The Body Under the Bridge

by The Body Under the Bridge (epub)

  Holt was in a fire service inflatable with two other fire service officers and a paramedic. During gaps in the rain they were taking the chance to inspect the many vehicles which had tumbled down the river. It was a risky plan, because the centre of the river was still a torrent with vicious ‘stoppers’, waves caused by buried obstacles that were quite capable of swamping their boat. But if anyone was still trapped in those vehicles, they couldn’t afford to wait until first light. Exposure would kill in an hour. Boatswain Chris Marshall steered the boat expertly, watching out for the many underwater obstacles that a newly submerged shoreline could offer. They collided with only one, which turned out to be a cast-iron bench on what used to be the riverbank, just a foot or so below the waterline. Steering around it, Marshall powered the outboard until they could reach the car.

  The hopes of finding anyone living were not high. When a vehicle has taken in so much water that it floats upside down, there is no place inside that offers enough air for survival. The tyres are the only buoyancy. Holt called out and rapped on the side of the vehicle, hoping for an answer. He didn’t expect one, and he didn’t get one. All the windows were underwater, just the bottom six inches of corroded door sills visible in the light beam. But there was good news. The driver-side door, on the far side, was open, and had bent in half against itself where it had scraped against the bridge. That gave some hope that anyone inside had escaped. With the inflatable next to the car, Holt tried to rotate the vehicle so that he could reach the open side. After a few minutes cutting of branches, he succeeded.

  As the vehicle bobbed around, a great fan of fair hair floated up in the water. He reached down and felt a clothed female body beneath. He tugged gently, but she was clearly snagged. He felt for the seatbelt but it was snug in its holder. He wriggled in further, the freezing water coursing up his sleeve and down his neck as he forced the waterproof torch into the narrow cavity between the waters and the driver’s footwell. Yes, a leg was caught deep in the water, tangled in the steering wheel, now at the base of this watery cell. The icy, bone-chilling unknotting of the limb allowed him to float her free. A young woman, no more than a girl.

  She was as cold as stone.

  Chapter Seven

  Monday

  Alison Rigby had demanded a seven a.m. incident room meeting on the Beatrice Ulbricht case on Monday, making no allowance for the after-effects of the flooding. She had somehow put Surrey CID on to continental time, always to be prepared for an early call from Germany. There was no doubt where her priorities lay.

  Detective Chief Inspector Craig Gillard was in, on time, at 6.45 a.m. The CID block was virtually deserted. The overnight on-call detective inspector, John Perry, had just come in, dripping water everywhere. He was dressed for a Welsh bank holiday: heavy duty anorak, waterproof trousers and wellies. He sighed heavily as he dropped a head torch, laptop bag and various other bits and pieces on the nearest desk. With his hangdog expression, and prematurely greying hair, the forty-two-year-old looked more like the exhausted school physics teacher he once had been than a detective. To Gillard, and many of his more junior colleagues, Perry exuded that submissive resentment of the unsporty schoolkid, always forced to be in goal.

  ‘Welcome to water world,’ Gillard said. ‘Found those kids yet?’

  He nodded, which shook a few extra drips onto the desk and carpet tiles. ‘They’re fine. Turned out to be with a neighbour. But we’ve another death, a rather sad tale. A lady of ninety-three had a heart attack in her car while waiting at some defective roadworks lights. It was stuck on red for an hour and a quarter in the pissing rain, but even though others overtook her and went past, she wouldn’t move. That makes three weather-related deaths.’

  ‘Three?’

  ‘Oh yeah, the fire service pulled out some teenage girl from a car stuck under Gorlaston Bridge in the early hours. Must’ve drowned hours before. Like to catch whichever bastard was the driver, leaving her there to die. They pulled her out by boat, and called me over to take a look. Poor kid.’

  ‘Do we know who she is?’

  ‘Not yet. Doesn’t match any of the recent missing person reports, at least none locally.’

  ‘Who is the on-call pathologist?’

  ‘Delahaye. Poor bugger is run ragged. I think the coroner’s office will call for reinforcements from London, but either way they’ll not get to these bodies for a few days.’

  Dr David Delahaye was Gillard’s favourite forensic pathologist: a mind like a razor and a keen eye for details. With gangly limbs and with a balding dome of a head, he absolutely looked the part.

  ‘My role in this is to dig up the dirty on the vehicle,’ Perry said, shrugging off his anorak and dumping it on the back of a chair. ‘Once I’ve got a coffee.’

  Gillard looked around and saw that, in the absence of most of the required staff, the incident room meeting was not going to happen on time. ‘I’m already logged into the DVLA. Pass me the registration number, if you go get us both a brew. Mine’s extra milky, no sugar.’

  Perry agreed, passed across his notes, and after thanking Gillard strode off to the refectory, shaking drops of water everywhere.

  Gillard copied in the number and waited. The record came up quite quickly. The car was very old. A 1982 Austin Allegro, in canary yellow. SORN, since 2012. Statutory off road notification. That meant the car was not taxed for road use, had no MOT to prove it was roadworthy, and would therefore not have been insured. He wasn’t surprised. Gillard’s own father had driven an Allegro and had cursed it almost daily. Supposedly cheap and economical, they weren’t much cop even from new. Those Allegros in good condition these days would presumably be worth a bit, but keeping them running would be the problem.

  The last registered keeper was a Kevin O’Connell of Lacey Dutton Caravan Park. The detective quickly switched to the local database of criminal records, and typed in O’Connell’s details. Bingo! He had form. Drink-driving, failure to stop at an accident, driving while disqualified. No jail time, but several sizeable fines. His last disqualification had not yet ended. Reading between the lines, Gillard reckoned he knew why this driver might have disappeared from the scene of an accident. He’d done it before, after all.

  All they needed to do now was to find out who the girl was. He looked down Perry’s very neatly written but rain-smeared notes, and saw an order number he recognised as being one from the largest independent forensic lab in the country. Good. He’d already sent in a DNA sample.

  By the time Perry came back with the two coffees, Gillard reckoned he had a decent hunch about what had happened. The detective inspector was impressed. ‘He must have just used the Allegro locally, he’d have been caught in a heartbeat if he ever went past an ANPR camera.’

  ‘There’s another thought I’ve had,’ Gillard said. ‘Put a chestnut wig, a mauve fedora, a coat and a scarf on this girl. Do you think she could have been on the train?’

  Perry shrugged. ‘Now she is surplus to requirements, is that what you’re thinking?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Gillard said. ‘If true it would put us in an even darker place, I fear.’

  * * *

  DI Perry’s wife Melanie sat in the office above her wellness shop, going through the finances. Wholebods was doing quite well. Woking was prosperous and with just two part-time employees, a short lease and a business rates exemption, costs weren’t too bad. The full body Shiatsu massages and the ear candling were doing really well. She had remortgaged their home once for the business two years ago, but now she had done so again, on the quiet. She moved the money, another sixty grand, into her personal account and set up the secret payment. John would kill her if he found out what she was doing, but he wouldn’t find out. She had always looked after the finances. In fact it made her laugh that such a clueless man had ever considered becoming a detective.

  Having a secret life gave her such a buzz. It pepped up the otherwise dull suburban existence she had at home. But what she had done recently, well, that was so much more f
un precisely because of the risk she was taking. A colossal gamble.

  She looked at her watch. Shit! She had to be home in half an hour to help Vanessa make a cake for a friend’s birthday. At seventeen, her daughter was reasonably adept as a baker, but this had to be gluten-free. Vanessa had asked her mother to pick up fresh cherries, soya milk and polenta to replace normal flour, but she had forgotten. She picked up her bag and rushed out of the door.

  * * *

  Gillard caught up with DI Perry at ten. The detective inspector slumped at Gillard’s desk with a sausage sandwich drowned in mustard.

  ‘Are you still here?’ Gillard asked.

  ‘In body but not in mind,’ Perry said. ‘I’m going home now. Five extra hours on top of the nightshift is enough for anyone.’ The man looked exhausted. ‘Uniforms picked up Kevin O’Connell this morning, bailing out caravans at his mum’s campsite. Admits the car is his, but swears absolutely blind it’s been a non-runner since before he bought it. Claims it was stored on waste ground behind one of the static caravans, close to the river.’

  ‘So he reckons it was just lifted up by the tide and floated down with this girl in it?’

  Perry managed a laugh. ‘Yeah. He says he has no idea who the girl is, or what she would be doing in the car. They’ve got the Allegro at Newsome Motors in Lacey Dutton. I need someone to take a look. I’m formally SIO on the river death from tomorrow.’

  Gillard looked at his watch. ‘Rigby has rearranged the incident room meeting for midday, so I’ve got an hour. Leave it to me. I could do with a breath of fresh air.’

  * * *

  Within half an hour Perry was almost home, which was just as well because he didn’t think he’d ever been so tired. The white VW Polo purred along happily enough to the outskirts of Woking, until he saw the developer’s flagpoles which marked the Shepherds’ Rest estate. A vast development of nearly 3,000 ‘exclusive executive’ homes, of which just over two thirds had been completed. He drove along Southdown Way, past the sales office and show homes, and cul-de-sacs of five-bedroom detached homes with sizeable gardens, which had been the first phase built. He then turned left into Ryeland Drive, a meandering street of semi-detached three-bedroom boxes, all garage and no house. He and Mel had looked at one of these, but she thought them soulless, with a front garden no bigger than a tablecloth, and soon to be overlooked at the back by three-storey townhouses when the next plots were built. In the end they had bought a home in yet another bucolically-themed street. It was a big stretch financially, yet more piled on the family debt. As a policeman he had not been keen to live on a street named Romney Crook. But Mel had put her foot down. The houses were a tad more expensive and a little more secluded, and the teardrop-shaped wildlife garden around which the crook-shaped road ran boasted the only mature oak tree that the developers had seen fit to leave unfelled. For Mel, and even more for his daughter, this had been a clinching advantage.

  It hadn’t escaped his notice that his wife had seemed happier in the eighteen months they had been in their new home. They had been through a pretty bad patch before, and divorce had been mentioned. He really wanted to make Mel happy, but it wasn’t easy. She was what you would call high maintenance, a bit out of his league. Not just in looks, though that was important, but in aspirations and expectations. She had come from a well-off background, and having earned an MBA expected to progress well beyond his level. That’s why he was so reticent to tackle her about the mounting debts, even the never-never financing for the Audi soft-top, her pride and joy. He was simply delighted that her new wellness business seemed to be taking off.

  There was very little crime in their new estate. He’d always kept an eye on the local community policing website. A few incidents of criminal damage, one of domestic violence, and then, just the other week, a high-profile incident. Five minutes’ walk away, among the townhouses of Wensleydale Walk, a burglary and carjacking had occurred. Professional thieves stealing a high-value vehicle, presumably for export.

  Apart from that, there was nothing reported. But as far as crime was concerned he had been looking in the wrong place. He knew now he should have been looking inside his own household. Trying to deal with it meant that Perry had his own dirty little secret, one that would quite possibly bring him down.

  Chapter Eight

  The bridge at Lacey Dutton looked forlorn in the watery spring sunlight. Though the water levels had dropped considerably, and the riverside path had re-emerged, each arch was still choked with uprooted trees and boughs, with car tyres, caravan panels, polystyrene containers and a thick sludge of mud and plastic. Every waterside tree sported a stork’s nest of debris well above the reach of a stretching man, a clear high-water mark that would no doubt one day be engraved into the cast-iron flood record bolted to the centre of the bridge.

  Newsome’s Garage was on a side street opposite the Jolly Boatman, and had been spared the worst of the rising waters. It was a tiny place, petrol pumps removed a decade ago, two years after the BMW franchise was lost. Now it was just for repairs, and had only two employees. The Allegro, now right way up, had been pushed onto a lift in one of the repair bays.

  Any idea Gillard had that the car may have been driven anywhere in recent years was instantly dispelled. The sills were rotted, there was only one hub cap, and there was mildew on the windows. Gillard, wearing overalls and latex gloves, was greeted by Brian Newsome, proprietor, a vigorous-looking seventy-year-old with greased back grey hair in a teddy boy DA, and the stub of a cigarette burning between fingers and thumb which he dropped on the ground and stamped out.

  Newsome already had firm opinions about the car. ‘There’s no such thing as a good Allegro. But this one, well. Non-runner, guaranteed, a hundred not very careful owners. Illegal tyres, severe long-term corrosion, electrics well-fucked.’

  ‘Show me.’

  Newsome hit the button which raised the vehicle lift, hoisting the two-door saloon to shoulder height. It looked tiny compared to most modern vehicles. He pointed out the broken oil seals underneath, the worn bearings, the extensive rust like a Martian landscape.

  ‘My guess?’ Newsome said, though he hadn’t been asked for it. ‘It’s been sitting in a puddle for a decade.’

  Gillard nodded, unwilling to share any details.

  ‘You won’t get no forensics nor dabs off of this,’ Newsome said with finality, folding his arms as if daring his expertise to be contradicted. ‘I watched The Bill.’

  ‘Things have moved on since the eighties,’ Gillard said. ‘Can you bring it down, please?’

  Once the vehicle was down, Gillard opened the door. The interior stank of weed and stale water. Various insects of the crawling and sliding variety seemed to have made their homes underneath the seats and in the fabric roof lining. The hardest thing to gauge was how much of that had occurred since the waters carried it away, and how much before. It was conceivable that someone would willingly sleep in an old car if it was dry, or more likely may have sheltered in it from the rain. But it was hard to imagine that this car had been dry for a very long time.

  So what had this young woman been doing in it?

  He noticed something else. There was a great mess of vegetation entangled around the clutch and brake pedals, and a skein of something else. He reached down and untangled what seemed to be human hair, on which leaves, grass and muck had been caught. He took a small plastic evidence bag from his pocket, and gingerly dropped the tangle of fibres in.

  Stepping back from the car and going outside, Gillard held the bag up into the watery sunlight. He’d been right. This hair wasn’t blonde, like the girl found in the car.

  It was dark.

  * * *

  Lacey Dutton Caravan Park was a sprawling piece of floodplain, about five acres on the outside bend of the River Wey, three quarters of a mile upstream from Lacey Dutton bridge. From previous visits he recalled it was a sprawling site, a dozen or so static caravans on the higher land, with a couple of dozen pitches nearer the river
for camper vans and touring caravans. Now, with the floodwaters mainly receded, the entire site looked like a film set for a re-enactment of the Battle of the Somme. Two chocolatey-coated caravans were stuck in some willow trees, one vertical, one on its side, seemingly grappling each other like overweight mud wrestlers. Empty gas cylinders were strewn around the site like muddy corpses. The site office was the only element unmarked by the fight against the waters. A static caravan surrounded by a neat trellis fence and an Astroturf lawn, with gaily painted concrete gnomes and toadstools standing sentinel over a slimy moat. Approach was only possible across slippery planks recently laid for the purpose. Gillard parked on the road and donned his wellingtons. He met Mrs Deirdre O’Connell, Kevin’s mother, as she emerged from the site office with a bunch of mops grasped in one hand and a vape in the other. They greeted each other casually.

  ‘Insured?’ Gillard asked, his inclined head indicating the entire sweep of disaster.

  The woman gave him a weary look over her steel-framed spectacles which told him the answer. Gillard had known Deirdre on and off for many years. She was a tough cookie, having run the campsite on her own for several years after the death of her husband, with little or no active help from her tearaway kids. The business was only marginally profitable, he guessed, with the long-term prospect of a sale of the land for housing dangling like a jewel in the distance.

  For the next few minutes he indulged her tour of the carnage and devastation that the river had brought on her life and livelihood. He gently guided her towards the subject of the yellow Allegro, as they squelched together through ankle-deep puddles, criss-crossing foot-deep muddy tyre tracks until they finally reached a leylandii hedge with a broken gate.