The Body Under the Bridge

by The Body Under the Bridge (epub)

  ‘She told me that if they hadn’t spotted it, or if the magnet hadn’t grabbed hold of it, it would be on its way to Bristol this evening to be burned at the Severnside Energy Recovery Centre.’

  ‘So Beatrice is still missing?’

  ‘Yep. They’re taking a look through the hopper for her, but in the meantime, Rob…’

  ‘I’ll get right back on the CCTV, sir.’

  ‘Thank you, Rob. I’m a lot more worried now than I was an hour ago. Millennials are inseparable from their phones. I can’t think of a good reason why it should be at a rubbish dump.’

  ‘Unless she’s there too,’ Townsend said.

  Gillard nodded grimly as he reached for the phone. Alison Rigby would want to know. He punched out her direct line. As so often, it fell to him to be the bearer of bad news.

  Chapter Two

  Adrian Singer lived in the village of Westmeare, population 280, in a quiet rural corner of Surrey. His home was a small whitewashed cottage with a neat well-tended garden surrounded by a white picket fence. There was a wooden sculpture by the door and a rustic wagon wheel leaning against a wall. Gillard parked his car behind the aged Honda Civic already there, and turned to PC Lynne Fairbanks.

  ‘Nice place he’s got.’ Gillard was sure that the climbing roses over the front door would look lovely in the summer. Even in the steady rain it looked delightful.

  ‘It makes me think of the gingerbread house in Grimm’s fairy tales,’ Lynne replied. ‘And we know how that turned out.’ They both peered in at the warmly lit house, then got out of the car shrugging up their raincoats against the weather. Singer met them at the door. He was a balding fellow in his early forties, slightly unkempt, with bright eyes and a limp handshake. Gillard and Fairbanks were offered coffee and biscuits, and sat at a rustic table in front of a roaring open fire while it was prepared. The low-ceilinged lounge boasted an upright piano, an expensive-looking Bose stereo and a series of three brass instruments balanced on stands.

  ‘Trombone, alto sax and trumpet,’ Fairbanks said. ‘Can’t play any of them, though I can bang out a few tunes on the piano.’ She then leaned in to her boss and whispered. ‘I’d expected him to be a bit younger.’

  ‘Me too. He’s more like a teacher than a friend.’

  Singer appeared, and once they were all seated, the interview began. Singer said that he first met Beatrice Ulbricht in France when she was a promising sixteen-year-old and he was playing in the orchestra that accompanied her. ‘We had a relationship back then,’ he said. ‘There’s no point trying to hide that. But since then we’ve really just been friends.’

  The remark sat steaming between them, very much like Gillard’s raincoat in front of the fire.

  ‘You said that you picked her up from the wedding reception, which is five miles away, but then left her to get the bus back last thing at night on a Sunday,’ Lynne said. ‘That’s not very kind, is it?’

  ‘Well, you’ve got things the wrong way round. We had an argument, and she stormed out. I was going to give her a lift, but she said not to bother.’ His eyebrows were high and arched, as if in permanent surprise.

  ‘What was the argument about?’

  He exhaled, his mouth spread wide in discomfort. ‘Well, there was a misunderstanding, let’s say that. I thought she was planning to stay here and go back in the morning.’

  ‘And she thought you were trying to seduce her?’ Gillard asked.

  Singer recoiled, as if the idea was repugnant. ‘It really wasn’t like that.’

  ‘Wasn’t it?’ Fairbanks asked, with a sceptical smile.

  ‘Look. I knew the wedding organiser, and he rang me to try to get him out of a hole. The previous quartet he had booked cancelled at short notice because of illness. He only had a few days to find another, and asked me to help because of my Royal College links, so I rang Beatrice. The rest of Beatrice’s group are frankly not quite in the same league as the Stanislavsky Ensemble who had cancelled, but beggars can’t be choosers. The Lysander Quartet were happy to play an undemanding ninety-minute set for a few hundred pounds plus travelling expenses and a free meal. I offered overnight accommodation if any of them needed it. Purely to keep their costs down. It’s perfectly normal for these low-key events. And Beatrice accepted, initially.’

  ‘I see,’ said Lynne, giving him a level stare.

  ‘You can choose what to believe, but it is true. Anyway, once we’d had supper she seemed to change her mind. I was baffled, and a little offended.’

  Gillard said: ‘We’ll need to take a cheek swab of your DNA to eliminate you from our enquiries.’

  ‘That’s perfectly all right,’ he sighed. ‘I’d expected it.’

  The sample taken, the two detectives left. They had arranged to meet Eric Sargent, the wedding organiser, to verify the details that Singer had given them. Gillard drove to the end of the road and found the bus stop. He’d seen worse. It was a fairly typical rural bus shelter, a pitched wooden roof over a rudimentary brick enclosure, a single rusting metal bench within. Getting out to inspect it more closely, there was no legible information about the services or their frequency. A damaged Perspex display, scratched and defaced with marker pen, held the tattered remnants of what might have been a timetable. He crouched down and shone a torch over the flagstones. Chewing gum, cigarette ends, silver paper and cellophane cigarette wrapping. Nothing unexpected.

  * * *

  Detective Constable Carl Hoskins smiled to himself as he opened the first file of CCTV footage. Cell site analysis put Beatrice Ulbricht at Clandon railway station at a quarter to four on the Tuesday afternoon. That would be exactly right to catch the South Western Railway 15.48 service to Waterloo. There were two CCTV cameras car park side at Clandon, covering the station apron and the ticket machine. Right on cue, Ms Ulbricht appeared at 15.45, right below the left-hand camera, hurrying through the rain and dodging puddles. She was wearing the navy coat, mauve fedora and scarf, and carrying a violin. There were no platform cameras, so it took a while for Hoskins to establish which carriage she had boarded. Each coach had had one internal camera at each end. He had already been sent a link to the footage from the 15.48 which was stored on the South Western Railway database.

  She had got on right at the back, carriage eight. She sat roughly in the middle, reading a magazine. There were a few other passengers, only one having got on with her at Clandon. After five dull minutes trying to ignore a businessman picking his nose right opposite the camera, Hoskins fast-forwarded right to the end, the final two minutes before arrival at Waterloo. By then the carriage was packed. Almost everybody had stood up and crowded the doorways for a fast escape upon arrival. He couldn’t see her, not even the hat. As the doors opened, the detective watched the raincoated commuters squeezing off, laden with briefcases, umbrellas and phones.

  Once half of them were gone, Hoskins did a double take.

  The woman had completely vanished.

  He rewound three minutes and tried again. No sign of her. ‘Christ, I bet she’s moved to a different carriage,’ Carl muttered. He looked through the data files. Eight carriages, sixteen cameras. Assuming they all worked. There were often one or two out of action. He put his head in his hands. Gillard was not going to be happy with this. He’d lost her somewhere. But he knew from the cell site analysis that she had made it as far as Waterloo.

  Thursday

  The Brentford waste transfer station is an old landfill site in West London, squeezed between clusters of railway lines. High razor wire fences, a variety of elderly cranes, eight-wheel quarry lorries and lots and lots of noise. DCI Gillard and DC Carl Hoskins were given fluorescent red high-vis jackets on arrival, and shown the main activities of the site, which were not highly sophisticated. Essentially, tipper trucks dumped vast quantities of mixed waste on the concrete floor of the five-acre facility, and a variety of machines, including a crane with suspended magnet, went through it looking for recyclables. Forget plastic, glass, paper. The only stuff worth retriev
ing at this stage was ferrous metals, thanks to the magnet, and copper, much of which was retrieved by hand from cables, old televisions and so forth.

  Manager Tony Lowgreave brought them into the office, the higher of two stacked Portakabins, reached by a rickety ladder. He offered them scalding hot instant coffee in flimsy plastic cups.

  ‘We like to think we are doing our bit,’ Lowgreave said, as he risked a sip of the coffee. ‘It’s not glamorous work, but we save thousands of tonnes of valuable product from going to waste. The stuff we can’t make use of goes in sealed railway containers across to the Bristol Channel. It’s burned to produce electricity. So it’s pretty green.’

  Gillard set aside his less-than-single-use coffee, probably the only drink worse than any police beverage, and asked to be shown the retrieved mobile. It was on Lowgreave’s desk, in a clear polythene bag. A standard Samsung model, clearly contaminated by some sticky substance.

  ‘Is that how it was?’ Gillard asked.

  Lowgreave nodded and brought in Gladys Olewando, who had answered the phone when Gillard had rung it. A very large black woman, on whom three square yards of hi-vis was utterly redundant, she said she had retrieved the phone from the magnet.

  ‘Do you get many phones in the rubbish?’

  ‘Maybe half a dozen a week,’ she said. ‘The magnet doesn’t do them any good, but this one was on a long streamer of metal cans and coat hangers dangling beneath.’

  ‘And you’re quite sure there is isn’t a body?’ Hoskins asked.

  ‘We dumped the entire container out onto a big plastic sheet,’ Lowgreave said. ‘That is what we always do on these occasions. In the old days, I would have just sent the guard dog in there. He’d have found a body in no time. Anyway, Gladys and Mick went through it. No body, no body parts.’

  ‘Where did that hopper come from?’

  ‘Ah, now. Most of what we take in here is household waste from the Borough of Brent. But we have a contract with Network Rail to take their mixed consumer train waste from Waterloo and Paddington, two consignments per day. This came from the Waterloo truck.’

  ‘That makes some sense,’ Hoskins said.

  Lowgreave passed across a business card. ‘That’s the bloke you need to talk to at Waterloo.’

  * * *

  An hour later, the two detectives were standing looking out from a high window over the enormous concourse of Waterloo Station. With them was Phil Perkins, the Network Rail recycling manager. He pointed to an arriving train on platform six. ‘There you go. That’s the slow Guildford service, come in via Cobham. The fast ones go via Woking. The procedure is that the mixed waste from on-train bins is picked up by contractors and then goes into a hopper, which is wheeled out to the waste trucks.’

  ‘Does anyone go through it at this point?’

  ‘No, not really. There’s always a security check, because of the possibility of explosive devices being residual in bins, which used to happen in the old IRA days. So our operatives always take a visual glance in the bin bags, especially if they feel anything unusually heavy: batteries, wires, stuff like that. Unfortunately, although we have plans to ban concessionaire use of single-use plastics in-station by 2020, and are already providing refill points for plastic water bottles, the issue of mixed waste in litter bins, whether on-concourse or on-train, is still moot,’ he said, sucking his teeth. ‘The problem is that coffee cups, carton lids, straws, drinks bottles and so on can be recycled in some cases, if they are clean. In practice, approximately 38.4 per cent of bins are dreg-contaminated and consequently recycling non-compliant. It’s simply not cost-effective to deal with it.’

  ‘So, in short, it goes to the tip?’ Hoskins asked, clearly exasperated by the bureaucratic lingo.

  ‘In short, yes.’

  ‘Do you ever get mobile phones turn up in the rubbish?’ Gillard asked.

  Perkins laughed. ‘Last year there were over 7,600 mobiles left on trains coming into Waterloo. But generally not in the waste receptacles. They tend to be left on seats or in luggage, coats or jackets. That makes commuters look like a very careless bunch, but actually it’s simply a result of the enormous numbers of people that use the railway. In 2018 there were 94.4 million passenger journeys. We are Britain’s busiest railway station,’ he said proudly.

  * * *

  Within twenty-four hours of her being reported missing, the search for Beatrice Ulbricht had been ramped up into a major investigation, using the Holmes-2 major inquiry database. As senior investigating officer, Gillard had a team of eight officers drafted in purely to look through CCTV, while another twelve detective constables dealt with the calls received from the public on the information line. The Metropolitan Police had allocated two officers to interview fellow students and friends in London, while the British Transport Police had offered a liaison officer. A press conference was due to take place at six that evening with a formal public appeal, but already the early editions of the free London papers, widely distributed across Surrey’s commuter network, were carrying the story. The front pages carried glamorous pictures of Beatrice in evening dress, embracing her violin, wavy hair cascading over one shoulder. The inside pages showed a series of hazy stills from the railway’s CCTV cameras, of her carrying a violin case and wearing the distinctive fedora.

  Gillard had set up an incident room meeting for one p.m. as a working lunch, with sandwiches provided from the chief constable’s personal budget. There was no surer sign of a high priority case than bought-in food.

  He was under no illusions. The major effort was being made to coincide with the arrival from Germany of Karl-Otto Ulbricht, Germany’s Minister of Justice and father of the missing woman. He would be accompanied in his brief trip to Mount Browne by the British Home Secretary. They would arrive around six o’clock.

  No pressure, then.

  * * *

  Gillard’s first port of call on return was the surveillance suite. This was part of Mount Browne’s forensic centre, and was set up to provide the equipment needed to review CCTV. This was the first time they’d ever had the staff to fill every desk. They were led by DC Carrie Macintosh, who had just transferred over from Police Scotland. Ms Macintosh, inevitably known as Rainy, had abandoned her seven-year career as a junior doctor because of the stress and long hours. With spiky hair, a no-nonsense demeanour and an earthy Glaswegian sense of humour, she fitted in well with the largely male CID. One of the lads, all agreed.

  ‘Have you managed to trace her?’ Gillard asked.

  ‘Nope, she’s vanished, sir.’

  Hoskins had managed to establish that Ms Ulbricht had got up from her seat in carriage eight and, taking her violin, had moved through into carriage seven. After that the trail went cold and Rainy’s team had made little progress ‘The CCTV in number seven didnae work,’ she said. ‘One camera produced nae image at all, and the other image was snowier than a blizzard.’

  ‘What about carriage six?’

  ‘Perfect CCTV, enough to show she never went in there. So we’ve bitten the bullet and downloaded all the network rail footage from platform four at Waterloo, which is where the service terminated. There are two exits, one out onto the station concourse and one down into the Northern Line, and nine cameras, so it will take a while to be sure.’

  ‘Okay.’

  * * *

  There was a big team on the case, but there were even more detectives in the incident room for the meeting than Gillard had expected. You didn’t need to be a senior officer in CID to guess that the presence of large piles of generously filled baguettes and sandwiches was strongly correlated to attendance. As well as the CCTV and information line teams, DI Claire Mulholland and DCs Michelle Tsu and Carl Hoskins were there along with DC Townsend, who seemed to be busy with his phone. The one guest was Nigel Duffy, a grey-haired inspector from the British Transport Police who looked to be in his sixties.

  They were just about to start when the door opened and Chief Constable Alison Rigby strode in, power dressed i
n a houndstooth jacket, black slacks and court shoes. Her arrival chilled the atmosphere faster than the arrival of the Salvation Army at a lap dance joint. Rigby took a seat at the back, as if pretending that would in some way make her more incognito.

  Gillard called the meeting to order, and after a few introductory remarks summarised what they knew so far. ‘Beatrice Ulbricht, twenty-five, an accomplished violinist studying at the Royal College of Music for an MSc in musical performance, has been missing since Tuesday afternoon when she boarded the 15.48 Waterloo-bound train at Clandon just east of Guildford. Had she remained aboard, she would have arrived in London about an hour later. And we know for a fact that her phone did arrive in London. It was finally found at the Brentford waste transfer station, and the cell site analysis corresponds with the movement of the contractor’s waste consignment from Waterloo. We are assuming it had been deposited in a waste bin somewhere on that train.’

  Gillard dimmed the lights, set up his laptop projector and activated the video screen. ‘This is Ms Ulbricht getting on coach eight at Clandon. As you can see she is hard to miss. Not only the mauve fedora, but that distinctive rainbow scarf, the navy blue overcoat and the violin. We’ve already had a half-dozen calls to the information line from people who saw her during the early part of the journey, and we should get more after this afternoon’s press conference. As is typical with eyewitnesses, they notice her getting on and taking a seat, and when she moves to a new carriage. We’ve nothing firm on where she got off.’