A Sailor's Honour Read Online Free Page B

The Chinese women of Auckland protect their hands and faces from the sun. They don’t care that they might look like chauffeurs when they drive. She caught his eye and nodded.
    â€˜I drove to Beachlands where I kept observation of a suspect. I came home. I went looking for my daughter when she didn’t come home. I called the police,’ De Villiers said. ‘The rest you probably know.’
    â€˜Not so fast,’ DI McCarten said. ‘You know we need more detail than that, don’t you?’
    Prissy bitch, De Villiers thought, but she was right. ‘Ask me what you want to know,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been in this position before.’
    â€˜Let’s talk about your investigation,’ DI McCarten said. ‘Who went with you?’
    â€˜I was alone.’
    She raised an eyebrow. De Villiers knew what she was thinking. Any interaction with a suspect should always be performed by investigators in pairs, just as DI McCarten and her partner behind her were doing. ‘The golf estate is near my home, and I decided not to waste resources by bringing DS Veerasinghe with me,’ he said. ‘I was just going to see what the man does and whom he meets.’
    â€˜So there is no one who can verify your whereabouts, is there?’
    â€˜My wife,’ De Villiers said.
    â€˜We’ve already spoken to your partner,’ DI McCarten said. ‘And she can’t account for your whereabouts until much later.’
    De Villiers shrugged. ‘Of course. Only from the time I got home. At which time my daughter was still with her teachers. As you must know by now.’
    DI McCarten put her pen down. ‘No, Inspector, we don’t know that. As a matter of fact, her teacher can’t remember seeing her after 2 p.m. At which time you say you were in Beachlands. With no one to back you up.’
    So Zoë might have been taken earlier. The kidnappers might have had a start of two to three hours before he initiated the full-scale search by seven in the evening. Several agencies of the New Zealand government had sprung into action, including the Child, Youth and Family service, and the Advice Desk for Abused Women and Children. Within the police, the Child Protection Unit took over the investigation. De Villiers was immediately a suspect, because when a child disappears – especially a young girl – the father or an uncle is usually responsible. The junior detectives from CPU had listened to his story with ill-concealed scepticism and had made him walk and re-walk the route he had taken to fetch Zoë with them. The officers had knocked on doors and had spoken with the homeowners. They’d pointed to De Villiers at the gate. Here and there someone had remembered seeing De Villiers going towards the school and returning alone. ‘He came past twice,’ an elderly man had said. ‘Twice in each direction.’ The search had proceeded to the school, but eventually the detectives had taken De Villiers back to his house.
    De Villiers had considered telling the police about the phone call.
    Then they’d taken him and Emma to the Howick Community Police Centre.
    He looked at DI McCarten and wondered whether he should tell her that he’d returned home early to have sex with his wife. She’s probably never had sex before, he thought, and would never understand. She might even think of it as abuse.
    When he’d joined the force ten years earlier, there had been more than a hundred South Africans in the New Zealand Police already. The number was now closer to two hundred. He expected that each of them would make it their personal business to assist in the footslogging and paperwork accompanying a search of this nature. When a child goes missing in New Zealand, the whole community comes out to help. But Zoë’s abductors were not New Zealanders; that De Villiers knew. They were South Africans, and of a persuasion that made it unlikely for them