Critical Incidents. Lucie Whitehouse
I do. She would. Yes.’
When Robin was in her final year of junior school, a local woman was kidnapped. Stephanie Slater was twenty-five, an estate agent, taken from a house she’d been showing in Great Barr, only a few miles away in the north of the city. It became a major national news story, one of the biggest manhunts in British history. Christine and Dennis whispered about it in the other room, waited ’til she’d gone to bed to watch the news, but the details had been in the air, all anyone could talk about: the ransom money snatched from a railway bridge, the coffin-sized box inside a green wheelie bin in which Slater had been locked in darkness for eight days, told that if she moved she’d be electrocuted. After she was released, she described how she’d talked to Michael Sams, and kept talking, so he’d be forced to understand that she was a person, a human being. Her bravery and presence of mind probably kept her alive.
Michael Sams, badger-faced, wooden-legged Michael Sams – by the following year, when Robin started at the grammar school and met Corinna, he’d become a playground bogeyman, the shadowy figure who offered you the bag of sweets, who shoved you into the back of a van as you walked home from the corner shop at twilight. Michael Sams’ll get you.
And then, two years later, barely fifty miles away in Gloucester, came Fred and Rose West.
She and Rin were twelve turning thirteen by then: prime-time adolescence. It had gone on for weeks, the systematic taking-apart of the house at Cromwell Street where, over decades, Fred and Rose had together raped, tortured and killed young women, including their own daughters. White forensic suits on the news, day after day, week after week, another set of remains and another and another, in the garden, in holes dug in the cellar floor. Again her parents had tried to shield her but away from Dunnington Road, she and Rin had followed the news with a horrified fascination, reading the papers, watching the news at Rin’s place when Di was at work and Will, babysitting, was doing his homework in the other room. There were few stories, thank god, as depraved as that. Rose was found guilty on ten counts of murder; Fred, charged with twelve, never stood trial. He committed suicide while on remand at Winson Green, HMP Birmingham, just a handful of miles up the road. Robin remembered: it was New Year’s Day.
Two of the biggest crime stories of the decade, both local, both sexual violence against young women, a double whammy that happened just as she and Corinna became aware of the news, aware that they were – or soon would be – young women, and that monsters were not just in books but opening their car doors to offer you a lift in the rain.
It started with Stephanie Slater, her bravery as she lay alone in the dark, injured and terrified. To Robin, she became a hero, a symbol of strength, and when the Wests and their house of horrors came to light, Robin had an epiphany: that was what she wanted. She wanted strength. She wanted to be a hero. She wanted to break down the door and rescue the next Stephanie Slater. She wanted to be the one who followed the Wests home, kicked Fred in the bollocks, and pulled the girl away from the car, the teetering edge of the void.
That was what she told anyone who asked why she’d decided to go into the police. Over the years, she’d made it sound more and more ridiculous – Behold the high-kicking, karate-chopping teen ninja girl! Marvel at the self-importance, the naivety! – but it was true; it had been the first reason before she had another.
Maggie hadn’t followed the Slater case in the news: she’d worked on it. Not immediately, on the original core team, but as soon as the investigation started to expand. Unsurprisingly, it loomed large in her memory. She’d kept quiet at Valerie’s, of course, but in the car on their way here to the office, she’d brought it up.
‘Kidnap for ransom? Really?’ Robin was dubious. Nothing about the Woodsons’ set-up said money, and Valerie’s only real savings, she’d told them, were in a small private pension that wouldn’t mature for another seventeen years.
‘Remember the Slater case?’ Maggie said. ‘It was her employers, the estate agents, that Sams went after – he wanted their insurance money. Valerie might not have much but Becca works for a silversmith.’
Hanley’s. Battered floral address book in hand, Valerie had given them the number. ‘They make photo frames and candlesticks,’ she said. ‘Hip flasks and the like. Corporate gifts.’
‘They’d have had a demand by now, wouldn’t they?’ said Robin. ‘Thursday to Tuesday – five days?’
‘Yes. Unless …’ Maggie had glanced across. ‘Julie Dart.’
Mentally shafted as she was, it had taken Robin three or four seconds to connect the dots. Then she did.
The investigation into Sams had expanded beyond Stephanie Slater. Based on similarities in the two cases, West Yorkshire Police believed that a year earlier, in Leeds, he had abducted another woman – if woman was the word. Julie Dart had been just eighteen when he’d taken her, a kidnapping ‘dry run’ that went wrong; she’d managed to escape from the coffin-sized box and he’d returned to find her desperately trying to get out of his workshop. He’d killed her.
‘If there’d been a demand, we wouldn’t be on the case, obviously – the police would be all over it,’ Maggie said. ‘But if something went wrong, he – or they – might not have got that far. He might have killed her, jettisoned the plan, like Sams did.’
‘But if it is abduction, don’t you think a sexual motive’s more likely?’
‘I do. But all lines of enquiry at this stage – everything’s on the table until we get something solid. What else? There’s a new notebook in the glovebox there; let’s get some of this down.’
The list was on the table in front of Robin now, a spiral-bound page of parental pain from basic heartbreak to worst nightmare: she’d met someone and run away, upped and left; had an accident; overdosed; killed herself; been killed. The only good-news scenario, really, was that she’d needed to get away and had taken a break somewhere to clear her head. But then why not tell her mother, especially when they were so close? Why put her through this? And wouldn’t she have taken something with her – a few clothes, her washbag? The only things she could see were missing, Valerie said, were the clothes she’d walked out in that morning.
And then there was her phone.
‘Anything in her online stuff?’
Robin clicked back onto Facebook as Maggie stood and came around the table. The picture she’d been looking at was a social-media classic. Taken the Christmas before last, fourteen months ago, it showed Becca and Lucy with their heads together, big living-our-best-lives grins. Slight over-exposure made their lineless skin near-perfect. They were both wearing beanies – Becca’s navy and studded with little silver beads, Lucy’s dark burgundy with a scarf the same colour – and both had long wings of hair protruding from their hats like Afghan ears, Lucy’s light brown, Becca’s darker. In their hands were red cardboard cups, presumably the hot chocolate for sale at the stand behind them, beyond which, just visible, were the Palladian columns of the Council House in Victoria Square. Christmas Market with my bestie! Becca had written. Love winter!
Besties, BFFs – the terms hadn’t existed when she and Corinna were that age. Not that they would have used them anyway – they didn’t make a thing of their friendship like that. Even if she hadn’t been up to her ears in nappies and revision when she was twenty-two, Robin doubted she would have been slinging her arms around her anyway, huddling in for photo after photo. Corinna might have made her do it occasionally – she was more of a cuddler.
She moved sideways to give Maggie a better view. ‘Nothing that rings alarm bells,’ she said. ‘It’s what you’d expect – pictures of her and her mates at parties and pubs, a couple of weddings, the occasional cat video or viral thing of someone doing something stupid. Nothing provocative, no bikini pictures or underwear-posing. I’ve been through all the comments for the past two years