‘I think it’s someone pretending to be Shawn.’
Someone who was at the party. The same person who’d planted the evidence to frame Mervyn.
They thanked Mangan and headed back to the car. Patrick had almost forgotten that Kai Topper was on the back seat, looking like a dog who’d been locked in by a thoughtless owner. Patrick slid into the driver’s seat, Carmella climbing in next to him, and turned round to talk to Topper.
‘She’s not there,’ Patrick said.
‘Are you sure?’ His eyes were bloodshot and watery and Patrick was sure he’d been crying again. Did he realise how much danger his girlfriend was in?
‘We’re going to take you back to the station,’ he said. ‘We— For fuck’s sake!’
Topper had produced a knife from his inside pocket. Patrick immediately dived between the seats, grabbing the boy’s wrist and twisting his arm. Topper cried out and the knife fell onto the car seat. Patrick snatched it up. Carmella had already exited the car and yanked the door beside Topper open, handcuffs at the ready.
‘I wasn’t going to stab you!’ Topper blurted. ‘I just thought I’d better tell you I had it.’
‘Got any more concealed weapons?’
‘No. I swear.’
‘What were you doing, Kai? Planning to stab Kerry Mangan?’
Topper’s eyes fell. ‘I wouldn’t have actually done it. But he’s a hard man, a bodyguard. I thought he might attack me. I just . . . I just want to find Jade.’
As he spoke, Carmella searched him and cuffed his hands behind his back, just in case.
‘You’re going to tell us everything you know, Kai,’ Patrick said. ‘If you do, I’ll think about letting you off with a caution. Understand?’
The boy refused to meet his eye. ‘Yeah.’
‘Good. And in the meantime, you know what I want you to do?’
‘What?’ The boy’s voice was a squeak.
‘I want you to shut the fuck up.’
Chapter 54
Day 14 – Patrick
The incident room was packed full of bodies, every pair of eyes focused on Patrick as he paced up and down in front of the whiteboard. Photos of Chloe Hedges and Jade Pilkington had been pinned up beside the pictures of Jessica and Rose, plus the smaller one of Nancy Marr. Patrick stopped pacing and raised a hand, the whole room falling silent, including Winkler, who was skulking in the corner. Gareth was there too, refusing to meet Patrick’s eye, and Suzanne, standing upright by the door with her arms crossed, one foot tapping anxiously. It was 7.30 p.m. but nobody wanted to go home. Patrick knew this team would stay here all night if they were needed.
‘I’ll keep this brief,’ Patrick said. ‘But I want everybody up to speed with what’s going on. The first thing to say is that, contrary to rumour, we do not believe Mervyn Hammond is guilty of the murders – not least because he’s been here all day and, before that, DI Winkler was with him.’
Several heads turned towards Winkler, who pretended to be examining something beneath his fingernails. Fifteen minutes earlier, Winkler had called Sandwell, the journalist who accused Hammond of molesting a teenage girl years before. Hearing that Hammond was in custody, Sandwell had panicked at the thought of testifying in court and admitted to making the whole thing up, trying to settle old scores.
‘However, we are keeping Hammond at the station for the time being as we believe he holds important information and we don’t want to lose track of him. We also have Jade Pilkington’s boyfriend, Kai Topper, here for an interview.’
He turned to the whiteboard.
‘Here’s what we know at the moment: Jade Pilkington got a lift home from Hammond’s party last night and was dropped off just after 3 a.m. At noon, Topper went round to her house, but she wasn’t in. Luckily for us, Topper had an app linking his and Jade’s phones, so he could trace where she was.’
‘Creepy little fucker,’ said Winkler.
‘The phone signal told him Jade was at a place called Platt’s Eyot. He went there and looked round, but there was no sign of Jade or her phone, and the signal had gone, like the phone had been turned off. He then assumed she must have hooked up with Kerry Mangan after the party and headed round there, having looked up his address online.’ Patrick paused for a moment. Most people were shocked to discover how easy it was to find home addresses on the Web. ‘But Mangan hasn’t seen Jade since he dropped her home at 3 a.m. I’ve sent a couple of uniforms to this Platt’s Eyot place to look for the missing phone.
‘Chloe Hedges went out at around 4 p.m.,’ Patrick went on. ‘She told her mum that she was going to meet a friend and that they were planning to go shopping in Kingston later. We’ve contacted the friend, Pareesa, who tells us she had no plans to meet up with Chloe and, in fact, hasn’t heard from her for a few days. We called the Bentall Centre in Kingston who put out a tannoy announcement that got no response, and I’m going to ask one of you to go down there to review CCTV footage, though we don’t believe she ever went there. We are trying to pinpoint the location of Chloe’s phone, but it appears to be switched off.’
He paused and surveyed the room, ensuring that everyone was listening.
‘Here’s why we believe Chloe and Jade are in danger, why they may have been targeted and haven’t just gone off somewhere, either together or separately: we discovered that Rose and Jessica were the co-authors of a piece of fiction on a website called StoryPad.’
Martin Hale nodded as Patrick said this.
‘There were two other co-authors: Chloe and Jade. We don’t know what it is about this story that has made them the target of the killer – we’re going to talk to Kai Topper about this shortly.’
Winkler finally piped up. ‘You reckon someone killed them because of a story? What’s it about?’
Patrick counted to three under his breath before replying. Stay calm. Don’t let him rile you.
‘It’s about OnTarget. Carmella and I have read parts of it, but it doesn’t appear to contain any clues – certainly not clear ones. StoryPad have provided us with a huge number of comments that were made about the story by other users and we’ll need a couple of you to go through these. Though we’re hoping Topper will be able to save us the trouble. We’ve also spoken to Strong’s team who have confirmed that Wendy had been looking at StoryPad shortly before she left the station and headed to the Rotunda. My belief is that she discovered something that put her in danger – that she made contact with the killer.’
There was an audible puff of breath from half the officers in the room. Patrick thought he could feel a draught.
‘Finally, we all know that somebody called the station this morning informing us that we would find Rose’s underwear at Hammond’s house, which led to his arrest. We believe that this caller planted this evidence during the party last night and made contact with Jade at the same time. Given everything that has happened today, it’s likely that this was a diversionary tactic – intended to distract us today while they went after Chloe and Jade.’
He gestured at the photos of the two missing girls, drawing every pair of eyes in the room to the pictures.
‘I want you all to be aware that we don’t have much time. The man who murdered Rose and Jess did not keep them alive for long. And during the time he did have them, he tortured them. Chloe and Jade may already be dead. And if they’re not dead yet . . .’ He let his words hang in the air.
‘I’ve got a theory,’ said Winkler.
Patrick suppressed a groan. ‘Let’s have it, then.’
‘What if Chloe and Jade are the killers? They murdered the other two girls. Jade planted the knickers at Hammond’s gaff last night. All this stuff about her getting a mysterious message is bullshit. They’ve got scared and done a runner.’
Patrick had already thought of this. ‘Chloe has a solid alibi for the time of all of the murders. And Kai Topper says Jade was at her house with him, with her mum downstairs, when Rose and Wendy were murdered. We can’t get hold of Jade’s mother at the moment to corroborate this, but we believe him.’