“Anything?”
“Where do you want me to start?”
“Start with the search of the moorland.”
“The lads haven’t finished yet. They’re still out there. No sign of a body so far.”
“What about the clothes?”
“I’ve got Frank’s report in front of me. He’s our blood expert. It was a dry stain, so we can’t tell as much as we’d like — the presence of certain drugs, for example — but it is blood, it’s human, and it’s group A, one of the most common, unfortunately, and the same as Gemma’s, according to our files. We’re doing more tests.”
“Anything else?”
“Well, we can tell a fair bit about how it came to be there and — this is the interesting part — first, there wasn’t very much, nowhere near enough to cause loss of life. It was restricted to the bib area of the T-shirt and the dungarees, which might make you think on first sight that someone cut her throat, but no way, according to Frank. At least not while she was wearing them.”
“Then how did it get to be there?”
“It didn’t drip. It was smeared, as if you cut your finger and wiped it on your shirt.”
“But you surely wouldn’t wipe it on a white T-shirt and yellow dungarees?”
“I wouldn’t, no. That’d be grounds for divorce. But Gemma was only seven, remember. How careful were you about getting your clothes dirty when you were seven? Someone else washed them for you.”
“Still… And less of your cheek, Vic. What kind of injury could have caused it?”
“We can’t say for certain, but most likely a scratch, a small cut, something like that.”
“Any idea how long the clothes had been out there?”
“Sorry.”
“Anything else at all?”
“Yes. In addition to the items I’ve mentioned, we received a pair of white cotton socks and child’s sneakers. There was no underwear. You might care to consider that.”
“I will.”
“And there was some whitish powder or dust on the dungarees. It’s being analyzed.”
“What about the cottage?”
“Very interesting. Whoever cleaned that place up really did a good job. They even took the vacuum bag with them and combed out all the fibres from the brushes.”
“As if they had something to hide?”
“Either that or they were a right pair of oddballs. Maybe house- cleaning in the nude got them all excited.”
“Aye, and maybe pigs can fly. But we’ve got nothing to tie them in to the missing lass?”
“No prints, no bloodstains, no bodily fluids. Just hair. It’s practically impossible to get rid of every hair from a scene.”
“And it’s also practically impossible to pin it down to any one person,” said Gristhorpe.
“There’s still the DNA typing. It takes a bloody long time, though, and it’s not as reliable as people think.”
“Was there anything that might have indicated the child’s presence?”
“No. The hairs were definitely adult. Some sandy coloured, fairly short, probably a man’s, and the others we found were long and blonde. A woman’s, I’d say. A child’s hairs are usually finer in pigment, with a much more rudimentary character. We found some fibres, too, mostly from clothes you can buy anywhere — lamb’s-wool, rayon, that kind of thing. No white or yellow cotton. There was something else, though, and I think this will interest you.”
“Yes.”
“Well, you know we took the drains apart?”
“Will Patricia Cummings ever let me forget?”
“There’s a fair bit of dark sludge in there.”
“Could it be blood?”
“Let me finish. No, it’s not blood. We haven’t run the final tests yet, but we think it’s hair-dye, the kind you can wash out easily.”
“Well, well, well,” said Gristhorpe. “That is interesting. Just one more thing, Vic.”
“Yes.”
“I think you’d better get the lads digging up the cottage gardens, front and back. I know it’s a long shot — most likely somebody would have seen them burying anything out there — but we can’t overlook it.”
“I suppose not,” Manson sighed. “Your estate agent’s going to love us for this.”
“Can’t be helped, Vic.”
“Okay. I’ll be in touch later.”
Gristhorpe sat at his desk for a moment running his palm over his chin and frowning. This was the first positive link between Mr Brown and Miss Peterson, who had abducted Gemma Scupham on Tuesday afternoon, and Chris and Connie Manley, who had abandoned a prepaid holiday cottage in spotless condition on the Thursday of that same week. Coincidence wasn’t enough; nor was the fact that Manson’s men had found traces of hair-dye in the drains, but it was a bloody good start. His phone buzzed.
“Gristhorpe,” he grunted.
“Sir,” said Sergeant Rowe, “I think there’s someone here you’d better see.”
“Yes? Who is it?”
“A Mr Bruce Parkinson, sir. From what he tells me, I think he might know something about the car. You know, the one they used to take that young lass away.”
Christ, it was coming in thick and fast now, the way it usually did after days of hard slog leading nowhere. “Hang onto him, Geoff,” said Gristhorpe. “I’ll be right down.”
II
Dark satanic mills, indeed, thought DC Susan Gay as she approached Bradford. Even on a fine autumn day like this, even with most of the mills closed down or turned into craft shops or business centres, the tall, dark chimneys down in the valley still had a gloomy aspect.
Bradford had been cleaned up. It now advertised itself as the gateway to Brontë country and boasted such tourist attractions as Bolling Hall, the National Museum of Photography and even Undercliffe Cemetery. But as Susan navigated her way through the one-way streets of the city centre, past the gothic Victorian Wool Exchange and the Town Hall, with its huge campanile tower, Bradford still felt to her like a nineteenth-century city in fancy dress.
After driving around in circles for what seemed like ages, she finally turned past St George’s Hall and drove by the enormous Metro Travel Interchange onto Wakefield Road. The next time she had to stop for a red light, she consulted her street map again and found Hawthorne Terrace. It didn’t seem too far away: a right, a left and a right again. Soon she found herself in an area of terrace back-to-backs, with washing hanging across rundown tarmac streets. The car bumped in potholes as she looked for the street name. There it was.
An old man in a turban and a long white beard hobbled across the street on his walking-stick. Despite the chill that had crept into the air that morning, people sat out on their doorsteps. Children played hand-cricket against wickets chalked on walls and she had to drive very slowly in case one of the less cautious players ran out in front of her chasing a catch. Some of the corner shops had posters in Hindi in their windows. One showed a golden-skinned woman apparently swooning in a rajah’s arms — a new video release, by the look of it. She noticed the smells in the air, too: cumin, coriander, cardamom.
At last she bumped to a halt outside number six, watched by a group of children over the street. There were no gardens, just a cracked pavement beyond the kerb, then the houses themselves in an unbroken row. The red bricks had darkened over the years, and these places hadn’t been sandblasted clean like the Town Hall. Like any other northern city, Bradford had its share of new housing, both council and private, but the Johnsons’ part of town was pre-war, and here, old didn’t mean charming, as it often did out in the country. Still, it was no real slum, no indication of abject poverty. As she locked her car door and looked around, Susan noticed the individualizing touches to some of the houses: an ornate brass door-knocker on one bright red door; a dormer window atop one house; double-glazing in another.