Rob blinked at him. A light had just gone on in his head.
“No, sir. There isn’t?”
“Pardon me?”
“I can’t believe I didn’t see it sooner. Of course, it’s linked. It’s obvious when you think about it.”
“Not to me,” grunted Lawrence.
But Rob had thrown open the office door and was striding through the squad room.
“Where are you going?” Lawrence called after him.
Such was the power of his voice that everybody stopped what they were doing and glanced up.
“I’m going to speak to Tessa Parvin,” Rob replied. “I know why she did it. I know why she kidnapped Katie.”
33
Mallory, who’d seen him through the glass walls of Incident Room 2, swung open the door and ran after him.
“Wait up, Rob,” he called, as he took the stairs two at a time after his DCI. “What’s so important you can’t wait.”
Rob stopped in the stairwell on the ground floor.
“Come on, I’ll explain on the way.”
They had to wait for Tessa Parvin’s solicitor to turn around on the A3 and come back to the station. By the time she arrived, Rob had filled in Mallory on his line of thought.
Now, as he sat opposite Tessa, his heart pounded in anticipation.
She looked like she’d been crying. Obviously, the last interview had got to her. Rob felt sorry for her. It was the police’s shortcomings that had forced her to do what she did.
“I know why you did it, Tessa,” he said, once Mallory had switched on the recording device and announced them all for the second time that afternoon. “I know why you kidnapped Katie.”
She didn’t respond, but her lip quivered.
“It was our fault, wasn’t it?”
She glanced up. Her solicitor looked confused.
“We failed you when Arina went missing. We let you both down. I’m sorry about that.”
She kept her eyes on him. Unblinking.
“That’s why you kidnapped Katie, isn’t it? You wanted to get our attention. You wanted us to reopen your case. And it worked.” He studied her and saw a small blush creep into her cheeks. “You knew we’d look into her friends and family; you knew we’d discover your daughter went missing four years ago. That was what you wanted, wasn’t it? You wanted us to make a connection between the two missing girls.”
Tears welled up in Tessa’s eyes. She nodded. “It was the only way I could get you to take Arina’s disappearance seriously.”
Yes!
She was talking. They had a confession.
Mallory stiffened beside to him.
“You don’t have to continue,” her solicitor pointed out, laying a hand on her arm. But Tessa shrugged it off.
“I want to.”
The solicitor removed her hand.
“I never planned on hurting Katie,” Tessa whispered. “I just wanted to find my girl, to know for sure whether she was dead. I couldn’t stand not knowing.”
It had eaten her up inside.
“I arranged Katie’s disappearance to look like an old case I’d read about online. I knew there had been other girls that had gone missing in the county, so I looked into those disappearances, and I saw that one of their school satchels had been found in a nearby river. I thought if I did the same, you’d connect the cases and take Arina’s disappearance more seriously. I didn’t for a moment think–” She petered off, unable to continue.
Her solicitor sat stone-faced beside her. She was picturing the kidnapping charge on top of the one for attempted murder.
“You didn’t think we’d also find her school rucksack weighed down in a nearby lake?” Rob finished for her.
Or that it would lead to Jo making the connection with her sister.
She shook her head. “I had hoped she was with Ramin in Iraq, but deep down I knew she wasn’t. I knew she was dead. I could sense it.”
Tears flowed freely down her face, but she didn’t care. She was beyond caring.
Rob’s heart went out to her. Everything she’d done had been in search of the truth. If the original SIO had done his job in the first place, Tessa Parvin wouldn’t be sitting here today. She wouldn't be spending the next ten or twenty years in prison.
They had what they needed for a conviction.
He excused himself and left Mallory to finish the interview.
“Well done, Rob.” Chief Superintendent Lawrence pumped his hand when he told him they’d wrapped up the Katie Wells case. The CPS had given them the go-ahead to further charge Tessa Parvin with kidnapping.
“Let’s issue a statement to the press ASAP. You do it. This is your moment.”
But Rob shook his head. “I’ll let DS Malhotra do it, sir. For consistency's sake.”
Lawrence wagged his finger. “You’ll never get ahead if you don’t suck it up, Rob. If you want my job one day, you need to own your successes.”
This didn’t feel like a success. Tessa Parvin should never have had to resort to kidnapping to get the police to take her daughter’s disappearance seriously. Besides, Arina’s killer was still out there and it was his job to hunt that person down. He wanted justice for the Parvin family.
With the case wrapped up, Rob decided to go home early and take Trigger to the park. He called Jo, but her phone diverted straight to voicemail, which meant she was busy. Had she managed to convince her superiors to second her to their team yet?
As he stepped outside the police station, he was besieged by a reporter. The young women thrust a recorder under his nose and asked, “How do you feel now that Katie’s kidnapper is in custody?”
“I’m delighted,” he said, pushing past her.
She ran alongside him. “Do you think Tessa Parvin will get a reduced sentence seeing as it’s the police's fault she was put in this position?”
“I can’t comment on the outcome of the trial,” he said, annoyed.
“Are you in charge of her daughter’s case?”
“Yes, now if you’ll excuse me.” He managed to get away from her and jump into a passing taxi, even though it was less than a kilometre to his house.
He’d just paid the fare when Jo rang him back.
“Congratulations,” she
