The phone call with the Nottingham detective, who had left his details for Inspector Rase upon his return to the station, went well, or as well as Grey would consider afterwards as any conversation begun on such crossed purposes could be expected to.
With Sergeant Smith there with them, Grey called the number on Superintendent Rose’s phone and placed it on speaker. The room filled with the metallic clatter of the far phone being lifted from its cradle, before the sounds became a voice which issued words to greet them,
‘Inspector Rase, thank you for calling. I’m Chief Inspector Nash.’ After greetings all around, the Chief Inspector, though ever amiable, cut right to the chase, ‘Now, perhaps you’ll be good enough to tell me why you’re making enquiries after Stephen Carman? Is it related to our prior request for information relating to a phone call?’
‘Thank you, Chief Inspector,’ began Grey. ‘Yes it is. We asked at the Havahostel this morning: your call was placed from a room booked in the name of Smith. The receptionist who dealt with the tenant is uncontactable till the morning. We will of course pass on anything she can tell us.’
‘Then thank you, Inspector. But you also made your own enquiries into Stephen Carman? We have a flag against his name on the Police National Computer,’ explained Nash. ‘It reports when anyone views his file.’
‘Yes. Well, I don’t really know where to start. The thing is, there could be links with two of our open cases.’
‘Just the two?’ Nash chuckled.
‘Well, neither link might prove to mean very much,’ offered Grey apologetically.
‘I’d still be glad to know as much about them as you’re able to share. However, I must say this before we go on, if you’ll permit me to offer just a few words of caution.’ At this point Nash’s jovial manner fell away like a passing fancy,
‘It might be taken as read, but worth stating nonetheless, that for Stephen Carman to have been flagged in this way means he is an active suspect in our own investigations. Very active, if you catch my meaning. Of what he is suspected, I would rather say as little as possible – suffice it to say that if you have looked up his record, then you will know that Carman has some slight convictions for drug offences; so it shouldn’t be too much of a stretch for you to deduce what we might be tracking him in relation to.
‘Please let me reiterate just how very important he is to our enquiries. These may very well be undercover enquiries, and so you’ll appreciate how keen I was to get in touch with you and set our relationship off on the right foot; nip things in the bud, so to speak, before anything gets jeopardised.
‘Which isn’t to say that we won’t do everything we can to help you; indeed we would welcome an honest exchange of whatever information we each can share. I must insist though, that the extent of any actions resulting from our exchange be dictated by the needs of our investigation. Is that amenable?’
There was a pregnant pause over the line before, upon a nod from Rose, Grey voiced their tentative approval.
‘Then pray, continue...’ bid the Nottingham detective.
‘Well,’ resumed Grey warily, after listening to all that, ‘Firstly, we are looking for a man called Thomas Long – twenty-four, a Southney resident, no record – who was last seen on the outskirts of town on Tuesday evening; seen outside that particular Havahostel indeed, although this was some hours after the call was made.’
‘Yes, we caught this on the wire. I believe you’ve made a televised appeal? I’m afraid his name means nothing to us, Inspector.’
‘Well, not to worry. It was always a long shot.’
‘The thrill of the chase though, eh? There’s nothing like it.’ The man here began a kind of reverie, ‘I envy you, chasing white rabbits down holes, not sure what little door he might have run through. It rather takes the thrill out of it when, like us, you’ve been sitting on your prey for eight months, only waiting for one of them to say or do something incriminating near enough for one of your microphones to capture it. It is a long wait for that magic moment, when you finally burst in through the front door, and see the look on their faces when you tell them that they’ve been watched all this time.
‘But, you’re saying Thomas Long is clean?’ Nash summed up in efficient fashion. ‘Are we absolutely sure about that?’
‘Certain.’ Superintendent Rose shook the others by answering so directly. ‘I’ve never come across a cleaner lad in my life, or a better family. He works for a living, goes home for his tea every night. I’m not having him suspected of anything. Now, what we need to know from you, Chief Inspector, is what your drug dealer has to do with Thomas Long – if anything. And for that matter,’ he glanced at Grey as he asked this, as if somehow blaming him for the absurd directions the investigation was taking, ‘what he has to do with Isobel Semple?’
Grey had known his superior had been frustrated, what with the whole Aubrey affair, but not that his upset had spilled over into this particular case.
‘Sorry Superintendent,’ asked Nash. ‘What was that name again?’
Less heated now, and realising he needed to offer the beguiled narcotics officer something by way of explanation, Rose answered, ‘Well, since this morning’s enquiries in the Thomas Long case, it has come to light that Carman may have been involved in another matter we’re investigating.’
Grey took over, ‘Just in the last couple of hours, we have had someone confirm Carman as being a witness in the disappearance of a local girl called Isobel Semple, nearly three years ago now.’
‘Witness? In what way?’ Nash seemed eager to assist, no matter how he had been spoken to.
‘He was a friend, or boyfriend,’ explained Grey. ‘He never came forward.’
‘Isi?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Blond hair, slim, pale, about twenty? That’s his girlfriend, he calls her Isi.’
The Superintendent, listening to this exchange, jumped as if from an electric shock; while elsewhere the room was still with the breath of revelation.
The penny had dropped for Nash, ‘She came from your town, didn’t she. I remember it being in the papers of course; but she didn’t come on our radar till long after all the fuss over her disappearance had died down. I knew there had been a connection to Southney somewhere. We did check missing persons at the time; she had always been a likely contender for being Isi – though hard to check without asking her, and obviously we couldn’t do that if we’re tailing the pair of them.
‘And to be blunt,’ continued Nash, ‘she was never at the centre of our enquiries. Whatever Carman is up to, she may well know about it, but he doesn’t involved her – and I am afraid we have rather bigger fish to fry... Sorry, are you still there?’ He hadn’t noticed at first that no one else had spoken for a while.
‘Chief Inspector Nash,’ answered Rose slowly. ‘You do realise that you have just solved the most famous case our town has known in recent times?’
‘Well, sorry about that,’ he said mock-apologetically. ‘I’m sure I can’t take any of the credit. You know,’ he continued over the speaker, ‘it was probably she who answered the phone yesterday, she who this Mr Smith spoke to. The phone is in Carman’s name, but the couple share it. I don’t suppose you know either, who it was who called her on it the day before? Late Monday evening this would have been? They’ve called her a few times actually: an odd number, some kind of mobile device we think; it’s proving tricky to trace.’
But the Southney detectives were still agog. Nash continued,
‘Hmm, this does though create exactly the kind of situation I mentioned earlier. For you’re going to want to and come and speak to her now, aren’t you; and you’ll believe that her family ought to know she’s been found, and all manner of other considerations; and at a time when any interference in the couple’s day to day routine could be critical.’
‘How long are you expecting your operation to go on?’ asked Grey, still not quite aligned to the new reality.
There was a telling silence at the end of the line.
‘Well these things are always open ended, the timescale under constant revision.’
This would have sounded like classic obscuration, but for the note of tension Grey, who often read too much into these things, sensed behind the Chief Inspector’s words.
‘The critical moment though does seem to be drawing in,’ resumed Nash. ‘I suppose,’ he added, suddenly brightening, ‘that it is a good thing that you are only approaching us now. Lucky really, or she could have been caught up in this for months yet.’
‘We hadn’t known Carman’s real name until today though,’ (This was Cori, who had been listening intently.) ‘and so we hadn’t traced him before.’
‘No, he’s slippery like that.’
‘Oh? So what’s he like?’
Nash considered his answer, ‘Stephen Carman is a pure-blooded 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 individual: 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 all: 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 emotional 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 surveilla
nce. But are we any closer to 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.
‘So sum up for me: is there the slightest link between the two enquiries?’
Grey struggled to come up with any but the most obvious connections, ‘Both their fathers worked at Aubrey’s; both attended the same school, but in different years, though Thomas and Carman’s years would be closer.’
‘And what about at the Havahostel?’
‘Only that the call was made that morning, and Thomas seen there that evening.’
‘Quite a gap though...’
‘Well, we don’t know when Smith was there till – they could easily have been in the room still at seven pm.’
‘So do we know when Smith checked in, checked out? Do we know anything about them?’
‘Well, the receptionist will be back first thing...’
‘You know, I’m not sure you’ve handled the hotel angle at all well.’
‘Sir, we learnt quite a bit from...’
‘It sounds like you were only there ten minutes.’
‘Well the phones were ringing when we left here; we hoped there’d be other leads waiting to be chased...’
‘You didn’t speak to anyone else at the scene, anyone who might have seen him.’
‘There’s someone doing that right now.’
‘Either way, I want you back up there before you leave for Nottingham.’
‘We have learnt some new facts though, sir,’ Grey pleaded in mitigation. ‘We know it’s likely Smith was calling Isobel and not Carman.’
‘But that still has nothing to do with Thomas Long! We really have no other leads on him after the hotel sighting?’
‘No, sir. And Sarah would have interrupted us if anything had come in while we’ve been here speaking.’
‘So where did Thomas go? Use your experience, break it down for me.’
‘My best guess?’ Grey hated having to speculate so openly. ‘Well, the sightings we have point to someone waiting at a different bus stop than usual after work, and from there heading directly to the services; where, and here we must be judicious, he appeared to be waiting for someone, to have an appointment to keep with whoever owned that distinctive, possibly an older, car he was seen standing by – there really seems no other reason for him to be stood where he was. Now, in any other case...’
‘You would think he had planned to meet someone and go away with them?’
‘But not Thomas. I don’t believe that is how his mind works. He is inward-looking, not outward. I think he would believe his problems, if they could be solved at all, would be solved by his family and close colleagues, here in town: his mother, Gail Marsh. He would turn to them, not run away.’
‘Even if his family and colleagues were the problem: this secret he was keeping from his father and the other workmen, knowing none of them would get paid? He’s hardly Cassandra, but even so, it must have been tormenting.’
‘Agreed, sir. Agreed. Yet I still don’t buy it. You asked my honest opinion, and there it is.’
‘You know, Grey,’ said Rose quietly after him as he and Cori had risen to leave the room, ‘About Isobel: if we do confirm she’s living up there, then we may have a problem down the line, about telling her parents that she’s found. If she is a part of Nash’s undercover operation...’
‘That had occurred to me too, sir.’
‘I just mean, if it’s playing on your mind like it is on mine... Look, I know things are a mess at the moment, what with everything that’s going on. But, you’re doing a good job here. I don’t know who else I’d trust to run things on the ground.’
Astonished with the praise, Grey could only stand a moment, before thanking Rose quickly and turning from the office.
Back in the mess room phones were still ringing, if not quite as frequently as before. When just at that moment, among the various call being answered and callers imparting information, one particular phone rang, the caller offering one particular fact...
Chapter 15 – Larry Dunn Returns