The Body on the Shore

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

  ‘I tried everything I could to talk her out of it,’ Anderson shrugged.

  She turned back to the corpse. ‘The major task is to give him a quick shot of body vodka, or embalming fluid, to give it its more formal title.’ From the tray she picked up a terrifying hook-ended instrument. ‘This is an aneurysm hook, which we use to find ourselves a nice fat artery,’ she said. She took a scalpel and cut half an inch of the previous incision near the right collarbone. ‘I’m looking for the carotid,’ she said. It was like cutting raw fish; there was almost no blood. It was only when she pressed the aneurysm hook in and snagged a pale-blue blood vessel that the wound began to weep. She pulled the reluctant artery until it emerged from his neck like a pale slug and slid the hook fully under so it could not retreat into its hole. Tina cut into the artery with a scalpel and connected one of the rubber pipes with a cannula. A gout of dark blood emerged. She then cut another blood vessel, which she explained was the jugular vein, and fitted a drain tube into it. ‘Blood out, glutaraldehyde in.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Mulholland asked, pointing to a tubular dagger on the tray.

  ‘That’s called a trocar, used to aspirate organs, to let out foul air from small intestines, pancreas and stomach,’ she said. ‘We don’t need it in this case, because it was done when the post-mortem took place.’

  It took a few more minutes to set up the embalming machine, and once it was running Tina took some cotton wadding and popped it into the corpse’s throat. ‘That stops him purging any fluids or vomit while he’s being moved. I’ve already done the anus.’ She took two small plastic cups about an inch across and slid them under the eyelids. ‘His eyes have dehydrated a lot in the week since he died, so that makes them look normal. We also use a kind of mouth guard to give his cheeks some shape.’ From her tray she took an already threaded needle and with practised hands reached into his mouth, put a suture behind the front teeth, under them and up in front, then through the upper jaw into the nose, and via the septum down again. She tightened the thread, closing the knot and tying it, before poking it back in his mouth. ‘There, no one can see that.’

  ‘What’s it for?’ Claire asked.

  ‘We can’t have his gob drifting open as if waiting for the communion wafer, can we?’

  Once finished, she took a small jar of moisturizer and delicately worked it into the face, and particularly the eyelids and cheeks. Even to Claire Mulholland’s amateur eye, it was clear that Peter Young looked a bit livelier, a bit rosier in the flesh than he had before. The body was then moved to a specialist body hoist which facilitated dressing. ‘This means we never have to turn the deceased over,’ Tina said, as she slid a pair of trousers onto Young’s body and fastened them at the waist. ‘That’s important because we can get purging of the stomach contents or damage to his face.’ She and Charles deftly lifted the shoulders and slid on the suit jacket that he was to wear. ‘A lot of people these days go for T-shirt and shorts, or jeans. Whatever the deceased was comfortable wearing.’

  Tina laughed. ‘My boyfriend complains that I’m a bit too practised stripping him at bedtime. He knows where I do my rehearsals.’ This was a woman who clearly loved her job.

  Finally, there were socks and shoes and a tie to put on.

  His tasks over, Anderson left to make a phone call. While Tina stepped out of the room to get some equipment, Claire was left for a moment alone with the corpse of Peter Young. This was the moment she had been waiting for. She had set everything up in advance, and it had been ready since the first moment she walked in. She unzipped the murder victim’s flies, then slid an object into the newspaper wadding that bulked out the crotch of his trousers. She withdrew her hand and zipped him up again.

  ‘Goodbye, Peter,’ she said. ‘It’s been nice knowing you. If I’m ever passing I’ll let you know,’ she said.

  By the time Tina came back into the room, DI Claire Mulholland was ready to leave.

  She emerged into the reception room of the funeral director’s just as Charles Anderson was greeting a family. His tiny ears seemed to waggle in sympathy as he nodded his head at the tale of grief he was told. The sombre mood was shattered by the vibration of Mulholland’s phone. She apologized and made her exit onto the street.

  ‘Got something nice for you,’ said DC Colin Hodges. ‘We’ve found the man on the bus.’

  * * *

  Oleg Sikorsky sat in the interview room at Surbiton police station, wearing the same fashionable Puffa jacket and high-top canvas shoes that had been seen on the CCTV. Claire peered through the window at a man who seemed to fit not only the description of the man on the bus, but in the flesh slightly resembled the Albanian-speaking intruder at Colsham Manor too. He was about five foot ten, had nearly shoulder-length sandy hair, a thin wispy beard and a nose ring. The only problem with all of this, as the desk sergeant explained, is that he had come in voluntarily.

  ‘He’s Polish, was back in London on business, said he saw himself on the TV and was really worried.’

  Hodges banged his way backwards through a series of doors from the street with three coffees clutched to his chest. He handed one to Claire, another to the desk sergeant and took a tentative sip at his own. Before they went in, they ran over the details that Sikorsky had given. He was a self-employed graphic artist, based in Milan, who had been visiting Britain on and off for two years and had a girlfriend in Hersham. Every time he came to London, which was perhaps three or four times a year, he would go and see her.

  ‘So why wasn’t he on the train from Waterloo?’ Claire asked. ‘Hersham is the next stop after Esher, isn’t it?’

  ‘He says he was, as far as Surbiton, but the service was suspended on that day, so he caught the bus most of the rest of the way.’

  ‘Did we know that there were problems with the trains on the day Peter Young was killed?’

  ‘I might have seen it,’ Hodges admitted. ‘It would have been hard to predict that it was relevant.’

  Mulholland sighed. ‘It sounds plausible. Shall we go in?

  * * *

  The Pole was a model of cooperation. Yes, he said he had been on the train, but got off at Surbiton when it was clear the service was not going any further because of signal failure. He decided to try his luck by bus, but stayed downstairs.

  ‘I like going upstairs on London buses, but this one was crazy busy with mad girls,’ he said. ‘I stayed downstairs with the old folks and the posh boys. I got off, I can’t remember which stop, and then walked to Esher.’

  Sikorsky spoke German, English and now Italian, as well as Polish. But he claimed not to know a word of Albanian. Asked about Colsham Manor he looked mystified. After half an hour Claire was convinced that this young man had absolutely nothing to do with either case. She would take a cheek swab anyway. She had one final question for him.

  ‘You said you did go upstairs?’

  ‘Only when I first got on the bus at Surbiton.’

  ‘Did you see anybody on the bus who looked suspicious? I mean, we’re looking for a male, carrying some kind of bag.’

  ‘I don’t remember anything like that. I only stayed at the top of the stairs for a moment or two.’

  After another half an hour, and after taking a cheek swab, they released him. ‘So what do you think?’ Hodges asked.

  ‘We’ll have to check his story in detail, but it all sounds plausible enough. The infrequency of his journeys explains why only one person recalled seeing him.’

  ‘But he’s got to be lying,’ Hodges said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because without him, ma’am, we’ve got nobody in the frame for the murder of Peter Young. Somebody fired that gun and murdered that poor bloke. If it’s not the Pole, who is it?’

  Tuesday evening, 5.30 p.m.

  Craig Gillard sat with Claire Mulholland in the Fat Friar café in Guildford. It was a hurried meal, of the deep-fried variety, grabbed between respective meetings, primarily to get away from Mount Browne for a while.

  �
��So it was the aunt who snatched the kids?’ Mulholland said, spearing a chip with her fork.

  ‘It looks that way,’ Gillard said. ‘She flies over, stays in a hotel nearby and keeps her head down. Sophie Lund presumably has no idea she is there. Auntie knows what car the au pair uses from her previous visit at Christmas. It’s a tricky problem for Auntie, because with the obsession over paedophiles there is no end of teachers and parents keeping an eye out at the school gates. So she needs an identical car. She softens up the garage by going to test drive a different car every day for three days. By the third day she’s an old friend, and she’s had plenty of practice going the route to the school and back. So on day three, they let her drive the car on her own. She nips up to the school early, the kids see the car and are presumably delighted to see Auntie Zerina.’

  ‘So there’s nothing that would make the lollipop lady suspicious.’

  ‘Nope. She then drives the car to some secluded spot where she’s parked her own car, not at the garage but nearby. She moves the kids into that car while she returns the Fiat. The car’s away less than half an hour. She then walks back and drives off, presumably to the Continent, in some grey Hyundai whose number we don’t know.’

  ‘It’s brilliant.’

  ‘It’s bloody frustrating, that is what it is,’ Gillard said, chewing on a sausage. ‘Being family, she could easily claim to have had permission to take them. We’re chasing up her passport details with ports and airports. But at least on the bigger picture we have much less reason to worry about the safety of the kids.’

  ‘That’s a relief, then,’ Mulholland said.

  For a few moments there was no conversation, then she spoke.

  ‘They’re burying Peter Young tomorrow. Widow Laura wanted an open casket.’

  ‘What, with bullet holes in his head?’

  She nodded. ‘I watched them prepare him for the hereafter.’

  ‘Spare me the details,’ Gillard said with a grin as he smeared some more mustard on the remains of his sausage.

  ‘I’ve got a cunning plan,’ she said. ‘I’ve done my research. It’s a good way to test if there really is an Albanian angle. I’ll let you know if it works out.’

  Gillard grunted. ‘Have you seen any sign of a Dragusha symbol – you know, that three-headed eagle job – in Young’s house?’

  ‘No. I had a look when you sent it to me. Nothing like that.’

  Gillard scooped up the last of his chips onto his fork. ‘The way this is going it looks like all roads lead to Albania. It might be the only way we get the answers we are looking for.’

  Chapter 21

  By Wednesday’s incident room meeting, many of the blanks in Zerina Moretti’s movements had been filled in. The whiteboards were filled with notes, and Rob Townsend had set up a laptop projector.

  ‘Okay,’ said Gillard. ‘First the good news as regards Amber and David Lund.’ He described the identification of the children’s aunt from the test drive of the Fiat 500. ‘She boarded a car ferry from Dover to Calais later on the same day, driving a grey Hyundai hatchback. There was no record of the children as passengers, but they could easily have been hidden. I’ve got the details of her mobile, and with the help of the French police we’ve been able to track it. Though it has been off a good deal of the time, it does appear she drove down through France and across into Italy.’

  ‘Why did she do all this in secret?’ Michelle Tsu asked.

  ‘We don’t know. The upshot is that this may well now become a more complicated case. Surrey Social Services have got a Family Court order to go after her, and a couple of senior social workers who are liaising with the Italian police.’

  ‘But the big picture is that the children are in Italy and safe,’ Mulholland said.

  ‘We think so. We’ve also asked the Italian police to help, starting with an interview with her. But we’ve been warned that this may take a while.’ Gillard sighed. ‘All right, Colin, what have you discovered?’

  DC Colin Hodges stood up and went to one of the whiteboards. ‘I went round with CSI yesterday afternoon to the back of Colsham Manor where the handgun casings were found. It’s nearly half a mile from the Manor, but it is their land. As the DCI suggested, someone had been doing target practice in the walled garden. It was a good two hours’ work to clear enough weeds to find and be able to retrieve any bullets. But we got two. They’re going off for analysis, but one thing that was obvious immediately, because of the deformed flower shape of the projectile, is that they are hollow-point.’

  ‘So the same as the ammunition used to dispatch Peter Young,’ said Michelle Tsu.

  ‘Precisely,’ responded Hodges.

  ‘So whoever killed the architect was practising near Colsham Manor,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t think we can be sure of that,’ Gillard said.

  ‘To me,’ Mulholland said, ‘everything seems to be professional except doing target practice so close to where the children lived. And this strange night-time appearance where someone speaks Albanian to the little girl.’

  ‘I’m not sure we can give any weight to that,’ Hoskins said. ‘She is only five.’

  ‘Well, we have Sophie Lund as witness to a man appearing on the lawn,’ Mulholland said.

  ‘But not to the Albanian speech,’ Hoskins added.

  ‘And let’s not forget,’ Gillard said, ‘that on another occasion both Sophie Lund and separately Geraldine Hinchcliffe and our own chief constable witnessed and gave chase to an intruder…’

  Hodges sniggered. ‘Well we know how that turned out.’

  ‘…which is an important piece of corroboration to a CCTV image. We do know there were a series of intrusions on the grounds of Colsham Manor in the last month.’

  ‘Can we have another look at our intruder?’ Mulholland asked.

  ‘I was just coming to that,’ Gillard said. He gestured to Townsend who clicked his mouse and projected an image onto the screen. It was the same picture that Gillard had already examined from the Lunds’ CCTV. It showed a man in a long, light-coloured coat, with fair or possibly grey hair, and a small rucksack.

  ‘He still looks quite a lot like that Pole, doesn’t he?’ Hoskins said.

  ‘He does a little. There’s one small problem with that,’ Gillard said. ‘Sikorsky wasn’t in the country on the day this footage was taken, according to passport records.’

  ‘So who is he?’ Michelle Tsu asked.

  ‘I’ll tell you who is,’ Hodges said. ‘He’s an Albanian assassin, with multiple passports and a disguise kit, who has killed twice already, and may be about to murder two kids. Case solved!’

  Hoskins laughed and shook his head. ‘That’s cobblers.’

  ‘Lots of little things are niggling me,’ Gillard said.

  ‘Like what?’ Hodges said.

  ‘It would be neat to have just the one guy, obviously. But they don’t look alike, we have this weird target practice at Colsham Manor which would be so amateur, and then there’s something that’s just come up via ballistics.’

  They all looked to him expectantly.

  ‘A different kind of ammunition was used to kill the Lincolnshire victim.’

  ‘Have they found the bullet, then?’ Mulholland asked.

  ‘No, but ballistics think the exit hole in the guy’s skull is too small for it to have been a hollow-point round. Rob, could you do the honours?’

  Townsend turned off the lights and clicked the mouse next to the laptop. A series of images were displayed on the pull-down screen. Gillard continued: ‘On the left is Peter Young’s skull, where you can see that there is extensive damage to the skull on exit. On the right is that of Mr X, our mysterious body in Lincolnshire. By contrast the exit hole is only big enough to accommodate a pencil.’

  ‘Could the difference have been accounted for by the difference in range at which the shot was fired?’ Mulholland asked.

  ‘It’s a good question. Ballistics sent off the images to Sheffield University to analyse th
e differences. They would need to examine both bodies to be sure, and Young’s has been released for burial, but their initial conclusion is that we are talking about different ammunition.’

  ‘I’m no expert,’ Michelle Tsu interrupted, but you can use different types of ammunition in the same gun, can’t you?’

  ‘Yes, generally,’ Gillard replied. ‘Trouble is, Lincolnshire Police are still trying to find the bullet that killed Mr X,’ Gillard said. ‘They’ve dug up all the sand within a five-yard radius of the body, and they haven’t found it. Nor the casing, for that matter. If the perpetrators were professionals, they would have dragged the body 10 or 20 yards after shooting him, and with the action of the tide and the shifting of the sand, the bullet would be lost for ever.’

  ‘But whatever the result of that, surely one gunman can have more than one gun?’ Michelle asked. ‘So the crucial question, of whether it was the same finger on the trigger, still isn’t answered, is it?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Gillard responded. ‘We mustn’t make assumptions.’

  Colin Hodges shook his head. ‘Look, it seems obvious to me that we’ve got two gangland-style executions, admittedly more than 200 miles apart, with the same modus operandi, and the same ethnic target, an Albanian. I would have thought that it’s common sense that we’re talking about the same perpetrator or group of perpetrators.’

  ‘Yeah,’ added Carl Hoskins. ‘Especially when you think there’s a third Albanian angle, in the abduction of the two orphans, at the site of which we just happened to find some more hollow-point ammunition. That kind of ammunition is rare. This cannot be a coincidence.’

  Gillard raised his hand. ‘We’re in the realms of conjecture here. The only way I think for us to get to the root of it is to investigate exactly who Peter Young, and David and Amber Lund actually are.’

  ‘I thought we had already tried that,’ Hodges said.

  ‘This time I’m looking for answers in Albania,’ Gillard said. ‘I’m flying out on Tuesday.’