Eutopia (First version)

Chapter 9

Monday morning rolled in faster than Rose had hoped it would. Sunday had been his allocated rest day, but he had kept in contact with the officers from Guildford that had been tasked with speaking to the girl’s foster parents. So now, eight AM found Rose slouched in his desk chair pouring over the notes that had been hurriedly typed over night for him. Not that he had discovered much more from the paperwork than he had from speaking with PC Manders on the phone the night before.

‘Do we have anything new?’ DI Mason’s sudden question sent Rose slopping scalding tea over his hand as he jumped, looking up from the notes in front of him. He cursed, wiping his hand on his trousers.

‘Sorry, Guv’ner, didn’t see you there. Wasn’t expecting to see you ‘til later.’

‘Thought I’d make an early start this morning,’ Mason said with a smile, hitching up his pristine trousers before taking a seat opposite Rose in the hard-backed blue plastic chair. The office that Paul Rose shared with three other Detective Sergeants was empty save for the two men. ‘What did the Guildford station manage to glean for us?’ he asked, eagerly, resting his smooth hands with perfectly short, clean nails on the desk-top as he leant forwards.

‘Well Trev Manders and a female PC, uh, Ellen Martin, I think,’ Rose checked the notes in front of him, ‘made a visit to the foster parents. Pretty much like I thought. Haven’t heard a peep from her. They fostered the girl, this Eutopia, in early ’97, when she was six. The girl’s mother died, cervical cancer, father absent from day one, so they took her in. She had a brother, William, but he was placed into a kids’ home in Croydon because the family only wanted a girl.’ Rose raised his heavy grey eyebrows meaningfully as he looked up at Mason. ‘Anyway,’ he continued when the Inspector failed to react, ‘For two years this family, Mr and Mrs Scott, fitted in with plans from social services to keep the contact flowing between the two, but they put their foot down when the boy fell in with some oiks in Croydon.’

‘The usual?’ the Inspector asked, pushing the wire frames of his glasses further up his snub nose as he peered over at the notes that Rose was shielding with his meaty forearm, like a schoolboy afraid of having his homework copied.

‘Pretty much, Guv. Underage drinking, smoking weed, a few petty thefts from local shops. Nothing major, just teenage hijinks.’ Inspector Mason raised his pencil thin eyebrows, his tone cutting as his hazel eyes fixed on Rose’s.

‘I don’t know what you did for ‘hijinks’ as a teenager, Sergeant Rose, but petty crime was not on my list of fun,’

‘No, Guv,’ Rose said, doubting that the Inspector had ‘fun’ in any shape or form. He puffed, bristling the wiry grey moustache under his nose as he looked back at the typed sheet, running a fat finger down the margin to find his place. ‘So, the Scott’s have no trouble from the girl, they keep her separate from her brother until boom, he pitches up at her window one night, when the girl’s about ten or eleven, encourages her to run away to London with him. After that they say they had no end of trouble with her.’

‘Did they have a good relationship with her?’ Mason asked, curiously.

‘From what Manders could pick up from the foster mother, yes, mostly for the first two years or so. The relationship dissolved a little bit, just before the girl’s brother turned up that night. The kids were picked up at Waterloo station after the foster father had reported the girl missing in the middle of the night and one of the station guards was alerted to them jumping a barrier or something. The call came through just as the police based at the train station were trying to get to the bottom of why two kids were out and about so late by themselves. Social services put the girl back with the Scott family but after that she just kept running away, following in big brother’s footsteps.’ Mason nodded, recalling the long list of charges against the skinny thirteen year old with the haunted eyes.