Jo caught his eye; she was thinking the same thing.
They pressed on until they came to a fork in the road.
Tessa paused. “This is where they would have split up,” she said. “The other girls live on that side of the common, so they would have gone that way around the lake. Arina would have walked on.”
“Lake?” asked Jo.
“Yes, I think it used to be an old quarry. It’s more of a deep pond actually.”
“Let’s carry on then.” Rob strode ahead, his head turning from side to side like a homing beacon. He could hear traffic and knew the road was close by, but on this section of the footpath, Arina would have been invisible. Anyone could have grabbed her and dragged her into the surrounding bushes.
A hundred metres later they emerged onto a winding road. It was busy, cars rushing downwards through the green tunnel of trees. The woods didn’t end here, the road had simply been carved through the trees.
“What’s on the other side?” he asked.
“That’s a school,” Tessa told him. “A private boy’s school. Arina used to go around the back to get home, she was too shy to walk past the front.” Her eyes glazed over with memories.
Jo touched her arm. “Do you want to show us her route home?”
They waited for a gap in the traffic. There was no hard shoulder, but there was a slim dirt verge where a vehicle could pull over if necessary. On the bend, it was a dangerous place to stop.
When there was a break, they darted across. A high wall flanked the pavement, behind which was the school.
They took the first right and walked around the school. Then they turned left and two hundred metres after that, Tessa came to a halt.
“This is it.”
In front of them was a neat, red brick, double-storey terraced house. Tessa stared at it, unmoving.
“I’m sorry, this can’t be easy for you,” Jo said.
“I haven’t been back here since…” Her words petered off.
“Thank you for showing us.”
Rob glanced back the way they’d come. “Arina could have been snatched at any point from the fork in the footpath to here.”
Tessa nodded. “That’s right. But there are security cameras mounted on the wall surrounding the school, and the footpath is the most likely spot.”
He’d seen one camera at the start of the road, but not any others. He’d make sure to pay more attention on the way back. The entire walk had taken them twenty-five minutes.
“Did Arina walk back home through the common every day?” Jo asked.
Tessa shook her head. “Not in winter when it was dark. She took the bus, then. It went around the common but dropped her at the bus stop outside the boys’ school.”
It was a pity she didn’t take the bus that day. But it had been a warm, summer evening. Late July, if he remembered correctly. The temperature would have been similar to what it was now, in the first week of August. Warm, humid with a light breeze, perhaps.
They walked back past the school. There was a second camera, but it was hidden from view by a tall Scots pine, which was why he hadn’t noticed it earlier.
“Did the police check the CCTV footage, do you know?”
Tessa shrugged. “If they did, they didn’t tell me.”
That wasn’t unusual. The police didn’t share their methods with the victim or the victim’s family.
“They might not have, considering they assumed Arina had been kidnapped by her father,” Jo pointed out.
His thoughts exactly. That was something he’d ask DCI Purley when he spoke to him next.
“Is this road always this busy?” Rob asked.
“Only in the morning and evening, and on Saturdays,” Tessa said. “It’s a shortcut to Woking and the A3.”
Rob frowned. “When Arina was coming home from school, that would have been about…?”
“Three-thirty,” supplied Tessa. “She didn’t have anything on after school that day. She did computer club a couple of times a week, which ended at five, but not the day she went missing.”
Three-thirty. The traffic wouldn’t have started building by then. The kidnapper could have parked on the dirt verge and hidden in the woods, waiting for Arina to walk past. Alone. Unguarded.
He suppressed a shiver. What kind of man lay in wait for a young girl like that? How twisted did he have to be?
“Did Arina mention anything suspicious in the months or weeks leading up to her disappearance?” Jo wanted to know. It was a good question, and one he hadn’t thought to ask himself. Most victims knew their attackers.
“No, I don’t think so.” Tessa wrinkled her forehead.
“No problems with friends or boyfriends? Any teachers giving her a hard time, or problems at school?”
“Nothing like that. She was a good, hardworking girl. She got good grades and didn’t mix with boys. She was still too young for that.”
Twelve was a bit young for boys.
“You mentioned she didn’t have much of a relationship with her father,” Rob said. “Was that something she found difficult?”
“What do you mean?” Her voice was sharp. Defensive. Rob met Jo’s eye. It was a rather extreme reaction to a fairly simple question.
“It must have been difficult having a father who, in your own words, didn’t care about her because he wanted a son.”
She kept her eyes glued to the footpath. Dry twigs cracked underfoot, the echo making it sound like someone was following them.
“It wasn’t ideal, but they were civil to each other. Ramin often worked late, so Arina would be up in her room or doing homework by the time he got back. They didn’t speak much.”
“Still, it couldn’t have been easy for her,” commented Jo. “Did she ever talk to you about it?”
Tessa shrugged. “Once, when she was little. I tried to explain, but what can you say that won’t hurt their feelings? When she grew older, she understood.”
That still didn't make it right.
They emerged from the woods out into the
