‘You’re sure?’ he’s saying. ‘Definitely gave her name as Pippa Walker?’
His fingers clench into a fist. ‘Woods,’ he says, ‘you are a bloody life-saver.’
***
‘Thanks for coming back, Vicky,’ I say as we take our seats. ‘I’ve got DC Everett with me again, if that’s OK. Just in case I miss anything.’
She smiles a little. Nods. She’s playing with her jumper in her lap again.
‘I want to start by thanking you, Vicky. After what you said about the other girl, we searched the house again. And we found something. A plastic sheet.’
She raises her eyes to mine. Her lips move but there are no words.
‘There’s blood on it. We believe it’s from that other girl – the one who disappeared. So we think you’re right. He did kill someone else.’
She closes her eyes for a moment. Then hangs her head.
I glance at Everett. She gives a tiny nod.
I take a deep breath. ‘I’m afraid that wasn’t the only thing we found, Vicky. On the top floor of the house there are three empty rooms. It didn’t look like anyone had been in there for years. But we tested them all the same. Just to be sure. And in one, the smallest one at the back, we found traces of a very unusual substance. Only small traces, but you can never entirely remove a trace like that, even if you clean up really carefully. Not with the equipment we have these days. Do you know what that substance was?’
She’s not reacting.
‘It’s called meconium. It’s the waste matter babies have in their bowels when they’re in the womb. It’s unmistakeable, and it’s only present for a few hours after birth. There’s only one explanation, Vicky. A baby was in that room. In fact, a baby was probably born in that room.’
The girl raises her eyes to mine. Her face is defiant now.
‘Why didn’t you tell us?’
‘Because I knew you’d start accusing me – just like you are now.’
‘Accusing you of what, Vicky?’
‘Of not escaping, of not getting away.’
‘So why didn’t you? Why didn’t you try to escape?’
‘Look,’ she says, ‘he only let me out when my waters broke. And he never left me alone up there. Not once. No way I could have escaped. No way.’
Everett looks up from her pad. ‘How long were you upstairs, roughly?’
She shrugs. ‘A few hours, maybe. It was night. It was dark outside the whole time. Listen, are you accusing me of something here? That bastard raped me – did the most disgusting things to me –’
‘We know that, Vicky,’ I say quietly.
‘Then why are you talking to me like I’m the criminal?’
‘Look, Vicky, I’d understand – we’d all understand – you were just trying to survive. And if that meant coming to some sort of compromise with the man who abducted you, well, there’d be no shame in that – not as far as I’m concerned –’
‘I’m not ashamed,’ she says, staring me straight in the face, her hands flat on the table between us, ‘because I never did compromise with that disgusting old pervert. Is that clear?’ There are spots of dangerous colour in her cheeks now.
‘OK,’ I say quickly. ‘Let’s talk about something else.’ I sift through my papers. ‘Yesterday, you said Dr Harper brought down your food in tins, is that right?’
She rolls her eyes. ‘Do we have to go over all this again?’
Wilcox shoots a look in my direction. A look that says, what the hell are you playing at, can’t you see she’s distressed?
And she is. But not for the reason he thinks.
‘What about your baby, Vicky? Did Dr Harper get food for him? Your little boy?’
She flinches at the word. ‘I was breastfeeding. I didn’t want to, but the old man made me. He let me have my hands free while I did it and tied me up again after.’
‘Ah yes, I remember that now. But there is one other thing that puzzles me.’
‘Oh yeah?’ she says, sitting back and folding her arms. Gow’s always talking about the nuances of body language, but I don’t need his help to interpret that one.
‘That bag of rubbish in the cellar, there were some tins of baby food in there. So it wasn’t just breastfeeding, was it?’
She starts looking at her fingernails. ‘Yeah, he got the kid some stuff. Only recently though. When it got bigger.’
‘So where did Dr Harper get the food from?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ she snaps. ‘I wasn’t there, was I? Could be anywhere. There are shops all over the place round there.’
‘Actually, there are surprisingly few. And even fewer within walking distance. Dr Harper hasn’t been able to drive for at least a year, and with his arthritis, he’s not very mobile. There are only two shops he could have got to on foot. Yesterday afternoon, DC Everett here went and spoke to the staff there.’
‘And when I showed them Dr Harper’s picture they all recognized him,’ says Everett. ‘They’d served him many times. Mostly beer, by the sounds of it. But none of them had ever sold him any baby items.’
‘As you can imagine,’ I continue, ‘something like that would have stuck in their minds – an old man like him buying things like that.’
‘Ah,’ says Everett quickly, ‘but there was the supermarket order as well, wasn’t there, boss – perhaps that’s where he got them?’
Vicky looks at her. And takes the bait. ‘Oh yeah, I remember now.’
I glance down at my file. ‘You’re right. Some of the waste we found in the cellar did indeed come from Dr Harper’s supermarket order. The trouble is, that’s never included baby food. We checked. It was set up for him by his social worker and it’s never varied.’
She glares at me. ‘Look, I was in the cellar. I haven’t got a clue where he got it from.’
‘We took fingerprints from the baby food containers too. Yours are there, Vicky, and some others, mostly smudged. But there are none from Dr Harper. Some of the food tins have his prints, but there aren’t any of his on the baby items – none at all. Can you explain that for me, Vicky?’
She shrugs. ‘He’s the one you should be asking. Not me.’
‘Oh, we will. We definitely will. But to be honest, he’s not in a good way –’
‘Good,’ she says quickly. ‘I hope he rots in hell for what he did to me. Look, have we finished – I’m tired –’
‘Not much more, I promise. But you’re going to be asked for a lot of these details in court, so we need to hear what you’re going to say. About the journal, for instance.’
She frowns. ‘What about it?’
‘I asked our forensics expert to look at it again. He’s found something now he hadn’t picked up before. Something that never occurred to him to check.’
She says nothing, but her eyes have narrowed. She’s on her guard.
‘He used a special piece of equipment called an Electrostatic Detection Apparatus. It’s quite an old-fashioned piece of kit, these days.’
So old, in fact, that the machine in question has spent the last fifteen years stuffed in the back of a cupboard. It’s the first time I’ve ever been grateful that Alan Challow is such a terrible hoarder.
‘But it still has one very useful function,’ I continue. ‘It can give you a pretty good idea how much pressure has been applied to the paper. How hard the writer was holding the pen, in other words. Or whether they stopped and started at all while they were writing it. In that journal of yours, the pressure was remarkably even.’
‘Yeah, and?’
‘That’s very unusual. I mean, with something written over more than two years. You wouldn’t normally see that. It’s much more likely to happen if all the pages had been written at the same time.’