FORTY-FIVE

Kate

THURSDAY, APRIL 12, 2012

She rang DI Sinclair early that morning, eager to hear the latest in the investigation before the Editor’s news conference. She hoped the officer would have something for her. She and the DI were getting on like a house on fire after their shaky start. She’d made sure of that. This was a story that could run and run, and she was going to keep him onside, whatever that took.

So she behaved herself, never straying from the official lines. It had been a happy collaboration so far; the DI was very pleased with the public response provoked by the Post’s story—mothers who’d given birth at the same time as Angela, the nurses who’d searched for Alice, even one of the officers who had investigated the case. Their chats had got cozier.

Kate now knew he had kids the same age as hers and he supported Spurs.

“Hello, Andy,” she said. “Sorry to be an early bird. How are you?”

“Been better, Kate,” he said, sounding weary.

“Sorry to hear that. Heavy night?”

“No. Not really.”

He hesitated and she let the silence force him to continue.

“Look, something has come up on the Alice Irving case. Bit of a problem. Can we talk off the record?”

“’Course,” she said, brain on full alert. “Problem, Andy? What kind of problem? Is it the DNA tests?”

“No, no. The match is solid. But there is a major snag with the timeline.”

Kate pulled out her notebook. Off the record now but she wanted to get it all down for later. In case things changed.

“Go on,” she said.

“As we know, Alice was taken on March 20, 1970,” DI Sinclair said.

“Yes . . .”

“Well, she wasn’t buried in Howard Street until the 1980s. Couldn’t have been.”

“What? Why? How do you know?” Kate said.

“Forensics are telling us the paper wrapped round the body was from the eighties—something to do with the ink on the newsprint, haven’t got the details in front of me—and we’ve been looking at the history of the site. Should have done it earlier but the DNA match blindsided us. Anyway, the houses had tiny concrete yards, not gardens, until the end of the seventies. The yards backed onto a Boys’ Brigade hall and workshops. The buildings were only knocked down in 1979 when the houses were bought by a developer and the gardens extended. So the body couldn’t have been buried before then.”

Kate swallowed hard.

“Peter, the lad who found the body, said there were concrete foundations in the garden,” she recalled. “They were digging them up. Underneath where the urn was.”

“Did he? I’ll go back to him,” DI Sinclair said, making his own notes.

“So, what does this mean, Andy?” The million-dollar question.

“I suppose it means that Alice’s body must have been kept somewhere else for ten years.”

“Christ. This is all becoming pretty macabre.” Who else knows this? she thought.

“Indeed,” he said, adding as if reading her thoughts, “No one outside the team knows yet, Kate. I haven’t even told Angela. Want to be absolutely sure we’ve got everything right.”

“I’d love to write this, Andy.”

“Yes, I bet you would. Hold off until tomorrow, though, Kate. Then you can write as much as you like. I need your help getting this new timeline out there.”

“’Course. Whatever we can do to help.”

Her brain was racing. Who was living in Howard Street a decade later? Where would you keep a body?

“Thanks for telling me, Andy. I’ll sit on the info until you are ready. Let’s talk later,” she said.

“Okay,” he said.

•   •   •

She rang Bob Sparkes immediately. Her touchstone.

“Kate,” he said. “I’m driving. I’ll put you on loudspeaker.”

“Right. On your own?”

“Yes. Why? What’s happening?”

She told him the highlights of the conversation with DI Sinclair and he left her hanging while he thought it through.

“The body could have been kept anywhere in the country for ten years. Throws the whole investigation into the air again. Could have been someone already living in the house who needed to move the body, or someone who moved in and brought the body with them.”

“Or one of the workmen working on the demolition of the Boys’ Brigade hall?” Kate added.

“All possibilities. Poor Andy Sinclair. Does Angela know?”

“Not yet. Glad it’s not me telling her.”

“And me,” Sparkes said. “Keep in touch, Kate.” And gone.

Joe arrived as she put her phone down.

“You’re in early, Kate,” he said. “Have I missed anything?”

“You could say that, Joe. Sit down,” she said quietly. “Bit of a spanner in the works as far as Alice is concerned.”

“What, what?” Joe stuttered, wheeling his chair closer to Kate so he could hear. “What’s happened?”

“We’ve got to fast-forward to the 1980s, Joe. Alice was buried in Howard Street in the eighties, not the seventies. But no one else can know yet. Andy Sinclair told me this morning but it’s still unofficial.”

Joe rocked back in his chair. “But she wasn’t killed in the eighties . . .”

“No, or we’d have the body of a ten-year-old, wouldn’t we?”

“’Course, ’course,” he said. “Just thinking out loud. So where was the body for ten years?”

“Exactly,” Kate said. “And who buried it in Howard Street? Let’s concentrate on that.”

“Well, it couldn’t have been Marian Laidlaw,” Joe said. “I looked for her last night in the records and she died in 1977.”

“God, that was young. What a bugger,” Kate said. “Well, it was a long shot—Len Rigby said she had an alibi—but it would have been a great story if she’d confessed all these years later. So who was alive at the time?”

“Barbara,” Joe said. “She was living in one of the houses then.”