Nine Elms (Kate Marshall #1)(70)

“No,” he said, opening the door of a petrol-blue helicopter. The glass bubble of the cockpit was glistening in the sun. India pouted, petulant, but still took her phone from her bag.

He leaned over and put his hand over her phone. “I said no. No photo . . .”

“Oh, come on, you own this magnificent machine. It’s just crying out to be photographed.” She grinned and pulled her hand away and went to snap a picture. He grabbed her wrist and twisted. She yelped and dropped the phone.

“I said no fucking photo. When I say no, I mean it!”

He leaned down and picked up her phone, then opened the door for her. India had tears in her eyes as she clambered inside. He slammed the door.

At the back of the pub, he could see Fizzy, smoking. She raised her cigarette, smiling. He waved back, muttering, “Nosy bitch,” under his breath.

He climbed into the cockpit, pulled on his headset, and got clearance for takeoff. It took a minute for the blades to start spinning, and with a roar they took off. The grass below them flattening and then seeming to drop away. India refused to put on her headset, so he was unable to talk to her over the roar of the engine.

It was a short ten-minute journey back to the Oxfordshire heliport where they’d met. He left the engine running when they touched down and turned to her with a smile and a wave and said, “Bye-bye, India.”

She motioned to him that she couldn’t hear, but he carried on smiling and waving as she jumped out and was met by one of the stewards from the heliport. He watched them move away, their hair flattened by the wind from the whirring blades.

An image of India flashed into his mind, naked and pleading. That perfect hair plastered to her face with sweat and tears.

He took off again, and the helicopter sheared up and off into the sky, heading west.

It worried him the police had made an arrest. They had the wrong man. He was their man, and he would reveal himself. Soon, but not yet.





38

When Kate got home, the police car had vanished from outside her house, and Glenda called to say the police car watching Jake was also gone.

She tried to call Varia to ask what was happening but was told to expect a callback. Kate didn’t want to wait, so she drove over to Exeter, went into the police station, and asked to see her. She waited for an hour, and finally Varia appeared.

“What’s going on?” asked Kate. “You’ve arrested someone, and you take away police surveillance on me and my son. Have you got him?”

“Come to my office,” said Varia. Kate followed her along a corridor, past offices with support staff. Phones rang, officers walked and talked. It felt odd to be back in a large police station—odd, but at the same time it felt like home.

“Would you like tea?” asked Varia, taking her into a small office overlooking the car park.

“No, thank you,” said Kate, taking a seat as Varia closed her office door.

“Okay. We arrested a teacher from Layla Gerrard’s school. His DNA was matched to a burglary in 1993, in Manchester. At the time, blood was taken from the point of entry. He broke a window, cut himself. He then beat an elderly couple badly and took off with their valuables.”

“Is he a suspect?”

“No. He has an alibi. He was in France when Layla went missing. I have passport records and CCTV. His arrest should not have been publicized. I have the news cameras to thank for that.”

“Are you going to release him?” said Kate.

“We are going to charge him for the 1993 assault and burglary. He won’t be released, but I will still face the wrath of the press. I have twenty officers assigned to this case who are all working harder than you can imagine, going without family time,” she said.

“I’m not questioning that. Are you looking into all the schools that those girls went to? That was Peter Conway’s way in.”

“Yes. We’ve looked at the schools that the three victims attended. Teachers, support staff, caretakers, casual workers. We’ve taken voluntary DNA samples from almost every male teacher and support worker who came into contact or who was associated with the girls. Hence the arrest. We’ve also taken DNA samples from males in the families, and in the case of the first victim, Emma Newman, we have looked at the children’s home she went to, and everyone who works there has been cross-checked.”

“And nothing?”

“The DNA samples gave us the arrest today, and we had another hit at Layla’s school, on the caretaker. He was involved in a sexual assault in 1991. A girl on her way home from school. He picked her up and raped her. We interviewed him. His wife is his alibi, but he now has limited movement—he’s registered as partially blind, and he can’t drive. With the logistics of how these girls are being grabbed and abducted, he would have had to take the bus to do it. He’ll be charged for the historical crime, but there is no way he was able to kill these three young women.”

“Did you get anything from the CCTV at the candlelight vigil?”

“Kate, I got a crowd of people surging through the village. The point where your car was parked isn’t covered by CCTV, nor is the first half mile of the route the vigil took, then we’ve got fields and trees in the other direction.”

“What about satellites, Google Earth?”

Varia raised an eyebrow.

“I work for the Devon and Cornwall police, not MI5. If this were a matter of national security, then I might be able to request still images from Google Earth data, but for a note left on a car windshield by a potential suspect, we’re not there yet. Besides, I already thought of that and pulled up Google Earth to check the location . . .”