The Corpse in Highgate Cemetery: (Quigg 8)

by Tim Ellis

  ‘Did the woman go willingly?’

  ‘Seemed to. Although I don’t think that was the case when she reached the car. They were on the other side of the vehicle, so I couldn’t see a lot of what was going on, but I got the impression that she was pushed into the car against her will.’

  ‘Was the man driving?’

  ‘I couldn’t see whether he was driving or not, but I was wondering that if she wasn’t a willing passenger then who was stopping her from getting out of the car again?’

  Quigg stood up. ‘Thanks very much Mrs . . .’

  ‘. . . Lucifer.’ The woman smiled and her false teeth slid about inside her mouth as if they belonged to someone else. ‘Not really. I know what those girls call me, but my name is Mary Hammond.’

  ‘Thanks for answering our questions, Mrs Hammond. And, of course, for the registration number. You might have just identified the woman’s murderer.’

  Outside Dwyer said, ‘It was the Assistant Commissioner, wasn’t it?’

  ‘You’re jumping to conclusions, Dwyer. Let’s get that number plate checked out before we pin the tail on the donkey.’

  ‘You never did tell me what the Chief said about Scott-Simpson.’

  ‘He’s working on it.’

  ‘Working on a cover-up, you mean?’

  ‘He said there’d be no cover-up on his watch.’

  ‘Yeah, and the sun rises in the West.’

  ‘It does, doesn’t it?’

  Dwyer’s brow furrowed. ‘Of course it does.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  ‘Yes, I can tell you about Leonard and Fanny Tomkins,’ Sheila Howe said as he lay recovering after the second time. ‘Would you like some nice cold lemonade with ice?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  As well as the lemonade, she returned with a pot of double cream and passed it to him. ‘You know what to do with that, don’t you?’

  His face creased up. ‘Pour it in my lemonade?’

  ‘You have some strange ideas, Rodney Crankshank.’ She lay down next to him again. ‘When you’re ready.’

  She squealed and wriggled like a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig going to market when he poured the ice-cold double cream on her breasts and trickled it over her quivering belly. He wasn’t really in the mood for double cream, but he licked and slurped like a dessert addict just the same – he had standards and a reputation to maintain. And whether it was the copious amounts of cream he consumed, or Sheila Howe slithering beneath him like a jellied eel, his erection soon began to resemble a totem pole.

  He stopped mid-slurp. ‘So, you were going to tell me about . . .’

  ‘I’ll be responsible for murder if you don’t finish what you started, Rodney Crankshank.’

  No doubt she would tell him when she was good and ready and not before. All he could do was complete his mission and hope his efforts were all worthwhile in the end.

  Afterwards, panting like marathon runners, they slept.

  ‘Rodney!’

  He forced his eyelids open. ‘Again?’

  ‘No. I think you’ve provided the required goods equal to the information I’m going to tell you.’

  ‘That’s good, because I was flagging slightly.’

  ‘So, you want to know about Leonard and Fanny Tomkins?’

  ‘Yes, please.’ He pushed himself up and upended the pillow.

  ‘What have you found out about Sally so far?’

  ‘After she was taken into care she was fostered by Maria and Alfonso Perez at 15 Dallaway Drive in Stone Cross. She stayed with the Perez family for eighteen months, and then she was supposed to have been adopted by Carol and Kenneth Hughes who lived at 44 Underhill Road in East Dulwich.’

  ‘What do you mean, “supposed to have been”?’

  ‘She was taken away by Social Workers supposedly to be adopted by Carol and Kenneth Hughes, but she never arrived. And the Social Workers weren’t Social Workers . . .’

  ‘Who were they then?’

  ‘No idea. In fact, the Hughes’ own daughter – Caitlin – was killed by a hit-and-run driver, and then the mother – Carol Hughes – killed herself. But here’s what’s interesting – Kenneth Hughes and his wife knew nothing about the adoption.’

  ‘You’ve lost me,’ Sheila said.

  ‘Their daughter Caitlin was killed for her identity. Remember when I first came to Fairlight Cove I asked if you knew a Caitlin Hughes?’

  ‘I remember. So Sally Tomkins became Caitlin Hughes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I don’t know yet, but I’m nibbling round the edges. I think it has something to do with a secret organisation called Lancer Communications, but I still don’t know who they are or what they do.’

  Under normal operating conditions Sheila Howe wasn’t particularly pretty, but when she was perplexed and screwed up her face like the inside of an Miyagi oyster he wondered what he was doing sitting in bed with her.

  ‘I’m still confused. If she wasn’t adopted by the Hughes’ family, where did she go?’

  ‘That’s a very good question. What I do know is that Mr and Mrs Perez and two of the children they were fostering were murdered the day after Sally was taken away.’

  ‘Murdered! Are you sure?’

  ‘More or less. ’

  ‘That’s terrible.’

  ‘It certainly is.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘My only guess is that any and all witnesses are eliminated, so don’t become a witness yourself.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Don’t tell anybody what we’ve been talking about, and definitely don’t mention Lancer Communications to another living soul.’

  ‘I’m touched, Rodney. You care?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I feel as though what I’ve got to tell you is hardly anything in comparison to what you’ve told me. I suppose I’ll have to let you take advantage of me again to even things out.’

  ‘That’s not necessary.’

  ‘I insist.’

  ‘What can you tell me about Leonard and Fanny Tomkins then?’

  ‘They arrived carrying little Sally in June of 1985 and moved into 17 Fyrsway. Mostly, they kept themselves to themselves. Sally must have only been a couple of months old, yet Fanny looked as fresh as a daisy. Of course, this is a small village and there was lots of talk, but the truth of it never came out, otherwise I’d have heard about it. After a time people simply ironed over the creases and welcomed them into the village as one of their own.’

  ‘You think that Sally wasn’t their child?’

  ‘I didn’t say that, but that was one theory being discussed at the coffee mornings. Especially as Sally had blonde hair and blue eyes, yet both Leonard and Fanny had black hair and brown eyes. I’m no geneticist, but I don’t think that’s even possible. What do you think, Rodney?’

  ‘No, I don’t know either.’

  ‘And even if she wasn’t their biological child she could have been adopted, couldn’t she?’

  ‘I suppose she could have been – yes.’

  ‘There were some people who thought that maybe they were up to no good and had stolen the child, but talk like that didn’t last long. When they did venture out of their house they were friendly enough. Leonard stopped off for a pint in the local pub now and again and talked about cricket and football with the regulars, and Fanny gossiped with the old ladies in the Oxfam shop about the weather, the price of potatoes and such like. And they attended church on Sundays, so people thought that they couldn’t be all bad if they were worshipping the Lord once a week.’

  ‘What work did Leonard do?’

  ‘Said he was a self-employed graphic designer. Worked from home, had a few pictures on the wall to prove it and show people what he could do. Sometimes, men in business suits appeared for meetings about a project he’d be working on, and then they left. Pretty soon, it was as if they’d lived here all their lives. Sally started growing up, went to the village playscho
ol, onto the primary school and . . .’

  ‘. . . And then they were murdered, and Sally was taken into care?’

  ‘You’ve heard this story before, haven’t you?’

  His lip curled up. ‘I knew the ending. And these men in business suits – is there anything you can tell me about them?’

  ‘One man came once a year between 1985 and 1993. Mr Pettigrew from the ironmongers saw him one time in the car park of Priory Meadow shopping centre in Hastings. He was there getting supplies for his shop . . .’

  ‘The man?’

  Sheila rolled her eyes. ‘Mr Pettigrew, Rodney. The man arrived in a chauffeur-driven car with blacked-out windows and bodyguards, and then he climbed into a grey Mercedes that had been parked up waiting for him and drove to the village on his own.’

  ‘Did you recognise him at all?’

  ‘No, but Mr Pettigrew said that the blacked-out car had diplomatic plates. He knew that because he looked it up . . .’ She climbed out of bed naked and padded through into the living room.

  He could hear her talking to someone, and guessed it was on the phone seeing as she had no clothes on.

  She came back into the bedroom carrying a bright green post-it note. ‘There you go – the number plate of the blacked-out car.’

  Rodney looked at the registration number: 273D426. ‘That’s great. I should be able to find out who it belonged to.’

  ‘Anyway, people thought that he was just another client of Mr Tomkins who wanted to remain anonymous. And, of course, Mr Pettigrew didn’t see the man switching cars again, so everyone soon forgot about the incident.’

  ‘Except you?’

  ‘I never forget anything, Rodney.’

  ‘And Mr Pettigrew at the ironmongers?’

  ‘He only remembered because I jogged his memory.’

  ‘The man didn’t have blond hair and blue eyes, did he?’

  ‘Bald as a coot, and I don’t know what colour his eyes were. He arrived in the village, went into the Tomkins’ house, stayed for half-an-hour and then left.

  ‘Didn’t people think that the man might have been Sally’s father?’

  ‘If they did, they didn’t say it out loud.’

  ‘Thanks, Sheila.’

  ‘Oh, we haven’t finished yet,’ she said, sitting astride him. ‘I don’t want you leaving Fairlight Cove and telling everybody you meet how the postmistress didn’t feed you right . . .’

  ‘Feed me?’

  ‘I have some strawberry yoghurt, chocolate-chip ice cream and chilli dip . . .’

  ‘Chilli dip! I don’t think . . .’

  ‘Where’s your sense of adventure, Rodney?’

  ***

  While she was eating her ribeye steak with blue cheese sauce, she hacked into the security system at The Museum of London Archaeological Archive located at Mortimer Wheeler House in Hackney and ran the CCTV security tape for Tuesday afternoon.

  Nicholas Myers arrived and walked straight into the exhibition entitled: The Metropolitan Crime Museum Uncovered. The exhibition boasted original evidence from some of the UK’s most notorious crimes from Dr Crippen to the Kray Twins, the Great Train Robbery to the Millennium Dome diamond heist. She could see a briefcase with a syringe and poison; counterfeiting and forgery implements; black stocking-top masks used by the Stratton brothers who were the first men to be convicted in Great Britain using fingerprint evidence in 1905; and objects relating to the acid-bath murder of Olive Durand-Deacon by John Haigh in 1949.

  But Nicholas Myers wasn’t alone. Oh, the two men didn’t make it obvious they were having a conversation, but a keen observer such as herself could see that they were. They had their backs to each other. Myers was looking at one wall, the other man was looking at the opposite wall. As they shuffled along, they stood next to each other. She would liked to have been privy to their conversation, but there was no sound on the recording.

  The second man was older, probably between fifty-five and sixty-five with thinning grey hair and a Roman nose. She had the feeling she knew him, but from where?

  She froze the recording and stared at the man while she was eating her steak and skin-on chips. Eventually familiarisation crystallised in her facial recognition cells. She searched Google Images for the group photograph of the UK Chancellor and his team standing outside No.11 Downing Street in London. George Osborne was holding up William Gladstone’s old budget box. Was the budget really in that battered briefcase? And why didn’t George buy a new briefcase? Surely the UK Government couldn’t be that poor – could they?

  There were seven other people with the Chancellor in the picture, and the man she recognised in conversation with Myers at The Museum of London Archaeological Archive was the third person on George Osborne’s right. She clicked on the picture and went to the website, but no names were provided. After a brief search she found an article entitled HM Treasury team win special Civil Service Award, and underneath were all the names of those in the photograph. The man with Myers was called Simon Kilborn: Third Financial Secretary to the Treasury. Was he a member of the Druid Council? If he was, then he’d be her way in, and that’s what she needed – a finger of light in the darkness to point the way.

  What she needed to do now was follow a similar process to the one she’d used to find out about Nicholas Myers at New Scotland Yard. Only, she imagined it would be that much more difficult, because the Treasury was located at 1 Horse Guards Road in Westminster, known colloquially as GOGGS – Government Offices Great George Street. And she anticipated that it would be like trying to hack into Fort Knox. Not that she’d ever tried to hack into Fort Knox, but she wanted to try one day – when she wasn’t so busy.

  ***

  ‘It’s coming together, Dwyer.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  They were on their way to speak to Taras Jager at the cobbler’s shop in Soho on the corner of Poland Street and Oxford Street about the child’s shoeprints forensics had found under the corpse.

  ‘We have pieces.’

  ‘Pieces of what?’

  ‘The puzzle.’

  ‘Are you completing a different puzzle to me?’

  ‘You’re so negative, Dwyer. I feel depressed.’

  ‘I can understand why you might feel depressed, Sir. You have no partner, because I don’t classify myself as that unlucky individual; you’re at the bottom of the Inspectors’ chart because nobody actually likes you; you have no idea how to solve the case you’re working on; your wife has been murdered; you can’t find your daughter; you live in a weird commune with three women and a gaggle of children . . .’

  ‘I have other issues as well, you know.’ He was thinking of his eighty-seven year-old mum who was pregnant, married to a Burmese native and running an English cafe in Bago with Maggie Crenshaw; about the problems selling his mum’s house because the chartered surveyors had found a Roman Temple of Mithras beneath the foundations and archaeologists had moved in to study it; about Ruth and Duffy trying to get him to have a vasectomy; about the Chief keeping Miss Tinkley away from him; about Cheryl and their baby Poppy; about the fact that he didn’t have any idea where DI Gwen Taylor and their baby were; about Celia Tabbard and the issue of stopping his CSA payments . . . Yes, he had a lot of other issues. He wondered how he managed to find the motivation to get out of bed in the mornings.

  ‘I’m sure you do. Well, once the Chief has replaced you with someone who knows what they’re doing, or we’ve thrown the case onto the unsolved pile, your issues will no longer be my issues.’

  ‘They’re not your issues now, Sergeant.’

  ‘That’s true, but you always look as though you’ve got the weight of the world balancing on your puny shoulders, so I feel a bit sorry for you.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Yes . . . like I’d feel sorry for a snail on the pavement that someone had trodden on, or a slug that had been squashed by a spade, or a worm that . . ..’

  ‘Very kind.’

  As expected, they had trouble
parking in Soho.

  ‘Maybe we should have come on the tube,’ Dwyer said. ‘Oxford Circus is along there . . .’ She pointed left up Oxford Street. ‘. . . And Tottenham Court Road is down there . . .’ She pointed right.

  ‘Well we didn’t, so park the car.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On the pavement.’

  She glanced sideways at him. ‘That’s against the law.’

  ‘I have a “POLICE ON DUTY” sign in the boot.’

  ‘We’re not meant to use those.’

  ‘Should we just go back to the station and watch the DVD of the orgy then?’

  ‘It’s your car.’

  ‘Yes it is. Try not to knock down any pedestrians.’

  She beeped the horn and shouted through the windscreen, ‘GET OUT OF THE FUCKING WAY, YOU MORONS.’ Eventually, she manoeuvred the Mercedes onto the pavement so that the nearside wheels were on the double yellow lines.

  Quigg got out of the passenger side, retrieved the sign from the boot and placed it on the dashboard. ‘There, that should stop any undesirables from molesting my car.’

  ‘You hope.’

  They made their way into the Oxford Street Cobbler shop, which had a large glass window displaying a mishmash of adverts ranging from a local crèche called Tickle Me Silly Daycare to ballooning trips over London with Air Flight One. The door stood open. A podgy bald-headed man with dark matching tufts of hair above both ears had his back to them, and was busy working on a large red machine with revolving brushes and an array of other contraptions.

  Dwyer smacked her hand on the dirty brass bell sitting on the counter. ‘Hello?’

  The man turned round, switched the machine off and put down the red stiletto shoe he’d been working on. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Taras Jager?’

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  Dwyer produced her warrant card. ‘A couple of questions, if you’d be so kind?’

  ‘I have time. Business is slow as usual. The country is in the toilet. People don’t want to buy professionally-made shoes anymore, they want cheap rubbish that is mass-produced in China or Taiwan. We live in a throw-away society now. I earn my living making and repairing shoes, yet people no longer want to pay what it costs to make a good pair of shoes, and they don’t bring their throw-away shoes for repair. They wear inappropriate footwear like sandals, flip-flops and jellies. Austerity is killing the high street. The internet is killing the high street. The banks are killing the high street. I make as much money cutting keys as I do repairing shoes, and I can’t remember the last pair of shoes I made. Good morning. My time is your time.’