Stolen. Paul Finch

take as long as it needs to, I’m afraid, Mrs Rodwell. We have a pensioner missing, and we’d like to get to the bottom of whatever’s happened to him. So, I’d like you both to throw your minds back to Tuesday. Not just the night, but during the daytime as well. Did anything unusual happen? Doesn’t have to be serious, but anything that seemed like a break from the norm, apart from the telly being left on?’

      Their faces turned blank as they tried to think it through.

      ‘You didn’t hear any raised voices, perhaps?’ Lucy prompted them. ‘Any shouting or even laughing?’

      They still looked blank.

      ‘Any vehicles coming and going? Maybe at the back of the house?’

      ‘Oh yes, wait …’ Sam Rodwell said. ‘There was something like that. Hell, I think this was on Tuesday night too. We heard like a screeching of tyres along the Backs.’

      Lucy watched her carefully. ‘Definitely along the Backs?’

      The young woman nodded. ‘Like a vehicle was tearing away, you know. It was quite unusual, because it’s very narrow back there.’

      ‘Yeah, I remember that now,’ her husband said. ‘Only lasted a second and then it was gone.’

      ‘What time would this have been?’ Lucy asked.

      ‘I don’t know.’ Sam thought about it again. ‘We weren’t in bed at that stage, so not too late. Half-past ten, something like that.’

      ‘You don’t really think something bad could have happened to Harry, do you?’ Alan asked, finally sounding concerned.

      ‘That, sir,’ Lucy replied, ‘is what I’m trying to discover.’

      ‘What do we think about the daughter?’ Stan Beardmore asked from Lucy’s laptop screen.

      Lucy sat back in her office chair. ‘I think she’s genuine. She took a long time coming around to check, but she lives in Blackburn, plus she’s a radiographer at the hospital there, so she works shifts. Sounds like this morning was the first chance she had to visit.’

      ‘And the neighbours?’

      ‘There’s no one in No. 6. An old lady owns it, but she’s in long-term care. The Rodwells, the couple who reported the speeding vehicle, live at No. 10. I don’t get any particularly bad vibes about them. Typical young suburbanites. Bit self-centred maybe, but who wasn’t at that age?’

      ‘These were the ones Hopkins didn’t get on with?’

      ‘I don’t think it was a case of him not getting on with them. Sounds more like the odd disagreement. Plus, if they were involved, wouldn’t they just have turned his telly off, locked the house up, tried to make it look like he’d gone away?’

      ‘Not if they wanted to make it look like he’d been attacked by an intruder,’ Beardmore suggested.

      ‘Outside his house at the back?’ Lucy said. ‘Late at night? If you were making a story up, would you seriously expect someone to buy that?’

      Detective Sergeant Kirsty Banks, who was sitting on the desk behind Lucy, now cut in. She was a hefty woman, with an unruly mop of blonde hair and a penchant for wearing big cardigans over her T-shirts and jeans, though as it was warm today and electric fans whirred in the otherwise empty CID office, the cardigan at least had come off.

      ‘I must be honest, Stan,’ she said, ‘if the Rodwells had done something to Harry Hopkins, and were trying to make it look like an intruder, surely they’d have wrecked the interior of his house … tried to make it look like a burglar had broken in?’

      ‘That’s your gut instinct, is it, Kirst?’

      ‘I think Lucy’s on the money. This needs further investigation.’

      Beardmore thought about it. From his open-neck polo shirt, the garden chair he reclined in, the kids running around the lawn in the background and the muted conversation of friends and neighbours, he too was spending his Saturday at a barbecue.

      ‘Lucy,’ he eventually said. ‘What other work have you got on?’

      ‘Just bottoming off the paper from the dog-fighting arrests,’ she replied.

      ‘Get that done ASAP. Then you’re on this exclusively till we get some kind of result.’

      ‘No probs.’

      ‘Kirsty … how buried is Tessa Payne?’

      Banks flicked through the crime log. ‘Not very. Plus, she’s on call today.’

      ‘Okay. Lucy … you’ve got Tessa.’

      Lucy nodded. That would suit Tessa, she thought. The youngster had come into CID excitedly, and even more so on learning she’d be working with Lucy, whose recent results had caught the imagination of many young women in the job. Whether having an adoring student along for the ride was ideal for her, Lucy was less sure, but help was help.

      ‘Right … you all know what you’re doing.’ Beardmore reached forward to switch off his laptop. ‘If you need me, get on the blower.’

      ‘Oh, boss …?’ Lucy said.

      ‘Yeah?’

      ‘Can we copy Serious Crimes Division in?’

      Beardmore sat back, looking suspicious. ‘Why?’

      ‘I don’t know …’ She shrugged. ‘But I’m hearing second-hand that some homeless people have dropped out of sight recently.’

      Beardmore pondered this. ‘Pensioner age?’

      ‘They’re older people, certainly. And two different sources have now drawn my attention to it.’

      ‘Any suggestion these mis-pers have been abducted?’

      ‘I don’t know about that. I’ve not looked into it yet.’

      There was a long pause while he considered it.

      Lucy had already mentioned the vehicle at the back of Harry Hopkins’s house, but she’d purposely said nothing about a black van. In truth, the thought had occurred to her immediately on hearing about the screeching tyres, but, on reflection, it was a real stretch. Firstly, no evidence had been found that any such vehicle existed. From the outset, the black van had been more legend than fact. They’d gone after Les Mahoney through intel received by the RSPCA. It had seemed possible at the time that there was a connection with this rumoured black van, but it wasn’t the van, or any vehicle in particular, that had led them to his farm. Secondly, even if the black van was real, dog-napping didn’t easily equate to kidnapping. Where was the actual link between the two?

      ‘Copy Serious in if you want to,’ Beardmore said, interrupting her thoughts. ‘But be careful how you word it. Tell them this whole thing is open-ended as yet, and we’re only marking their card. Underline that we’ve observed nothing thus far to make us suspect that a series of abductions is under way.’

      Lucy nodded and Beardmore leaned forward again and cut the call.

      Banks stood up. ‘Big difference in MO, that, Luce. Grabbing someone from off the streets and grabbing someone from their own back door.’

      ‘I know …’ Lucy was equally uncomfortable with it. ‘Hunch, sixth sense, whatever you want to call it.’

      ‘Well, don’t beat yourself up too much.’ Banks headed back to her own desk. ‘Hunch and sixth sense have caught killers in the past.’

      Killers, Lucy thought.

      She wouldn’t have used that word herself. Not yet. But there was something disconcerting about all this, and the weirdness didn’t reduce it to merely silly. Despite the arrests at Wellspring Lane, over twenty dog-napping cases were still wide open, along with rumours that a late-night vehicle had been prowling the housing