‘What are you doing here, Craig?’
‘Solving a mystery, hopefully.’ He looked at the parcel, which was franked and had a typed sticky address label but no business dispatch information. He was just about to start tearing off the parcel tape, when he stopped himself. ‘Hope it’s not a bomb. I wouldn’t put anything past this guy.’ He gently picked the parcel up and walked out and down the steps into the car park.
Claire followed at a safe distance, and watched as the detective chief inspector put down the box, then brought out his own mobile phone. He punched out a number, put the phone to his ear, and then knelt down in the car park with his other ear to the box.
‘It’s in there,’ he said. ‘I’ve rung her number. It’s on silent but I can hear the buzz.’
He walked away from the box. ‘I think you’d better get the bomb disposal people to have a decko. I’m going to have a look at the bridges at Lacey Dutton.’
* * *
Sir Robin Loxcombe had in 1763 donated money to build a ‘great stone bridge’ over the River Wey at Lacey Dutton, to replace the narrow Gorlaston Bridge half a mile downstream. Gillard reckoned the local aristocrat would be turning in his grave to see the state of it now, less than a week after the flood. Reopened to traffic and controlled by temporary traffic lights, it was splinted in scaffolding. Contractors’ vehicles were squeezed behind cones on the upstream side of the bridge, which had been damaged by the trees and cars that were ground against it.
The detective watched from the car park of the Jolly Boatman, before going inside to briefly greet the landlady who had been kind enough to provide him and Sam with blankets and food after the flood rescue. The detective looked at his iPad, on which the report of the fire and rescue service was displayed. It was absolutely clear that a full search had taken place at the time of the flood. But what if Sam’s body had been dumped here in the last few days? He couldn’t bear to hold that thought in his head, but he had to check it out.
He made his way along the bridge, walking the narrow pavement on the downstream side. He looked over the parapet, and saw that the river was getting down towards a more normal level. His earlier scouring of the Environment Agency website, and a conversation with the duty officer, had revealed that the depth of the river here was not normally sufficient to hide anything like a body for very long. The water was a thick brown mud, rather than the usual clear-running waters, and there was plenty of debris still in it. One new and quite substantial sandbank in the lee of the middle pier of the bridge held a child’s pushchair, a broken table and a moped. Nearer him was a more general raft of timber: everything from bits of garden shed, right through to rustic planters and a kitchen chair, all woven together with a dense mass of torn willow branches.
Gillard made his way right over the far side of the bridge and crossed through the kissing gate into the pastures at the far side. Fortunately he had brought wellingtons, because the grassland leading down to the water on the downstream side was like a swamp. He splashed up to the water’s edge, and looked under the first vaulting span. He tried to get closer, but the newly formed mudbank sucked him down almost to the top of his wellies within a few steps. He was still a good fifteen feet from the water. He shone his torch into the shadowy gloom. Endless amounts of plastic rubbish washed down from God knows where, the full David Attenborough eco-disaster. He supposed it would eventually be washed out to sea to choke some poor turtle.
The detective stared at the waters, the gentle herringbone ripples like melted chocolate. Any of this, from the sandbank to the waters themselves, could conceal the body of the woman he loved. Being here now seemed essential, an act of faith and loyalty to Sam, to look for her in the place she would most probably be found. Yet at the same time, the professional side of him knew it was a complete waste of time and effort, because unless he was to don a wetsuit and get right in there, there was no hope of spotting her.
Under the bridge/ That’s where you’ll find her/ cold, with the fishes/ drowned by your own hand
That was the thing that really mystified him. Drowned by your own hand. It didn’t make any sense. There was nothing he would ever do that would put Sam in danger. He just couldn’t find the answer to the riddle. Even as he turned his back, he felt like he was abandoning her. Meanwhile, whoever it was who’d kidnapped her had the entire Surrey constabulary rushing around at their own bloody headquarters.
* * *
Returning to the pub, Gillard ordered a round of roast beef sandwiches with chips, and pulled up a bar stool next to the log burner, which had filled the public bar with a toasty heat. He checked his phone to see if his contact at the fire and rescue services had got back to him. Ideally he wanted a fresh search underneath not only the main Lacey Dutton bridge but at Gorlaston too, where the yellow Allegro had been trapped. He’d repeatedly viewed the YouTube footage of the inverted vehicle, bobbing away like a disconsolate toy duck.
The landlady, a solidly built woman with a helmet of dyed blonde hair and a shrewd expression, asked him about the investigation. He answered mechanically, giving away as little as possible.
Drying glasses and placing them on a rack above the bar she asked: ‘The women who were in the car didn’t have anything to do with each other, did they? That’s what the papers say.’
‘Sorry, I hope you don’t mind, but I can’t discuss operational matters.’ He took a bite of his sandwich, which had been well seasoned with a fiery horseradish.
‘Of course, they must have been connected by one thing,’ she said, turning away to get more glasses from the dishwasher, and releasing a huge cloud of steam into the air. ‘That is, whoever killed them, must have known them both.’
Gillard smiled and ordered a half pint of Kelham Island bitter. He recalled that the Sheffield-based brewery had itself been flooded in the past. She offered him a pint, on the house, but he demurred. He wasn’t on duty, but a recognisable police officer can only be seen to down minimal levels of alcohol if he is to retain the respect of the public.
The landlady, doggedly pursuing her theme, said: ‘Of course, he’d have to be quite an age to have killed one of them, wouldn’t he? She’s been missing for decades. Unless he was working with someone else.’
The detective looked at her. ‘How’s the repair work going?’
She clicked her teeth and sighed, clearly a practised expression. ‘Hasn’t started. Bloody insurers won’t get a loss adjuster down here for a week. Got more important things to do supposedly. Luckily, the cellar didn’t flood.’ He let her trot out the various frustrating details of trying to put right what nature had done wrong, knowing that a sympathetic ear is in itself a small piece of catharsis.
After twenty minutes, thoroughly warmed by the heat and the food, he bade her farewell, and walked out to the car park. Just as he did so a text came through from Claire to say that the package in the car park had been detonated with a controlled explosion, and unfortunately Sam’s phone had been destroyed in the process.
‘Idiots!’ he yelled at the phone. They weren’t supposed to do that. They needed the SIM card to find out if the texts had been set in advance. That information was probably lost for good now. He got into the car and sat head in hands, wondering what he could do. Then his phone rang. It was the head of the anti-kidnap unit. He wanted to see Gillard ASAP and was on his way to meet him.
* * *
Gillard sat in the front passenger seat of an unmarked Ford Galaxy in the car park of the Jolly Boatman, watching the rain patter down on the windscreen. In the driver’s seat was Detective Chief Superintendent Rajinder Otara, a veteran of anti-terrorism operations and an experienced hostage negotiator. Over the last forty minutes, Gillard had told the Sikh officer everything that he knew about the abduction and murder of Beatrice Ulbricht, his near-death experience with an olive green Mitsubishi Warrior, and the abduction of his wife.
Otara had listened carefully. ‘We’ve already had a chance to re-examine the CCTV footage from the train and the plat
forms, the cell site analysis of the various mobile phones, as well as your fitness tracker. We’ve been impressed, actually, by the resourcefulness of many of your team, including you.’
‘Thank you.’
‘We’re expecting the hostage taker to contact you or Surrey Police again, to try to twist the knife a little. To that end, the first thing we did last night was to put a full real-time monitoring system in place on your home and work phones and mobiles, as well as your email. We should get us an almost immediate trace on the location of any caller. It’s not foolproof, of course. It’s clear that you are up against at least one perpetrator who has advanced technical skills. And at least one, possibly the same one, who has a grudge against you.’
‘I’ve put a few people away in my time.’
Otara stroked his neat beard. ‘Yes, but I’m particularly intrigued by your wife’s ex-boyfriend Gary Harrison. DI Claire Mulholland thinks he is possibly the best candidate, although it’s unclear whether he would have the technical skills we have seen exhibited. We have two research specialists trying to trace him, going back through everything we know from him in his army days and when he was a chef.’
‘If it is him, he might kill Sam,’ Gillard said. ‘It won’t be about money, it’s about getting even with me.’ He described his own attempts to trace Harrison’s whereabouts.
‘I agree. Having seen the messages, this is clearly not a conventional kidnap case. That makes it difficult because there are no demands, no cash we can offer and precious little to negotiate about.’
‘What is your strategy then?’ Gillard said.
‘Trace the car. Our perpetrator has been moving around a lot, transporting corpses and who knows what else. That is the weakest link, and unlike with phones it’s more difficult for him to give us a false signal.’
Gillard nodded. It was a logical conclusion.
‘So, as he seems to be pretty good at staying off main roads, we are ramping up a surveillance operation with twenty mobile ANPR cameras concealed in parked vehicles on various back roads between Woking and Lacey Dutton on the western edge, and right across to Croydon and Caterham in the east. We are putting together an analysis of all the cell site data we have accumulated, not only on Beatrice Ulbricht’s phone, but on your wife’s too, or what we’ve been able to recover from it. We are monitoring her social media accounts to see if anything pops up there.’
‘That’s all very well,’ Gillard said. ‘But I think our suspect has gone to ground. He’s done all the driving, all the texting, and all the setting up he needs. He’s watching to see if we can find him. And my gut feeling is that he has eyes and ears in the police.’
* * *
With Mount Browne like a disturbed ants’ nest, and overrun with the bomb disposal people, NCA officers and miscellaneous spooks, DI John Perry took Rainy Macintosh to a small conference room, where they could shut out the mayhem and he could give his full attention to what she’d learned in the Jane Morris case.
‘Boss, after yuz alerted me to the chance that Jane Morris had given birth, I checked through one of those ancestry websites. You might not know this but you can get school attendance records from it as well as births, marriages and deaths. Because of the unusually common name, it took me a while to work out which South London secondary school wee Janey had been to. Then I realised I was being stupid, because one of the photographs released at the time showed her in school uniform. What I discovered was that she had not attended at all in the six months prior to her death.’
‘What is the significance—?’
‘Och, sir, it’s obvious. Schools didn’t like to have pregnant schoolgirls swanning about. Advertises moral degradation, all that shite.’
‘When I was a schoolteacher we had several pregnant girls,’ Perry said.
‘Aye, but that is since the 1996 Education Act, which made it compulsory for teenage mums to complete their education. Back in the 1980s, well, it was still a stain on a school as well as a family. The parents may well have kept her away.’
Frank and Eileen Morris. Perry wondered just what they might have known of their daughter’s activities. If she looked pregnant, they might well have withdrawn her from school. And what did Uncle Harold the fishmonger really see the day she disappeared? As before, the answers could only come from evidence in the present day.
‘Have any DNA samples come to light for our suspect?’ Perry asked.
‘Nope. Every sample we have has been accounted for by a witness or one of us.’
‘That’s a shame, I just had a little theory that I was going to test. But as I’ve got nothing to test it against, I’ll have to leave it.’
‘What’s your theory?’
It seemed so outlandish that Perry was reluctant to tell her. ‘I was just wondering if Jane Morris’ baby grew up to be our killer.’
‘You mean the wee twisted lad hung on to his frozen teenage mum as a kind of keepsake?’
‘Yes.’
‘But that means someone else killed and froze the poor wee hen.’
Perry laughed nervously. ‘It would be just too bizarre, wouldn’t it?’
She put her hands on her ample hips. ‘So you’re looking for someone a bit more normal to be responsible for two stranglings and an abduction?’ Macintosh gave a dry laugh. ‘You could be on to something, sir. It’s just a shame the bomb squad blew up the package containing Sam Gillard’s phone. You could expect a DNA or fingerprint lift off that screen when he was sending messages.’
‘We didn’t get one off Beatrice’s phone.’
‘Aye, that’s because it was smeared in Coca-Cola. That stuff’s super-acidic. One other thing, sir. I checked up the witness you asked me about, Betty Garrison. The dead girl’s grandmother is still alive, at the grand age of a hundred and one, living in a care home in Carshalton.’
* * *
Perry set off for Carshalton with a sheaf of cuttings. It seemed like the perfect time to visit, and it had the great benefit of deferring having to go home. He found Mrs Garrison in her private room, sitting up in bed watching TV. She gave him a waspish look, and demanded: ‘Who the hell are you?’ She muted the TV with her remote.
She was a substantial old lady with wattles of blotchy skin hanging down from her chin, and swollen arthritic hands the size and texture of old gardening gloves. Only a few wisps of hair clung to her skull. The care worker who had escorted Perry in had reassured him that Mrs Garrison was still lucid and in control, but did have a bit of a temper. ‘It’s probably what has kept her alive all these years, even after her children have died,’ the woman said.
Perry introduced himself and showed his detective ID card.
‘Did I just park my Rolls-Royce in the wrong place?’ She guffawed at her own joke.
‘No, Mrs Garrison. It’s about something—’
‘Ah, yes. Still digging for my granddaughter after all these years, then?’ she said softly, her face tightening.
Perry explained slowly and carefully about the recovery of Jane’s body. ‘We believe she has been kept frozen for nearly forty years.’
‘I heard about it. I expect you think that my son Harold did it, don’t you? Him having a fish freezer and all.’
‘We are keeping an open mind.’
‘Are you now?’ she asked with a slight smile. ‘That would be a first for the filth.’
Perry thought carefully about how to approach this prickly woman, his last remaining potential witness. If she didn’t cooperate, he’d be stuck. ‘Before I get to all that, Mrs Garrison, can I ask you about your grandson, Graeme?’
She began to cough violently, bringing up something liquid into a handkerchief that she apparently kept for the purpose by her bedside. ‘I’ve not seen that one for a long time.’
‘Since when?’
‘He came crawling round asking for money more than ten years ago. He knew that we’d finally sold the Balham properties, that was my house and the shop in Hildreth Street, for a tidy sum, so I could come and
live here. He just assumed there would be lots spare. Just like his bloody father.’
‘That would be Harold.’
‘Yes, my Harold, God rest his twisted soul.’
‘Tell me about Graeme’s childhood. I presume you enjoyed playing with him in the early years?’
She narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips. ‘He was a difficult baby, always crying as I recall. By the time he was seven or eight, he was quite big and he used to bully the girls out in the street. Hair pulling, pinching, stuff like that. My Harold tried to thrash it out of him, but it was no good. What comes from bad always turns bad doesn’t it?’
‘Why do you say Graeme comes from bad?’
The old woman licked her lips, but said nothing.
Perry saw his opportunity: ‘Graeme wasn’t Linda’s child, was he? He was Jane’s.’
A shadow passed over her face, an ancient agony which distended her mouth. With a supreme effort she organised her features into the matriarchal antagonism that had presumably served her well for decades. ‘Well, well, the good old British bobby gets there in the end. Even if it takes nearly half a century.’ She felt for a fresh tissue, and dabbed the corner of her eyes.
‘Care to tell me about it?’ Perry said.
She sighed deeply, clicked off the TV, and then continued. ‘Look. I’ve seen everyone I ever cared about die, you know. First was Linda, then Frank, my Harold and finally Eileen. She hung on until the end, hoping to find out what happened to her daughter before she died. But in my heart I always knew. It was a truth too terrible to tell.’
Perry waited while she composed herself. ‘Jane told her mum, when she was about three months gone. Frank was enraged, concerned about his standing among the neighbours, many of whom were regulars at his betting shop, especially after Harold whispered to his brother in law that he’d seen her talking to West Indians. Eileen was religious, and wouldn’t hear of letting the girl have an abortion. Jane wouldn’t say who the father was, but I thought I knew.’
The Body Under the Bridge Page 18