Dangerous Games

Chapter 7 part 3

The moment I'd left the office, Claire was next to me. "Well? How did he take it?"

"Badly. I barely got the idea out when he told me to forget about it."

"Well, we thought he'd probably react like that."

"You'll be pleased to know that I left your name out of it. No point in both of us looking like idiots."

"Much appreciated."

"One thing I did get from him was that he's not interested in those tapes from that company, so I suppose we can return them whenever we like. When are you off to Yorkshire to see that girl again?"

"Tomorrow. I've got a day's leave coming up."

"And you thought you'd spend it travelling hundreds of miles up and down the motorway, on police business no less."

"Yeah, it's not really dedication to duty so much as not having much else to do with my days off."

"How sad! Why does a gorgeous young lady such as yourself have nothing to fill her spare hours?"

"Dunno. But since I'm going north tomorrow anyway, I might as well take those tapes to Leeds while I'm at it. Just to be on the safe side, I think I'll make yet another copy, so we've got one spare in case somebody starts taking an interest. I wouldn't want to give up my only copy."

"Smart thinking. Best of luck talking to Charlotte tomorrow. Make sure you're wired for sound just in case she says something useful."

"Will do."

The rest of the day was occupied by something approaching day-to-day ordinary police work. Since we had run out of leads, rather than simply sitting around twiddling our thumbs, we made a start on the backlog of cases that had built up. After all, when a child goes missing, ordinary crime doesn't stop to let the police concentrate on the important stuff. Criminals aren't that considerate. Urgent matters such as burglary, malicious wounding and affray, i.e. crimes that simply won't wait, get the attention of an officer straight away, but there are always a host of other, smaller incidents ranging from minor criminal damage, through things like criminal trespass, to (ironically) missing persons (adults, that is), which can't get the immediate attention they deserve. We ask people to photograph any damage, give them an incident number for insurance purposes, and tell them "we'll get back to you as soon as we can." That moment was now.

Inevitably, there was a great deal of talk about the place about the journalists laying siege to the place. It wasn't until the evening news that the answer became clear. In the "and finally..." section of the television broadcast, some of the wackier theories about Anita Patel's disappearance were discussed. The Elevator Game was mentioned by name. The presenter refrained from explaining the ritual itself, but did mention that the missing girl and her friends had found out about it on the Internet. Surely they must have realised that that would be an invitation for the idly curious up and down the country to do the same thing. Obviously, the slant of the news item was that this was all some unfortunate distraction from the real hunt for Anita, and therefore no harm could possibly come from it. Little could they have imagined how dangerous it was.

The next day, Tuesday, the crowds that had formed outside the station the previous day had been dispersed, probably by the use of some crowd control order. There's a whole raft of legislation that the police can use when they find hoards of people an inconvenience, from Breach of the Peace right up to the Riot Act. Usually just threatening them with arrest is enough, but occasionally we have to put one or two of the stragglers in the cells just to make sure the others get the message.

The newspapers were a different matter though. Copies of everything from the Daily Mirror to the Guardian were being passed round the office. The story was everywhere, but the papers had changed tack. Since the police were keeping tight lipped, and there were no hard facts about the actual disappearance that they could print, they were grubbing round the edges of the story. The Daily Express, for instance, devoted its central pages to an extensive interview with some psychic who claimed to be able to contact the missing girl somewhere in the netherworld. Anita was quite well, apparently, and missing her parents and friends very much. The Times, no less, that pillar of the newspaper world, printed letter after letter from readers complaining that the current obsession with "magic" was a clear indictment of our modern godless society, and the Independent printed an editorial about the gullibility of people who were prepared to believe in such arrant nonsense. The Sun, as you can imagine, really went to town on the story, talking to as many people as possible who claimed to have an opinion.