Smith would not have been the only person present to notice that the man had just become a victim for the first time. At least one other individual had been involved, and knowingly so because you cannot run into a seventeen-stone man and do that much damage without noticing it. Someone had knocked him down and failed to report it. The very best spin one could put on this now was that it was a hit-and-run, but for a number of reasons Smith had already moved on from there; it was at this moment that he took out his notebook and began to bullet-point the questions.
Serena said next, ‘The man also has a contusion on the back of the skull. This is a tearing rather than a deep-impact wound. Several inches of the scalp have been torn away from the bone. Dr Robinson says this wound is consistent with the body being dragged over a hard surface as a part of the same impact that broke the legs. He has been able to remove some foreign material from the wound which will be sent for analysis.’
Terek was tapping away on his iPad with the fingers of one hand – the other was raised in the air, asking Serena Butler to pause her report for a moment. He seemed then, in the obviously new suit that was a little too large for him and his pebble glasses, more like a schoolboy swot than a man in charge of a dozen experienced detectives, and Smith saw one or two smirks being exchanged in John Wilson’s team. Wilson himself had a face that was impassive. There was no outward sign that he thought the man in the detective inspector’s place had taken a seat that by rights should have been his own.
Then Terek said, ‘Anything else? What about an ID?’
‘There is nothing on the body that immediately identifies it, sir. But Dr Robinson says that he should still be able to get fingerprints. I didn’t know this but apparently after a certain number of hours in the water the skin begins to lose what is called its integrity, but Dr Robinson should be able to make prints directly. We’ll have those in a couple of hours.’
That’s a lucky break after a couple of very unlucky ones, thought Smith. If the corpse has lost too much of its integrity, one can peel the skin off, setting it onto dummy fingers and try getting results that way but it’s a fiddly and time-consuming business. Prints today would be a real bonus. He pictured the dead man then, in his expensively sharp suit with its suspiciously empty pockets; a man who had come to an oddly violent and drawn-out end. Then he wrote a sentence on the back inside cover of his notebook and showed it to John Murray. The note said ‘Ten to one he’s in the system and we’ve got a name by the end of the day’.
Terek said, ‘DNA?’
‘Lots of material, obviously. We won’t have anything back before the end of the week, though, at the earliest.’
Terek pulled an irritated face, as if things had been done much more quickly than this in his previous force, but at least he didn’t make the mistake of saying so. Smith kept quiet, but his thoughts, and his advice had he given it, were plain enough – move on, you won’t need DNA for this one.
‘What else on ID?’
‘All the pockets were empty, not a single personal item which is odd. The clothes are quality and the suit has a London maker’s label. It might be made-to-measure and traceable. The man has old tattoos on his arms and shoulders but they’re not obvious giveaways. Mrs Markham has photographed these and we can already access them on the system if we need to…’
Blimey, thought Smith, you’ve just married off the senior mortuary technician. She’ll be thrilled when I tell her the good news. But Serena still had more to give and he could sense that she liked what she had kept until last.
‘Dr Robinson noticed some scarring around the eyes. He took additional X rays of the skull, and was cautious about what he found because simple X rays are not the chosen means of diagnosing problems with the brain. However, he believes that there is evidence of CTE, which is Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. So then he took X rays of the hands and found healed breaks of the metacarpal bones in both of them. All of which suggests…’
Serena Butler was thoroughly enjoying herself, and good luck to her. Smith looked around and then put up his hand.
‘Yes, DC? Sorry – sir.’
‘He was a boxer, miss.’
She smiled and blushed a little, but said that he might well be right – Dr Robinson had said that it was likely that at some point in his past the man had boxed regularly and probably seriously, over a period of years.
To Terek, she said, ‘There’s one more little thing, sir.’
‘Go on.’
‘He’s almost certainly Jewish.’
Terek was looking down again, tapping away.
‘How do we know this?’
Serena Butler glanced around at the upturned faces, widening her eyes and making a show of being slightly perplexed; she could see that Murray had got it, and Mike, and Smith, of course.
‘Well, it’s as I said, sir. Just a little thing. There’s a bit missing.’
Terek looked up at her then, when the laughter began, and it took him another few seconds. He joined in, belatedly, and made a fair effort to laugh at himself, too.
Then he said, ‘Excellent, great work, Serena. If you’re all done here for now, go back and see if you can push the fingerprints along. If he’s in the system, that will save us hours of work.’
Not bad, thought Smith – Terek fancies this bloke to be known to us, just as I do. When Serena left the room, watched by more than one pair of eyes, the detective inspector took a moment to rearrange his iPad and his nerves before he said, ‘Right, people. This is something – I’m sure you can all see that. In view of the communications situation up on the coast, we’re going to hold off sending a team up there for now, at least until we see whether we can get a name via the prints. If we get a name, we can be much more focused as soon as we hit the ground up there. Or the beach…’
Nobody laughed.
‘In the meantime, let’s plan this out. I see us dividing into two teams. There are those samples to be collected as well as statements to be taken – that’s team one. We will also need people working here, back-tracking this man’s history, as soon as we know who he is. Before that, we need to examine all reports of anything that came in over the weekend that might relate to this man’s death. OK, let’s get some ideas together.’
Please, thought Smith, do not at any point say ‘brainstorm’…
But the quicksand of etymological cliches was safely skirted around, and after a momentary pause some ideas did indeed begin to get themselves together. Terek seemed relieved, and then, for a split second, he looked at Smith. Much can be conveyed by the human face in a split second. If Terek read there something like, not bad, pretty much what I would have done, he would not have been so wide of the mark.
Chapter Eight
Terek called it a meeting of the leadership team – it consisted of him sitting down an hour later with his two sergeants in Alison Reeve’s old room for the first time. He began by saying that he was encouraged by their detectives’ work up to now; some good ideas had come up, hadn’t they? Smith nodded and Wilson said, ‘Yes, sir.’
Still Wilson’s face was giving nothing away, and he was avoiding any direct looks at Smith – not that they had ever exchanged any loving glances. But even so, Wilson’s retreat into this stony formality was obvious enough to anyone who knew him. Terek didn’t, of course, and that was the point. Smith considered it, considered having a quiet word with the new DI, and then almost immediately he reconsidered it. Not really any of his business, even if he had been planning to stay around for a while. Alison Reeve would have given Terek a few clues if she had any sense – and she usually did – but it was impossible to tell from Terek’s demeanour whether she had done so. Sometimes, he reflected, it’s all too much like hard work.
Terek broke the silence.
‘So, I’ve been thinking over the way we work in teams.’
When necessary, Smith had a highly compartmentalised mind. The trouble was that it was necessary too often these days where the job was concerned. Compartment one at
this juncture began work on the proposition that whatever Terek was about to suggest as far as the teams’ working arrangements were concerned was bound to be a thoroughly bad idea. Thoroughly understandable – new broom, shake things up a bit, get them out of their comfort zones – but still thoroughly bad. Compartment two asked the question about why younger people these days begin every new statement with the word ‘So’.
Wilson said, ‘Go on, sir,’ as if he cared, and Smith’s heart sank a little.
‘OK. I wondered whether it might be a good idea to reform the teams, your teams. Mix them up, get them working with new faces. Give some new people the benefits of your combined experience.’
Wilson leaned in as he responded.
‘You mean like Alan Sugar does in ‘The Apprentice’, sir, about halfway through the series?’
‘Oh. Possibly. I don’t actually watch-’
‘I think it’s a great idea, sir.’
Terek was visibly taken aback by this show of enthusiasm for his very first management initiative. Perhaps he had a real gift for this whole business of organising and motivating others.
‘And what do you think…’ There was a pause, a tiny one, because Terek had realised then that he could not, in front of his fellow sergeant, use Smith’s surname or no name at all, as he had up to now – ‘DC?’
There we are, then – ice broken at last. Useful, because Smith now intended to throw his bucket of cold water over that very first management initiative.
‘I wouldn’t, sir, at least not yet.’
‘Why not?’
Wilson had turned his head to watch, turned it slowly and with a crocodile smile.
‘Because it’s too soon. I’m not saying that the teams should never be rebuilt or that there would not be some benefits to it, as you say. But I think it would be wiser to watch how they work on a case as they are. Assess that for yourself and then make any changes you think necessary. Put another way – why try to fix something before you know it’s broken?’
Wilson had what he wanted, of course. One sergeant seemed to be supportive and open to new ideas – the other one was holding back, stuck with the old ideas, stuck in the mud of the past.
Terek said, ‘Of course, I have considered that aspect of it… And we seem to have got ourselves a new case much more quickly than I’d anticipated. I take your point, DC. We’ll go with your greater experience for now, as long as we all accept that to improve is to change. Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.’
And the more things change… But what did it matter? Terek had, quite unwittingly, made the situation with Sergeant John Wilson much worse by mentioning the one thing he despised above all others - Smith’s greater experience. Nevertheless, Wilson now wore a mask of disappointment that they were not about to put all the detectives’ names into a hat and draw them out into brand new teams. Oh yes, thought Smith, the sparks of creativity will certainly start to fly then. Put Serena Butler with O’Leary, for example, and you could start a blaze that might burn Kings Lake Central to the ground.
‘Sir?’
The source of the imagined conflagration was standing in the doorway to DI Terek’s office – when she spoke, both Smith and Terek turned to look at her. In her hand, she had a piece of paper.
Terek said, ‘Yes, Serena?’
‘We’ve got a name, sir.’
Alison Reeve said, ‘What’s the probability on the match?’ and Serena answered, ‘Over ninety eight per cent, ma’am.’
The DCI looked around at the assembled detectives and then back at the interactive whiteboard before she said, ‘OK, I’ll take those odds.’
There was plenty to read on the screen but it was the face that caught one’s attention first of all. It was a classic mugshot from the 1980s, black and white, the big face of a big man staring angrily and implacably back into the camera that was recording once again his identity for future reference. No-one, least of all Bernard Reuben Sokoloff, would have imagined that the record would be for this particular future reference.
Smith began to read. A quick calculation told him that the man was forty one years old when that last picture was taken, and that matched the last encounter with the police that he had recorded against his name. Twelve years ago. Either Bernard had mended his ways or he had begun to work smarter – nice bit of management-speak there, Smithy.
There were three addresses in the file, all in the East End of London, the last one being in Barking. Here was a typical career criminal’s CV, beginning with minors in his teens and then moving on up to degree-level work in his early twenties, culminating in most of 1986 being spent in Wandsworth for some serious grievous bodily harm. Then there was a gap, or rather there were several gaps, between arrests and interviews for a variety of nefarious possibilities that never came to court. All these were routine except for two mentions of Mr Sokoloff being under suspicion of engaging in arson – once in an intimidation case, and once with regard to a high-value insurance claim. That was the occasion on which he had been photographed, twelve years ago. Ultimately there had been no prosecution, and so, technically, this photograph should have been deleted rather than placed on the file. No doubt a pragmatic sergeant somewhere had concluded that they were bound to need it sooner or later anyway.
Smith looked again at the image. It could well be the face of an old-school, East End bruiser. Bernard had probably given up the boxing by then but you could half see and half imagine the evidence of it there on the screen – a certain flatness in the large nose, one of the ears looked a little puffier than the other, and there was indeed the scarring above the left eye which Dr Robinson had spotted, and which, you, Smith did not.
Terek stood up – no-one quite knew why – and said, ‘Any first thoughts?’
Smith said, ‘We should have wished him a happy birthday.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Last Saturday, the 10th of September. It was his birthday.’
Wilson had a small grin on his face and O’Leary was shaking his head, both for Terek’s benefit as far as Smith could tell. Terek looked around the other faces then, and Reeve raised her eyebrows and shrugged, as if to say, well, it might be something…
Terek said, ‘Right. Thanks, DC. We should all make a note of that.’
Someone began humming ‘Happy Birthday To You’, just a few notes, just enough to disrupt the briefing a little more, stopping when the look of annoyance on DCI Reeve’s face became obvious. After a silence, she nodded to Terek, and he talked the group through what he believed were the key points in the criminal record displayed on the screen.
In the chair next to Smith, Murray shifted his large frame, reached forward for his pad of paper and appeared to be making notes on what was being said. He angled the page towards Smith and wrote “Nice call on him being a regular customer. If you’re serious about going, your timing looks good.”
Smith didn’t respond. No need – he and Murray were long past the point of needing to affirm each other’s existence. Instead, he continued to think about that birthday. So often it’s the little things that begin the unravelling. If Bernard – and surely he must have been known as Bernie to all those East End associates – if Bernie had gone into the water last Saturday, then he had gone into it on his birthday. Looked at simplistically, the odds against that were three hundred and sixty four to one. Coincidence or causal connection?
Sometimes people go away for their birthday, of course, a treat, a little celebration, but not on their own, surely? As of this morning, no-one locally had reported him missing, however, so… Either he had come up to Norfolk to celebrate a lonely birthday, or the people he was with had decided not to report his disappearance. There was one fairly obvious way to explain that – the people he was with had put him into the water. But then, and on the other hand, if you were trying to cover up such a crime, you would report his disappearance, in all innocence, unless you were absolutely certain that you could cover up your entire presence in the area at the
time of Bernie’s very unfortunate accident and demise.
Another possibility – Bernard wasn’t visiting. Bernie might have retired to the coast, or have a holiday home of some description. If he could afford four-figure suits, he might have a cottage tucked away somewhere and come up for a few days, including his birthday. But again – on his own?
Or he wasn’t on holiday or even having a day off. Maybe Mr Sokoloff was working on that Saturday. What kind of work did he do these days, had he been doing these past twelve years? What kind of work could he have been doing on a weekend in the little seaside town or in one of the tiny villages between there and Barnham Staithe?
Smith’s eyes went back to the screen and checked the dates; nothing, not even a quiet word in his shell-like since 2004. Bernard has money but seems to have given up his old ways of earning it. Bernard might have gone straight. It does happen. Smith could take you to half a dozen respectable citizens of Kings Lake – businessmen and women, tradesmen, even an undertaker, heaven help us – who have more than made up for their offences against society since they mended their ways. That undertaker is a leading light in the Rotary Club these days.
The eyes of Bernard Sokoloff continued to gaze out of the screen, as fixed and empty as those of his corpse in the mortuary not a hundred metres from here. Dead as they might be, Smith looked into them again and saw something there. Bernie Sokoloff a leading light in his local Rotary Club? Sorry Bernie, but I don’t think so.
Detective Inspector Terek was on his feet again – no-one knew why – and speaking.
‘So this is the plan. Two teams. Team one works from here, we’ll use room 17, and starts to put together an investigation into the victim’s history and present circumstances, or at least his recent ones. We know all about his present circumstances… This will involve contacting the local force for his last addresses on the record here. We all know that this can involve some tricky conversations, so I’m going to be here with team one initially. If the Barking police don’t know where he’s based, hopefully they can at least tell us where he was the last time they spoke to him. Team one will be John’s people.’
Time and Tide Page 7