London was constantly changing. More buildings going up where others had been torn down. Urban regeneration. Or perhaps they were just trying to hide the decay that was already there, patch it up so nobody noticed.
Was that what her mother had done? Put a bandage over Rachel’s abuse, hidden it away from the world so no one would know?
She’d been ten at the time, too young to notice those things. The lustful glances, the fearful looks, the withdrawal and depression.
Rachel had always been so vivacious, so popular. Was it possible she’d been harbouring a deep, dark secret?
She spent the two-and-a-half-hour journey reading through more of her sister’s case files. The ones she could fit into her bag, anyway. Witness statements by her sister’s friends.
“I didn’t see her that weekend. She said she had to study.”
“There was a party, but Rachel didn’t come.”
“No, she didn’t have a boyfriend, although there was this weird guy she used to hang out with. I don’t know his name, he didn’t go to our school.”
Who was that guy?
Jo had a dim memory of a slim, geeky boy with glasses who lived in the neighbourhood. Michael? Was that it? He used to walk Rachel home sometimes.
She fiddled through the file. Damn, she didn’t have the right one.
Hauling out her phone, she rang Rob.
“Miss me already?”
She smiled. “Yes, but that’s not why I rang.”
He chuckled. “What’s up?”
“I need a favour. Remember that kid my sister used to know, the last person to see her alive? Could you look up his name for me? I’ve left that particular folder in the incident room. It should be on the table, I was looking at it yesterday.”
“Sure, hang on.”
She listened to the sound of him rifling through the folders on the table where she sat. She’d left them in a neat pile in case anyone else needed access to them.
“Okay, got it. The statement of Michael Robertson.”
“Michael! I thought that was it. Thanks, Rob.”
“Is that all you need? You don’t want me to send you a photo of it?”
“No, it was just his name. Thanks, Rob. I’ll call you later.”
They signed off.
Michael Robertson.
Using her phone, she Googled him, but several hundred came up. Facebook. Linkedin. Twitter.
“Oh, God,” she moaned. That wasn’t going to work.
She tried Michael Robertson Manchester, which narrowed it down some, but still provided far too many to read through. Why’d he have to have such a common name? She didn’t even know what he looked like. There was no picture of him in the file, and her twenty year old memory was fuzzy, at best.
The statements by Rachel’s friends were telling in themselves. Why had Miss Popularity suddenly shunned all her friends?
Not going out. Studying.
That didn’t sound at all like the Rachel she knew.
And then there was this boy. This nerdy guy who nobody knew. Why was her sister hanging around with him?
She leaned back and closed her eyes.
Hopefully, her mother would have the answers.
Rob stared at the witness statement. Michael Robertson. The last person to see Rachel Maguire alive. He also Googled him, but like Jo, realised his mistake when thousands of results returned in a nanosecond.
He typed Michael Robertson into the criminal database. It took longer than Google’s giant search engine, but eventually returned two results. Neither were particularly enlightening.
The first entry was of an eighteen year old arrested for breaking and entering. He glanced at the date. Two weeks ago.
Moving on to the next one. Michael Robertson, sixteen, cautioned for getting into a fight at school. Let off with a warning.
He wrote the name on a post-it note.
“Where are you now, Michael,” he murmured, as he stuck it to the table where DS Jenny Bird sat.
The neon blue digits on the squad-room clock said it was nearly seven. He had another hour or so before people began arriving.
Nicking the flip chart from next door, he wrote all seven victims’ names down the left side. Next to them he wrote what he knew about their injuries.
Rosie had a broken arm, Angie was sexually abused, as was Anna Dewbury and Lucy Chang. All three were underage.
Chrissy and Rosie’s bodies were too badly degraded to be able to tell.
What about Rachel? Since her body had never been discovered, there was no way to tell. Unless Jo’s mother could shed some light.
A burly shadow caught his eye. DCS Lawrence strode across the floor towards his office. The Chief Superintendent prided himself on being the first person in the office, and he wouldn’t like that Rob had beaten him to it.
Sure enough, two minutes later the DCS’s solid frame appeared in the doorway.
“Getting an early start, Rob?”
“Jo left for Manchester this morning, so I thought I’d come in while it’s quiet and go over everything again.”
“Good idea,” he said. “Find a suspect yet?”
“Not yet, sir,” he grimaced.
Lawrence gave him a hard look before turning away. “I’m counting on you, Rob.” He marched back to his office.
What they needed was some DNA. The two victims most likely to yield any were Angie Nolan, who’d only been buried for ten months, and Anna Dewbury, whose body had been discovered within a day or two of her death.
Knowing he was in for a bollocking, he called Liz Kramer’s direct line.
“Don’t tell me you’ve found another dead teenager?” she barked into the phone.
“No, nothing like that,” he said, putting her mind at ease. “Just something I wanted to ask you.”
“Anything that isn’t a dead body can wait until I’ve got some clothes on.”
And she hung up.
Rob chuckled, despite himself.
“Right, what is it?” she said when she rang back twenty minutes later. Rob heard her indicator going and knew she was in her car on the way to the mortuary.
“The youngest victim, Angie Nolan,” he began. “You mentioned she had some flesh under her fingernails. Did you ever find out who it belonged to?”
“I sent it to the lab,” she said. “As far as I know, they haven’t emailed through the results. I’ll chase them up, but there’s a backlog at
