The Child(25)

Sparkes nodded. “’Course they are.”

“I’ve written about the discovery of the body—it was in the paper last Saturday,” Kate added. “So small, you probably wouldn’t have seen it. Anyway, I’m not sure how much further I can take it as a story. If it’s a domestic, it’ll have limited news value as far as my lot are concerned. Might make a page lead, but I’m not sure it’s worth too much running around.”

She waited for a response. She felt she had wittered on long enough. Didn’t want to bore the man.

“What about you? What are you up to?” she said when the silence grew.

Bob put down his glass and smiled at her. “Sorry, Kate. Just thinking. I’m doing some policy revision for the force at the moment. Apparently, that’s also police work. Anyway, have the Met looked at missing persons? They must have.”

“I expect so, but it’s hard when they don’t know what era to start with. Why?”

“It’s not a long list, wherever they start looking. Abducting babies is an unusual crime anyway, but the number not found is tiny.”

Kate nodded. She was trying to think of any cases where a missing baby hadn’t been found and reunited with its parents within weeks, if not days. She remembered the disappearance of a baby who was reported stolen from a car. But all the other headline cases had ended happily.

“I can think of three cases,” Bob said. “Baby taken from backseat of a car in London.”

“Just thinking about that one,” Kate said. “Must be twenty years ago.”

“Yes, and then one taken from a pram outside the a co-op somewhere just after—possibly a copycat crime—and a newborn taken from a maternity hospital in Hampshire in the seventies, Alice she was called. Never seen again.”

“Don’t know either of those. Were you involved in the Hampshire case?” Kate said.

Sparkes laughed. “Hardly, Kate. I’m not that old. I was about thirteen at the time.”

“Sorry,” she said and laughed with him. “Hadn’t done the maths . . .”

“I remember the case because one of my aunties had a baby around then,” Sparkes said. “And she called my cousin Alice. So she and my mum talked of little else for a while. It was a big story—not twenty-four/seven like it would be now, but it made an impression and I’ve never forgotten her name.”

“Another of your lost children, Bob?” Kate said. She knew the list from their previous entanglement: Bella Elliott, of course; Laura Simpson, taken by her pedophile uncle; Baby W, shaken to death by his stepfather; Ricky Voules, drowned in a park. Bob Sparkes carried them all with him—those he’d rescued and those he felt he’d failed during his career. And little Alice was tucked away there, too, apparently.

“Have a look at your cuttings files on missing children, Kate, if you’re interested. I might have a quick look at the files our end,” he said, and she knew he would. Sparkes was the sort of detective who could never let anything go.

“May be nothing but . . .” His thought was interrupted by DS Butler putting his head round a pillar.

“Speeches, boss. Hurry up or you’ll miss them,” the young officer said, his face flushed and excited.

“Coming,” Sparkes said. “He doesn’t get out of Southampton much,” he muttered to Kate and they grinned at each other.

“Bring your wine—we ought to get back up there,” he said, but she knew he was all about the Building Site Baby. And now, so was she.





NINETEEN


    Kate


MONDAY, APRIL 2, 2012

The remnants of the reference library staff dwelled in the bowels of the newspaper, troglodyte survivors of the Google revolution. They were reduced to a handful of oddbods and nerds, a low-budget version of the Star Wars bar, the Crime Man said—used to say, she reminded herself. Their heyday had come and gone with the advent of Internet searches, but they were still there, sorting and filing every story published and holding on to their expert knowledge of news items of the past century until the last paper cutting was digitalized.

Kate always enjoyed challenging them with bizarre requests: Have you got anything on widows who married their husband’s brother? There would be a pause while the librarian disappeared down the corridors of filing cabinets, and he or she would appear with a brown envelope of cuttings marked “Marriages: Women Who Married Brothers-in-Law.” Never failed to amaze.

The library smelled of paper and silverfish when Kate pushed open the swing door, and she breathed it in deeply. It was the scent of her past; the days of running down the stairs to the library when a story broke, racing through telephone directories at the counter in search of a name, leafing through cuttings, and spotting the vital link that would make a tip-off work.

Bill Bridges, a man who wore the sort of jumpers normally favored by Portuguese tractor drivers and seemed to have been on the brink of retirement for decades, looked up from his table.

“Hello, Kate, what can we do for you?”

“I’m looking at old missing children cases, from around 1970 to the mid-1990s,” she said.

“Well, you’ve come to the right place,” he laughed. “We do old. Do you have a name? Or shall I get ‘Missing Children, General’ for the periods?”