Author: Chris Collett
Category: Mystery
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/chris-collett/page,11,530504-baby_lies_reissue.html
‘You told me that his business is in trouble.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘We’ve had a ransom demand.’ Knox saw from her face that now, suddenly, she wasn’t so sure of her boyfriend. ‘What’s his mobile number?’
‘Wait, it’s stored on my phone.’ Fetching her phone from a white leather handbag, Christie brought up the number in her phone book and handed it to him. ‘And yours?’ Knox asked. But when he looked, neither was the number they had for Zion. The opening digits were entirely different. ‘Does Jimmy have another phone?’
‘He has one for the business but I don’t know the number.’
‘Give him a call, would you?’ Knox asked. ‘On his personal phone.’
Christie did as he asked, but the phone was switched off. ‘It usually is when he’s at work. He’s probably with customers.’
Before leaving Knox said, ‘Do you mind if I have a look round upstairs?’
‘No.’ She seemed unsure, but Knox felt certain it wasn’t because she had anything to hide. She was worrying about what Bond would say if he found out. It didn’t take him long to scrutinise the small, boxy bedrooms and bathroom — where he found nothing that looked out of place — and when he glanced out of the window and into the garden he saw only a small patch of green lawn surrounded by bare wooden fencing. Nowhere to hide anything — or anyone — out there.
‘Christie, if you’re protecting Jimmy, you’re in big trouble and there’s nothing I can do to help you. You understand that, don’t you?’ Knox said, fixing her gaze.
She didn’t falter. ‘Of course I do.’
* * *
The address she gave Knox for Jimmy Bond’s garage, led him to a street corner off the Pershore Road in Balsall Heath, close to the city centre. But when he got there it was all closed up. Knox peered through the plate glass windows, but alongside the row of dubious-looking ‘pre-owned’ cars, there was no sign of human life anywhere. So where the hell was Bond?
He’d told Christie he was going to work as usual, and surely Saturday was a good day for the used car trade. He couldn’t afford to close unless he had some other, more pressing business to attend to. Knox crossed over to the other side of the road and stood back to have another look at the garage building. The showroom itself was a wide single-storey structure, but built on at the rear he could see a higher two-floor structure, with an iron fire escape snaking up towards a single window. Had those curtains been closed when he got here?
Walking round the side of the garage Knox came to a high wooden gate. It was unlocked. Knox walked in and crept up the fire escape and when he got to the top, banged his fist on the panelling of the door as hard as he could. God, that hurt. ‘Police! Open up, I know you’re in there.’ He could have sworn he heard a sound. The door looked flimsy and unsubstantial. He probably could shoulder it if he needed to. ‘If you don’t open up we’ll break it down,’ he shouted, giving himself some imaginary backup. ‘Five seconds . . . four . . .’
This time there was definite scuffling and the door opened a crack, behind it a white male, twenties, overweight and wearing nothing but boxer shorts. Knox could see why Bond had shortened his name — 007 he wasn’t. He peered over Knox’s shoulder to ascertain how many he was up against. He was in for a disappointment.
‘Jimmy Bond?’ said Knox, holding out his warrant card.
He didn’t deny it. ‘What the hell do you—?’
Catching Bond off guard, Knox shoved open the door and forced his way in, slamming it shut again behind his back. He’d walked straight into a room that offered little more refinement than the houses they’d raided on Ocean Blue, and contained a double bed that, judging from the state of the sheets, had seen a lot of very recent action. In an alcove off to the left a woman stood, wearing a look of indignation and probably very little else under the thin duvet that she hugged around her. Small and slim, as far as Knox could tell, she had coffee coloured skin and her cropped black hair was in tight curls. ‘What is this?’
Ignoring her Knox strode over to where she stood and peered in. It was a tiny bathroom of the most basic kind. Not much doubt about what was going on here, and it had nothing to do with Jessica Klinnemann. Set to vibrate, Knox felt his phone ringing. He ought to respond to it and there was nothing else to be done here. ‘Christie know about all this, does she?’ he sneered as he walked back past Bond. ‘You piece of shite.’
Back out on the street Knox checked his phone. The call was from Mariner. He returned it straight away.
‘Meet us up at the Lickeys.’ Mariner’s voice was grim, and there was a background roar. He was in a car. ‘Coven Lane behind the chapel. Some baby clothes have been found, including a pale green babygro.’
‘Oh, Christ.’
‘Yeah. We’ll see you up there.’
‘Right, boss.’
* * *
Mariner drove up the steep incline of Rose Hill, with the dread of anticipation tight in his chest. He’d ordered the area to be cordoned off and called for back up from the dog handling team. He drove past the little church and into the lane that ran between a row of detached houses to their right and woodland on the left, and pulled into a rough lay-by behind a pale blue minibus. The call had come from the leader of a Scout group who were out on an orienteering exercise in the woods. Now a crowd of boys in bottle green jumpers milled around the back of the bus, some of them swigging from sports bottles, all of them high with excitement as they watched the drama unfold.
Uniformed officers in fluorescent green jackets were already stretching crime scene tape to the side of the group, around the trunks of the beech trees whose leaves were a bright orangey-gold in the late afternoon sun. Mariner sought out the woman in charge of the boys, who introduced herself as Akela. She, in turn, took Mariner over to Ryan, the eight-year-old who had found the clothing.
‘We were having a leaf fight,’ the boy explained, ‘and I grabbed this little baby suit by accident, with a handful of leaves. It was all dirty. Then I remembered what they said on the telly last night about that baby that got taken so I went to tell Akela.’
As he was talking Mariner was aware of another car pulling into the lay-by. Tony Knox.
‘Can you take us to where you found them?’
‘I left my neckerchief there to mark the spot,’ the boy said proudly. ‘Akela told us to leave the clothes where they were.’ Good old Akela.
Impressively in a thickly wooded area where each tree looked precisely the same as all the others, the boy was able to lead them, unerringly, to the exact place, about a hundred metres into the woods, where he’d come across the clothing. A couple of minutes in Mariner was able to spot the bright red and yellow scarf up ahead.
‘Well done Ryan,’ Mariner said. ‘You did the right thing. Now, can you go back to your friends exactly the same way as we just came?’ Taking out a business card he handed it to Akela. ‘Give me a call when all this is over and we’ll arrange a visit for them all to Granville Lane.’
‘Thanks.’
When Ryan and Akela had retreated back to the road, Mariner turned his attention to the crumpled garment, still half-buried and difficult to identify at all from where it now lay. Pulling on latex gloves, and with Knox squatting beside him, he gingerly picked it up. The little suit was filthy with soil and leaf mulch and around the neck and down the body was a more distinct dark brown stain that to him was all too familiar. ‘It fits the description,’ he said. It did, even down to the same manufacturer’s label that had been on the one they’d seen at the nursery yesterday afternoon. Bagging it up, he noticed the condensation that immediately began to form on the inside of the polythene packet. He and Knox walked around the spot but there was nothing else to see.
‘This isn’t consistent with the ransom demand,’ Knox observed.
‘It could be,’ Mariner said. ‘We’ll have to wait and see. Maybe it’s Zion’s way of letting us know how serious he is. Or it might be nothing at all,’ Mariner said. ‘It could simply
be that the abductor has discarded the clothes because they’re identifiable.’ It didn’t explain the ominous stains, but Mariner wasn’t ready to pursue that line of reasoning.
‘He came a long way from the road to dump just a baby suit,’ said Knox, as they started back towards the road, following the dying light of the sun through the trees. ‘If that’s all there was, why not just throw it into the trees from the road? It would still have been pretty well hidden.’
‘Perhaps that’s what he did and an animal, a fox or something, picked it up and brought it further in.’ Mariner said, avoiding the other, more obvious alternative. As he walked his foot kicked up something greyish white among the dead leaves. He picked it up. It was a chunk of plastic-looking material backed with some kind of wadding.
‘Is this what I think it is?’ he asked Knox.
‘It’s a chunk of nappy.’
If his theory was correct they’d a highly organised fox on their hands.
Back at the roadside a couple of vans were disgorging police dogs and their handlers. The clothing was dispatched to the lab for analysis and uniformed officers, some enlisted from the incident room, were pulling on forensic suits to commence a fingertip search of the immediate area. All of which would take at least a couple of hours to complete.
It began to drizzle. ‘We can’t do anything more here,’ Mariner said. ‘We may as well go back to base and do something useful.’ Whatever that might be.
‘Will you tell the parents?’
Mariner watched the group of young lads piling back into their minibus. ‘I’ll have to. It’s only a matter of time before the press will get wind of what’s going on up here. I’m amazed they haven’t already.’
In the car Tony Knox had the opportunity to fill Mariner in on his visits to Christie and Jimmy Bond. ‘So we can rule him out?’ Mariner concluded.
‘He hasn’t taken baby Jessica. He’s been too busy for that, but there’s something about him—’
‘Aside from the fact that he cheats on his girlfriend and beats her up?’ said Mariner. ‘He’s just a pathetic loser.’
On the way back they stopped off at the hotel to break the news, Mariner taking Peter Klinnemann on one side to tell him. ‘It doesn’t necessarily mean the worst,’ Mariner stressed. ‘All we’ve found is clothing, nothing else.’
‘I’ve made some calls,’ Klinnemann said, chalk white. ‘I can raise the money.’ So Emma O’Brien had talked him round.
‘Let’s just wait and see what happens next,’ Mariner said. He looked at his watch. ‘Zion could call back at any time.’ But almost the whole day had passed and Zion had remained silent.
* * *
Back in the incident room everyone seemed to have stopped working. Manpower was depleted, thanks to the search, but even so . . .
‘What’s going on?’ Mariner asked.
‘You didn’t get the message, sir? Shortly after you left the scene the search officers found the body of a baby close to where the clothing was discovered. It’s on its way to Croghan’s office.’
* * *
Mariner and Knox drove to the mortuary in silence, Mariner unable to believe what was happening. How could the case be over so soon when they’d made so little progress on it all? What had they done that was so wrong, and what could they possibly have done differently? Did Zion know they were onto him, or did he think they weren’t taking him seriously?
They arrived at Newton Street just as the tiny body bag was being transferred from the mortuary ambulance, and had to endure frustrating minutes while Stuart Croghan prepared himself for the examining room having pushed back all his other work to look at the findings. After what seemed an interminable wait, Mariner and Knox were allowed in.
‘The good news for you guys is that it’s not Jessica,’ said Croghan.
Mariner felt a surge of relief. ‘How can you tell so soon?’
‘The body is in a much too advanced stage of decomposition. It’s been there many months, I’d say, possibly up to a year. And the baby is small too, I’d say only a couple of weeks old.’
‘Is it likely that the clothes belonged to this baby?’
‘They’d swamp him a bit, but yes he could have worn them, and he’s still wearing what looks like the remains of a vest, with a bloodstain pattern very similar to the one on the babygro. It looks as if an animal of some kind has had a good chew on it too.’
‘So it’s pure coincidence that the babygro is the same make as the one that Jessica is wearing?’
‘It would seem so. I’m guessing these garments must be pretty widely available.’
‘Any idea how this baby died?’
‘That kind of detail I can’t give you yet,’ Croghan said. ‘Sadly I haven’t yet perfected the old x-ray vision. I’ll let you know as soon as, but meanwhile,’ Croghan broke off what he was doing, ‘go and find baby Jessica. Aren’t you due a phone call?’
* * *
The atmosphere in the incident room felt ready to explode as the minutes and hours passed, waiting for Zion’s next call, and Mariner had to remind everyone to continue pursuing other lines of enquiry. ‘Somebody must have seen something.’
Then at five past four in the afternoon, the phone rang and Zion identified himself. As before, Mariner pressed the button and lifted the receiver.
‘Have you got the money?’ Zion asked immediately.
No reference to the findings at the Lickeys, Mariner noticed. He didn’t know. ‘We haven’t had enough time,’ he said, reasonably. ‘It’s the weekend. Mr Klinnemann can’t put his hands on that amount of money instantly.’
‘Then he’s not trying hard enough,’ said the distorted voice. ‘If he wants his daughter back he’ll find it. I’ll call back tomorrow morning with the location.’
‘I need some kind of proof that you have Jessica and that she is safe and well. She has a birthmark. Can you tell me where it is?’
‘I’m not playing games. You’ll just have to trust me.’ And the line went dead. There was an audible echo around the room as everyone seemed to collectively sigh, the tension temporarily relieved.
‘What about the voice?’ Mariner asked. ‘Have we had the analysis report on the first recording yet?’
Tony Knox had the paperwork. ‘It’s definitely a man’s voice, but it’s been disguised, muffled somehow.’
‘Professionally?’
‘No, according to this there’s no distortion device. More likely that he’s covering the receiver with something. It’ll disguise the sound of his voice but the vocal pattern will stay the same.’ Knox finished reading. ‘All we need now is someone to compare it with.’
‘Christie said the woman had a northern accent.’
‘That isn’t obvious, though again it could have been deliberately disguised.’
‘I don’t like this,’ Mariner paced in front of the white board. ‘We have no proof that he’s even holding Jessica. I think we should stall him for longer.’
‘It’s a big risk, boss.’
‘What choice do we have?’
Knox’s mobile rang and he went outside to take it.
‘Sergeant Knox, it’s Christie. I thought you should know. Jimmy just phoned me and asked a really weird question. He wanted to know if baby Jessica had a birthmark. I didn’t know and he started getting angry,’ her voice went up an octave and she began to whimper. ‘Why would he ask me something like that? I don’t understand.’
‘You’ve done the right thing, Christie. Where is he? This is important.’
‘I think he’s still at the garage.’
‘Stay where you are, and don’t contact him again,’ said Knox. ‘If he tries to ring you again, don’t answer. Do you understand?’
‘Okay.’
He’d save the bad news for later. Ending the call Knox pushed open the door of the incident room. ‘Boss? We’ve got Zion.’
‘You’re sure about this?’ Mariner said as they bounded down the stairs.
‘Why else would Bond
want to know about birthmark?’
‘He clearly doesn’t have Jessica then.’
‘Unless he’s keeping her somewhere else. But no, I don’t think he’s that bright. He hasn’t got it in him.’
* * *
Bond’s showroom was all locked up as it had been when Knox had called there earlier in the day, but this time when he raced up the fire escape and kicked open the door the love nest was empty, too. By now it was dusk and when they went back onto the street Mariner saw the faintest sliver of light escaping from below a door at the back of the showroom. They hammered on the outer door, fully prepared to break it down. But they didn’t have to. Jimmy Bond appeared, looking amazingly cool, even smiling. He had absolutely no idea that he’d been caught. ‘What can I do for—’ The smile left his face as Knox interrupted to read him his rights, and in one smooth move cuffed his wrists behind his back.
‘I don’t understand, you’ve got the wrong—’ But it was another sentence he didn’t complete. He knew he’d been had.
Bond protested his innocence all the way to Granville Lane. Knowing that he wasn’t holding Jessica, they had the luxury of letting him stew overnight in a cell. Free of that particular false trail there were more important things to do. But Knox did make a further call to Christie, to let her know what had happened. ‘It’s your choice, love, of course, but we’ll be keeping him in at least overnight, probably twenty-four hours. Might be a good time to make yourself scarce. We haven’t told him what you told us but he’ll probably work it out for himself.’ He considered telling her what else he’d learned about Bond that day but decided against it. She’d been hurt enough already. ‘Have you got somewhere you can go?’
‘Yes.’
Almost all the vehicles leaving the hospital car park at around the time of Jessica’s abduction had been accounted for. The only ones that had not been claimed were a dark saloon, possibly a Renault, with a partial index, and a white or silver four-wheel drive. The CCTV enhancement team had provided clearer footage, which they had studied, straining to see who was in the cars. But in both cases the driver’s features were indistinct. It was possible that there could be a passenger in the back, or a child in a child seat, but the vehicles flashed by too fast for them to see. Nonetheless, the grainy photographs of both vehicles were shown on the next national news bulletin, along with all the other details.