The Body in the Marsh

by Nick Louth

  ‘With any luck, this will be a short operation but let’s make it utterly professional. Professor Knight is a public figure, a long-time critic of the police, so I assume the refusal to ring back is part of some petty point-scoring exercise. We mustn’t get drawn into it. I hope he’ll make his whereabouts known pretty quickly. Any sign of her car, Rob?’

  ‘Nothing on ANPR. The PCSOs have searched a half-mile radius. Her mobile’s been switched off since late last Thursday, so that doesn’t help either. But we’ll keep monitoring.’

  Rob was an expert on the automatic number plate recognition database, which drew on a national network of digital cameras on major roads and in patrol cars.

  ‘Good. Do the same for Professor Knight. If we haven’t heard from him this evening I want to know every mast he’s pinged in the last week, every text sent and every number called.

  ‘CSI is going in for a quick look at their home this morning. I don’t want to go public on the missing person’s case before we’ve done that, because the press will be down there, getting in the way. I’ve pencilled in a five o’clock news conference for tomorrow afternoon, but with luck both Knights will turn up and we won’t need it. The tech boys will have a press briefing room set up for us at Caterham. In the meantime, it’s likely we’ll get calls from journalists, and I want you to refer them all to the press office, who are going to take a hard line. No off-the-record briefings, whatever your relationship with reporters for other cases, understand? We’re going to keep an entirely open mind on this case.’

  They all nodded in agreement. Gillard went on. ‘I’m meeting Oliver Knight, the son, at their home in Chaldon Rise in Old Coulsdon this afternoon. The daughter is coming down later. Mrs Knight’s elderly parents live just a half-mile away, and Claire is seeing them this morning. At the moment, as per the regs, the Knights are absent rather than missing persons. Any questions?’

  There were no questions, just an array of folded arms and smug grins. Professor Martin Knight, a previously lofty enemy, seemed to have fallen at their feet.

  Wednesday afternoon

  The London School of Economics squats on a cramped site in Houghton Street just off the Aldwych in central London, and is one of the most understated homes of educational excellence. The buildings are a mishmash of architectural styles, and the internal structure a warren of never-quite-finished renovation. To a casual passer-by the only evidence it even is a university is the preponderance of youngsters gathered on the steps of the two principal buildings. In the 1970s and early ’80s, when most of Britain’s dailies were based in Fleet Street, only a five-minute drunken stagger away, the LSE was always a good place for a lazy journalist to find evidence of student political mischief. Craig Gillard’s first experience of the place was as a youthful PC on public order duty, trying to contain a demonstration against student fees that threatened to spill out into one of London’s busiest thoroughfares.

  Martin Knight’s academic secretary, Zakira Oglu, was a very tall and disarmingly friendly African-looking man wearing jeans, a linen jacket and – surprisingly, considering the warmth of the room – a colourful outdoor scarf. Craig Gillard was offered a coffee and a Hobnob. Mr Oglu closed the door and posted a whole biscuit into his own mouth, where it disappeared, apparently without a single chew.

  ‘We’re all a bit surprised by this,’ Oglu said, not betraying a whisper of a foreign accent. ‘Martin works from home a lot, but also at the Home Office where I believe they have given him a perch.’

  He smiled at Gillard as he lifted up piles of files and located his own laptop. ‘Right. As I said in my email, I can certainly send you a log of his academic emails, his appointments and so on.’

  ‘What about his phone calls?’

  ‘The system records incoming and outgoing numbers.’

  ‘Did he just have the one mobile phone?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. Look, we have recordings only of conference calls, would you want those?’

  ‘Not for the moment. How soon can you get the emails?’

  ‘Technically, within a few hours via our IT department. Once we have permission from the director. That may take a few hours more.’

  Gillard shrugged. He didn’t yet have the manpower to go through thousands of emails, and hoped it was never required. But getting early permissions in place always speeded an inquiry.

  ‘How long have you worked for Professor Knight?’

  ‘I’ve worked with him for three years,’ Oglu said. ‘But I report to someone else, the departmental manager. Still, it’s enough time at least to have got to know a little about him.’

  ‘So how would you describe him?’

  ‘I’m sure you know of his academic career already. As a colleague, it wouldn’t be unfair to say he’s brisk and demanding; focused without being monomaniacal. He can be irascible and abrasive, but he’s also kind. He cancelled a meeting to give me a lift home, all the way to Walthamstow, the day I got knocked off my scooter, and helped me with the insurance claims. He doesn’t suffer fools, period. But he cares, very deeply, about justice. You’ll discover that when you finally meet him.’

  ‘I hope I do,’ Gillard said, letting the ambiguity lie between them. ‘When was the last time you saw or spoke to him?’

  ‘Yesterday afternoon, when he was on the train from York. He wanted me to draft a letter of apology to the committee for him missing the last two days. He was furious that this report of his wife going missing had caused him to have to return home. I can’t recall his exact words, but he was angry with her for going off in a huff.’

  ‘Has he ever expressed his anger with her to you before?’

  ‘Not that I recall. He rarely mentions her.’

  Gillard chewed back a gristle of irritation. ‘She may only have been reported missing yesterday, but no one has seen her since last Thursday. So I’d really like you to cast your mind back to all the conversations you had with Professor Knight over that period.’

  ‘I saw him on Friday afternoon, when he was here. He sent me an email over the weekend, about arrangements for the conference in York. And he must have spoken to me a half-dozen times, either in person or by voicemail, during and after the conference. I’ve not heard from him since yesterday.’

  ‘And you’re sure that he didn’t give any hint that he was going away on a business trip, or for some family event or anything that would interrupt his working schedule?’

  Oglu shook his head. ‘No.’

  The door opened and an athletic man of Mediterranean mien with a shaven head and a burgundy-coloured leather jacket came in. His arms were filled with papers and books which he dumped wearily on the desk next to Oglu’s.

  ‘Ah, this is Vuk Panić, a senior lecturer in criminology at our Mannheim Centre,’ Oglu said. ‘He’s worked closely with Martin for a number of years. Vuk, this is Detective Chief Inspector Gillard. He’s going to help us find him.’

  ‘And his wife, who has been missing for six days now,’ Gillard said, shaking hands with the lecturer. The man had an iron grip, and an intense gaze. With his coffee-coloured head and dense, dark stubble he looked more like an upmarket security man than an academic. ‘If you know him well, perhaps I can ask you a few questions,’ Gillard said.

  ‘Sure, come to my office,’ Panić said, in a gravelly, heavily accented voice. The office was on a lower mezzanine floor reached from a narrow staircase, and was little more than a cubbyhole crammed with books and journals. ‘Sorry it’s so cramped. Can I get you a tea? Almond or camomile is all I have here, but if you want builder’s tea, there’s a machine in the hall.’

  Gillard declined the offer, but accepted a chair and was given one more piece of information. ‘My name is pronounced pan-itch, not panic. Of course I appreciate your best efforts not to mispronounce my first name either. Vuk as in book.’ He smiled briefly, betraying efforts to deal with what must have been years of jokes at his expense.

  Formalities completed, Gillard waded in: ‘So when did you first meet
the professor?’

  ‘At Oxford when I was a graduate student about ten years ago. I had come over from Serbia after the war, and he was very supportive of my studies. I was at Strathclyde University and then in the US for a number of years, but we kept up email contact. I did quite a lot of work towards the Rossingdale Inquiry and later on the Girl F report, so we had a lot of contact over that.’

  ‘Did you ever meet his wife?’

  ‘Yes, Liz and I got on very well. Their parties at Oxford were always quite fun. She’s very bright and entertaining.’

  Gillard had to restrain himself from agreeing. ‘Can you offer any insight into why either of them might have gone missing?’

  Panić looked up to the ceiling and breathed heavily, as if scenting the question for traps. ‘I have no idea, actually.’ Gillard watched as the Serb rubbed an eyebrow with his thumb. ‘I can’t think of anything.’

  Gillard locked eyes with the lecturer, crossed his arms and waited. The empty seconds expanded, until Panić blinked and looked away. Gillard had telegraphed his disbelief effectively. He stood, picked up his briefcase and overcoat and shook the lecturer’s hand. ‘I would ask you to think carefully about what we’ve discussed. If anything comes to mind, this is my number.’ He gave Panić a business card on which he had written in ballpoint the new incident room direct line. ‘We all hope of course that both Dr and Mrs Knight reappear safe and well, but if there is any doubt about it you will be hearing from me again.’

  Panić pointed him along the corridor towards the lift. As Gillard left the room, the Serb called him back. ‘There’s a name you should know, but please don’t say I told you.’

  Gillard looked back expectantly.

  ‘It’s Krugman. Dr Natalie Krugman.’

  The detective wrote down the name and looked up, ready to ask who she was and where she fitted in. But Panić had closed the door.

  Gillard walked to the lift, pressed the call button and in two minutes was standing outside on Houghton Street. It was just beginning to rain, and as he stood on the steps of the university, he took in the groups of students chattering, smoking and laughing. They were just the right age to be his sons or daughters, if things had turned out differently. Young lives to live, aspirations to fulfil, love affairs to begin. And to end.

  Love or its absence explains a lot. If your wife disappeared, wouldn’t you call the police? Not just once to report it, but again and again to find out what might have been discovered about her absence? Of course, anybody would. Yet no one had heard from Martin Knight. He hadn’t responded to any of the dozen phone messages and emails sent by the police since yesterday. To Gillard that silence was beginning to look more and more suspicious. The idea of the Knights as a normal, untroubled family was already feeling false.

  Chapter Six

  Professor Martin Knight is Prince Khalifa ul Haq Professor of Criminology at the Mannheim Centre of the London School of Economics and Political Science, and visiting Hiram Wacke fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He chaired the British Society of Criminology in 1995–8 and 2002–4. He was born in 1961, educated at the Parkdean School, Manchester and then at Jesus College, Cambridge. At St Peter’s College, Oxford he won the 1988 Horniman Prize for his M.Sc. dissertation Thinking Crime, Doing Time, which later became the basis for the young offender rehabilitation programme adopted by the Danish government. He has been an adviser on youth justice to the Home Office since 1997, is a frequent commentator on criminality and the justice system on television and radio, and has a weekly column in the Guardian, as well as regularly contributing articles to The Times, the Washington Post and numerous other leading publications. Among his many works, which have been translated into more than 60 languages, are Crime and Double Punishment, Consigned to Criminality and Lessons in Failure: A History of British Incarceration 1920–97, as well as Condemned from Birth: Essays in Class, Crime and Offending, which was the winner of the Howard Speake Award for popular sociology in 2008. His Reith Lecture on ‘The Civil Society’ in 2012 was voted the most accessible critique of British justice by the Barrister magazine. He is a fellow of the British Academy and was awarded Finland’s Paremmuusjärjestyksessä (Order of Merit) for his role in redesigning that country’s youth justice system in 2009. He is married and lives in Surrey.

  (Foreword to the 2014 edition of Consigned to Criminality)

  Gillard’s train back from Waterloo to Guildford had been late, so he flicked through some of the pile of Knight’s work that Oglu had given him. Inevitably he drifted into looking again at Knight’s report on Girl F. The full story was awful.

  Francine Cole was a 13-year-old of mixed race who had been in care since she was two. A one-girl whirlwind of shoplifting, antisocial behaviour and absconding from social services’ care in Purley, she was known to treat Surrey Police as a taxi service, ringing up to demand a lift back to the home when she had run out of stolen cash or felt like some food. On one such trip in February 2009 she mentioned that an older man was in the habit of picking her up in a silver car, giving her drink and drugs and then taking her back to his flat, where one or two other men had sex with her. The last time had been four days previously, or possibly three. She wasn’t sure. A day later she retracted the allegations during formal interview, then two weeks later reinstated them to her social worker. Surrey Police, having initially failed to gather DNA evidence from her clothing, then began a belated and rudimentary investigation. The girl was driven around the part of Croydon where she said the incident took place, but was unable to identify the actual address. The man they were looking for she knew as Barry. He had a strong Scottish accent, but was otherwise made for invisibility: average build, medium height, late 40s to perhaps as much as 60, tidily dressed, metal-framed spectacles. Always sucking mints. That peppermint breath was the clearest impression she retained.

  Surrey Social Services were sceptical. Their report said that while Girl F was vulnerable because of her near-adult appearance and sexual precocity, she was a fantasist and had ‘long-established issues around honesty and truthfulness’. Surrey Police concurred, handing the matter back to social services. The informal police conclusion, found in one officer’s notebook during the IPCC inquiry, was simpler: Girl F was a lying little scrubber, and her allegations a waste of time and resources.

  Two months later she threw herself in front of the Gatwick Express as it hurtled through East Croydon station. She had left a suicide video on her phone, which she had emailed to a friend just before she killed herself. The friend then posted it on YouTube, where it went viral. The video’s tearful tirade against social services and police for failing to believe her hit the news, and suddenly Surrey Police and Surrey Social Services were side by side in the court of public opinion.

  The initial failure to take her allegation seriously was then compounded. In the seven years since, no one had been arrested. The silver car she had been driven away in had never been found. The house where she’d claimed the abuse took place had never been identified. There was not a scrap of DNA evidence to support her case, and most inconveniently of all, the only witness was dead.

  Scottish Barry might never have existed. The trouble was that the lawyers, the media, Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Constabulary and the judiciary believed he did exist.

  So now, whether he existed or not, he had to be found.

  * * *

  Chaldon Rise is a quiet crescent of large 1930s mock-Tudor homes set into the lower slopes of Farthing Downs. The Knights’ house, like most on the Downs’ side, was set back and shielded from view by large and well-tended box hedges. A tarmac drive and paved front path, both now cordoned off by blue police tape, led up through the hedges and revealed long and well-tended lawns to the bay windows and double front door. While Tyvek-suited crime scene investigators walked in and out, a uniformed PC stood by the door, talking to another man: Oliver Knight. Gillard parked the unmarked Ford and, with DS Claire Mulholland at his side, opened the gate and climbed the pat
h. Knight greeted them confidently, every inch the solicitor: dark suit, polished black shoes and a paisley-patterned mauve silk tie. He looked like a man who had already spent too long sitting on a chair. Stocky, thick-necked and with the beginnings of jowls. The thick-framed spectacles added to the impression of a man who had hit his 40s, even though Gillard knew he was just 24.

  ‘This is only precautionary,’ Gillard said, nodding towards the CSI activity. ‘But if anything has happened to your parents, early clues are vital.’

  Oliver nodded. ‘In the meantime I hope they won’t make a mess.’

  ‘No, everything will be restored to how it was found,’ he said. ‘You mentioned rental properties. How many are there?’

  ‘A house divided into two flats in Thornton Heath, and a terraced house in Purley. Mum runs them really. I just do the legals.’

  Gillard was itching to take a look inside Liz’s home, to see how she lived now, but he didn’t want to get under the feet of the CSI team. They had quickly established that Liz wasn’t there. The front door opened, and Yaz Quoroshi, senior CSI for the forensic service now shared between Surrey and Sussex police forces, emerged with a plastic bag in each hand.

  ‘Plenty of computer kit in there,’ he said to Gillard. ‘There’s a big wooden shed, more like a chalet really, in the garden, which seems to be an office.’

  ‘That’s where dad works,’ Oliver Knight said. ‘I hope you didn’t damage anything.’

  Gillard walked with Quoroshi down towards the large CSI van, and out of Oliver Knight’s earshot. ‘Have you seen the size of that bloody garden?’ Yaz muttered. ‘It’s 100 metres by 30, and full of mature trees. If we have to dig it up looking for a body it’ll take months. And then just behind are the Downs. Hundreds of acres of protected chalk grassland. The excavation required would be like the Valley of the Kings.’