It was 9.58 a.m. on the same day and Harry Edwards had just put down the phone on his desk in Golders Green police station. So excited had he been with the phone call that he stood up soon after he received it, much to the surprise of his colleagues, he noticed. It had been the British Transport police, who had given him some very interesting information on his latest misper.
Harry and his female Detective Constable colleague Sarah had interviewed Mr and Mrs Simmons yesterday soon after they had reported their daughter Jodie missing in the morning. They had both been naturally distressed and worried about her but perhaps not as surprised as they should be, Harry thought.
They then explained that Jodie had gone out with some friends the previous night, which was typical behaviour for her at weekends. She did sometimes stay over with friends after parties without calling and had a small problem with alcohol. But this morning one of her friends ‘Jenna’ called to say that Jodie had disappeared last night. (Why did teenagers have such strange names these days? Harry had asked himself.)
Harry got the details of ‘Jenna’ and he and Sarah interviewed her with her parents in her house nearby. She seemed reluctant to talk at first but after her mother told her how serious the case was, she eventually revealed what had happened.
They had all been on a mini pub crawl in the West End of London. Sometime after 10 p.m. Jodie, having had too much to drink, had disappeared. They had not realised this at first and when they did were too drunk to inform anyone. It was only the next morning that Jenna did so out of guilt and concern after calling Jodie’s house to find she had not come home. Harry had read that most teenagers who disappeared were female and this drunken behaviour now seemed typical of them.
Harry then went through the rest of the missing persons procedure with the help of Sarah. Because the weather could be quite bad at the moment, and Jodie was under 18 and could have been vulnerable because of alcohol, he assessed her as a high risk case, which meant greater priority.
Harry next informed his superior, a Detective Inspector, who had to supervise the case. After this, Harry arranged for Jodie’s details to be put on the Police National Computer. He then circulated them to other forces, the National Missing Persons Helpline, and the Police National Missing Persons Bureau. As a part of procedure, Harry also had had to supervise a search of Jodie’s house, which her mother in particular had found upsetting.
In the meantime, Harry’s superior, the Detective Inspector, had circulated Jodie’s details to the local media, which would begin to report her missing that day. Harry eventually got home just after 11 p.m. that night and went straight to bed, exhausted.
Now, some eleven hours later, having put down the phone in his office, he got ready to meet the witness, a tube station assistant that the British Transport Police said had last seen Jodie on Sunday night. He would also view the CCTV footage they had.
He was very excited: he knew there was a good chance he could discover more about these ‘linked’ missing persons’ cases now there was a fourth one. She too had last been seen on the Northern Line, near to which she lived, late at night, and probably been intoxicated. The only difference was that she was significantly younger than the others at 17. But any further information he got could prove he was right in feeling that the links between the cases were more than co-incidences and help to find out what had happened to the missing people.
Harry phoned his superior to tell him what he was doing. He had not told him about the possible links with the other cases, for it was still only a theory, which he wanted to prove himself before the cases were transferred to another department. He got his overcoat, and left the police station to go to Leicester Square Tube station on the Northern Line, where the witness was. Sarah gave him a lift to Golders Green tube station. He decided it would be quicker to go by tube. Besides this, it looked like a big storm would start some time that day, which he did not fancy driving in. It was now 10.02 a.m.