The Body in the Marsh

by Nick Louth

  ‘What if he’s driving a French car?’ Gillard asked.

  ‘Then it’s easier. They will more easily be able to sort out which vehicles have been in all those places. Of course it would help if we knew exactly what kind of car we were looking for,’ Glomiquet said. ‘Then it would be easy, yes?’ He shrugged expansively.

  Gillard felt the sting of reproach. ‘We’ve got Knight’s own car still in Britain, and his wife’s. There’s been no use of his credit cards, so he’s not hired a car in Britain or abroad, at least not from one of the big operators. He could have bought one privately and be using it illegally, but that will catch up with him in the end.’

  ‘Okay, Creg,’ Glomiquet said. Gillard enjoyed the French version of his name. ‘We’ve circulated the professor’s details and pictures to hotels and guesthouses. There are a fair number of petrol stations with private cameras too, and we’ve asked for their cooperation. The trouble is that if he’s travelling using a false name and in an unidentified vehicle, we’ll be lucky to catch him.’

  The three detectives stopped at a roadside bistro for lunch – seafood soup followed by duck pâté with crusty bread. Glomiquet surprised them by ordering a small pastis, which he downed in one. Kincaid and Gillard went back with Glomiquet to visit his office in the suburbs of Paris, but this shed little new light on the investigation, so they headed off early to the motel that Surrey Police HQ had booked them. It turned out to be a shabby place in an anonymous suburb just off the N104 at Évry.

  There was no one at reception. Kincaid rang a bell, and a middle-aged woman, stick-thin and caked with make-up, emerged from a back room. She looked up the booking. ‘Oui. Une chambre double avec un lit matrimonial. Premier étage.’ She handed Gillard a key.

  ‘Excuse mois,’ he said. ‘Combien lits de cette chambre?’

  The woman winced at Gillard’s mangling of her language. ‘Un lit, monsieur.’ A sly smile spread across her jaw. ‘Voulez-vous en plus, messieurs?’

  Gillard turned to Kincaid. ‘There’s only one bed, sir.’

  Kincaid, looking puzzled, said to Gillard. ‘Who booked this bloody room?’ I bet it was on Rigby’s orders.’

  ‘It was admin at Mount Browne, so perhaps, yes.’ Gillard asked the receptionist, who was clearly revelling in their British embarrassment, if there was another single room available, or one with twin beds. The woman made a meal out of consulting her computer, tapping her teeth with a pen and exhaling in a perplexed the-things-I-have-to-do fashion. Eventually she showed them a rather small and old-fashioned box room in a gable next to the laundry, which had no en-suite toilet and a sloping ceiling designed to dent the heads of the unwary.

  ‘He’ll take it,’ said Kincaid. ‘I’ll have the original room.’

  They met up again an hour later in a pizza place across the way, where they shared a thin-and-crispy family-size dish. While they were eating, Gillard laid out a map of Île-de-France, which had all the places marked on it that they knew Knight had visited: Gretz-Armainvilliers, Itteville, Kirch-en-Bourses and Houdan for cash withdrawals, and somewhere around Chartres for posting the birthday card.

  ‘It’s all in a very odd order,’ Kincaid said, dropping a lump of sweetcorn on the map. ‘Look at Houdan, it’s way over to the west. And this Gretz place is in the south-east. It’s like there is no rhyme or reason to the cash withdrawals, except perhaps to throw us off the scent.’

  ‘All but two have been from Crédit Agricole,’ said Gillard. ‘I’ve got a list of their branches with cash machines, but there are literally thousands. Almost every little town has one.’

  * * *

  Next morning Craig was awakened just after six by a call from Rob Townsend. ‘Professor Knight used his credit card last night, for the first time. He got a cash advance from a machine in a suburb of Paris called Neuilly-sur-Seine.’

  ‘Fantastic news.’ Gillard knelt on the floor to open his map of greater Paris. ‘That’s almost in the centre of the city. There’s bound to be CCTV, surely.’

  Two hours later the two British detectives arrived with Glomiquet at the shopping precinct on the western edge of Neuilly. Crowded around and above the two-storey mall were a number of tower blocks which boasted the names of several large international corporations. The cash machine belonged to BNP Paribas, and was one of five machines in a 24-hour foyer attached to the bank. The foyer seemed to be in constant use by a well-dressed clientele from the surrounding offices.

  Glomiquet went into the bank to talk to the female manager, a middle-aged woman with spectacles dangling on a chain. She came out with a male security guard who prevented any new customers entering the foyer, instead directing them to other machines in the main body of the bank. The manager escorted the detectives into the foyer, and after the last customer had left, locked the door.

  ‘Here,’ she said, in excellent English, pointing to a small hole in the ceiling from which a couple of wires trailed. ‘This is the CCTV fitting. We have been waiting a week for it to be upgraded. So we have no footage of yesterday’s transactions.’

  ‘Are there other cameras nearby?’ Gillard asked.

  ‘Yes, several. There is one across the road, and another on the bank opposite,’ she said, pointing.

  Glomiquet spoke to her rapidly in French and then turned to the others. ‘We can’t spare any resources, so the banks will courier the recordings directly to you in Britain,’ he said. ‘If you need further liaison, I can of course always help.’

  Gillard got his own bank card out and went to one of the machines. ‘Time me, would you, Paddy?’ He went through the various menus, and made a small advance on his credit card. He rejoined the others. ‘How long?’

  ‘Forty-eight seconds,’ Kincaid said.

  ‘So we should add that delay into the CCTV timings when we see people emerge.’

  Gillard and Kincaid thanked the bank manager, and left with Glomiquet. ‘I think the professor’s made a major mistake,’ Kincaid said. ‘We’re going to get proof positive of him being here, maybe even a vehicle registration number. He can’t stay hidden for ever.’

  * * *

  Gillard flew back to the UK leaving Kincaid behind to keep an eye out for any fresh cash withdrawals in France. The CCTV discs were already waiting on his desk at Caterham, but no one else had thought to take a look. The recordings covered a half-hour each side of the 9.33 p.m. transaction. A Post-it from Glomiquet on the sleeve carried a brief message: Malheureusement, il pleuvait. What he meant was soon clear when they played the disc. The intense shower not only blurred the images, but many pedestrians were using umbrellas, which not only obscured them from the high cameras, but also blocked out others. They had to work with very brief glimpses of faces and features.

  ‘You’ve got all these people going in and out of the foyer door, sir,’ said Hoskins, fast-forwarding through the disc. ‘But we can’t see who goes to which machine, and so can’t exactly match each person to their transaction nor the time of it.’

  The first quick run-through had shown half a dozen men who looked vaguely like Knight, at least if Knight had tried to disguise himself. One was a bearded fellow with a rough head of hair wearing a bulky raincoat. If anything he looked a little broader than Knight, and wore glasses when the professor didn’t. Still, he was the best prospect, and better still he had emerged from a car which was illegally parked right outside the bank. It should be possible to identify the number plate, especially when the make and model was matched with other cameras on that road. There was also a man in a hoodie, again thickset, but probably a little too tall. He moved like a younger man, with some vigour in the shoulders. He had spent a long time in the foyer, as had two other younger men, African-looking, who could be disregarded. Finally there was a man in a suit with a large umbrella about whom nothing could be determined except his relatively skinny build. If none of them was Knight, as seemed likely, then they at least would have seen him. Dispersed amongst these male possibilities were a number of young female customers
, and a few of both sexes who were clearly elderly.

  Hoskins went back to the start of the disc, and with Gillard at his side homed in on the three most likely men. The bearded man, the fellow with the hoodie and umbrella man. He let it run through at normal speed, to watch their gait. ‘What do you reckon, sir?’ Hoskins asked.

  ‘The guy with the hoodie isn’t Knight. Let’s have a look at the fellow with the beard and raincoat, just one more time.’

  Hoskins ran it through. The view on the way in was good, just for a second. The man held open the door to a tattooed woman unseasonably dressed in a strapless blue dress and carrying a large pink frilly umbrella, who was going into the foyer. The man gave her a lingering look as she went in, and the camera caught his smile. Gillard strained to discern more, but the definition wasn’t good enough.

  ‘It could be Knight, I suppose. Can we get this image enhanced, Carl? To get the glare off?’

  ‘Let’s see what the tech lab can do,’ Hoskins said. ‘Of course there’s always a chance that Knight’s been robbed, and one of these other blokes has the card.’

  ‘Or that he’s given the card to an accomplice,’ Gillard added, ‘who could be female.’

  ‘Christ, if he did that we’re really screwed,’ Hoskins said. ‘We’d have no idea who to look for.’

  * * *

  The summons to Mount Browne came on the afternoon of Gillard’s return to the UK. It was already the end of November, nearly two months after Liz Knight’s murder, and Craig knew that Alison Rigby was going to want some answers.

  He knocked on the door of her office and received the curt command, ‘Come.’

  Opening the door, he stepped in. The ACC’s office was a large one, bigger than the chief constable’s, but with a view over an estate of 1960s police housing. Rigby was clearly buried in paperwork. Her desk was piled high, and she was signing and passing across papers to an out-tray at a rate of knots, while dictating a letter into a tape recorder. She ignored him totally for a full two minutes while she continued her multi-tasking. Finally she looked up. She was wearing reading glasses, and her icy eyes were even more glacial than normal.

  She finished the letter with a ‘Yours et cetera’, turned off the recorder, beckoned him over, and pointed to a low chair by a coffee table. He looked at it, and she nodded. Sit. She didn’t actually say that word, but she clicked her fingers and pointed again. Like the good dog that he was, he sat.

  She stood up and walked around the front of her desk to lean on it, arms folded, looking down at Craig. Bar her white blouse, she was dressed in black from head to foot: trouser suit, patent leather shoes, square earrings of some no doubt expensive mineral, but which looked to him like small Lego bricks. ‘Things aren’t really going terribly well, are they, Craig?’

  ‘Ma’am.’

  ‘We’ve not found Professor Knight at all, and only a small portion of Mrs Knight. We seem to be no closer to a conclusion, do we?’ She leaned forward, and her blouse gaped slightly, revealing a crescent curve of freckled breast in a lacy bra. Black, naturally. He forced his eyes back up to her face, and banished as best he could the image of what it would be like to make love with her. She would be on top, naturally.

  ‘Well, ma’am, we are—’

  ‘Rhetorical question, Craig. I only ask questions where I already know the answers.’

  Then why have you got me here? Gillard thought. He looked at her desk. With shock, he realized there actually was an opaque glass jar there, twice the size of a jam jar, with a screw-on plastic lid. An emasculatory vision flitted through his imagination.

  ‘So, is our professor on the CCTV footage from Paris that arrived yesterday?’

  ‘It’s too early to be sure, ma’am. We’re having it enhanced—’

  ‘Too early! Seven weeks since the murder, Detective Chief Inspector. This isn’t some elusive billionaire drug lord with a network of criminal associates, safe houses and bogus bank accounts – he’s a bearded overweight academic from suburbia. We should be able to pull him in on a piece of string, and the fact we have failed to do so is making Surrey Police a laughing stock. More particularly it is making me a laughing stock.’

  ‘Ma’am, if I may explain. It seems increasingly likely Martin Knight has an associate. Someone who drove him through to France on a ferry, someone who speaks fluent French, maybe even has a home in France, near Paris. There has to be, because nobody seems to have seen him. There are no credible sightings, despite an extensive publicity drive in the French press and on TV. If it wasn’t for the cash withdrawals and his letter to the daughter, we’d have nothing to go on.’

  Rigby’s gaze was so intense it was giving Craig a headache. ‘I was before the Home Affairs select committee last week on the subject of Girl F.’

  ‘I watched you, ma’am, on Parliament TV. Impressive.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t. It was a humiliating experience, because I don’t have answers. Cunliffe’s report ripped us to shreds.’ She folded her arms. ‘By the way, Craig, if I want my arse kissing I’ll ask Kincaid to do it. At his evolutionary stage he’s more comfortable on all fours. For you, with your track record, I had higher hopes. Now go away and solve your case.’

  * * *

  Craig Gillard returned to Caterham to look again at the CCTV discs. He was just getting ready to let Hoskins head off home for the evening when the email from the lab came with the enhanced images attached. As soon as they sat down together, Hoskins already bundled up in his coat, it was clear that the bearded man wasn’t Martin Knight. The shape of the face was wrong. ‘Oh, well. So much for that,’ said Hoskins, standing up. ‘Shall I get you a coffee on my way out, sir?’

  Craig held up a hand. ‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘Not the bloke, but the woman in front.’

  ‘Always happy to look at a fit woman, sir,’ Hoskins said, sitting down.

  Even with enhancement there was nothing of her face to be seen beneath the pink umbrella, but she had dyed green hair neatly tied in a ponytail. She looked to be in her 30s. Her strapless blue dress revealed a swirling tattoo on her tanned and rain-spattered back and another, smaller and darker, on her right upper arm.

  ‘Kincaid would like her,’ Hoskins said, pursing his lips with approval. ‘Good legs and high heels. Looks like she’s going on a night out.’

  ‘We haven’t got the enhanced version of her coming out of the foyer, have we?’

  ‘No, that wasn’t on the segment we chose.’

  ‘Pity, let’s look at the original.’ Craig inserted the original disc and fast-forwarded through. The CCTV showed the woman emerging with her umbrella already up, but still no view of her face. Craig looked at the timing on the bottom of the screen. ‘She was out the door 53 seconds after the transaction time stamp. That’s about right, if she didn’t hang about.’

  ‘There’s a purse still in her hand,’ Hoskins said. It was a distinctive embroidered bag, with sequins that caught the light. ‘Maybe she was in a hurry.’

  ‘Let’s go back to the enhanced image.’ Gillard switched tab, then pulled up the enlargement. The arm tattoo was perhaps the size of a packet of cigarettes. ‘What do you reckon to that tattoo on her arm, Carl?’

  ‘Is it a dog’s head, sir?’

  ‘I thought that at first, but it’s actually a horse’s head. Stylized, from the side. Do you play chess?’

  ‘No, sir, too brainy for me. Draughts I can do.’

  ‘Well, what she’s got is a chess piece tattooed on her shoulder. A knight.’

  ‘As in Martin Knight, sir?’

  ‘Precisely.’ The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. Was this the woman? An accomplice and lover to help Knight escape. No wonder there had been no credible sightings of Knight himself. But who was she? And where was Knight?

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The press seized on the CCTV image with huge enthusiasm, the tabloids carrying it on front pages under the headline ‘Who Is This Woman?’ Many reprinted the knight tattoo. Tattoo parlours on both sid
es of the Channel were asked if they had recently been commissioned for such an image. Gillard finally felt optimistic that they would quickly catch Martin Knight, and his girlfriend, besotted enough to have his symbol slowly and uncomfortably injected into her skin.

  The French police had done their bit, and after several days’ delay had got the bank to contact every customer who had used the bank foyer during the crucial half-hour. They had interviewed about half, had images of a couple more, and only six were being elusive. The Martin Knight lookalike, who turned out to be a Swiss architect, was one of the first to come forward, and had volunteered a description of the woman.

  Gillard had asked research intelligence officer Rob Townsend to scour his academic and private sector contacts to get some further analysis of the French images. He wanted to know the woman’s height, weight and approximate age. All that would help narrow down who it could be. But it was the tattoo that intrigued him most.

  ‘The knight’s piece in chess,’ remarked Kincaid, in one of his more reflective moments, can jump, can’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gillard. ‘In this case, even across the Channel.’

  ‘My dad taught me the moves. The knight, I think, was one square straight, and one diagonal.’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Gillard. ‘Very hard to envisage where it can go, a move or two ahead.’ Kincaid looked at him and nodded sagely. ‘That’s him, then, the elusive bugger.’

  The phone lines buzzed with reports of women with horse-shaped tattoos, which turned out to be dragons, or dogs or, in one case, a pet rabbit. The LSE staff, shown pictures of the woman from the cashpoint, were unable to offer any help, nor were Knight family members or friends. After another week with no fresh useful leads, and without further cash withdrawal transactions, Gillard once again began to get pressure from above – daily phone calls from Rigby, chasing progress. But next morning there was progress from a different direction: Dungeness.