Backlash

by Lynda La Plante

  ‘Make him take you inside, dear, it’s quite chilly this morning.’

  She strode off, leaving Anna to walk around the narrow pathway to the rear of the house. There was Andrew Markham, in old cord trousers, a polo-neck jumper and green wellington boots similar to those his mother was wearing. He had a brown cloth cap on and was digging out what appeared to be a small trench beside the greenhouse.

  ‘Hello.’

  He turned, surprised.

  ‘I just met your mother, she said you were out here.’

  ‘You must be Detective Travis?’

  He took off a big old gardening glove and shook her hand.

  Anna didn’t have to suggest they go inside; he removed the other glove and propped them on the spade’s handle.

  ‘Follow me. It’s a bit muddy, I’m afraid, but I’ve got to get a new drainage system as the old one has packed up, so I’m going to run some new pipes from the garage.’

  He was a very good-looking man, tanned and fit, and very tall. When he got to the back door, he had to bend his head to enter. He held the door wide for Anna to go through.

  The huge kitchen was warm and yet looked as if it needed some decorating. The old green paint was peeling in places and the walls were yellow with smoke. There was a double Aga in one corner with an array of copper pans on hooks beside it, and dog baskets and dog bowls took up a lot of space around it. Anna noticed an old bookcase spilling out an array of cooking and gardening books.

  ‘Would you like some tea?’

  ‘Yes I would, thank you.’

  He removed his cloth cap and tossed it onto what looked like an old church bench. He had thick dark curly hair similar to his mother’s, worn quite long. He also had a gold looped earring.

  Andrew insisted they take their tea into the sitting room as his mother would be back and they’d have wet paws all over them as well as his mother’s attention.

  ‘We refer to her as the Queen Mother. Do sit down, please.’

  The room was gorgeous, high-ceilinged, with lovely old green velvet drapes and matching well-worn sofas and chairs. A stone fireplace held the residue of a wood fire; beside it was a stack of chopped logs ready to light.

  There were Persian rugs scattered around the wide polished oak floors. Oil paintings covered the walls, many of horses and hunting, with one very large painting clearly that of his mother as a young woman. The gilt frames were somewhat worn and chipped, but the feel of the room was one of jaded elegance.

  Anna sat on the edge of the sofa as Markham handed her tea and some scones. They were freshly baked, he said, but she refused. He sat opposite her, munching on one.

  ‘I was interviewed years ago about Rebekka, it’s something I don’t think you ever sort of forget. Not the interview, I mean about her disappearance.’

  ‘Did you meet her?’

  ‘Oh yes. She was often in the garden with her brothers watching us all work, but they were never a problem. I had to move a small pond – you know, drain it – and they helped catch the fish. We had them in a sort of big old bathtub until we had the new pond ready.’

  He sipped his tea.

  ‘She was very concerned about the frogs. I told her they’d hop over to the new one when it was built, but she wanted to catch them all. She said there were six she knew and had given names.’

  He leaned back.

  ‘Frogs, every time I see one, reminds me of her.’

  Anna finished her tea and took out her notebook. She asked about the excavation of the Jordans’ garden and he got up and crossed to an oak desk, searching around and then pulling open drawers. Eventually he returned to sit beside her with a drawing book.

  ‘These were my original designs. They were the sort of basic to start off from.’

  Anna turned over page after page of sketches and notes.

  ‘Have you found her?’ His voice was soft and quiet.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It was a long time ago, maybe five or six years now.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘May I ask why you wanted to see me?’

  She closed the drawing block.

  ‘Do you recall if you ever, whilst you were working there, saw any children’s toys or got rid of anything the children might have been playing with?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so. The Jordans hadn’t lived there for very long and I think they had done a bit of clearance before I started. It was a major job though. I mean, Stephen Jordan sort of cleared old garden furniture and stuff like that, but we had to take down the back fence of his garden to get the diggers in and the rubbish out.’

  ‘When you say “we”, how many of you were working on the project?’

  ‘Well there was me and two friends I worked with at Kew Gardens who helped out. I hadn’t really started out on my own then but was just doing some extra weekend work on the side, so I had to rely on anyone I could get to give me a hand. Pay was better than I got at Kew so I took a week off to do the initial work. To be honest it turned out to be a much bigger job than I had anticipated.’

  ‘The builders recommended you for the job, didn’t they?’

  He nodded and smiled. ‘Lovely guys, those brothers, and yes they did. Met them in the beer tent at the Chelsea Flower Show in May, a few weeks before starting at the Jordans’. Said I was thinking of starting my own business and gave them my number. In fact I’ve worked on and off for them ever since.’

  He leaned back and folded his arms behind his head.

  ‘We have a possible suspect,’ Anna said. ‘These two people who worked alongside you, do you have their names?’

  ‘Yes, somewhere. I think one went back to Australia, but the other still works in the hothouse at Kew.’

  Anna opened her briefcase and took out the envelope with Henry Oates’s photograph.

  ‘And you only ever used these two friends to work with you, no one else?’

  ‘No, the three of us did the job. When the initial excavation of the tree and other shrubs was completed the brothers began digging out the foundations and I was working on my own. I had to demolish a brick wall and dig out the area for the new pond. Couldn’t do a lot more until the building work was completed. It was a big job for them as well, good-sized extension took up almost a quarter of the garden.’

  ‘So you went back after the extension was built?’

  ‘Yeah, for a couple of weeks to put up a new wall, rebuild the pond and also finish the overall landscaping. My own company was up and running by then but I worked on my own – not enough money coming in to employ staff back then.’

  She passed him the photograph of Henry Oates.

  ‘Have you ever seen this man before?’

  He stared at it, frowned and then ran his fingers through his hair.

  ‘Jesus Christ. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

  Her heart missed a beat. He shook his head, but still stared at the mug shot.

  ‘I completely forgot. I’d forgotten, Jesus Christ, I had forgotten this guy, this man.’

  ‘Do you recognize him?’

  ‘Yes, yes I do. Shit, I don’t believe it.’

  The door burst open and the two sodden spaniels hurtled into the room while Mrs Markham screeched for Andrew to get them out and not let them onto the sofas. The dogs chased manically around the room, skidding on the carpets, jumping on and off the chairs as Mrs Markham appeared.

  ‘Get them out, for goodness’ sake, they’ve been rolling in manure. GET OUT! GET OUT! Why did you leave the kitchen door open?’

  Andrew grabbed one by its collar as his mother chased the other out of the room. Anna could hear him shouting at the dogs before he walked back in and slammed the door shut.

  She was impatient to hear what he had to say, but he fetched a decanter of Scotch and poured a good measure.

  ‘Would you like one?’

  ‘No, thank you. Please, this is very important, Mr Markham. If you recognize this man—’

  ‘Just a second . . . I need a drop of water with this.’


  Anna wanted to scream, but he came back quickly.

  ‘Okay. I have to piece this together because it was a long time ago, but . . .’

  He picked up Henry Oates’s photograph.

  ‘Remember I said that I had to dismantle a wall at the Jordans’ . . . well, I was wheeling the bricks out to my van, as they were nice old ones and I knew I could re-use them and . . . he came up to me and asked if there were any odd jobs I could give him.’

  ‘You never mentioned this before?’

  ‘No, the reason being he wasn’t employed to work at the Jordans’ and without this photograph . . . I just didn’t think. I gave him twenty quid to help stack up the bricks in the back of my van.’

  ‘Do you remember his name?’

  ‘Yes, Henry . . . Christ, I am so sorry, but you know, when I was first questioned I’d finished off the garden work at the Jordans’ almost six months previously and I was expanding my own company. I mean, if they’d shown me this photograph of course I’d have said something, but it was really more to do with where I was on the day Rebekka disappeared. I gave them the names of the guys who had helped me on the job and they were questioned, I think, but this . . .’

  ‘So on this day when he helped you wheel out the bricks, did he go into the Jordans’ back garden?’

  ‘Yeah, he would have had to, shit!’

  ‘Is that the only time you saw him?’

  ‘No. It must have been about one, maybe two weeks later that he turned up here looking for work. He looked down on his luck, I felt sorry for him and paid him fifty quid to clear out our septic tank as it was blocked up.’

  ‘How did he know where you lived?’

  ‘From the time before with the bricks. He came back here in the van to help me unload them. I was going to give him more odd jobs to do but Mum had a set-to with him.’

  Mrs Markham walked back in with a towel.

  ‘Have they marked the sofa? How many times must I tell you to always keep the kitchen door closed as they dive in here at the slightest opportunity. You’ll have to hose them down, they’re filthy.’

  ‘Mother, do you remember this man?’

  Anna couldn’t believe it. Mrs Markham picked up the photograph and pulled a face.

  ‘Yes I do, ghastly creature, I wanted him off my property. You remember I found him skulking around in the kitchen. He smelled dreadful and I said to him, what do you want, and he said a glass of water, I said I had taken a jug out not ten minutes before. It was the time the septic tank was blocked.’

  Anna stood up and took a deep breath.

  ‘Could you both please sit down, this is very important. The man you have both recognized is a suspect in a murder enquiry. It is imperative I get the dates and times you remember seeing him as we believe he could have been involved in Rebekka Jordan’s and another girl’s disappearance.’

  ‘Oh God, this is terrible. He was in my kitchen!’

  She grabbed Andrew’s Scotch from his hand and downed it in one.

  Over at the multi-storey car park, Barolli now knew the dates when Henry Oates had worked on the construction site. The last one was the day after Fidelis Julia Flynn was known to be alive. They’d established that Oates was working the ticket machine area alone, with Pavel occasionally checking on him. His job, which he had completed, had been to finish digging out the area then pump in two foot of ready-mix concrete. He was supposed to turn up the next day when the cement was dry to help tile the floor, but he never showed up at the site again.

  The archaeologists were almost finished with their GPR analysis and had found nothing that might suggest that a body was buried under the concrete. They told Barolli, who had remained at the scene throughout, that there was nothing more they could do and once they had finished the last section they were going to call it a day. Barolli then rang Mike Lewis to give him the bad news. Mike was naturally very disappointed but thought it strange that if Oates had abducted and murdered Fidelis he should turn up for work the next day, especially if he’d actually buried her there. The day’s events suggested that Oates might have hidden her body elsewhere. Before hanging up, Mike asked Paul to keep the two archaeologists on site as he not only wanted to come and thank them personally for their time and effort but also to seek their advice on further searches of the area.

  By the time he got there the archaeologists had set up arc lights and one of them was in the lift shaft.

  ‘Wasn’t the lift built before Oates ever worked here?’ asked Mike.

  ‘Yeah, and we weren’t going to bother looking, but I remembered a manslaughter case I was involved with a few years back,’ Barolli began.

  ‘Paul, this is a murder enquiry . . .’

  ‘I know, but the job was a health and safety case. Engineer was working on a lift that had broken down between two floors. He left the door open, no safety tape, no nothing, some poor bloke walked straight in and fell three floors down to the bottom of the shaft.’

  ‘And your point is . . .’

  ‘There’s a recessed area, like a car inspection pit, below the ground floor, big enough to put a body in. So we thought it was worth a look. The archaeologist’s taken a hand-held radar down with him.’

  Mike was impressed and patted Paul on the back.

  They watched the monitor screen, grey and fuzzy as the GPR inched slowly across the lift-shaft floor.

  ‘I’ve been staring at this all bloody day,’ Barolli moaned.

  The lead archaeologist pointed to the screen.

  ‘We’ve got something.’

  Barolli and Mike leaned closer, not really sure what they were looking at. The archaeologist hit a button on the laptop and a three-dimensional image started to appear. Like an ominous shadow a dark shape began to form. They were unable to detect exactly what it was, just that it was some kind of figure just below the surface of the concrete.

  ‘Is it what I think it is?’ asked Mike.

  ‘That’s what I’d expect to see with a buried body,’ said the archaeologist. ‘As to who it is . . . well, that’s up to forensics and pathology.’

  Barolli gave Mike an admiring glance. He had certainly grown in confidence – maybe not having Langton breathing down his neck all the time was paying off.

  Although time was of the essence, it was almost dark and the archaeologists had been working all day, so Mike was hesitant about continuing the work through the night. The two archaeologists were both now on a high and keen to keep going. It was agreed that they would get some colleagues in to continue the excavation while they took a couple of hours’ break.

  ‘This is gonna cost,’ Barolli said.

  ‘I know,’ said Mike slowly, ‘but I think we may have just found Fidelis Julia Flynn.’

  Chapter Ten

  It was 7 p.m. when Anna joined the entire team in the incident room as Mike was giving a briefing update. He brought out photographs of the lift shaft and a copy of the picture from the monitor screen showing the shrouded shape encased in concrete. The identity could not be confirmed until they had completed the excavation and removed the body to the mortuary for full forensics and a post mortem examination. Digging out the body was not going to be an easy task and would take some time. Not only were they working in a confined space using specialist cutting equipment, but the archaeologists would have to slowly and painstakingly cut round and under the body to try and remove it as a block.

  He explained all that he and Barolli had learnt about Oates’s employment on the site. On the day Fidelis disappeared he had completed digging out the ticket machine area and left work at six in the evening. The next day he filled it with ready-mix concrete pumped in by hose from a truck and was due to return the following day but he never turned up for work again. Mike went on to say that as the car park was near completion the site barriers had been removed and overnight security consisted of a guard in a Portakabin who was supposed to patrol the grounds every hour.

  Barbara raised her hand and said that if Oates had gone t
o the site at night, thrown the body down the lift shaft and covered it with concrete the next day then surely someone would have noticed the new level the following morning!

  ‘Good point, Barbara, but the lift was already completed and in working order, so nobody ever had a need to look inside the shaft. Oates would have to have used some kind of transport to get the body to the site so he probably borrowed, or more likely nicked, a motor. Joan, I need a list of all lost or stolen vehicles in London on the day Fidelis went missing.’

  Listening to Mike and watching the expressions on the faces of the team, Anna realized what she had missed while on Specialist Casework. She could once again feel the buzz of excitement and adrenalin rush through the room when an investigation suddenly made a major breakthrough. She hoped that what she was about to tell the team would add to the euphoria. Mike looked over to her as she came forward.

  ‘I have a big development. I went to Cobham to interview Andrew Markham who runs a garden design company. He excavated the garden for Rebekka Jordan’s parents.’

  Anna pinned up the ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures given to her by Markham.

  ‘There was this brick wall and tree that had to be removed before the builders could dig out the earth and lay the foundations for the extension. Mr Markham dismantled the wall brick by brick, they were Victorian and he decided rather than get rid of them in the skips he would retain them for himself to use in his work.’

  She could sense a lack of enthusiasm around the room, and Mike pointedly looked at his wristwatch. She decided to get straight to the point.

  ‘This work was done late June or early July 2006, some four months prior to completion of the Jordans’ extension. Mr Markham identified Henry Oates as the man he paid to wheel out and load the bricks onto his van.’