The Body on the Shore

by The Body on the Shore (retail) (epub)

  Still, one quite possible scenario would put paid to it.

  Two dead kids.

  Chapter 18

  The first full team meeting for the Lund kidnap investigation took place next morning on a freezing cold February Wednesday in a reassuringly well-equipped incident room at Mount Browne. Gillard’s team included DCs Hoskins and Hodges, Michelle Tsu and Rob Townsend. Geoff Meadows was there too, as an independent consultant, and would be joined later, Gillard hoped, by DI Mulholland and someone from the PR department. An abduction of two young children instantly created a news frenzy, as Rigby had predicted. After a hurried news conference the previous evening, most of that day’s papers had obliged by publishing family pictures of Amber and David, and CCTV stills of the Colsham Manor intruder. Though the articles quoted a police spokeswoman playing down any connection with the Peter Young shooting, the Daily Telegraph and Guardian had both linked them. ‘The Albanian Connection’ was already a live headline.

  ‘Rob, can you summarize where we are with tracing the kids?’ Gillard asked.

  Townsend was a studious-looking 30-year-old who might have been an accountant had something more interesting not turned up. He went to one of the whiteboards where he had already scrawled some headings. ‘There’s good news and bad news,’ he said. ‘We didn’t get the registration number of the vehicle the children got into, so ANPR is no help. But I have started by tracing every Fiat 500 of that colour rented within a 100-mile radius. We don’t have all the information yet, but it should come in later today.’

  ‘What about stolen vehicles?’ Gillard asked.

  ‘I chose the same 100-mile radius. We have 16 stolen Fiat 500s reported within the last week. But my guess is that a professional, if that’s what we’re dealing with, would only steal the vehicle a day in advance unless they were planning to create a false plate.’

  ‘And the obvious false plate would be a copy of the au pair’s car,’ Meadows said. He was wearing a surprisingly trendy light grey suit, one which matched his remaining fuzz of stubbly hair.

  ‘Exactly,’ Townsend said. ‘We’ve run all the stolen plates through the ANPR database. Excluding vehicles that are accounted for by joyriders or burn-outs, we have a couple of journeys logged, but nothing that would obviously indicate fleeing to an airport or ferry port. I’ve handed them on to the relevant local forces to pursue.’

  ‘That’s a pretty distinctive car,’ Hodges said. ‘You can’t easily steal them to order, or even respray to match without the right type of alloy wheels and all that. You can’t even be sure to hire them.’

  ‘That’s a fair point. What about the descriptions of the children?’ Gillard asked. ‘Any positive ID?’

  ‘No,’ Hodges said. ‘David Lund is fairly unremarkable, but Amber wears spectacles for a lazy eye and has a large birthmark on her forehead which is quite distinctive. I would have hoped that someone might have spotted them following the media coverage.’

  ‘Unless they are already hidden away,’ Gillard said. He had two civilian staffers currently manning an enquiry line, but they would need more. Hoskins had been allocated the task of going through all the thousands of mobile phone pictures that had been emailed in of children seen at motorway service stations, airports, ports, cafés and shopping centres who might be either David or Amber. ‘Any luck on the pictures, Carl?’

  ‘Nope. It’s quite quick work, really, but I’m struggling to keep up,’ Hoskins replied. ‘I might end up as cross-eyed as the tot herself.’

  Michelle Tsu rolled her eyes and exchanged a glance with Gillard.

  ‘So, Michelle, you followed up at the airports and ports. Any luck?’

  She stood up and went to a flipchart that she had already populated with extensive details of departures and arrivals. ‘I got detailed information on all the direct UK flights to Albania, which isn’t very many. There were a few children booked, but judging by the passport pictures they weren’t the Lund kids. Indirect flights are a bit more complicated, and I haven’t managed to chase all those down yet. The channel ports and Eurostar have sent me some initial information, but there are no obvious matches for their current or original names.’

  Meadows shook his head. ‘If we are assuming an Albanian angle, they would probably be on false passports. They aren’t hard to get in the Balkans.’ He shrugged. ‘And if this is a professional job, they are almost certainly no longer in the country.’

  Shoulders sagged around the room at this assessment from the man most experienced in dealing with Albanian organized crime.

  Colin Hodges put his hand up. ‘Sir, can I ask your professional opinion on one thing? If it is a bunch of Albanians, why do they want these two kids?’

  ‘It’s a very good question,’ Meadows said standing up and putting his hands in his pockets, where he began to jangle loose change. ‘The way I see it, it is one of two things. One, Dag Lund has upset some very significant organized crime group, perhaps with one of his business deals, and they have kidnapped the children for leverage. In that case the nationality of the children is not that important. Or two, the children themselves are relevant. What the little girl heard in the garden that night, about vengeance, might be true.’

  ‘Revenge against the children?’ Michelle asked, incredulously. ‘What could they have done to deserve that?’

  Meadows gave a grim little chuckle and shook his head. ‘It’s not what they’ve done, Michelle, it’s who they are. Particularly what family they originally came from.’

  * * *

  DI Claire Mulholland wasn’t entirely impressed to be handed the Peter Young murder case just when it seemed to be running out of steam. She liked Craig, but if he was being set up by the chief constable to lead the charge to rescue the Lund children, it seemed she had been left with a shovel to deal with what the cavalry always leave behind.

  She was at home, on her second glass of Sauvignon blanc, enjoying one of those rare evenings where no one else was in the house, reflecting on what she could find out about the murder that Craig had not. There were tantalising possibilities, but turning them into hard evidence seemed impossible. She had interviewed Laura Diaz a second time, and remained convinced that the victim’s wife knew more than she was letting on. There was no doubting the sincerity of her grief. Almost every mention of her husband brought floods of tears. Claire just couldn’t see the wife being complicit in the murder, but conversely her expressions of ignorance about his background and what may have befallen him didn’t feel quite genuine either.

  She had tried to close off all the loose ends. She had re-interviewed all of the Kurdish family members who had stayed above the kebab house in recent months, an exhausting process over the course of a week involving translators, the first of whom was vetoed by the family on the grounds that he was Turkish, and in their view biased against them. All that was uncovered were a few visa irregularities. In the end, the fact the windows of that flat didn’t really line up with the bullet trajectories rendered it moot. She also re-interviewed the other staff members at Hampton, Deedes, Gooding. One, with another architect called Derek Prichard, did produce a useful nugget of information.

  Prichard recalled that Peter Young had several months ago been involved in an altercation over parking, ‘There was this bloke who kept parking his van in our car park overnight,’ Prichard had told her. ‘We’ve only got six allocated spaces, and Peter, because he liked to get in early, often found this van still in one of the spaces.’

  As Prichard described it, the van man was a bit of a bruiser, and when Peter challenged him on one occasion, there had been a bit of pushing and shoving. The whole thing smouldered on and off for weeks, until one evening, when Peter was about to drive home, he found his car had been vandalized, with scratches down both sides and the wipers broken off.

  ‘Was this ever reported to the police?’ Mulholland asked.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Prichard. ‘I remember a WPC coming to the office. I think she went and had a word with the bloke.’
r />   Perturbed to have missed this useful piece of background, Mulholland had checked through the records and struck gold. The registered owner of the van, visited by the female officer, was none other than Ryan Hardcastle, the ex-con who lived above the tattoo parlour. To discover he had a motive to hurt Peter Young was a significant breakthrough. It was something she would pursue next day.

  * * *

  Mulholland’s 9 a.m. meeting the next day had been assigned to the small incident room next door to the giant modern one allocated to the Lund kidnap. For now, she was still able to call on the full team that had been on the Peter Young case since the start. That included the familiar overweight figures of Tweedledum and Tweedledee who were going through more CCTV as she arrived.

  ‘Any breakthrough?’ she asked. They shook their heads. ‘It’s just a bit more we got from Surbiton railway station,’ Hodges said. ‘Haven’t found our man on it yet.’

  At that moment Craig Gillard walked in, still in his coat, with a coffee in hand. ‘You might find him on this,’ he said, digging out of his pocket a copy of the CCTV disc he’d made the day before. ‘It’s the intruder at Colsham Manor.’

  ‘That’s brilliant,’ Claire said, feeling that she’d just had her thunder stolen. ‘How’s the search for the Lund children going?’

  He shook his head. ‘Nothing yet.’ He looked exhausted, as if he hadn’t slept at all. That’s what happens when Alison Rigby gets on your case.

  Carl Hoskins took the disc from Gillard and slid it into the terminal in front of him. ‘Go to 2.19 a.m.’ Gillard said.

  Hoskins fast-forwarded to the correct time. The image of the intruder was well lit, better than anything they had previously seen of their suspect. ‘Aha,’ Mulholland said. ‘It could be the same guy from the bus, couldn’t it?’

  On the adjacent terminal, Colin Hodges pulled up the best pictures they had of the man who had been on the bus. All four of them looked from one screen to the other, several times. ‘Definitely similar,’ Hoskins said. ‘Light hair, maybe combed a bit different.’

  ‘No,’ Gillard said. ‘He looks different to me.’

  ‘No nose ring on the Colsham intruder,’ Hodges said.

  ‘True, but the beard’s pretty much the same,’ Hoskins said.

  ‘The one from the bus looks a bit like a young Bjorn Borg,’ Mulholland said. ‘This one, I don’t know, has a bit more of a delicate face.’

  ‘A bit girlish, you might say,’ Hoskins added.

  ‘Amber Lund got it spot on,’ Gillard said. ‘She called him an angel. He offered to take her to see her mummy in heaven.’

  Mulholland turned to him. ‘That’s a thinly veiled threat to kill her, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t think she understood it, fortunately,’ Gillard said.

  ‘She might do by now,’ Hodges said. ‘I think now he’s got them two kids to himself he won’t turn out to be so angelic.’

  No one said a word for a full minute, then Hoskins piped up. ‘Pardon me, ma’am. If we have now officially concluded this geezer at the manor isn’t the guy off the bus, then who shot Peter Young?’

  Mulholland was horrified to see the three men turn to look at her, as if she was suddenly expected, after less than 12 hours on the case, to magic the answer from thin air.

  * * *

  It was just after 10 a.m. on Thursday when the courier arrived with the express DNA test results for Colsham Manor that Gillard had ordered on the Tuesday afternoon. After more than 36 hours with Rigby and the press breathing down his neck it would be a relief to be able to have some fresh facts to work with, and perhaps something to tell the press. He summoned the team together in the large incident room. He then put his head through to the next-door incident room to alert Claire Mulholland, who was talking to Geoff Meadows, and rang up for Christine McCafferty, the PR officer assigned to the case.

  ‘Okay, this is hot off the press,’ he said, once they were all assembled. Everyone huddled around as Gillard leafed through the documents until he got to Amber’s. He speed-read the summary then gave a little groan of disappointment. ‘I was hoping we might find a familial DNA connection between Peter Young and the missing kids. There isn’t one, beyond shared ethnicity, which showed up in the mitochondrial tests.’

  ‘You were smart to order both familial and mitochondrial tests,’ Meadows said. ‘Familial tests rely on paternal linkage through the Y chromosome, while mitochondrial traces the mother’s side through the power-generating element of each cell which is passed down the female line. If you put the two together you can be far more sure of the family links.’

  ‘Sorry to be thick,’ said Hodges. ‘But why might there have been a family connection?’

  ‘I think I can answer that,’ says Meadows. ‘If Young was a relative of the abducted children, it might indicate a vendetta. Albania is known for them. They have vicious blood feuds that last centuries. I’m not kidding. Tit-for-tat, for decade after decade.’

  ‘You don’t have to go to Albania to find a feud,’ said Michelle. ‘Sophie Lund and her neighbour are apparently at each other’s throats the whole time.’

  Gillard handed out one DNA report to each officer, to scan through for useful information. He kept two, which he put in a desk to peruse later. They were the results for Alison Rigby and Geraldine Hinchcliffe.

  ‘I’ve got the residuals report,’ said Michelle, who seemed already to be on the third page. ‘And it’s very interesting. Setting aside those who live or work at Colsham Manor, we’ve got three non-eliminated DNA samples. Two are from inside the manor, one of which was found quite extensively in a spare bedroom and en-suite bathroom…’

  ‘That’s probably an overnight guest,’ Gillard said. ‘It could be the children’s Albanian aunt who stayed with them over Christmas.’

  Michelle flipped over a page and then nodded. ‘Yes, the familial test does show a family connection: more than 75 per cent of the markers match with the kids. So that’s probably her, then.’

  ‘Any others?’ Gillard asked.

  ‘Two other unidentified samples on outside door handles, and on the external WC in Colsham Manor’s outbuildings,’ she said, flipping over another page. ‘There are no familial or mitochondrial connections shown.’

  ‘So nothing which proves the existence of our Albanian-speaking intruder,’ Gillard said.

  ‘Wow, I don’t think we expected this,’ Rob Townsend interrupted, waving a bulky sheaf of documents to attract attention. ‘There’s a familial match of the children against the national DNA database.’

  ‘Really?’ Gillard said.

  ‘Yes, there was an unidentified dead body found on the Lincolnshire coast a couple of weeks ago. It’s a close familial match to both David and Amber.’

  ‘Lincolnshire? That’s got to be 200 miles away. Why didn’t we know about this?’ Gillard asked.

  ‘Well, sir,’ Townsend said. ‘I’ve got a summary report. It seems Lincolnshire Police still have no idea who this person was. There was no ID on the body.’

  ‘Does it give a cause of death?’ Gillard asked. ‘Did he drown?’

  The seconds seemed to extend as Townsend flicked through pages of printout. ‘No, not drowning.’ He looked up. ‘Gunshot to the head. Short range.’

  ‘Front or back?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Front or back, Rob – I’m trying to establish whether they think it’s suicide or murder,’ Gillard said. ‘Gunshot to the back of the head would pretty much eliminate suicide.’

  ‘Yes, sir, it was the back of the head, exit wound at the front.’

  ‘Not a great time to be an Albanian in Britain,’ Hodges muttered.

  ‘I bet Lincolnshire Police will be as surprised as us about him being from the same family as the Lund kids,’ Townsend said.

  ‘Get on to it, Rob. I want to be copied in on everything Lincolnshire Police have on their investigation.’

  ‘Righto, sir,’ Townsend said.

  ‘But what about Peter Young?�
� Mulholland interrupted. ‘Is he connected to this or not?’

  ‘According to this, no,’ Gillard replied. ‘No familial overlap, although the mitochondrial test does confirm him as being of Albanian origin, like many Kosovans.’ He dropped the documents on the table and went to the whiteboard, wiping a space clear with a cloth. With marker pen he drew two boxes, side by side. ‘All right, everyone, here’s something to get you heads around. Box A,’ he said. Inside it he drew four figures, two adults and two children. ‘We have one biological family: the Lund kids, their aunt.’ He drew a triangular skirt on one figure. ‘Plus the guy found on the beach in Lincolnshire. Makes four.’ He then drew a second box and sketched in it a single figure. ‘Box B, Peter Young, from another family. And no one else, so far.’ He then drew a gun beneath the boxes and dotted a line from it into each box, one to the head of Peter Young, the other to the Lincolnshire man. Gillard then looked across the room at each detective there. ‘All right, so who’s got GCSE or O level maths?’

  The lack of replies made him smile. ‘Come on, I went to a secondary modern, and even I did Venn diagrams. It’s a question of logic.’ He saw Michelle Tsu nod her head. ‘Come on, then, Michelle.’

  She stood up and came to the board. ‘If each family is a set, we need to establish if our perpetrator is a member of one or both sets or outside them both.’ She drew a small gun with a question mark in both boxes.

  ‘Okay,’ Gillard said, as she sat down. ‘Anything wrong with that?’

  ‘We could have more than one perpetrator?’ Hoskins asked.

  ‘True, and we mustn’t forget that possibility. But there’s an equally important issue.’ He drew a firm line back and forth to wall off the boxes from each other. ‘The DNA tests told us that Peter Young has no familial overlap with anyone in Box A, right? Ergo, and that isn’t a word you will often hear me say, there is no intersection of sets between Box A and Box B. That is obviously true for the five people on this whiteboard, but it also encompasses the unknown perpetrator. The murderer can have a blood connection to either family, but not to both. Only to one or none.’