‘Like what?’ Simon wants to know, sounding, for the first time since we got here, a bit impatient. Tetchy, not like himself at all.
‘OK, the first thing we’re going to take a look at are her mobile phone records. Was she the sort of person who’d have her phone on her person or close by her at all times?’
A moment while Simon and I glance across at each other.
‘Well … yeah,’ we both say together. ‘In case one of her tutors at night school needed to contact her,’ Simon adds, ‘or if the restaurant ever called to change her shifts.’
‘But we’ve been ringing her mobile number for days now!’ I chip in. ‘And believe me, there’s nothing! I must have left about five hundred messages by now and still not a whisper out of her!’
‘When you call the number, does it go straight through to voicemail?’
‘Em … yeah, it does.’
I’m narkily thinking: but what’s that got to do with anything?
‘Right then,’ Crown says, scribbling away on the pad in front of him. ‘In that case, we can safely assume her phone is probably out of battery. So the first step we take is to get onto her carrier and get them to put a triangulation trace on it a.s.a.p. Pinpoint the exact location of her phone, is the theory, and there’s a chance we’ll have a good starting point as to where to start the search for Kitty. With luck, she won’t be too far behind. Been very successful in cases like this before. We may not be able to nail down her specific location, but we certainly should narrow it down to within a one-mile radius.’
Simon and I nod back at him, a bit more enthusiastically now. Maybe not offer of SWAT teams I’d been hoping for, but still. It’s positive. It’s something.
‘Secondly,’ he continues, ‘I’ll need to take her home computer to run a few checks on it, as well as all her bank records and credit card details, if you can access them. The first thing anyone who goes missing will always need is access to hard cash.’
That, though, we’re prepared for, and I have them whipped out of the big mound of Kitty-related documents from my handbag barely before he’s finished talking. In fact, the only reason I haven’t called the bank myself before this, is that they’re all still closed for holidays.
‘And thirdly,’ Crown goes on, ‘I need to ask you both one or two personal things about her, if that’s OK?’
We nod and sit forward, both on the edge of our seats.
‘You’ve already stated that Kitty Hope doesn’t have any history of drug or alcohol abuse …’
‘Most sober, reliable, upstanding girl you could ever hope to meet,’ I interrupt, to a raised eyebrow from Simon at the sheer outrageousness of the exaggeration.
‘So in cases such as these there’s about a ninety per cent chance that she is, in fact, safe and well. And just for whatever reasons, felt she needed a bit of time out. Was she under severe pressure at work or maybe at the night school she attended?’
We both shake our heads.
‘Well, I mean, she worked long hours and when she wasn’t working, she was always studying,’ I throw in, ‘so the odd time she’d complain about being bone knackered, but apart from that …’ I trail off a bit here. Mainly because the exact phrase Kitty always uses is, ‘These fecking books have my brains turned into baked Alaska.’
‘Was she under any financial strain?’
Again, we tell him no more so than any of the rest of us. No mortgage, low rent, no major credit card debts, no big whacks of cash outstanding to any shady loan sharks, nothing. She earned good money at the restaurant and always said Byrne & Sacetti’s customers were consistently the best tippers in town. Sure, she’d overspend a bit; but then Kitty’s outrageously generous and would often find herself broke and counting days till payday or until some whoppingly generous tip would tide her over. But doesn’t that just make her an ordinary, normal person?
‘Any gambling addictions that either of you know of?’
Almost want to guffaw at that one. I once went dog racing with Kitty (under the misguided impression that it might be good place to meet blokes). I can still remember her roars of laughter, claiming that the mutt of a thing she bet on would probably still be panting towards the finishing post at midnight that night. Said anything she put money on was instantly cursed and doomed to the greyhound equivalent of early paralysis. So that one, single night was the beginning and end of her gambling career.
‘Was there a chance she may have been in the early stages of an unwanted pregnancy?’
An angry flush from Simon at that, followed by a firm no.
Did she appear to be suffering from depression lately?
No, we tell him, stressing what a happy, open person Kitty is naturally.
More questions come thick and fast, as Crown ticks off a long, long list in front of him.
Had she been acting in any way strangely up until the night she disappeared? Was she bringing home large sums of money? Had she recently appeared alienated in any way from her close group of friends? Were a lot of her clothes and personal belongings missing from her house? Any valuable jewellery suddenly gone missing? Or electrical items? Did she have an eBay account? And what about her foster mother, had she been to visit her in the days leading up to Christmas Eve?
We tell him no, a v. firm no to everything.
And finally he finishes writing, closes the file in front of him and sits back, eyeballing each of us in turn. One of those cold, unflinching glares. Serial killer-ish, I find myself thinking a bit nastily.
‘So neither of you is aware of any personal reasons at all why she’d need to take off?’
‘NO!’ we chorus back at him, yet again. Don’t know about Simon, but I’m kind of getting seriously sick of this guy by now. Worse than useless, if you ask me. And if he uses the phrase ‘established set of procedures to follow here’ once more, I’m seriously tempted to reach across the desk and thump him one. We’re not exactly talking about a bloody wallet one of us left in the back of a taxi here!
I want far, far fewer questions and far, far more coppers to burst in, heavily armed and telling us they’re now taking over the whole investigation. And that they confidently expect to have Kitty back home, with not a hair on her head harmed and looking for a shower, a glass of wine and a big feed of chips, in that order.
‘Well, then, in that case,’ Crown shrugs dismissively, ‘the news is not necessarily bad. Rest assured, we’ll do everything we can, but you should know that the chances of her turning up safe and sound are relatively high. In well over ninety per cent of cases like this, the subject is nearly always secure and will inevitably return when they’re good and ready.
‘However, given the worry and upset that Kitty’s causing to all around her, then unfortunately there’s one hard, cold fact that remains. So I’m afraid I’ll need you both to ask yourselves one unpleasant but unavoidable question.’
We both look at him expectantly.
‘Why would she do this in the first place? She must have had a very good reason for wanting to leave. So what do you think it might have been?’
I ask Simon exactly the same question again in car on our way home.
He doesn’t answer me, though, just goes v. quiet and stares out window into the night, completely wrapped up in thought.
By the age of fifteen, she’d already been with a grand total of eight foster homes, which had to have been some class of a record, she figured. They