Author: Chris Collett
Category: Mystery
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‘We made the decision early on that my partner would be the stay-at-home parent.’ She placed her own interpretation on Mariner’s silence. ‘You don’t agree with that?’
Mariner shrugged. ‘I’m old fashioned, I suppose. I still tend to think the main carers would be the mothers.’
‘She is their mother.’
‘Ah.’
‘I’m disappointed in you, DI Mariner. It’s the good detective’s mantra. Never make assumptions about anyone, including your colleagues.’ There was mischief in her voice. She’d got a buzz out of stringing him along.
Across the road in the hospital entrance they could see the fluorescent jackets of the officers stopping the drivers, and further along a couple of uniforms consulting on the house-to-house. Now that all the children and most of the staff had gone, it was time to close the nursery.
‘So, what next?’ Sharp asked.
‘I think we’ve done what we can here,’ Mariner said. ‘We should move across to Granville Lane.’
‘I was thinking the same thing.’
Mariner went back into the staff room to break the news to PC Khatoon and Jessica’s parents, who gathered together their things. Brian Mann would remain on the premises until Trudy Barratt left and would seal off the building, but the rest of them would decamp. Charlie Glover went out in advance to bring round a car.
The press office was doing its job and outside a gaggle of reporters had already begun to assemble, but for once, Mariner didn’t mind. It was one of those rare occasions when press interest was to be actively encouraged.
‘Chief Inspector!’ someone called out. ‘Baby Jessica has been missing for several hours now. Do you think she’s still alive?’ yelled a voice from the back of the pack.
Mariner cringed. That they could do without. Too much to expect that Emma O’Brien hadn’t heard.
Once they were bundled into a car and safely on their way, accompanied by Millie, Sharp responded, approaching the nearest reporter. ‘There will be a press conference at around seven o’clock at Granville Lane police station when we’ll be able to give you more details.’
‘Chief Inspector! Do you think what’s happened here this afternoon is a consequence of the government’s growing policy of forcing mothers to return to work, leaving their babies in the care of the state?’
Sharp ignored the question that came from a middle-aged woman in dungarees and Doc Martens, who stood apart from the group, and unlike the others seemed to carry no recording equipment or notebook.
‘Should have known that she’d crawl out of the woodwork at some point,’ Sharp muttered as they walked back along the road to the cul-de-sac where Mariner’s car was parked, now in isolation.
‘Who is she?’ Mariner asked, unlocking the car.
‘Marcella Turner. She’s a longstanding campaigner for a return to the “traditional family unit.” Runs an organisation called “Families Come First.” She thinks that women should stay at home to care for their children, and be paid by the state for doing so. In many ways I agree with her views but she takes them to the extreme. Breastfeeding children until they go to university and all that.’ Sharp saw Mariner’s face. ‘Okay, I exaggerate, but some of her group have been known to infiltrate day nurseries posing as potential parents, then make official complaints to Ofsted in an attempt to close down the settings. I don’t doubt that she’ll cash in on what’s happened here and get the press all fired up.’
Minutes later in the car, Sharp said, ‘Are you happy about taking the lead on this one, Tom?’
‘Any reason why I shouldn’t be, ma’am?’
‘I just thought with the upcoming trial . . . you must have a lot on your mind.’
‘I’m fine, thank you.’
‘Good. So let’s find out what all this is about.’ And she’d moved on, just like that. She was starting to trust him, Mariner realised with some satisfaction.
* * *
Back at Granville Lane, Mariner left Millie to settle Emma and Peter Klinnemann in a side room, making them as comfortable as possible, then headed up to the incident room on the first floor adjacent to the press room. There was no shortage of volunteers for overtime and he opened the door onto a dozen or so uniformed worker-bees, either fielding phone calls or working at computer stations, logging information as it came in. It was crucial at this stage that every detail be recorded. Something seemingly insignificant could prove to be of the utmost importance later on in the enquiry.
A whiteboard took up the length of one wall. In the middle of the organised chaos was Tony Knox, sticking up an enlarged version of the e-fit. ‘How’s it going?’ Mariner asked. ‘This is the picture Christie gave us?’
‘This is it,’ said Knox. ‘She did a really good job in the end. I think she quite enjoyed it.’ The two men stood back for a few seconds and studied the image of the woman with tied-back brown hair framing an unremarkable face.
‘She looks so bloody ordinary, doesn’t she?’ Mariner complained. It wasn’t going to help them.
‘But somebody knows her,’ said Knox. ‘It’s gone out to the press and we’ve set up a voice bank of up-to-date information that the media can tap into. We’re getting a big response from the initial appeal, close to a couple of dozen calls so far, but nothing yet in the way of concrete sightings.’
‘What we could really do with is a link to a vehicle or transport of some kind.’
‘Well, if she did get into a car, no one’s come forward yet to say they saw her.’
Glover, Khatoon and DCI Sharp appeared and gathered round one of the tables at the quieter end of the room, while Mariner summarised what had been learned so far. It wasn’t much. ‘I think the most helpful way of approaching this is to consider the motive,’ he said. ‘If we can understand why Jessica has been taken it will lead us to who may have taken her. There are a number of possible scenarios: this could only be a one-off, so I think we can rule out the possibility that Jessica has been taken for some kind of commercial gain. Similarly if the baby has been taken as part of a religious ritual, I can’t believe that the abductors would go to all this trouble just for one child. I think we can also discount the idea that the baby has been taken in error. I don’t believe that a mother would mistake her own child and this woman behaved as if she knew Jessica.’
‘And if she simply took the wrong baby, where is her baby — the one she left behind?’ said Millie.
‘Precisely. I do think, however, that we have to explore a possible link with the hospital. It’s too close to ignore. The crèche facility is publicly advertised there, and details of the children booked into the crèche are sent to the admin office. What we don’t yet know is whether the reason for the snatch is personal to the abductor, or if there’s some kind of external motive.’
Millie spoke up first. ‘If you think about the baby snatches that have happened in the past, in most of those cases the abduction was the result of some kind of psychological disturbance, a woman who has recently lost a child and was desperate to fill the hole that’s been left. The nursery is right next to the hospital’s maternity wing and the fertility clinic, so we could be talking about a woman who has lost a baby, or who has been told that she can’t have children.’
‘Yes, but in the last couple of years since Naomi Carr, security in maternity units has been stepped up big time,’ Knox pointed out. ‘They electronically tag all newborns, they have coded locks on the doors and the staff are trained to be alert to strangers.’
‘So perhaps this woman saw the nursery as the next best thing,’ Millie came back. ‘The women who do this kind of thing aren’t thinking rationally, are they? Normally theirs is an act of desperation. She might even have started off in the maternity wing, and when she saw that she wouldn’t get away with it, the nursery was the next best place.’
‘But this doesn’t sound like a desperate woman,’ Knox countered. ‘The nursery staff describe her as being reasonably calm. At the time they didn’t particularly notice any
thing odd about her behaviour. Would she have been that composed?’
‘It might depend on how deeply delusional she is.’ Sharp chipped in. ‘In the past, abductors have managed to pose convincingly as health visitors or social workers. If this woman has concocted the fantasy that she is Jessica’s mother, and she truly believes her own fabrication, then she may appear outwardly calm.’
‘That would tie in with her encounters with the staff in the nursery,’ Knox said. ‘In the first instance, when Christie asked if she could help she said, “I’ve come to collect my baby.” Christie was quite clear on that. It was the only time the abductor was put on the spot and her automatic response was to claim Jessica as hers.’
‘So we’re looking at a woman who has already thought herself into the role of the baby’s mother and, when she takes her, truly believes that Jessica is rightfully hers. If she knows about the crèche arrangement this woman could have simply convinced herself that she’d deposited her baby at the nursery that morning, and that all she had to do was go and collect it. Blonde, blue-eyed babies fit most people’s ideal, so this woman goes into the nursery, into the crèche, sees Jessica and picks her.’
‘But that line could equally have been rehearsed,’ said Charlie Glover. ‘The success of the abduction depended on the nursery staff believing the woman to be Jessica’s mother, so she would have practised it.’
Knox remained unconvinced. ‘I still don’t think a day nursery is an obvious place to abduct a child from if you’re just wanting any child. Surely a woman who’s lost a baby or who can’t have kids is going to want a newborn; one that they can pretend is their own, not a child who already belongs to someone else. Nurseries are more associated with young children than newborn babies.’
‘Naomi Carr was taken to sustain and protect a relationship,’ added Millie. ‘The abductor thought that having a baby would make her partner stay with her. She faked the whole pregnancy thing.’
‘That’s what I mean,’ said Knox. ‘The success of what she did depended entirely on her friends and family believing that she had given birth to Naomi. You couldn’t do that with a child that’s even a few weeks old.’
‘But the nursery does take very young infants,’ Glover pointed out. ‘We saw that today.’
‘The abductor wouldn’t necessarily have known that. And Jessica Klinnemann is seven weeks old. She’s hardly a newborn, is she?’
‘The other aspect to this is the staff,’ said DCI Sharp. ‘In most nurseries the staff would be too familiar with the parents to allow this to happen.’
‘You think this woman knew about the crèche?’
‘It’s the feature that makes this nursery unique and vulnerable. The strategy wouldn’t have worked in another nursery.’
Having sat back and listened thus far it was time for Mariner to step in. ‘I’m inclined to agree with DCI Sharp,’ he said. ‘That this isn’t a conventional baby-snatch. It was neither random nor impulsive. There was too much that could have gone wrong.’ The murmurs of agreement signalled that they were all coming round to that way of thinking. ‘It’s no simple thing to walk in off the street and take a baby,’ Mariner went on. ‘So this operation was carefully planned and executed, meaning that the abductor must have had pretty in-depth knowledge of how the crèche operates and the shift patterns of the staff. It’s interesting too that the snatch took place while Mrs Barratt — the one person who could have identified Jessica’s real mother - was out of the building. The abductor even double checked that Mrs Barratt wasn’t there.’
‘But that was a risk,’ said Knox. ‘How would she know that Mrs Barratt had gone?’
‘That car is distinctive enough,’ said Mariner. ‘And if she knows how the crèche operates then she’ll know that the staff in the crèche wouldn’t recognise the person who’d brought the child in, and that the crèche is staffed by agency workers who may also be less familiar with security procedures. And, if we’re in agreement that this was a planned operation, then we have to conclude that either this child or this nursery were targeted for a reason.’
‘We should start looking at former nursery employees and anyone linked to the crèche up at the hospital.’
‘How long has the crèche been open?’ asked Millie.
‘About seven years,’ said Mariner. ‘Look at former members of staff, especially those who haven’t yet had children, or possibly even married. The nursery has a high staff turnover and I’ve asked Mrs Barratt for details of those who have left in the last six months. Tony, I want you to go through that and find out if there’s anyone who has reason to hold a grudge against Mrs Barratt.’
‘It could even be an inside job,’ Glover suggested. ‘Two of the girls are temporary agency staff.’
‘I’m not sure that any of those girls are up to it. Samantha, the deputy, seems the most experienced of them and she was clearly panicked. The others just look too young to front it out. But we’re doing the usual background checks, using DBS records as a starting point.’
‘Somebody could have got to them.’ Mariner turned to Knox. ‘You’ve spent some time with Christie. She’s given us the best description of the woman.’
Knox was doubtful. ‘She seemed genuinely eager to help. But did you notice that bruising?’
‘The mark on her face?’
‘She’s in an abusive relationship. I mean, she didn’t come out and say it, but she didn’t deny it either, so I did a check on her boyfriend, Jimmy Bond.’
‘And?’
‘He’s on our books. Three years ago he was convicted of tax fraud. He runs some kind of garage and vehicle distribution business.’
‘Okay, well it’s hardly an obvious link but there’s a financial element there so it’s something else to keep an eye on. It’s another motive.’
‘That someone’s in this for financial gain?’
‘It’s a possibility, in which case we can expect a phone call at any time.’
‘But why this nursery, this child? Is it likely to be that lucrative?’
‘I agree,’ said Sharp. ‘The nursery is an independent business. If someone wanted to make serious money out of this surely it would be better to hit one of the larger chains of nurseries.’
‘So there may be a personal element,’ said Mariner. ‘Tell us more about Marcella Turner; is there any way she could have orchestrated the snatch, as a way of demonstrating that children aren’t safe in day-care provision?’
DCI Sharp turned down her mouth. ‘It’s way beyond the scale of her normal protests, but that’s not to say she wouldn’t. It would be an interesting stunt and perhaps one born of frustration. And it’s making people sit up and take notice. We certainly need to keep a watch on anyone who’s involved, even on the periphery, which brings us to the parents. How do you think they’re handling it?’ Sharp addressed her question to Millie.
‘They’re beside themselves with worry, which is about what you’d expect.’
‘Their home life is not as happy as it might be,’ Mariner said. Suddenly everyone was interested.
‘It’s the second time around for Klinnemann,’ Millie said. ‘But that doesn’t necessarily mean—’
Mariner shook his head, slowly. ‘No it’s more than that. There’s tension with his ex and the children from his first marriage. Emotions were running so high when they were mentioned I could practically feel it. Klinnemann told me — his wife didn’t even know he was having the affair with Emma O’Brien until Jessica was on the way.’
‘Oops.’
‘His two adult kids didn’t think much of the development either. The son — Paul — has gone AWOL,’ Mariner said. ‘I’d like to track him down.’
‘So maybe it’s not the nursery that’s under attack, but the Klinnemanns.’
‘Anyone else get a sense that money is tight too?’ Mariner asked. ‘A couple of times during our initial conversation Emma O’Brien mentioned economising — with the crèche place and by staying overnight with friends.’
> ‘Setting up a second family doesn’t come cheap,’ said Knox. ‘And she’s not back to working regularly yet.’
‘It seems to me that we could do with a bit more background on the Klinnemanns,’ Sharp said.
‘I’ll give Cambridgeshire police a call, ma’am,’ Mariner said.
‘And we’ll get the press conference done.’
‘On the plus side, none of the options we’ve discussed would lead us to believe that the abductor means to harm Jessica in any deliberate way. She might be working alone or with an accomplice, but we just have to hope that she has the skill, instinct and inclination to take proper care of her.’
All the time they’d been speaking, Mariner had been scribbling on the white board, creating an image that resembled a spider with far more legs sprouting from it than was biologically possible. A number of lines of inquiry to follow up, while at the same time the clock was ticking, challenging them to get to baby Jessica before any harm could come to her. A map of the immediate area had been pinned alongside the diagram, but so far it was blank. So far they had not a clue where Jessica had been taken.
Chapter Six
When the others went off to pursue some of those avenues, Mariner remained with DCI Sharp and PC Khatoon to plan the press conference.
‘How do you intend to play it?’ Sharp asked him.
‘Well, whatever has happened, the approach we’ll adopt is the sympathetic one. We need the abductor on our side,’ Mariner began. ‘At the moment we have no way of telling why this baby has been abducted, but what we don’t want is to panic this woman or anyone she may be working with into abandoning Jessica. She wouldn’t survive more than a few days alone. We’ll try to make contact, but starting from the angle that all we want is to know that Jessica is safe, and we try to convey the anguish Jessica’s parents are going through. She needs to see them as real people who will be understanding and non-judgemental.’
‘Will the Klinnemanns say anything?’ Millie asked.
‘Not yet,’ said Mariner. ‘We’ll have them there, but we’ll need to keep something back for a further appeal if nothing comes of this.’ He couldn’t shake the thought that, in so many of these appeals, the guilty party turned out to be one of those sitting alongside the police. ‘I’d better go and smarten myself up.’