The manager has gone pale. ‘She can’t have gone out the front – I’d have seen her. And Chloe’s been back here stocktaking all morning – or at least she was supposed to be –’
There’s noise then – a sound of flushing – and another door swings open. A woman comes out, sees them and blushes.
‘Chloe – weren’t you supposed to be keeping an eye on Ms Walker?’ says the manager sharply.
The woman looks flustered, holding one hand to her stomach. ‘She’s in the office, isn’t she? She was there a second ago. Honestly, I was only in the loo a minute – I held on as long as I could but you know what it’s like when you’re pregnant –’
Quinn throws up his hands. ‘Shit – she must have bloody heard us.’
‘Is there another way out?’ interrupts Gislingham.
The manager gestures. ‘There’s a back exit on to the Covered Market, but we only use it for the bins –’
But the two men have already gone.
Quinn clatters out of the door into the market and checks each store as he passes. Sandwich shop, Thai takeaway, boutique, bakery. The place seems full suddenly of long-haired girls. Same voices, same clothes, same long blonde hair and expensive highlights. Faces that turn to his, startled, irritated, bemused. One of them even smiles at him. And then he’s in the open space in the centre, seeing Gislingham racing down towards him from the opposite side. The two of them stand there, turning, scanning the alleys. Picture framer’s, pie shop, cobbler’s. The racks of plants outside the florist’s, the noticeboard of posters for concerts and art shows and plays in college gardens. Avenues leading off in all directions. It’s like looking for a rat in a maze.
‘Can you see her?’
‘Nope,’ says Gislingham, his eyes on the crowds. ‘We can’t cover this whole place on our own – she could be anywhere.’
Quinn is breathing hard. ‘If you were trying to hide in here, where would you go?’
Gislingham shrugs. ‘Somewhere with an upstairs?’
‘That’s more like it – what’s that place called – the coffee shop – ?’
‘Georgina’s,’ says Gislingham, ‘but I can never bloody find it –’
But Quinn has already gone, running now. ‘This way.’
He rounds the corner and crashes up the wooden stairs into the café, coming to a halt at the top and barely missing a waitress with a tray of coffee. Half the people in the room turn to look at him. But none of them is Pippa.
‘Sorry,’ he says. Then turns and goes back down, slower now. Where the hell is Gis?
His phone beeps.
‘I’ve found her,’ says Gislingham. ‘Market Street. And move it.’
When Quinn emerges into the open air he realizes at once where she went. And why.
‘Is she inside?’
Gislingham nods. ‘Went in a couple of minutes ago. There’s only this exit. All we have to do is wait.’
‘Fuck that – let’s go in.’
‘It’s the Ladies – you can’t –’
But Quinn’s already pushing past the queue of patient middle-aged women, flashing his warrant card.
‘Police. Move aside please. Move aside.’
The women retreat, muttering and affronted, and Quinn starts to bang on the doors. ‘Police – open up.’
One by one the doors swing open. An Asian woman in a headscarf scuttles out with a child, her face down, making no eye contact. An elderly lady follows, moving with difficulty. Then a sturdy woman in tweed who complains loudly about ‘reporting this to your senior officer’. Until only the door at the far end remains. Quinn goes up to it. ‘Miss Walker,’ he says loudly. ‘We need to speak to you. Open the door please or I’ll have to break it down.’
His heart is beating hard with the running. Or the adrenaline. Hard to tell.
There’s a silence, then the sound of the bolt drawing back.
***
When I was a kid I had a thing for those Escher pictures. You know the ones – all black and white and geometrical. There were no fancy websites then so all we had was paper, but I loved optical illusions and those were the best. I had one of the Escher pictures on my bedroom wall, Day and Night. You’ll have seen it – it’s the one where it’s impossible to say whether it’s white birds by night or black birds by day. And that’s how I feel as I push open the door to the incident room. It’s not what you’re looking at, it’s where you’re standing that determines what you see.
The team look up. See my face. Fall silent.
And then I tell them what my wife said.
There’s a long pause as they take it in, and then suddenly we’re all looking at Gow.
‘It’s possible Harper was letting the child out too,’ he says finally, taking off his glasses and pulling out his handkerchief. ‘That the girl negotiated that.’
‘But?’ Because there is a but here. A big one; I can see it on his face.
‘When she denied being ashamed of compromising with Harper, everything about her body language suggested to me that she was telling the truth. So whatever it is she’s struggling with, it’s not that. So how, I ask myself, are we to explain the fact that this child has clearly not, as Ms Neale alleges, spent the whole of his short life imprisoned in that cellar? Personally,’ he says, putting his glasses back on and looking at me, ‘I would tend towards the most obvious explanation.’
Occam’s razor. The simplest answer is invariably right.
There’s a ripple of incredulity as they work out what Gow is actually saying.
Surely not – surely she couldn’t have –
But I think she did.
‘She made it all up,’ I say. ‘The abduction, the imprisonment – the whole thing. It’s all a fake.’
I can hear them draw breath. Gow glances at his watch and gets to his feet. ‘I have a seminar to give in exactly thirty-five minutes. But you can call me later, if you need me.’
When the door closes behind him, people shift, change position. There’s a sense of time shunting forward suddenly, after days of going round in circles.
‘Makes complete sense to me,’ says Baxter, folding his arms, thoroughly vindicated. ‘There’s no need to escape if you were never imprisoned in the first place. That girl has been camped out there all this time. Living in Harper’s house. Eating Harper’s food. No wonder the poor old sod has been losing weight.’
Somer turns to me. ‘You really think she could have been living there for nearly three years? I mean, I know she was looking for somewhere cheap to live, but that’s ridiculous. And in any case, surely someone would have noticed?’
I point to the photograph. ‘I’m not so sure – look at that place. No one’s used the top floor for years. The only neighbour was an old lady who wasn’t likely to hear much through those walls. And the only person who visited didn’t stay any longer than fifteen minutes and never went upstairs –’
‘Walsh did,’ interrupts Baxter, ‘to steal those netsuke.’
‘Exactly,’ says Everett, ‘and when he did he heard something he thought was a cat. But I bet you any money you like it was Vicky’s baby.’
‘But what about Harper?’ asks one of the DCs. ‘Both of my kids screamed the bloody place down when they were babies. Surely Harper would have heard something all those months, even if he was losing it?’
There’s a silence. A silence that ends with Everett:
‘Remember those sleeping pills forensics found upstairs? What if Vicky found them? She could have been drugging the old man to keep him quiet.’