At the next hold-up, Gillard called up his emails. There was a reply from Geoff Meadows, a former detective chief superintendent at the National Crime Agency. Meadows had recently retired and ran a busy security consultancy, but remained one of the few experts on Albanian crime outside academia. He had even taught himself the language, which had proved its value when he sat in on interrogations of Albanian criminals in Britain. In his earlier years, Meadows had mentored Gillard in his first days on the Surrey force. Gillard had immediately thought of Meadows when he heard of the Albanian angle, and had forwarded Sophie’s photo of the sprayed graffito on her stable door to him.
He punched in the number and called Meadows.
‘So you got something for me, Geoff?’ he said when he was finally patched in.
‘Can’t talk too much now, just about to go into a meeting on a VAT fraud case. But that image reminded me of something I’d seen before, branded on the neck of an informer: a triple-headed eagle with crossed scimitars beneath.’
‘A dead informer?’
Meadows laughed. ‘Not at the time he was branded. But they killed him, yes. This wasn’t in Britain, I hasten to add. I was on a joint operation in Tirana.’
‘In Albania?’ Gillard asked, fearing that his hunch was right.
Meadows chuckled and then back-pedalled a bit. ‘Well, it’s only a resemblance. It’s hardly likely to turn up in a rural area in Surrey I suppose. Still…’
‘Geoff, what are you telling me?’
‘Look, Craig, I really hope I’m wrong, because that’s the symbol of the Dragusha clan.’ He turned away to have a brief conversation with somebody else.
‘Who are they?’ Gillard asked. It was a couple of minutes before Meadows was able to return to the call.
‘Like I said, I really hope I’m wrong. Because the Dragusha are the most murderous mafia family in Albania.’
* * *
Sophie Lund’s interview with PC Adrian Kerrigan on Wednesday morning was every bit as disappointing as she had expected. Scepticism oozed from the man as he sat on her sofa, making intermittent jottings in a small notebook but much larger forays into the plate of biscuits she had provided. It was only with reluctance, and after the plain chocolate digestives had been consumed, that he agreed to follow her to the beech tree where she had seen the man. Sophie had already rooted around thoroughly for cigarette ends, footprints, anything that would prove the existence of what Amber continued to call an angel.
She had kept Amber back from school so that she could recount to the policeman the conversation she had had with the man, but Kerrigan said that wasn’t necessary.
‘Why isn’t it necessary?’ Sophie asked.
‘Children as young as this are not reliable witnesses, generally speaking. She had just woken up, as you said yourself.’
‘Well, I had woken up too. And I can tell you I bloody saw him. Do you want a description of what he looks like or not?’
‘Yes, all right,’ Kerrigan said with a sigh. ‘Fire away.’
‘He was slim and quite well-dressed. He had light-coloured hair and a pale beard. And he seemed quite fit. He moved pretty fast when I appeared at the window.’
‘Age?’
‘Hard to say. Mid-30s? Possibly 40?’
Kerrigan’s chorus of noncommittal murmurings in response to Sophie’s retelling of last night’s events was only interrupted by the approaching figure of Michael. The estate manager was clad in his usual attire of worsted jacket, mustard-coloured corduroys and stout brown lace-up shoes. Kerrigan greeted him with a solid handshake, and a certain matiness, as if sanity had now arrived. As they shared some private joke, Sophie’s anger grew. Bloody men, she thought.
Once the constable had waddled back to his car with evident relief, she reflected that there was only one piece of advice he had given her that she was going to follow: to reconnect the CCTV. In fact she was going to go better than that. She was going to expand it.
* * *
Tweedledum and Tweedledee took the best part of a week to get through all of the CCTV footage from pedestrian crossings, buses and Surbiton railway station, and they were the first to acknowledge they hadn’t made as much progress as they’d hoped in identifying their only suspect in the murder of architect Peter Young. DC Carl Hoskins stood in front of the daily incident room meeting and reported: ‘We have two seconds of footage from the bus, five seconds of him crossing the road, and a possible brief glimpse at Surbiton station a week earlier. But we don’t yet know who he is.’
DC Colin Hodges took up the theme. ‘We’ve got a pretty decent idea of what he looks like. He is about five foot ten tall, medium build, may have a slight wispy beard, and his hair is light-coloured. There may be a nose ring. The bag he’s carrying is a leather shoulder bag or satchel made by Next and sold only in their stores. He is wearing canvas high-top baseball shoes, but not, we think, a well-known brand.’ He turned to Hoskins to continue.
‘Enquiries at the girls’ school, as you know, turned up nothing. Only the one girl who thinks she saw him at Surbiton station. I went to St Cuthbert’s preparatory school earlier in the week and managed to speak to a number of the boys who are regular travellers on the morning bus. One of them thinks he has seen him. The boy said, unprompted, that the man got off at Coulton Road, which dovetails with the CCTV footage we have on the pedestrian crossing by that stop.’
‘But Carl, the boys always sit downstairs, don’t they?’ interjected Gillard.
‘That’s right. He saw him downstairs, but he doesn’t remember which day.’
‘That’s going to be a problem for us, isn’t it?’ Mulholland asked. ‘If the only place he’s been seen is downstairs on this bus, he’s not likely to have been the shooter.’
‘Unless he was upstairs on another occasion,’ Hodges suggested.
‘Let’s take a step back,’ Gillard said. ‘If you want to kill someone, you need to know where they will reliably be at a certain time. Peter Young was clearly visible in that window from quite early each day. If I was a hit man, I would have done my initial reconnaissance by car or on foot. I’d have needed just one prior trip on the bus to make sure the shot was possible, so obviously not downstairs. I would hardly be a regular bus user.’
‘But how reliable is the recollection of these kids?’ Mulholland asked. ‘Maybe he just saw the man coming downstairs and off the bus.’
‘Well, they should be astute. St Cuthbert’s has over the years produced one former prime minister and half a dozen Cabinet ministers,’ Gillard began.
Hodges laughed. ‘Nah, sir. What it means is they are in intensive training for a career of lying and evasion, and nothing they say can ever be trusted.’
* * *
For almost a week there had been no sign of the angel. Dag had returned home from Houston on Friday with a bunch of red roses for Sophie. They had made love passionately all that afternoon, while Estela took the children on a prearranged nature trip to see the newborn fauns at the venison farm at the far end of Tithe Lane. Dag was very worried, and had even offered to postpone his next trip to the Gulf for a week. Feeling a bit pathetic, Sophie had talked him out of it. After all, it was not as if she hadn’t made her own arrangements to feel safer at night.
The security company had done a good job. The lawns were now covered by a series of night-vision cameras, directional and sound-activated, including one carefully disguised in the beech tree below which the man had appeared. Michael had agreed to now lock the main gates at night, something that even the previous owner Clive Gashley had not done. She had even broached, with Geraldine Hinchcliffe, the subject of locking the smaller back gates at Tithe Lane. However, Sophie’s email of two days ago had not yet been answered.
Even PC Kerrigan had made a return visit, unexpectedly, late on Monday afternoon. Sophie showed him all the new security arrangements, and it was only when they both stood again at the beech tree, looking back at the magnificent manor house, that the constable noticed something.
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‘Mrs Lund, what are those objects in the gutters?’ He pointed out two small bundles, one at either end of the house, below the attic windows.
‘I don’t know,’ Sophie replied. ‘I don’t have my binoculars with me.’ When they walked back close to the house, the angle was too low for them to be able to see, so Sophie led the constable back via the boot room, where she asked him to remove his outdoor shoes, and in stockinged feet they ascended the main staircase to the galleried second floor. There were two front attic bedrooms here, one used as a box room, the other as a toy room. They entered the toy room first, and Sophie fumbled with the keys to the newly installed window locks. She then pulled open the small casement windows and looked out and down to the gutter. Sitting there in a mulch of leaves, wet and bedraggled, was one of the charity shop teddy bears that she had bought for Balfour to run about with a year or so ago.
‘Who put that there?’ she asked, of no one in particular.
‘Perhaps your son, to torment his sister?’ the PC replied.
‘But it’s the dog’s teddy, not hers.’
‘Who else could have put it there?’ he asked. ‘The little girl could surely not have reached.’
She dared not think who else. It had to be David.
They went to the other attic room, and below that window was a more fearsome mannequin. One of David’s own hooded sports tops, stuffed with dog towels, and with a drawn paper face. The arms were made of sticks, and taped to one was a broken plastic toy pistol, which Sophie thought had been thrown away.
‘Kids, eh?’ Kerrigan said, lifting the mannequin back into the room. ‘I expect you’ll find that your son made the other one in the wood too.’
‘No, absolutely not. He promised me that it wasn’t him.’
The PC shrugged, with a face that said ‘case solved’.
Sophie decided that she was going to have a proper talk with David when he got back from school.
* * *
Sophie took David up to the toy room and asked him whether he had made something to sit in the gutter. ‘Did you make a little mannequin out of Balfour’s chewing teddy?’ she asked.
‘It was a monkey,’ David said. ‘To protect us.’
‘What do you mean, a monkey? How can it protect us?’
‘Against the sy të keq. The evil eye.’
‘Do you mean the man that Amber saw?’
David looked down. ‘I don’t know, I didn’t see him. But a monkey helps us all. In Albania, everyone uses monkeys to protect what they have.’ David felt for Sophie’s hand and pulled her by the fingers to his own room. He opened the window and showed her in the gutter below his own attic window there was a stuffed rabbit, again one of Balfour’s, dangling from a wire that went around the window catch. ‘Any bad people will see the monkeys, and they will go away.’
Sophie stroked the little boy’s dark hair and his warm cheek. ‘David. I have to ask you again. Did you make a monkey in the woods? The one of the little girl with Amber’s wellies that was hung above the bridge?’
He didn’t look at her, but he shook his head emphatically. Sophie hadn’t taken either of the children to see the mannequin, in case it gave them nightmares. But she had described it to David. ‘You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?’
He shook his head, and said solemnly: ‘No, Mummy.’
* * *
That night, after the children had gone to bed, Sophie prowled around the house, listening to the rising wind that bent the leafless trees in the woods at the back and howled down the chimneys. She was feeling anxious and lonely. Dag was in Qatar, and wouldn’t be back until Friday. She stopped outside Amber’s room, listening carefully. She eased open the door and watched her daughter, asleep in the big bed at the centre of her row of dolls, Mimi the panda clasped to her cheek, and on the other side a cuddly kitten that Teto Zerina had given her which made a noise when you pressed its tummy. The curtains were not fully drawn, and moonlight caressed Amber’s delicate forehead and pinkly wet lips. Only her eyelashes moved, traversing some dreamscape, perhaps another country, another life, before this one.
Sophie retreated carefully from the room without waking the child, easing the door closed, and then climbed the final flight of stairs to the attic level. Her hand was poised over the corridor’s light switch, but she did not touch it. David’s bedroom was the second on the left, and she could see fingers of light from under the ill-fitting door, and the faint sound of his voice. It was well after ten, and he should be asleep. She tiptoed along the edge of the wood-panelled hallway to avoid setting off a well-known creaky floorboard. She pressed her ear to the door of his room, praying that what she heard was not another conversation between the intruder and one of her children.
David was talking in Albanian, but she soon realized that the quality of the sound indicated that the window was closed. She opened the door and walked in. David was sitting on the bed in his pyjamas with a mobile phone to his ear.
‘Who on earth are you talking to at this time of night?’ she asked, rushing to him. ‘You should be asleep.’
‘Teto Zerina,’ the boy said, putting the phone down. Sophie snatched up the mobile, but saw the call had been ended. The ugly old ‘dumb phone’ was the one that Zerina had given to the children to share a year ago, so that they could call her cheaply. Sophie didn’t approve of the children having their own phone, but Zerina had persuaded her that this would be her lifeline to them.
‘Did she ring you?’ Sophie asked.
David nodded.
‘What did she want?’
He seemed to stumble uncharacteristically over his reply. ‘To see if Amber is having nightmares still,’ he replied eventually.
‘Calling at this time of night is likely to give both of you nightmares. I’m going to call her and tell her not to ring so late.’ And it would be nice if she’d rung her first, Sophie thought.
* * *
DI Claire Mulholland had been digging into Peter Young’s background and had repeatedly come up against a brick wall. Beyond the limited documents kept by Barnardo’s and a recording of an interview with his grandmother, nothing was known for sure except the fact of a boy being found in Canterbury. Her request for the detailed case notes for the immigration decision makers seemed to have stalled. She fully expected that she would be eventually told that they had been lost.
Peter Young had given his original name as Pjetër Ardian Cela, an Albanian living in Kosovo, a semi-autonomous region of southern Serbia. His birth town was given as Gjakova, and his parents had died in the Kosovan war in 1999 when Serb forces had intervened to end a separatist uprising. Thereafter he was brought up by his grandmother until he was old enough, in her view, to leave in pursuit of a better life. He joined hundreds of other Kosovan child refugees who came to Britain each year from 1999 onwards.
When Claire had emailed the Kosovan authorities in the capital, Pristina, to check the details kept by Barnardo’s, the reply came back that records of births in the country were partial, and the only one of that name registered in this town was of a baby who had died in 2002. There was no record of death certificates issued for his parents either, nor of the grandmother. The official advised that as the family name indicated someone of Albanian extraction, which was of course the majority ethnic group within Kosovo, writing to the Albanian authorities in Tirana would be the best course of action.
Claire was gradually coming around to Laura Diaz’s theory about her husband. Peter Young might not be an orphan. He could have been sent to Britain with a false identity that was hard to trace to give him a fresh start. By someone, probably family, who had gone to enormous lengths to try to keep Peter Young safe.
But from whom?
The strategy had failed. What would the family do now he was dead?
She had a couple of ideas, but wasn’t quite ready to share them with anyone.
Chapter 15
Craig Gillard lifted the glass and peered at the colourless liquid, then held it to his n
ose before taking a sip. It was a fiery liquor, but with fruity overtones. ‘Strong, but tasty. What’s it called again?’
‘It’s raki,’ Geoff Meadows replied, before turning his gaze across the table, as he had sporadically all evening, to stare at Gillard’s younger and quite glamorous wife. ‘Like to try the Albanian national tipple, Sam?’
‘All right,’ she said.
Madeleine Meadows, cleaning away the dessert plates, gave a little shake of her head, but Sam wasn’t going to take the hint. She sniffed the glass and then chugged it in one, before exhaling throatily. ‘Whoa,’ she gasped. ‘Rocket fuel.’
‘Good job you’re not driving us home tonight,’ Gillard said.
‘I didn’t think you’d like it,’ Madeleine said, bringing out a cheeseboard laden with a half-dozen wedges. ‘It’s far too strong for me.’
‘You’ve got to try it the way the locals do,’ Sam said, grinning at her husband.
Craig smiled back, glad to see she hadn’t lost her adventurous spirit. They had enjoyed an excellent meal, prepared mainly by Geoff himself, who was a consummate chef. After a ten-year gap in their friendship, Craig was happy that his old mentor had followed up with a dinner party invitation soon after they had talked on the phone about Albanian crime gangs. Geoff had lost most of his hair, now just a fuzz of grey, and his face was lined, but he still appeared to have the upright, athletic build that had made him such a fiendishly tough opponent on the squash court.
The Body on the Shore Page 10