by Ann Cleeves
Porteous lived in a barn as big as a church, which had been converted into three flats. He had the top floor to himself. Exposed rafters stretched to a sloping roof. There were two long windows, a view over farmland. Occasionally, if the light was right, he could see the glint of the lake in the distance, like a child’s imagined glimpse of the sea. One wall was exposed stone, the others plastered and whitewashed. On these he hung the paintings he collected. He always went to the fine-art students’ finals exhibition at the university in the city. Usually he saw something he liked.
It was early evening. Porteous didn’t believe in unnecessary overtime. It messed up his budgets, and tasks which could normally be fitted into the working day expanded, became more complicated, to fit the time allowed. Tonight, despite the body in the lake, he sent his team home at the usual time. There was nothing they could do until they had identification. Besides, he wanted them calm and reasonable in the morning. He hated the frantic, febrile atmosphere which sometimes enveloped a murder case. Rational judgement was lost. It was as if there was something heroic about the obsession with one victim, one perpetrator, about the lack of sleep, the passion stoked by alcohol. He had, however, brought work home with him. He had carried six large box files up the open stairs. They contained the flimsy copies of missing-person reports between 1968 and 1985. The last five of the years which were of interest to him, 1986–1990, had been computerized, and he would check those in the morning.
He had attended Carver’s post-mortem. As the pathologist had suggested, there was quite an audience. The little man had played up to them, preening himself, throwing out scientific jokes and puns which meant little to Porteous but raised a titter amongst his colleagues.
Porteous had taken notes in impeccable shorthand, following Carver’s commentary exactly. The pathologist had performed like a music-hall magician, and there was likely to be as much information in the suggestion, the conjecture, the surprise discovery as in the completed official report. Porteous set his notes on the painted table which stood under one of the windows and went to the tiny kitchen to make a pot of tea. He liked Earl Grey, weak with a slice of lemon. He poured a dribble, was satisfied that it was ready and filled the cup. Then he returned to his notes and translated them in his head.
Carver had confirmed that the body had been in the water for at least ten years. The victim was a young male, aged between sixteen and twenty-five. He was five feet ten inches tall and, despite the adipocere, which usually occurred only when the victim had considerable body fat, he was of slender build. Carver had been excited by that fact, had thought it might warrant a note in a scientific journal. Enough of the organs, protected by the hard white layer of adipocere, remained for Carver to give a cause of death. The young man had been stabbed. By a knife with a short but unusually wide blade. A dagger of some sort. He had been stabbed in the back. A sharp upward movement into the heart. Either the perpetrator had known what he was doing or he had been very lucky. At this Carver had looked at his friends and grinned.
‘Very exotic, gentlemen, very theatrical, as I’m sure you’ll agree, for our small town in the hills.’
The body had been tied to the anchor by a piece of nylon rope, which had been looped around the waist. The young man had been clothed, though most of the garments had rotted and only tatters remained. The scraps had been retained and the forensic team was examining them. He had been wearing boots made of a soft leather or suede. Around his wrist was a plaited leather bracelet, which looked home-made. Perhaps from a bootlace.
At this Porteous stopped for a moment and took a sip of tea. He had been a child in the seventies. His only brother had been ten years older, and Porteous pictured him preparing to go out for the night. He saw him quite clearly, standing in front of the mirror in his parents’ room, the only long mirror in the house. He was wearing wide trousers, desert boots, a fringed suede jacket. Around his neck was a leather thong threaded with wooden beads. The victim’s bracelet suggested to Porteous the fashion of the seventies. The end of flower power. Not punk or the new romantics. He made a note and continued.
There had been some dental work. Carver announced this as if they should be grateful to him. Which Porteous certainly was. After all this time it held the best chance of positive identification. There had not been extensive work on the teeth – one extraction and two small fillings – but a record of the mouth, perhaps even an X-ray would have been taken. There was no guarantee that the dentist was still in business or that the records had been kept but at least it provided an avenue of investigation. Porteous thought it would give his team something to do the following day. He liked to keep them busy.
He leant back in his chair and emptied the pot into his wide blue cup – part of the tea service which had been a present to himself when he moved into the barn. He stretched with satisfaction. This was why he had joined the police. Not to save the world. Not to race around the countryside in fast cars or strut the city streets in a uniform. But to bring order, to solve problems, to understand.
He set the post-mortem notes to one side and pulled the first box file towards him, savouring a moment of anticipation before opening it. This was what he loved, this precise and meticulous sorting of facts. He had never understood why his colleagues thought such work tedious.
Each report was a minor human tragedy, baldly told, given a dignity because the facts were unembellished. He sorted them first into gender and age, rejecting the menopausal women with depression, the elderly wanderers from care homes, the occasional heart-breaking ten-year-old who had gone to a friend’s house to play and never returned. Still he was left with a mountain of paper. The majority of missing-person reports was for young males. They’d left home after problems at school, a row with parents, or in search of a more exciting life. He knew that many would have returned or got in touch. The relatives, simply relieved that the panic was over, would never have thought to inform the police.
He became engrossed in the task and couldn’t let it go. He had planned just to sort through the paperwork but began phoning the contact numbers for relatives. Inevitably some had moved or died, but Cranford was the sort of town where people knew one another. Other phone numbers were given, alternative names suggested. The people wanted to talk. Porteous listened patiently to tales of lads who’d been scallies as youngsters but who’d gone on to do well for themselves, who’d taken university degrees, settled down, had families. The worst calls were when boys were still missing and no contact had ever been made. Porteous heard the flurry of hope in elderly voices.
‘Does this mean there’s some news?’
‘No, no,’ he said gently. ‘Just checking old files.’
Some had heard about the discovery of the body in the lake on local radio and put two and two together.
‘But that can’t be our Alan,’ one said. ‘He could swim like a fish.’
He stopped when the light faded and it was too dark to read the scrawled names and numbers on the copy paper. He had reached 1980. If nothing came of the names he had set to one side he would check the files for 1980–1990, but he thought he had gone far enough. He had a picture of the victim in his head. A boy who was a teenager in the early seventies just after the lake had been flooded; who wore desert boots and a leather bootlace bracelet; who had been stabbed in the back.
He stood up and pressed the light switch. The room was lit by spots fixed to the ceiling beams. They shone through the rafters, throwing shadows on to the stripped wooden floor. He was hungry. He loved to cook; the process of peeling and chopping relaxed him. But today he wanted something quick and simple. He filled a stainless-steel pan with water for spaghetti and sweated garlic and red chilli in olive oil then covered the lot with freshly sliced Parmesan. He ate as if he hadn’t seen food for days, shovelling it in with a spoon and a fork. He was sitting at the table where he’d been working and he looked out through the uncovered window at the lights which were all that remained of the roads and the farmhouses. Later he poured himself a glass of
wine.
He liked to go to bed early but tonight found it impossible to let the investigation go. He thought he was as bad as the macho colleagues who bragged of their nights without sleep in pursuit of their prey. Still with his glass in his hand he read through his shortlist of candidates again, hoping to pick up on some minute detail which would point him to the man he was looking for.
He judged them, just as a betting man would pick a horse from a racing paper, using a mixture of fact, experience and superstition. There were three. After those he had picked a dozen or so more to follow up if nothing came of the first group. He set the three sheets before him in alphabetical order and read them again.
The first was Alan Brownscombe, the boy who could swim like a fish. His parents still lived in Cranford. They came originally from the West Country and had planned on moving back there when they retired, but even after retirement they had stayed where they were – ‘otherwise how would Alan know where to find us?’
Porteous had spoken to the mother. She had worked as a dinner lady in Cranwell Village First School. The father had worked for British Gas and taken a redundancy package when the company was privatized. Mrs Brownscombe could remember exactly what happened when Alan disappeared. She had the story pat, word for word, like a favourite bedtime tale repeated over and over to a child. He was the eldest of three, a bright boy, and he’d gone to Leeds University to read electrical engineering. He’d never been away from home before. Perhaps he was homesick. Perhaps the course was more demanding than he’d expected. At any rate when she managed to get through to him on the phone she sensed he was unhappy. It was Easter when he went missing. He was nineteen. It was 1978, a bit outside Porteous’s preferred time-scale but not by much. Alan had come home for the holidays and managed to get a job on the caravan site by the lake, cleaning the vans before the start of the season, doing small repairs. One day he set off for work and never arrived. He didn’t take anything with him other than the packet of cheese-and-pickle sandwiches she’d made up for his lunch. So far as they knew he had no money. He didn’t return to university and they never saw him again.
‘You say he was unhappy,’ Porteous had said. The woman’s West Country accent was preserved intact. If they could tell her what happened to her son, even if he were dead, she’d feel she could move home. He’d wanted to help her. ‘Could he have been clinically depressed?’
‘I don’t know,’ she’d said. ‘It wasn’t something you thought of then. Not with a nineteen-year-old lad. And he was home with us. We’d not have sent him back if he didn’t want to go, whatever sort of noises his father was making.’
The height and the build fitted the body in the lake. She gave Porteous the name of Alan’s dentist without asking why he wanted to know.
Michael Grey was reported missing only after his foster parents had died and the executors of their wills had tried to trace him. They’d left him the small house where they’d been living. He’d have been twenty-two at the time, but when a firm of solicitors tried to track him down they discovered that no one had seen him since he was eighteen. That would have been in 1972. It was a peculiar case but Porteous tried not to read too much into it. Social Services seemed not to feel too much responsibility for kids in care once they were sixteen. They drifted in a twilight world of hard-to-let flats, hostels and mates’ floors. And if the next of kin had been named as one of the executors presumably there wouldn’t have been much incentive to trace the boy. Perhaps they would have received the profit from the house in his absence. The description was vague. Porteous had the feeling that the person reporting Michael as missing had never seen him. Nothing ruled him out from being the dead boy in the lake, but there was nothing to suggest it. There was nothing as useful as a photograph.
Carl Jackson had lived twenty miles from Cranford with his parents, who farmed sheep on the other side of the lake. He beamed gappily from a school snap attached to the file. He was sixteen and had learning difficulties and was described by the constable who’d taken the first missing-person report as ‘mentally retarded’. Because of his vulnerable status there’d been a big search for him, involving not only the police and mountain-rescue team but also members of the public. He attended Cranford Adult Training Centre and was collected every morning from the end of the farm track by a bus which picked up all the trainees from rural areas. His parents were elderly, considered by the staff at the centre as overprotective. Usually one of them waited with him for the bus and was there to meet him in the evening. In an attempt to encourage Carl’s independence it was suggested that he could make the half-mile walk down the track alone. What could go wrong? The track led only to the farmhouse. It would be impossible for him to get lost. But one day, the third that this experiment in independent living was tried, he failed to arrive home. His parents waited less than half an hour before going out to look for him. Two hours later they alerted the police. It was as if he had disappeared into thin air.
Porteous had phoned the contact number without much hope of success. The Jacksons had been in their fifties when Carl had disappeared in 1969. He was answered by a machine. ‘You’re through to Balk Farm Computing. No one is available to take your call . . .’ The farmhouse had been sold to yuppies, the land dispersed. It was happening to hill farms all over the north of England. It had happened to the farm where he was living.
He looked again at the photo. Carl was dressed in a check shirt, corduroy trousers and a hand-knitted V-neck pullover. Old man’s clothes. It was hard to imagine him wearing a hippy leather bracelet.
The long case clock in the corner chimed the half-hour. Half-past midnight. Porteous rinsed out his glass, stoppered the bottle and put it in the fridge. In bed he took ten minutes to go through the breathing exercise which usually helped him to relax, but he slept fitfully, haunted by the grainy photographs of Carl Jackson and Alan Brownscombe, by the fat white body in the mortuary and by Carver’s grin.
Chapter Three
They sat in Porteous’s office, which was so small that their knees almost touched, making an effort to get on.
Eddie Stout had seen Porteous cart off the boxes of files the night before and wondered what was going on. Was the man some sort of control freak? That wasn’t his job. Didn’t he trust the rest of the team? But Eddie was a Christian, a lay minister on the Methodist circuit, out every Sunday preaching to a handful of old ladies in the windswept chapels in the hills, so he had to forgive Porteous for being promoted over him and he had to make allowances. It was a strain for him, Porteous could see that. The silence between them was awkward.
Porteous liked Stout. Perhaps it would have been easier if the man had been less hospitable and generous. Why was Stout trying so hard? When Porteous had first arrived Stout had invited him to dinner at his home – an overture of friendship which had been impossible for Porteous to refuse. It had been an unexpectedly pleasant evening but Porteous felt he had disappointed Stout because he had given too little of himself away. He had taken flowers and chocolates as gifts instead of wine. Methodists didn’t drink, did they? But it seemed that nowadays they did, and after several glasses of home-brewed beer Stout had become mellow, almost Dickensian, sitting in a fat armchair, puffing his pipe, surrounded by evidence of his family. Porteous had drunk little and maintained his guard.
Stout’s wife, Bet, was plump and motherly. There were two grown-up children, settled down with babies of their own, and photographs of them were on the mantelpiece and the window-sills. Then there was Ruthie, the baby, ten years younger than the others, a wild adolescent with cropped hair, who had eaten with them, entertaining them with stories about school. Afterwards she had disappeared off to a party with her boyfriend, but not without giving her father a big hug first.
‘You’ve no family?’ Bet had asked, as if it were a loss in his life, something to be pitied, to be compensated for with comforting casseroles and sticky puddings.
He had shaken his head. ‘Never married.’
He had seen the
m looking at each other and had read their thoughts. At first they had considered that he might be one of them – a Christian. Perhaps of the happy clappy born-again variety, saving himself for the right girl. That might have explained his reluctance to go to the pub after work, to join in the swearing, the banter about women. But he hadn’t used the right phrases, as recognizable as a Masonic handshake. He hadn’t made himself known.
So then they had wondered if he might be gay. That too was something he was used to. It was a way for colleagues to explain his apparent celibacy, his love of art and theatre. He had heard the sniggers and the jokes, though he never responded to them. Eddie and Bet hadn’t sniggered – they were too kind and too tolerant for that. But they had felt cheated because he hadn’t been more open with them and they were curious. Later he was sure they would ask Ruthie what she thought. Porteous wondered what the answer would be.
Now, in his office, so close to Eddie that he could smell the tobacco, he had a sudden urge to explain. It would have been like talking to a priest or a shrink: ‘Ten years ago I had a nervous breakdown. Stress. Now I avoid it. You know, prevention better than cure. And I take the medication. I like my life ordered, predictable. That’s why I live alone. So I can control what goes on. It runs in the family, actually, psychiatric disorder. My dad was a nutter. He jumped off a bridge in front of the Birmingham Intercity. It’s like diabetes. Genetic.’
But it wasn’t like diabetes. Diabetes would have been no big deal; his promotion wouldn’t have been a cause for self-congratulation on the part of his superiors. ‘This shows that we take equal opportunities seriously, Peter. You’re a trailblazer. But we suggest that you don’t make a song and dance about it. You need authority, the confidence, you know, of your troops. Your past illness is no business of anyone else, is it?’
He was aware suddenly of Stout watching him, waiting for him to speak. God, he thought, it won’t take him long to work out that I’m a headcase if I sit here with my mouth open, staring into space. He pulled the three files out of his briefcase, lay them on the desk.