Thin Men, Paper Suits

by Tin Larrick

  All this activity depended on information. Any minute now, a call could come from the incident room to say that Helen and Colin Canavan had remembered something new that, however, small, could completely change the shape of the deployments.

  With this in mind, Boswell looked down at the seat next to him. He had not yet resealed the evidence bag containing Maggie Canavan’s dress. He picked it up, laid it flat on the table and went to the back of the van to fish out tape and labels from a go-box on the floor.

  He sat back down. He signed, timed and dated the label, and then made a note of the activity in his notebook. He picked up the bag, and then, just before he sealed it, lifted it to his face and sniffed through the narrow slit in the side of the bag in a pale imitation of Hector’s olfactory enquiries.

  He smelled the polythene. He smelled the cotton of the dress. The fabric smelled crisp and new.

  Very new.

  He put the bag back down – mercifully, as it happened, because half a second later a uniformed constable appeared at the open door of the van.

  “Suspect’s been taken to Eastbourne custody, sarge.”

  “Did they seize his clothing?”

  “All done. He’s in a dry cell waiting for SOCO.”

  “His Jackie giving you any trouble?”

  “She was a bit hysterical at first. Threatening to go to the papers and the like, but she’s okay now.”

  “What about his car?”

  “Found it in the main car park,” the constable said. “Jevington side. It’s a Volkswagen Passat estate. Full of the usual junk. Can’t search it properly until SOCO’s had a look, but the girl’s definitely not in it. His house is next.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  The constable disappeared.

  Boswell resealed the exhibit bag. He chewed his lip for a moment, and then dialled a number on his mobile phone. The force had not yet upgraded its work mobiles from old-style Nokia bricks to more modern alternatives – just as well, Boswell thought. With an operation like this one, a smartphone battery wouldn’t last five minutes.

  One of the DCs in the incident room answered.

  “DC Kirtley.”

  “Phil, it’s Jack. What’s happening with the Canavans?”

  “Softly-softly, sarge. Me and the FLO are doing a tag-team job on them, but they’re in bits. Don’t worry, though. We’re looking after them.”

  “What’s the intel unit doing?”

  “Well, they’re stretched pretty thin. Lost a couple of analysts to a shooting in Crawley, or somewhere. At the moment their priorities seem to be vehicle movements and a matrix of area RSOs.”

  “And you?”

  “Tea-and-biscuit duties. Building up to taking their statements. Awaiting any further orders, sarge.”

  “Okay, do me this. Leave the FLO with them. Go and do some gentle digging on them. Nothing too deep, just some basic checks. Then call me back, okay? I’m going to be heading back to start preparing to interview Bass.”

  “Right you are, sarge.”

  Boswell ended the call and stepped out of the van. The van had been cool and dry, and the muggy sunlight of the forest was like a thick blanket. Boswell stretched and went to the uniformed sergeant in charge of the search, who was running things from the RVP. Known as a Police Search Adviser, the PolSA was an expert in searching for anything with two legs. Their work was clinical, scientific and largely emotionless. Information informed hypotheses informed search strategies – it was as simple as that. Fine, bring them a hunch, but have some evidence to back it up. Don’t guess, and don’t waste resources by deploying them at random.

  The PolSA did not object when Boswell told him he was leaving the scene. If anything, detectives and SOCOs crawling all over the forest on their hands and knees didn’t exactly assist the search effort.

  Boswell sent a constable to guard the van with the makeshift exhibits store, but kept the exhibit bag containing the dress with him. He drove out of the east car park and headed to Eastbourne on the coast road.

  Kirtley called back as Boswell was heading down into East Dean, a small village nestling in a valley between the Seven Sisters and Beachy Head. Boswell shoved the phone into the handsfree cradle and answered it as the road dipped down sharply into the village and then up the other side.

  “Sarge… Canavans… nothing… ordinary…” Kirtley’s voice filled the car from unseen speakers. The line was broken and distorted.

  “Phil, what did you say? The signal’s rubbish.”

  “Canavans… children… missing... before…”

  “Phil, I’m coming back. I’ll speak to you in about fifteen minutes, okay?”

  “I… important… search… talking…”

  Boswell ended the call and concentrated on driving. The coast road was the most direct route from Friston to the incident room in Eastbourne, but, to Boswell, the twisting route through Warren Hill, over the undulating green of Beachy Head and down through Meads onto the seafront seemed interminable.

  In stationary traffic in Grand Parade just by the pier, Boswell tried Kirtley again, but the young DC’s phone went straight to voicemail. Now he didn’t have a signal.

  He pulled a left past the Crown and Anchor into Seaside, which wasn’t a great deal better, and so at the Territorial Army centre he turned right onto Cambridge Road and back onto the seafront. He’d skipped past the worst of the traffic, though – and, as a lucky bonus, pulled out ahead of the Dotto train – and the rest of the journey took only a few minutes.

  At the incident room he found a space outside the SOCO base. He grabbed the exhibit bag off the front seat; as he shut the driver’s door, a dog barked at him from the footpath that led into Bridgemere on the other side of the site fence. The noise startled him, and he dropped the exhibit bag.

  He went to pick it up from the tarmac, and then stopped, his arm frozen mid-reach.

  He stared.

  There was a small white price tag poking out from the hem of the dress. He’d not noticed it before.

  He shook himself out of the reverie caused by a sudden flurry of brain activity, and retrieved the bag.

  He walked to the incident room. He forced himself not to run. Kirtley met him at the door.

  “Where are the Canavans?” Boswell asked as he approached.

  “Up here. They’re having a cuppa in the canteen.”

  Boswell followed Kirtley up the stairs to the first floor, his brain rattling as he did so.

  The first floor was square in shape, with a suite of offices around the outside and a glass-walled, high-ceilinged canteen at its hub. As they walked down to the SIO’s office, Boswell saw Helen and Canavan huddled around a corner table. Each was cradling a steaming mug with one hand. Colin Canavan’s other arm was around his wife. Neither looked up as Boswell passed.

  The detectives stepped into the empty SIO’s office.

  “They’re clean, sir,” Kirtley said. “No previous criminal history. No domestic reports. Nothing on the child protection files. They’ve lived for twenty years in a three-bed terrace in Whitley Road. Two 999 calls in the last five years – Helen reported unruly youths outside the house in 2009, and Colin called about a road traffic crash in 2010. Maggie is their only child.”

  “They seem a little old to you? To have a six year-old, I mean,” Boswell said.

  Kirtley looked a little puzzled.

  “Well, maybe. But, these days, people have kids at all ages, don’t they?”

  “What about medical records? Hospital visits? Births, deaths and marriages? That kind of thing?”

  “It’s a Sunday afternoon, sarge. I won’t be able to get anything like that until tomorrow. What’s this about, anyway?”

  Boswell held up the exhibit bag.

  “Is there a unit at the house?”

  “Of course.”

  “Get hold of them and get them to talk to the neighbours. Find out about Maggie’s movements. Comings and goings to the house. See if you can identify any other Canavan family
members. In-laws, that kind of thing.”

  “We could just ask them…”

  “And take this with you.”

  He thrust the exhibit bag into Kirtley’s hand.

  “Give it to SOCO on your way out. I want the dress examined and the blood tested, pronto. DNA profiling, precipitin testing, the works.”

  Kirtley made to go. He opened the office door, and then turned back to Boswell.

  “Sarge… preciptin tests are to distinguish human and animal blood.”

  “Phil, I don’t think that dress has ever been worn.”

  Kirtley’s eyes widened, and then he left. Boswell sat heavily in the SIO’s chair and ran his hands down his face.

  He recalled his conversation with the search sergeant before he left the forest. The PolSA would be working to a finite number of possible scenarios, intended to make sense out of chaos. The girl was lost and wandering, or she was lost and had been rescued – by either someone trying to get her home or someone with more sinister intentions – or she was injured and immobile, or she had been kidnapped and was in immediate danger, or she was dead.

  Or she had never been there.

  Never there.

  Boswell suddenly sat forward in his seat and logged into the computer in front of him. There was one check that Kirtley hadn’t done – one which, in fairness, was another one he could not have done until Monday.

  Boswell, however, could.

  He brought up the file storage folder belonging to the Divisional Coroner’s Office, and found the archived files. Coroner’s Officers were more meticulous than detectives in a number of ways, and the databases were immaculately kept. Most cops couldn’t get into them, but Boswell, having supervised the Coroner’s Officers for six months during a management restructure two years previously, still had access.

  He researched the annual records of sudden, unexplained and suspicious deaths by year, starting with the current year and then going back one year at a time. The records were entered onto spreadsheets, which could be ordered by name, age, date, cause of death and various locations.

  He had gone as far back as 2005 when his eyes locked onto the screen. He read and reread the information, his heart thumping in his chest.

  The first thing he did was pick up the phone.

  “This is DS Boswell,” he said. “Release Nigel Bass.”

  Kirtley opened the door to the office, and leaned against the doorframe. He looked stunned. Behind him, Helen and Colin Canavan were staring at the canteen floor.

  “Update from a neighbour, Jean Purnell. She’s lived in her house almost as long as the Canavans have lived in theirs. She says…”

  “…that the Canavans have no daughter,” Boswell said.

  “How did you know?” Kirtley said.

  “Or rather, they did have a daughter, but she died. In 2005.” Boswell spun the screen around so Kirtley could see it.

  “Coroner’s records,” Boswell said. “Their only daughter died in a boating accident, aged six. Maggie Canavan drowned nine years ago.”

  Boswell spun the screen back.

  “Nine years ago today, in fact. She was recovered from the water on the fourteenth of August, wearing a pink cotton summer dress.”

  “Oh, my God,” Kirtley said.

  Boswell stood up and walked slowly over to Kirtley, the energy and urgency of the last few hours having evaporated in a heartbeat. He looked past his colleague’s shoulder at the couple sitting in the empty canteen.

  “I think,” Boswell said quietly, “we’d better get them to a doctor.”

  Neither Helen nor Colin Canavan could have heard him, but they both looked up as he spoke, their faces strained and their minds ruined by the cycle of grief they could never break.

  ****

  The £50,000 Signature by Tin Larrick

  “I very rarely give categorical advice,” Thorp said. “But I can safely say that I am one hundred per cent certain you will win this case.”

  The lawyer stroked his chin. He was a comparatively healthy man; only his diminutive stature and wizened, brandy-rouged nose betrayed his true years.

  Thorp wrote carefully on his legal pad, absently fingering his nose as he did so, while Glen and Phoebe Rigg relaxed a little in their seats. The tiny conference room was stuffy in the July heat, and ahead of the imminent trial, the palpable tension in the air did nothing to assuage their discomfort.

  In the adjacent conference room, Graham and Linda Wall were receiving similar predictions from their own lawyer – a tall, thin creature named Smart who resembled a praying mantis. The delivery was a trifle less earnest, the diction considerably more pronounced, but the essence of the sweeping statement was the same.

  Thorp continued to stroke his nose, then he rose suddenly.

  “I’m going to fetch some water,” he announced. “Would you two like some?”

  The Riggs shook their heads. Thorp left the room.

  “He was looking at your legs again,” Glen Rigg said to his wife.

  “I know.”

  “I think he fancies you.”

  “For heaven’s sake,” she snapped. “Is that all you can think about? I think we’ve got enough to worry about without you getting all possessive. And besides, he’s the best there is. He said we‘re going to win.”

  Her husband, chastised, stared into his lap.

  Glen was an engineer. Not a remarkable practitioner by any stretch, but years of diligence and dedication had finally earned him an offer of a three-year contract with an American contractor, dripping with corporate perks and an over-inflated salary. But the real screamer was the site of the development – it meant three years in the Cayman Islands.

  Glen had been quietly thrilled, but Phoebe hadn’t bothered to conceal her excitement. How often do people actually get to live a tropical island fantasy? The answer is: not many. But Glen and Phoebe, despite the job offer, were finding it difficult to break from the shackles of the pipe-dreamer’s group.

  The problem was the kids. Well, not the kids themselves, but their father. By her former husband, Phoebe had given birth to two children in quick succession. One boy, one girl, who had just attained the ages of six and twenty-one months respectively when the erstwhile Mr Phoebe had suffered an anxiety attack coupled with a mid-life crisis and hurriedly departed to his mother’s house.

  He had seen the children sporadically over the next few years. Glen had arrived on the scene a couple of months after Graham’s departure, after Phoebe had taken over the running of an independent bookshop. Glen used to visit the shop in his lunch hour, and conspicuously flick through ‘difficult’ authors – Joyce, García Márquez, Kafka – with a thoughtful look on his face. These attempts to impress were then rather nullified when he darted off to the reference section to look up all the words he had just read but didn’t understand.

  Nevertheless, Phoebe found his unwieldy efforts quite endearing. Their relationship had been a meeting of opposites, and there was no doubt Phoebe’s zest for adventure had opened Glen’s hitherto conservative eyes. Among the catalogue of the more daring aspects of their courtship was Glen’s introduction to flirting by text message. This was a pursuit Glen grew increasingly fond of over time – notwithstanding the one occasion he became a little over-excited and accidentally sent Phoebe a message telling her he wanted to kick her puppy. Such were the vagaries of predictive text messaging under his clumsy thumbs.

  Despite token intervention in his children’s lives, Graham Wall – a successful management consultant – had been unable to conceal his smugness when he politely informed the Riggs that it would be a cold day in hell before he would ever consent to them taking his kids out of the country. (He would never admit it, but it was the fact that the kids called Glen ‘Dad’ that was the sole reason for this – it stuck in his throat like a perpetual fishbone.)

  So, following a brief interlude of solicitors exchanging threats of varying degrees, the Riggs, the Walls and some highly-paid lawyers gathered for a frank exch
ange of views in Court 2 at the Sidcup Family Centre.

  *

  The social worker, Joan Cathcart, was first to give her evidence. The examination took most of the day, the majority of which Glen spent looking at his feet. Phoebe, on the other hand, glared at the social worker intently throughout her evidence.

  From the moment Joan Cathcart had first set foot inside their house, both Glen and Phoebe knew that the woman would be a thorn in the side, a poisoned chalice, the bane of their collective lives.

  The children’s reaction had spoken volumes. Joan Cathcart was hunched, old, ugly, and had a faintly sinister odour – naturally, the children were terrified of her. They hid behind their mother and Glen whenever she visited, refusing to answer any of her loaded questions.

  Unfortunately, this particular demonstration of reticence had found its way into the social worker’s evidence.

  “Yes, it was apparent to me from an early stage that the children have an emotional overdependence upon their mother.”

  “I think in your report you refer to this as ‘unhealthy.’ Is that correct?” Smart peered at her from behind half-moon spectacles, his thin wrists resting lightly on the lectern.

  “Yes, without a doubt. Both children presented with clear attachment issues. Gareth even tried to kick me in the shins once.”

  Glen stifled a snigger, and earned a withering look from the judge – a rather withered-looking female with the surname of De’ath.

  “I really feel the children would be better off staying in this country. Their father is a dear man who loves his children and can provide all sorts of wonderful stimulation for their development.” Joan Cathcart smiled warmly at Graham Wall.

  “Thank you,” Smart said. “I believe my learned friend may have some questions for you.”

  Phoebe’s look of abject bewilderment quickly turned to one of utter contempt, which she aimed more or less in her ex-husband’s direction. He didn’t meet her glare, however, and made a show of being studiously absorbed in his notes. Phoebe nudged Thorp in the ribs, and he rose to his feet.

  “Ms Cathcart, do you recall being asked for your notes concerning this matter? Notes made as part of your meetings with the respective parties and assessments of the children?” Thorp asked.