Having fed her conversation with Kirsty Evans that previous afternoon into the system it had sparked much debate that morning in briefing, adding another dimension to the enquiry. As a result Hunter and Tony Bullars had the job of tracing and interviewing some of the boys from the skate park, whilst she and Mike Sampson had been given the task of going back over old ‘missing from home’ reports to determine how many were still outstanding, particularly if they had disappeared in unusual circumstances, and especially where teenage girls loosely fitted the description of their Jane Doe.
Before coming down to the basement Grace had spent the early part of the morning logged onto the UK Police National Missing Persons Bureau computer network, based at New Scotland Yard, feeding in the current details they had of the mummified remains. It had been a frustrating morning with many phone calls to the operators to double-check the information she had entered. She knew the system itself was flawless, providing a cross-matching service by comparing the description of their body, with that of all long term missing persons. It also held a dental index, which was regularly maintained and allowed liaison with Interpol. She had quickly learned that each year 77,000 teenagers went missing, hence the need to double-check everything.
The agitating part was that she quickly uncovered the fact that although the bureau had been operating since 1994, her own force had only joined the network in the last eighteen months. Therefore anything older than that had to be sought in the files, which the Administration Department had stored away in this grimy basement. It now meant that she and Mike had to physically check back over every handwritten record; and there were several thousand, in order to identify those that were marked as still missing. As she began to sift through the latest batch, Grace realised this was a task bigger than she had imagined.
“Nineteen-ninety-six.” she announced, a note of frustration in her voice. “How many years have we gone back now?”
Mike Sampson glanced down at the pile near his feet “Three years,” he replied, “only ten to go,” he retorted with a wry smile.
She scraped back an old wooden chair, which despite its battered and weathered appearance she had found surprisingly comfortable over the last three hours, and seated herself under the long oak table opposite Mike. She let out a long sigh as her eyes roamed around the huge windowless room with its floor to ceiling metal shelves, which appeared to contain just about every paper file which had been generated at the station since it was built in the early 1960s, and it seemed at first sight as though nothing had ever been thrown away. It was one of the many antechambers off the cold windy corridor, which connected the station cells to the nearby courtroom, where prisoners could be escorted to their fate without the need to be dragged in handcuffs through the streets. They were in a cold and drab room, with paint peeling in places as a result of the damp.
From time to time she or Mike had been glad to make a welcome cup of tea, not only to stave off the cold but also clear the dust motes from the back of her throat. During one of these interludes she had discovered a large cardboard box containing the Crown Court files relating to The ‘Beast of Barnwell,’ an enquiry, which she knew, had occurred well before both their times as detectives. She had attracted Mike as to her finding and the pair had become distracted as they scoured old black and white photographs, and digested parts of the yellowing crime files revealing how during the nineteen sixties the Barnwell man had indecently assaulted, beaten, and raped several women, before being finally captured in the seventies. Back then it had been up there amongst the top of the country’s major enquiries, and remembering what the Detective Superintendent had said at morning briefing Grace now wondered if they were also on the verge of something similar.
“On the subject of sex,” said Mike as he pushed the box back under the shelving unit, “I once made love to my girlfriend for one hour and five minutes.”
Grace caught the smirk creeping across Mike’s face and just knew it was going to be another one of his jokes. Since joining the team there had been many times when her sides had ached from his funny stories and at his antics.
“Go on you’ve got me, when was that?”
“Last March, when the clocks went forward.” He started to laugh; a deep belly laugh. It was infectious, sometime funnier than his actual joke.
She joined in the laughter for the best part of a minute, wiping the tears from her eyes, careful not to smudge her mascara. She nudged him eventually. “Stop it now Mike, we’ve got to get on with this.
It was very rare that Grace worked with Mike Sampson — Hunter was her regular partner, though when she had done, she had found the experience a refreshing change. He was the ‘character’ in the department. Full of one-liners and jokes and he always had the ability to come up with a witty punch-line to lighten things. Yet she also knew the professional side to his work, and he was dedicated. He was regularly the last person to leave the office at the end of the day. Yet unlike her working relationship with Hunter, where they regularly shared small-talk on a daily basis about their personal lives, she realised she knew very little about Mike’s personal life. She knew he was single and spent quite a lot of his time in the pub with mates following a quiz trail around various venues throughout the week and she also knew that he loved to spend his weekends off fishing competitively up and down the country. But that was where her knowledge of him ended. She had never seen him in a relationship and he had never introduced a love of his life. As she dragged her eyes back to her paperwork she made it her objective over the next few weeks to get to know him better.
* * * * *
First Rebecca Morris’s smiling face came into view, fading away and followed quickly by a blurry distant shot of her in her school uniform standing by the bus stop, the same one where he had picked her up, and it stopped him in his tracks. The hairs in his nostrils quivered from a sharp intake of breath and he tried to catch up the two beats his heart missed. A cold clammy sensation swelled inside him and the palms of his hands suddenly itched from the beads of sweat, which rolled across his skin. He wavered only slightly but the two cups he was carrying clattered together and a splurge of hot tea splattered his training shoes and the carpet. He felt his heart flutter as he quickly tuned his hearing to the muted conversation that came from the television.
“What on earth are you playing at?” screamed his mother, her head whipping round, peering back over her armchair.
He quickly realised what he had seen was a reconstruction of the last sighting of Rebecca Morris being played out on ‘Crimewatch’, and that except for her facial photo, what he had witnessed was someone who had only been acting as a body double for Rebecca.
He heaved a sigh of relief but a lump emerged in his throat, which he tried to swallow in order to answer his mother back.
“I don’t know,” she spluttered. “Nearly thirty years old and I can’t even trust you to make me a cup of tea without spilling it.”
He plonked the two cups onto the wooden coffee table in front of her, but it was too harsh and more tea slopped out.
“Sorry, I’ll just fetch a cloth.”
He turned to go back to the kitchen but there was more to the report, which again stopped him from what he was doing. He thought he recognised the scene being shown on their new HD ready TV. The colourless grey landscape had taken on changes over the years but there was no mistaking the area he was now looking at and he tried to catch what the presenter was saying.