Barbara was considering what punishment she might be able to inflict upon Isabelle Ardery for the suggestion that she get herself into this glamorous position in the first place when deep within her shoulder bag, her mobile phone rang, bleating out the musical equivalent of the first four lines of “Peggy Sue” that she’d gleefully downloaded from the Internet.
“Buddy Holly,” Hadiyyah said.
“I remain gratified to have taught you something.” Barbara fished out the mobile and looked at the number of the caller. She was either saved by the literal bell or her movements were being tracked. She flipped it open. “Guv,” she said.
“Where are you, Sergeant?” Isabelle Ardery asked.
“Shopping,” Barbara told her, “for clothes. As recommended.”
“Tell me you’re not in a charity shop and I’ll be a happy woman,” Ardery said.
“Be a happy woman, then.”
“Do I want to know where … ?”
“Probably not.”
“And you’ve managed what?”
“A necklace so far.” And lest the superintendent protest the oddity of this purchase, “and makeup as well. Lots of makeup. I’ll look like …” She racked her brain, seeking a suitable image. “I’ll look like Elle Macpherson when next we meet. And at the moment I’m standing in a changing room having my knickers disapproved of by a nine-year-old.”
“Your companion is nine years old?” Ardery said. “Sergeant—”
“Believe me, she has definite thoughts on what I ought to be wearing, guv, which is why we’ve only managed a necklace so far. I expect we’re about to compromise on a skirt, though. We’ve been at it for hours and I think I’ve worn her down.”
“Well, effect the compromise and get in gear. Something’s come up.”
“Something … ?”
“We’ve got a dead body in a cemetery, Sergeant, and it’s one that’s not supposed to be there.”
ISABELLE ARDERY DIDN’T want to think of her boys, but her first sight of Abney Park Cemetery made it nearly impossible to think of anything else. They were of an age when having adventures trumped everything save Christmas morning, and the cemetery was decidedly a place for adventures. Wildly overgrown, with gloomy Victorian funerary statues draped in ivy, with fallen trees providing imaginative spots for forts and caches, with tumbling tombstones and crumbling monuments …It was like something out of a fantasy novel, complete with the occasional gnarled tree that had been carved at shoulder height to display huge cameos in the shape of moons, stars, and leering faces. All this, and it was just off the high street, behind a wrought-iron railing, accessible to anyone through various gates.
DS Nkata had parked their car at the main entrance where already an ambulance was waiting. This entrance was at the junction of Northwold Road and Stoke Newington High Street, an area of tarmac in front of two cream-coloured buildings whose stucco was flaking off in sheets. These sat on either side of enormous wrought-iron gates, which, Isabelle learned, were normally open throughout the day but now were closed and guarded by a constable from the local station. He came forward to meet their car.
Isabelle got out into the summer heat. It came off the tarmac in waves. It did nothing to soothe her pounding head, a pain in her skull that was immediately exacerbated by the thunka-thunka-thunka of a television news helicopter that was circling above them like a raptor.
A crowd had gathered on the pavement, held back by crime scene tape that was looped tightly from a streetlamp to the cemetery fence on either side of the entrance. Among them, Isabelle saw a few members of the press, recognisable by their notebooks, by their recorders, and by the fact that they were being addressed by a bloke who had to be the duty press officer from the Stoke Newington station. He’d glanced over his shoulder as Isabelle and Nkata climbed out of the car. He nodded curtly, as did the local constable. They weren’t happy. The Met’s intrusion into their patch was not appreciated.
Blame politics, Isabelle wanted to tell them. Blame SO5 and the continual failure of Missing Persons not only to find a missing person but also to strike from their list persons who were no longer missing. Blame yet another tedious press exposé of this fact and a consequent power struggle between the civilians running SO5 and the frustrated officers demanding a police head to the division, as if that would solve its problems. Above all, blame Assistant Commissioner Sir David Hillier and the manner in which he’d decided to fill the vacant position that Isabelle was now auditioning for. Hillier hadn’t said as much, but Isabelle was no fool: This was her test run and everyone knew it.
She’d commandeered DS Nkata to drive her up to the crime scene. Like the constables at the scene, he wasn’t happy either. Clearly, he didn’t expect a detective sergeant to be required to act the part of chauffeur, but he was professional enough to keep his feelings unspoken. She’d had little choice in the matter. It was either select a driver from among the team or attempt to find Abney Park Cemetery herself, using the A-Z. If she was assigned permanently to her new position, Isabelle knew it was likely going to take her years to become familiar with the convoluted mass of streets and villages that had, over the centuries, been subsumed into the monstrous expansion of London.
“Pathologist?” she said to the constable once she had introduced herself and Nkata and had signed the sheet recording those entering the site. “Photographer? SOCO?”
“Inside. They’re waiting to bag her. As ordered.” The constable was polite …just. The radio on his shoulder squawked, and he reached up to turn down the volume. Isabelle looked from him to the gawkers on the pavement and from them to the buildings across the street. These comprised the ubiquitous commercial establishments of every high street in the country, from a Pizza Hut to a newsagent. All of them had living accommodation above them, and above one of them—a Polish delicatessen—an entire modern apartment block had been built. Countless interviews would need to be conducted in these places. The Stoke Newington cops, Isabelle decided, should be thanking God the Met was taking the case.
She asked about the tree carvings once they were inside the cemetery and being led into its labyrinthine embrace. Their guide was a volunteer at the burial ground, a pensioner of some eighty years who explained that there were no groundsmen or keepers but instead committees of people like himself, unpaid members of the community devoted to reclaiming Abney Park from the encroachment of nature. Of course, it wasn’t ever going to be what it once had been, the gentleman explained, but that wasn’t the point. No one wanted that. Rather, it was meant to be a nature reserve. One’ll see birds and foxes and squirrels and the like, he said. One’ll note the wildflowers and plants. We aim just to keep the paths passable and make sure the place’s safe for people wanting to spend some time with nature. One wants that sort of thing in a city, don’t you agree? An escape, if you know what I mean. As to the carvings on the trees, there’s a boy doing ’em. We all know him but can’t bloody catch him at it. If we do, one of us’ll let him have it, he vowed.
Isabelle doubted this. He was as frail as the wild snapdragon that grew along the path they followed.
He took them down trails that grew increasingly narrow as they coursed their way into the heart of the cemetery. Where paths were wide, they were stony, pebbled so variously that they looked like representatives of every possible geological period. Where they were narrow, the paths were thick with decomposing leaves and the ground was spongy and aromatic, sending up the rich scent of compost. At last the tower of a chapel appeared and then the chapel itself, a sad ruin of brick and iron and corrugated steel, its interior thick with weeds and made inaccessible by iron bars.
Over there, the pensioner told them needlessly. He indicated a gathering of white-suited crime scene officers across a parched lawn. Isabelle thanked the man and said to Nkata, “Track down whoever discovered the body. I’ll want a word.”
Nkata gave a look towards the chapel. Isabelle knew he wanted to see the crime scene. She waited for him to protest or argue. He did
neither. He said, “Right,” and she left him to it. She liked him for his response.
She herself approached a small, secondary building abutting one side of the chapel, near to which a body bag waited next to a collapsed ambulance trolley. The body was going to have to be carried out upon it, as the uneven paths in the cemetery would make rolling the trolley impossible till they got near the exit.
Scenes of crime officers were engaged in everything from taping and measuring to marking off footprints, for what little good this would do, as there appeared to be dozens. Only a narrow access route consisting of end-to-end boards made the immediate site of the body available, and Isabelle donned latex gloves as she picked her way along it.
The forensic pathologist came out of the secondary building. She was a middle-aged woman with the teeth, skin, and disturbing cough of a chain-smoker. Isabelle introduced herself and said, “What is this place?” with a nod at the building.
“No idea,” the pathologist said. She did not give her name, nor did Isabelle want it. “No door from it into the chapel, so it can’t have been a vestry. Gardener’s shed, perhaps?” The woman shrugged. It didn’t really matter, did it?
Of course it didn’t. What mattered was the corpse, and this turned out to be a young woman. She was half seated and half sprawled inside the little annex, in a position suggesting she’d stumbled backwards upon being attacked and had subsequently slid down the wall. The wall itself was mottled by the weather, and above the body a graffito of an eye inside a triangle proclaimed, “God Goes Wireless.” The floor was stone and littered with rubbish. Death had come to mingle with crisps bags, sandwich wrappers, chocolate-bar wrappers, and empty Coke cans. There was a pornographic magazine as well, a much more recent bit of rubbish than the rest of the debris as it was fresh and uncrumpled. It was also open at a gleaming crotch shot of a pouting, red-lipsticked woman in patent leather boots, a top hat, and nothing else.
Ignominious location in which to meet your end, Isabelle thought. She squatted to have a look at the victim. Her stomach rolled at the scent coming off the body: a smell of meat rotting in the heat, thick as yellow fog. Newly hatched maggots writhed in the body’s nostrils and mouth, and her mouth, face, and neck—where they could be seen—had turned greenish-red.
The young woman’s head lolled on her chest, and on the chest itself a vast amount of blood had coagulated. Flies were doing more business there, and the sound of their buzzing was like high-tension wires in the close space. When Isabelle carefully moved the young woman’s head to expose her neck, more flies rose in a cloud from an ugly wound. It was jagged and torn, suggesting a weapon wielded by a clumsy killer.
“Carotid artery,” the pathologist said. She made a gesture towards the body’s bagged hands. “Looks like she tried to stop the bleeding, but it couldn’t have done much good. She would have bled out fast.”
“Weapon?”
“Nothing left at the scene. Till we get her on the table and have a close look, it could be anything sharp. Not a knife, though. The wound’s far too messy for a knife.”
“How long d’you reckon she’s been dead?”
“Difficult to say because of the heat. Lividity’s fixed and rigor’s gone. Perhaps twenty-four hours?”
“Do we know who she is?”
“There’s nothing on her. No handbag here either. Nothing to suggest who she is. But the eyes …They’re going to give you some help.”
“The eyes? Why? What’s wrong with them?”
“Have a look for yourself,” the pathologist said. “They’re clouded over, as you’d expect, but you can still see something of the irises. Very interesting, you ask me. Don’t see eyes like that very often.”
From Alan Dresser’s account, later confirmed by the takeaway’s employees, McDonald’s was unusually crowded that day. It may be that other parents of young children were also using the break in the weather to get out of the house for the morning, but whatever the case, most of them seem to have converged on McDonald’s at the same time. Dresser had a querulous toddler in tow, and he was, he admits, anxious to appease him, to feed him, and to be on his way in order to put him down for a nap. He established the boy at one of the three remaining available tables—second in from the doorway—and he went to place their order. Although hindsight demands one castigate Dresser for leaving his son unattended for so much as thirty seconds, at least ten mothers were present in McDonald’s at that moment and, in their company, at least twenty-two small children. In such a public setting in the middle of the day, how was he to assume that inconceivable danger was approaching? Indeed, if one thinks of danger at all in such a location, one thinks of paedophiles lurking nearby and seeing an opportunity, not of three boys under the age of twelve. No one present looked the least bit dangerous. Indeed, Dresser was himself the only adult male there.
CCTV tape shows three boys later identified as Michael Spargo, Ian Barker, and Reggie Arnold approaching McDonald’s at 12:51. They had been inside the Barriers for more than two hours. They were doubtless hungry, and although they could have assuaged their hunger with the bags of crisps they’d taken from Mr. Gupta’s snack kiosk, it seems to have been their intention to take food from a McDonald’s customer and to make a run for it afterwards. Both Michael’s account and Ian’s account agree on this point. In every interview, Reggie Arnold refuses to talk about McDonald’s altogether. This is likely due to the fact that, no matter whose idea it was to take John Dresser from the premises, it is Reggie Arnold who has the toddler by the hand as the boys walk towards the Barriers’ exit.
In looking upon John Dresser, Ian, Michael, and Reggie would have been gazing at the very antithesis of their own past selves. At the moment of his abduction, the child was dressed in a new, azure snowsuit, with yellow ducks marching across the front of it. His blond hair was freshly washed and had yet to be cut, so it fell round his face in the sort of cherubic curls one associates with Renaissance putti. He had bright white trainers on his feet and he was carrying his favourite toy: a small brown-and-black dog with floppy ears and a pink tongue partially torn from its mouth, a stuffed animal later found along the route the boys took once they removed John from McDonald’s.
This removal was apparently accomplished without difficulty. It was a matter of moments, and the CCTV film that documents John’s abduction makes for chilling viewing. In it, one clearly watches the three boys enter the McDonald’s (which, at the time, did not have closed-circuit filming of its own). Less than one minute later, out they come. Reggie Arnold emerges first, holding John Dresser by the hand. Five seconds later, Ian Barker and Michael Spargo follow. Michael is eating something from a conical container. These appear to be McDonald’s French fries.
One of the questions relentlessly asked after the fact was how could Alan Dresser have failed to notice that his son was being taken? Two explanations exist. One of them is the noise and the crowded conditions of the takeaway, which covered any sound John Dresser might have made when approached by the boys who took him. The other is a mobile phone call that Dresser received from his office as he reached the till to place his order. The wretched timing of this call kept him with his back turned from his son longer than he might otherwise have had it turned, and as many people do, Dresser lowered his head and maintained that position as he listened and responded to the caller, likely to avoid distractions that would have made it more difficult for him to concentrate in the raucous atmosphere. By the time he had concluded this phone call, paid for his food, and returned with it to the table, John was not only gone but likely had been gone for nearly five minutes, more than enough time to get him out of the Barriers altogether.
Dresser did not at first think that John had been taken. Indeed, with the takeaway so crowded, that was the last thing on his mind. Instead, he thought the boy—restless as he’d been in Stanley Wallingford’s DIY shop—had climbed down from his seat and wandered off, perhaps attracted by something inside McDonald’s, perhaps attracted by something just outs
ide the takeaway but still well within the arcade. These were vital minutes, but Dresser did not see them that way. Not unreasonably, he looked round the take away first before he began asking the adults therein if they had seen John.
One wonders how it is possible. It is midday. It is a public place. It contains other people, both children and adults. Yet three young boys are still able to walk up to a toddler, take him by the hand, and make off with him without anyone apparently noticing. How could this happen? Why did it happen?
The how of it is, I believe, contained within the age of the perpetrators of this crime. The fact that they were children themselves made them virtually invisible because what they did was beyond the imagination of the people present in the McDonald’s. People simply did not expect malevolence to arrive in the package in which it was presented that day. People tend to have predetermined mental pictures of child abductors, and those pictures do not include schoolboys.
Once it became clear that John was not in the McDonald’s and had not been noticed, Dresser widened his search. It was only after he had checked the four nearest shops that he tracked down the arcade’s security force and an announcement was made over the public-address system, alerting the patrons of the Barriers to be on the lookout for a small boy in a bright blue snowsuit. An hour passed during which Dresser continued to look for his son, accompanied by the shopping arcade’s manager and the head of the security team. None of them considered looking at the CCTV tapes because none of them at that point wished to think the unthinkable.
Chapter Five
BARBARA HAVERS HAD TO USE HER ID TO CONVINCE THE constable that she was a cop. He’d barked at her, “Hey! Cemetery’s closed, madam,” as she’d approached the main entrance, having finally found a place for her decrepit Mini just behind a skip, where a building was being renovated in Stoke Newington Church Street.
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