The Moor (DCI Ryan Mysteries, #11)(26)
Morrison knew that Ryan was adept at reading people; it could be a royal pain in the arse, most days, because it meant you couldn’t get away with anything less than the whole truth. But that didn’t mean his judgment was infallible.
“I want you to bear it in mind, that’s all. In the meantime, Samantha’s still the only witness you have and she’s out there, in a strange city, on her own. I want a full-scale search set up.”
“Already underway,” Ryan confirmed.
“She can’t have much money,” Morrison thought aloud. “That limits her options, significantly.”
Phillips thought that it also limited a little girl’s ability to buy things like food, if she needed it. Outside, the air was turning cool as the wind picked up and night began to set in. He thought of all the people who were homeless, unable to pay for a warm shelter or a bed for the night, and he bore down against the sense of helplessness that seeped through the defences he’d carefully built.
“Do you want to alert the press?” Morrison asked, and Ryan found himself unusually torn by indecision. On one hand, the added exposure on the nightly news or on the radio might lead to Samantha being found more quickly; then again, it might not. Instead, it could lead to numerous false sightings and, crucially, would alert any nefarious characters to her disappearance and further jeopardise her position.
It was an uncomfortable choice, but he made similar ones every day.
“We should get it all over the news,” Phillips said, beating him to it. “We’ll have every parent in the North East looking out for her.”
“As well as others we’d rather not have looking for her,” Ryan reminded him.
Phillips swore roundly, and wished for a cigarette.
Another thing Charlie O’Neill had to answer for.
“We can’t take the chance, Frank,” Ryan continued. “There’s still time to find her, before nightfall. If she hasn’t resurfaced by sunset, we’ll contact the press team and go public. That gives us”—he paused to check the time—“more than two hours.”
Morrison nodded.
“You’ll call me, if there are any developments.”
It was not a request.
CHAPTER 15
Having been recalled from her sojourn at The Shipbuilder, MacKenzie sent Yates home and joined Ryan and Phillips in their hunt for the missing child. With his usual lightning speed, Ryan had set up an incident room and was treating Samantha’s disappearance with the same focus he would give any murder investigation or serious crime befalling the city or its people. Teams of local police were patrolling the neighbourhood where she was last seen and had gone house to house to find out if there had been any sightings. The same approach had been taken at the nearby Gosforth High Street, where there was any number of shops and restaurants whose CCTV might have caught her movements on camera.
Unfortunately, all of these steps took time, energy and resources that were already stretched thin.
“There are some bus stops close to where the foster family live,” Phillips said, poring over a dog-eared map he’d laid out on the conference table. “Gosforth Metro station is nearby, too. We could try to get hold of the CCTV from around there.”
“I’ve already been in touch with the metro and bus companies,” MacKenzie said. “The upside is, everybody is willing to help. The downside is, it’s going to take hours, at least. It’ll be tomorrow before any of the footage comes through and even longer before we’ll have had time to go through it all.”
None of that came as a surprise; it was the same story every time.
“Let’s think about this,” Ryan said, moving to stare out of the window with unseeing eyes. “Where would Samantha go?”
Where she felt safe.
He quickly put a call through to Anna, on the off-chance the girl had turned up on their doorstep, but pocketed his phone a few minutes later.
There’d been no sign of her.
“Let’s get a squad car to check along the roadsides and bus routes up into Northumberland, anyway,” he said. “She could be on her way.”
Over the next hour, reports streamed in from local police, hospitals, local businesses and transport officials, and their message was the same: nobody had seen Samantha O’Neill. Outside, a light rain began to fall as night closed in and Ryan knew the time had almost come to contact the press.
“Frank? There’s a chance Samantha has gone back home, to the circus. They wouldn’t tell us, if she did; I’m almost certain. We need to check for ourselves.”
Phillips grunted his assent.
“It’s familiar,” he said. “She might have thought it was better than the alternative. Let’s go.”
*
Samantha had not gone back to her family’s circus, either.
The fact Ryan and Phillips were making two visits in one day was enough to set tongues wagging but, when Charlie O’Neill found out the reason for their unexpected arrival, he considered it a gift in his favour. A dramatic scene followed, where he’d bemoaned the loss of his daughter, as if he’d entrusted her into police care—conveniently forgetting his own lax approach to parenting in what Ryan considered to be a hypocritical masterstroke of public relations.
After a full search of the circus and its grounds, with particular focus on the stable tent and the caravans, they’d retreated empty-handed into the night, their ears ringing with threats of hard-hitting exposés about police incompetence being printed in the Daily Mail.