I look again at the satellite map unfurled across a car bonnet. Statistics don’t make science. And all human behaviour cannot be quantified by numbers or reduced to equations, no matter what someone like Oliver Rabb might think. Places are significant. Journeys are significant. Every excursion or expedition we take is a story, an inner narrative that we sometimes don’t even realise we’re following. What was Gideon’s journey? He boasted that he could melt through walls, but he was more like human wallpaper, able to blend in and become simply background while he watched houses and broke into them.
He was there when Christine Wheeler jumped. He whispered in her ear. He must have been somewhere close. I look at the terraces, studying the skyline. The Clifton Suspension Bridge is less than two hundred yards to the west of here. I can smell the sea stink and gorse. Some of these addresses are likely to have a view of the bridge from the upper floors.
A man rides past on a bicycle with elastic around his trouser legs to stop the fabric getting caught in the chain. A woman walks her black spaniel on the grass. I want to stop them, grasp them by the upper arms and roar into their faces, demanding to know if they have seen my wife and daughter. Instead, I stand and study the street, looking for something out of the ordinary: people in the wrong place, or the wrong clothes, something that doesn’t belong or tries too hard to belong or draws the eye for another reason.
Gideon would have a chosen a house, not a flat; somewhere away from the prying eyes of neighbours, isolated or shielded, with a driveway or a garage so he could take his vehicle off the road and move Charlie and Julianne inside without being seen. A house that is up for sale, perhaps, or one that is only used for holidays or weekends.
I step across the muddy patch of grass and begin walking along the street. The trunks of trees are wreathed in wire and the branches shiver in the wind.
‘Where the hell are you going?’ yells the DI.
‘I’m looking for a house.’
Ruiz catches up to me and Monk is not far behind, having been sent to keep us out of trouble. I keep looking at the skyline and trying not to stumble. My cane click-clacks on the pavement as I head down the slight hill past a row of terraces and turn into Sion Lane. I still can’t see the bridge.
The next street across is Westfield Place. A front door is open. A middle-aged woman is sweeping the steps.
‘Can you see the bridge from here?’ I ask.
‘No, love.’
‘What about the top floor?’
‘The estate agent called it “glimpses”,’ she laughs. ‘You lost?’
I show her the photographs of Charlie and Julianne. ‘Have you seen either of them?’
She shakes her head.
‘What about this man?’
‘I’d remember him,’ she says, when the opposite is probably true.
We keep moving along Westfield Place. The wind is whipping up leaves and sweet wrappers that chase each other along the gutter. Abruptly I cross the street to a brick wall with stone capping.
‘Give me a leg-up,’ says Ruiz, before stepping into Monk’s cupped hands and being hoisted upwards until his forearms are braced along the white painted capping.
‘It’s a garden,’ he says. ‘There’s a house further along.’
‘Can you see the bridge?’
‘Not from here, but you might be able to see it from the top of the house. There’s a turret room.’
He jumps down and we follow the wall, looking for a gate. Monk is now ahead. I can’t match his stride and have to run every few yards to catch up.
Stone pillars mark the entrance to a driveway. The gates are open. Tyres have crushed leaves into the puddles. A car has been here recently.
The house is large and from another age. Overgrown with ivy on one side, it has small dark windows poking through the leaves. The roof is steep with an octagonal turret on the western corner.
The place looks empty. Closed up. Curtains are drawn and leaves have collected on the main steps and entrance portico. I follow Monk up the steps. He rings the doorbell. Nobody answers. I call Charlie’s name and then Julianne’s, pressing my face against a slender pane of frosted glass, trying to catch the tiny vibrations of a reply. Imagining it.
Ruiz has gone to check out a garage at the side of the house, beneath the trees. He disappears through a side door and then appears again immediately.
‘It’s Tyler’s van,’ he yells. ‘It’s empty.’
My head fills with tumbling and leaping emotions. Hope.
Monk is on the phone to DI Cray. ‘Tell her to get an ambulance,’ I say.
He relays the message and snaps the phone shut. Then he raises his elbow and drives it hard against the glass pane, which shatters and falls inward. Reaching gingerly inside, he unlocks the door and swings it open.
The hall is wide and paved with black and white tiles. It has a mirror and an umbrella stand, as well as a side table with a Chinese takeaway menu and list of emergency numbers.
The lights are working, but the switches seem to be camouflaged against the floral wallpaper. The place has been closed up for the winter, with sheets and rugs covering the furniture and the fire grates swept clean. I imagine figures lurking unseen, hiding in corners trying not to make a sound.
Behind us a trio of police cars streams through the gates and up the gravel driveway. Doors open. DI Cray leads them up the front steps.
Gideon said Julianne and Charlie were buried in a box, breathing the same air. I don’t want to believe him. So much of what he said to people was designed to wound and to break them.
I stand swaying in the dining room, watching a spill of light from the patio doors. There are muddy footprints on the parquetry squares.
Ruiz has climbed the stairs. He calls to me. I mount the stairs two at a time, gripping the banister and dragging myself upwards. My cane falls from my hand and clatters down the steps to the black and white tiles.
‘In here,’ he yells.
I pause at the door. Ruiz is kneeling beside a narrow cast iron bed. A child is curled on a mattress, her eyes and mouth taped shut. I do not remember uttering a sound, but Charlie’s head rises and turns to my voice and she lets out a muffled sob. Her head rocks from side to side. I have to hold her still while Ruiz finds a pair of dressmaking scissors lying on a thin mattress in another corner of the bedroom.
His hands are shaking. So are mine. The blades of the scissors open and close gently and I peel back the tape. I am staring at her with a kind of wonderment, mouth open, still not able to believe it’s her. I meet Charlie’s blue eyes. I am seeing her through a shining fluid that will not be blinked away.
She is dirty. Her hair has been hacked to her skull. Her skin is torn. Her wrists are bleeding. She is the most beautiful creature to ever draw breath.
I crush her to my chest. I rock her in my arms. I want to hold her until she stops crying, until she forgets everything. I want to hold her until she remembers only the warmth of my embrace and my words in her ears and my tears on her forehead.
Charlie is wearing a bathrobe. Her jeans are on a chair.
‘Did he…?’ The words get caught in my throat. ‘Did he touch you?’
She blinks at me, not understanding.
‘Did he make you do things? You can tell me. It’s OK.’
She shakes her head and wipes her nose with her sleeve.
‘Where’s your mum?’ I ask.
She frowns at me.
‘Have you seen her?’
‘No. Where is she?’
I look at Monk and Ruiz. They’re already moving. The house is being searched. I can hear doors being opened, cupboards explored, heavy boots sound from the attic and the turret room. Silence. It lasts half a dozen heartbeats. The boots start moving again.
Charlie puts her head back on my chest. Monk comes back with a set of 24” bolt cutters. I hold her ankles
