Vanished

Chapter 32

Jack lay on his back with one arm tucked beneath his head and the other wrapped around Maggie. They often fell asleep cuddling, then he naturally rolled away at some point during the night. But, tonight, Jack had not yet been to sleep, so their position had not changed.

There was so much his team didn’t know because they weren’t leading. There was so much deemed irrelevant to the murder investigations, yet relevant to the drugs investigation. But Jack didn’t trust anyone except his own team to make such important calls. Jack hated being so far away from the front line. He had to focus! Which was hard because his mind didn’t move in a linear fashion. Jack was happy to be distracted by details when they leapt out of a pile of evidence like luminous signals screaming, ‘Follow me!’ When the evidence spoke, you listened. Always. But some officers didn’t know how to. Steve Lewis certainly didn’t.

A thought from days ago suddenly resurfaced in Jack’s tired mind. ‘Last I heard, he’d gone straight because he bagged himself a beautiful young girlfriend — titled, I think. Then she OD’d on sodium pentothal.’ Julia shook her head in disgust. ‘Wonder where she got that from.’

Jack was suddenly wide awake and thinking hard. It was 3.42 a.m. when he looked at the clock for the last time before finally falling asleep.

As soon as the clock on Jack’s mobile screen ticked to 7.30 a.m., he deemed it a sociable enough time to phone Laura. He needed her to send him copies of all documents given to them by Arnold Hutchinson pertaining to the inventory of ‘stolen’ items from Avril Jenkins’ home, and all insurance companies involved with the Jenkins property across the years.

‘Why are you working, Jack?’ Laura asked. ‘Why aren’t you... gardening? I’m not saying this for your benefit, you understand, I’m saying it, so you’ll stop distracting me from the work I’m meant to be doing.’ Jack thanked her for making time to indulge his hunches.

Jack sat at the rear of the library in front of a microfiche machine. He was now working on two trains of thought at the same time: firstly, he wanted to try and find the beautiful girlfriend who had tempted a younger Elliot Wetlock back onto the straight and narrow, before herself OD’ing on sodium pentothal. Julia had implied that she would have needed a trusted and constant supplier, which described Wetlock perfectly. Jack suspected that it was also the role he played in his daughter’s life — the similarities between the deaths were too striking to ignore.

Jack did not have any dates to help him in relation to the girlfriend’s death, although he did know from Maggie that there was nothing in the hospital’s gossip mill about dead girlfriends. So, it must have been long ago. Jack searched back thirty years with no luck, so he took a break, opened his mobile phone and downloaded the insurance attachments sent from Laura in relation to the Jenkins case.

The various lists of precious items were so contradictory that Jack went right back to the original inventory from Frederick Jenkins. This had to be the list that all others should be measured against. Jack spent a couple of hours scrolling through paintings, antiques and other collectable items including valuable books to get an accurate steer on the overall value of the Jenkinses’ collection. At which point, he was starting to get hungry. He joined the library and took all of the relevant art books home with him.

It took him forty minutes to walk home, and all the while he was desperately trying to figure out how high-value items could vanish from one list to the next, whilst seemingly not being recorded as sold or reported as stolen. He decided the truth must be that many items had never been listed and never insured: that’s how they vanished without raising any kind of alarm. As Jack rounded the corner into his own street, he looked forward to being able to think things through properly.

Jack’s office at home was his sanctuary. His pure, serious thinking space into which normal life was not allowed to intrude. Or at least, that’s what it was supposed to be.

As he sat at his desk beneath the window, his blinds angled so that he could see the world, but the world could not see him, his eyes were drawn to the pile of boxes and bin bags in the corner of the room. Bloody Maggie! Within weeks of Jack getting his office up and running, she’d started using it as a storage space for all the clothes and toys that Hannah had already grown out of. ‘They’ll go on eBay when I get the time,’ Maggie had said. ‘Just ignore them.’

Jack glanced at his small radiator bedecked with Paw Patrol baby-grows. As he tried to get down to work in his office-cum-laundry-cum-store cupboard, Maggie FaceTimed. He opened the call on his laptop to see Maggie standing outside Hammersmith police station.

‘Lyle’s an intense young man, isn’t he!’ Maggie had decided to open with a joke in case Jack was worried about her being interviewed. In truth, he’d forgotten she was due at Hammersmith today. ‘I told him that it was me who let Tania into our personal lives by trying to do her dad a favour. I never expected her to show up at our home, pissed and stoned, and you had every right to be angry with her. And with me.’

Maggie’s words were occasionally drowned out by the noise of the wind blowing across the microphone on her mobile, but he got the gist of what she was saying. She hadn’t bothered to deny Jack’s anger at Tania — the neighbours and the taxi driver had all given statements saying as much — but she’d vehemently supported his right to be angry.

‘He told me that Tania had finger bruises on her wrists and upper arms. I don’t know what he thought I might say to that — maybe he imagined I’d break down and tell him you’re an abusive husband. I said that you would only have responded physically in defence of yourself and our daughter, and that you would have used the minimum force needed to keep Tania from hurting anyone, including herself.’ Maggie smiled. ‘I told him that Tania was lucky that you were the one who opened the door to her, because I would not have been so understanding about having our home invaded by a volatile, drunk teenager. I’m so sorry for all of this, Jack. I know Mr Wetlock was an unobservant, absent father, but he’ll blame himself for that for the rest of his life.’

Maggie seemed particularly saddened by the situation after reliving it with DC Lyle so Jack, once again, refrained from telling her the truth about her esteemed mentor. ‘God, I hope this isn’t what he’s remembered for, Jack.’ Maggie ended the call, saying that she had to get back to work as she was picking up another one of Wetlock’s shifts whilst he was on compassionate leave.

Jack’s mind was now distracted by the two vastly different versions of Wetlock he’d been given, one by Maggie and one by Julia. One Google search later, and Jack was reading about the great man for himself.

Wetlock was 62 years of age and had started his medical career as a GP in Hammersmith before returning to medical school to study his specialism. He divorced from a woman called Katherine Mercer fifteen years ago, and Tania Katherine Wetlock was born two years before that. Jack could find nothing more about Wetlock’s private life. Everything else was in reference to his meteoric rise through the ranks. When Jack searched for the name of Katherine Mercer, he found nothing to tell him whether she was even dead or alive.

Jack looked at an image on his screen of the young Dr Elliot Wetlock graduating from medical school. He looked like a man who knew exactly where he wanted to be in life and knew how to get there.

A text message then appeared in the top right-hand corner of Jack’s screen. It was from Ridley.