A Photographic Death

by Judi Culbertson

  WHEN GABRIEL SAMPSON walked into the station, I was blindsided by emotions I’d never expected. The tea rose from my stomach and became a burning acid. My heart began jumping and I had to put the cup down to steady my shaking hand. What did my body know that my mind didn’t remember? All I could think was, This isn’t going to be pleasant.

  DCI Sampson looked older, his dark hair now salted with gray, but his face was still wary as a hawk’s. The last time I saw him he had been wearing a blue constable’s uniform, not an expensive tweed overcoat and cashmere scarf. Now he appeared to be running the station. As his eyes flickered over to us, I remembered he had been the one who pooh-­poohed Jane’s comments about a “bad lady.” He had treated me as if the tragedy was only to be expected from someone sleeping on the job. I suddenly remembered how odd it had seemed that he was intent on proving that Stratford and the river had not been to blame.

  I had wanted to talk to someone familiar with the case. But not him.

  Was there anyone else?

  “These lovely young ladies are waiting for you,” Constable Bradford said gallantly.

  DCI Sampson stared at us. “You’ve made a report?”

  “It’s not about that. I’m Delhi Laine. Caitlin Fitzhugh’s mother?”

  He didn’t recognize me or the names.

  “Can we talk to you?”

  He didn’t move a millimeter. Pushing up from the bench and coming close to him, I saw that he had developed gray flecks in his mustache. His aftershave smelled like clean laundry.

  He saw that I was not going to go away. “What’s this about then?”

  I did not want to tell him the story standing in the middle of the lobby, but I understood he was not going to move. So we stood in the center of the room, the lights of a tabletop Christmas tree blinking erratically on and off, personnel edging around us, and I reminded him of what had happened nineteen years ago.

  He blinked with impatience. I was making a poor job of it.

  Quickly I showed him the note and envelope. “This is what made us come back!”

  He looked at them, scrutinized the postmark, then handed them to me.

  I felt disappointed that he did not keep them for a forensic examination. “Can you tell if the letter was mailed from around here?”

  “Hard to read. It could be Rugby.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Northeast of here. Larger than Stratford. But it could be any number of places in Britain.”

  “Well, we came back to see if there’s anything we missed here.”

  DCI Sampson sighed. “As I remember, the investigation was thorough. We even brought in a police diver. The file was closed as death by mishap.”

  “You remember a lot about it,” Jane said, as if admiringly.

  He preened. “Only because it was an anomaly. We deal with few fatalities. Automobile casualties, of course, drownings now and then. The kind of kidnapping you’re suggesting, never.”

  Get ready to have your world rocked.

  “Do you have notes about the case we could look at?” I asked. “Wasn’t there a detective on the case?”

  “Our files are official property, madam. There would have been no detective assigned as it was a drowning, not a crime. The case belonged to another constable and myself.”

  The concept of ownership seemed odd. “Could we speak with the other constable?”

  “He left soon afterward. He went south.”

  I heard Jane breathe in. “What was his name?”

  He turned on her reproachfully, as if she should know better than to ask. “That isn’t information we divulge.”

  I jumped in. “Not even his name? He was part of our case, after all. Anything he remembers would help.”

  “There’s nothing for him to remember. It’s all in the case file.”

  “Which we can’t see.” I tried to keep my voice calm. I didn’t think acting pitiful or begging would work and in any case I was much too angry to be convincing. How could he be so officious when it was a matter of a child’s life? “Could you at least look at the file to see if there’s anything you’re forgetting? We’ve come all the way from New York to try and find out what really happened.”

  He couldn’t have cared if we’d flown in from Jupiter. “When you bring me some new evidence—­something more substantial than a ‘recovered memory’—­I’ll take a look at it. Otherwise it stays in the file. Enjoy your stay in Stratford.” And he moved past us and into a hall.

  “What about the note?” I called after him, but he kept walking.

  Jane and I stared at each other. Had we flown several thousand miles at considerable expense only to be brushed off like a flake of dandruff from his expensive coat? Could he actually refuse to tell us anything more?

  “Have you seen Anne Hathaway’s Cottage?” Constable Bradford called consolingly from the desk. “It’s not to be missed.”

  We smiled at him and left.

  “ ‘Enjoy your stay in Stratford,’ ” Jane mocked. “He’s hiding something. I know he is!”

  “Not to even give us the constable’s name,” I agreed. I cast back into my memory, back to that time, to see if the name or the constable himself was lurking somewhere in the shadows. No one stepped forward. Truth be told, even the police station looked unfamiliar.

  “I’ll bet the constable who disappeared was in on it! Maybe the nanny was his wife, and as soon as they’d taken Caitlin they moved away so no one would find out. No one would suspect a policeman.”

  “We still have other things we can check out.” I was upset too, but I saw that Jane was hitting the travel wall, that point of feeling overwhelmed when everything seems futile and you’re sorry you ever left home. It usually came closer to the midpoint of a trip, but travel malaise can strike anytime.

  “We’ll check my iPad later to see if anyone’s e-­mailed about the flyer,” I promised. “In a small town like this, someone has to know something. If that constable’s from around here, he’s probably come back for visits over the years, maybe with a cover story about where Caitlin came from—­either that they adopted her, or that she was a friend’s orphaned child.” I stopped, hearing myself. On the basis of nothing, I was embracing Jane’s theory as if it were a fact. “Let’s go look at the archives.”

  “I need more coffee.”

  “Looking at the newspapers won’t take long. The Stratford Herald’s a weekly.”

  She sniffed. “Where’s this newspaper office?”

  “Actually, the archives are kept at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, not at the paper.”

  “Can’t they do anything logically here? How do you know?”

  “I e-­mailed them.” Unlike DCI Sampson, my correspondents at both the newspaper and the archives had been extremely helpful. They’d explained where the older newspapers were kept and what we would need to do to be able to see them.

  The Trust was on Henley Street in an impressive brick and glass building with a bronze abstract design—­now gone to green—­on one side. Inside was a fascinating mélange of exhibits and films, worlds of sounds and visuals that the Bard himself would have marveled at.

  Shakespeare would have loved Hollywood, I decided.

  We made a stop at the loo, then headed for the Reading Room.

  I had forgotten to bring our passports, which were stowed in the room safe, but we had our driver’s licenses and those served for identification. The librarian brought us to an oak table next to a large window to wait for the volumes. “Let me know if you get cold. Sometimes the wind breaks right through.”

  We were still wrapped in our winter jackets and I was wearing the heaviest sweater I had brought, but I promised to let her know.

  “There’s no daily paper?” Jane asked.

  “No, just one from Birmingham. We’d have to go down there to see the archive
s and I’m not sure they would have given it any more coverage. Probably less.”

  The newspapers we wanted were in one oversized volume bound in blue leatherette. The accommodating librarian positioned it on a cushion on the table in front of us. I had—­and had not—­been looking forward to this moment, but now it was here. Although I was desperate for any new scrap of information, any hint of where we should look next, I was not anxious to come face-­to-­face with that pregnant, frantic girl who hadn’t even known what she was saying. I had a hazy image of myself apologizing over and over—­to Colin, to the police, and most of all to Caitlin, whose just-­starting life I had brought to a close.

  My fingers felt as if they were encased in heavy gloves. I was unable to get any purchase on the page edges. Jane finally reached over and found the first story:

  TODDLER SLIPS INTO THE AVON, DROWNS

  For a moment I thought, How terrible! before my mind admitted that the story was about us.

  The newspaper had been published on a Thursday, the day after it happened, so the only photo was of swans on the river. The facts were basic, preliminary.

  Then Jane said, “Look!” and pointed to the end of the story. A Constable Donnelly was quoted as pointing out, “The current can be tricky, even in summer. The water was not clear enough to see to the bottom.”

  “Well, we already knew that.”

  “Mom. His name.”

  “Oh!” I wrote it down in the tiny notebook I had brought with me, though I was sure I would not forget it.

  The next week’s paper gave more details about what had happened, focusing on police interviews with ­people who had been in the park that day. The constabulary requested that anyone who had seen anything “out of the ordinary” to please come forward—­had that been to placate us, to try and verify Jane’s claim of a “bad lady”? The story did not say.

  I stared at a photo of the five of us taken at Easter, which I didn’t remember giving them.

  In that same story a Celia Banks from Worchester Cottage recalled often seeing us in the park. “Such a lovely family! Brilliant little girls, and such a young mum. It’s a terrible tragedy, yes it is.”

  “She saw us,” I told Jane wonderingly. “This woman saw us in the park.” Somehow that verification made it seem real in a way I couldn’t explain.

  “Let’s hope she hasn’t moved away like the constable,” Jane said.

  I wrote down the information. I had no idea whether Worchester Cottage was the name of a neighboring village or an apartment complex.

  The third week, there was no mention of the story at all. We scoured every page, then looked at each other.

  “That’s it?” Jane was crushed. “No one said anything about the woman I saw.”

  “The police wouldn’t make it public if someone had. Let’s keep looking.”

  But the next week’s lead story was about a hit-­and-­run on the Birmingham road. The paper showed a photo of the deceased, a glamorous shot of a young, dark-­haired woman. Evidently she had been an actress with the Royal Shakespeare Company. And DCI Sampson had insinuated nothing violent ever happened in placid Stratford. A “drowning” that no one witnessed and a fatal hit-­and-­run within a month of each other?

  I heard Jane breathe in next to me and supposed she was reacting to this second tragedy.

  “Where’s that photo you took?” she demanded.

  I looked at the article again. “You think that’s her?”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  My hands began shaking again, the way they had at the police station. I reached around to my bag and pulled out the nanny’s photo still wrapped in tissue, and put it on the table. Even slightly blurred, even with her head turning away, it looked like it could be the same woman. What I had thought was a smudge was definitely a beauty mark. How many local women would have a mole in that exact same spot?

  “Oh, my God,” Jane breathed. “She’s the one I was talking to when I was hypnotized, I’m sure of it. She didn’t have makeup on like that; she was supposed to look plain. But her nose is the same, I know it is!”

  “But she died right after. How could she be dead?” What I meant was, how could she be dead three weeks after she’d kidnapped my child? What had happened to Caitlin?

  It was possible we were imagining it was the same woman because we so badly wanted her to be. Maybe this was a common English type. Perhaps this woman was a sister or a cousin of the kidnapper.

  I calmed down and reread the story. The woman’s name was Priscilla Waters, age thirty-­eight. She had been with the Royal Shakespeare Company for two years and had had small parts on the London stage before that. A member of the theater company told the reporter they were shocked and grieved. “Everyone loved Priss. Her Cordelia was to die for.”

  To die for?

  I shook my head to rid it of the travel malaise that was threatening me and read the rest of the story. Her death had happened at night, when poor visibility might explain how you could mistake hitting a person for a deer. Priscilla Waters had been knocked into a ditch where she lay undiscovered until the next afternoon when an older ­couple out walking their dogs noticed the body.

  It appeared that the police had stonewalled the newspaper. They would make no comment about their investigation or the search for the driver of the car. Frustrated, the reporter, a James Wattle, had gone to the scene himself and reported on his findings the following week. In one spot he had noticed tire tracks swerving onto the narrow shoulder and back onto the road again and photographed them. Despite his persistence, the police spokesman, a Constable Sampson, would not confirm that the tracks were where the hit-­and-­run occurred.

  “What an idiot!” I said, loud enough that several ­people at other tables turned around. I pressed my hand against my mouth, then whispered to Jane, “It’s like he’s trying to do the opposite of investigate. Obfuscate?”

  “I know. He probably won’t let us see that file either. Don’t they have some kind of Freedom of Information Act here?”

  “They do, but it would take weeks. We have to know now. Anyway, let’s get a photocopy of these stories and her picture. And see if they found out who did it.”

  But there was nothing more. Though we turned to the next issue and several weeks after that, Priscilla Waters and the investigation into her death never appeared again.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “WE NEED TO go back to the police station. Now they have to listen to us!” Jane cried.

  “I think we need more proof.” If DCI Sampson did not agree that the two women were the same, he could refuse to see us a third time no matter what evidence we had amassed by then. “Didn’t you want to get coffee?”

  “Now? Now I’m psyched.”

  Out on the sidewalk Stratford-­upon-­Avon was coming to life. Tourists moved slowly, staring at everything, and a knight in silver armor stood on the corner next to an Anne Hathaway look-­alike and a young William Shakespeare. They weren’t statues, of course, just actors standing motionless until someone approached to take their photo. Then they would spring to life and offer to pose with them—­for a price.

  I jumped as a beep sounded from Jane’s pocket, indicating a text message. She pulled out her phone and looked at it and then at me. “Hannah.”

  “What does she say?”

  She turned the phone around so I could read it:

  Why are u in Stratford?

  Busted. Colin must have told her we weren’t just in London to buy books and sightsee.

  “What should I tell her?”

  “That you wanted to see Shakespeare’s home?”

  “Right. She knows he’s my fave.”

  “Lots of ­people come here.”

  “I think she knows what we’re doing.”

  “Probably.”

  It made me uneasy. I hated to have Hannah upset. A
nd I had the irrational thought that now she knew we were in Stratford, she might come wandering down the street and see a poster of herself taped to a window.

  Jane shrugged and went to work with her thumbs, then watched the screen and said, “She says we should have waited.” She flipped the phone shut. “For her to finish classes, I guess.”

  “I thought about that. But then it would have run into Christmas and . . . it doesn’t seem like she wants to do this. Find Caitlin.”

  Jane slipped the phone back in her pocket.

  “I want to talk to Celia Banks before we go to the police,” I told her.

  “Who?”

  “The woman in the news story. From the park.”

  “If she knew anything she’d have told them.”

  “Maybe they didn’t ask the right questions. She might have known Constable Donnelly or Priscilla Waters. She may have heard what happened with the hit-­and-­run investigation. It could have taken months. Where’s the post office?”

  Jane looked mutinous. Still jet-­lagged, both of us on edge, we were on the verge of a quarrel. “They’re up to their eyeballs in it,” she muttered. “I don’t know why you won’t admit it.”

  She meant the police and I didn’t agree. They were overprotective of their records certainly, reluctant to turn them over to foreigners who were demanding to revisit a twenty-­year-­old case, but that didn’t make them complicit in any crime. While I wouldn’t choose DCI Sampson for my prom date, I saw no reason to doubt his integrity. “That’s the point. If they are involved, we’ll need all the ammunition we can get. Otherwise they’ll just blow us off again.”

  The post office was farther down Henley Street. We quickly found out that Worchester Cottage was not another village or inn, but the name of the Bankses’ home. I’d forgotten that so many of the English gave their houses names. Derrick and Celia Banks’s house was out on Avenue Road.

  “It’s just shy of a mile,” the clerk warned. “You’ll want a cab.”

  “Oh, that’s nothing,” Jane assured him. “I walk for miles in Manhattan.”