Critical Incidents

‘You made a success out of a tough situation,’ she’d said.

‘Yeah, well, this time I’ve done the opposite, haven’t I?’

Back in her childhood bedroom, Robin felt a bead of sweat run between her breasts. Christine had finally got the full set of replacement windows she’d been craving and the room was nursing-home hot. Going over, she shoved one open. Like punching the lid off a Tupperware box. She sucked in as much air as her swollen stomach allowed. Below, dull little portions of garden stretched away on either side, rectangles of winter grass and anonymous shrubs, Homebase panel fencing. The Richardses, their immediate neighbours, had a Little Tikes slide and sandbox in chunky red-and-yellow plastic that confused her until she remembered her mother saying that Karen had ‘given John and Brenda grandchildren’. The right way, Robin had heard: house bought; wedding reception at a hotel in Solihull; tiny feet only thereafter. Rather than too young, out of wedlock, father never disclosed. Not so much given as foisted.

She turned and faced the bunk beds – the fact of the bunk beds. Back then, Luke used to lean over the side and flick snot-balls between the rungs of the ladder as she was falling asleep; now, at the age of thirty-five, she was going to share the beds with her daughter. Everything she’d struggled for in her adult life lay in pieces around her – how had it happened? How the fuck was she going to sort it out?

Chapter Two

If you were really on the edge – and who was to say she wasn’t? – a wet February morning on an industrial estate in Stirchley might be enough to tip you over. Beyond the windscreen, a leaking grey sky bulged over a huddle of building-supply megastores and a near-empty car park, stacks of lumber, sodden nylon holdalls of shingle and sharp sand. In the twenty minutes they’d been here, they’d seen two people, and one of those had been a member of staff pulling a trolley out of the scrubby hedge in front of Toolstation. She glanced at the clock on the dashboard. At this hour on a Monday morning her Murder Investigation team would be at full hum, the insect chatter of keyboards and phones stopping only when Freshwater, in all his ferrety majesty, swept in for the briefing, clutching the Starbucks cup he thought made him look au courant and dynamically caffeinated. She felt a swell of deep-tissue yearning that she quickly suppressed. She’d check in with Gid again later, see if anything new had come up.

The wipers made a grudging sweep of the windscreen and Maggie shifted, sending over another waft of her spicy perfume. Shalimar, was it, or Opium? Robin couldn’t remember. At this stage, it was basically her essence, anyway – getting into the car this morning, she’d breathed it in and felt a wave of comfort. Maggie was solid, unchanged in the thirty-five years she’d known her, from the eyeliner and jet-black hair, once natural, now courtesy of L’Oréal, to the revolving collection of chunky silver jewellery set with tiger’s eye and turquoise that she bought on her regular tanning trips to the Greek Islands. She looked less like a private detective, Robin always thought, than a pier-end palm reader, but likely that worked in her favour – who would suspect?

An hour ago, she’d swung her silver Ford Focus away from the kerb at St Saviour’s like they were Thelma and Louise. They’d started late so Robin could walk Lennie to school on her first day but normal kick-off could be six o’clock, or earlier. ‘Cul-de-sacs at dawn, basically,’ Maggie’d said. ‘Shots of people up bright and early, suited and booted and slinging their briefcase/toolbox in the back of the car/van, delete as applicable, are of the essence.’ She’d indicated right at a Tudorbethan pub strung with banners boasting Sky Sports and Gut Buster Burgers. ‘How did Lennie go off?’

‘Okay. I think. Nervous but putting a brave face on. You know what she’s like.’

After she’d turned the light off last night, she’d listened to her daughter flipping around overhead, the slats of the bunk creaking under her weight like a flight of arthritic stairs. ‘Are you all right up there?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Comfortable?’

A pause. ‘It’s kind of weird being this close to the ceiling.’

Two or three minutes had passed, another couple of all-body adjustments. ‘Mum?’ Not much more than a whisper this time. ‘I’m sorry I said that about Ade earlier. Sorry I got Gran on your case, I mean, not that I said it. I didn’t like it when Uncle Luke said that about him.’

Uncle Luke’s a cretin, Len – oh, the temptation. ‘I know,’ she said.

A minute or so; another revolution. ‘Mum?’

‘Hm?’

‘You know when you spoke to Ms Brampton? She said I could go back to RPG, didn’t she, when we move back to London?’

‘As long as they have a free place, she said, it’s yours.’

Another pause. She could almost hear Lennie’s mind whirring in the dark.

‘Do you think it’s going to be really different at St Saviour’s?’

No, no, no, my love, it’ll be just the same, just as cosy and sheltered and academically rigorous, and everyone will want to be friends with you straight away. ‘A bit,’ she said. ‘It’s a comprehensive and the area’s not very well off. There’ll be kids there from some tough backgrounds – and boys, obviously. But you’ll be fine wherever you go.’

‘You think so?’

The neediness, so rare coming from Lennie, had been a dart in her chest. ‘Yes. I do. And like we discussed, it’s not forever.’ Please god, let it not be forever.

Next to her now, Maggie snapped to attention. ‘Look lively,’ she murmured as a trolley loaded with sacks of cement nosed through the shop’s automatic doors, pushed by a man currently suing his employers for a work-related back injury. When he wasn’t doing hard physical labour, Robin thought, he must be spending most of his sick leave on the bench press: encased in sportswear, his upper arms looked like Christmas hams. Amazing how bloody stupid people could be.

Maggie waited until she had a straight shot of his face and then, under the guise of texting, took a volley of photographs. ‘We’ll get some of him loading the van,’ she muttered, ‘and Bob’s your uncle. Like shooting fish in a barrel, this one. Here, take this.’ She passed Robin the phone then sat forward to turn on the engine. ‘I’ll go round behind him on the way out so you get a clear view. Then we’ll wait a few minutes and drive over to the site.’

‘Iced buns,’ Maggie said as she dropped her outside Greggs. ‘Get a whole pack. And here,’ she pulled a twenty from her purse, ‘get some sausage rolls as well, or whatever you fancy for lunch. We might not have a chance later.’

Robin waved her away. ‘I’ll get it.’

‘Oh, shut up.’ Maggie reached over and stuffed the note into her pocket. Robin tried not to look relieved.

Inside, she joined the queue. It was mid-morning, lunchtime a way off yet, but the place was already busy, two tills going, a steady stream of customers, nasal-musical Brummie accents dipping and rising around her like carousel ponies. She had the accent herself though she’d never given it much thought until Isobel-from-Berkshire laughed at it in her first week at UCL. It was lighter these days, anyway, after a decade and a half away.

Isobel – god, when was the last time she’d thought about her? But the whole morning had been like that, an extended hobble down Memory Lane. Every time they turned a corner there was something else: the community centre where she’d been forced to do ballet; the bus stop for school; the wooden arch to John Morris Jones Walkway down which she and Corinna had disappeared to do their underage smoking. The same but different. The little precinct at the roundabout but the shops had changed. Gardens had been overhauled, extensions added. Instantly recognized, deeply known, but foreign. Even the general look of the place, the style – years in London had altered her aesthetic.

The déjà vu had started the moment she’d opened her eyes and seen Lennie’s new school uniform looming on its hanger like the Ghost of Christmas Past. She’d been at Camp Hill, the grammar school herself, but for a couple of months when she was sixteen, after they were introduced by a mutual friend, she’d gone out with the baddest of St Saviour’s bad boys, Sean Harvey. When he asked her, she’d said yes because she knew it would piss Christine off and because, let’s face it, he was fit and she was shallow, but she’d grown quite fond of his rebel heart and precocious sexual talent. He’d dumped her after she got her GCSE results – apparently her A-stars had been an embarrassment to him. Given her current luck, she thought, she’d probably find herself sitting in a cul-de-sac outside his house before too long.

Catching scroungers on the sick in Sparkhill. How the mighty have fallen.

‘The site’ just now had been a semi-detached in Bournville where the Christmas Ham, real name Barry Perkins, was working cash-in-hand on a kitchen extension and where they’d filmed him tossing the sacks of cement out of his van like confetti. The client was Hargreaves & Partners, a local law firm acting for Perkins’ legitimate boss. She had quite a bit with them at the moment, Maggie said, and another bigger firm, too, on top of her long-standing contract with the city for suspect disability and unemployment claims. With Luke’s comments ringing in her ears, Robin had listened to the list and felt her soul wither.

‘Foive pound seventy-foive, bab,’ said the woman behind the counter.

Back in the car, Maggie ate a sausage roll in four bites then pulled off again.

Robin buckled her seatbelt. ‘Where to now?’

Sparkhill, just north of her parents’ in Hall Green, was almost entirely Asian, which was why Luke, the bigot, had reflexively chosen it for his scroungers. The shops and restaurants on Stratford Road were a mix of Balti houses and halal butchers, travel agencies and bakeries, the windows of the clothing stores full of salwar kameez and Pakistani suits in jewel-box colours. Maggie turned off by a Sikh temple Robin didn’t remember having seen before. Three storeys high with reflective windows trimmed with blue, it looked more like a call centre than a place of worship. Its red brick was the only thing it had in common with the rest of the street, a shabby collection of Victorian terraced workers’ cottages.

Stratford Road had been buzzing but just a few hundred yards off the main drag, the pavement was deserted bar a single elderly woman wearing an anorak over her sari. The houses had a dormant air, the only indication that anyone in them was awake – or even alive – the flicker of television through a ground-floor window.

Maggie brushed pastry flakes off her trousers. ‘Right. Time to come clean.’

‘About what?’

She laughed. ‘Your face! Relax, will you, I mean me, not you. There’s something I haven’t told you about the job.’

‘What?’

‘Obviously I trust you, it wasn’t that, but I’ve always worked strictly need-to-know on this side of things and because this is probably short-term, you and me, I didn’t know if it’d come up. Also, the fraud’s eighty-five, ninety per cent of my work, so you had to be all right with that. I mean, obviously you’re not going to be thrilled, are you, going from Homicide Command to hanging round Wickes’ car park waiting for scumbags. They’re hardly criminal masterminds, Barry Perkins and his ilk.’

‘Maggie. You know I’d be buggered without this. Without you having offered me a job.’ It wasn’t just the money, she thought; if she’d had to spend another day without doing something, belonging to the world of people who had somewhere to be, work to do, she might actually have gone insane.

‘Oh, stop, I don’t need gratitude.’ Maggie pointed at the bag at Robin’s feet. ‘Pass me those, will you?’ She took the pack of iced buns and pulled one out. The floor heaters had loosened the slab of icing, which slipped sideways across the top like an ill-fitting toupee. Her mouth encompassed the thing without it even touching her lipstick.

‘Anyway, I’ve got a bit of a bone to throw you. It’s hardly Interpol but I do some work for women in tight spots,’ she said. ‘Sometimes just helping them sort a problem, sometimes it’s more serious. You can start off expecting one thing and it’s actually something totally different.’ She took another bite. ‘Like, last year, I had a bigamist. His second wife came to me, she had no idea, just knew something wasn’t right. I poked around a bit and that was it. I found him in the Peak District eventually with a whole other family: three kids, cocker spaniel, the lot.’

‘So it’s personal fraud work?’

Maggie shook her head. ‘Not really. Sometimes. It’s all sorts. I’ve had girls about to be sent overseas for marriages arranged by “uncles” who’d basically sold them as British passports – those both came word-of-mouth. One of them lived just round the corner from here, other side of Stratford Road. Her mother was the client – wanted more for her. I got her away, helped set her up elsewhere. Nice girl. She’s in Leeds now, doing a degree – we’re still in touch. I had a girl who was trying to get out of a cult. I’ve also had parents who just wanted to know about their daughter’s dodgy boyfriend. Research.’

‘How long have you been doing it?’

‘As long as I’ve had the business. Since I left the job.’

‘They know?’

‘Of course. And that’s how I get most of the cases. I’ve got a contact – Alan Nuttall, my old DS, DI now – and he rings me if something comes up, a situation where there’s no actual crime, nothing the police can do, or it’s like the bigamist: something’s off and I help find out what. He was prosecuted afterwards, obviously, once it was clear there was a charge to be brought.’

‘You’re a dark horse, Maggie Hammond. I had no idea.’

‘Need-to-know, like I said. And now you do.’

A lot of the Victorian houses Robin knew were Tardis-like, with inner proportions that seemed impossible from the outside, but this one was every bit as small as it had looked from the pavement. Dark, too; there was no fanlight above the front door, and the internal door to the front room was shut, blocking any light that way. As they followed the woman to the kitchen at the back, the phrase ‘down the rabbit hole’ came into her head.

It wasn’t just the lack of light or space, though given her choice of small mammals, Robin thought, she’d say Valerie Woodson was more of a harvest mouse than a White Rabbit. Her shoulders hunched as she scurried ahead of them, and though her colouring was sandy – once-auburn hair fading to an odd peach-grey – her eyes were so dark, they looked like buttons, currants in a bun. Maybe they’d adapted to the conditions.

It was brighter in the kitchen, where she stood dazzled in front of them.

Maggie smiled gently. ‘How about a cuppa?’

The woman spooned Nescafé into mugs Robin recognized as garage giveaways from twenty years ago while Maggie kept up a soft patter about the rain, the lead story in the Post on the table, a pot of snowdrops outside the back door. The kitchen was old but looked-after, the white Formica almost stain-free even as the red plastic handles dated it at warp speed. The fridge was covered with magnets shaped like pizza slices and strawberries, a London bus.

An ‘I heart Devon’ magnet anchored a photograph of Valerie and a girl of fifteen or sixteen. They squinted into the sun, arms around each other, their lop-sided smiles so similar they could only be mother and daughter despite the girl’s extra two or three inches and dark brown hair. She wore denim cut-offs and a turquoise vest top and, unlike her mother – the small visible area of whose shins was the colour of cream cheese – she was tanned. Behind them was a beach, unmistakeably British: windbreakers, buckets and spades, and one egregiously burned fat white back.

‘Torbay,’ said the woman as she carried the mugs to a small table. ‘Five years ago. Six this summer.’ She fetched a third chair from the front room. When they were all sitting down, they were elbow to elbow. Robin moved back a little, let in some air.

At close range, the woman looked ill. Her skin was paper-dry and blotchy, raw around the nostrils from nose-blowing. Her eyes were marbled with pink. When she saw Robin notice how her hands trembled, she moved them quickly under the table as though ashamed of the weakness.

‘She left a message just before eight this morning,’ Maggie had said in the car, ‘Alan gave her my number. I was in the shower, and when I called her back I got voicemail. Phone tag. Anyway, she got hold of me while you were getting the food. Her daughter’s missing, she says, has been for four days. We were in the vicinity so I said we’d come round, talk face to face.’

She sat forward now, silver bangles chiming against the table. ‘So tell us what’s going on, Valerie. As much detail as you can.’

The woman brought her hands back up and wrapped them round her mug as if it were a crystal ball. Plain gold wedding band, no engagement ring. Her nails were unpolished, cut short. In fact, all evidence suggested a complete lack of vanity. Her hair was cut in an unflattering pageboy, and she wore a pilled blue round-neck sweater and the sort of elasticated trousers sold from the back of Sunday supplements. If you saw her on the street, Robin thought, she’d barely register.

‘My daughter’s called Rebecca,’ she said. ‘Becca for short, never Becky – she hates Becky.’ A glimmer of a smile. ‘That’s her on the fridge, obviously. She was sixteen then – we went to Devon after her GCSEs.’

‘So now she’s twenty- …?’ said Robin.

‘Two. Her birthday’s in October.’

‘When did you last see her?’ asked Maggie.

‘Thursday. In the morning, before she went to work. Just before eight, like it always is.’

‘She lives here then? With you?’

Valerie nodded.

‘And have you heard from her at all since? Any calls, emails?’

‘No. Normally she texts me during the day – practical stuff, what’s for dinner – but that day, nothing. Then I found her phone upstairs.’

Robin sensed Maggie shift infinitesimally. ‘Where was it?’

‘On the floor, like she’d put it on the bed and it had fallen off. It was almost hidden by the valance – I called her from the landline down here and heard it ringing but I had to ring again to find it.’

‘How about her purse? Her handbag?’

‘She took those. She’d have needed her Swift card to get on the bus.’

‘And where’s the phone now?’

Valerie stood up and fetched it from the counter, a Samsung Galaxy in a sparkly mint-green case. They looked at it without picking it up.

‘Is it locked?’ said Robin.

Valerie Woodson nodded. ‘I don’t know the code. I’ve tried everything – her birthday, mine, her dad’s.’

‘Her dad is …?’

‘He’s dead. Graeme. He died when she was eight. Cancer.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Maggie.

‘Tell us about Thursday morning.’

‘It was … normal. I’ve been over and over it for anything unusual. She did go to work that day, I know that, because on Friday morning when her bed hadn’t been slept in and I found her phone, I rang the office to check she was okay. I got Roger, her boss, and he said she’d been there all day on Thursday and left as usual.’

‘But she wasn’t there then?’

‘No. He was about to call here, he said.’

‘Where does she work?’

‘In the Jewellery Quarter.’

The Jewellery Quarter. Robin felt a cold hand on the back of her neck.

‘A family silversmith,’ Valerie was saying, ‘Hanley’s. She’s been there since she finished her A-levels; they’ve encouraged her to go on, do book-keeping at college at night so she can take more on.’

‘And has she?’

‘Not yet. She says she will but now there’s the other place so I don’t know when she’d have the time.’

‘The other place?’

Valerie frowned. ‘She’s got a bar job in the city centre, place called The Spot. She’s been there since September. Three nights a week – Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.’

‘You don’t approve?’

‘It would be better to do the evening course, wouldn’t it? But she says she’s saving up for a summer holiday.’

‘Have you looked for her passport?’ asked Robin.

‘Yes. It’s here, still in the drawer with mine.’

‘And have you spoken to anyone at the bar?’ said Maggie.

‘Of course.’ A terse note. The woman heard it and caught herself. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s okay. Just take it steady.’

Valerie exhaled heavily, as if she could breathe out the tension. ‘She wasn’t there that night – she wasn’t supposed to be, she doesn’t do Thursdays. On Friday I called to see if she was in and spoke to the manager. He was annoyed with her for missing her shift, leaving him in the lurch.’

‘Right. And you’ve talked to her friends?’

‘As many as I can. And Jane who she works with at the office. She’s got new friends, though, at The Spot. I don’t know them.’

‘Boyfriend?’

‘Not at the moment. She broke up with Nick in October and there hasn’t been anyone since, as far as I know.’

‘How about him?’ said Maggie. ‘Nick. How did he take the break-up? His idea or hers?’

‘Hers. Well, he wasn’t pleased, he liked her, but as far as I know, he didn’t push it. There were a few phone calls then he got the message.’

‘How long had they been together?’

‘Four or five months. But I’ve been through all this with the police.’

‘Valerie, do you understand why DI Nuttall says she’s not a high-priority case?’

‘Because of her age – she’s an adult. And because there’s no evidence of anything … untoward.’ She looked down, chin quivering. ‘Violent.’ Robin watched her bring herself under control. ‘She doesn’t have any of the risk factors – she’s not suicidal, she doesn’t self-harm; she’s not an addict; she’s not in an abusive relationship. I understand what he was trying to say – people leave, they don’t want to be found, that’s their prerogative – but this isn’t that. This is different. Something’s wrong, I know it. I know my daughter. If she hasn’t come home and she hasn’t rung …’

‘What’s she like as a person?’ Robin asked. ‘What does she like doing?’

Valerie took a wad of tissue from her cuff and pressed it under her eyes. ‘She likes reading. We used to go to the library a lot when she was younger and it stuck.’

‘What kind of stuff?’

‘Novels – all sorts. Historical, thrillers. She likes Jane Eyre – reads it over and over again. Lately she’s been reading a lot of YA, she calls it – young adult. Well, I suppose she is one but it means younger, really, doesn’t it? All teenagers and girls with crossbows. Fantasy. And she likes cooking. Those are hers.’ She pointed to a stack of books on the counter: Ottolenghi and Polpo, two River Cafés. ‘She loves the Bake Off, all those cookery shows on Saturday morning. She watches them then goes shopping down Stratford Road, comes back and cooks. It’s not all my taste, what she makes. Too … herby. Lentils, little beans. What’s that funny stuff – tabbouleh? But she’s good at it.’

‘Wish I was,’ said Maggie.

‘So she’s a homebody, would you say?’

‘No, I wouldn’t. She’s … a mixture. She likes her cooking and her books but if I said she was always sensible … She drinks. She goes out. She’s not a wallflower.’

‘You said she’s not an addict; have you ever suspected she might be taking drugs at all?’ Robin asked.

‘No.’ She seemed to hesitate. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Remember, we’re not police,’ Maggie said. ‘The objective here would be to find Becca, not get her into trouble. Knowing about drugs is for us, to make sure we have the whole picture. We’re not going to go to the police about personal drug use, okay?’

‘Right. Well, maybe. I don’t know. Nothing … serious.’

In the bag at her feet, Maggie’s phone started ringing. ‘I’m sorry, Valerie.’ She took it out, looked at the screen then stood. ‘Will you excuse me a moment?’ She pointed to the hallway. ‘Hello?’ The tinny sound of a male voice on the other end that faded as she moved away.