Anna took the contact details for the witness Trisha had given her and went back to her office. She sat at her desk and dialled the one confirmed number next to a name.
Valerie Cobain had been walking her dog on the afternoon Rosie was abducted, and she reported seeing a man dressed in army fatigue trousers, a green army T-shirt, sunglasses and a hat emerge and cross the road. She’d been walking away from the man, but when her dog paused to relieve itself, Valerie had glanced back from 100 yards. The man’s quick and purposeful stride, and the fact that the backpack looked very heavy, struck her before she’d reached down to scoop her dog’s poop into a plastic bag. Valerie had been sixty-five at the time.
Valerie answered Anna’s call immediately and listened while it was explained to her how Avon and Somerset were looking again at the case. Her account tallied exactly with the witness report Anna had in front of her. The man, Valerie explained, walked purposefully, leaning forwards because of the weight of the rucksack. He had not looked up but she remembered he’d worn sunglasses and a camouflaged floppy hat. A bush hat.
‘Of course, we lost poor Roxy two years ago,’ Valerie said.
‘Roxy?’
‘Our Lab. The one I was walking.’
‘Sorry to hear that. Valerie, do you remember seeing him get into a car?’
‘No. But he must have because one minute he was walking up the hill, the next he’d gone. He must have got into one of the parked cars. But I don’t know which one. I didn’t see.’
‘Were there many cars parked on the street?’
‘Quite a few if I remember rightly. Always are there. People using the park, you know.’
‘Notice any vans?’
‘Not really. I wasn’t looking, if you know what I mean. There might have been.’
‘And this was,’ she scanned the notes, ‘about four forty in the afternoon?’
‘Yes. I used to take Roxy out after her tea.’
Anna made a note. Always useful to have someone who was a creature of habit when it came to drawing up a timeline.
‘Does this mean you know who it is?’ Valerie asked, her voice hushed.
‘We’re following up on some new information. Cases like Rosie’s are never completely forgotten.’
‘I hope you do catch him. Terrible it was. The whole town was shocked that it could happen to one of our own. In Clevedon of all places.’
‘Valerie, if you remember anything else at all, here’s the number to get in touch with.’
‘Let me get my pen.’
Anna repeated the number twice.
And so it begins, she thought.
Four
Blair had stopped crying. For now anyway.
The cave smelled funny. Old, like the toadstools under the wet wood in Haugh Park where she sometimes went for walks with Kirsty. The dog man had left her a little lamp and told her to leave it on all the time and if it went out there was another one and another one. A miniature fridge hummed in one corner, containing milk and water. There was no window in the cave and the walls were too smooth and it was dead quiet. Quieter than when you hid under the bedclothes in the dark because you’d heard something on the creaky landing at home. It didn’t help that she’d lost her hearing aid.
She’d wrapped herself in the duvet because the cave was cool, though she wasn’t cold now. She thought about everything that had happened but it was hard because her thoughts were coming all at once, jumbling and mixing her up. The policeman had noticed her T-shirt. Maroon with a ‘G’ in yellow letters. He said it was the right thing to have worn because where they were going was magical, just like Hogwarts. He told her how Kirsty had collapsed and had to go to hospital and that was why he’d let her out of the van. He said there were bad people after them and that one of them cursed Kirsty and that was why she’d got all funny and twitched. He told her how he had to take her, Blair, away from the bad people, the ordinary people because, just like in books, she was special. A good witch. Blair witch. He’d laughed then.
The dog man said he had to take her because the bad, ordinary people wanted to hurt her. They didn’t understand how special she was. He’d fetched her because they had a really big, scary adventure to get through before she could go back and tell Kirsty all about it. Tell her who she really was.
She’d wanted to believe him. He wore a kind of uniform and he had Banshee too. But a part of her remembered Kirsty twitching on the floor of the van. A part of her, deep inside, cowered, terrified, because Kirsty had told her things. About bad men who wanted to steal you into their cars. Kirsty told her if it ever happened to scream and run away. She had screamed and the man put tape over her mouth as well as Kirsty’s. And he hadn’t left Kirsty for the ambulance, he’d just thrown her out of the van in a field with poor little Banshee. And then he’d driven the van into a bigger lorry and driven her to the cave.
A part of her knew this wasn’t real, not the magic part anyway. But the rest of it was. The bucket in the corner where she was supposed to go to the toilet was. The smell, the duvet, they were all real. Not having her mum was real. Not knowing if Kirsty was OK was real.
After a while, Blair got up and picked up the lantern. The room wasn’t big but the shadows in the corners were dark and deep. She ran her hands over the walls. They were smooth, but the floor felt rough and stony. At the end of the room she saw a big, round, flat stone. It looked heavy. She tried to shift it and it moved, just an inch, but it did move. The light from the lantern wouldn’t shine into the gap, but it was dark in there and it felt deep, she could tell that much.
She went back to her duvet and waited, wondering if Kirsty was OK. Hoping that she was. Wondering if the dog man was coming back. She felt the tears coming again but she forced herself not to cry.
Five
If they weren’t out interviewing or otherwise engaged, Superintendent Mark Rainsford, commanding officer of the MCRTF, liked to ‘have a chat’ with Anna on Friday afternoons. He probably would have preferred the word debrief, but he was doing his best to shrug off his military background. Chat definitely had a warmer feel to it.
Tall, slim, white-shirted always, straight back on pain of death, Rainsford had, at least, also taken off his jacket on what had turned into a stifling afternoon. First time ever she’d seen him jacketless. Anna looked forward to the evening news headlines. It wasn’t every day that hell froze over.
‘What?’ Rainsford asked, seeing her smile.
‘Nothing, sir. Just wondering why, in this country of four seasons in every day, we’re not geared up for the extremes, that’s all. A heatwave has us sweltering, a bit of snow closes all the airports.’
‘The foibles of a maritime climate, Anna. But we wouldn’t have it any other way, now would we?’
‘No, sir.’
‘How do things stand?’
‘Justin and Ryia are moving forward on the Bright rape case, sir. We’re going to attempt to obtain some DNA for elimination testing. We want to make sure we approach the right suspect. Dave has just briefed us on the Dawson case.’
‘How’s he shaping up?’
‘He’s keen, I’ll give him that. Unorthodox, certainly.’
‘You two should get on well then.’
Anna gave him her best inscrutable look.
Rainsford sighed. ‘He’s still on a probationary period here. He’ll want to try and impress.’
‘I don’t want to be impressed, sir. But I’m happy to be fair. See what his approach leads to. And the Dawson case will be a good test. As far as I can see, evidence was, and is, thin on the ground.’
‘What direction does he want to take it?’
‘Revisit the scene, review forensics and reinterview a suspect. See what we can glean from this new image.’
‘He did some very good work in the Midlands.’
‘Serious crimes, wasn’t it, sir?’