by Nick Louth
‘He was found in a builder’s bag, and had to be cut out of it to get him in the body bag. Whoever had found him had dumped him in the bag with a box load of absorbent pellets, probably cat litter, to minimize the smell. In fact, a lot of the pellets just absorbed him.’
‘May I take a few samples?’ Gillard said.
‘Sure, help yourself,’ said Christophe. He handed him a pair of plastic tweezers and some sample vials. Gingerly Gillard looked at the leathery remains in the bag and picked out four flesh fragments, each of which he sealed in separate screw-top vials. Once sealed, he put them in a plastic evidence bag, and then doubled sealed it in another.’
‘What do you want all these for?’ asked Christophe.
‘Just testing a little theory.’
‘Well, take all you want. The cremation is down for next week.’
* * *
On the flight on the way home, Gillard’s thoughts circled like a stacked airliner, whining and turning without ever seeming to get closer to the firm ground of certainty. Pamela Jones was utterly convincing as the framed innocent. Her DNA appeared nowhere in any aspect of the Knight case. Yet it was her picture on a passport applied for in her name. Who could have got those pictures without her knowledge? Nobody. A fellow tenant or the landlord could have got most of the details – copies of utility bills and so forth. The Slovenian child abuser, Horvat, had some opportunity. So could Martin, Oliver or Liz Knight. As landlords they might have required utility bills. Could Martin really have prepared a false passport for his accomplice? It was a lot of trouble to go to, and probably unnecessary. After all, if his accomplice, the tattooed girl, wasn’t known in his usual circle of friends, she could have travelled on her own passport.
Ignoring the ‘fasten seatbelts’ sign, Gillard made his apologies, extracted himself from his window seat and clambered out to the aisle. He pulled down the heavy briefcase from the overhead locker and squeezed back into his slot. Among the documents he noticed a pro forma letter from Oliver Knight’s employer, Barker Caynes Tipping in response to the inquiry from the PCSOs. It merely recorded the dates of Mrs Jones’s tenancy, enclosed a copy of the receipt for return of deposit and was p.p.’ed with just the merest peremptory dash of ballpoint.
Gillard’s brows furrowed as he looked at the date of the end of the tenancy. Strange. It was three months before the date of the passport application, and a year and a half before the registration of the purchase of the Peugeot. If Mrs Jones had left as stated, it was simply not possible for her to have dealt with the paperwork for the passport or car.
As soon as he arrived at Gatwick he rang Oliver Knight, who was quite grumpy about being rung at a quarter to nine in the evening. Gillard asked him about Pamela Jones. Could there be some error in the tenancy record?
Oliver Knight blew a sigh. ‘I really don’t have that type of information here. I can get Wendy at the office to look it up. I hardly remember the woman at all, except that she was late with the rent on a few occasions. In the end I think that’s why Mum gave her notice.’ Everything in his manner proclaimed how beneath him such queries were.
‘It seems she left in November 2014,’ Gillard continued. ‘But then she applied for a passport in February 2015, and a vehicle was registered to the address in May 2016.’
‘Well, quite possibly. How can I help?’
‘Mr Knight, she wouldn’t have been there to receive the documents. Someone else seemed to have rifled through her correspondence and papers sufficiently to get all the documents for a passport application. Including photographs.’
‘I’m sorry, officer, but to me that stretches the limits of credulity.’ Oliver Knight had returned to his habitual officious tone.
‘What documents do you require for a tenancy?’
‘My mother simply required proof of earnings, a personal reference, and two proofs of ID—’
‘And a passport?’
‘Not necessarily. Some of her tenants didn’t have passports. We were happy to take a driving licence or an electoral register entry, plus a utility bill or bank statement less than three months old. Look, couldn’t this wait until office hours, it would be much easier to check?’
‘Did you sign the back of Mrs Jones’s passport photographs to verify it was her?’
‘I really don’t recall.’ There was a great rumbling harrumph. ‘Detective Chief Inspector, I hope it won’t have entirely escaped your notice that in the last 18 months my mother has been murdered and cut to pieces, my father has disappeared, and we’ve been swindled out of a multimillion-pound family fortune. My sister tried to cut her wrists last week, and is being treated for depression. So I hope you’ll forgive me forgetting whether or not I signed a tiny photograph for an old tenant a couple of years ago. Goodnight.’ The line went dead.
* * *
The next morning Gillard decided to approach the problem from the other direction. He rang Pamela Jones to ask her opinion of her landlords, the Knight family, and more particularly Liz Knight. She was more than happy to give her impressions. ‘She was all right face to face,’ Jones said. ‘But behind me back she was a bitch. She chucked me out just before Christmas!’
‘But you were apparently behind with the rent,’ Gillard said.
‘No! I never was. I never owed a penny, not in any place I ever rented. She said she needed to give me notice because a member of her family was moving in, which was allowed under the lease agreement.’
‘Can I ask what kind of paperwork you had to supply for the tenancy agreement?’
‘Well, it was ridiculous what she asked for. Utility bills and bank statements, okay, but there were loads more documents too. Birth certificate an’ all. I had to get photographs done because the solicitors needed them, apparently. But I’d never been asked before, not anywhere.’
Gillard thanked her and hung up. It was beginning to look more and more like Liz and Martin Knight had cooked this bogus passport application up together. But why? He’d just learned something that shocked him to the core. Liz had been capable of lying. She’d told Oliver one reason for evicting Pamela Jones and used another to the woman herself. He just couldn’t square it with the Liz he had loved. Gillard’s next call was to financial specialist DC Corey-Williams.
‘Shireen, I’ve got a priority job for you. I want you to find me every single document that links a Mrs Pamela Jones to 146B Manor Road in Thornton Heath, south London.’
‘So do we have Mrs Jones in the frame?’ Shireen asked.
‘Not her, but the identity thief. I want every utility bill, every insurance policy, and especially every bank account. We’ve got one credit card number because it was used to purchase a ticket on Le Shuttle, so you can start with getting a full list of transactions with that.’
‘That will take a while.’
‘I know, but I’ll probably be able to help. I’m going to the address to check any post that’s been accumulating there, and on to the landlord’s office at Barker Caynes Tipping in Croydon where some of it may have been forwarded.’ Seeing another call coming in from Rob Townsend, Gillard said a hurried goodbye and hung up.
‘Rob. What’s up?’
‘I thought you’d like to hear the news, sir.’ Townsend sounded almost beside himself with excitement. ‘We’ve found Professor Martin Knight.’
‘Go on, don’t keep me in suspense.’
‘He’s dead. The Syrian wasn’t a Syrian. It was him. It was Martin Knight.’
Chapter Thirty-Three
Gillard was absolutely staggered. He just couldn’t work it out, and he didn’t have time. He had been ordered to go back to Mount Browne immediately to brief the Chief Constable. Alison Rigby was waiting for him in her office, surrounded by paperwork. If she was pleased to have discovered where Professor Knight had been hiding from justice, she didn’t show it.
‘DC Townsend copied me in on the test results, but I’m baffled. Perhaps you would be good enough to summarize where this takes us.’ She rested her elbows on the
desk holding a pencil between her fingertips.
‘The DNA test showed it was Martin Knight in that Peugeot boot, ma’am,’ Gillard said. ‘It seems he’d been there for up to 18 months.’
‘So Professor Knight was dressed as a Syrian refugee, right down to the cheap plastic sandals and worry beads. The passport was for a genuine Syrian man. Why would anyone want to disguise him as an Arab?’
‘The only reason I can think of is to minimise the chance a DNA test would be undertaken, to avoid any chance of the French police discovering that for all the time that Professor Knight was seemingly leading us on a wild-goose chase around Paris, he was actually already dead.’
‘So who killed him?’
‘I don’t know. There were no other DNA markers or fingerprints on the car.’
‘Jimmy Bartram? It would be nice to take him down a peg or two,’ Rigby said. ‘He’s taken on a bit of the mantle of Knight as tormentor in chief of the British constabulary, if you’ve seen his latest Guardian articles.’
‘I have. But unfortunately, ma’am, Jimmy’s in the clear. No forensics, and watertight alibis.’
‘Horvat?’
‘Possibly, but the only time he went abroad was to save his own skin over Girl F.’
‘But he would have been able to create a false identity using Mrs Jones’s documents, wouldn’t he? Seeing as he was living in the same house.’
‘Well, partly. But some of the more valuable documents, like her birth certificate for example, were given directly to either Mrs Knight or her son.’
Rigby sighed and took off her reading glasses, giving Gillard the full benefit of the paralysing blue stare. ‘Whoever killed Knight presumably wanted us to believe that he was still alive,’ Rigby said. ‘To sustain as long as possible the idea that it was Knight who killed his wife.’
‘That’s right, ma’am,’ Gillard said. ‘Whoever killed Professor Knight presumably did so in Dungeness, shortly after killing and dismembering his wife. They then chucked him in a builder’s bag in the boot of the Peugeot. Someone masquerading as Pamela Jones then took the car across to France and dumped it at the holiday home of Kathy Parkinson.’
‘Hmm. Kathy Parkinson.’ The chief constable’s faced adopted a faraway look. ‘Was it her we saw using the cash machine in France on CCTV?’ she asked. ‘Did she lead us on the wild-goose chase?’
‘No, ma’am. She was here in the UK at the time. And the woman we’re looking for is younger and of a more petite build than Ms Parkinson.’
‘But you said it was her holiday home. That’s a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, and it does indicate someone within the Knights’ friends or family who would know that Ms Parkinson’s holiday home was rarely visited and thus a suitable place to abandon a car. But I think we can be sure a man was involved. Martin Knight would have weighed around 200 pounds. Getting him in the boot of the car wouldn’t have been easy.’
‘So you’re sure that the Pamela Jones in whose name all these documents were isn’t the person we saw on CCTV footage?’
‘Absolutely sure. The real Pamela Jones is a much bigger build, older and, to be quite frank, not smart enough to have done this.
‘So it’s not Ms Parkinson or… what is the other one’s name?’
‘Helen Jennings. No, like Ms Parkinson, Ms Jennings has multiple colleagues who saw her in the UK on the same days that someone was in France pretending to be Martin Knight.’
‘And Natalie Krugman was in the US at that time, wasn’t she?’
‘Yes, ma’am. Her alibis are rock solid too.’
‘It’s a curious case,’ Rigby said. ‘The family inheritance is gone, via Panama. Mr and Mrs Knight are both dead, and we have no credible suspects. You can just imagine what the press is going to say, can’t you, Gillard?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘I’ve already briefed Christina McCafferty. We’ll release only the minimum information about Knight’s death, even to the family. They’ll know that their father is dead, found in a car boot in France. Nothing more. Make sure your team understand, okay? Keep the family liaison officer away from the latest details. I don’t want any leaks.’
* * *
Like a bad dream, the grey-stained concrete of Croydon University Hospital seemed to keep reappearing in Gillard’s investigation. As he drove his Ford Focus into the packed car park on a damp Thursday morning, he gazed around at the tired-looking buildings. This was where Mrs Jones had worked as a cleaner. Only ten minutes away on foot in Thornton Heath was her former home, the rental flat owned by Liz Knight, and it was 20 minutes to Oliver Knight’s office at Barker Caynes Tipping. The mortuary here was also where the smirking corpse of Harry Smith had been examined by Dr David Delahaye, and the marks of strangulation had been found.
Gillard had once again arranged to meet the forensic consultant to examine some human remains. Those of Liz Knight. And so the nightmare loop continued.
Delahaye was already there with mortuary technician Nick Stevens when Gillard was shown through the rubber-lined double doors into the mortuary. Greetings were exchanged.
‘I was fascinated by your hypothesis, Craig,’ Delahaye said. ‘No one has ever asked me anything like this before.’ He went over to a laboratory table on which the mortal remains of Liz Knight were already on display, under a dazzling light, labelled like exhibits from the British museum. There were five teeth, a piece of dental bridgework, two surgical screws and, at the centre, a collection of vertebrae.
‘I have to admit that something about the vertebrae had already been bothering me,’ Delahaye said, tapping one of them with a plastic scalpel. ‘As you recall we were able to extract DNA from the blood in the pubic hairs and hair roots which were trapped in the underwear. But there was a complete lack of confirming DNA in any of the bones or the gristle surrounding them. There were indications of saltwater contamination in the bones, which might have suggested the body had at first been recovered from the sea, or a saltwater rather than freshwater marsh. But if that was so, I would not have expected so much DNA to have survived in the hairs. They too are eventually damaged by salt water. In cases like this I always follow lex parsimoniae.’
‘What?’
‘The simplest plausible explanation, Craig. Also known as Occam’s razor. So I assumed this disparity of pathological journey merely told us something about the process of dismemberment, in which the hairs and fabric were perhaps a later and inadvertent contaminant.’
‘So what would the less plausible alternative be?’
‘That, by design or error, we have two bodies mixed up together.’
‘So back to my original idea, David. Given that we have about three litres of Mrs Knight’s blood, lots of her flesh, teeth and a metal pin from her leg, could our supposed murder victim still be alive? Could she have faked her own death?’
Delahaye sucked his teeth for a long time. ‘Theoretically, and assuming she was forensically very well trained, had plenty of time and access to certain resources,’ he said. ‘It’s not impossible. So long as the vertebrae are not hers.’
‘So what other skills and resources would be required to make it possible?’
‘Well, I’m not sure. Give me a day or two to think about it and I’ll give you a definitive answer.’
* * *
Family liaison officer Gabby Underwood was already there when Craig arrived at Oliver Knight’s house to break the news of his father’s death. Chloe was there too, ghostly pale, and nails bitten to the quick. Before a word was said, they seemed to know. Chloe’s reaction was to fold inwardly, knees tucked up, head down, like a damaged doll expecting to be consigned to the toy box. It was quite possible to perceive what this traumatized 20-year-old would look like on her deathbed. Oliver by contrast seemed to have shed age and experience. No longer the smug solicitor, but a confused puppyish schoolboy in an ill-fitting suit, unpolished black shoes, a red rash of some kind now visible at the hairline, a knee jostling to some unhear
d rhythm.
‘This is all impossible,’ Oliver said. ‘Stuffed in a car boot, in France. Where in France?’
‘In a rural part of Normandy,’ Craig said.
‘And you don’t know how he died?’
‘The cause of death could not be determined after so long.’
Gabby’s sympathetic smile stretched across her face, a mask against infectious grief. She slid away silently, as if on castors, to make the umpteenth cup of coffee that morning. She had earlier warned Craig that Chloe had now dropped out of university and was receiving counselling after a suicide attempt. And that was before the latest news.
‘So could he have killed himself?’ Oliver asked. ‘Was anything found with him? Like a note.’
‘Nothing was found.’ Gillard paused, feeling unequal to the task of concealing the full circumstances of their father’s death. ‘I’m really sorry we cannot provide answers. However, the coroner is likely to order a full post-mortem, as the French procedure was rather inconclusive. So I’m afraid the body of your father is unlikely to be released for a funeral for quite some time.’
Oliver nodded. Chloe said nothing, her head slumped on her chest. Craig and Gabby exchanged glances. There was nothing more to be done, but Gabby had already indicated she would keep up regular contact with Chloe, whose vulnerability was now palpable. The inevitable social work of policing once again taking as much time as preventing and detecting crime.
* * *
The discovery of Martin Knight’s body reignited press interest in what was now assumed to be a double murder. Chief Constable Alison Rigby was happy to have the previous large investigative team restored. The only detective held back from the original team was Detective Inspector Claire Mulholland, the apple of Rigby’s eye, who was working with Radar Dobbs, tying up the last loose ends of the Girl F case.
For Gillard, his first full investigative team meeting was going to be important.