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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.’
