Dangerous Games

Chapter 2

"Anita Patel. That's P – A – T – E – L, yes?" The desk sergeant wrote the name in block capitals on his pad. He pressed a buzzer on his desk connecting him with the station intercom. "Would Constable Pritchard please come to the front desk? Constable Pritchard." He smiled sweetly at the anxious man and woman standing on the other side of the glass. "Don't worry. I've contacted the correct officer to deal with this. We'll soon have it sorted out."

And so I came into the story. A minute later, I was down in the reception area of Kingston-upon-Thames police station. "What's up, Gavin?"

The sergeant indicated the Asian couple standing with their hands clasped tightly in front of them with his ball point. "This is Mr. and Mrs. Patel, Tim. Their daughter Anita went missing last night."

"Ah, in that case we must act quickly. Please come with me into our interview room." The sergeant buzzed us through the door into the rear of the building, and I ushered the couple down the corridor into Interview Room A. As soon as they had sat down, I did likewise and took my notebook out.

Now, if I'm honest, a missing person, or "misper", enquiry doesn't normally evoke much interest in your average copper. If Fred Bloggs goes missing, the police will make a note of it, enter his details – description, age, what he was last seen wearing etc. – onto the correct computer databases, but won't break any bones going out and trying to find him. Not enough manpower to start with – sorry, I mean staffing. Current guidelines indicate we're not supposed to call it manpower anymore – but even if we had more officers than we knew what to do with we probably wouldn't go out hunting for them.

The fact is – and I hate to say this but it's true – that much of the time a missing person isn't really a problem. Many of them come home of their own accord. Many of them, if by chance they aren't found, simply don't want to come home, if they've run off as a result of a family dispute or something similar. And, as I say, we just don't have enough coppers to go out and find these people, so we just go through the motions, try to look sympathetic to those left behind, and basically do nothing.

It's different if it's a vulnerable adult, like someone with dementia or learning disabilities. In that case we'll do a proper job. Teams will be organised to investigate all possible places the person could have got to, CCTV footage will be commandeered, and the countryside will basically be combed until the person turns up.

And the person does usually turn up. She's (it's usually an elderly woman) wandered off from her care home or got on the wrong bus and ended up somewhere where she can't cope, and ended up sitting in the corner of some bus station crying. Occasionally, the person turns up as a dead body, which is tragic, of course, but does at least provide what the Americans call "closure" – the person is found, foul play is rarely suspected, and the case is effectively solved. I'm sorry if that sounds callous, but that's how it is.

And then there's a missing child. That's a different story all together. As soon as a child – anyone under the age of 16 – is reported missing, a whole team swings into action. Specially trained officers – such as myself – swoop on the area and all the stops are pulled out to find the youngster before anything happens to it. Much of the time, the child returns by itself within a few hours. It might have decided to go on an unannounced trip somewhere or wanted to punish its parents by hiding away for a bit. That works, by the way. As soon as the parents find that little Johnny is missing, they won't rest for a moment until he's back.

That's why, when the panicking parents arrive at the police station in tears, we have to tread a fine line between overreacting, which is expensive and looks stupid if the child turns up unharmed, and under-reacting, which opens the police up to criticism if the child does then come to harm. That was the fine line I was treading with the Patels.