“You’ve got nothing on me. You’re grasping at straws.”
Was he?
Rob scowled at Payne who still hadn’t broken a sweat. He was either a brilliant liar or a calculating psychopath – maybe both.
“Where were you the morning of the second of August?” asked Mallory, diffusing the tension.
“At the gallery. I already told you, I open at eight thirty on Tuesday mornings.”
For the purposes of the recording they had to go over it again.
“And Indigo at the Olympic Cafe can vouch for you?”
“He served me an iced mocha Frappuccino.”
They hadn’t checked up. Mallory fired off a text message to one of the officers still at the gallery and asked him to take a statement from the barista, backing up Payne’s claim.
“You could have gone afterwards,” Rob pointed out. “Katie was taken between eight-thirty and ten past nine.” At twenty past, Lisa had got the call from the school.
“Was she?” Payne looked straight at him.
Shit. He walked into that one.
“Yes, she was. Which means you could have got your iced whatever, then driven to Belgrave Road and waited for Katie to appear. Maybe you’re there most mornings. Maybe you like to watch as she walks to school.
That touched a nerve. He shifted in his chair and for the first time Rob thought, I’m getting somewhere.
Unfortunately, there was no CCTV in Katie’s street, but there was near the gallery. He met Mallory’s eye, and his DI nodded and left the room. “For the recording, DI Mallory has left the room.”
Once again, Rob saw Payne’s gaze flicker over Mallory, but this time it was tinged with fear.
He finished up the interview and told Payne he was holding him while they cleared up a few things. Payne simply grunted in response. His previous cockiness had all but disappeared.
“I’d like to have a word with my client in private,” the solicitor asked. He’d also sensed something was up.
“Sure, go ahead.”
Rob left them to it and went to speak to the custody sergeant. It wasn’t over yet. Payne had definitely flinched when he’d mentioned Katie’s school. Were they on the right track? Did the sex offender have something to do with the missing child?
And was that a good or a bad thing?
“I’ve got Edward Maplin on the phone,” Jenny told him as he entered the squad room. “He wants to talk to you.”
“Put him through.” Rob sat down at his desk, appreciating the air con. The interrogation room had been sweltering. “Ed, what can I do for you?”
He listened for a moment.
“We have covered those areas. But go ahead.”
They could search them again if it made them happy. People liked to feel as if they were doing something proactive.
“Sorry, guv. He was adamant, so I thought it best to put him through you.”
“It was nice of him to call,” Rob admitted. “He didn’t have to.”
Three days. It was usually about now a body turned up.
Mallory had assigned two detective constables to look through the CCTV footage on Church Road. They’d isolated the camera nearest the gallery and were homing in on the footage taken on Tuesday morning.
Rob resisted the urge to peer over their shoulders. When he’d first arrived at Richmond CID, he’d been assigned that job and he knew it required the utmost concentration. They didn’t need a frustrated DCI distracting them.
“Anything at the storage unit?” he asked Mallory, who was in constant contact with the search team.
“Nothing. Just a lot of sealed boxes that look like they’ve been there for years. They’re going through them now.”
“He probably put his stuff in there when he went inside,” Rob remarked. He’d never thought about the logistics of going to prison before.
“Makes sense,” Mallory muttered.
Half an hour later, a uniformed police officer sent through Indigo’s statement confirming that Payne did indeed buy an iced mocha Frappuccino on Tuesday morning at eight seventeen AM according to the till slip.
“Bugger. Still, he got awfully edgy when I suggested he’d watched Katie.”
A shout from across the squad room.
Yes!
Rob strode across the room to where the two DCs were ploughing through reams of footage.
“We found something, guv,” the young woman said, pointing to the screen. “That’s the suspect. He’s on foot, walking away from the gallery with his iced coffee at twenty past eight on Tuesday morning.”
“He didn’t go back to the gallery?”
“No, sir. Not until nine thirty.”
Fuck me.
“That puts him in the frame for the abduction.” He couldn’t believe it.
“Yes, sir. Here’s the clip of him coming back.”
She ran the footage. Payne could be seen strolling back up the road toward the gallery. Relaxed, unrushed, the same loping gait as before, except the iced coffee was gone.
“Can you track him?”
“Only as far as the green. He disappears after that.”
“But he’d have gone down the high street to get to Katie’s road. There must be cameras on the high street.”
“There are, sir, but he isn’t on any of them. We’ve checked several times.”
The young man next to her nodded.
Shit.
“What happened to him? He can’t have disappeared?”
“He could have sat on the green and drank his coffee,” the constable said.
“Or walked up Station Road.” The female DC brought up an aerial view of the town. She pointed to a section of road. “There are no cameras until you get to Barnes Station.”
Rob stared at the map until his eyes watered. “Could he have cut through, taken another route?”
“It’s possible,” she said. “The area is riddled with pedestrian footpaths running between the houses.”
Rob let out a long, slow breath. Payne could have gone anywhere in that hour, and they’d never know. “Thanks guys. Keep on it. Let me know if you find anything else.”
He turned to Mallory. “The guy disappears for the exact time frame of Katie’s abduction. How can he not be involved?”
“He was on foot,” Mallory pointed out. “Very difficult to pull off an abduction without transport.”
“He could have parked a car by the river towpath the day before. Then, all he’d have to do is lure her down to the river, walk along the towpath and get her into the
