Cold Justice Read Online Free Page A

investment.’ She glanced up and over her glasses. ‘Not keen on living in the real world, maybe?’
    ‘And what about her?’ asked Carter.
    ‘Lauren Forbes-Wright works for an American drugs company with a research department over here in east London,’ answered Pam. ‘We are guessing that’s how they can afford to live in the middle of Greenwich; it’s the usual thing for Glastons to pick up the tab on their overseas workers. Toby and her married in 2011 and they produced Samuel bang-on nine months later.’
    ‘There’s a twelve-year age difference,’ added Robbo.
    ‘So she could have been looking at a ticking baby clock when she married him. And what about him? What was he looking for, do we think?’ Carter asked.
    ‘The mum he never had, maybe?’ answered Robbo. ‘She ran away to live in Argentina with a boyfriend when Toby was seven. His dad packed him off to boarding school soon after. Seems like Jeremy Forbes-Wright concentrated on his career, for all the good it did him.’
    ‘That’s the trouble when you set yourself up as Mr Traditional Values and spotless,’ said Pam, ‘and then caught with an underage escort.’
    ‘That was denied, and a long time ago,’ said Carter.
    ‘Maybe he just couldn’t pay his way out this time,’ said Robbo. ‘But is that enough to kill yourself over? Politicians have survived worse.’
    ‘I think he was banking on getting back into the Cabinet. He must have known he had no chance,’ Pam said.
    ‘The missing forty minutes, Robbo?’ asked Carter. ‘Any nearer to solving it?’
    Robbo stood and used a marker to draw a balloon shape on the whiteboard behind his desk. ‘This is his verified route.’ Robbo drew in the
Cutty Sark
and the Royal Observatory. ‘Here’s his house. We know that Samuel and his dad Toby left the Riverview apartments on Thames Street at two thirty.’ He wrote the times on the map as he talked. ‘They were seen by a neighbour as they left. He was seen passing by the
Cutty Sark
and then he headed up to the Royal Observatory. We know Samuel was still inside the buggy at this point because work colleagues saw him in there. After Toby leaves the Royal Observatory at approximately ten past four and makes his way home we lose any sightings of the buggy until we pick him up again at just before five in the middle of Greenwich,
here,
and then again
here.
But we do not know whether he still had Samuel in the buggy then. At twenty past five he arrives home without Samuel.’
    ‘What about the internet?’ Carter continued. ‘If he’s with a paedophile there will be footage being circulated on the net, I’m sure.’
    ‘All being monitored, sir, so far as we can,’ answered Hector, a detective who had been seconded in from the Exhibits Room. He’d helped out in Robbo’s department before and was needed again now. ‘We’ve distributed Samuel’s photo to every officer looking at tapes.’
    ‘There’s an alert out to all Special Branch officers within a three-hundred-mile radius of here.’ Robbo went back behind his desk. ‘You could get far in that missing forty minutes. And, what if it wasn’t a random abduction? What if it was planned?’
    ‘Then there are a few areas we are looking at,’ Carter said. ‘The father is socially inept. He seems to have a touch of Asperger’s to me. He’s shy and awkward and he didn’t have the kind of childhood that involved any parenting. He was abandoned soon after his mum left. I doubt very much if he wanted Samuel.’
    ‘So we step up the search for a body in the park.’
    ‘Yes, and all around the Royal Observatory. He could have killed and hidden his son’s body there. He knows the place back to front.’
    ‘Then the Royal Observatory stays shut until we also know it back to front,’ said Robbo. ‘What else do you have?’
    ‘There’s always the possibility it has something to do with Jeremy Forbes-Wright,’ said Carter.
    ‘Best to talk it through with Toby,’ Pam said. ‘See