The Body in the Marsh

by Nick Louth

  The two detectives were perched on a low-slung tubular sofa in Jennings’s large and sunny seventh-floor flat, with the afternoon light filtering in. Jennings said she had chosen it because it was just two minutes’ walk from East Croydon station. She was, she said, ‘always on the go’.

  Gillard could see why. Jennings was a slender five foot ten with an extraordinary figure for a woman of 54. She wore a tight white blouse and a short denim skirt, and padded around on the thick carpet with tanned and beautiful bare feet as she talked of her friendship with Liz Knight.

  ‘I met her through schools chess in the 1980s,’ Jennings said, as she seized a handful of nuts from a bowl, which she then passed to Gillard. ‘Of course, she was so much stronger than me, always was, but we girls had to stick together against hundreds of pushy and patronizing grammar school boys. I thought she was spunky and clever, and I admired her.’

  ‘And did you keep up the friendship throughout all those years?’ asked Mulholland.

  ‘No, not at all. I didn’t stick with chess for long. I came up to see her at Cambridge for a weekend and well, I suppose it doesn’t matter to mention it now. We had a bit of a fling. Just experimental for both of us, actually, though there was a great deal more exploration done, and vastly more pleasure had, than either of us had really expected.’ Jennings laughed at the reminiscence, her hazel eyes bright in the saffron afternoon light from the balcony. ‘For her I think it was a last chance to taste another world, seeing as Martin had just asked her to marry him. I think we both knew that it wouldn’t happen again, at least with each other. For me, though, it was an eye-opener. I had a bit of a crush on her. She, I think, became a bit embarrassed about it, and for ten years we didn’t really have any contact.’

  ‘Let’s fast-forward to the last couple of years,’ said Mulholland.

  Part of Gillard was transfixed by this revelation, another side of Liz he knew nothing about, but he could sense Claire’s impatience. She bristled at this showy woman with her carefully and expensively layered hair, and her overweening self-confidence.

  ‘Well I already knew Kathy, I think you must have spoken to her, and we were going to arrange a drink in Covent Garden one Friday with Liz, but it kept not happening. But I ran into Liz on the train about three years ago; I’d just got divorced and we got on like a house on fire.’

  ‘Did you get any sense of her relationship with Professor Knight?’ Gillard asked.

  ‘Yes. She wasn’t happy, that was clear.’

  At that moment, a ringtone sounded and Helen scampered over to pick up her mobile. There was an exchange of gushing endearments, and a final whisper: ‘They’ll be gone in half an hour, dear. Hold your horses.’ She hung up and turned to the detectives. ‘Anyway, I’d been divorced from miserable Mike for three years, been given the villa in the Algarve in exchange for the house, and half his rather considerable pension. With that and my lovely flat, I was set fair. So naturally she was envious.’

  ‘Did she ever say that Martin had struck her?’ Gillard asked.

  ‘Gosh, no. Did he?’ She paused. ‘I wouldn’t have assumed he had that level of passion, unless it was on the subject of government policies and policing, of course. Still, he did have all those affairs.’

  ‘Recently?’ Mulholland asked.

  ‘Well, I don’t know. She didn’t spill, dear loyal Liz. She had no intention of divorcing, I don’t think. In some ways it was rather old fashioned. It was a marriage and she wanted to make it work. I suppose that’s out of the window now, one way or another.’

  ‘So she didn’t mention any recent affairs?’

  ‘Well, I hope I’m not talking out of turn here. But during one of our lunches over the summer she did mention that Martin seemed to be up to his old tricks. The name Natalie Krugman had emerged again. I tried to tease out some more details, but she wouldn’t say anything except that she had given Martin what she called a final warning back in 2012.’

  Mulholland nodded. She had emailed Krugman twice already asking for a statement, and had left a message at her university office in New York, but had yet to receive a reply. ‘What did you take that to mean?’

  ‘Divorce, I presume. What other lever did she have?’ Helen’s elegant face showed the conceit of a person who had passed that predicament long ago. Craig wondered whether she really understood what difficulties someone as loyal as Liz might face in accepting that her marriage was ending.

  The beep of a text made Helen Jennings jump. She looked at her phone.

  ‘Actually it’s mine,’ said Craig, fishing his phone out of his pocket. Rob Townsend had asked him to call, urgently.

  Craig walked out to the bathroom and closed the door before returning the call. The room was lined with mirrors, and as he inspected his rather patchy shave in the brilliant light he couldn’t help noticing in the reflection some lacy black lingerie drying on a rack over the bath.

  ‘What have you got, Rob?’

  ‘Bit of a breakthrough by the tech boys. I’m in Redhill forensic computing lab at the moment. We’ve just stumbled on evidence that Professor Knight has spent weeks planning to kill his wife.’

  ‘I’ll be passing Redhill on my way to Dungeness. I’d like to see this for myself.’ After he hung up, Gillard smiled grimly to himself. So Professor Knight’s act was not one of temper or a moment of madness. It was cold-hearted premeditation.

  * * *

  Forty minutes later Gillard had dropped Mulholland off at Caterham, and was sitting around a large computer monitor with DC Townsend in a spacious open-plan office near Redhill railway station. A young tech whizz with a goatee beard and an earring called Paul Armstrong was sitting at an adjacent terminal, telling them what he’d discovered on Knight’s computers.

  ‘We recovered three computers from his office. A modern desktop – Windows Ten – an old Acer laptop running Windows XP, and a Samsung tablet. We got the ISP to send us three-month search histories for each of these, and there was nothing that stood out. A little porn, seemingly legal, that was it.’ He looked across at the two officers. ‘So just as a back-up I got into the hardware log file on his router to look at the household’s Wi-Fi activity.’ He tapped a few keys, and both screens filled with a list of codes, each six sets of two characters separated by colons. ‘This is the list of the machines that have used this hub in recent weeks.’

  Gillard peered at the screen. ‘There are seven codes, four more than he had.’

  ‘Very good,’ Armstrong said. ‘This one is Mrs Knight’s ancient desktop. They all share the same network.’ A cursor appeared on both screens halfway down. ‘Her Hewlett-Packard laptop is immediately beneath.’ The cursor flicked to the bottom. ‘This is Chloe Knight’s MacBook Pro.’

  ‘What about this one?’ Gillard pointed at the one line that had not been referenced.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Armstrong. ‘Another machine. Not one we have in our possession. However, these codes are MAC codes, part of it assigned by the Internet service provider to each machine, and part intrinsic to the hardware. Now we saw from Knight’s own webmail account that he bought a new laptop about six weeks ago from Amazon using his credit card. We think it was this machine, because the manufacturer code buried within the MAC matches the make shown on the receipt. Last use…’ – the cursor flicked to the time stamp code – ‘…corresponds to a time when we know he was at home.’

  Townsend leaned conspiratorially towards Gillard: ‘Good detective work, yes?’ Gillard nodded.

  ‘Using the assigned MAC code we were able to get the ISP to send us the device’s entire search history since activation.’ He tapped a few keys and the screen filled with references and search terms. Gillard’s jaw dropped as he read the terms: ‘Body disposal, quicklime, John Haigh…’

  ‘That’s the 1940s acid bath murderer,’ Townsend muttered.

  ‘I know,’ Gillard responded. ‘The 1954 body in the marsh murder, that’s there too. Of course, he is a criminologist, but he’d searched for nothing like th
is on his main computers.’ He pointed to the screen. ‘There’s a whole list of murders where dismemberment took place: Jeffrey Dahmer, Jimmy Bartram, Stephen Marshall. There are searches for fake ID, false passport, power tools. Bloody hell!’

  ‘Knight was probably unaware that broadband routers log the unique codes of the devices they connect with,’ Armstrong said. ‘If he’d done this search in a library or a café, we’d not know of the device’s existence. He’s definitely slipped up.’

  ‘So we can track him as he uses it?’ Gillard asked.

  ‘Ah, that depends. It’s fairly technical, but the MAC code will partly change depending on which Wi-Fi hub it is using. There are various IP address/location databases which can help.’

  ‘Has he been using it since this last search?’ Gillard tapped the screen.

  ‘Unfortunately not, so far.’

  ‘Maybe he’s not so stupid,’ Gillard said. ‘He’s either ditched it or he has another device. A new smartphone would do both jobs, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘It would,’ Armstrong said.

  The enormity of Knight’s guilt seemed to expand hour by hour. Before he could take in the full implications of what he’d heard, Gillard’s mobile rang. It was Nigel Cropper, head of CSI at Kent CID. ‘We’ve made a major discovery in the house at Dungeness which you should see,’ he said.

  ‘I’m on my way,’ Gillard said. ‘You’ve found her body, right?’

  There was a slight pause. ‘Well, yes and no.’

  Gillard’s throat went dry. Yes and no? That could only mean one thing.

  * * *

  It took Gillard the best part of an hour and a half to drive to Dungeness from Redhill. All the time the mysterious ‘yes and no’ comment stuck in his head, like a dire but catchy song. All he could think of was that it meant dismemberment. Poor Liz!

  There were four white Kent Police vans parked outside Great Wickings, and a large plastic CSI tent shrouding the front of the wooden house. Two uniformed women PCs stood by the front gate talking to a knot of members of the public. He went to the boot, pulled out his own white coveralls and polythene shoe covers.

  As he did so a couple of scruffy-looking reporters with faces suitable for radio approached. One pressed a microphone towards him just as he had one foot on the back bumper, putting on his second shoe cover.

  ‘Kieran Todd, Channel Coast 93.2 News,’ he said, a straggly apology for a moustache failing to add any gravitas to his thin, inquisitive face. ‘Seems to be something of a breakthrough this morning, Chief Inspector Gillard. Got anything to tell the listeners?’

  ‘We’ve no comment as yet,’ said Gillard, irritated that the press already seemed to have wind of what the Kent lads had found.

  Once he’d donned his gloves, Gillard brushed past the reporters, flashed his credentials to the PCs and disappeared inside the flap of the tent. Adjusting his eyes to the peculiar space-station light of the crime scene tent, Gillard approached two figures in white overalls who were hunched over a laptop which sat on a plastic table. CSI officers always looked to Gillard like escaped Jelly Babies of some uninteresting flavour, like vanilla or mint or pot noodle. When they looked up, the image was barely dispelled. A short, prematurely balding man in his 30s with purple-framed spectacles introduced himself as Nigel Cropper, the man he’d spoken to on the phone. His number two, if anything even shorter and wider, was Diane Cooke.

  After introductions, Cropper pointed to the laptop and said. ‘We’ve got a DNA positive for Elizabeth Knight on the spade, and a nice clear thumbprint on the handle which matches one from Martin Knight’s LSE phone. We separately tested the blood and hair, fortunately a couple of full follicles, and they’re definitely hers. We haven’t got the results for our other findings, though. That will take a couple of hours.’

  Cropper led Gillard through a polythene tunnel built on metal plates to the car port and into the house, which looked like a scene from Invasion of the Alien Teletubbies. Two were leaning over the butler sink in the kitchen, and two crouching down on the inside of the sun lounge.

  ‘We got some fingerprints on the taps which match those of Martin Knight, which may or may not be significant. However, after what we read about the bloodstains in the other house, we were expecting to find a body, or body parts somewhere here. We sprayed the house pretty thoroughly with Bluestar, concentrating on the kitchen and bathroom,’ Cropper said. ‘But the killer was pretty thorough, I have to say. All over the sink and work surfaces, the taps, the hall. Lots and lots of clean-up happened here, and I think quite recently. In the old days with Luminol we would have struggled because we got loads of hydrogen peroxide flare-up, it was almost dazzling. The killer knew what to use. It was really quite hard to spot any blood, until…’ He led Gillard to the sink, and with a plastic-shanked scraper pointed to the sink splashback. ‘Here he had cleaned the tiles very thoroughly. But the grout lines are recessed, and if he was scrubbing back and forth, he wouldn’t have got them all. We wouldn’t have noticed with Luminol, but Bluestar gives off slightly different colours for blood and for oxygen bleach. So we got five tiny residual blood spots, mostly smaller than a full stop. We have carved two out on a fragment of grout here’ – he pointed to a chip missing from the grout – ‘and that is currently being tested.’

  ‘The other benefit of Bluestar,’ Cropper said, ‘is that unlike Luminol it doesn’t damage the DNA in the blood. They are small samples, so we shouldn’t hold out any hope for a resounding DNA match, but you never know.’

  ‘Good work, Nigel, very impressed.’ Gillard tried desperately not to imagine the grisly scenario that Cropper seemed to be hinting at.

  ‘That’s not all. We disconnected the U-bend, and made a rather interesting discovery. I’ll show you the picture, but essentially it’s a tooth with some attached metal wings, probably a piece of dental bridgework. There was a substantial amount of what for the moment we’ll call organic residue in the U-bend, which prompted us to remove the plastic pipe down to the trap. There we made another interesting discovery, which we are currently testing.’

  ‘Are you hinting at something?’

  ‘Well, yes. The pipe hasn’t been properly cleaned for some time, apart from the pouring down of some household cleaner which was presumably done in the last few days. As is common with domestic pipes, there is effectively an internal sleeve of organic matter deposited over a period of years. We cut the pipe lengthways and were able to remove it whole. It’s here if you want to take a peek.’ Cropper gave a grim little smile and led Gillard out through the kitchen door into the sun lounge. Two technicians were looking at something wet and viscid lying on a polythene sheet. It was a four-feet-long tube of residue, glossy with grease and ball-bearing sized bubbles of fat.

  Gillard crouched down with Cropper to take a closer look. ‘There’s a lot of hair,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, that in itself may not be indicative of anything,’ Cropper responded. ‘Many people wash their hair at the sink.’ Cropper pointed to clearly discernible tea leaf and coffee grounds, slender pin-like bones which could be fish or chicken, and then something else. ‘This,’ he said, pointing to something shiny in the column of grease, is far more interesting.’

  ‘What is it?’ Gillard said.

  ‘It’s a very small, specialist stainless steel screw. We recovered another two from the sump. I can’t be absolutely sure, but the consensus here is that it is a surgical fastening used in limb repair.’

  ‘Liz Knight had a road accident in 2007, and her medical records show she had pins inserted in her leg,’ Gillard said.

  ‘I know, we saw the scanned documents late yesterday. We also found a couple of human lower incisors in the trap, and a molar. So all the evidence we have seen so far indicates that the killer spent several hours here, working on separating and perhaps even rendering the body, or parts of it, at this sink. Subject to DNA confirmation, of course.’

  ‘I presume this house has a septic tank?’

  ‘Yes. But crucially
, this sink didn’t connect to it. It’s simply a soakaway out in the shingle. We’re going to excavate it, but I don’t think we’ll find much more.’

  ‘So what are you saying?’ Gillard asked.

  ‘Well, we think the kitchen was largely used to dissect Mrs Knight. The body parts will have been hidden elsewhere.’ Cropper gestured with his chin out of the sun lounge window, north to the vast expanse of Romney Marsh. Gillard followed his gaze. Of course, it’s so bloody obvious. If you want to dispose of body parts, here is a vast expanse of brackish, muddy water to conceal them.

  ‘Have you got the divers booked?’

  ‘Yes. There’s a double-sized team coming this afternoon. Arc lamps, more tents, you name it,’ Cropper said.

  ‘So in the meantime, all we have left of the woman is this sleeve of jelly from inside a pipe?’ Gillard said.

  ‘Effectively, yes. But it would be enough for a conviction even if nothing else turns up.’

  Gillard nodded. ‘From the Internet searches we retrieved from Knight’s laptop, he certainly spent a good deal of time investigating how to dissect and dispose of a human body. But until you showed me this, I really wouldn’t have thought he had the stomach for it.’

  ‘Agreed. I just can’t see it,’ Cropper said. ‘I’ve done a couple of dismemberment cases, and as part of that read up on most of the rest in recent UK history. They’re normally either organized crime jobs, or if it’s a domestic murder the suspect almost always had training as a butcher, or on a farm or abattoir, something like that. But a middle-class academic? It’s not easy to cut a body up. They’d run a mile faced with the sheer amount of residual blood, the fat, the gristle and the stink.’

  ‘Martin Knight had some outdated forensic textbooks on his shelves, presumably from his university studies. He might have done some practical forensic study, I suppose, we’ll have to check. But his work was policy and always had been,’ Gillard said.