by Lou Peters
Perhaps, because all three of them were young and female that the policewoman felt a certain affinity towards Rachel and Jackie. Felt she could speak openly, as though they were friends and not strangers who had come into report a missing person. It seemed like she was speaking from personal experience and it caused Rachel to wonder who had broken her heart. The officer’s glance was unwavering as she continued to stare at her. Rachel was unsure if the woman was looking straight through her, remembering past events. Or if she was trying to see inside of Rachel’s soul, to unearth any fragments of doubt she may be concealing from herself regarding Richard’s fidelity. It was an unnerving experience and she was relieved when the woman behind the counter finally blinked and refocused on the next question.
‘Are any of Mr. Johnson’s clothes missing?
‘No, one of the first things I checked this morning.’
‘How about his passport?’
‘Oh, I hadn’t thought of that, but I’m sure it will be in the bedside draw when I do look.’
‘You say you’ve only moved here recently, have you had time to change your documents, driving license etcetera?’
‘No, we hadn’t got around to doing that yet. I suppose that should have been one of the first things we did.’
‘Yes, and I suggest you don’t leave it any longer, after all I’m sure you don’t want to be breaking the law? But what I was thinking, it wouldn’t do any harm to check out your old address, just in case something turns up there. If Mr. Johnson’s suffering from amnesia, for example, he might make his way back to somewhere more familiar.’
‘I suppose it’s a possibility. I’ll give the new tenant a ring tomorrow. Anything is worth a try.’
‘I know you said you’ve already rung around the local hospitals, but we’ll do that again as a matter of course and extend the area of our enquiries. Did Mr. Johnson have any distinguishing marks? Tattoos, scars anything you can think of?’
‘No tattoos, but he did have a rather deep scar on the right side of his chest which he didn’t like to talk about. Oh and yes, he had a small birthmark on his left shoulder.’
The policewoman’s fingers continued to tap, tap the information onto the screen. Rachel wished she could sit down. Her legs were still suffering from the shakes and her head didn’t feel much better. It’d been such a long day. She’d be glad when the questioning was over and she and Jackie could leave.
‘Did Mr. Johnson wear any jewellery? Rings, etcetera.’
‘Yes he had a gold signet ring on his right hand. It was a twenty first birthday present from his parents. Square shaped with an etched design on the front. He’d told me there was an inscription of some sort on the inside. I’d also bought him a slim gold neck chain for his birthday...’ Rachel faltered, her voice cracking with emotion at the memory of how pleased Richard had been to receive the gift, and how much he’d shown his appreciation later that night. ‘... just last month and I’m almost certain he would’ve been wearing that.’ Rachel realised with a sickening jolt the police would need the information to identify his body, if other forms of identification were not possible. Suddenly all hope drained from her. It was at that moment it hit her like a knife in the stomach. Her worst fears realised. Richard was probably dead already. She would never again see his crooked smile. Never feel his warm nakedness beside her. Rachel’s knees went weak, unable to support her body. She slumped forwards against the counter. In an instant the policewoman raced from behind the enclosed partition and with Jackie’s assistance sat Rachel in one of the chairs that ranged along the edge of the room.
‘I’ll go and get her a glass of water.’ Placing Rachel’s head between her knees she announced with authority, ‘keep holding your friend’s head down and make sure she doesn’t fall off the chair. I’ll be back in a second.’
‘Don’t worry, I won’t.’ Jackie was on her knees in front of Rachel, ensuring she didn’t go anywhere.
A few sips of cool water later and with Jackie’s assistance Rachel felt able to stand. She clutched onto her friend’s arm for support, ready to shuffle for the exit and freedom.
‘Are you sure, you’re alright?’ The concerned face of the police constable loomed in front of Rachel’s blurred vision.
‘Yes thanks, I just want to go home and have a lie down. Please let me know if you get any information on Mr. Johnson’s whereabouts. No matter what time of the day or night. I won’t be able to relax until I know what’s happened to him.’ Rachel gave her mobile number to the young PC in case the police needed to contact her when she wasn’t at River Cottage, explaining the lack of reception at the property. The officer was all too aware of the problem of mobile signals in the area.
‘Of course, you do also understand, if we do locate Mr. Johnson and he doesn’t want you to know of his whereabouts, then we won’t be able to divulge that information to you.’
‘That won’t be a problem.’ Jackie assured the young woman. ‘But you will be able to let us know he’s safe?’ She slipped her arm around Rachel’s shoulders.
Feeling as though she was about to lose it at any moment, Rachel wanted to be out of the station before the tears started to flow. Unsure once they started, if they would ever cease.
‘We can do that. Just make sure she gets her documents up to date. Okay?’
Bloody red tape, she was sure Jackie was thinking the same as she was. Jackie didn’t respond to the comment, but gave the policewoman a tight smile. ‘We’ll be off then and wait to hear from you.’
In a few strides the woman crossed the floor. Her low heeled shoes made no sound on the synthetic tiles. She opened one of the swing doors for their departure. At the same instance allowing admittance to a couple of suits. The men stood aside to let the two young women slowly pass, offering them a courteous, ‘good evening.’ The men’s curiosity held in abeyance for the time being.
‘Travis.’ Rachel saw the shorter and older of the two men acknowledge the policewoman with a nod of his head, ‘you still here? You should have been gone hours ago, make sure you get yourself off home, now.’
‘Sir,’ the female officer immediately stood to attention. The smile disappeared from her face, as though an internal light had been extinguished. ‘I was just going to be on my way after seeing these ladies out.’
Even with her blurred vision, Rachel had instantly recognised the imposing figure of the second, she presumed plain clothes policeman, as the cup holder in the photograph. The sudden tightening of Jackie’s hand on her arm let Rachel know that fact hadn’t slipped past her, either. The goliath said something to the female officer, but they’d passed through the doorway into the chill of the night and his words as the door closed, were lost to them. No doubt he was wondering what the story was with the walking wounded, or should that have been the living dead?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Early Friday Morning11 December 2009
The nightmare came, as he knew it would. Walters sat upright in bed perspiration sticky on his forehead. He fumbled in the dark for the bedside lamp, relieved when with a click the room was softly illuminated. He blinked, re-adjusting his eyes in the muted light, preferring the discomfort over the risk of slipping back into the dream. Resting his head against the pillow, Walters breathed slowly in and out. The nightmare still boldly etched in his consciousness.
Dreaming he’d returned to the family home he’d shared with his parents and sister, he’d gone in search of his mother. He’d found her in the garden, hanging out freshly laundered sheets onto the washing line. Alice Walters, in the scenario his mind had created, had been young and happy. Walters had been overjoyed to see her. It was as if she’d been absent from his life for a very long time. The wind whipped at the sheets held prisoner on the length of cord, as if they were pristine white sails on a tall ship.
‘Can I help you mum?’ He’d offered. Their dream ages correlated, Walters had experienced the strange sensation of once again being a child.
‘Pass me up another sheet, woul
d you, dear?’ The young Alice smiled down at her son.
The washing basket had been positioned on the grass. Walters reached out a hand. However, the sheet had been reluctant to leave the basket. The boy tussled with the linen, wondering what was preventing its departure, and as so often occurs in dreams, his movements were slow and ineffectual. Finally freeing whatever had been entangled in the sheet, it rolled to the surface and the suddenly adult Walters, saw to his horror, the detached head of his dead wife. His trauma had been compounded, when the eyes had slowly opened and Sophia had looked at him with great sadness. ‘Why haven’t you moved on Mark? I’m never coming back,’ she’d said softly. Her voice had been the same sweet voice he’d loved. Her accent still as pronounced, her smile the same dazzling smile that could take his breath away. She looked completely normal, with the exception that she was nothing more than a talking head in a plastic washing basket. But then a transformation began to occur. The young woman’s eyes were crying tears of blood. They fell to crimson stain the remaining white sheets in the basket. Like the stains on Ruth Montgomery’s cardigan. The head was disintegrating before his eyes. The luxurious brown curls turning white and sparse. He could see the pink of her scalp beneath. A hammer appeared from nowhere. It hung suspended in the air above the basket and the disembodied head. ‘You know what I’m going to do Walters, don’t you?’ The threatening voice sounded vaguely familiar, as if he should recognise it. He was shocked to realise the hammer had gained lips. As he looked, he could see the outline of Bowden-Smythe’s elongated grinning face through the grain of the wooden handle. Walters had ineffectually grabbed at the tool, time and time again. Felt it slipping through his grasp, as though his hands had been smeared in oil. Always remaining just out of his reach, it taunted him, hovering perilously close above the transformed head. Which had now morphed into an up to date version of his mother, or was it Ruth Montgomery? Walters could second guess what was coming next. In the dream he’d closed his eyes to blot out the vision. The abrupt thud of the hammer against the decapitated head, followed by a high pitched scream mingling with his own, had released him from the bizarre images and he’d woken drenched in sweat.
Walters went downstairs and poured himself a large whisky. Slugging it back neat, he splashed more of the amber liquid into the bottom half of the glass.
‘Jesus Christ, when is this ever going to end?’ He asked himself. His voice sounded strained and unfamiliar. He was still shaking. The whisky not yet having the desired calming effect, he could feel the burn trickle down his gullet, warming his insides. Walters slumped into an armchair, bringing his glass with him. He took another sip, more slowly this time and placed the tumbler onto the table at his side.
Closing his eyes, thankfully the monstrous images had gone, replaced by the memory of the beautiful dark haired girl who had stolen his heart from the couple’s first meeting. Walters had taken his then fiancée, for a meal to their favourite Italian restaurant, Esposito’s, to ironically, finalise their wedding plans. There’d been a new girl waiting on the tables. She’d been a vivacious brunette with a sparkle in her dark, chocolate brown eyes. She’d smiled at Mark. In that moment their fates had been sealed.
The restaurant bore the family name of the proprietor and belonged to the girl’s Uncle Bruno. Sophia de Luca had been spending a two week vacation with her uncle and Aunt Arabella, and her younger cousins, Biagio and Messalina. Due to that unexpected meeting the Italian girl had ended up remaining in Britain for far longer than she’d originally intended. With the certainty of youth, Walters had been expedient in calling off his wedding plans to Laura Palmer, due to take place later that year. Unreservedly, he had transferred his affections to the vibrant Italian beauty. The two had quickly become inseparable, twin destinies intrinsically twined.
Theirs had been a whirlwind courtship. Four months later the service had been re-booked. Mark and Sophia had married on the twentieth of July nineteen ninety seven. Walters found himself recently wondering, if the subsequent events of the last two years, in some way represented a kind of retribution for breaking Laura’s heart. Still, he didn’t regret a single moment of the ten wonderful years he’d shared with Sophia.
The fateful day Walters would never be able to forget, arrived without warning. It was as if from the moment of that first meeting they’d been hurtling towards this unstoppable, pre-ordained event. Why, is the question everybody asks when something dreadful occurs. Why me? Why my family? Or, if only I’d known I would have done things differently. I would have stayed in bed all day. Or never let her out of my sight, until the danger had passed. Saturday April the seventh two thousand and seven, Easter Saturday, dawned as any other. No dramatic music played in the background, or thunderbolts and lighting to announce death’s arrival.
Sophia had received a phone call the previous day, asking if she would be able to help out at Esposito’s, the following evening. Bruno didn’t ask very often, only when he was really stuck and so Sophia hadn’t minded. It was the Easter week-end and the popular restaurant had been fully booked. Her uncle needed someone behind the scenes in the kitchen’s separate side annex. Loading the dishwashers and generally helping out. Walters was to be at work until midnight. It’d been pre-arranged he would collect Sophia from the restaurant after he’d finished his shift. Easter Sunday promised to be fine and they’d made plans to go out for the day. Possibly have a picnic, if the predicted fine weather extended to a further day. He’d kissed his wife as he’d left to go to work that afternoon, wrapped her in his arms, holding her tightly against him. Sophia snuggled her head into his shoulder, as she always did. Walters could still recall the smell of her perfume, the softness of her hair against his face.
The restaurant was situated in the old part of Boynton, nestled down one of the cobbled streets off the main square. It was an ancient building, full of character. The circular tables were bedecked with red cloths. In the centre of each, a lit candle, wax cascading like an erupting lava flow, oozed down the sides of the Chianti bottle holder, further adding to the romantic, subdued lighting. Sophia, alone in the annex, had been busy unloading one of the three industrial dishwashers. Hurrying across to the dumb waiter in the corner of the room, she waited impatiently for the next pile of used crockery to reach her from the floor above, enabling her to re-load a machine standing idle. She heard the rattle of plates and dishes resounding down the funnel. One of the harassed waiters activated the lever to set the platform in its downward motion. Rushing off to serve the next table, he hadn’t realised his action had been ineffectual. Wafts of animated conversations and laughter in the full restaurant filtered down the sound box to Sophia. Her impatience grew as the minutes passed. It seemed to be taking far too long for the next batch of items to reach her. Curiosity getting the better of her she extended her head into the aperture to see what the problem was. At that precise moment, without the slightest hint of warning, the twisted cables in the faulty apparatus snapped. Caused by the delay in its original descent, more crockery than usual had been piled onto the wooden platform’s surface.
Like a bullet from a gun, the over laden receptacle descended at terrific speed. Effective as a guillotine, Sophia’s head had been instantly separated from her body. Decapitated on the sharp, stainless steel edge of the frame as the dumb waiter plummeted, thundering down to the wine cellar below. The twisted contraption came to rest in a matter of seconds at the bottom of the shaft, broken plates and broken lives. Sophia had been just thirty three. The couple’s life together had ended at the place it’d commenced.
Walters had never had the courage to see the mutilated body of the woman he’d loved with such a passion. The policeman had witnessed too many times, disfigured, dismembered bodies, he couldn’t bear to see his Sophia like that. The embalmer would have tried to make the body look presentable, Walters knew. However, he didn’t want that, certain to be grotesque image, to be the lasting sight he had of his previously, very beautiful wife. If Walters had seen her in that state
then the nightmares would have certainly been a lot worse and he probably would have ended up as a psychiatric patient, or topping himself. The one small consolation Walters had, was that death would have been instantaneous. Sophia wouldn’t have known a thing about it. No such consolation for the Esposito family. The restaurant had closed that night, never to re-open. The distraught family had sold up and returned to their country of origin. Walters had taken his wife’s ashes back to her home town. In a simple ceremony, in the presence of her weeping nearest and dearest, Mark had said his last goodbye, setting his Sophia free to blow on the warm Mediterranean winds.
It was useless for Walters to even consider going back to bed. He glanced at the clock, five forty five. It could be worse he told himself. He went into the kitchen. Lifting the kettle to gauge the amount of water it contained he flicked the switch, setting it to boil. A lone packet of bacon remained in the fridge. Seal still intact it was nearly two weeks out of date. What the hell, it was cured bacon. How was it going to go off? Walters lit the grill and took out four rashes, replacing the remainder into the almost empty fridge for use on another occasion. Sitting in his kitchen that morning, eating his sandwich, Walters came to a decision. He could either remain haunted by the past, or he could get on with his life. He’d been lucky to have loved Sophia, to have that love reciprocated and to have had ten years of incredible memories to sustain him. But there was a message contained in that dream he must acknowledge, it was time... He had to move on. If he didn’t, he would remain a sad and lonely individual; maybe end up like Donald Headley. He was thirty nine not seventy nine. He had no right to give up on life. Sophia wouldn’t have wanted that. Walters acknowledged if the roles had been reversed, he would have wished her to live her life to the full, without exception. It would be a slow process. He shouldn’t expect too much of himself. Take life day by day, but he must regain his positivity and he must solve this case, his first murder. Perhaps for him it’d been a blessing in disguise. Get the investigative juices flowing and bring to justice the perpetrator of this heinous crime. Not just for his self satisfaction, or even that of his crew, but for the old lady, for Ruth Montgomery.