by Nick Louth
Claire capped her fountain pen and set it aside. ‘Can I ask you if everything seemed all right in Liz and Martin’s marriage?’
‘Well, where to start?’ Kathy said with a groan. ‘Liz has given everything up for him. She had a fantastic career just waiting for her, but he always managed to get his own way. When she was at Cambridge she researched and wrote some amazing paper about the Spanish Civil War. She’d gone off to Spain under her own steam, managed to interview some of the surviving Republican prisoners who had only just been released after the death of Franco. It won the 1988 A. J. P. Taylor prize for undergraduate history, and on the back of that she was offered an Eleanor Roosevelt bursary and research fellowship at Harvard. I mean, it’s a quarter of a million dollars, there’s only one offered every five years, and it’s a huge honour. She was only 20! Now Martin, who was doing pretty well himself, had just got his MA at St Peter’s College in Oxford, and been offered a funded research fellowship there, though tiny compared with the Harvard one. He didn’t want to lose Liz, so he pulled out his ace in the hole and proposed. Liz was head over heels with him anyway, so she foolishly gave up the bursary and, after she graduated, followed him to Oxford. But I actually don’t think she ever forgave him, quite, in later years when she realized that she wasn’t ever going to have a second chance. Once the children arrived, and then she was ill, she never quite fulfilled the initial promise.’
‘And in recent years?’
‘Things had definitely got worse. She got very down… actually I mean it was more than that, it was clinical depression. Then she was in a car accident when Martin drove into a skip in Abinger Hammer.’
‘Martin was driving?’ Claire asked, recalling that Chloe’s version of events had her mother in the driver’s seat.
‘Yes, silly drunken bugger. He was all right because of the air bag, but her face hit the dashboard and she got a badly broken ankle too, and the ambulance took ages to get there. All this meant endless bloody hospital appointments, pins being fitted and God knows what. Now there’s arthritis in it. She has good days and bad, but when it’s bad, she needs a stick to walk. The poor woman’s only 48, for God’s sake.’
‘So there is a lot of resentment. Anything else?’
Kathy took a deep breath. ‘I suppose I should tell you about the affairs. Martin had an affair with a doctoral student in the late 1990s. This was pretty hateful, because Liz had Oliver who was eight, and Chloe, just two. What chance has a mother run ragged by two young kids, clearing up vomit and used nappies against a honey-skinned Brazilian with big tits? I mean, it’s just not fair, is it?’
Claire, divorced once herself, could feel the divorcee solidarity neurons working on her just as it had on Kathy, a woman who had by the sound of it been in a similar situation.
‘That one only lasted a few weeks. The major affair began in 2010. Dr Natalie Krugman, the Dr Natalie Krugman.’
‘Sorry, I don’t know her.’
Kathy seemed slightly surprised. ‘The bestselling author of Menstruation and Martyrdom. Ring any bells? She’s quite famous in feminist circles.’
‘Sorry.’ Claire shrugged. ‘I don’t even have time to read Family Circle.’
‘She’s quite glamorous, I suppose. Anyway, Martin apparently chased after her like a dog that had scented a truckload of Winalot. It was pretty shameless. I told Liz she should divorce him.’
‘So Martin isn’t your favourite person?’
‘No, but I’m pretty good at hiding my feelings. I see them both a lot, they have a wide group of very faithful friends, so I keep my counsel. I don’t think he’s got the faintest idea how much I know about their marriage. There are some things that I know that no one else does.’
‘Such as?’
‘He hit her! I dropped in one Monday evening when Martin was away, and she had a humdinger of a black eye. I asked what happened and she responded: “The official version or the real one?” The official version was that she’d fallen off the mountain bike Martin had given her for Christmas. She’d been practising to get fit, because he wanted her to go with him on weekends away in the Peak District, puffing up muddy paths in some hopeless quest for fitness. What had really happened is that he’d punched her. Can you believe it! She wouldn’t give me the details, and swore me to secrecy. I think she was too ashamed. She abhors violence, and it was entirely new to her to be on the receiving end.
‘When was this?’
‘January, I suppose. I pleaded with her to divorce him, and she said maybe she would once Chloe left university. I told her she could do a Helen Jennings…’
‘A who?’
‘Helen Jennings. A delightful friend of ours who’s actually made it work. She got the dream divorce deal. A villa in the Algarve, a Saab turbo, half his huge pension. She’s still got the looks, lucky thing, and has been dating a succession of charming younger men.’
‘And what did Liz say?’
‘She looked at me very soberly, and said: “Not everyone can be like Helen. The probability is that I would end up in the majority: one of those lonely middle-aged women, radiating desperation and disappointment from every pore, stuck in a one-bedroom flat while her ex marries a woman a dozen years her junior.”’ Kathy shrugged and rolled her eyes.
‘Was that a dig at you?’
‘I felt it was an observation. Not particularly kind, but unfortunately rather accurate. If Keith could get away with it, and sad to say he has, then Martin certainly could. Keith is a balding and increasingly rotund middle manager in a car component business. Even his best friends would be hard-pressed to describe him as a catch. Yet he’s now married to a 26-year old marketing manager in Bracknell that he met on a dating website. I have absolutely no idea what she sees in him. Of course, he had secretly been stashing away money for this for years. And Keith has neither the brains nor the attractiveness of Martin.’
She looked away and shrugged. ‘Anyway, as Liz observed, wedding day dreams die a slow and painful death in most marriages. Nothing in the cold bitter daylight of divorce brings them back.’
Claire mulled the sentiment. ‘Perhaps it’s just growing older. You can’t live in daydreams.’
‘That’s true, but it’s the realization that men give less consideration to the fabric of the marital relationship than they do to the garage which contains their precious toys.’ She smiled. ‘Look, don’t get me wrong. I have a lot of fun, and I’m not bitter. I’ve got my career, which is as good as Liz’s. Well, as good as Liz’s is now. But I don’t have kids, and now I’m too old to have any. She, by contrast, never wanted them, really, and has two. If she divorced Martin, she predicted that he’d probably want to keep the house, and the grown-up children would get to know a new woman, who would undoubtedly be younger and more fun than a mum who’s put on loads of weight, lives on her own, looks ten years older than she is and walks with a stick. I do see what she means.’
‘We have no record of her reporting an assault. Do you know if she went to see the doctor about it?’
‘If she did, it would have been reported as a bike accident. Look, I have to go pretty soon. But if you’ve got any questions, please call or email.’ She passed across a business card: senior lecturer in psychology, King’s College London. ‘By the way, I’ve been told that the officer in charge of the investigation is one Craig Gillard.’
‘Yes, he’s my boss.’
‘Interesting. Is he by any chance the same Craig Gillard who used to go out with Liz back in the 1980s?’
Mulholland tried to glaze her shock with a smile. ‘He didn’t say anything to me about it.’
‘I’m not surprised. She broke his heart, you know. The man was in pieces after she dumped him for Martin. If anyone has the motive to bear enmity towards the eminent professor, it’s your detective chief inspector.’
Chapter Eight
The night that Chloe was born, that fearful pain, like turning myself inside out, his hand was there for me to hold. I held it so tightly I could feel ev
ery bone. ‘I’ll always be there for you,’ he said. ‘You can squeeze my fingers until the blood seeps out, but I’ll never pull my hand away.’ I saw that hand yesterday, almost a decade and a half later. It was scratching at the back of his neck while he read some journal. I once knew every inch of that hand. It steadied my heart, and its pulse matched every cadence of my life’s breath. Does it now only explore another woman’s breasts, divide another’s thighs?
Liz’s diary, January 2011
King Edward VII’s School in Oxted was everything Gillard had expected. As the detective’s Ford slid between the wrought iron gates with their stone lion posts, he spotted the half-timbered Jacobean hall at the centre of extensive lawns and the magnificent cedars that cloaked the rest of the school from view. Gillard had been due to meet the headmaster at noon, and as it was now nearly 12.40 p.m., he was slightly nervous. Mr P. W. J. Cordingley had been the devil’s own job to track down on the phone, and a rather steely secretary had offered him half an hour, notwithstanding the official nature of his inquiries. ‘It’s all I can manage, because we’re in the middle of Ofsted. Please be punctual. Philip is a very busy man.’
The detective found the gravelled car park, and as he emerged he realized it must be lunchtime. The faint sound of handbells stirred neat pupils in magenta and grey uniforms to brisk but unhurried movements from one red-brick building to another. Asking for directions to the headmaster’s office, he was addressed as sir and accompanied by a boy the entire way along a glass corridor built between an ivy-covered chapel and a modern library. The child then directed him up hushed stairs where gilded portraits of educationalists for the last two centuries stared sternly down at him.
‘I’m terribly sorry that we’ve not been able to show you appropriate flexibility,’ Cordingley said as he invited Gillard into his spacious study. ‘Ofsted inspectors are like the Spanish inquisition…’
‘Nobody expects them,’ Gillard said.
‘Exactly,’ Cordingley said. ‘Chief weapons: fear, surprise and a fanatical devotion to the national curriculum.’ He was a tall and upright fellow with sparse white hair and a soft voice. ‘Now, I have to tell you we are all quite horrified that Elizabeth has gone missing. It is absolutely out of character, and we are bereft without her. Not only as my deputy and head of history, but the Christmas play, the school orchestra, the Chess Society, and her wonderful charitable endeavours.’
Gillard was happy to let Cordingley document Liz’s activities, and to show him to her office, which was small and modern. He agreed to keep it locked until officers could come to take away her computer for examination, and to provide passwords as required. ‘It’s just a precaution,’ Gillard said. ‘Her school email record could give us some leads as to where she might be.’
Chapter Nine
Getting the kids up, dressed and breakfasted; heading off to a school whose headmaster genuinely believes it runs itself; smiling at staff, listening to children, glad-handing parents. Shopping, preparing food, talking to my friends. Every day I do my marital origami. Folding each exterior leaf of my life carefully inward, the crisp creases covering the jagged hole in the centre of my soul. A last flap of self-esteem, sealed carefully, so that no one can see the void or guess its existence.
Liz Knight, email to Kathy Parkinson, June 2011
Thursday, 4 p.m.
Gillard was at Caterham police station making final preparations for the news conference in an hour. Paddy Kincaid and Alison Rigby had just arrived, so he could now begin briefing the full investigative team on what to look for once the public’s calls began to flow in.
‘Okay, let’s run through what we’ve got,’ said Gillard. ‘Rob, off you go.’
‘Right, Mrs Elizabeth Knight, nee Bishopsford, reported missing on Tuesday morning at 10.45. No one has actually seen her since last Thursday at 1 p.m., except her husband who said he saw her on Friday morning. Setting his account aside, that’s six whole days. She’s missed several important events, quite apart from work. Last Thursday evening she was supposed to attend a birthday drink for a friend, at a pub in Carshalton, and texted her apologies just half an hour before she was due to arrive. The mobile operator confirmed this as the last outgoing text or call on her missing phone. It has been switched off since then.’
‘Do we have cell site analysis on that text?’ Gillard asked.
‘Yes. Old Coulsdon. As far as we can work out, she was at home.’
‘Okay, next,’ Gillard said.
‘Professor Martin Knight, missing person.’ There were a few chuckles around the room, which Gillard silenced with a glare. ‘LSE academic, missing since 8 p.m. on Tuesday, so less than 48 hours. However, given that he was speaking to us, from a landline at Dungeness in Kent, just a few minutes before, we can be quite clear that was a firm last contact. There was also an email yesterday, sent to the departmental secretary at LSE, which pinged a cell site in Dungeness. So he’s still about, but evading us.’
‘What about his car? Presumably gone?’ Kincaid asked.
‘Yes,’ Townsend said. ‘Last ANPR contact for that vehicle was on the M20, prior to the phone call. We’ve got it on nationwide alert. The vehicle’s not been booked in at ports, airport car parks or the Chunnel. Kent Police have secured the Dungeness address, but they’ve had their work cut out since yesterday with two bodies discovered in an emergency refuge inside the Channel Tunnel. Consequently they won’t have the resource for a full CSI until Friday morning…’
Gillard groaned, and someone muttered: ‘Why can’t the French deal with it?’
‘…but they can confirm his car isn’t at the address in Dungeness,’ Townsend said. ‘No other vehicles there either. There are no neighbours nearby, but Kent Police are doing house to house. Many of the homes are unoccupied in the low season, so we shouldn’t expect anything much.’
‘What about her car?’ Kincaid asked. ‘Why did that turn up where it did, more than two miles from her home?’
‘Uniform are doing house to house in that street too,’ Gillard said. ‘Doesn’t seem that anyone there knows her, or him. Forensics are crawling all over the car, but results will take a day or two.’ He turned to Townsend. ‘Tell us what you know about his mobile, Rob.’
The research information officer repeated what he had earlier told Gillard, and added: ‘He rang his wife’s mobile at least 16 times between Sunday and Tuesday evening. We’ve got messages for the first recorded few, but by Monday evening her mailbox was full. He’s clearly been going through the motions of the distraught husband.’
‘Did anyone interview the cleaner?’ Alison Rigby asked.
Claire Mulholland held up her hand. ‘I did, ma’am. Her name is Doreen Henderson, age 57, part time lollipop lady too, clean as a whistle on the PNC. I’d trust her account.’
‘May I interrupt? asked Rigby, walking up to the whiteboard. ‘Let’s step back a little and do a little speculating. There are two reasons we might not have heard from Professor Knight: one, he killed his wife, by accident or design, and is in a panic. Or two, they are both dead, killed by someone else.’
She stepped away. ‘Let’s invert the logic. As I see it, if Mrs Knight is alive, there should be no reason for Martin Knight not to return our call.’ She stared at each of those present in turn, her blue-eyed gaze intense. ‘Come on, someone fault my reasoning. I won’t bite.’
There was an uneasy silence. Gillard looked at Kincaid, who made an almost imperceptible shake of the head: she does bite, and how.
A hand went up at the far end of the room. ‘Ma’am,’ said a young, newly qualified DC, Aaron Gibson. He looked so young that he could have been answering a question at school. ‘What if she’s been kidnapped, and Knight has received a ransom demand, which tells him not to call the police.’
Rigby inclined her head in consideration of this. ‘That would explain Knight’s repeated calls to her phone which then ceased after the time of the last contact with us.’ She looked to Gillard. ‘Craig, what do you thin
k?’
‘It’s unlikely for many reasons, ma’am,’ Gillard said. ‘There was no sign of disturbance at the house which you might expect from an intruder. More importantly, if she went out after the cleaner saw her, then the kidnapper came back into the vicinity later to send a text about missing a birthday meal, which is implausible. But if that text was genuine, then Elizabeth Knight was in or near the house. Above all, I just don’t think the Knights have the kind of resources to attract kidnappers this professional.’
‘In other words, this is Surrey, not bloody Beirut,’ muttered Kincaid.
At that moment the duty sergeant poked her head in the door. ‘The Knight family are here for the press conference.’
‘Show them into room C, would you?’ Gillard said. He looked at his watch. A quarter to five. Fifteen minutes before everyone in the country would know that Liz and Martin Knight were missing.
‘The family just gave us some video of Mrs Knight,’ the sergeant said, handing across a disc.
‘Let’s have a quick look,’ Gillard said. Townsend inserted the disc into his laptop, and as the officers crowded round, ran the video that Oliver Knight had given them. It showed Liz at her birthday party in August. The party was in the family room of their house, packed with about 30 middle-class, middle-aged friends making polite conversation, slightly embarrassed by Martin Knight wandering around with a camcorder. Towards the end he homed in on Liz, walking around with a tray of nibbles. Her face was swollen and a little florid, she was wearing the awful glasses and her gait seemed stiff and restricted. Even from the back, it was obvious that Martin’s running commentary was irritating her. After he had followed her around for a minute or two, she turned to the camera and said: ‘Martin, I think that’s quite enough.’ The recording stopped.