But it's also rare, and seven years ago I could think of no specific case, certainly nothing that was unsolved. It was possible, of course, that one of the paedophiles had sacrificed his own daughter. For most people that's a thought too shocking to contemplate, but, believe it or not, there are people out there who've actually done such things. The thing is, though, they've usually been caught. Kill a young family member and, even if you don't report them missing, someone somewhere's usually going to notice that they're no longer around. Which left me with the conclusion that there was going to be a record of this girl's disappearance somewhere. If I looked hard enough, I'd find it.
My first port of call was a cyber cafe on the Edgware Road. I bought a coffee, went online and looked up the National Missing Persons Helpline.
The National Missing Persons Helpline is a registered charity that deals with the thousands of people who go missing every year in the UK. They include a hundred thousand children under the age of eighteen. That's a lot of kids out on the streets. Thankfully, the vast majority just disappear for a day or two and then come back home, but I remember a representative of the charity telling me a few years back, when she'd come to the station to give a talk, that even if 99.9 per cent of the cases were solved and the kids found, that still left one hundred children completely unaccounted for. It wasn't a thought I wanted to dwell on.
I found the number for general enquiries, logged off and phoned it.
The woman who answered was busy (with a hundred thousand people disappearing every year, it'd be difficult not to be), but helpful, too. I explained that I was a private detective working for the legal team representing a young man who was on remand for murder. Part of his defence was that he'd been abused as a boy by a paedophile ring, and that he claimed to have seen a female child murdered during one incident. The woman at the other end, who sounded in her sixties and was probably a volunteer, gasped when I said this, and I immediately felt guilty.
'To be honest with you, madam,' I said by way of explanation, 'it's not likely that the story's true, but I wouldn't be doing my job properly if I didn't follow it up.'
'No, of course not,' she replied uncertainly.
'Is there any way I can check on this man's claims?' I asked, giving her the dates in question. 'I know you keep records of missing children.'
'We do,' she said carefully. 'We have a comprehensive database and we never remove names from it, even if the person concerned is found, but it's not accessible to the public. And I can't give out any information. However, we are capable of carrying out comprehensive searches of our database, if we receive a request from the police. Can't you go through them? I'm sure they'd be interested.'
But that was the problem. I couldn't.
I knew better than to try to strong-arm the information out of her, so I thanked her for her time and rang off, disappointed but not entirely surprised. If detective work was that easy, there'd never be such a thing as an unsolved case.
I finished my coffee, left the cafe and went to retrieve the car that Tyndall had provided me with. It was a black Kia four-wheel drive that I'd left over near Hyde Park the previous night, and when I got there and eventually located it, it had already received a ticket. No one can accuse London's parking authorities of inefficiency. Still, it didn't bother me. I wouldn't be paying it. I peeled it off, chucked it on the passenger seat, and drove out onto Park Lane, heading for my next port of call.
The British Library's newspaper arm – the place where they keep microfiche archives containing two hundred years' worth of back issues of selected newspapers – is situated in a drab suburb of postwar residential housing in Colindale, North London. The building itself was uglier and smaller than I expected and looked more like a factory or a functional modern schoolbuilding than a library. It faced onto a main road almost directly opposite Colindale underground station.
I showed my false passport at the door as ID and was given a one-day reading pass by the man at the desk. A notice said that all coats and bags had to be left in the cloakroom for security reasons, but luckily he didn't ask me to remove my jacket. If he had done, he'd have probably seen the.45 revolver sticking out of my jeans, and if he'd missed it, plenty of other people wouldn't have. But he let me through with a smile, informing me that archived copies of The Times were kept on the next floor up.
I was going to have to do this the hard way. According to the records, Ann had been taken into Coleman House children's home in Camden on 6 June 1998, and she had claimed to Dr Cheney that the murder she'd witnessed had taken place some weeks before that. I decided to concentrate my search on issues of The Times, from 1 January, to see if there were any reports of children who'd disappeared or had died in unusual circumstances. I felt sure that something like this would be reasonably big news, so I narrowed my search to the first five pages of each issue. It was hardly a scientific methodology, but then I was a one-man band with severely limited resources, and I didn't see any other way.
The microfiche machines were bulky contraptions situated in a darkened back room. I found a spare one and spent the next ten minutes trying to load the film spools containing the editions of The Times from 1 to 10 January, without any success whatsoever, until finally a pretty Spanish student took pity and showed me how to do it.
The year had begun with the usual batch of bad news: Loyalist gunmen on the rampage in Northern Ireland; bloody massacres in Algeria; gangland killings; a string of domestic tragedies. Things didn't improve much either, but then again, when do they?
There was the trial of the teenage thug who'd buried a carving knife up to the hilt in the head of a twenty-eight-year-old charity worker as she sat alone on a suburban train with her back to him, purely because, according to him, she was 'the only target visible'. There was the trial of Victor Farrant, the rapist released early from his sentence who went on to murder his new girlfriend and batter another woman half to death. His girlfriend was a divorced mother of two, and as Farrant was returned to prison (this time, presumably, to complete his sentence), her anguished kids were quoted as asking why on earth he'd been let out in the first place. One, I thought, that Britain's new Lord Chief Justice, Parnham-Jones, might like to answer in one of his fireside chats.
What struck me as I read was the sheer number of brutal crimes committed in the UK by people whose only motive seemed to be the sadistic gratification their violence gave them. In the Philippines, people killed. They killed a lot more than they did in England, as even the most cursory glance at Manila's murder statistics would demonstrate, but in general those killings were the direct result of poverty or ideology. Few people there murdered for pleasure. Here, where people had money and freedom, they did. It was a depressing thought, because it suggested that where the violence of humankind was concerned, things would never get better.
But for the moment, such lofty issues didn't concern me.
I kept reading. Trawling. Searching.
It was time-consuming work. I estimated I was taking about three minutes per issue, so each month was taking me more than an hour and a half. By the time I got to March, it was almost half past three and my eyes were hurting. I thought about stopping for a while, taking a break and ringing Emma to see if she'd arrived home, but I didn't want to lose my place at the machine. One more hour, then I'd call it a day.
1 March – nothing. 2 March – nothing. 3 March, something caught my eye. The bottom of the front page. I read it through; then read it again.