Dead and Gone: A gripping thriller with a shocking twist (DI Annie Parker)

by D. L. Michaels

  ‘DNA harvested from hair found on the jacket in the grave where Crewe was supposed to have been buried matches that of Danny Smith. He’s an ex-con and we had his profile on record.’

  ‘Hrrm. Let me think on that.’ She drums beautifully manicured fingers on the table. ‘What if Smith says he and Crewe were close friends and maybe had been play-fighting as teenage boys do? Or even proper fighting? Either option would explain the trace evidence transference. On its own, this evidence is worthless.’ She drums some more. ‘I’m going to play devil’s advocate: What if this isn’t a fake murder? What if the mannequin turns out to be a decoy?’

  I follow her flow. ‘You mean, what if Crewe had been murdered by Smith and buried by him and his future wife?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I’ve thought about that. I wondered if Danny Smith had feared that one day his wife might go to the police, so he went back and moved the corpse.’

  ‘Is that a possibility?’ asks Goodwin, his face draining of what little colour had remained.

  ‘No, sir, I don’t think it is. The first thing I did was have the labs analyse the blood on Ashley Crewe’s clothes. It’s pig blood. Just as Danny Smith had asserted. Carbon dating also places the timeline of the blood, clothing and other trace as twenty-plus years old and is consistent with his testimony of fakery. No traces of human blood were discovered.’

  ‘How can you prove those clothes were Ashley Crewe’s?’ asks Sabrina, clearly enjoying the puzzle.

  ‘Because the recovered clothes bore mitochondrial DNA that gave us a familial match to Kieran Crewe, whose DNA is on record.’

  Goodwin looks pleased.

  ‘Additionally,’ I add, ‘Paula Smith’s testimony identifies the clothes recovered from the dummy as the ones she saw on Ashley Crewe on the night of his disappearance.’

  ‘Paula – that’s Paula Smith?’ Sabrina runs a finger down her notes. ‘This is the woman also known as Sarah Paula Makeney and Sarah Johnson?’

  ‘Yes, it most certainly is,’ I reply, with a rueful smile on my face.

  ‘Thank you for the clarity. Before we come to her and all her marital mysteries let’s finish with Daniel Smith. In his case, I see no possibility of charges.’ She ticks points off on her fingers. ‘He didn’t come to you and instigate the inquiry, he didn’t lie under oath, there is no case for perjury and no evidence of attempting to pervert the course of justice. But – and it’s a big but – if you find Ashley Crewe, then we might revisit him. Okay?’

  ‘Understood,’ says Goodwin.

  I fume silently.

  ‘Right,’ continues Sabrina. ‘And so to your fascinating lady suspect.’ Her face lights up. ‘This is juicy. I’ve never done a bigamy before. And she’s made a clear admission, is that right?’

  ‘She has,’ I confirm. ‘Married to two men for five years.’

  ‘Lordy, Lordy, Lordy! Two husbands. Doesn’t that sound like hell? Any religious, polygamous complications?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘So, I can be confident she’s not going to claim immunity from prosecution because she’s a practising member of an Indian polyamorous sect?’

  ‘You can be confident of that,’ I reassure her.

  Goodwin frowns his way into the conversation, ‘Are there really religions that allow women to have two husbands? I thought it was only men that were allowed multiple partners.’

  ‘How blinkered and misogynistic of you,’ snarks Sabrina. ‘Polyandry, that is females with two officially recognised husbands, used to be common in Tibet and still regularly happens in the Yunnan and Sichuan regions of China, as well as Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria and parts of India and South America.’ She scowls at me, ‘Our girl didn’t marry there, did she?’

  ‘No,’ I confirm. ‘She did not. Scotland and Italy.’

  ‘That’s a relief. Now let me think. What else could affect us? Well, she would escape prosecution if she believed husband number one was dead. And that’s not the case. So why haven’t you been pushing to charge her?’

  ‘Given her overall cooperation and intent to plead guilty,’ I answer, ‘we saw no rush. And to be honest, with the pressure of the Ashley Crewe murder enquiry, I didn’t want what could be a complicated case of bigamy to distract and drain us of resources.’

  ‘That was my advice, as well,’ adds Goodwin.

  ‘Probably a good call,’ concedes Sabrina. ‘But actually, the bigamy should be a reasonably straightforward prosecution. Do you have her marriage documentation – copies of licences from the Scots and Italians?’

  ‘Yes, we do.’

  ‘Then feel free to charge her as and when you’re ready. This is an offence punishable by imprisonment, but jail is usually only sanctioned when the deception was committed for financial gain.’

  ‘No gain,’ I comment.

  ‘None at all?’ she queries.

  ‘No, to the contrary. Smith actually built a multimillion-pound business when hubby number one went to jail. And though number two probably doesn’t realise it, she pays 70 per cent of all his bills and has even been the major purchaser of his artwork, donating purchased pieces to charities.’

  ‘You mean she’ll do a twirl and turn into Mother Teresa if we put her in the dock?’

  We all smile. ‘Not unless Mother Teresa ever got pregnant,’ I add.

  ‘She’s pregnant?’ says Sabrina in amazement.

  ‘Yes. And before you ask, no, I don’t know who the father is.’

  ‘Juicier and juicier,’ pronounces our crown prosecutor. ‘You do both realise that when the press has finished tearing her apart, broadsheet feminists are going to want to whip a pound of flesh out of our unsympathetic hides as well?’

  ‘I have a thick hide,’ says Goodwin, without hesitation. ‘And as a faithful husband and practising Christian, I have no hesitation in going ahead with this prosecution.’

  ‘Then go ahead we shall,’ chirps Sabrina.

  103

  Danny

  Stevie Sinclair is a sixty-year-old recovering alcoholic. He’s a silver-haired, former headmaster, driven to drink by the pupils of an inner city school who were more interested in drugs, sex and punching teachers than learning poetry, algebra or geography. Booze cost him his job, his marriage and almost his life. Stevie drank so much he damaged both his liver and spleen to the point where he was given the ultimate medical ultimatum: stay dry or die. He chose life, as we Trainspottin’ fans say.

  Now I am with Stevie in a greasy spoon café round the corner from my house and his choices of the day are a mug of builder’s-strength tea and a toasted bacon and egg butty. ‘What’s troubling you, Danny?’ he says, then bites into the bread and sends a yellow river of yolk running through his fingers.

  ‘Marriage shit. I’m guessin’ Paula told you she’s left me?’

  He nods while lickin’ yolk from his fingers.

  ‘And she’s pregnant. Did she mention that?’

  I can tell from his wide-eyed response that she didn’t. ‘Oh, yes, up the duff she is, and it might be mine. Might not.’

  Stevie wipes his hands and takes a sip of tea but says nothing. I know the score. Twelfth Step visits and interventions like this are about him listenin’, not tellin’ me what to do.

  ‘And she’s married. Not to me – well, yeah, married to me, of course – but to some other fucker as well.’

  He puts his mug down. ‘What?’

  ‘Yeah, I thought that would break your monk-like silence. She’s fuckin’ married, Stevie. She’s a bigamist.’

  ‘And how does that make you feel?’

  ‘Oh, fuck off. Don’t go all pretend psychiatrist on me. It makes me feel like killin’ the bastard who’s been shaggin’ her and slappin’ some sense into Paula.’

  He nods to my bandaged hand. ‘Is that what happened there?’

  ‘Kind of.’ Unexpectedly, I feel embarrassed. ‘And there’s a whole pile of crap from my childhood, old ghosts come back to haunt me.’

  �
�Go on,’ he says, takin’ another bite of his breakfast butty.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about them. I mean, there’s no point. It’s bad stuff I did and thought I’d got away with. But I haven’t. You know when you’re a kid, you make quick decisions, especially when you don’t have anyone you can talk shit through with. And those decisions are like little cancer cells. You don’t see how wrong they are. You ignore them. Only as you get older they grow unnoticed. They grow and grow, and then they surface. And when they do, they’re so fuckin’ big they just kill you.’

  He wipes his mouth with a paper napkin. ‘You know my story, Danny. I remember you approaching me at the end of an AA meeting after I’d told it and you asked me to be your sponsor, but it’s worth reminding you of bits of it. All alcoholics are frightened. We all feel that something out there is going to ruin us or kill us. I thought failing to control the kids was going to get one of them, or a teacher, seriously hurt or killed. I thought failing to be successful as a head was going to get me sacked and then my wife would leave me because I was useless. So I drank to avoid the fear. To bury it. But you know what? No kid or teacher died while I was at school. Three years after I got sacked two pupils knifed a fourteen-year-old to death. My wife didn’t leave me because I lost my job. She stayed with me for four more years. She finally left because my drinking was killing her as much as it was killing me. Booze isn’t the answer, Danny. You know it, and I know it.’

  ‘It’s just in those moments, it helps.’

  ‘It doesn’t. Booze is not a solution to your problems. It’s a way of ignoring them. You said there was stuff in your past, bad stuff growing like cancer. Well, to use your analogy, you have to diagnose it properly, examine it fully, then irradiate the hell out of it.’

  ‘But I don’t know how to do that.’

  ‘You do it by bringing it out in the open. Admitting your mistakes. Then you make decisions. Just because you made bad ones in the past, doesn’t mean you will again.’

  ‘It probably does.’

  ‘No, not at all, Danny. You were young then. Inexperienced. Probably frightened. Now you’re a man. You have experience and courage. Don’t let drink cloud your judgment or your bravery to face the future, Danny. You’re better than that.’

  104

  Annie

  For the second time today, I ring home to see how Dee is, but get no answer. We’re an old-fashioned household, with a landline, rather than just mobiles, so I try that one first, then I try her mobile and then Tom’s. Then I start leaving messages.

  My sisterly imagination conjures up all manner of medical emergencies, then I calm down and remember they’re both the most forgetful people in the world and have probably gone out together and left their phones behind. Or they have them muted. Or they ran out of battery power. Or they are buried deep in pockets or bags and are ringing out in muffled ignorance.

  Alice and Nisha are standing three metres away, waiting for me to shift the phone from my ear. As soon as I do so, they come over.

  ‘We are bearers of good news,’ announces Nisha. ‘We know where Ashley Crewe is.’

  ‘You do?’ My spirits lift.

  ‘He’s in Thailand. Your suspicions about the desk in Crewe’s room and the girl on reception were right. Alice, you did the crunches, can you join the dots for our beloved DI?’

  ‘My pleasure. Let’s start with Crewe’s receptionist, Chomechai. She is not the daughter of a family friend doing work experience in the UK as he suggested. She holds both British and Thai passports and her name is Chomechai Chaiprasit. She is the only child of a hugely successful Thai businesswoman called Janjira Chaiprasit. By successful, I mean multimillionaire, yachts and several homes successful.’

  ‘Married?’ I ask impatiently.

  ‘No,’ says Nisha. ‘She isn’t married, but she does have a long-term partner. A westerner by the look of him.’

  ‘Thanks to Google Images,’ says Alice, ‘and no end of society balls and dances in Thailand, we have a photograph of the happy couple.’ She drops a glossy print on my desk and slides it towards me.

  It shows a slim, beautiful Asian woman of maybe forty, forty-five, wearing a gorgeously clingy ball gown of shimmering emerald-green chiffon and ruffles with an exquisite string of pearls as white as her perfect teeth. Next to her is a handsome, even taller, broad-chested, dark-haired, pale-skinned man of about the same age, dressed in a dashing black tuxedo with frilled white shirt and red four-handed bow tie.

  I scramble through the stacks of paper and files on my desk.

  ‘Here.’ Nisha produces exactly what I was searching for – a copy of the photograph of the young Ashley Crewe in his Manchester United shirt. I greedily place it alongside the shot Alice provided.

  The hair is different. The body shape different. The posture different.

  But the nose is the same.

  The eyes are the same.

  The mouth is the same.

  Adrenaline surges to my heart and head. I feel drugged by the excitement. ‘Do we know what name he is going under?’

  ‘Still finding out,’ says Alice.

  ‘Then find out faster,’ I say impatiently. ‘We also need a facial recognition expert to look at these shots. There’s software that can do comparison analysis. We need to get—’

  ‘Done. And done,’ says Nisha proudly. ‘It’s definitely Ashley Crewe, boss. We have a top expert and his computer programming agreeing on that.’

  ‘Wow!’ I blow out a long sigh of relief. My eyes fix on the two photographs. Almost a quarter of a century separates them. Two and a half decades, during which a teenage boy disappeared from rural England and then reappeared in South East Asia, richer than a prince.

  ‘Good work. Very, very good work,’ I say, still absorbed by the prints. ‘And now the big question – do you have an address for him?’

  ‘Yes, we do,’ says Nisha. ‘We have that – and more.’ She puts down another photograph. ‘This is Crewe’s crib. It’s a beach-front residence in Koh Kaew, Phuket. I grabbed it from Google Maps.’

  I take the picture and stare in awe at the low-level mansion, complete with huge pool, sun terraces, patios, views of the sea, countryside and distant mountains.

  I place the house next to the society couple and the young footballer. How can it be that a young thug who rapes a schoolgirl ends up luxuriating in paradise?

  I know the answer.

  Drugs.

  ‘Looking at this lifestyle, I think it’s clear that Raurie Crewe isn’t the head of the family’s crime business – Ashley is. We need his Thai phone records. We need to show that he was the one who made the call to Richardson. Brother Raurie isn’t the brains – he’s just an accountant and a despatch boy.’ I turn around the picture of Ashley in his dinner suit. ‘This is the man Ellison was afraid of. Not Kieran. Not Raurie. Ashley Crewe is our Mr Big.’

  105

  Paula

  A flash of morning sun is enough for me to put on a coat and head for the Cotswold hills. I’m no good at sitting around moping. I’d rather be out trudging. Dosing up on the medicine of nature. Fresh air. The sight of a squirrel or spooked pheasant breaking from frosted undergrowth or tree branch.

  I’m back at the Devil’s Chimney. Breathless and red-cheeked, having walked the same rutted, frozen tracks across Leckhampton Hill that I did more than half a decade ago. The hike that ended in me bumping into Martin Johnson at an arts exhibition in Chipping Norton town hall. A day that changed my life.

  Now my unborn child and I stand on the same ancient precipice of bleak winter hills and our hearts beat together. Despite the mess my life has become, I feel exhilarated. I am alive, I am healthy, I have a new life inside me, and a new life to live.

  I watch two common ravens break from nearby woodland. Great crosses of blackness whirl across the grey sky. They intuitively find a thermal, then circle for signs of prey on the vast fields below. I remember reading that ravens mate for life, stick together through thick and thin. Aside f
rom hunger and predators, I wonder what might split them up. Deceit? Doubts? Insecurity? Probably not.

  I turn and walk back towards the woods and the steep, winding descent to the car park. My mobile rings just before I enter the darkness of the trees.

  Most likely it’s Danny. I called his sponsor yesterday and asked him to look in on him, so I’m sure Danny will have misinterpreted that as a willingness for me to be talked to.

  I pull the phone out and check the screen.

  It’s a number I don’t recognise.

  ‘Hello,’ I say cautiously.

  ‘This is Detective Inspector Parker, from Historic Crimes.’

  My heart sinks. ‘Hello. How can I help you?’

  ‘I’ve some news that concerns you. We have traced a man to Thailand, whom we believe is Ashley Crewe.’

  I’m in the middle of open countryside but suddenly there is no air. Either that, or I have forgotten how to breathe.

  ‘Did you hear me?’

  ‘Yes,’ I manage. ‘I heard you. Are you sure?’

  ‘About 99.9 per cent. Thing is, we want to have him extradited to Britain, but, for that to happen, I’m going to need you to testify that he raped you. Can you do that?’

  I don’t answer. It’s something I’ve never considered. Never thought would be possible. Now the whole concept panics me. I see Ashley’s contorted, angry face, the veins in his neck as he holds me down and violates me. I feel my heart aching in my chest. I feel the tears of my teenage self, forcing their way through and rolling down my cheeks.

  Finally, I answer. ‘Yes, I can do that, Inspector.’ I take a deep breath. ‘I can do whatever you need me to do.’

  ‘Good. Can you come in tomorrow, so we can go over your statement? Bring your lawyer, if you wish.’

  ‘I’ll have to call him and confirm his availability. If not tomorrow, then it will be the day after. I promise.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘And … there’s something else I have to tell you.’