‘It makes sense,’ said Valentine from the door. ‘The diversion on to Siberia Belt, the mobile black spot, everything. All set up to stop Sarah Baker‐Sibley picking Jillie up, and then stranding her out of mobile contact long enough to get to sea.’
‘Let’s get out to the scene, see if it works on the ground.’
‘Mark wants a word,’ said Valentine, nodding down the corridor towards the front counter.
The DC was filling in the station logbook. He gave Shaw a black plastic box, about the size of a brick, and flipped open the hinged top. Inside was a porous pad. In the lid was a stamp. He pressed it into the ink, turned his hand over, and printed a neat BT on his skin, just like the one Valentine had seen on the skin of the driver of the Mondeo, and just like the one on Jillie Baker‐Sibley’s narrow wrist.
‘We’ve had some luck,’ said Birley. ‘Forty‐one tickets were sold for the dance. Security for the disco, and the running of the bar, was handled by a private company…’ Birley checked a neat note, ‘called SoundEvent, based in Lynn. The parish council chairman is Rod Belcher – he’s outside if you want a word. He says his son went and he said there was no trouble. The bar was beer and lager
Birley worked a finger inside his shirt collar, easing the material away from his neck. ‘So: forty‐one names, twenty‐nine blokes. I’ve got the lot. One of them has to be our runaway driver.’
He unfolded a file and arranged the snapshots. Birley had dragooned two uniformed PCs from Burnham to help build the photo gallery. He laid them out in rows, then stood back, admiring his work. Valentine studied the faces. Then he did it a second time, but it was just for show. ‘Nope. ’Fraid not.’
Birley blew out his cheeks. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.
‘Our kid got in for nowt,’ said Valentine.
‘How?’ said Birley, looking at Shaw.
‘You said the parish council chairman had a son?’ asked Shaw.
Birley searched the faces, found the one he was looking for, and stabbed it with his index finger. ‘Gerald Belcher – known to his friends as Gee.’
‘It’s not him,’ said Valentine. ‘Believe me.’
‘There was someone else at that disco, Mark. We need to find him. Let’s speak to Gee’s dad. He’s here?’
Birley outlined their problem with the photos but Belcher couldn’t help. His son was a regular at the discos, which were monthly, and he was sure there was no one there who was a stranger.
‘Bit of a mystery,’ said Belcher, checking a mobile. ‘You never go?’ asked Valentine, his head wreathed in cigarette smoke.
‘No. Well, sometimes. But kids at this age are best left to themselves. There’s been no trouble.’
‘We’d like a word with Gee,’ said Birley. ‘Just to double‐check.’
‘OK,’ said Belcher, ditching the cigarette and getting back in the car. The dashboard bristled with the calm, sophisticated telemetry of a £45,000 motor car. The engine purred into life. The finish was teak, a SatNav unit attached to the windscreen, the seats in tan leather. Valentine reached in and turned the ignition key, killing the engine, because around the steering wheel there was a snakeskin cover, the design unmistakable – black chevrons on a silver background.
Jillie Baker‐Sibley could hear the traffic in the sea mist but she couldn’t see the pus‐yellow headlights until they were thirty yards away; the cars whispering past, the drivers bent forward, trying to see something where there was nothing. Fossdyke, the ancient Roman bank which kept the sea back off the land, stretched out into fog ahead of her, like a drawbridge over an unseen gorge.
She was getting colder, her arms held awkwardly at her sides, her jaw aching with the effort of not shivering. Any warmth she’d gathered overnight was bleeding away. She’d slept in the shed at the bottom of Clara’s garden, wrapped up in a picnic blanket, with a paraffin lamp on. Her friend had got her soup in a flask and a microwaved stick of garlic bread.
At dawn she’d crept out and left a note.
Thanks. Don’t tell them. I’ll write.
J. x
She picked up her first lift on the coast road, round Lynn, and west towards the Midlands. The mist had cleared for an hour and she’d seen the horizon. To the north, reclaimed land ran to the shore of the Wash, a patchwork of mathematical fields dusted with snow, a power station the only feature, catching the sunlight like
The icy wind had made the legs of her jeans flap. ‘Fuck it,’ she’d said to herself, wishing she hadn’t forgotten how to cry. In her pocket she clutched a key, but its power to still her rising panic was fading. Alone, stranded, she felt an almost overwhelming urge to scream.
She’d got a lift, finally, from a truck to Sutton Bridge where the old mechanical swing bridge loomed, a giant’s Meccano set crossing the grey waters of the Welland. The mist closed in again beyond the town, curling over the thirty‐foot‐high bank like dry ice. Grey cottages built on the wide dyke came and went, but they saw no one. Villages dripped in the damp cloud which had fallen on the world.
Then another truck: Luxembourg plates, a single silver container. She’d answered the driver’s questions.
Where was she heading? The M1.
Was this the right way? It was the right way. Shouldn’t she be in school? She was sixteen.
Where would she go when she got to the M1 – north or south? To the airport.
Did she have a ticket? Did her parents know?
She said she needed to get out at the next roundabout. He said that it would be best to go to a police station, they could check she was OK. She said she’d tell them he’d tried to rape her, in a lay‐by, that he’d used his weight to lie on top of her, that you couldn’t hear her screams because of the traffic thundering by. He didn’t see her cut a thin line along her cheekbone with a fingernail.
They drove to a service station in silence and she got out at the exit. Standing on the grass verge she’d spat on his windscreen. That made her feel better, in charge, powerful. Empowered. She liked that word.
He’d pulled away and she’d watched the tail lights fade in the mist, the world around her a shifting jigsaw of grey and white.
The car that picked her up was a black Jag.
It went past once. Then she heard it brake. She didn’t notice it going back the other way, or hear it pulling an unseen U‐turn. When it coasted out of the gloom the second time its tyres crunched in the kerb on broken glass and she recognized the umbrella furled on the back seat.
She took a step back, looking around as if trying to find a way off the bank. But the field below was a milk‐white pool of mist, weaving its way between wooden posts.
The passenger side window came down electronically. She shook her head, but then she got in.
A POLICE – NO ENTRY sign blocked the way forward on Siberia Belt.
‘Weird,’ said Shaw. ‘Tom said he’d have it wrapped up by last night. Why are they still here?’ He got out and stamped in the snow while Valentine struggled into his raincoat. They heard a marsh bird’s call, like fingers down a blackboard. Walking, Valentine smoked doggedly, while Shaw tried to set in order, in his own mind, everything that they’d learned.
He’d left DC Birley to interview Rob Belcher and his son Gee about the whereabouts of the BMW – and the snakeskin wheel cover – on the night of the blizzard on Siberia Belt. DC Campbell was told to get a unit down to the cockle‐pickers’ hostel in the North End and round them up for interview. But the big breakthrough was Sarah Baker‐Sibley. Her statement would provide a cornerstone for the inquiry; laying out the foundations of the plan her ex‐husband had so meticulously laid to abduct his daughter. Luring her mother into the mobile black spot, and then bottling her up like a spider in a jar for the crucial hour it would take to spirit Jillie out of the country. The sudden snowstorm had all been to the good, turning the lid on the jar ever tighter.