Nash considered his answer, ‘Stephen Carman is a pureblooded criminal, Sergeant, make no mistake. He harms lives, and does bad things to people he doesn’t think could complain: addicts, other criminals, those outside the law. It is my avowed intention to bring him and those he works with down. However, this is not easy, for he is also a canny and careful individuaclass="underline" very wary, very good antennae, and a vivid — almost paranoid — sense of trouble on the horizon.
‘Not to put to fine a point on it, Sergeant, but when he was in your town he was probably already dealing drugs. But something will have made him nervous, and he left with his girl. You’ll probably find someone like him on your own files. An officer will have spotted him, started piecing together his movements, his routines, his patterns of behaviour: where he went, who he met there. Never his real name though, or, as you say, you would have been in touch long before now. Nor would a physical description have been much help, for he’s not the most distinctive of individuals. You might recognise him if you saw him again, but he would be hard to describe with any conviction. He uses his anonymity.’
‘Then it’s a good job we got the clue of the phone call,’ said Cori with relief.
‘Yes, and only then because he has that flashy phone of his listed in his own name, allowing us to trace it.’
‘Why does he do that then?’ asked Grey.
‘Because it won’t work without it.’
‘Then why is he using that phone?’
‘Because he’s an idiot,’ answered Nash with a chuckle, knowing full-well he was contradicting his earlier character-assessment of Carman.
‘I don’t get it.’ Grey was confused by all this.
‘I would suppose,’ began Cori in speculative clarification for her Inspector, ‘that the couple wanted the street cred of having one of the latest internet-enabled devices, even while knowing it wouldn’t work without setting up an account with the service operator.’
‘What a clever Sergeant you have there, Inspector.’ Nash concurred, ‘With this particular phone you’re buying a monthly mobile broadband subscription, paid for by Direct Debit — it just won’t work otherwise. And you can’t do that without giving your name and bank details. Stephen Carman: ultra-cautious, as I say, but for this one moment when he lets his ego get the better of him, not wishing to be seen with anything but the newest and best and most expensive smart phone. He has a lot of other luxury items too — you ought to see their flat. But that is all paid for with cash.’
‘So, you must get a lot of information from that phone?’ supposed Grey.
‘Well, it turns out Carman’s not quite such an idiot after alclass="underline" for a lot of his work calls he uses throwaway mobiles, twenty quid jobs. He changes them too quickly for us to get much of a trace on them. He often leaves the smart phone with Isi when he’s out on business. So you see, for our part, we didn’t know that the Havahostel call held any great significance; more likely it was a personal call for her. But it always pays to check.
‘Anyhow, I can see we’ve all got a lot to chew over.’ Nash began the winding up. ‘And you’ll want to get up here and take a look at what your girl’s been doing for these last three years? As I say, I can’t let you approach her; but I’ll see what there is in the file I can show you. We work all hours, so the sooner the better really.’
‘I think this evening would suit the Inspector,’ Rose startled them to announce.
‘Well, we’re out in the field a fair bit just at the minute — incommunicado, you know — but I will be around till late today catching up on paperwork. If that suits?’
‘That’s fine,’ answered Rose. Grey looked at Cori, who nodded.
‘Great. You could be back home by ten. I’ll have someone meet you at the station.’
‘I’ll think it will be easier to drive up,’ Grey considered.
‘That’s fine. Just come into the main reception and ask for me.’ And with that the Nottingham officer rang off to resume his undercover operations.
The three sat awhile digesting the news, Grey speaking first,
‘Of all the things I thought might have happened to her — accident, running away, hidden secrets, even falling victim to someone or something, even murder — never did the possibility occur to me that she may have been purposefully hiding out… and quite happily so it seems.’
‘We don’t know that she was happy about it,’ Cori corrected him, her voice brimming with sympathy for the girl, ‘We can’t imagine what she was going through.’
‘But we know now that she must have been aware of the media coverage, saw her mother’s crying face in the papers. I can still see the headlines now: Mother pleads for “Snowdrop” to come home. And for what though? Deference to some scumbag boyfriend wanting to keep his dirty street deals secret, not wanting anyone to know where the two of them went?’
‘It is extraordinary,’ added the Superintendent, stunned out of his usual bulldog bluster by these developments, at least temporarily, ‘that she has been so close, so visible…’
‘But we don’t know what kind of life she’s been living.’ This was Cori again, feeling herself the found girl’s spokeswoman in answering the men’s speculations.
‘But at the very least she has been living, able to hear and see. What am I trying to say here?’ The Super was lost for the right form of words.
Grey had a go at helping him out, ‘Perhaps we have all had the impression, or misapprehension, that through being far away from here, or insensible or unaware through whatever ill influence I daren’t hardly care to speculate on, she might have been… unreachable somehow. That we now learn she seems to have been living an at least semi-normal life, and not very far away… well, it will take some time to adjust our impressions.’
What was it, Cornelia wondered, with these men that made them a sentimental mess at the very thought of this girl Isobel Semple? At first she wondered if it was simply that they had lived through this case from the start, had known the parents at the worst times, and now were having to contemplate the case’s completion. Yet it wasn’t as though this was the only sad tale either of them had ever come across in their police careers, and she couldn’t imagine they might fall into such maudlin reflection every time a person vanished or a family were parted.
Then she wondered if it might have been the air of mystery the affair had generated, the way it had gripped the town in speculation, and their deflation at now having to accept the facts were so much more prosaic?
But she settled instead on the notion that this physically small, and still quite young woman in danger evoked their paternalistic instincts; which, while they would work just as hard to find her as they would a person of any age or gender, left them at the same time in such a heightened emotionally state.
She pondered whether this sentimentally, albeit with noble intentions, could be felt in quite the same way by a woman, or by either sex for a missing man; and came to the calm conclusion that it wouldn’t, not in quite the same way. Fathers and daughters eh, she mused, as her thoughts returned to the tasks in hand.
‘Yes,’ concurred the Super upon hearing Grey’s assessment, ‘whatever our thoughts about Isobel, we know she is safe now, or as safe as we can make her, and under Nash’s surveillance. But are we any closer finding Thomas Long? Do we have the first idea of where he is, or what he might be up to?’
Grey knew any answer he could give would be speculative; so it was just as well the Superintendent was only asking rhetorically, he resuming,
‘That’s why I’m sending you there this evening. I want this one to be off-duty. You understand me? I’m as thrilled to hear of Isobel’s safety as the next man; but it is not our active investigation, and I’m not going to let people say we’ve put Thomas on the back-burner so we can go chasing off after that girl again. You go up to Nottingham this evening. Confirm it’s her, get it out of our systems, and then that is that until the Long case is concluded.