam and Paige had both been part of loving families, so there was no pattern there.
‘Grief makes people do all sorts,’ Wilson said.
Field considered this for a moment, and again her thoughts went to Toby. How would he cope, if something happened to her?
In her box, Field found family photo albums and Andrew’s degree certificate. First-class honours from UCL.
Wilson was scanning a bundle of letters. ‘I’ve got postcards from Brighton here.’
‘Any Brighton photos in there?’ Bellamy nodded to the photo album.
‘He needs somewhere he can go to ground,’ Field thought aloud, as she checked. ‘And Brighton makes sense. It’s close enough that he could get there quickly, but it’s out of London.’
A series of family photos caught her eye.
A tiny boy, Andrew presumably, standing between his mother and father on the steps of a B&B or a hotel.
She’d found a similar picture in the drawer downstairs.
The boy Andrew looked serious and worried, squinting up at them.
The same photo was recreated over the years, the boy getting taller and a little broader in each one, until he was about twelve.
Field extracted a few of the clearest ones from the sleeves. ‘Call Riley. Send these over to him, and see if we can enlarge it. Tell him to get the name of whatever hotel that is.’
Wilson took a picture of the photograph with her phone, then bagged it.
‘If the hotel is still there, get Riley to phone and ask if they’ve had anyone matching Andy’s description check in.’