They walked inside and sat down facing each other. Claire curled in on herself, hugging her knees to her chest, but Tony stretched his legs out, crossing them at the ankles. He let his hands fall into his lap, an open position that made him unthreatening. Now he could see clearly the shadows under her eyes and the skin round her fingernails, bitten till it had bled. ‘I know how much you love Jen,’ he said. ‘I realise you’re missing her all the time. There’s nothing we can do to bring her back, but we can maybe make things a bit better for her mum and dad if we can find the person who did this.’
Claire gulped. ‘I know. I keep thinking about it. What she would have done if things had been the other way around. She’d have wanted to help my mum and dad. But I can’t think of anything. That’s the problem.’ She looked anguished. ‘There’s nothing to tell.’
‘That’s OK,’ he said gently. ‘None of this is your fault, Claire. And nobody’s going to blame you if we don’t find the man who took Jen away. I just want to have a chat. See if you can help me know Jen a bit better.’
‘How will that help?’ Natural curiosity overcame her anxiety.
‘I’m a profiler. People don’t really understand what I do, they think it’s like something on the telly. But basically, it’s my job to figure out how Jen came into contact with this person, and how she would have responded. Then I have to work out what that tells me about him.’
‘And then you help the police to catch him?’
He nodded, a crooked smile crossing his face. ‘That’s the general idea. So, what was Jennifer interested in?’
He sat back and listened to a catalogue of teen music, fashions, TV shows and celebrity culture. He heard that Jennifer generally did what she was told - homework in by the due date, home on time when they went out in the evening. Mostly because it had never really occurred to Claire and Jennifer that they could do anything else. They lived a sheltered life in their selective girls’ school, ferried around by parents, existing in an orbit that didn’t intersect with the bad girls. Time passed and Tony’s relaxed questioning finally helped Claire to relax. Now he could probe deeper.
‘You make her sound a bit too perfect,’ he said. ‘Didn’t she ever go just a bit mad? Get drunk? Try drugs? Want a tattoo? Have her navel pierced? Mess around with boys?’
Claire giggled, then put her hand to her mouth, ashamed to be so light-hearted. ‘You must think we’re really boring,’ she said. ‘We did have our ears pierced the summer we were twelve. Our mothers went mad. But they let us keep them.’
‘No sneaking out after hours to gigs? No smoking behind the bike sheds? Did Jen have a boyfriend at all?’
Claire gave him a quick sideways look but said nothing.
‘I know everybody says she’s not going out with anybody. But I find that hard to believe. A good person who was fun to hang out with. And pretty. And I’m supposed to believe she didn’t have a boyfriend.’ He spread his hands wide, palms upwards. ‘I need you to help me here, Claire.’
‘She made me promise,’ Claire said.
‘I know. But she’s not going to hold you to that promise. You said yourself, if it was the other way round, you’d want her to help us.’
‘It wasn’t a proper boyfriend. Not like going on dates and stuff. But there was this guy on Rig. ZeeZee, he called himself. Just the letters, though. Like, two zeds.’
‘We know she talked to ZZ on Rig, but they just seemed to be friends. Not boyfriend and girlfriend.’
‘That was what they wanted everyone to think. Jen was paranoid about her parents finding out about him because he’s four years older than us. So she used to go to the internet café near school to talk to him online. That way her mum couldn’t check up on her. According to Jen, they were getting on really well. She said she wanted them to meet up face to face.’
‘Did she tell you about any plans they might have had?’
Claire shook her head. ‘She’d sort of gone quiet about him. Whenever I tried to get her to talk about it, she’d change the subject. But I think maybe they’d made arrangements.’
‘Why do you think that?’ Tony kept his voice free of urgency, making it sound like the most casual of inquiries.
‘Because ZZ was saying something on Rig about secrets and how we all have secrets that we don’t want anyone to know. And then him and Jen went into a sidebar. And I thought she was telling him off for hinting at what was going on between them.’
But she hadn’t been. She’d been pitched into that meeting they’d been skating round, according to Claire. It made sense of why a well-behaved girl like Jennifer would behave so recklessly. This was something that had even more of a build-up than they’d suspected. This was a killer who wasn’t taking any chances. The last time he’d encountered a killer who planned so carefully or over so long a time had been the first case he’d worked with Carol and it had taken a terrible toll. He really didn’t want to go into that dark place again. But if that was what it took to bring Jennifer Maidment’s killer to justice before he could kill again, he would do it without hesitation.
CHAPTER 25
The caravan site wasn’t going to win any beauty contests. Boxy vans in pastel shades squatted on concrete pads surrounded by weary grass and tarmac paths. Some residents had attempted window boxes and flower beds, but the prevailing winds off the bay had defeated them. But as Sam got out of his car, he had to admit the view made up for a lot. A watery sun added charm to the long expanse of sand that stretched almost to the horizon, where the sea twinkled at the fringes of Morecambe Bay. He knew this was a double-crossing beauty. Dozens had perished out there over the years, not understanding the speed and the treachery of the tides. From here, though, you’d never suspect a thing.
Sam made for the office, an incongruous log cabin that would have looked more at home in the American Midwest. According to Stacey, Harry Sim had last used his Mastercard ten days before Danuta Barnes had been reported missing. He’d used to it buy ten pounds’ worth of petrol at the garage two miles down the road from the Bayview Caravan Park. The bill had been settled by a cash payment at a Bradfield city-centre bank three weeks later. Also according to Stacey, this was an anomaly, since Harry Sim normally settled his account by posting a cheque to the credit-card company. How she managed to find out this sort of thing was little short of miraculous, he thought. And possibly not entirely legal.
The billing address for the card had been this caravan site. And that had been the last trace either Stacey or Sam had been able to find of Harry Sim. Computer searches, phone calls to Revenue and Customs, banks and credit-card providers had turned up a big fat zero. Which wasn’t entirely surprising, since Harry Sim had apparently been lying on the bottom of Wastwater for the last fourteen years.
Sam knocked on the office door and walked in, his ID front and centre. The man behind the desk was playing some kind of word game on the computer. He glanced round at Sam, froze the screen and lumbered to his feet. He looked in his mid-fifties, a big man whose bulk had started to sag into fat. His hair was a mixture of sand and silver, too dry to readily submit to brush or comb. His skin had acquired a papery texture from years of salt air and stiff winds. He was neatly dressed in a flannel shirt, a scarlet fleece and dark grey corduroy trousers. ‘Officer,’ he said, nodding a greeting.