Kim tried to keep the sadness out of her mind. Sadness that by all accounts this man had been one of the best detectives on the force. He’d been dogged and determined, and he’d met every case with the same level of passion, commitment and effort. But his energy had been like a dial he had not known how to turn off. At home, she had a dodgy gas ring on her hob. It worked perfectly at full power, but the second you tried to turn it down the thing went off. She tried not to be saddened further by the fact that despite the people he’d helped during his career, he was now without family, and his crusty manner appeared to have left him also without friends. Even sadder was the fact the man still dressed in a suit and tie as though ready to go to work.
‘Yeah, we’ve been asked to take another look at it,’ she answered.
‘Take my advice: save yourself the time and work on something you’ve got a chance of solving.’
‘You don’t think we’ll ever find Melody Jones?’
‘Nope cos she’s my punishment and—’
‘Punishment for what?’ Kim asked, pulling her stool closer to the table.
‘Forget it. Those thoughts are best left in my head to fester. Ask your questions and then fuck off and leave me alone.’
He took a good long drink of his old pint, finishing off half the glass. He moved the new one to an easy reach spot in front of him.
Kim decided to take his advice before he had much more to drink.
‘Talk to me about Melody’s family.’
‘Jesus, there’s no foreplay with you, is there? You must be a right—’
‘Did you suspect any of them of being involved in her disappearance?’
‘Not at first, cos you don’t really, do you? The mother seemed concerned, a couple of the younger siblings were a bit tearful, and the older ones were rallying around, except one who kept his distance, almost like he didn’t want us getting too close and asking him questions.’
‘Did you try?’
‘No, we fucking didn’t, so let’s just leave it at that, eh?’ he spat.
‘Okay,’ she said, wondering why that had hit a sore nerve. She backed off, unwilling to piss him off to the stage of non-cooperation until she’d asked all her questions. ‘You said you didn’t suspect the family at first but what changed?’
‘Over time, and I’m talking just weeks, Lyla became very keen on doing TV, radio, magazine and newspaper interviews. It got so we could barely get near her for questioning cos someone or other was in the house or she was going to them. At first, we appreciated her efforts to keep Melody’s name out there as the few leads we had dried up, but there was something not right. It was like she was enjoying the attention. For years she’d been Lyla Jones, mother of seven off Hollytree, and then she was Lyla Jones, mother of missing girl, Melody. It’s like she was somebody finally. Robbie Jones still wouldn’t talk to us about anything, and then the parcels and envelopes began to arrive. Money, presents, all kinds of stuff turning up by the bag load. The more Lyla appeared, the more stuff turned up.’
Kim thought about the woman’s most recent appeals and the bin liners in the living room.
‘You think they were using Melody’s disappearance to make money?’
He shrugged. ‘One of my team caught Robbie flogging the stuff on a car boot. Nothing we could do cos the stuff wasn’t solicited. It was all gifts.’
There was no law against it, but Kim felt that familiar distaste rise in her mouth. Most families might have donated the gifts and money to charity.
‘You wanna just tell me what you think?’ Kim asked candidly.
He took another long swig. ‘Why not? It’s not like I think about anything else. This bloody case is stuck in my teeth like a piece of dry pork. Never stopped imagining the suffering that little girl went through just because I couldn’t bring her home. What she must have gone through.’
He took another drink, prompting Kim to wonder how long after the Jones case his drinking had intensified. Was this the case that had pushed him over the edge?
‘If I’d have only pushed the boss harder, we might have found her, brought her home, given the family members that cared closure and a body to bury.’
Kim pushed away thoughts of another little girl, taken that day, frightened and alone, or worse.
‘Pushed the boss harder on what?’
It was clear that it was self-blame that had haunted this guy for a quarter of a century. The case had become his personal failure and he beat himself with it every day.
‘I wanted him, begged him to let us go in harder on the family, make them sweat a bit, but the boss wouldn’t hear of it. Back then it was okay to suspect the family members quietly, but it wasn’t acceptable to go hard, cos if you were wrong and it got out… Well, let’s just say that careers never recovered from that kind of exposure if it was made public, and my DCI wasn’t going to allow that to happen to him. Ironically, he had no such compunction when it came to shagging the wife of a prime suspect in a double murder, which cost him his job, but no, we couldn’t put a family under pressure to find a missing kid.’
‘You really think they were involved?’
‘Look, it’s been so long now I’m not even sure what I think anymore, but I’ll tell you this. Melody Jones had a miserable life, but it was a life she knew. She was pretty much ignored as the youngest, didn’t have many friends and then she disappears and not one person saw a thing. Not one. How does that happen on an estate of four thousand people?’
Kim shook her head and waited for him to continue.
‘Until Karen Matthews came along and did the unthinkable with her own daughter, we weren’t allowed to suspect family members to that degree.’
‘But surely if that was the case Melody would have been miraculously found not long after.’
He shrugged, and his face seemed to crumple.
‘I still look for her, you know. Her little face is never far from my mind. Sometimes I think I see her in a shop, or in a playground. In some part of my mind she’s still that little girl that went missing twenty-five years ago, but the good sense I’ve got left knows that she’s been dead for years.’
‘You think something went wrong and she died at the hands of her family?’
He looked at her for a full minute before opening his mouth again.
‘Or maybe they realised she was more valuable to them dead.’
Thirteen
Kim had already worked out that by taking the back roads and with a good wind, she could take a quick detour and still get to Wombourne to take Penn off Harte watch at around eleven.
Kates Hill was an area that had reportedly been the scene of chaos in the 1600s when parliamentarians used it as their base in the civil war against King Charles I. Many of the roads were named in honour of parliamentary figures, and it was on Cromwell Street that she was parking now.
‘Okay, boy, be good,’ she said to Barney as she got out the car. She’d make sure he got some good exercise and a few dog treats once they got to Harte’s house.
She took a quick look around as she walked up the path. The area had not been developed residentially until the 1830s when large numbers of houses were built to accommodate people moving to the Black Country to work in the ever-growing number of factories and coal pits.