And every time he thought about that, he sought a new distraction, because he didn’t want to make that decision.
As soon as he got back inside, Gareth hurried over, phone in hand. Carmella was upstairs, talking to the SOCOs. It crossed Patrick’s mind that Gareth saw Carmella as a rival, that he wanted to win brownie points with his superior officer. He wanted to be the one to make the breakthroughs, deliver the news. Patrick looked Gareth up and down as he approached, thinking how different they were. At school, Gareth would have been one of the popular kids, the football team captain, head boy material, the kind of guy that Patrick avoided, hanging out with his Goth mates, going out with girls who only chose him because they knew their parents would disapprove. There was something of the Peter Perfects about Gareth Batey and Patrick didn’t know if he wanted to protect him or encourage him to stop being such a . . . swot and get himself an attitude.
‘Boss. I think we’ve got an ID,’ he said in his crisp Scottish accent. ‘A teenager whose mum reported her missing this morning.’
He held up his iPhone. On the screen was a picture of a frowning girl. A selfie, as they called it. He thought the frown was meant to be a pout but had gone wrong.
‘Once I got the name I looked her up. I couldn’t find her on Facebook, but she’s on Twitter and Tumblr. Calls herself MissTargetHeart.’
She had a soft face, dotted with freckles, and light brown hair. The photo looked like it had been taken in her bedroom, sitting on her bed with a teddy bear propped on the pillow behind her. She had drawn a crude target on her cheek in eyeliner, three concentric circles, with an arrow through. It was definitely her – the girl upstairs in room 365.
‘Her name’s Rose Sharp and she lives about ten minutes from here.’
Patrick looked at him.
Gareth’s cheeks coloured faintly. ‘Lived, I mean. Lived.’
Rose Sharp’s mum, Mrs Sally Sharp, lived in a terraced house in a backstreet of Teddington, the kind of place that a decade ago would have been considered moderately desirable but was now worth the kind of money that would make anyone north of the M25 gasp and shake their head. Close to a good school, low crime, a couple of organic delis nearby. A whole generation of Londoners had become property millionaires simply by buying at the right time. Patrick knew he could sell his house and move to Thailand and live like a prince. Sometimes, when confronted with this kind of task, he was tempted to pack up and go.
Patrick rang the bell, Carmella standing beside him. Gareth had wanted to come, but Patrick had instructed him to go back to the station and start checking the list that the hotel had finally produced. They were looking for known offenders, anyone with a record of violence or sexual offences. Even though they didn’t know yet if Rose had been raped, the fact that she was underage and had been found naked meant there was almost certainly a sexual element to the crime.
‘Call me the second you find anyone who looks like a good hit. Don’t go off on your own, OK? It won’t impress me,’ Patrick had told Gareth.
Sally Sharp opened the door almost instantly, and it was clear that she had been hoping to see her daughter standing there.
Sally looked over Patrick’s shoulder, peered around Carmella. Realisation entered her eyes then, and her face crumpled. But there was still hope – for a few more moments.
‘Mrs Sharp?’ Patrick said. ‘Rose Sharp’s mother?’
She nodded, inspecting Patrick’s badge as he introduced himself and Carmella. Her hands were trembling visibly as she held on to the front door.
‘Can we come in, please?’
She led them into the living room. It was an ordinary room: medium-sized TV, saggy sofa, a bookcase filled with DVDs and framed photographs. There they were – the pictures of Rose as she grew up, from a bald-headed baby with dribble on her chin to a teenager in a school blazer. There was a framed photo on the wall of Sally, Rose and a man Patrick assumed was Rose’s dad. Sally was blonde with green eyes, and in the family portrait she sparkled with life and happiness. Now, standing before them, she looked squashed, as if a giant boot had stamped on her.
‘Are you here on your own?’ Carmella asked.
Sally’s eyes followed the two detectives’ towards the portrait.
‘Yes.’ She sounded like she had no saliva in her mouth.
‘Is your husband at work?’
‘I expect he’s at work, yes. But he’s not my husband anymore. He left us a year ago, so it’s just me and Rose now.’ She had a string of beads round her neck that she fiddled with. ‘Have you found her?’
Patrick braced himself. ‘I think you should sit down, Mrs Sharp.’
And before he’d even managed to tell her that they’d found the body of someone who matched the description of their daughter, that they would need her to identify the body, that her life would never be as happy or bright or hopeful again, she started wailing.
Patrick went into the kitchen to put the kettle on, while Carmella attempted to comfort Mrs Sharp. He called the station to check that the body had been removed from the hotel and taken to the mortuary so they could organise the identification. Sally had instantly said that she needed to call her sister, and that she would need to tell Rose’s dad, Martin, which had prompted a fresh wail.
While Patrick was waiting for the kettle to boil, he slipped into the hall and looked up the stairs. Looking over his shoulder to check Sally Sharp wasn’t watching, he went up onto the landing. The first door he opened was the bathroom; the second was the master bedroom. That left Rose’s bedroom.
He pushed the door open gently and stepped inside. His eyes widened.
Four male faces stared at him from every surface: three white, one Asian. Every inch of wall was covered with posters and pages carefully torn from magazines or printed off the Internet. The screensaver on the computer showed the four boys with their arms around each other’s shoulders. A T-shirt bearing their logo lay on the unmade bed and a life-size cardboard cut-out of Shawn, the most popular member, stood at the foot of the bed.
Patrick was in his mid-thirties. He liked indie and rock music. He didn’t watch much TV apart from CBeebies with Bonnie. He didn’t read a tabloid paper or any glossy magazines. But even he knew who this lot were. Rose was an OnTarget fanatic. Now, he thought, the media were going to have one hell of an angle.
Chapter 4
Day 2 – Patrick
The MIT9 incident room at Sutton station smelled of machine coffee and bacon sandwiches, making Patrick’s stomach growl and clench simultaneously as he took his place at the front of the room beneath the blown-up photo of Rose Sharp. In the picture, she was smiling, revealing a gap between her front teeth, though there was a far-off look in her eyes. He wondered if she’d been happy and, if not, how far she had been from finding joy in her life. Growing up had been the best thing that ever happened to him, Patrick thought. Getting away. Reinventing himself.
He mentally glossed over the fact that he was back living with his parents now.
Half a dozen officers, including Carmella and Gareth, perched on tables or stood, and Patrick found himself appraising them as his eyes passed over them. DC Preet Gupta was leaning against the wall at the back – competent and affable, she was a straight-down-the-line, trustworthy young woman Patrick was always pleased to see on his team. DC Martin Hale, a tall man with thinning hair who reminded Patrick of Kevin Spacey, was older and seemingly happy to stay at his rank forever. He had teenage daughters, and Patrick noticed how Hale’s jaw clenched as he surveyed the picture of Rose. He was sitting at the front of the room, so close to Rose’s photo that he could count the few freckles on her nose – and indeed probably was. That summed him up – keen, with an admirable attention to detail.