‘How are we with missing persons?’ the boss called, from the doorway of the glass box that she called an office.
‘They’re all still missing, Becky,’ I told her. ‘I had four possibilities from the national trawl that I did this morning, but they’ve all dropped off. Four families contacted and asked if their loved one was circumcised and had perfect teeth, and all four were negatives. It took time, though; the wife of John Ancram, of Middlesbrough, didn’t know what circumcision meant, far less what it looked like, but she did say that his teeth were very good. When the local cops went to his dentist, they discovered that she’d neglected to mention that he kept them in a jar. They told me that they don’t want to find John now, for his own sake. The partner of Michael Winterton, of Bourton, was so surprised when he was told he might have been found that the officers who visited him got suspicious. As soon as they started to question the guy, he broke down and now they’re digging up the back garden. As for the other two. .’
‘Complete pricks?’ Sauce chipped in.
‘You got it.’
‘Ha bloody ha,’ the DI grumbled. ‘Do you two schoolboys have anything positive to tell me?’
She was getting testy, and young Haddock had the sense not to wind her up any further. ‘I’m working on the pathologist’s suggestion that he might not be British,’ he volunteered. ‘I’m looking at immigration, talking to the Border Agency. They’re suggesting that we focus on failed asylum seekers; so far they’ve sent me photographs of males in the age group we’re after, all of them currently missing from detention centres. None of them was a match, but they haven’t finished. Now they’re trawling through people waiting to be sent back who aren’t in detention, to see if any of them aren’t where they should be.’
‘What’s the thinking behind that?’ I asked him.
Sauce looked at me as if I was thick. ‘Let’s say a family goes underground,’ he replied, ‘and one of them dies.’
‘Possible,’ I conceded, then put a hand to my ear.
He looked at me, puzzled. ‘What are you listening out for?’
‘The cackle of wild geese,’ I told him. ‘A well-nourished young man with perfect dentition and an athletic build: I don’t like to stereotype people, mate, and I know we look after visitors to our country very well, but does that sound like an asylum seeker of any description to you?’
‘He doesn’t sound like a runaway steel erector from Middlesbrough either,’ Sauce retorted, but I knew that I’d made my point.
So did Becky. ‘I know, guys,’ she said. ‘It’s a human needle in a haystack, but you know what they say, once you eliminate all other possibilities, what you’re left with is. .’
Sauce and I looked at each other and grinned. ‘Fuck all!’ we cried, in unison.
Our DI is a patient woman, with a sense of humour, but she’s not at all keen on being leaned on by the head of CID. ‘Look,’ she began, until the phone rang and let us off the hook.