Текст книги "Harum Scarum"
Автор книги: Felicity Young
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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 18 страниц)
24
EXCERPT FROM CHAT TRANSCRIPT 141206
HARUM SCARUM: how do u want the story to start?
BETTYBO: ummm ... it was a dark and stormy nite
HARUM SCARUM: LOL ok
BETTYBO: and I want the princess to kill the evil count
HARUM SCARUM: and torture him first?
BETTYBO: yeahhhhhh!!!
Stevie fought her way through the heat, the noise and the crush of traffic to meet up with Izzy and Monty for their picnic tea on the beach. The sea was flat as wine and the sun still bit. It was nearly six o’clock but the sand was still dotted with people. She stopped when she reached the end of the wobbly steps, put down the picnic basket, prised off her shoes and rolled up her jeans. The sand was warm underfoot; she grabbed the basket and made a beeline to the firmer sand at the sea’s edge.
Shading her eyes with her hand she scanned the multitudes for her family. Finally she spotted her daughter in her red bathers, collecting shells in a small yellow bucket.
Izzy ran over when Stevie called, hugged her around the waist and began burrowing about with sandy hands into the picnic basket.
‘Wait on there Miss Greedy; you’re getting sand in the chips. Find Dad for me so we can start our tea.’
‘You won’t be able to find him,’ Izzy said as she lunged again for the picnic basket. This time Stevie was ready for her and swung it away. ‘You won’t be able to find him,’ Izzy repeated, ‘cos I buried him!’
Stevie walked a few steps and searched the surrounding sand. She really didn’t have time for Izzy’s games this evening. Not only were their fish and chips getting cold, she was desperate to get home and start wading through Bianca’s stories plus the sheaves of emails she and Tash had printed from Bianca’s iPod.
Izzy’s hand stopped her in her tracks, preventing her just in time from tumbling over a mountain of sand. ‘Careful, you’ll step on him!’ her daughter warned.
A few cracks knifed their way through the compressed sand and the mountain groaned. Only Monty’s head was visible and it shone from one end of the mound like that of a red painted tortoise.
‘Monty, you idiot, you’re burnt to a crisp!’ Stevie cried.
‘I think I fell asleep.’
‘No sunscreen? No hat? Izzy, go find your father’s hat!’
‘I used it to carry water for my sand castle,’ Izzy said.
‘Then go and get it. Now!’
‘Don’t let him get up, I haven’t finished decorating him yet,’ Izzy called over her shoulder, running off to find Monty’s hat.
Compressed sand slid off his body in great slabs as Monty sat up. He climbed groggily to his feet and shook like a dog, reaching out for Stevie when he almost lost his balance. After planting a sandy kiss on her cheek, he headed to the water to sluice off.
Stevie spread out the picnic blanket and opened up the parcels of fish and chips, the mouth-watering smell reminding her that she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. She managed to hold off until her family returned, Izzy with the hat and bucket of shells, Monty with the smell of the sea on his skin.
While they ate, Izzy regaled them with every second of her day spent playing with her friend Georgia. When they’d finished their meal, Stevie told Izzy that if she wanted to bring her shells home she’d have to first wash them; it was all she could think of to get some time alone with Monty.
‘I had a word with Tash,’ Stevie got in quickly when Izzy skipped off. Monty’s shrug made her pause and she sat poised with the last chip halfway to her mouth. ‘Well, it’s what you wanted me to do, isn’t it?’
‘Forget it, it’s over, let’s drop the subject.’ Monty turned to watch Izzy at the water’s edge. The sea was pulling the sun down; pinks, oranges and mauves smeared the sky around it.
Stevie decided to file the matter of Monty’s strange mood in the too hard basket, to be retrieved later when she had the mental energy for it.
She filled him in on what she and Tash had discovered and gave him the name of the photographer. ‘We should be making an arrest tomorrow.’ She added, ‘I’m hoping the printed documents from the iPod might tell us a bit more about how men like Kusak operate, and maybe give us some details on the Dream Team. I also think that Emma and Bianca knew each other, it’s a long shot but I’m going to follow it through.’
‘Good one, sounds like you’re in for a busy night. Ring me if you find anything more of interest. Oh and by the way, the mystery of Mrs K’s large cash withdrawal has been solved. She was planning on a trip to Italy next month and used it for an airline ticket and other expenses.’
‘Not to pay a contract killer?’ Stevie was hardly surprised.
‘Right, scratch that theory. It’s all on the street kid now.’
He screwed up the fish and chip paper and headed to a bin with it. ‘Hey, what about your mother, aren’t you supposed to pick her up from the station tonight?’ he turned and asked.
‘Oh shit, yes, at eight o’clock.’ Stevie looked at her watch, then pleadingly at Monty as he’d trudged back through the sand to her. ‘Will you, please? You were going to be having Izzy tonight, anyway.’
‘Sure,’ he said, without enthusiasm.
She rummaged in the basket for some sunscreen. ‘Here, put this on, better late than never and it might stop you from peeling.’
He rubbed the lotion into his face, took some time to massage the remainder into his arm. She looked at him for a moment. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’
In reply he handed her back the tube and stooped to rearrange the items in the basket. Izzy returned with her washed shells and insisted they both examine her latest find, a shell with legs.
‘It’s a hermit crab Izz, you can’t take it home, it’ll die and stink the place out,’ Monty said.
Izzy protested and Monty gave in with an unusual lack of conviction. Stevie caught his eye and signalled her concern to him.
‘Just a touch of the sun,’ he said, putting the crab in the bucket.
Stevie ignored the breakfast dishes in the sink and settled onto her sofa with the emails, chat transcripts and printed stories. She’d also left copies with Tash, so they could meet at Central in the morning to discuss them.
Tempted as she was to get started on them straightaway she forced herself to pause, leaned her head against the back of the sofa and closed her eyes, trying to conjure up a portrait of Bianca Webster. Criminal profilers stressed the importance of getting into the mind of the killer, but Stevie knew it was just as important to get into the mind of the victim. Soon the image of the child became so clear in her mind’s eye she could have been watching her from a web cam.
She visualised Bianca dipping a greasy hand into a packet of chips split open upon her desk. She could almost smell salt and vinegar in the air, see the crumbs dropping on to the keyboard, salt sprinkling the strewn papers. With much sighing and brow furrowing, the girl struggled to write coherently, typing with two lead-heavy fingers. She could see her lose concentration and pause to doodle on a piece of scrap paper, or scratch the name Daniel with a compass into the veneer of her desk. When a new email appeared, she’d give it a quick skim and impatiently type back words before they had even formed properly in her brain. Sometimes she got angry, sometimes she cried, sometimes she swore and stabbed at the desk with the point of her compass.
Stevie shook her head to rid it of the images—imagination was a powerful thing and as a cop she should use it with extreme caution: evidence, that’s what she was after. She picked up a bunch of printouts and started to read.
Then read it again.
She should have guessed. Daniel, the name she’d seen carved into Bianca’s desk, was Miro Kusak, not some rock or movie star as she’d earlier assumed.
None of ‘Daniel’s’ earlier emails had been saved to the iPod. Stevie could only guess that Kusak had made the first move, getting Bianca’s email address and photo from the Dream Team webmaster, Lolita. With her email address and the necessary computer skills, it would have been no problem for Kusak to cyber stalk Bianca wherever she chose to travel on the web. She needed to confirm this with Clarissa, but she suspected Kusak had probably infected Bianca’s computer with a Trojan virus disguised as some innocent-looking email attachment addressed from a friend. Once installed on her computer it would forward to Kusak the log files of all her Internet activities.
Stella had told Stevie that her daughter was a loner, often seen sitting in the school playground fiddling with her iPod. Bianca had probably been reading Daniel’s messages over and over again, trying to boost her fragile self-esteem. Stevie closed her eyes and took a breath and waited a moment for the ache of sadness to become manageable again.
The contents of Daniel’s saved emails were sickeningly predictable, flattery and talk about their common interests mostly. ‘I only have one parent too, we have so much in common; we’re soul mates...’ It was what she told the school kids at her talks: the cyber predator closely examines the profile of his victim and makes himself into what they want him to be. Unlike the inexperienced Robert Mason, Kusak seemed to have been able to hold back on the dirty talk—though Stevie had a feeling the needy Bianca Webster would’ve played along regardless.
Shuffling through the papers on the coffee table she picked one up at random, surprised to discover that this correspondence was not from Miro Kusak at all.
> From: B. Webster [[email protected]]
> Sent: Thursday, 12 January 2007 7:35AM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: hi
>
> I hat my life, sometimes I wanna die. He was round the
> otha da & giv mum a blak i . i had to go next door cos
> Mrs smith the naybor thumpd on the wall then took
> mum to the hopital. Her arms broke 2. I hate him. hop
> things r o k with u.
> rite S.O.O.N
>
> lots of Luv bettybo xxxxxxxxxx
This message posed more questions than it answered. Stevie recognised Bianca’s email address and assumed Bettybo to be her Internet nickname. But who was this man who terrified her so and had broken her mother’s arm? The man on the stairwell and by the lake? ‘Bob’ of the mysterious phone call?—or were these men one and the same? Stella had told her she hadn’t seen Bianca’s father since the conception. Was this a stepfather Bianca was referring to, or a boyfriend, and why hadn’t he been mentioned before?
If it hadn’t been so late, Stevie would have been pounding on Stella’s door now, demanding answers.
The email from Bianca was addressed to someone at a Katy Enigma website. At least that was something she could check out now. She moved over to her PC tucked into a workstation in the corner of her lounge room, pushing Izzy’s collection of ‘My Little Ponies’ from the seat before she could sit down.
When the computer was booted up she typed Katy Enigma into the search engine. A Katy Enigma fan site came up at the top of the list, the only complete entry for the name. This meant that Katy Enigma wasn’t the commercial fad she’d first assumed it to be. And since Emma had been telling Izzy Katy Enigma stories, Emma must be a member of this fan site too.
She clicked on the website link and waited for the page to load.
A cartoon figure of Katy Enigma appeared on the screen. The manga style animation had exaggerated eyes, a dark bob and scarlet hotpants with the letters KE emblazoned in fire on the bib.
‘Welcome to the Katy Enigma fan site,’ the large script at the top of the page said. ‘Here you will find original stories featuring super-girl hero, Katy Enigma. Follow the links to read other stories written by fans, the chat room, message board, writing competitions, prizes and lots more!’
The cursor drifted over the web page and she found a link to a message board, then to a form a potential member had to fill out before joining. She filled in the form, gave herself the screen name of bizzylizzy and clicked to submit it. Within a few minutes she was a member of the Katy Enigma site. As her eyes ran down the list of member names she wondered which, if any, belonged to Emma— poshgirl, squeaky, oddmouse, katyfan!
She checked out her own new profile, which she discovered was accessible to all the board members. Her email address wasn’t displayed because she’d ticked the box asking for it not to be. Members could still contact each other through an internal private mailing box without revealing their email addresses. Soon she found Bettybo’s profile and saw her private email address displayed for the world to see. Kusak had already known Bianca’s email address, but even if he hadn’t, she might just as well have knocked on his door and presented herself to him.
‘If that’s how Kusak did it, it’s too easy,’ Stevie mumbled to herself. He must have cyber stalked her via the Trojan Virus to the KE site, joined up as Daniel, pretended to be a Katy Enigma fan and then befriended her through the message board and chat room.
She rubbed her eyes, yawned, scrolled down pages filled with stories by members. Some of the stories were quite long, too long for her to read now. She’d see if she could persuade Clarissa to give up her Sunday morning to look through them, while she questioned Emma about the site.
Stevie made herself a mug of strong coffee and returned to the email printouts on the table.
> FROM [email protected]
> SENT 12 January 2007 8:48AM
> TO [email protected]
> SUBJECT hi
>
> Don’t say things like that Bettybo, life is good. U just
> have 2 think of ways of giving yourself powa. Think of
> Katy Enigma, she wouldn’t kill herself, would she? U cn
> b like KE, clever and fast and cute if u wanna b. luv HS
[[email protected]] 6 Febuary 2007 7:35 wrote:
Danel thinks Im cool and sexy. Im gonna meet him.
[email protected] 8 Febuary 2007 7:52 wrote:
Idiot. He could be any1.
> HS
On 9/2/07 8:49AM, “Bianca Webster”
< [email protected] > wrote:
> well Up yors2!? ur jelos!
As far as Stevie knew, this was one of Bianca’s last notes. She was abducted on 12 February from the Shenton Park Lake and her body found on 14 February at a building site in Midland.
Stevie retrieved her notebook from under the piles of paper and scribbled down what she’d learned from the emails. Someone who called themselves Harum Scarum corresponded privately with Bianca via the Katy Enigma website. ‘HS’ seemed to be doing his or her best to boost Bianca’s brittle self-esteem, playing at pop psychology and attempting to ‘empower’ Bianca through stories featuring Katy Enigma. The printed versions of these stories were now strewn before Stevie on the coffee table. She glanced through them; they ranged from missing puppy scenarios and magic castle hideaways, to princesses, evil counts, anger, blood and vengeance.
Unfortunately this empowerment strategy hadn’t worked. Bianca had needed or wanted further affirmation and she’d found it in the form of Miro Kusak posing as a boy called Daniel. Harum Scarum had tried to warn Bianca off the meeting, an email fight had followed which left Bianca still determined to go ahead.
Stevie didn’t need to replay the remaining events in her head; the picture of the abduction, the abuse, the pump house and the duct tape were still livid in her mind.
She looked back at a chat transcript she’d noticed earlier. In it they were talking about running away: betta 2 get even than run, Harum Scarum had said.
Weariness began to creep in. Stevie yawned and swallowed her last gulp of coffee. Just one final look at the website then she’d call it a night and hand the problems over to the experts in the morning.
Back at her PC she clicked on the stories page and found something short, a poem with no title and no author listed.
Living nightmare, darkest fears, he comes at night.
His gain, my pain, I cry in vain and no one hears.
He is the monster from under my bed.
She thought for a moment, pondering the lines. As realisation dawned she covered her mouth with her hand. Oh God, is this what the site was really all about?
25
Sunday Morning
EXCERPT FROM CHAT ROOM TRANSCRIPT 151206
BETTYBO: he did it again 2me 2day
HARUM SCARUM: u ok?
BETTYBO: I wanna run away
HARUM SCARUM: me2 but we can’t
BETTYBO: ynot?
HARUM SCARUM: betta 2 get even than run
BETTYBO: lik u?
Aidan Stoppard’s Porsche was parked in the Breightlings’ driveway. Stevie laid her hand flat on the bonnet as she hurried past it. Cold.
The black lacquer door opened before she had a chance to knock. Miranda stood before her with panda eyes, pillow hair and pale blotchy skin. When she saw Stevie standing there, she pulled her silk robe tight over her generous breasts, strikingly out of proportion with the rest of her small frame. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said in puzzled recognition. ‘That was very quick.’
‘I only live around the corner from you Mrs Breightling. Central contacted me at home and I came right away.’
‘Who is it?’ Stevie heard a deep male voice from somewhere down the sepulchred hallway.
‘The police, Aidan,’ Miranda called over a porcelain shoulder.
From the distant family area Stevie recognised Aidan Stoppard. ‘Already?’ he queried.
‘They told me you’d reported Emma missing,’ Stevie said. Miranda took a deep breath, the ribs in her chest visibly straining. ‘Yes, yes, you’d better come in. I think she’s been kidnapped!’
With ballerina grace she turned on her bare heels and fled down the passageway into the waiting arms of Aidan Stoppard.
He looked gravely at Stevie as she approached, pushed Miranda gently to the side and handed her his business card. Stevie barely glanced at it, put it in her jeans pocket.
He cleared his throat and explained, ‘I’m a friend of the family, popped in for breakfast. Miranda’s just told me the news.’ He spoke with a slightly flat intonation, the residue of some kind of faded London accent Stevie suspected. The Bill flashed briefly to mind.
She cut him no slack. ‘No you didn’t just pop in for breakfast, you stayed here overnight.’
The tight expression and the straightening of his shoulders told Stevie this was a man not used to being challenged.
‘Emma and I get nervous when Christopher’s away,’ Miranda cut in, as if anticipating an unfavourable reaction from Stoppard. ‘And Emma’s prone to nightmares. She feels more secure with her Uncle Aidan around.’
Stoppard relaxed, spoke with a flash of white teeth, ‘There you go then, sorry about the white lie, officer. People will talk and Miranda has a reputation to maintain. Christopher knows I stay here—the spare room’s a home away from home for me.’
‘Of course it is.’ Stevie didn’t bother to hide her sarcasm. Emma had told Stevie the other night that she didn’t have problems with nightmares, that she was usually able to control her bad dreams. So which one of them was lying and why?
Emma had also told her that her mother and Aidan Stoppard were lovers.
She regarded Stoppard closely; he wore white pants and a lightweight dark polo neck. When she’d seen him the other day from the car, she’d assumed his hair had been wet from the shower, now she realised it must have been slicked down with gel. In contrast to Miranda’s dying swan look, Stoppard looked clean, neat and pressed, as if he’d at least had the time to shower and change while Miranda was making her frantic calls to the police.
He fingered a longish curl behind his ear where a single diamond stud gleamed. ‘Err, don’t you want to hear the details?’ he asked.
Stevie glanced at Miranda. She wasn’t looking at either of them, but was busy rolling the hem of her robe back and forth between her fingers.
‘Go on,’ Stevie said.
‘I heard screaming from Emma’s room. I rushed in and turned the light on. She woke up, seemed very embarrassed, said she had a nightmare and apologised for disturbing me.’
‘She often gets night terrors,’ Miranda stammered. ‘When she was younger it was always the monster from under her bed. I would’ve gone if I’d heard her, but I’d taken a sleeping pill and was out for the count.’
A hollow feeling grew in the pit of Stevie’s stomach.
‘And what time was it that you went into Emma’s room, Mr Stoppard?’ Stevie asked, the hollow feeling turning to dread.
‘About one o’clock, I’d say.’
Stevie kept her voice level. ‘Did she say anything else?’
‘She said there was a man in her room. I searched it, looked in the wardrobe, under the bed, out the window—just to humour her, yeah? She seemed reassured by this and went back to sleep. I feel like a right prat now of course, I should have believed her.’
‘Stupid, Aidan, stupid,’ Miranda spat, the air around her crackling as if with static. She reached for a glass half filled with orange juice, and downed it in a couple of swallows. Aidan looked at her, his eyes narrow with anger. But when Miranda returned his glare, Stevie was sure she saw something else flash in them.
Stevie asked Miranda to take her up to Emma’s room. Stoppard followed them up the stone staircase.
The room wasn’t the orderly high tech sanctuary Stevie had imagined. The single bed was a mess of twisted sheets and the chair near it upturned with one of the curtains draped over it as if yanked from the track. Hot air and flies poured in through the open window.
‘Was the room like this when you first checked on Emma, Mr Stoppard?’ she asked as she looked around the room. A pile of magazines seemed to have been tipped from the desk and fanned across the floor. She glanced at the titles, mostly computer mags but also copies of New Scientist and Psychology Today. A softball bat lay at an angle next to them.
‘No, it was a lot tidier than this,’ Stoppard replied. ‘But the window was open and I closed it.’ He hesitated, the silence sounded contrived, as if he was willing himself to at least sound repentant. ‘It does look like she was telling the truth after all, doesn’t it? It wasn’t a dream, the man was real and he must have come back later and taken her.’
A World Vision poster on the pin board above Emma’s desk had a picture of a small African boy pinned onto it. There was also a snap of a khaki-clad man on the board, crouching down as if to examine a ragged line of African children. The picture seemed old and the colours faded.
‘Who’s that?’ Stevie said, pointing.
‘Her father, years ago, before we were married,’ Miranda replied with a dismissive wave of her hand.
A comfy armchair next to Emma’s desk was covered with a Mexican throw rug and a well-worn teddy bear was sitting on it. It hadn’t occurred to Stevie that Emma would be the kind to hang on to an old teddy—her grandmother’s encyclopaedia maybe, but not a teddy. A postcard was propped upon the Teddy’s arms, showing a rolling scenic view with a European castle in the foreground. She swallowed down the growing ache in her throat. You’re all right Emma, you’re safe; I know you are and I’ll find you.
Stoppard followed her movements intently, joining her at the bedroom window when she moved over to examine it. ‘Did you lock this after closing it?’ she asked him.
‘No, I’m afraid not,’ Stoppard said. ‘It didn’t cross my mind; it’s on the second floor, isn’t it. It would be pretty hard for someone to get in.’
‘Stupid, Aidan, stupid,’ Miranda spat again.
Stoppard briefly closed his eyes and rubbed the back of his head as if it ached.
Stevie peered down through the open window. Emma’s room was at the front of the house, the view of the road blocked only by a line of skinny pine trees. She could see the flyscreen lying in the garden bed next to the wall on which a rose trellis was tacked. Part of the trellis looked as if it had been prised away from the wall, the young rose left to waver in the breeze.
‘Is this damage new, Mrs Breightling?’ Stevie pointed to the trellis.
Miranda moved next to her and peered down. ‘Yes, I think so. The gardener only put it up last year.’
‘Do you think that’s what the man climbed up to get through the window?’ Stoppard asked.
‘Possibly,’ she said curtly, mentally noting the vacuousness of the question. A car pulled up and she saw Monty step out of an unmarked police car and behind him a blue and white with a couple of uniformed officers.
‘My colleagues have arrived, they’ll need to talk to you,’ she addressed the hovering couple. ‘Scene of crime officers will be searching this room and the rest of the house.’ She cocked her head to Emma’s PC. ‘We’ll need to take this too. Has Doctor Breightling been notified of Emma’s disappearance, ma’am?’
‘Mr Breightling, not Doctor Breightling,’ Miranda corrected. ‘He’s a surgeon. Yes, he’s due home today, any minute in fact. Aidan rang him and he was already driving home from the airport.’ She looked down at her attire and let out a dramatic sigh. ‘I suppose I’d better go and get dressed.’
Stevie met Monty in the hall and filled him in on Emma’s disappearance. She also took the opportunity to mention some of her discoveries from the previous night.
‘So, who is this Harum Scarum character?’ Monty asked when she’d finished. ‘Adult, kid, male, female?’
‘I’ve no idea, I’m handing the problem over to Clarissa as soon as I get away from here.’
‘But you think this Katy Enigma site, this Harum Scarum, supports abused kids—it’s not just another way of gaining their trust and conning them?’ he queried, rubbing his chin.
‘I’m not sure of anything yet. It’s just that some of the stories and poems are very suggestive. And no, I don’t think it’s a scam. I think any actual counselling support that goes on probably happens in private emails, like those between Harum Scarum and Bianca. But the thing is, I think Emma’s involved with this website too. Not only did she tell Izzy Katy Enigma stories, but there’s an anonymous poem on the site that sounds like something she may have written. It implies abuse.’
Monty cocked an eyebrow; a website helping abused children becomes undermined by paedophiles—the irony wasn’t lost on Stevie either.
‘So this site might have been discovered by another paedophile who’s now taken Emma?’ Monty asked.
Stevie sighed. ‘I don’t know what to think. I can’t believe Emma would be conned as easily as Bianca.’
‘It’s a stretch, Stevie.’
‘It’s all we have.’
They heard the sound of an approaching car. Through the open front door they watched a silver Mercedes turn into the driveway and pass into the garage through an automatic roller door.
Monty tipped his head toward the closing garage door. ‘The father?’
‘I guess so, I’ve never met him.’
‘Is the mother still getting changed?’
‘She doesn’t change,’ Stevie said. ‘She sheds.’
A tallish man in a well-made suit, Christopher Breightling had quick blue eyes which spent more time flitting between his friend and his wife than on Monty who was speaking to him.
‘We’ll need to put a recording device on your home and mobile phones,’ Monty continued with his brief. ‘If she’s been kidnapped for money, you’ll probably be getting some kind of a ransom message soon.’
‘But what if she’s been taken by a pervert,’ Miranda said. ‘What if we hear nothing until she’s found like that last girl, dumped in a garbage bin?’
Christopher’s shoulders slumped as he sat at the breakfast bar. His hand slid across the granite surface to clasp his wife’s, which lay unresponsive under his. He slowly released it as if he was well aware of the futility of his gesture, his features taking on a stamp of defeated weariness.
There was constant coming and going as police officers photographed and dusted for prints, searched the house. The garden bed below Emma’s bedroom window had already been examined, the SOCO officer reporting the discovery of several similar bare footprints, approximately women’s size five.
‘Has Emma ever run away from home, Mrs Breightling?’ Stevie asked.
‘No, why should she?’ Miranda replied with a prickly look.
‘I don’t claim to know Emma particularly well, but I did get the impression from talking to her the other day that she wasn’t happy at the moment.’
‘Then I don’t think you know her at all,’ said Christopher Breightling. ‘She is a perfectly happy child.’
‘There was only one set of footprints under the window, Mr Breightling,’ Monty said. ‘And we think they might be Emma’s. We found no evidence of prints belonging to any one else. We think Emma might have climbed out of the window herself.’
‘The man might have gone down the stairs and grabbed her from the front of the house when she was trying to escape him,’ Stoppard persisted with his theory.
Stevie ignored him and spoke to Christopher. ‘When I was chatting with her the other day, she told me she didn’t want to go east to boarding school.’
Christopher lifted his head in surprise. ‘What? She told you that?’ He glanced at his wife.
Miranda shrugged.
A physical and emotional wreck when she’d first admitted Stevie to her home, Miranda was now a different woman. Made up, hair coiffed and wearing an elegant fuchsia sundress, she could have been on her way to a garden party rather than being questioned over her daughter’s possible abduction. Did she care at all? While there was no prescribed script for this kind of emotional trauma, Stevie couldn’t help comparing Miranda’s appearance to the empty shell that was Stella Webster.
Stevie excused herself from the group in the family room and made her way to the front of the house where she found the SOCO sergeant in the hall. She asked him to accompany her to the master bedroom, which had yet to be searched.
The gown Miranda had been wearing lay crumpled in the middle of the floor, one discarded slipper, then another, followed by some knotted panties, formed a trail to the ensuite bathroom. She skirted the puddles on the floor, took in the dripping mirror, flapped her hands at the steam still hanging in the air. Lipsticks and lotions, bottles and tubes of make-up lay strewn across the vanity top.
Stevie slipped on a pair of latex gloves and prised the lid off a bottle of natural health pills near the sink, tipping a few into her hand.
‘Do these look like echinacea tablets to you?’ she asked the sergeant. He bent to examine the small white pills in her palm. Without answering, he picked up a pestle and mortar from the bench top and ran his fingers along the marble surfaces, showing Stevie the fine white powder on his fingertips.
