64

BARRETT PASSED ON THE INSTRUCTION AND I SENSED THE room holding its breath. We waited the several minutes it would take for strong young coppers to break down a door.

‘They’re inside,’ said Barrett.

‘If anybody here’s religious, this would be a good time to put it to use,’ said Tulloch in a quiet voice.

‘Nothing on the ground floor,’ said Barrett. ‘They’re making their way upstairs.’

I am not remotely religious, but I was still repeating an old prayer from my childhood, over and over in my head.

Seconds ticked by. Barrett was talking quietly on the phone again. He looked up.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Not a trace of anything out of the ordinary.’

There was a sound of exhalation and I wondered if everyone in the room had been holding their breath. Tulloch sank on to a chair. ‘Thank God,’ she said, dropping her head into her hands.

‘Hang on a minute, Boss, they have found something.’

Every head in the room turned in one direction.

‘It’s an envelope behind the door,’ said Barrett. ‘It’s not been opened but it looks a bit like the one Jacqui Groves had. What do you want them to do?’

‘Open it,’ said Tulloch.

We waited.

‘Another warning note, Boss,’ said Barrett after a second. ‘Press coverage of the Jones and Weston murders and a typed note saying “TIME FOR NUMBER FOUR”.’

Tulloch was on her feet. ‘We need to find Karen Curtis as a matter of urgency,’ she said. ‘She hasn’t seen the note, so may not be on her guard. Tom, can you sort that out?’

Barrett nodded.

‘And get a team talking to her neighbours,’ Tulloch went on. ‘Find out where she works, who her friends are, when she was last seen.’

‘Who’s sending these notes?’ asked Joesbury. ‘The Jones, Weston and Benn mothers weren’t warned.’

‘That we know of,’ said Tulloch. ‘They could have had a note of some sort, just not kept them. Or the killer could have taken them.’

‘Doesn’t make sense to me,’ said Joesbury. ‘If you want to take someone by surprise, you don’t put them on their guard. And why two number fours? Surely the killer knows who he or she’s going for next.’

‘Gayle, get back to the three families,’ said Tulloch. ‘Find out if the mothers received any unusual mail in the days before they were killed. Then find out where these letters were posted. And get them down to Forensics, see what they make of them.’

‘On my way.’

‘OK,’ said Tulloch, as Mizon left the room. ‘After finding Karen Curtis, top of the list is tracking down the Llewellyn sisters. Mark, do you have contacts in Cardiff?’

He nodded. ‘Helped bring down a paedo ring couple of years ago,’ he said.

‘Find out as much as you can about the girls, please,’ said Tulloch.

‘Yes, ma’am.’ Joesbury sat down and picked up the phone.

‘And I want someone to get on to Social Services in Wales,’ said Tulloch. ‘See if they have any record of them. We need to know about family background, school, that sort of thing.’

Across the room, someone volunteered.

‘Neil and Lacey, can you make your way through the other agencies. Start with the DSS.’

DS Anderson and I nodded. It was standard procedure when trying to track someone down. Start with the Department of Social Security. If the two girls had ever claimed benefits, they’d be on the system. Failing that, we’d work our way through the others. If they paid tax, the Inland Revenue would hold records; if they drove a car, the DVLC would have them on file. We’d try the utility companies in Wales and then London. If they’d ever paid a gas, electricity or phone bill, they’d appear on a database somewhere.

‘We’ll meet back in an hour,’ called Tulloch as she left the room.

Fifty minutes later she was back. ‘Jacqui Groves is going to stay with her sister’s family for a few days,’ she said. ‘With a police escort. Anything on the letters, Gayle?’

‘None of the other families can remember their mothers getting any sort of warning letter,’ said Mizon. ‘We’ve got uniform going through the Benns’ dustbin just to be on the safe side. Both the notes and the press coverage were printed out on the usual A4 office paper on a completely bog-standard printer. We’ve got umpteen similar ones here, apparently. No prints yet.’

‘Thanks, Gayle,’ said Tulloch. She turned to the corner desk. ‘Mark?’

Joesbury glanced down at his notes. ‘I ran them both through the box,’ he said. ‘Nothing on Catherine, the younger sister.’

By ‘the box’, Joesbury was referring to the Police National Computer. Anyone who has ever been charged with an offence or accepted a caution will be on it.

‘The older one, though, Victoria, she was a different story,’ continued Joesbury. ‘Two reprimands on her record, both for being in the company of joy-riders. Shortly before the incident, she accepted a final warning for knowingly being a passenger in a stolen vehicle and for exhibiting abusive and anti-social behaviour.’

‘So we’ll have her fingerprints?’ said Tulloch.

Joesbury shook his head. ‘It all happened on the street,’ he said. ‘No prints taken.’

‘They must have been printed,’ said Tulloch. ‘We’ve just been told the girls’ prints were on the condom packet.’

‘Yep, both girls had their prints taken that night,’ said Joesbury. ‘But they went back a couple of weeks later with their social worker and witnessed them being destroyed.’

Tulloch muttered something under her breath.

‘The night Victoria disappeared, she was caught on camera breaking into a car in the city centre,’ Joesbury was saying. ‘They put out an APB on her, but never found her or the car. Technically, she’s still on Cardiff’s wanted list.’

‘They can join the queue,’ said Tulloch.

‘I spoke to everyone I know at Cardiff Central,’ Joesbury went on, ‘but none of them were around eleven years ago. They suggested I speak to a Sergeant Ron Williams. He’s not on duty till tomorrow.’

‘I talked to Social Services in Cardiff,’ said Barrett. ‘The girls’ mother, Tina Llewellyn, was a drug addict and an alcoholic. She served time when the girls were small.’

‘What for?’ asked Tulloch.

‘Dealing,’ said Barrett. ‘All minor stuff. She wasn’t a big player, but it wasn’t her first offence. The girls were sent to a children’s home in the city and then, when they were eight and six, they were fostered.’

‘Go on,’ said Tulloch.

‘The foster placement broke down when the older girl went to secondary school,’ said Barrett. ‘She had a history of truancy, abusive behaviour towards the teachers and suspected shoplifting, although that was never proved. They went back into the children’s home.’

‘Both of them?’

‘Yeah. The foster family were happy to keep the younger girl, but she wouldn’t be separated from her sister. There were several other foster placements over the years – apparently the younger girl was very pretty and could be quite engaging in a quiet sort of way.’

‘Did any of them last?’

Barrett shook his head. ‘They followed a pattern, Boss. It worked for a while, then Victoria would get into trouble, the foster parents would give up and poor little Cathy got dragged back into care. In spite of that, she still managed to do pretty well at school. She was considered university material. Until the alleged rape, of course.’

‘Then what?’

Barrett took a moment to look at his notes. ‘Well, ironically, Victoria seemed to pull herself together for a while. She stopped hanging round with the gangs, made an effort to sort herself out, even started trying at school. But the headteacher says she had a sense of real anger bubbling away inside. Several of the teachers became genuinely afraid of her. And it all started to go wrong for Cathy. She started missing school, she was suspected of taking drugs. There’d be very public rows between the two sisters. One day, Cathy just upped and left.’

‘To go where?’

Barrett shrugged. ‘No one knows for sure. She’d said nothing to any of her friends, not that she had many left by this time. The view at the time was that she’d come here, to London, and was living rough. A few weeks later, Victoria left too. In the stolen car we’ve already heard about.’

‘Are they on the missing-persons list?’ asked Tulloch.

‘Haven’t checked yet,’ replied Barrett. ‘There’s just one snapshot on file. It was taken two years before the rape and isn’t that clear. I’ve blown it up as much as I can without losing too much clarity.’

He passed round a sheet of A4 paper. Joesbury looked at it for a long time. Eventually it came to me. It had been taken in a photo booth, two young girls messing around. The older girl, whom we could only see in profile, was a Goth. Dyed black hair sticking away from her head at angles and falling down over her forehead to meet eyebrows that had been plucked to a pen-stroke. Her mouth had been painted in very dark lipstick and was pursed up as she pouted at the camera. She was wearing a torn black T-shirt that didn’t hide very generous breasts for a fourteen-year-old, and a black leather jacket with lots of metal.

Twelve-year-old Cathy was quite plump, with a wide-mouthed grin and even teeth. Her fair hair was shiny as toffee. She was model-girl pretty and the glint in her eyes said she knew it.

‘And that’s that?’ asked Tulloch. ‘Nothing else?’

DS Anderson held up both hands and shrugged. I shook my head. We’d found nothing. Whatever had happened to Victoria and Cathy over the last eleven years, they hadn’t claimed benefits, paid tax or utility bills or legally driven a car. They’d fallen off the grid, as so many do.

‘Tina Llewellyn, the girls’ mother, died of cancer seven years ago,’ said Barrett. ‘She was a lifelong smoker apparently, got a tumour in her lungs that spread very quickly. She died in a hospice in Mid Glamorgan. No father that we know of. The girls might not even have had the same father.’

‘Actually, Victoria did re-emerge briefly, after about twelve months,’ said Anderson. ‘The girl’s grandfather, their mother’s father, lived up in the Rhonda Valley. They hadn’t had much contact with him even when they were kids, but when he died he didn’t leave a will and the girls inherited his house. Went for about a hundred thousand quid. Victoria claimed it.’

‘All of it?’ asked Joesbury.

‘As far as I’ve been told,’ said Anderson. ‘If she’s a psycho, she’s a psycho with money.’

‘Is that it?’ said Tulloch.

Nobody spoke. That was it.

‘OK, we keep looking. Lacey, we might need you to go out on the streets again, take a team with you, show that picture around.’

‘I can start now, if you want,’ I offered.

‘Actually, I have another job for you and Gayle first,’ said Tulloch. ‘Karen Curtis hasn’t been seen at work for two days, but according to one of her neighbours, she had an elderly mother living close to the river in Fulham. She used to visit her several times a week. It could well be where she’s gone to ground.’

‘You want us to go and check?’ asked Mizon.

‘The mother is frail, by all accounts,’ said Tulloch. ‘No point scaring her with the heavy brigade. Go and see if she can help.’