Chapter 12

Chapter 12

‘What else have we got?’

The team is gathered in the interview room. Jennie has summarised the information from her conversations with Elliott Naylor and Paul Jennings, and Zuri has walked them through the post-mortem findings. Jennie feels increasingly disturbed by the growing evidence of Hannah’s turbulent family life. She knew it was volatile, but Hannah never let on exactly how bad.

‘I’ve checked the local A the caller will have to wait.

Zuri nods. ‘Yes, but he wasn’t at the visit she made four weeks before she disappeared. On that occasion she was treated for a heroin overdose and had light bruising to her chest and neck, following her friend’s attempt to resuscitate her.’

What the …?

Jennie knew nothing about this. Surely Hannah would have told her? She struggles to keep an even, calm tone to her voice as she says, ‘You’re sure?’

‘Totally,’ says Zuri. ‘There’s a comprehensive write-up on Hannah’s patient record.’

‘So who was the friend?’ asks Martin, putting his mug of coffee down on the desk beside him.

Good question , thinks Jennie. Who was the friend?

Zuri flicks over the page of her pad and reads from her notes. ‘Robert Marwood.’

Rob?

Jennie battles to keep the shock from her face. She knew the darkroom crew had smoked weed in the basement; they even offered her some. That was the reason Rob first warmed to her – her willingness to try smoking a joint even though she nearly coughed her lungs up the first few times. But taking hard drugs – heroin – that was in a whole different league. Hannah never told her about taking harder drugs, or about the overdose. She also never said she met up with other members of the darkroom crew without her. She remembers Hannah telling her multiple times that it was only Jennie she got together with outside the group.

Jennie’s blindsided. She never suspected Hannah lied to her, ever. She was like her sister, like her real family. Getting together in the darkroom with Hannah and the crew had been Jennie’s refuge from her shitty life, the one good thing about that time. Now, with the revelations about Hannah’s drug taking and Elliott hiding the truth about seeing Hannah the night she’d disappeared, it’s starting to feel like their tight-knit friendship was a lie.

‘Rob Marwood? He was one of the witnesses the original investigation spoke to, right?’ asks Steve, rubbing his eyes and looking as knackered as ever.

‘Yes,’ says Jennie, her voice coming out as more of a croak. She clears her throat. Tries to push away the emotion that feels as if it’s tightening around her throat.

Focus. I have to focus.

She looks around the room at the team. ‘What else do we have?’

Martin makes a show of sitting up in his chair and smoothing out some creases in the front of his Ted Baker shirt. ‘I spoke to Morris Walker, the elderly man who lived next door to the Jenningses back when Hannah went missing. Old Morris was a bit of a talker, and seemed to have a pretty good memory for what went on back then. He told me he heard shouting and glass breaking, like stuff was getting thrown about, through the party wall between his place and the Jennings’ place. He also said it wasn’t the first time; the walls in the terrace were very thin, and he’d often heard screaming matches between Jennings and his wife before she left. He clearly didn’t like Paul Jennings. Morris said Paul was always being aggressive and menacing to his neighbours. Apparently, there had been a big hoo-ha earlier that year when Paul had punched the man across the street for parking outside the Jennings’ house.’

Zuri glances at Jennie and she can tell from her expression that her DS is thinking the same as her: the more they find out about Paul Jennings’ behaviour back in the early Nineties, the more it seems he might have harmed his own daughter. She looks at Martin. ‘Good work.’

‘Thanks, boss,’ says Martin, looking very pleased with himself. ‘Morris also said that on the evening Hannah went missing he’d heard the front door slam twice, and then a few moments later there was shouting in the street. He wasn’t sure of the exact time but thought probably around seven or seven-thirty.’

‘And he’s absolutely sure it was Paul and Hannah Jennings?’ asks Zuri.

Martin rolls his eyes. ‘Yes, I just said that, didn’t I? Morris looked out of his front window and saw Paul and Hannah arguing in the street. Then, suddenly, Hannah ran off into the night.’

‘That doesn’t chime with the account Mr Jennings gave us,’ says Jennie, looking across at Naomi. ‘Can you add this as something to follow up on with Paul Jennings?’

As she waits for Naomi to finish updating the board, Jennie’s phone starts vibrating again; another call. Whoever is trying to get hold of her is certainly persistent. Pulling out her phone, she looks at the name on the screen: Lottie.

Shit.

Jennie rejects the call. The last thing she needs right now is to be pumped for information by Lottie.

‘There’s something else he wasn’t honest about,’ says Martin. ‘I got in touch with the motorway construction firm that Paul Jennings worked for back then. They’re still going but the personnel files from the Nineties have all been destroyed because so much time has passed. Luckily, there was still a record of him on the old HR system, and although it held limited information, it did say that Jennings had been fired from the job. The date his employment was terminated was Thursday the ninth of June 1994. The day Hannah disappeared.’

‘So he lied to us about several things,’ says Jennie, thoughtfully. ‘The argument in the street with Hannah, and the real reason he was at home earlier that night.’

‘Getting fired would be enough to put anyone in a foul mood,’ says Zuri. ‘Add that to his anger issues and finding Hannah packing a bag when she should be studying, and it doesn’t take much imagination to see how things could have taken a bad turn.’

‘Indeed, very easy,’ says Jennie. There’s a sick feeling churning in the pit of her stomach. Swallowing hard, she looks at the others. ‘Anything else to add?’

‘Steve and myself tracked down the construction workers who were laying the new pipes in the basement around the time Hannah went missing,’ says Naomi, putting the whiteboard pen down and picking up her scratchpad to consult her notes. ‘We spoke to them all and have discounted them as suspects. None had a key to the basement, so they had to wait for the school secretary to arrive and unlock the place each morning.’

‘Yeah, the foreman said working there was a bloody nightmare because of having to wait around to be let in,’ adds Steve. ‘But they didn’t see anything suspicious on the dig site, and never once found the basement unlocked.’

‘Even though we know Hannah was hidden in the trench beneath their pipes?’ says Zuri, her tone disbelieving. ‘You’d have thought they might have noticed the trench had been disturbed.’

Steve shrugs and looks apologetic. ‘That’s what they said.’

‘I spoke to the school secretary,’ adds Naomi. ‘She confirmed their story. Unfortunately, the headmistress moved to Australia back in 2016 and it’s taking a bit longer to locate her.’

‘Okay, keep on it,’ says Jennie. She feels her phone buzzing in her hand. Looking at the screen she sees the same name: Lottie. She rejects the call again, switches off her phone, and looks back at the team. ‘Steve, how did you get on with finding the photographer?’

‘It’s a dead end,’ Steve replies. ‘Unfortunately, he died six years ago and the company he’d booked our victim for went bust ten years before that, so that’s a dead end too.’

‘Have you had any luck locating the witness who saw Hannah at the train station on the night she disappeared?’ asks Jennie.

‘So that’s an interesting one,’ says Naomi, reaching for her notes again. ‘Siobhan Gibbons, the woman who claimed to have seen Hannah at the train station, is flagged in the system as an unreliable witness. Apparently, she’s tried to insert herself into a number of misper cases over the past thirty years and give fake sightings of the missing person.’

Jennie feels her blood go cold.

‘Sounds a real crank,’ says Martin, a smirk on his face.

A real something , thinks Jennie, rage building inside her. Siobhan Gibbons was the key witness in the original case into Hannah’s disappearance. Her sighting of Hannah at the train station was the reason they closed the case. ‘Are you sure, Naomi? Have you checked this thoroughly?’

Naomi bridles, clearly taken aback at being questioned so sharply. Her tone is more formal than usual when she replies. ‘Of course. DC Williams and I visited the witness. She lives in a flat near the train station, the same one she lived in when Hannah Jennings went missing. She gave us a tour of her flat—’

‘And her creepy rabbit dolls in dresses collection,’ interjects Steve, shuddering.

Martin laughs. ‘Sounds a right weirdo.’

‘Not helpful,’ says Naomi. ‘As I was saying, we checked the layout of the flat and got Siobhan Gibbons to run through her witness statement again. What very quickly became clear was that there is no way Gibbons could have witnessed what she claims, because the view of the train station from her first-floor window is entirely obstructed. It seems the detectives in the original case never checked out the flat layout; they just took Gibbons’ statement as gospel.’

Jesus.

‘So she lied,’ says Jennie. ‘She bloody lied.’

Jennie tries to control a rush of anger. Siobhan Gibbons’ witness statement was the main reason the police stopped looking for Hannah, the reason she was ruled a runaway. That was the moment Jennie began to doubt herself and the relationship she’d had with Hannah. Why she started to believe that Hannah had left town without her. Over the months, with still no word from Hannah, Jennie came to believe Hannah had betrayed her trust. That their friendship meant far less to her than to Jennie. And the realisation had destroyed her.

‘The team leading the original investigation screwed up,’ says Zuri, looking pissed off.

‘Yeah. They did,’ says Jennie. Sloppy coppers doing a half-arsed job make her sick to her stomach. So do members of the public like Siobhan Gibbons, craving attention so much that they give false information on a misper case. It would be easy to get lost in the anger, the injustice of it all, but she can’t. Hannah deserves justice, and she needs the truth.

She looks around the room at her team. ‘We can’t change the cock-ups of the past, but we can make sure we don’t make the same mistakes. Paul Jennings has lied to us, and in the original investigation. We need to bring him in and talk to him formally.’ Jennie looks towards Martin. ‘Set it up. We’ll interview him here this afternoon. You can ride shotgun. Book room two; let’s make him as uncomfortable as possible.’

‘No problem, boss,’ says Martin, a triumphant grin on his face as he looks towards Zuri.

Zuri’s expression is impassive, but Jennie knows she must be frustrated not to get in on the interview. It’s a shitty situation but although the way Paul Jennings presented last night was very different to the violent, woman-hating man Hannah had complained about, he could revert to type under the stress of being more formally questioned. If that happens, Jennie needs options in the room and it’s a sad truth that a man who doesn’t respect women is far more likely to respond to Martin than to her or Zuri. Jennie knows it’s messed up, especially in this day and age.

‘Okay, thanks everyone,’ says Jennie. ‘Keep working through the action list. We’ll regroup end of day.’

As the others file out of the incident room Zuri stays behind. ‘I think we should broaden the search to include everyone who used the basement space, like Elliott Naylor, Rob Marwood and the rest of this darkroom crew.’

Jennie frowns. ‘They were just kids though.’

‘Kids can be killers,’ counters Zuri. ‘You know that.’

‘No, I think the dad is our strongest lead at the moment, we need to focus on him.’ Jennie shakes her head. She doesn’t want this discussion. Doesn’t want to think about Elliott and the rest of the crew in that way; her friends couldn’t have had anything to do with Hannah’s death.

Could they?