Sam leaned across the table, took her husband’s face between her hands and kissed him forcefully. ‘I love you, Craig. You’re a good man.’
He smiled.
‘Very few men are as nice as you, Craig. Remember my friend Ellen?’
He did. He had a very clear picture of her standing in his kitchen. ‘How is she?’
Sam’s face fell. ‘That new guy has dumped her.’
‘Oh dear.’ He began to examine the coffee and liqueur menu.
‘Craig, don’t dismiss it like that. She’s in love. And this bastard has swindled her out of her life savings.’ Sam summarised the details.
She had his attention now. ‘Has she reported it?’
Sam sighed. ‘I don’t think she is emotionally ready. She just wants him back.’ Sam reached across and grasped his hands. ‘Don’t roll your eyes, she’s very needy at the moment.’
They talked through the possibilities, agreeing that nothing could be done until a complaint had been made. He changed the subject to something less gloomy while they finished the wine, a fresh pinot grigio, and rounded the evening off with a fiery shot of grappa. The walk home was a delight; they cut across a darkened park away from the main road, and had a slightly drunken kiss and cuddle by the swings, just as if they were teenagers. For a dare they clambered over the wooden palings which marked the park’s northern boundary, earning themselves a tut of disgust from a late-night female dog walker. Gillard carried his giggling wife over his shoulder the last 200 yards into the cul-de-sac, and with mock shushing and whispers tiptoed past his aunt’s bungalow. Still holding Sam, this time like a battering ram, he ran across the street towards their front door, and pretended to bash it in with her head, yelling: ‘Armed police!’
After numerous attempts to insert the key one-handed, Gillard opened the door, and toppled with Sam onto the doormat. Both laughing uncontrollably, they wriggled around, until he could kick the door closed behind them. The laughter suddenly ceased, the couple staring into each other’s eyes, the kissing became passionate, and he said: ‘Look, the Surrey bodice ripper strikes again!’ He attempted to tear off her pullover, but Sam became entangled in the sleeves. She made short work of his suit and tie, and when they made love, passionately, it was on a pile of flyers offering pizza and curry delivered to your door.
Tuesday
Sitting with his head in his hands at his desk, DCI Craig Gillard contemplated the impasse he was at. What on earth had happened to Beatrice Ulbricht? All of the usual electronic and technical tools available to CID – CCTV, mobile phone cell site analysis, and finally ANPR – had so far either drawn a blank or simply created contradictory ideas. They couldn’t find a single vehicle that had been both in Earlsfield and within the vicinity of Clandon station on that Tuesday afternoon, not even the van of the man who had seen Beatrice at the bus stop.
The breathless arrival of Detective Inspector John Perry broke into his reverie. ‘Craig, you are not going to believe this.’ He was waving his smartphone around excitedly.
‘Try me.’
‘The girl under the bridge has a DNA match on the national database, with a missing person called Jane Morris.’ Perry turned back to the phone, as if reading it properly for the first time. ‘It’s a cold case last reinvestigated by the Met in 2006.’
‘Let’s have a look,’ Gillard said. Perry passed him the phone, and he scrolled down the text. ‘This can’t be right, John. The girl in the river could only just have been born in 2006. Did she disappear as a baby?’ Gillard scrolled down to the date of the original investigation. ‘No, Jane Morris disappeared in 1982, aged fifteen. Is that just a familial DNA test?’
‘No, I didn’t ask for familial, just an ordinary match.’
Gillard suggested they download the full PDF onto a large screen so they could read it in detail. The results were astonishing.
‘So it’s not a familial test,’ Gillard said. ‘But it’s impossible. They’re saying that the woman in the Allegro is Jane Morris. But it can’t be. Jane Morris would be fifty-two. The girl we saw was thirteen maybe, seventeen tops.’
‘So what do I do now?’
‘Get them to retest. It’s possibly some cross-contamination. Thank God it’s the kind of mistake we can spot immediately.’
The detective chief inspector looked up at the arrival of DC Hoskins, grim faced, with a polythene evidence bag which appeared to be full of mud. ‘Another packed lunch, Carl?’ Perry said, and chuckled at his own joke.
Hoskins ignored him, and said, ‘This was found in a tree a mile downriver.’
‘What is it?’ Gillard asked.
‘I’m told it’s a scarf,’ he responded. ‘I’m off down to forensics, do you want to come?’
Chapter Nine
News of the find spread like wildfire. Five minutes later half a dozen detectives gathered round a large plastic sheet on the desk in forensics as technician Petra Amin used tongs to extract the item from the plastic bag. Filthy, stinking water sloshed out with it, and as the forensic technician stretched out the drenched woollen item to its full five feet, it was clear that it had once been multi-coloured. Muddied versions of red, orange, green, blue, indigo and violet wool, hand knitted by a loving mother for her talented daughter.
‘Do we know who found this?’ Gillard asked Hoskins.
‘Geoff Holt and Chris Marshall from the fire service.’
‘I’m impressed. They had enough on their plates with the floods, but still had time to read the missing persons round-robin.’
Hoskins nodded. ‘I’ve emailed the senior officer there to ask them to keep a lookout for the hat and the violin.’
The door burst open to reveal Chief Constable Alison Rigby. She immediately made the room seem very crowded. ‘I heard the news,’ she said unnecessarily. ‘The Environment Agency says the waters are now safe for police divers, and that’s where I want all of the effort to go in trying to find Beatrice.’
DI Perry, standing at the back of the group, piped up. ‘Ma’am, I put a request in this morning, but there is no confirmation of when we’ll have them. As you can imagine with six people still missing in the county and a huge number of sunken vehicles across the Wey, Cranleigh Waters and the Mole, we’re probably only going to get one team to begin with, as we’re already competing with Sussex, Hampshire and Berkshire for resources.’
Rigby smiled. ‘Fear not, John. The moment I heard the news about the scarf, I did a little calling around. As of five minutes ago I’ve been offered four teams coming in on an RAF flight from Scotland. The Home Secretary has agreed to pay the bill. Of course they should be useful not only for the Beatrice Ulbricht case but for the wider search for those missing in floods.’
‘Friends in high places, ma’am?’ Gillard asked.
‘The very pinnacle, Craig.’ She winked, and walked out.
* * *
Back at the incident room Gillard pulled out Ordnance Survey maps of Surrey, and using the largest available table spread them out. He called over DI Claire Mulholland, and they laid over some clear acetate so they could begin with marker pens noting the various events. They concentrated on the River Wey upstream from Lacey Dutton towards Hampshire. It was a good fifteen miles south-west of Westmeare and at least ten south of Godalming. Clandon was even further away.
‘We’ve not got much here,’ Gillard said. ‘There are ANPR cameras on the A281 and A283, and there is a road safety camera on Loxcombe Bridge at the traffic lights. I think the best we can do for now is to try to see if anyone who has been in the vicinity of Westmeare on Sunday night has also been in and around Lacey Dutton in the last few days.’
‘Whoever is clever enough to have constructed that girl on the train costume drama would certainly be smart enough not to get caught using the same vehicle in those two locations,’ Claire said.
‘I agree. But what else do we have?’ Gillard asked. ‘The DNA tests on the railway seat cushion came back with half a dozen different traces, one animal, almost c
ertainly dog.’
‘Why dog?’
‘British Transport Police warned me to expect that on any DNA test of a train seat. It’s from what passengers have walked in before they put their feet on the seat opposite.’
‘Icky.’
‘Yes. Anyway, none of the human traces are on the national database. We don’t even seem to have a trace for Beatrice on it, even though the impostor was sitting there wearing her coat.’
Down the far end of the incident room, they could hear chuckling. Rainy Macintosh and Carl Hoskins were watching something that amused them. Gillard wandered over, feeling that he could do with a little light relief.
‘You got to see this, sir.’ Hoskins beckoned Gillard over to his computer terminal. Macintosh discreetly slipped away, returning to do some work.
‘What is it?’
‘CCTV from last Monday’s Woking carjacking. I’m calling it the tale of the flying slipper.’
‘I’m due in a meeting in two minutes,’ Gillard said. He wasn’t looking forward to it. The German minister and his wife were already waiting in Rigby’s office.
‘You’ll only need half that, sir.’
Hoskins sat his boss in the chair, and restarted the footage again on quarter speed slo-mo.
It was domestic CCTV footage taken from above the front door of a house looking out across its short drive and onto a residential street. A dark Mitsubishi Warrior, an off-road monster pick-up with high suspension and a snorkel, reversed into the picture from the right-hand side close to the camera and swung in a fast clockwise arc down the drive towards the street. For the first one or two seconds nothing whatever could be seen of the occupant. However, a motion-sensor light further off to the left was triggered, and for a few seconds the car was bathed in dazzling light.
‘Camera’s mounted too high,’ Gillard said.
‘If it was a bit lower we could see his face,’ Hoskins said, pausing the replay.
‘Doubt it. Too much condensation on the screen.’ As it was, there was only the sleeve of a dark car coat, with a single narrow hi-vis stripe on it visible through the side window.
‘He’s wearing gloves,’ Hoskins said. ‘You can see a hand on the steering wheel. But watch this.’ He hit play again.
As the vehicle swung backwards and right off the drive and onto the road, a bathrobed figure sprinted into view from immediately underneath the camera. The man, who looked to be in his late thirties and athletically built, showed quite a turn of speed for someone in slippers, intercepting the car just as it ceased to move backwards. He grabbed the passenger-side door handle, leaned back and tugged, but when it accelerated forward, the change of direction seemed to catch him off-balance. He was jerked off his feet and fell sideways, still holding on to the door. His dressing gown flapped open, hairy chest and parts south briefly visible as he rolled on the road.
‘Ouch, that’s going to hurt,’ Gillard said.
‘Yep, dragged up the road on his bare bollocks. Now watch the slipper,’ Hoskins said.
The black item flew off the victim’s foot as he was knocked sideways, shooting straight up and out of view before landing on the left of the picture, enough to again trigger the motion sensor as the vehicle sped out of picture to the left. It was in that final sharply illuminated frame or two that there was just a glimpse into the speeding vehicle.
‘He’s wearing a balaclava,’ Gillard said. ‘But there’s a few pixels of face. He’s white. See if you can get it enhanced.’
Hoskins nodded. ‘Consider it done, boss. We’ve got only one ANPR hit on the vehicle, on the approach to the M4. Take a look to see if we’ve got any roadside cameras nearby.’
‘Good work,’ Gillard said checking his watch. ‘How is the victim?’
‘He got gravel rash on his bits, sprained ankle and some wrist tendon strain,’ Hoskins said. ‘But that was a week ago. He’ll live. I’m going to see him today.’
The detective chief inspector suddenly lost interest in the comedy. An email from the lab had pinged into his inbox.
‘Shit,’ he said.
Hoskins looked up at him.
‘The DNA test showed the dark hair I found in the Allegro belongs to Beatrice Ulbricht.’
Hoskins stretched his face in sympathy.
‘Shit! Her mum and dad are upstairs,’ Gillard said. He’d really hoped, against the odds, that the disappearance of this talented young woman would end happily, but that now seemed even less likely. What on earth was her hair doing in some ancient car that had been washed off a caravan site? It just didn’t make sense.
* * *
He tapped on Alison Rigby’s door, hearing the genteel clink of coffee cups within and a background hubbub of conversation. Called in, he was immediately tracked by the expectant faces of Karl-Otto and Lisbeth Ulbricht. The chief constable explained to him that she had already briefed them on the current state of the investigation. ‘I was wondering if there was anything new since the start of the day?’
Gillard felt extremely awkward with the one nugget of depressing news that he had just heard. He was surprised that Rigby seemed to have taken upon herself the role of family liaison officer when they had more junior staff trained to do it. He hadn’t himself really begun to assess what the discovery of Beatrice’s hair could mean, and it didn’t seem fair to anxious parents to just toss it out there.
‘Nothing significant to add,’ he said. He then trotted out the bureaucratic statistics of man-hours, CCTV hours, ANPR cameras checked and so forth, purely to justify his apparent lack of a conclusion. He was not proud of this evasiveness, but he felt dropped into an awkward situation. Herr Ulbricht was staring at him intently. You do not get to be a senior minister in any country without a good bullshit radar, and Karl-Otto looked to have struck the motherlode.
‘Detective chief inspector, surely by now you must have found out who this girl is who impersonated our daughter? The footage has been all over the television in both our countries. Does no one recognise her?’
‘Yes, we have had literally hundreds of suggestions for who this person is. We have a team of ten who do nothing else but follow up on the helpline. But simply stating a physical resemblance doesn’t help us too much, unless we know a little about the location and movements of each person. You have to bear in mind that she was probably wearing a wig,’ Gillard said.
‘That wide hat didn’t help,’ Lisbeth Ulbricht added, showing some signs of empathy with the embattled detective.
Gillard nodded and looked at her. ‘The brim of the hat kept her face hidden from the cameras almost all the time. She was intending to deceive. It is not like a normal case where some dim criminal is caught casually on CCTV. This young woman, and whoever is assisting her, are extremely forensically aware.’
‘We just need to know she is alive,’ the father said, and banged the table with the flat of his hand.
‘The surest sign of that would be if you had received a ransom demand,’ Gillard said.
Ulbricht shook his head. ‘There has been nothing. Of course, there are many sick people out there who send horrible messages on social media related to my political positions, but then there have been some very heart-warming messages of support too. I’m fortunate I have staff who just filter through the good stuff to me.’
A blue flash from Rigby’s eyes indicated the meeting was over, so Gillard made his excuses.
* * *
Downstairs in the gents’ toilet, Gillard was standing next to DI John Perry at the urinals. ‘We need to have a chat as soon as you’re done,’ Gillard said.
‘Absolutely. I’ve got something you just have to see.’
Gillard peered over into the adjacent receptacle and gave a mock wide-eyed stare. ‘Nothing special there!’
When his laughter subsided, Perry said: ‘I’ve got some photographs of Jane Morris from 1982. You will not believe them, I promise you.’
‘Filthy pictures?’
‘Anything but.’ After washing hands and sharin
g the noisy blow dryer they emerged into the corridor, where Rainy Macintosh eyed them up and down. ‘Having a wee meeting, boys?’
‘You’ll go down for a long stretch one day,’ Gillard said, laughing.
Perry led him to his desk, and dragged over a chair to let Gillard sit side-by-side at the screen on his PC.
‘This is the mystery girl, recovered from our yellow Allegro submarine. Photographs taken by CSI.’
Gillard nodded. He’d seen those pictures before from the Skype meeting with Dr Delahaye: the innocent teenager in her cardigan and fawn tights.
Perry clicked to the next image, which came up side-by-side. ‘And this is Jane Morris, the picture circulated at the time of her disappearance.’
Gillard’s jaw hung open. He looked from one to the other. They were identical, apart from the 1980s hairstyle on the old picture. Even the clothing looked identical. Same cardigan and tights.
‘It’s not possible, is it?’ Perry said.
‘When we talked earlier I had thought identical twins…’
‘They wouldn’t be identical now, would they?’ Perry said. ‘Jane Morris’ twin would be fifty-two now. The DNA test was rechecked, and it comes back that this is the very same woman who went missing in 1982 at the age of fifteen. They look the same, and forensics say they are the same.’
Gillard shook his head. ‘It’s weird that the car was made in the same year Jane Morris disappeared. You might imagine she’s been sitting dead in the passenger seat since 1982, except that she’s way better preserved than the car.’
Perry scratched his head. ‘Anyway, that’s my mystery.’
Gillard blew a sigh. ‘There’s another complication. If that yellow Allegro is a time machine, it seems Beatrice Ulbricht has been in it too. I recovered some hairs entangled around the brake and clutch pedals which turned out to be hers. I suppose they had got caught when the vehicle was inverted during the flood, and her head was being jostled into the footwell.’
The Body Under the Bridge Page 10