The One a Month Man

by Michael Litchfield

  If there is such a phenomenon as reincarnation, then Ted Bundy could have come back as Richard Pope, I’d already decided, even though I was only a half-day into the case and I’d only Sharkey’s word for the DNA clincher.

  Theodore Pope’s statement said more about himself than anything else. He was fifty-three years old and had been a Democrat senator for ten years. Although he lived in Washington DC, he also owned a ranch in Texas, his home state and where Richard had spent his early years. Richard was their only child and sole heir to the Pope estate, which, all-told, was worth in the region of a billion dollars. As for the Friday evening in question, Theodore merely corroborated his son’s account.

  I cannot be exact about times, but the three of us were pretty tired when we finally migrated from the restaurant and headed wearily to our rooms. Any big city takes its toll when you’re Christmas shopping and I’d spent most of the day trudging around London with my wife, Grace. Richard was also very sleepy. When you’re training for the University Boat Race – even in the initial stages – you have to be early to bed and early to rise. He wasn’t used to being up and awake after ten p.m. Neither was he accustomed to drinking alcohol, but it was a special occasion – only my second trip ever to the UK and first visit to Oxford, so we had something to celebrate. However, the wine did make Richard very drowsy and he was struggling to stay awake. Very soon after we got upstairs and after watching a bit of soccer, he had to get to bed because he was fighting to keep open his eyes. I also noticed that he was somewhat unsteady on his feet.

  Grace Pope’s statement was more interesting, particularly the last paragraph.

  About half an hour after Richard had gone to his own room, I tapped on the adjoining door because I’d remembered something of such riveting importance I wanted to ask him that I’ve completely forgotten what it was! Anyhow, there was no reply, so he must have been sleeping. I didn’t attempt to go into his room because I didn’t want to disturb him. I had no idea whether he had locked the door, though I see no reason why he should have.

  So she hadn’t tried the door. I flicked through the old paperwork; there was no indication that she’d been asked this question. Did either of them hear any noise from Richard’s room, such as snoring, heavy breathing or footsteps? Was there a bandage or a plaster on one of his hands at breakfast? From a superficial examination of the dossier, it didn’t appear that these obvious and very pertinent questions had been put to the parents. If they were covering for their son, they would have lied, of course. But at least their lies would have been on record. Neither did it seem that any of the staff on breakfast duty had been quizzed about noticing an injury on Saturday morning to Richard Pope. Already I was beginning to share Sharkey’s view of shoddy procedural corner-cutting. Not that it mattered too much now. DNA was a noose that never failed to tighten as soon as the right neck was identified.

  After lunch, I returned to the police station, where Sharkey had given me exclusive use of a room that hilariously was called an office. In size, its measurements were somewhere between a solitary-confinement prison cell and a broom closet. But it did have a desk (dilapidated), two chairs (in need of artificial lower limbs), a window (as mucky as a Victorian street urchin’s face) and a prototype computer (as slow as motorway gridlock).

  The internet had become an invaluable tool for research. I Googled Theodore Pope and quickly came across a comprehensive biography, the most important feature his death three years ago, aged eighty. Grace had joined him eight months later. The gravity of the grave was a fearsome force in uniting separated loved ones. Never mind, the background was useful.

  Richard had been engaged twice, once when he was nineteen and then four years later, while at Oxford. Interesting. His first fiancée was an Eleanor Reti, daughter of the mayor of Austin. They’d been dating since the age of fifteen, when they’d been students at the same expensive co-ed boarding school. Mayor Reti called the engagement ‘a match made in heaven’. Theodore Pope said it would ‘unite two important and influential Texas families’. Spoken like a true cold-blooded, mercenary shit! Grace believed the couple were ‘made for one another’ and would ‘produce beautiful babies’. Yuck! Six months later, it was off. According to Theodore, Richard had come to the conclusion that he was ‘too young to make such a lifelong commitment’. Eleanor and Richard had broken off their engagement ‘amicably, no hard feelings’, and remained ‘the best of friends’.

  Fiancée number two was a Jackie Reuben, whose father was a state Republican politician. Jackie was three years older than Richard and was an interpreter at the United Nations. She could speak twelve languages, but joked that she had difficulty with American/English. She met Richard in Washington at a Republican Party ding, but that relationship had cooled and collapsed shortly after he graduated at Oxford. After that, the only mention of Richard was that he had gone into ‘government service’ – camouflage for every institutionalized sin one could dream of, especially in nightmares.

  I started making my own notes.

  What were the REAL reasons for the curtailment of the engagements?

  Where are those ex-fiancées now?

  Did Richard Pope ever marry? If so, is he still married?

  Any children to his name – acknowledged or otherwise?

  What kind of childhood did he have – emotionally?

  Any evidence of abuse in his past – towards him or against others?

  How strong was his relationship with his mother?

  Was his father overbearing, over-demanding, unbearable?

  Back in my hutch, the cheap digital timepiece on my wrist alerted me to the fact that a mid-afternoon drink was overdue. I was fast finding my way around and had already located the two most important features of the building – the men’s room and the refreshment robot. Like most police-station vending machines, this one tried to rip me off, promising me change but reneging on the deal. Not until I’d given it a kicking did it cough up. Nothing in this life was ever straightforward. Going nuclear for one’s most basic rights had become the norm.

  Returning to the file, I again focused on the first case, the murder of Louise Redman. A portrait photograph, presumably from a family album, showed a strikingly attractive redhead. I always flinched at these kinds of happy-family pics in the context of a crime so hideous. Although the colour photo was more than thirty years old, none of Louise’s vitality had faded with the passage of time. She seemed so alive, as if trying to speak to me, to tell me something of what happened and who robbed her of the rest of her entitlement. You owe me, she was saying. I was having such fun. I had so many plans. I was going places. I was going to have kids. By now, I’d be a grandma, a success story, if it hadn’t been for that bastard who took me by surprise. You now know who it was. Go nail that psycho. Make him pay.

  If there was a way of connecting with the dead, I wondered how much help that would have been. Very little, I suspected. I doubted that she knew her killer; she’d learn from me. I didn’t believe that this was a case in which the victims had been preselected. They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. If the fourth assault was following a template, then Louise would have been scared witless, as Tina had been, by the ‘Scream’ mask. But Pope must have spoken. And unless he was a master of speech disguise, she would have instantly tuned into the transatlantic accent. A Yank at Oxford. Not too many of those in that era, especially of his physique. He couldn’t afford to let her live; nor the others. Tina was the one that got away and Richard Pope would have been behind bars three decades ago if the detectives on the job had pressed the right buttons.

  The only way now to ensure that Richard Pope got his comeuppance was to hunt down Tina Marlowe. There was no DNA evidence to link Pope to the three murders. So the only means of incriminating him for all four crimes was through Tina. The condom ritual was the four-time calling card. Convince jurors that Pope attacked Tina with intent to kill and they would convict him of the murders. The pattern of circumstantial evidence would be
crucial – and damning. But first Tina had to be traced. Then she had to be persuaded to testify. Without her in the witness box, giving a first-hand account, the case was a non-starter. The DNA evidence against Pope, although compelling, would not stand alone for the murder charges. Tina was pivotal. So where would I begin? Only one way: to treat Tina as a missing person. In today’s world of data footprints – from tax records to credit card and mobile phone providers – there was no hiding place. Unless you were dead, of course. And that was my one overwhelming fear. A cold case frozen in time for ever.

  3

  Next day Sharkey was at his desk before 7 a.m. However, cold-case plodding didn’t demand Flying Squad tempo: thirty-year-old investigations could be put on hold another couple of hours. On this detail, you danced to the tune of a waltz, not a quickstep. So I’d unilaterally decided to keep civilized office hours: nine-to-five, until the need to rack up the momentum.

  Sipping coffee, I went knocking on Sharkey’s door.

  ‘Something I can do for you?’ he said, the sort of response designed to make you feel a burden.

  ‘A small favour,’ I said, straddling the threshold, neither in nor out.

  He glanced up, waiting. The size of favours, like everything else, was relative. A request for a thousand-pound loan from a bank was peanuts; from a pauper, it was just nuts.

  ‘I need a partner.’

  ‘I don’t run a dating agency.’

  How droll! I obliged with a manufactured laugh; just a little one. ‘Not that kind of partner,’ I said, unnecessarily.

  ‘No can do. You’re only here because we’re so short-staffed. Remember?’

  ‘And I thought it was my talent that had been auctioned.’

  Now it was his turn to mimic amusement. ‘I can’t even spare you a pair of bicycle clips, never mind wheels.’

  ‘There’s someone at the Yard I’d like to join me; that’s what I’m after,’ I said, banter over.

  ‘That’s none of my business.’

  ‘I’m hoping you’ll make it your business.’ I stepped inside his office now, pulling shut the door behind me. ‘I’d appreciate your negotiating it with Pomfrey for me.’

  ‘He’s your boss, not mine.’

  ‘But he’ll say no to me.’

  ‘How do you know that without giving it a shot?’

  ‘I know. But you might have more luck.’

  He stretched for his yellow legal pad. ‘OK, who is it you want to hold your hand? What’s his name?’

  ‘It’s a her.’

  He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. His prurient thoughts were telegraphed telepathically.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Sarah Cable,’ I said.

  ‘Why her?’

  ‘Because she’s good.’

  ‘In bed?’

  ‘As a detective.’

  He wrote the name, then tapped the blunt end of his Parker ballpoint on his desk. Looking at me thoughtfully, he said, ‘Leave it with me.’

  I hesitated at the door. ‘I’d be grateful if her secondment was immediate.’

  ‘Leave it with me,’ he repeated. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Only that she is good in bed, too!’

  His face told me that he was a man who responded favourably to self-deprecation.

  Back in my stuffy, airless hutch, I returned to the Tina Marlowe documents. She originated from another river-town, not more than fifty miles away, to the east. There was an address in the file and every chance, I reasoned, that at least one of her parents was still alive, perhaps living at the same address. No statements had ever been taken from them (how could they have possibly helped?) but their names had been noted, just for the record, just to tick a box: Ronald and Rosemary Marlowe. There was also a phone number for them.

  OK, here we go. Ten rings, then a hesitant, ‘Hello.’

  ‘Is that Mrs Marlowe?’ I said, trying not to sound like a cold-call telesales pest.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, diffidently.

  Voices are notoriously deceptive. Pensioners can sound like bolshy teenagers, while adolescents can come across as comatose oldies.

  I rattled through my spiel, introducing myself and explaining that it was essential for me to make contact with her daughter.

  I heard what I believed to be a sharp intake of breath, like someone just winded by a blow below the belt.

  ‘Tina’s not here. Hasn’t been for years. Not since …’

  I sensed that it would be counter-productive to develop this conversation over the phone. ‘These are things that you can explain face-to-face.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ she said, clearly unsettled by my proposition. ‘I thought all this was dead and buried long ago.’

  This was the trouble with revisiting cold cases, rattling old bones, stumbling on skeletons in cupboards, opening sealed wounds, rekindling memories, some inevitably maudlin, some painful, few comforting.

  ‘When were you thinking of coming?’ she added, vaguely, yet seeming to have accepted the inevitable.

  ‘Today,’ I said. ‘I could be with you early afternoon.’

  ‘My health isn’t good,’ she said, demurring.

  ‘I won’t keep you long,’ I promised, disingenuously, having no idea how long the interview might take.

  ‘Well, if you must.’

  ‘See you about three,’ I said, underscoring the fait accompli.

  ‘Oh, dear….’

  That’s when I guillotined it, cutting the pipeline of resistance.

  Rosemary Marlowe’s house was on the fringe of the town centre and no more than half a mile from the sleepy River Ouse that belted Bedford across its midriff, dividing north from south. Mrs Marlowe’s home was situated in a leafy avenue on the more affluent and sedate north side, in view of a spacious park, with a bandstand, cricket pitches and a pavilion. The avenue was straight and wide; the Royal Mall in miniature.

  As I pressed the doorbell, I saw white net curtains twitch at the edges. When she didn’t immediately come to the door, I didn’t bother ringing again; I knew I’d been heard and observed. She was taking her time and preparing herself; an ordeal for her, a routine knock-up for me.

  ‘Is that Mr Lorenzo?’ she said, croakily, from the other side of the locked and bolted fortress door.

  ‘Detective Inspector Lorenzo, yes.’

  A key turned and a bolt was levered sideways gratingly, before the sturdy door inched open, still secured by a security chain.

  ‘Please pass me your ID,’ she said; a hard nut for any con artist or burglar to beat.

  It must have been a further minute or so until I was considered safe to be admitted.

  Mrs Marlowe was diminutive and stooping, leaning on a stick as she led the way, at a shuffle, towards her sitting room. The flower-patterned dress that covered her shapelessly almost reached her fluffy slippers. Even though she wore glasses, it was obvious that she was still severely myopic. The glasses kept slipping and this irritated her as she constantly had to stop to adjust them.

  ‘Where shall I sit?’ I said, showing that I respected the fact that she was queen of her castle.

  ‘Take your pick,’ she said, indifferently.

  The ceiling was high, from which a mini-chandelier, with a cluster of crystal bulb-sockets, was suspended in the middle of the lofty room. There was a white marble fireplace, over which was hung a large mirror, with an ornate, old-gold frame. In the mirror, I saw the none-too-pleasing sight that had confronted Mrs Marlowe at her front door: a man nearing the threshold of the Big Four-O who had abused himself, but seemed to have escaped, so far, without too many penalty points. But you cannot always judge a vehicle’s mileage from its external appearance and rust is easily camouflaged. My coal-black eyes matched my unruly hair. Before we separated, my wife, Patricia, told me that my ‘untamed looks’ preserved my ‘boyish appeal’. But when we parted, she said my features were evidence of a dissolute lifestyle and my boyish appeal had transmuted into immature personality. My ‘fugitive eyes’, according to Patr
icia, were those of a runner from reality, from responsibility and conformity; a Bohemian, but no rhapsody. My lifestyle may have been raffish, but my sartorial judgment had always conformed to Yard protocol. All-night gambling sessions in casinos, too much booze and fast-food addiction had done me no favours, but those vices were behind me – fingers crossed! My weight was coming down. I no longer had to breathe in and hold my breath in order to button my suit-jacket. I could also fasten my collar-button without garrotting myself. Admittedly, there was still some baggage beneath my eyes, but it was being unpacked by the day. Mind you, even when other parts of me had bloated, my face had remained lean, hungry and mean – just like a young Frank Sinatra, before he had ballooned, I’d been told flatteringly. My natural dark complexion made it seem that I was always in need of a shave, even while the aftershave was still smarting. At least six feet tall, I towered over my elderly hostess, who, when bent and buckled, was barely half my height.

  I parked myself in a chintzy armchair, fabric fading, beside the fireplace. She placed herself opposite me, lowering herself in aching increments, her fragile, arthritic frame creaking, her joints stubbornly resisting. There were several framed photographs on the mantelpiece, three of them of a beautiful young woman.

  ‘Tina?’ I surmised, pointing to the largest of the three portraits that had caught my eye.

  She followed the trajectory of my arm with her milky eyes. ‘Yes, that’s my Tina,’ the lump in her throat pulsing her wrinkled neck.

  ‘When she was at Oxford?’

  ‘Just before she went up to Oxford. The same year.’