fredbassett

Title : Misper, Part 1 of 3
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 12
Characters : Nick, OCs
Disclaimer : Not mine (except the OCs), no money made, don’t sue.
Spoilers : None
Word Count : 8,200 in 3 parts
Summary : A woman has disappeared. Her husband wants to find her.
A/N : 1) This is a sequel to a fic I wrote earlier this year, You’d Be Off Your Trolley To Go Anywhere Else, looking at the events eight years earlier when a gorgonopsid trashed the car park at Asda in the Forest of Dean, 2) This now forms one of the many prequels to my Stephen/Ryan series 3) Posting now for Forest of Dean Week in 52 Weeks of Primeval at

primeval_denial

EIGHT YEARS AGO, IN THE FOREST OF DEAN

Sergeant Sam Lewis gave in and ripped the packet, finally fighting her way her way into the prawn mayo sandwich Pete White had just dropped onto her desk. “Jesus, don’t they want you to eat the sodding things? Did you get the crisps?”

He tossed a bag over to her. “Prawn cocktail, as ordered. Prawn ice cream for afters, sarge?”

“Fuck off. I like prawns.” She started to bite chunks out of the sandwich, expecting the phone to start ringing any minute. It always did when you’d just started to eat. Alternating a mouthful of crisps with a mouthful of sandwich, she demolished her lunch in the time it took Pete to rustle up a couple of mugs of engine oil masquerading as coffee. “How did you get on with the cleaner?”

“Jerome? Nice lad. Not the brightest lightbulb in the box, but seems OK.”

Sam suppressed a grin. One day she’d introduce Whitey to the concept of irony. “What about his mystery woman? Any sign of her?”

“Nope. We’ve put an appeal out for witnesses, but apart from Widow Twanky in the Twatmobile, the whole fucking area has gone down with a bad case of the Three Wise Monkeys.”

“So what did Mrs Taylor actually see?” The woman was the wife of the local Lord High Executer in the Masons, not that Pete White would give a toss about that, but it meant that unless Sam wanted a bollocking from On High, she at least had to pay lip service to the old battleaxe.

“Shopping trolley flying across the road towards her bellowed Twatmobile.”

“Flying or rolling?”

“Flying. She said it bounced across the road in two bloody great big hops. Didn’t touch her car, but the owner of the Astra it ended up on top of wasn’t best pleased.”

“So how come someone managed to chuck it that far without her seeing them?”

He shrugged. “Same with the cars, sarge. There are dents everywhere on them, but no one was seen kicking shit out of anything and the CSIs couldn’t work out what had done it. They’ve not lifted a single print – finger or boot,” he added.

The CCTV had been fucked, as well. The manager, who hadn’t been best pleased to be rousted out of bed at gone midnight, said it had stopped working three days ago, but maintenance hadn’t got around to fixing it. The supermarket hadn’t had much trouble recently, so it hadn’t been much of a priority. Funny how priorities changed when some little toe-rags had just trashed a bunch of cars and the front of your shop.

“So suspect number one is Dev from the 12 o’clock shop…”

“Eh?” To emphasise his confusion, Pete scratched his bollocks.

“Well, he’s the one who’s benefitted most from Asda being out of action.” Sam rolled her eyes. “Joke, Whitey, and for fuck’s sake stop scratching your nuts.”

Pete grimaced. “It’s Pauline’s new washing up tabs, sarge. I think I’m allergic.”

Sam waved her hand in the air. “So, we’re precisely bloody nowhere. That’s not exactly going to get the DI off our backs, is it?”

Peter’s mournful expression wouldn’t have been out of place on a basset hound.

“Check the rest of the CCTV in the area. Let’s see who was out and about.” She stood up. “I’m going to see if the CSIs have got anything more for us.”

They hadn’t, although one of them unhelpfully remarked that the cars looked like they’d been head-butted by a de-horned rhino.

The total lack of suspects was starting to piss Sam off. It was as if the whole area had just decided to close ranks – apart from Widow Twanky, and she’d seen bugger all.

****

A week later, they were still no further forward, and even the manager had stopped phoning daily. The loss adjusters for Asda’s insurers had been as baffled as the CSIs and were probably still poring over the small print in the contract in an attempt to avoid a big payout. They’d had plenty of calls from pissed off car owners as well. All Asda had done with them was point out the sentence on their own signs that referred to cars being parked at their owners’ rick. That had gone down like a turd in a swimming pool, but that wasn’t Sam’s problem.

After ten days, the file had been stuffed into a cabinet and Sam was tearing her hair out over another spate of thefts from isolated farms. Situation normal for the Forest of Fucking Dean. Oh, and Widow Twanky’s Twatmobile had been written off after a collision with a wild boar. Naturally, she’d claimed it had been twice the usual size and twice as ugly and she wanted to know when Sam was going to organise a cull. Sam had smiled, nodded, and passed the report to her boss. He’d promptly filed it in the bin. She’d had to fish it out when he’d gone home and log it on the system, just in case the old bat complained.

****

“Sam, there’s a bloke in reception, says he wants to file a misper.”

“Can’t Pete deal with it?”

“Nah, he’s interviewing Gavin Dacre about a nicked car. Silly sod left his prints all over it.”

“OK, Sally, stick him in Interview Two.”

“Coffee?”

“Why not? Let’s push the boat out and offer him a biccie, too. I can do empathy. Went on a course on it last year.”

Interview Two was a small, dismal room smelling of BO and bleach. The only natural light came in through a thin window caked with pigeon shit. By the time Sam got there, Sally had left two mugs of coffee and a plate of chocolate biccies on the table. The plate wasn’t even cracked. Hospitality, Coleford style.

The bloke was pacing up and down as Sam walked in. He was mid-thirties, wearing some sort of green army jacket, a pale green shirt and shabby jeans. His blond hair looked like it could do with a good wash and his face hadn’t seen a razor for at least a week.

Sam plastered on her best professional smile and held out her hand. “Dr Cutter? I’m Sergeant Sam Lewis. I understand you want to report your wife missing?”

“Aye.” He stopped pacing long enough to shake her hand. His grip was firm but not too macho. “My wife, Helen, she’s not been home for nearly two weeks.” The accent was Scottish and his blue eyes were worried.

Sam waved her hand at the chair. “Sit down, Dr Cutter. Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?”

Half an hour later, she knew more about the state of the man’s marriage than she wanted to know and she’d eaten all the biscuits. He’d drunk half the coffee, but only when she’d reminded him of its presence on the table.

The Cutters had argued. So what, big deal. But she gave him points for honesty. Most husbands pretended that everything had been sweetness and light, with a side order of tea and kittens. At least this guy told it how it was, and she was inclined to believe him, even though she was having a problem getting her head around what the hell they’d been arguing about.

“Anomalies in the fossil record,” Cutter repeated, running his hands through his hair and making it stand up in startled-looking clumps. “And strange animal sightings.”

Sam tried not to roll her eyes. The wild boar periodically made it into the papers, and a few weeks ago, they’d had a couple of birdwatchers reporting something large crashing around in the bushes. It had been a slow news day and the local rag had picked it up. That had led to a spate of sightings of something that, conveniently, no one could give a coherent description of, but the whole thing had quickly died down, apart from one of the local farmers trying to cash in by saying two of his sheep had gone missing. They’d given him a crime number and his insurers had no doubt grumbled but coughed up and, to be fair, they did periodically get reports of stock being stolen.

“She said I wasn’t taking her seriously enough.”

“Were you?”

He sighed. “Aye, well, maybe not.”

“Why have you come to see us now, Dr Cutter?” Sam asked. “You’ve not seen your wife for nearly two weeks. But you’ve been away in the States for most of that time, so you don’t really know whether she’s been back home or not.”

“She’s not been home. The milk in the fridge was all off. There’s no way Helen would go without milk in her coffee. The house was exactly as I’d left it. There was post all over the mat.”

“So why suddenly pole up here and report her missing? You live near London. Wouldn’t it have been more appropriate to go to a station nearer your home?”

“I…” He looked acutely uncomfortable.

Sam made no move to help him out.

“I looked at the search history on her laptop. She’d been looking at maps of the Forest of Dean, and newspaper reports about animal sightings.”

“What about her car?” Sam threw the question at him casually. “You said she drove off.”

“Aye, she did.”

“Make and registration?” The image of the wrecked cars in the ADA carpark came strongly back to mind, but they had all been spoken for.

Cutter reeled off the details and Sam scribbled them down in her notebook.

“I’ll put the word around.” She stood up. “More coffee?” He hadn’t finished the first mug but Sam needed a refill.

“Thanks.” He was distracted and it showed.

Pete White was still at his desk, doing nothing useful.

“Whitey, run me a PNC check on this one.” She waved her notebook under his nose. “See if anyone has seen it parked anywhere on our patch.”

He grabbed a pen and wrote the make and reg down. “On it, sarge.”

Sam saddled a passing PCSO with the drinks order and wandered back into the interview room.

She smiled. The reassuring one she practised in the mirror every morning, just after she spat a mouthful of toothpaste into the sink. It needed more work, but he wasn’t in any state to give her marks out of ten for empathy.

“We’ve passed the details of your wife’s car to all units in the area, Dr Cutter.” She sat down, leaning slightly back in her chair, doing her best to look relaxed. “Why did you leave it nearly two weeks to come to see us? Weren’t you worried about not having had any contact with her while you were away.”

He looked uncomfortable. “This isn’t the first time…” He trailed off, looking even more uncomfortable.

“Mrs Cutter is volatile?”

“Dr Cutter,” he said automatically.

“Is Dr Cutter volatile?”

“She can flare up at times.” The words came out hesitantly, but he met her eyes and Sam saw nothing there to make him doubt what he said.

“What about your relationship. Would you describe that as volatile as well?”

He squirmed in the chair and hesitated, seemingly unwilling to confront the reality of their marriage, even though he’d already given her a pretty unvarnished picture of how things were between them. Sam let the silence draw out to breaking point, waiting to see how long it took for the man to finally fill the void between them.

“Yes.” He spoke softly, then cleared his throat and looked directly at her. “Yes, we had our rows. Helen is good at picking fights. I knew that when I married her, but…”

But from the slightly wistful look on his face, they probably had spectacular make-up sex. She needed time to dig some background on this guy.

Sam smiled. “Have you got a photo of Helen, Dr Cutter?”

Without hesitation, he pulled out his wallet and flipped it open, holding it out so she could see the photo in the inside pocket. A woman wearing a white top looked challengingly at the camera, one elbow resting on her bare knees, a hand held up to her dark hair. She was wearing sunglasses, so it was hard to gauge her expression, but to Sam, the picture spoke of easy confidence. The woman’s mouth was open in a slight smile. She was striking rather than pretty, but this was someone who would draw admiring looks.

“May I take a copy of this?” Sam asked. “I’ll make sure you get it back.”

Cutter slid the photo out of his wallet and handed it to her. His clear blue eyes were worried. “What will happen next?” he asked.

“We’ll see if her car turns up anywhere, and I’ll circulate her photo.” Sam stood up and offered him her hand. You could tell a lot from someone’s handshake at the end of an interview, on the rare occasions she offered one. Cutter’s was still firm, betraying no tell-tale sweat. “Where can I reach you?”

“I’ve booked into the Eddington Hotel. I was going to start looking for her myself.”

Sam nodded. “Let me know before you leave the area and I’ll get the photo back to you as quickly as I can.”

She showed him out, watching him walk to a battered silver Hilux in the carpark.

When she got back up to the office Pete White was sitting with his feet up on the desk, munching a doughnut. He pointed at a paper bag. “Got one for you, too.”

“Let me scan this first.”

She put the photo face down on the scanner, hoping the bloody thing would work properly for once without having to be coaxed into life with a mix of threats and pleas. The only person who could get it to work reliably was Brian, one of the PCSOs, and he wasn’t on shift again until after the weekend. For a change, it chuntered into life without too much problem and she sent the scan to her computer. She slipped the photo into an envelope and marked as the property of Dr Nick Cutter, to be returned to him.

Sam sent the photo to the printer then opened it on the screen and beckoned Pete over. “Take a gander at this for me. Husband says she left after a row nearly two weeks ago, and hasn’t been seen since. Apparently, she’d been looking at maps of round here on her computer, as well as that daft story the Echo ran on the Beast of Coleford.”

Pete proceeded to drop jam and sugar all over her desk. “She’s a looker.” But his voice was more thoughtful than she’d come to expect when he was faced with an attractive woman.

“Whitey?”

He finished off the doughnut and licked his fingers. “The cleaner at Asda said he saw a dark-haired woman banging on the door when all the shit kicked off.” He pointed at the screen. “She’s dark-haired.”

Sam felt her pulse quicken. “Get this over to him asap.”

For once, Pete White didn’t hang around.