Lost Souls Read online

  She’d already tried smoking skunk and told him she was interested in experimenting with other stuff too. He’d seen it hundreds of times – in his old life, and in work, now – kids trying to rebel. And the most damaged ones rebelled the most. Looking for ways to numb the pain, to get out of their heads and say fuck you to anyone in their lives who tried to lay down the rules, when no one who was supposed to look after them had played by those rules.

  The whole thing was a ticking time bomb, waiting to go off. That’s what he was saving her from: the pain and suffering of its explosion. The lifelong injuries. He was sending her somewhere she’d be safe and happy. And he’d do it tomorrow.

  He would take her to his special, private place. And, when they arrived at their destination, she’d realise that it was, in fact, the beginning of a new journey. The first page of her new chapter. A part of him didn’t want to have to do the act itself, knew there wouldn’t be any pleasure in it. He might even shed a few tears, like last time. But that shouldn’t discourage him or make him doubt what he needed to do.

  Becoming an angel was the best future she had.

  Friday

  8th January

  Twenty-Four

  Lockhart stepped off the edge and felt his body falling forwards, suddenly weightless as the dark water rose up to meet him. Then his head jerked back, and he was awake again, inside the car. He berated himself for nodding off like that; he could’ve missed something crucial. He flexed his fingers and wiggled his toes, trying to work some life back into their frozen bones.

  If Jess could’ve seen him falling asleep just now, she’d have taken the piss. He recalled how she always used to doze off when they were watching telly. She’d snuggle up to him under a blanket, lean against his shoulder, and before long – regardless of how exciting the programme was – her head would dip, and her breathing would shift into a slow and steady rhythm. He’d tease his wife for it whenever she woke up, asking what her favourite bit had been. But the truth was that in those moments, with Jess napping on him, he’d never felt so content. And he’d give anything to get that back. To get her back.

  He turned on the night vision monocular and peered through it. Nick’s warehouse at the Darent Industrial Park was visible in every shade of green, but nothing was happening. Lockhart checked his watch: 5.34 a.m. Stupid o’clock. He’d arrived about two in the morning. Nick hadn’t even been here tonight. But he couldn’t switch off or let his guard drop. He wasn’t about to let this lead on Jess go cold.

  In the military, Lockhart had always prided himself on his surveillance stamina. But it wasn’t surprising that tiredness had eventually got the better of him here. He’d been out late, visiting homeless shelters and food vans on the other side of town, brandishing Donovan’s photograph, in the same way he’d done countless times with Jess’s image. But no one he’d met had remembered seeing the kid.

  Lockhart would never ask his team to do anything he wouldn’t do himself, which was why he’d still been on the road long after Smith, Khan, Parsons, Guptill and Richards had all gone home to get their heads down. And he knew that combining a murder investigation of that intensity with the search for his wife was unsustainable.

  Make sure you look after yourself, that’s what Green had often said in their therapy sessions. She’d told him much the same thing again last night when she’d called him while he was driving to a soup kitchen in Brixton. She’d been thinking about Donovan’s murder, and expanded on her theory of forgiveness and its significance in the killer’s motivation. Green’s new suggestion was that the killer had been seeking forgiveness for all those who’d wronged Donovan in his life.

  Lockhart didn’t know if that was right, but it had made him think about whether, if he discovered that someone had harmed Jess, he could forgive them. He didn’t reckon so. Despite being a believer in the rule of law, he wasn’t sure he could control himself if he came face to face with a person who’d done something to his wife. More likely, there’d be a different kind of justice.

  Green had gone on to ask him how he was doing, and he knew it wasn’t an empty question or small talk. She actually cared about his answer. Maybe that was the therapist in her, maybe just the human being. The friend, even… He’d said that he was more or less OK – although starting to feel the pressure on this case, especially from Burrows and the media – before asking her the same thing. That was a bit of a role reversal from their past interactions, but he knew her dad was ill, over in the US, and that she would be worried about him.

  He was still thinking about Green when he heard the engine noise behind him and snapped to attention. Moments later, a white van cruised past his parked car and continued on towards Nick’s warehouse, with no sign that its occupants had noticed him. At the gate, the passenger door opened, and a figure hopped out. Lockhart couldn’t see too much detail with the monocular, but the guy was heavy-set and had a beard. He wore a big jacket and beanie hat. He keyed a code into the box at the side and the gate opened. The driver killed the lights and drove through, turning the van and parking as the passenger shut the gate again.

  Lockhart strained his eyes and picked out the writing on the side of the van: J. Tharpe & Sons, Fishermen. And another, smaller word underneath that he couldn’t immediately make out. He adjusted the monocular and it came into focus. His heart thudded inside his chest as he read: Whitstable.

  He observed as the two men went to the main door, took out keys to open the locks, and proceeded inside. Two minutes later they emerged and began shuttling between their van and the warehouse, taking crates in and bringing them out again. As Lockhart watched them moving back and forth, he got the sense that something was off. Then he realised what it was.

  The crates were being carried in as if they weighed nothing, but brought out with obvious physical effort. That meant they were being loaded up inside the warehouse. But why would fishermen do that? They brought the daily catch from the coast into the city to sell it. They didn’t carry empty crates towards London and fill them up at industrial units on the way. He didn’t like it.

  And there was the link to Whitstable, the small fishing port in Kent where Jess and Nick took their family holidays as children. The place where, according to two people, now, Jess was last seen. Lockhart scented something that was too much for him to ignore. If there was even the slightest possibility of connection to Jess, he needed to find out more about the fishermen, J. Tharpe & Sons.

  Eventually, the men finished loading and got back in the van. Lockhart watched them leave and then pulled out in pursuit. He kept well behind them for a couple of miles, long enough to see that they were heading north, towards the river, but he knew he couldn’t stay with them for long. When their van hit the approach to Dartford Tunnel, he peeled off. As much as he wanted to see where they were going, and find out what they were delivering, it’d have to wait. He needed to be back in Putney for the early morning team briefing.

  He still had a killer to catch.

  Twenty-Five

  Lucy Berry knew she didn’t have much time. She pulled up the hood of her duffle coat and buttoned its collar as a barrier against the cold. Her breath clouded in the air as she hurried towards the river and her appointment with Marshall Hanlon. She’d arranged to meet the PhD student in Wandsworth Park for a distanced walk and chat about his research.

  Mindful of Dan’s conditions for her to work on the missing children report, she’d set up the discussion with Marshall for her lunch break, making sure that she completed all her morning tasks in the MIT before leaving. With the murder investigation into Donovan Blair still going full pace on its fourth day, alongside half a dozen other cases that needed her input, she didn’t want to waste a single minute.

  When she got to the meeting point of the big arch by Blade Mews, Lucy was pleased to see that Marshall was waiting for her. She recognised him from his photo on the website of UCL’s Security & Crime Science Department. He was a small, neat man in his mid-twenties, she reckoned, with fi
ne, pointy features. His face put her in mind of the actor Elijah Wood, though the round, thin-rimmed glasses he wore gave him a distinct Harry Potter look. He was still wearing his cycling helmet, his right trouser leg tucked into his sock.

  She dropped her hood, waved at him and, when she got close enough, said, ‘Hello, I’m Lucy.’

  He gave a quick, slightly awkward smile, his limbs stiffening as she got closer.

  ‘You must be Marshall.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thanks so much for coming.’ She gestured to his bicycle. ‘I really appreciate you riding all the way from UCL.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ he replied. ‘I live in this part of town and I was working at home this morning, so, it wasn’t any trouble. It only took me sixteen minutes to get here.’

  ‘Great.’ Lucy rubbed her hands together. ‘Um, shall we walk? It’ll help us keep warm.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Have you been to this park before?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  Lucy waited. He didn’t elaborate.

  ‘Well, it’s super-close to our offices,’ she added. ‘We’re just up the road there at Jubilee House.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Right. But, er, I hardly ever manage to come here, in fact. Even though we’re really nearby.’

  Marshall didn’t respond.

  ‘Most of us just end up taking our lunch breaks at our desks,’ she went on, ‘which I know isn’t good, but we always have so much work to do.’

  He pushed his bike silently, staring at the ground.

  ‘I imagine it’s the same in your department,’ she tried. ‘Busy, busy. Is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It wasn’t often that Lucy found herself the extrovert in a social situation. She decided to give up on small talk. Marshall clearly didn’t enjoy it much, and the clock was ticking.

  ‘So, um, your report was fascinating,’ she said. ‘Particularly the models you developed. Can you tell me a bit more about how you got to those conclusions, please?’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’ Marshall looked relieved to be asked a question about work. He began explaining his study to her, taking her through the assumptions underpinning his analysis and how he worked with the source information, training his computer to identify patterns in the data before spotting the deviations.

  Once Marshall was able to talk about his thesis, he seemed to relax, speaking freely and eloquently. Lucy was riveted. She loved data, and there weren’t many people she could talk to about it like this, even in the MIT where so many of their investigations relied on it. Before she got too carried away though, she reminded herself about the subject matter and why she was pursuing this. Children who had gone missing.

  She waited for a pause before prompting him. ‘And you found the anomaly in south-west London, then?’

  ‘Technically I didn’t find it,’ he replied. ‘The algorithm did.’

  ‘Of course. But it was your algorithm.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘So, what was the exact deviation again?’

  Marshall adjusted his glasses, still pushing his bike along with one hand. ‘If you look at the rate of disappearances by children – under-sixteens, that is – across the UK, it’s broadly consistent nationwide, when you take into account population differences.’

  ‘You mean urban areas being more densely populated?’

  ‘Exactly.’ He turned to her, briefly making eye contact before looking away again. ‘We know that for children and adolescents, many who run away come back within days, sometimes weeks. Usually, they’ve just been staying out with friends or even, sometimes, on the streets.’

  ‘You compare open and closed missing persons cases to see who returned?’

  ‘Right. But in three boroughs of south-west London, consistently over the past twenty-two years, a lower-than-expected number of those children have turned up again relative to the rest of the country. Put another way, more children who go missing in Richmond, Merton and here, in Wandsworth, stay missing.’

  Stay missing. The words chilled Lucy as she thought about what they could mean for each child concerned.

  She cleared her throat. ‘And you’re sure this pattern is correct?’

  ‘Statistically significant with ninety-nine point nine per cent confidence,’ he replied. ‘I’d stake my PhD on it.’

  Lucy knew that science worked by ruling out alternative explanations for a phenomenon. She needed to be sure that Marshall had checked this, at least, before going further.

  ‘Could it be an artefact of something else particular to those boroughs?’ she suggested. ‘Like, um, how Social Services record their statistics?’

  ‘I thought of that,’ said Marshall. ‘But the data aren’t from Social Services. They’re from a combination of six different missing persons websites, as well as the police and National Crime Agency public records.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘The chance of such a pattern occurring by chance is one in a thousand,’ he added.

  ‘Gosh.’ There wasn’t much arguing with those odds.

  ‘This is real.’

  They walked on in silence for a moment.

  ‘How many children are we talking about here?’ asked Lucy.

  ‘Over the expected level of unresolved disappearances, it’s approximately fifteen across all three boroughs.’

  ‘Total?’

  ‘Per year.’

  Lucy’s breath caught in her throat. Fifteen per year for twenty-two years.

  ‘Three hundred and thirty children,’ she stated.

  ‘That would be the central value of the estimate, yes.’

  ‘And what input would you like from me?’

  ‘I want you to check your own records, and obtain Social Services information that I don’t have access to. Then we can feed the extra data into the model, and we might be able to find out what links those children.’

  She wasn’t sure if that’d even be possible, let alone legal.

  ‘Um, let me ask some people about it. I don’t know if we’ll be able to, though. I mean, I’d love to help, but there are all kinds of issues with—’

  ‘There’s something going on,’ he said firmly. ‘And we need to find out what it is.’

  Lucy agreed with the sentiment. She’d become excited about finding a pattern enough times herself, all the more so when the result might solve a crime or help someone. The logistics of what Marshall was requesting were another thing altogether, though.

  ‘I can’t make any promises,’ she said.

  ‘But you’ll find out what is possible?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’

  As they returned to the park entrance, Lucy’s curiosity got the better of her.

  ‘So, what made you get into this?’ she asked. ‘Why this research topic in particular?’

  He stiffened again, as he had when they first met. Took his glasses off and cleaned them on his sleeve.

  ‘Because it’s interesting,’ he said eventually, without looking up.

  ‘Yes, of course. And useful,’ she added. ‘Right, then. Thanks, Marshall. So, you going to be working on this for the rest of the day, then?’

  ‘This afternoon, but not this evening.’ Marshall fiddled with a strap on his rucksack before mounting his bicycle. ‘I’ve got something else on.’

  Lucy expected more detail. But, instead, the PhD student clipped into his pedals and cycled away without another word.

  ‘OK, bye, then,’ said Lucy under her breath, allowing herself a little smile at his eccentricity.

  Twenty-Six

  If Charley had thought going out to the restaurant yesterday was exciting, it was nothing compared to how she felt now. She was meeting him again, and this time he was going to take her to the secret party venue. She’d chosen a more casual outfit today – jumper, jeans and ankle boots – because she didn’t want to look like she was trying too hard to impress him. Now, she was waiting down the road from The Beacon for him to pick h
er up.

  This is how things should be, Charley thought, as she scrolled through the TikTok feed on her phone without really paying attention to the videos. Hanging out with an older man in the evening, driving somewhere in his car, to plan a huge party that would surely make her the most popular teen in town. Or at least in Wandsworth. She was getting a bit cold, though, so it’d be nice if he turned up soon…

  At the sound of a car slowing, she looked up, but immediately back down to her phone screen when she saw it was just some old van. She was surprised when a voice called her name through the open window. It was him.

  ‘Oh, hi,’ she replied, trying to hide her distaste at his transport choice. She’d expected something much cooler. A convertible, maybe, even though it was too cold to put the top down. Or a 4 x 4…

  ‘Jump in,’ he said.

  ‘Er, OK.’

  She had to climb up to get into the passenger seat and was thankful she hadn’t worn a short skirt or mini dress.

  ‘Just stick your bag here.’ He patted the seat between them. ‘Plenty of space.’

  He seemed different to yesterday. Like, tense. Not as friendly. Charley shut the door and he pulled away, checking the rear-view mirror. It was cold inside, and she noticed that his window was half-open. She shivered.

  ‘So, um, is this your car, then?’ she asked tentatively, after they’d driven in silence for a bit.

  He didn’t reply straight away, and she glanced sideways at him. He was leaning over the steering wheel, staring ahead.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It belongs to work.’