Quill slumped, and Ross thought she could see something terrible appear in his face. That wasn’t what he’d been missing. And whatever that was, it was getting harder for him all the time.
‘Pity,’ said Costain. ‘I’ve always wanted to be working on a case where the dots on a map formed a pattern.’
Ross called the Brockley nick, and got photos of the suspects’ house sent over. ‘Look there,’ she said, for there was that glowing soil shape in their garden.
The match was due to kick off at 8 p.m. And, of course, it was going to be broadcast live on Sky and Radio Five. Purely for the sport, of course. As the hours ticked away, and all four of them continued looking through the council records for the boroughs around and including Brockley, and started pulling out the many sighting reports of Losley from around that area, Ross found that she was developing stomach cramps. It hadn’t even occurred to her to eat, and she wondered if any of the others were managing to do so. It took until bloody nineteen-thirty for a van to arrive outside the Portakabin, bringing with it the two suspects, Mr and Mrs Franks. Their brief had arrived also, Janice Secombe from Mountjoy’s, stepping carefully out of her car and raising an eyebrow at the stretch of mud between her and the cabin itself.
‘Ross,’ said Quill, picking up the tape recorder he’d borrowed from Gipsy Hill that morning, ‘you’re with me in interview room one. By which I mean the far corner here. You two, keep checking those records and loom menacingly in the background.’
Quill knew Secombe from many such encounters. She was obviously loving this bizarre lack of the usual form, knowing how it’d play before a jury. But Quill was pretty sure these two weren’t destined for a trial. He set the tapes running with all due procedure, then he studied the suspects sitting across the table from Ross and himself.
For a moment, in his mind’s eye, he saw blood bursting from their faces.
This was going to be such a long shot. Despite the briefing notes they’d prepared on a few things they could have a go at, there were whole areas which, especially with a brief present, could not be touched on. Not without having these two immediately set loose with one hell of a story to tell the press, one which would snare the team and stop them from having the freedom to do what they had to.
‘My clients,’ began Secombe, ‘are the victims in a missing persons case-’
‘No we’re bloody not!’ said Terry Franks.
‘-who have suffered severe trauma-’
‘We haven’t!’
‘They. . agree with me, however, that there is no justification therefore for treating them like criminals. And I personally fail to see what they might have to do with the case you’re obviously pursuing here.’
That aspect must be freaking her out. They’d hidden the Ops Board before this lot had arrived, but Secombe knew which of them was working on what. Terry and Julie Franks looked as if they hadn’t slept recently. They were both in their late twenties, him with a number-two haircut that was growing out a bit, earring, white jacket, T-shirt with something pretty on it. If his mobile rang, it’d be something r amp;b. She was in a grey top that looked as if she’d worn it for three days. Layers in the hair, but no makeup today. She hadn’t been bothered. She wasn’t trying to put on a front, and hadn’t even done the tiny modest stuff that she would have done to attempt to indicate she deliberately wasn’t trying to put on a front.
Innocent, both of them. He wouldn’t normally have let that supposition mean anything, because you always worked the facts in front of your accumulated experience, and he had in the past met many seemingly innocent fuckers who’d done some terrible shit. But in this case he knew it to be genuine, and — had he a heart to break — it would have done so. They were saying something to him about himself, but in ways he couldn’t understand.
‘All right,’ said Terry angrily, ‘what’s going on?’
‘They keep saying we’ve got kids,’ interrupted his wife, still trying to be reasonable while he was already worked up. There was half a laugh in her voice. ‘It’s bureaucracy gone mad! As if we wouldn’t know. But I’m glad we can sort it out now. It’s some sort of error in the paperwork.’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Franks,’ said Quill, ‘but it isn’t.’
Terry immediately started to speak, but the brief cut across him. She said, ‘We’re still trying to establish the facts in this case, aren’t we?’
Ross put copies on the desk of what the brief and the Franks pair had already seen: birth certificates for Charlie, aged five, Hayley, six, and Joel, seven.
‘We keep saying there must be a mistake,’ Terry continued. ‘Just the same name. . maybe they used to live at our address.’
Ross, with no expression at all, put the photos on the table. They’d been taken both from what had been found during a search of the Franks’ house and from the albums of the children’s uncle and other relatives. They showed Terry and Julie with three happy, messy, gurning children at a theme park, by the sea side, on the deck of a cross-Channel ferry, wearing stupid hats.
The couple stared at the photos, as dumbfounded by them now as they must have been when first they saw them. ‘That’s just it — why would someone go to all that bother,’ Terry protested, ‘to Photoshop these? We are obviously being set up for something!’
‘If you don’t have any children,’ said Quill, ‘why is your house full of toys? Why, on several occasions during the last year, did you hire your niece as a babysitter?’
‘First Craig, and now you lot!’ The man was getting shrill, as if he could fight reality back to what was normal. ‘We get so worked up, we can’t hardly hear what people are saying, because they keep going on and on! You think we might just let these kids you think we have wander off, and forget about them? Forget about them after they went missing? Our own kids? Do you really think anyone would do that? Is that how far you think we’ve sunk?’
‘Everyone is looking at us funny,’ said Julie, more carefully, ‘and there’s something they’re not saying. It’s like they think we’re. . paedophiles. And we’re not! We’re terrified of people like that.’
‘Why?’ said Ross.
The couple were suddenly silent.
‘Why would a couple without children be terrified of paedophiles?’
The silence continued, while their mouths worked as if they were trying to find something to say.
Julie finally raised her hands. ‘I have. . been thinking about this,’ she said. ‘We’re not. . Whatever you may think of us, we’re not stupid.’
‘I didn’t say you were,’ said Quill gently.
‘I remember buying the. . I suppose you’d call them toys. Over, well, years. I remember buying this. . junior tennis set from the pound shop. Just this pair of yellow plastic rackets and a soft ball. Perfect, I thought. Only now. . now I can see that seems weird, because we don’t use it, do we?’
‘It’s not a crime,’ muttered Terry, ‘whatever this is, it’s not a crime.’
‘And I have to. . to try really hard to think about that. It’s like if I don’t think about it, it goes away again. Like my brain doesn’t want to think about it, because maybe there’s something. . terrible. Please. . Please tell us. Are we. . living wrong? Is there something. . wrong with us?’
‘Mrs Franks-’ began the brief.
‘There can’t be something wrong with both of us!’ explained Terry. ‘Everyone thinks we’re lying-’