And as soon as she had some proof… then he’d be sorry.

33

Bailey scratched her head in vexation as she surveyed the sea of paper that surrounded her. She took a sip from the cup of coffee which stood to one side. It had gone cold. Yuck. Had she really been here that long? She looked at her watch. Several hours had passed already.

She was sitting at a table in a small room in the police station in Bromley analysing the original case files on Jennifer’s disappearance. She’d had to come down here in person as this was an old case and the files hadn’t been digitised.

There were piles of empty boxes stacked around her. They’d contained interview statements, police reports, photographs and other documents relating to the investigation into Jennifer’s disappearance over twenty years earlier. Now the contents of those boxes were spread out all over the table as Bailey meticulously searched through them for evidence of Mister Snigiss. Just like the drawings in Jennifer’s bedroom, the material was getting yellow and curled at the edges with age.

It wasn’t the first time Bailey had looked at these files. She’d come here once before, not long after joining the police, hoping to uncover the truth behind her sister’s disappearance, but, just like the investigating detectives at the time, she’d been unable to pinpoint anything indicating how her sister had gone missing or who had taken her. It was in every sense a cold case.

This time, she was inspecting the documents through the prism of the recent Mister Snigiss revelation, hoping to detect some scrap of evidence that she might have missed the first time around, some clue as to who he was, or who he might have been, some reference to the name Snigiss or perhaps some innocuous mention of a fedora hat buried in an interview statement somewhere, or even an allusion to a pet snake. She was hunting for something… anything…

She’d been trawling laboriously through the whole lot, back and forth, again and again, going over it with a fine-tooth comb, hammering it with all the analytical skills she could muster, everything she’d learnt as a detective over the past few years. But so far she hadn’t managed to uncover a single crumb of information related to Mister Snigiss.

The problem with Jennifer’s case was that there’d been no witnesses to the actual abduction, despite the large number of people the police had talked to. No suspicious vehicles had been seen in the area and no similar events had occurred in the vicinity. And the police had been unable to identify any potential suspects. A subsequent Crimewatch reconstruction, broadcast across the entire nation, had still failed to generate any viable leads.

It seemed as if Jennifer had just disappeared into thin air. Walking the short distance home from her friend’s house just around the corner, she’d been snatched from the street in the blink of an eye and never been seen again. Bailey had always been of the opinion that it had been an opportunistic abduction by some predator cruising the area for solitary children, probably driving some kind of van with no windows in the back. He’d swooped extremely quickly and had been very careful not to get spotted.