A Good day to die

37

Seven years ago, a young girl had allegedly lost her life during a sadomasochistic orgy, during which she was brutally murdered at the hands of a number of men. Five participants had been there that night, according to Dr Cheney. One had been Richard Blacklip. And perhaps one had been Pope, but I didn't even know that for sure. What I did know, however, was that if it had happened as Ann had said (and I believed it had), then the girl in question would almost certainly have been reported missing by someone. It was just a matter of finding out who.

Not for the first time in the last twenty-four hours, I cast my mind back seven years. I have a good memory for heinous crimes. For instance, I can remember the time when three children were murdered by strangers over the course of a weekend, in two separate incidents. The summer of 1994, it had been. I woke up to the news on Capital Radio on a sunny Monday morning. Three kids dead. It made me think that the world really was going mad, and all my efforts as a copper were for nothing if there were still people out there capable of that sort of outrage.

But it's also rare, and seven years ago I could think of no specific case, certainly nothing that was unsolved. It was possible, of course, that one of the paedophiles had sacrificed his own daughter. For most people that's a thought too shocking to contemplate, but, believe it or not, there are people out there who've actually done such things. The thing is, though, they've usually been caught. Kill a young family member and, even if you don't report them missing, someone somewhere's usually going to notice that they're no longer around. Which left me with the conclusion that there was going to be a record of this girl's disappearance somewhere. If I looked hard enough, I'd find it.

My first port of call was a cyber cafe on the Edgware Road. I bought a coffee, went online and looked up the National Missing Persons Helpline.

The National Missing Persons Helpline is a registered charity that deals with the thousands of people who go missing every year in the UK. They include a hundred thousand children under the age of eighteen. That's a lot of kids out on the streets. Thankfully, the vast majority just disappear for a day or two and then come back home, but I remember a representative of the charity telling me a few years back, when she'd come to the station to give a talk, that even if 99.9 per cent of the cases were solved and the kids found, that still left one hundred children completely unaccounted for. It wasn't a thought I wanted to dwell on.

I found the number for general enquiries, logged off and phoned it.

The woman who answered was busy (with a hundred thousand people disappearing every year, it'd be difficult not to be), but helpful, too. I explained that I was a private detective working for the legal team representing a young man who was on remand for murder. Part of his defence was that he'd been abused as a boy by a paedophile ring, and that he claimed to have seen a female child murdered during one incident. The woman at the other end, who sounded in her sixties and was probably a volunteer, gasped when I said this, and I immediately felt guilty.

'To be honest with you, madam,' I said by way of explanation, 'it's not likely that the story's true, but I wouldn't be doing my job properly if I didn't follow it up.'

'No, of course not,' she replied uncertainly.

'Is there any way I can check on this man's claims?' I asked, giving her the dates in question. 'I know you keep records of missing children.'

'We do,' she said carefully. 'We have a comprehensive database and we never remove names from it, even if the person concerned is found, but it's not accessible to the public. And I can't give out any information. However, we are capable of carrying out comprehensive searches of our database, if we receive a request from the police. Can't you go through them? I'm sure they'd be interested.'

But that was the problem. I couldn't.

I knew better than to try to strong-arm the information out of her, so I thanked her for her time and rang off, disappointed but not entirely surprised. If detective work was that easy, there'd never be such a thing as an unsolved case.

I finished my coffee, left the cafe and went to retrieve the car that Tyndall had provided me with. It was a black Kia four-wheel drive that I'd left over near Hyde Park the previous night, and when I got there and eventually located it, it had already received a ticket. No one can accuse London's parking authorities of inefficiency. Still, it didn't bother me. I wouldn't be paying it. I peeled it off, chucked it on the passenger seat, and drove out onto Park Lane, heading for my next port of call.

The British Library's newspaper arm — the place where they keep microfiche archives containing two hundred years' worth of back issues of selected newspapers — is situated in a drab suburb of postwar residential housing in Colindale, North London. The building itself was uglier and smaller than I expected and looked more like a factory or a functional modern schoolbuilding than a library. It faced onto a main road almost directly opposite Colindale underground station.

I showed my false passport at the door as ID and was given a one-day reading pass by the man at the desk. A notice said that all coats and bags had to be left in the cloakroom for security reasons, but luckily he didn't ask me to remove my jacket. If he had done, he'd have probably seen the.45 revolver sticking out of my jeans, and if he'd missed it, plenty of other people wouldn't have. But he let me through with a smile, informing me that archived copies of The Times were kept on the next floor up.

I was going to have to do this the hard way. According to the records, Ann had been taken into Coleman House children's home in Camden on 6 June 1998, and she had claimed to Dr Cheney that the murder she'd witnessed had taken place some weeks before that. I decided to concentrate my search on issues of The Times, from 1 January, to see if there were any reports of children who'd disappeared or had died in unusual circumstances. I felt sure that something like this would be reasonably big news, so I narrowed my search to the first five pages of each issue. It was hardly a scientific methodology, but then I was a one-man band with severely limited resources, and I didn't see any other way.

The microfiche machines were bulky contraptions situated in a darkened back room. I found a spare one and spent the next ten minutes trying to load the film spools containing the editions of The Times from 1 to 10 January, without any success whatsoever, until finally a pretty Spanish student took pity and showed me how to do it.

The year had begun with the usual batch of bad news: Loyalist gunmen on the rampage in Northern Ireland; bloody massacres in Algeria; gangland killings; a string of domestic tragedies. Things didn't improve much either, but then again, when do they?

There was the trial of the teenage thug who'd buried a carving knife up to the hilt in the head of a twenty-eight-year-old charity worker as she sat alone on a suburban train with her back to him, purely because, according to him, she was 'the only target visible'. There was the trial of Victor Farrant, the rapist released early from his sentence who went on to murder his new girlfriend and batter another woman half to death. His girlfriend was a divorced mother of two, and as Farrant was returned to prison (this time, presumably, to complete his sentence), her anguished kids were quoted as asking why on earth he'd been let out in the first place. One, I thought, that Britain's new Lord Chief Justice, Parnham-Jones, might like to answer in one of his fireside chats.

What struck me as I read was the sheer number of brutal crimes committed in the UK by people whose only motive seemed to be the sadistic gratification their violence gave them. In the Philippines, people killed. They killed a lot more than they did in England, as even the most cursory glance at Manila's murder statistics would demonstrate, but in general those killings were the direct result of poverty or ideology. Few people there murdered for pleasure. Here, where people had money and freedom, they did. It was a depressing thought, because it suggested that where the violence of humankind was concerned, things would never get better.

But for the moment, such lofty issues didn't concern me.

I kept reading. Trawling. Searching.

It was time-consuming work. I estimated I was taking about three minutes per issue, so each month was taking me more than an hour and a half. By the time I got to March, it was almost half past three and my eyes were hurting. I thought about stopping for a while, taking a break and ringing Emma to see if she'd arrived home, but I didn't want to lose my place at the machine. One more hour, then I'd call it a day.

1 March — nothing. 2 March — nothing. 3 March, something caught my eye. The bottom of the front page. I read it through; then read it again.

MAN ARRESTED AFTER DAUGHTER GOES MISSING

A thirty-six-year-old man has been arrested by police after his daughter was reported missing by neighbours. John Martin Robes of Stanmore, North London, was taken into custody by police investigating the disappearance of his twelve-year-old daughter, Heidi, who had not been seen for several days previously. Heidi's mother is not believed to live with the family and police were yesterday trying to trace her. Neighbours claim that Robes and his daughter could often be heard arguing loudly, and that Heidi had some behavioural problems. A spokesman for her school said that everyone there hoped and prayed that she would be found safe and well, but added that she had run away before.

There was no photograph.

I took out my notebook and wrote down the details. Then checked 4 March, this time the whole paper, but there was no further mention of the arrest or the fate of the missing girl. Sometimes when a kid from the wrong side of the tracks goes missing — and this is especially true when they've got a bit of a history — there's very little publicity surrounding the disappearance. It can be a lottery. A pretty, middle-class girl under the age of ten from the Home Counties is going to get a ton and a half of newsprint dedicated to her. A tough young thing of twelve, born and bred on a council estate and a teenager in all but name, just hasn't got the same selling power, and in the end, that's what it always comes down to.

But was she the girl I was looking for? I brought up the issue of 5 March, found nothing, then checked the 6th. There, on the right-hand column of page two was a short report sandwiched between news of a strike by Heathrow baggage-handlers and more Anglo-American bombing of Iraqi military installations. It stated that John Martin Robes had been charged with the murder of his daughter, Heidi, even though no body had been found, and was due to appear before magistrates that morning. Again there were no pictures of either accused or victim, but my interest was aroused, the main reason being the lack of a corpse. A corpse provides the police and the CPS with a lot of the evidence they need in order to secure a conviction. Take that away and nailing the killer becomes an uphill task. It made me wonder what it was the police had on Robes. The problem was it wasn't going to be that easy to find out. There was usually a minimum of six months between an arrest and a trial — it can sometimes take as long as a year — so it meant going through a lot more back issues of The Times, or finding a quicker means to locate the date. I decided to use the Web.

There were a number of PCs with Internet access tucked away on the opposite side of the room from the microfiche machines and I found one that was free. On the screen was a large icon representing something called The Times software. I clicked on it and a box appeared, prompting me to type in a keyword. I typed in the name 'John Robes' and looked at my watch. Five to four.

Five seconds later, a list of hits appeared in chronological order. At the top were the articles I'd already picked up in the March editions. After that there was nothing until 26 October, when a few brief lines outlined the first day of the trial of John Robes for the murder of his daughter. There was another piece on 28 October, detailing Robes's testimony on the witness stand, in which he'd tearfully denied all knowledge of his daughter's death, but had been unable to explain how a knife with her blood on it had been found in his house, as well as a bloodstained piece of her clothing. But the trial obviously hadn't caught the imagination of the media or the public, because again the article was short and there wasn't a further mention of the case until 3 November, when a headline announced that John Robes had been found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

I began reading the article. There were photographs this time — one of father, one of daughter. I only took the briefest look at him. He was a youngish-looking thirty-six, with an angular face and dark blond hair in a side parting, and in the photo he was smiling broadly. As is so often the case, he didn't look like a killer. And Heidi wasn't what I was expecting, either. She looked younger than twelve, with straight, light brown hair cut level with her chin and a much rounder face than her dad's. She was smiling too, in the same broad manner as the man who'd allegedly killed her, and her cheeks showed cute dimples. She didn't look like the sort of girl who had behavioural problems.

I stared at her image for a long time, knowing Dr Cheney's description, though very basic, matched with that of the girl smiling out at me. The years have been kind to me where tragedy is concerned, and I've learned to detach myself from the suffering of others, both those whose deaths I used to investigate and those I've caused. But the past few days had stretched that detachment to the limit. The murders of Ann Taylor and Andrea Bloom, two kids fighting against all the odds to make a life for themselves, coming after the death of my old friend Asif Malik, had hit me harder than I'd been prepared for. And now, as I sat there in the forced silence of that darkened windowless room on a cold December afternoon staring at the picture of a girl who'd died, helpless and alone, seven years earlier, for the first time in a long while I felt like crying.

Turning away from the pictures, I scrolled down and continued reading. John Robes, the article stated, had been found guilty of murder after a trial lasting just over a week. Once again, the fact that no body had been found was mentioned, but the forensic evidence of the knife and the clothing, coupled with the further discovery of a bloodstained gardening glove which two witnesses claimed to have seen in Robes's possession in the weeks prior to Heidi's disappearance, proved damning.

Robes had also admitted to having had a violent argument with his daughter on the night he claimed she'd run away, during which he'd struck her, but he continued to deny any part in her death. The jury hadn't believed him, and after a fourteen-hour deliberation had pronounced him guilty. Robes had broken down in tears at this point, and had taken several minutes to compose himself. The judge had then sentenced him to life imprisonment, calling his act 'as incomprehensible as it was barbaric', and had bemoaned the fact that Robes had provided no explanation as to why he'd done it, nor given any indication as to where the body was.

Something caught my eye and I froze. Down at the bottom of the article.

'Jesus Christ,' I whispered audibly, ignoring the looks of the other people on the PCs.

For a full ten seconds I didn't move, the shock rooting me to the spot. I've faced guns before; been shot at; been certain I was about to die. But nothing has ever incapacitated me as much as what I was looking at right now.

Because now I knew what had happened.

Jumping to my feet, I turned and walked away as fast as I could, knowing without a doubt that Ann Taylor's story was true and was the reason she'd died, and that the twelve-year-old Heidi Robes was the victim who had been murdered in the paedophile orgy. And that it was essential that Emma had reached her parents' home safely, because otherwise she was putting herself in extreme danger.

You see, she knew one of the men who I was now sure had been involved on that dark, terrifying night seven years ago; the man who seemed to keep popping up wherever I turned, and who'd been quoted at the bottom of the article as he talked to the assembled press outside the post-verdict courtroom. It had been a harrowing case for all those involved, he'd said, but at least now justice had been seen to be done. Ironic words indeed, but understandable from the man who'd led the police murder investigation.

Detective Chief Inspector Simon Barron.