‘As you wish.’ His voice was like lead, heavy with fallen hope.
Monday, 22 September, 9 p.m.
The briefing that evening was uninspired. DI Alex Randall was well aware that they were no further forward. They still did not know their man’s name, neither did they have any idea who had killed him or why. It was all still a mystery. And now plans were being made to bury that mystery.
They’d gone over the few facts they knew but Randall wondered now whether to be buried in an unmarked grave would have been what Charles would have wanted. Perhaps it was the final unsatisfactory wish of this enigmatic man.
Randall feared that this would remain an unsolved mystery.
It wasn’t a great thought and, looking round his fellow officers’ faces, he knew that they were thinking the same thing.
They listened again to Delia Shaw’s account of her encounter with Phoebe Walker. Randall and Dart described their contact with Sharp, Hook and John Hyde but again, none of them could extract anything useful from the encounters. They hadn’t even learned anything useful from Missing’s founder, Graham Knebworth.
As the discussions continued, Randall was aware that the differing accounts of their man all matched. Polite, a gentleman, cultured. So where had he come from? Was there any particular reason he had come to Shrewsbury? It looked as though he had arrived at Moreton Corbet by chance. That was where the lorry had been headed. Had it been going somewhere else he would have gone there. Had it been the rain that had made him take shelter in the castle cellar? He’d had nothing waterproof with him and the coat would soon have become saturated, heavy and cold. Had his real destination been somewhere else? Had his killer deliberately followed him there or happened upon him by chance?
And the pen. What had he been writing? Who had he been writing to? A letter? An account of his life and situation? Had that been such a threat that he had had to be killed? If it had been a letter, had it been that which had summoned the killer to him?
He batted the questions out to the waiting officers and watched them toss around the same ideas he had – that there had been some event in Charles’s past that had caused him to escape his former identity. Nothing criminal or they would have had his prints and ID as quick as a snap of the fingers. No one resembling him was on their missing persons’ database so no one had reported him missing.
And that had to be significant. No one had reported him missing.
Why not? Was there no one who missed him? Did this, he asked the team, mean that somewhere buried in Charles’s past was some incident, some crime, some fear?
It was impossible to answer.
Randall was slightly irritated with himself. He should have been able to work something out from these random points. And yet he was still simply splashing around in shallow water, getting absolutely nowhere. And scanning the room full of the familiar faces of his team he could read only confusion there as well.
He handed the briefing over to Roberts and Talith, who spent some time describing to the team the scene at the gardening shed, each small detail helping to form a more complete, but still confusing, picture of their man. First of all, they described Miss Dreyfuss’s expression of fondness for their vagrant before going on to describe the interior of the shed in detail, using photographs to illustrate their point of obsessive tidiness. Randall frowned. This was not the normal chaotic life of the homeless. It did not fit in with the usual man with mental illness or a drug or alcohol problem. He looked at the photographs, as did the rest of the team. These were the actions of a tidy man, someone methodical who disliked loose ends, someone who would not just disappear on a whim and stay hidden for years. Therefore the reason for his vagrancy and wanderings must also be reasoned, as was the motive behind his deliberate and carefully preserved anonymity. The man had been writing something. So, if this man had laid a trail of breadcrumbs it would lead somewhere. And now Randall believed that a link existed between the man’s carefully concealed identity and his murder, which had not been a random attack either. Not a fists-and-feet beating up but that one deliberate, cruel, precise, fatal slash. It was hardly a large step to take that he had not been the unfortunate victim of a random assault but of a planned murder with a structured reason. Which meant, as his hitch-hike to Moreton Corbet had been chance, he must have been followed to the castle. What part did the castle play? Such a dramatic backdrop both in the physical and emotional sense, past and present. Had it been a deliberate setting? Had their murderer had a sense of the dramatic? Yes.
It was now ten o’clock. He switched his mobile phone back on and saw a missed call from Martha’s home number. He rang back. ‘I’m at home,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you come over – have a spot of supper and a drink and I can tell you what I’ve learned this afternoon.’
It was too tempting an offer to refuse. He was on his way.
TWENTY-SIX
He arrived twenty minutes later. She’d opened a bottle of red wine and had some leftover lasagne ready to put in the microwave. Sam was out training and Sukey was socializing with friends. She was in the house on her own.
He accepted the offer of the lasagne and took a long sip of the wine.
‘So,’ she said, ‘how did the briefing go?’ She was perfectly aware that this was not how contacts between coroner and senior investigating officers were normally conducted. This was more pally, more friendly, more intimate – and she liked it.
‘You first,’ he said, eyes twinkling. ‘You’re the one that phoned. You tell me your bit.’
She would have said, You show me yours and I’ll show you mine, but it had connotations and it was too dangerous a game to play. Instead she merely smiled. ‘Have I ever mentioned my friend Miranda Mountford to you?’
‘I think you have,’ he said. ‘Didn’t she have a husband who was a nasty piece of work, threatening her? Violent?’
‘That’s the one,’ she said. ‘He’s gone. Out of the picture. In South Africa, thank goodness. She’s free of him.’
Randall took another sip of wine and dug his fork into the lasagne. He gave her an appraising look. ‘Is that how women talk when they’ve shed a partner?’ He was teasing her.
‘It is when they’re a nasty piece of work,’ she said. Then added, ‘Anyway, he’s gone and that’s good.’
Randall waited for her to get to the real point for this contact.
‘She works part-time now,’ she paused, ‘in Public Health. The rest of the time she does charity work.’
‘Ahh,’ he said, on his way to understanding. ‘Let me take a guess – at the charity.’
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘And she knew him. She knew your man. She worked for Missing.’
He followed the same thought process as she’d done. ‘Why didn’t she come to us and tell us? We’ve asked anyone who knew him to come forward.’
‘She did. But she couldn’t give any information because she didn’t know any facts – only what he was like. What sort of person he was.’
‘Which was?’
‘Polite, well spoken, not a drug addict or a drunk. Just a nice guy.’
‘So where did he come from, this nice guy, this person who takes such trouble to tell no one his name, this person who gets his throat cut? Why did he have to remain such an enigma? Why is he still an enigma? Why was it so important to him? Was it the discovery of his identity that led to his murder? To be honest, Martha, I want to know that as much as I want to know who held the knife.’
‘We may never find out,’ Martha pointed out. ‘Have you thought of that?’
Randall nodded, meeting her eyes.
‘There was something else, Alex. On occasions she saw him writing.’
Now he was listening.
‘Having begged a pen from the girl who worked at the Missing shop.’
‘Yes – we’ve found the pen. PC Shaw spoke to the girl in the shop. Do we have any clue what he was writing? Was it sheets of paper? A letter? A notebook?’
‘An exercise book
which he would pocket if anyone tried to look.’
To Randall, writing meant information. Perhaps Charles was reluctant to tell people who he was but not so reluctant to write things down. His life story was somewhere. He felt excited.
‘We’ve found no exercise book, Martha,’ he said steadily. ‘And the CS boys have practically demolished the garden shed. There’s nothing there and no exercise book was found on the body.’
‘Did he work for anyone else apart from your Miss Dreyfuss?’
‘No one else has come forward so far.’ He fell silent and she jumped to her role in the case, leapfrogging over his own thought processes.
‘It’s time we buried him, Alex. We can’t leave him in the mortuary fridge for ever.’
Randall nodded. ‘Yes.’ Then he started to tell her a bit more about Genevieve Dreyfuss’s shed. He showed her a picture of the interior and she looked across at him, puzzled.
‘But this doesn’t make any sense,’ she said. ‘This man is obsessional. How could he be a vagrant, a tramp? Unwashed in dirty clothes that were someone else’s?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s almost like a disguise,’ she said slowly.
Randall looked at her. ‘I would have thought that myself. But for five years?’
They both heaved a sigh. Then he moved on to tell her that they had tracked down the origin of the coat.
‘And you think this man, Knebworth, knows something about our man?’
‘I don’t know, Martha …’ He’d finished the lasagne and now took a last sip of the wine. ‘He seemed kosher when PC Shaw and I visited him. He knew our man. Talked to him, seemed to like him but he couldn’t really tell us anything more.’ He leaned across the table and put his hand over hers. ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘for the information. Somewhere,’ he said, ‘our man has penned his story.’
‘And hidden it.’
‘If we find it we’ll learn his story. If we don’t he’ll remain an enigma. But where could he have hidden it?’
‘The obvious place would have been in the shed.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘Miss Dreyfuss told us she never went in there.’
‘But you say it can’t be there?’
Randall shook his head. ‘Not a chance,’ he said. ‘The CS boys are thorough.’
They were both silent, then Randall recalled something. ‘There is something more,’ he said, ‘but it’s probably not going to help.’
‘Go on.’
‘PC Coleman found a young lad amongst the homeless who was apparently familiar with our friend,’ He smiled at her. ‘I quote, “He used to talk in his sleep.”’
Martha was leaning forward in her eagerness to hear this. Talking in his sleep, to her, sounded like unguarded statements.
‘What did he say?’
‘Again, I quote.’ Randall used the jottings he had on his iPad. ‘Stuff like he’d scream and say “not you” and then he’d say “splash”. And then, “Take the money. Have it. Have it all.” Then, “Knock, knock, knock, I must finish these shoes.” And then …’ He hesitated. ‘“One hundred and five, north tower,”’ he said, frowning. ‘It all sounded like nonsense to me, the ramblings of a disturbed mind.’
‘The ramblings,’ she said, ‘of an unguarded mind. We all know that in our dreams our true feelings come out.’
Randall stared at her. The coroner was looking on these ramblings as important. He continued more slowly. ‘The boy wrongly deduced that Charles had been in prison.’
‘Or the army,’ Martha said. ‘The medals?’
Randall shook his head. ‘It wasn’t possible he’d been awarded the medals himself,’ he said. ‘He wouldn’t have been born. And almost certainly neither was his father, unless he was elderly when he fathered Charles.’
‘Grandfather,’ Martha said slowly. ‘Many people idolize their grandparents.’ She warmed to her point. ‘Mine, for instance …’ She smiled. ‘I idolize mine. Sorry,’ she apologized. ‘I’m veering off the subject, aren’t I?’
Randall nodded. ‘Maybe another time.’
‘I don’t suppose your young vagrant said if Charles ever spoke a name?’
‘Yeah. Lucy. Our friend tells us he cried it a couple of times in his sleep but when he woke him up and asked him who Lucy was he said he looked blank and that he didn’t know anyone called Lucy.’
‘Lucy,’ she considered thoughtfully.
Randall recovered something else. ‘Funny thing is, Martha, that Phoebe, the girl from the charity shop, told PC Shaw he called her Lucy too.’
‘A daughter, I wonder?’ she mused.
‘Perhaps.’
‘But wouldn’t a daughter have reported her father’s disappearance?’
‘Yes.’
‘So, even with this added, random information, you still don’t know who he is?’
He confided in her then, that this was the way Charles wanted it.
‘We’ll stick to our planned dates for the inquest and then his burial.’
He nodded, shoulders bowed as though he felt a failure. Martha wanted to say something but she couldn’t find the right words. Everything she thought of seemed fatuous and he would soon sense that any statement, however encouraging it was meant to be – that they would soon find out who their man was, who had killed him and why – would be very obviously hollow, untrue and pointless.
So after a few pleasantries Randall stood up and Martha saw him to the door. Almost without considering what he had been about to do, as he wished her goodnight, he bent, pushed aside the tangle of red hair and kissed her cheek.
Then he was gone.
Leaving Martha motionless. But it wasn’t only the kiss. Something was pricking her memory.
As she stood there, car headlights swung into the drive. Sam was home and he’d picked Sukey up from town.
Oh, the joy of mobile phone communication.
Now the house was filled with noise and light and whatever it was that had given her a spark of realization now abandoned her.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Monday, 20 October, 10.30 a.m.
She sat and surveyed the room. She had hoped that holding an inquest might provide some answers, publicize their man’s murder, maybe flush someone out who would come forward or proffer a comment or information that would help them ID the man. But instead it was a dry affair with John Hyde detailing the circumstances of the discovery of the body, Randall giving the bare bones of the police investigation and Mark Sullivan describing the findings of the post-mortem. He mentioned the fact that the prosthesis had been numbered and the patient’s ID would have been recorded but that the hospital in Switzerland was having trouble locating the records of the injury and data on the patient who had had the prosthesis inserted.
From being a promising lead it had, so far, shrivelled into nothing.
Alex Randall had finished by saying that the police investigation was ongoing and that they would be following up all their leads.
Martha had no option but to pronounce a verdict of homicide by person or persons unknown and to set the date of the funeral for the Thursday of that week. She used the opportunity to make another public appeal for anyone who knew or thought they knew their man or anything about the crime itself to contact either her or the police at Monkmoor station. ‘We are very anxious,’ she said in her clear voice, ‘to ascertain this man’s identity so he can be buried with dignity under his real name. At the same time the police are investigating a savage and cruel murder and have few leads to go on. There is a possibility that the assailant might strike again. Until we understand why this crime happened, who our victim is and who the perpetrator is we can only give this person an unknown grave. This is obviously a travesty which we wish to reverse as soon as possible. This man deserves the dignity of his identity. Thank you. The inquest is adjourned pending further police investigation.’
She stood up and the court stood up with her. Jericho was clipping together a sheaf of papers in the front. As her assista
nt he was always in the court to hear cases. Part of his job was to collect witnesses. In this case there were precious few. None, really.
23 October was a Thursday and the burial was arranged for eleven a.m. The day of the funeral was suitably sombre, a grey day, cold, the traditional words of the committal muffled by thick fog. Appropriate for someone who had shrouded his own life and past in similarly thick fog. Alex and Mark had turned up together with a few of the investigating team and they stood, a scatter of personnel and representatives of the press with their unmistakable long lenses and recording equipment. Martha stood by the open grave trying not to recall the day she had buried Martin while Vera looked after the two-year-old twins. It had been a day very much like this one, damp, drizzly, depressing. She reflected, was it worse to bury a loved one on a bright cheerful day as though their loss was being celebrated? Or, if you were a Christian, perhaps it was their ascent into heaven which was being celebrated. Or was it better to say goodbye on a day such this when death seemed like the very end of the world? A most terrible and painful eternal goodbye?
She drew in a deep sigh and focused on the day’s events. No good living in the past. She’d done that for long enough.
Charles’s plot would be marked by a plot number and she wondered whether he would, one day, be exhumed. Would they ever know who he was or would he remain forever anonymous? Known unto God. She closed her eyes. There were so many phrases for it. Known unto God. The Unknown Warrior. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the thousands of people’s body parts who never had the dignity of this. Ruanda, the Congo, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, the Ukraine, 9/11 … the list was endless. She glanced across at Alex Randall and wondered what he was thinking. He met her eyes but instead of smiling or nodding or even looking away he seemed to be peering right into her heart.
Don’t go there, Alex.
It was she who broke the gaze, feeling her face flush as only a redhead’s can. She wasn’t sure she wanted Detective Inspector Alex Randall peering right into her soul. But in that brief look she knew he felt a failure, disappointed that he had not yet made an arrest and disappointed in his own unhappy personal life. She would have liked to have put her hand in his.
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