October Wednesday, your sad African violet plant on the window ledge struggling in the meagre light and cold, as the noisy central heating, set to come on late for economy purposes, clattered and cranked into reluctant action. Preparing a case for court. Two youths cabbaged after drinking all day: one had stabbed the other to death in a flat. Something was said and taken the wrong way. A threat made; a counter, the escalation. One life ended, the other ruined. All in the time it took to buy a pint of milk. You recalled the murderer, stripped of bravado-giving intoxicants, in the interview room under the fluorescent lights; so young, broken and scared. But this case hadn’t bugged you. You’d seen so many like it.
What got to you was the phone call, at around eleven fifteen. A uniformed cop, Donald Harrower, telling you about a seven-year-old girl, Britney Hamil, setting off for school at 8.30 a.m. and never arriving. The school had reported the absence to her mother, Angela, just before ten, who, after phoning some friends and relatives, had called the police half an hour later. Harrower and another officer had gone out to speak to the woman, as well as Britney’s teacher and some neighbours and schoolmates. Two older girls had seen her walking down the street ahead of them, but when they turned the corner a few minutes later, Britney had vanished and they’d witnessed a white van speeding away.
— The girls, Andrea Jack and Stella Hetherington, were the only witnesses and the white van was the only vehicle they recall seeing in the vicinity, Harrower had explained in his adenoidal tones, — so I thought you’d like to know about it.
The words ‘unmarked white van’ crackled through your brain in static. That great British archetype: always trouble to a polisman. You’d thanked Harrower, thinking it was unfortunate his dour, taciturn aspect often shielded a thoughtful diligence from his bosses. The van compelled you to go straight to your boss, acting Chief Superintendent Bob Toal, and request to investigate the disappearance and potential abduction of a child.
You worked with Harrower, talking to neighbours, friends, the school staff and children whom Britney might have passed en route. And Angela. You remembered the first time you set eyes on the child’s mother, on her way out to the local shopping centre. She’d been due at her cleaning job in the Scottish Office that afternoon, but explained that she’d taken time off to look after her other daughter, Tessa, who had food poisoning. She was the eleven-year-old sister who normally accompanied Britney to school. Instead of asking Angela to hold on, something made you want to walk with her. You followed her around Iceland, as she filled up on cheap burgers, fish fingers, oven chips and cigarettes. Found yourself judging her every purchase, as if they made her not only complicit in Tessa’s poisoning but also in Britney’s vanishing. — Isn’t she a little young to be walking to the school on her own?
— I was gaunny take her, but Tessa started being sick again, really chucking it up. Britney… she didnae want to be late. Telt me she was a big girl now. Angela fought back the tears as she pushed her shopping trolley down the yellow neon-lit gangways. — It’s only five minutes’ walk, she pleaded. — You will find her, won’t ye?
— We’re doing everything we can. So Tessa was ill this morning?
— Aye. I took them oot tae that burger bar last night, the yin at the centre. For a wee treat, then tae the pictures, at the multi-plex tae see the new Harry Potter. Tess came doon wi it in there. Ah mind ay Britney bein that sad that we had tae go hame…
— Right, you had said, feeling then that missing a film might be the least of the girl’s worries.
Leaving Angela back at her flat, you walked the walk to the school and found that it actually took fourteen minutes. Out the housing scheme, past the Loganburn roundabout, round the corner into Carr Road (where Britney vanished), and alongside a long, stark brick wall, behind which sat a disused factory. Then, round another corner, a block of tenements and the Gothic black-railed gates of the Victorian school.
Everyone at Police Headquarters knew that the next few hours were crucial, the something-or-nothing time. An alert call was made to all cars to be on the lookout for the girl and the driver of an unmarked white van. But as morning rolled into afternoon there was no news, and outside of Andrea and Stella, the girls walking behind Britney, only a couple of neighbours – a Mrs Doig on her way to her work, and a Mr Loughlan out walking his dog – could specifically recall seeing the girl that morning.
You went back to Bob Toal and asked if you could put a proper investigation team together. In the era of sex-crime awareness a missing child was big news and the media-savvy Toal quickly concurred. — Take Amanda Drummond, he’d said, — and Ally Notman.
You expressed gratitude. Drummond was thorough and had good people skills, while Notman had an engine on him and knew his way around data management. Like you, he had an Information Technology degree from Heriot-Watt University, but you were envious of the more efficient way your younger charge put these skills to use.
Then Toal had added, — And Dougie Gillman.
You felt the air inside you ebbing away. There had been a serious personal fallout with Gillman a few years back. But you said nothing, because it was personal. You’d keep it off the job.
You got Harrower and another reliable copper, Kenny McCaig, out of uniform. You commandeered an office at Police HQ and started your formal investigation. McCaig and Harrower continued knocking on doors. Notman examined speed camera and CCTV footage to identify any white vans tracked in or around the vicinity of Carr Road at the time, pulling out possible registration numbers, checking the list of owners against the Vehicle Licensing Agency’s database in Swansea. Drummond and Gillman took a forensics team out to give the bend on Carr Road, where Britney had vanished, a good dusting down. Neither forensics nor IT were the forte of Gillman, an old- school street cop, but he’d coldly followed your order.
As for you, you busied yourself with the ‘register’: the database of sex offenders. Seeing who was out, who was on parole and who was under surveillance; who was considered to be high-risk and low-risk. You’d clicked through the mugshots that Wednesday in your office, as the light declined in the drizzle over the Castle Hill, calling Trudi and telling her that you’d be late meeting her at the Filmhouse. When you got there, you’d coughed out an apology. — Sorry, babe, shit day at work. This weather doesnae help.
She didn’t seem to mind. — Thank God we’ve got Miami to look forward to!
But you weren’t looking forward to anything. You’d felt a building tug of unease from Harrower’s call; through your job you’d learned to define evil not just as the presence of something malign, but the absence of something good. Experience had taught you that the only misfortune worse than a having loved one murdered was for them to vanish without their fate ever coming to light. The torment of uncertainty, where the heart pounded each time the doorbell or phone rang, and desperate, hungry eyes devoured every face in every crowd. The inevitability of the cherished person’s death could be mentally reasoned, but it was harder to stifle the soul’s defiant scream that they lived on. But were they coming home or had they gone for ever? After time spent in this hellish limbo, any news, no matter how searing, was welcomed beyond the endless waiting and searching. In Britney’s mother, lone parent Angela Hamil, you saw a woman slowly drowning in this terrible madness.
By that evening you all knew that somebody had snatched Britney. The next day Toal decided to go public and give it to the newspapers. If the situation couldn’t be managed, then the news had to be. The later editions of the
The police switchboards became jammed with the usual litany of busybodies and sickos, as well as the genuine but largely misguided members of the public. And that creeping unease, how it had spread like a virus through your investigative team. Whatever you all said on the PR front, or to the family, you knew as professional law enforcement officers that after twenty-four hours you were probably dealing with a child sex murder.
The team quickly swung into action. Gillman had been the first to find something, a single page of yellow notepaper wet in the gutter on the other side of the road to where Britney had vanished. Angela confirmed it was from her school notepad. Its very presence indicated some sort of struggle between child and kidnapper.
The villain needed some degree of tangibility in the minds of his pursuers, and was dubbed the usual nicknames, ‘The Stoat’, ‘The Nonce’ or ‘The Beast’. But another moniker in the police canteen was Mr Confectioner. It came from the Toblerone chocolate advert from television:
Stop this.
No crime…
