by Kate Simants
I turned it over and read the faded handwritten date: 11th June 1992. The day I was born.
‘We lost touch a few years ago,’ she was saying. ‘I think he went to Canada or …’ Bernadette trailed off, but I wasn’t listening.
From my pocket I produced the Polaroid: my one surviving baby picture, my tiny head taking up the whole frame, the edge of a tanned hand holding my sleeping face to the camera.
‘This is me.’
She met my eyes and then studied the picture, forehead tight and lined. Then she blew out a long, controlled breath. ‘I don’t understand what’s happened, but I promise you, I’ve got no reason to lie to you.’ She put the Polaroid down and rested her fingertip on the family scene. ‘My sister, Christine. Jim. This is their daughter, Eleanor. Ellie. All of these pictures are of her. My niece.’
My eyes locked on that family picture, on the face of the man who should have loved me, whose colouring should have explained mine, who should have had the same eyes as me, one green and one blue. Because that’s what Mum had said, all my life. His genes won; I was so like him.
But it was a lie.
There was no way the baby in the picture was me.
64.
Mae
Kit came onto the CID floor, returning from the drinks-run she’d volunteered for after morning briefing.
‘Ready?’ she called over, waiting for him to nod before she went round distributing the half-dozen coffees among their colleagues.
He finished the sentence of the write-up he was doing about the previous night’s trip to Surrey, then got up and fell into step with her, heading to the back stairwell. Halfway there, McCulloch joined them.
‘You shouldn’t have,’ McCulloch said, accepting the cappuccino Kit held out to her. ‘Not without a pastry, anyway.’
Without breaking her stride, Kit handed her a bag, a few spots of grease showing through the brown paper from the still-warm pain au chocolat inside.
McCulloch took that too with an appreciative chuckle. ‘What have we got so far?’
‘We had round one at 8 o’clock this morning,’ Mae said, pushing a door and holding it open until everyone was through. ‘Cox claims he’s as much in the dark about Matthew Corsham’s whereabouts as we are. Total denial on paying his rent as well.’
‘Hold on, you thought Cox had paid Corsham’s rent?’
‘Someone did, and it doesn’t look like it was Matt.’
‘Why would he have done that?’
Mae shrugged. ‘Buy him a bit more time?’
‘Minimize suspicion,’ Kit put in. ‘If something had happened to Matthew, his car being abandoned and his rent lapsing would trigger a hike in the resources we throw at it. We figured that Cox was in the middle of this surveillance thing of his, and wouldn’t have wanted the thing blown just yet.’
McCulloch looked unconvinced. ‘So what’s your theory now, then?’
Kit chewed her lip. ‘We don’t know. Cox could easily be lying.’
McCulloch gave it a minute’s thought and asked, ‘So he doesn’t know where Matthew Corsham is, but he’s admitting he knows him. Did he say how?’
‘We’re going to get into that now,’ Mae said. He swallowed the last of his espresso and tucked the empty paper cup into the bin between the lifts, then hit B for basement. ‘So far he’s just said Corsham called him about Ellie, wanting to find out what he knew about her condition.’
‘And so he blew his savings on kitting out a surveillance van?’
‘Said he’d decided to get hard evidence before they worked out he was onto them.’
‘Right, well that’s a perfectly logical conclusion,’ McCulloch said, rolling her eyes. ‘What about the photos? You think he’s going to cough for that?’
‘We’re coming to that next. I asked him about the child porn, why he deleted it from Corsham’s laptop, and he says he didn’t know anything about them until he saw them on the drive.’
McCulloch turned to Mae, one eyebrow arched high. ‘Well, it wasn’t his laptop.’
Mae had been turning that very question over in his head all morning. ‘No. But we do know he sent Matt the pictures of Ellie, so there’s context.’
‘Hmm, I don’t know …’
‘And there’s also the context of Jodie Arden—’
‘Who was over the age of consent, might I remind you,’ McCulloch said through a mouthful of French pastry.
‘… who was in the grey area between the age of consent and adulthood, and who had written a diary entry saying he’d bought her so much stuff that it was tantamount to paying her for sex.’
McCulloch paused and faced him. ‘We’re not going there again, Mae. CPS rejected that exact point five years ago.’
He couldn’t argue with that. ‘Yeah well. I’d still hope a jury would raise its eyebrows. Time will tell, I guess, once the tech forensics are done.’
She looked like she was turning this over. ‘Thoughts, Catherine?’
‘He was convincing,’ Kit said simply, stepping into the lift as the doors slid open. ‘And the fact remains that when the images of Ellie were taken, he was under the impression she was sixteen. No one disputes that. Even Jodie Arden thought she was sixteen.’
McCulloch screwed the paper bag up and handed it to Mae. He tutted but put it in his pocket, while she brushed crumbs off her chest. ‘But he’s claiming no knowledge of the bag and the cash, you’re saying.’
‘Flat out denial,’ Mae said. ‘Claims he’s being framed.’
‘What’s his take on the vehicle, the burnt-out one?’
They’d arrived at the interview room. ‘That’ll be what I’m here to find out.’
‘Righto. Good luck.’
Mae nodded and pushed open the door. ‘After you, Kit.’
65.
Ellie
Bernadette and I said goodbye outside the coffee shop. I walked without direction, a watery sun rising to my left and flaring in the higher windows to my right. I couldn’t get the pictures out of my head. The baby had to be a sibling, I reasoned, but if that was so, where was that child now? And why had I never been told?
Eventually turning onto the Broadway I stopped, scanned the street until I saw an internet café, and crossed the road.
A little bell above the door sounded as I went in. There were posters everywhere advertising telecoms deals for calls to Africa, Europe, India, everywhere and anywhere. I paid for an hour and chose a booth in the corner.
The first thing I did was move the keyboard and the peeling mouse mat aside to make room for the envelope from Cox’s office. I copied the words from across the top, and ran an image search.
I sat back, slowly pulled the cursor down the results. I clicked on one after another until I was sure I wasn’t jumping to conclusions. Because it seemed to be telling me that what I had in front of me was a birth certificate.
‘Hey!’ The young guy behind the counter called over to me, making me jump. ‘You want coffee? Cold drink?’
‘No, I’m fine,’ I told him, but as I glanced at him my eye snagged on a poster behind his head. A tariff. Costs per minute of a call Senegal, Serbia, Sweden.
After a frozen moment, I dug in the envelope again and pulled out Matt’s phone bill. There, halfway down the last page: that international number. I’d tried it before, but I hadn’t had enough credit to call, and I’d forgotten it. Checking each number, I typed it into a search. A whole load of hits.
The code was for a region of Bosnia, it said.
Tuzla. Toos-la, was how it was pronounced. I knew that name, and there was no reason why. At the back of my skull I could suddenly feel Siggy again, and she was holding her breath. I selected the top result on the search, the one that contained an exact match of the phone number from Matt’s bill. The screen went white for just a second as the website loaded.
I brought a hand to my mouth, jolted away from the desk. The image at the top of the page. It was a building, terracotta-coloured against a cloudless turquoise sk
y, and there were people, dozens of them, standing outside with their arms in the air, posed but smiling.
I knew the building. Not a hospital, not a barracks. The number Matt had phoned – it was the number for that building.
It was the building that Siggy had been showing me my whole life.
66.
Charles Cox Psychotherapy Ltd.
Clinical audio recording transcript
Patient name: Eleanor Power
Session date: 7 October 2006
[recording resumes]
CC: OK Ellie. So we’ve got a nice, relaxed, empty mind right now. Every time you start to think about something, you just notice the thought and move it away, OK? Your mind is a big, big empty space. Any thoughts that come in, you don’t need to worry about them, just let them drift on past.
EP: Mmm. OK.
CC: Great. And then, when you’re ready, I’d like you to very gently, very slowly, allow just something small from the dream we discussed earlier to emerge. You don’t need to try, just relax and tell me what you see.
[pause: 1 min 5 sec]
EP: A lot of people. Frightened … everyone is frightened.
CC: What are the people frightened of? Can you take a step back from what you see and have a look around you?
[pause: 25 sec]
EP: Soldier. There’s a soldier and he’s got … something in his hand. And … dirty. He’s very dirty and shouting.
CC: Is this … the big building we’ve talked about, are we there?
EP: No.
CC: All right. Tell me more about this soldier.
EP: He’s got soldier clothes on but his hair is all longish and dirty like he hasn’t washed and it smells like cigarettes and – man smell.
[pause: 27 sec]
CC: So I saw you flinch just then, is there anything else you can tell me about what you see?
EP: Blood.
CC: Blood, OK. Where is the blood?
EP: On the floor.
CC: Good, right. Tell me about the floor. Let’s see if we can get an idea of this room.
EP: Not a room. Outside. Blood on the ground. Stones. I’m-I’m scared.
CC: OK. Here … all right, so keep your eyes closed but I’m just going to ask you to move your hands down, is that all right? Good, that’s good. So you covered your ears then, what happened?
EP: A lot of noise.
CC: Can you describe the noise?
EP: Screaming. But … he’s trying to cry but he can’t.
CC: Who’s trying to cry?
EP: Little boy. Bleeding. His throat – the soldier cut him and he can’t. The little boy can’t—
[pause: 20 sec]
CC: So just try to slow your breathing … just slow that right down if you can. So there’s a little boy who’s been hurt by a soldier. On his neck? Can you describe what happened?
EP: He says it’s the little boy’s fault. The little boy shouldn’t have been crying.
CC: Do you know why the boy was crying?
EP: He was … he was hungry. He was really hungry and I was hungry too and the man said he won’t be hungry anymore.
CC: The man said that? The soldier?
EP: Yeah but the little boy—
CC: All right, listen to my voice a moment. I want you to take some deep—
EP: The little boy is going to die.
CC: He’s … all right, let’s take these deep breaths together, all right?
EP: He’s going to die and I want to help him but I’m too scared. I want to help but I can’t because—
CC: OK I’m placing my hands on you now, you can feel I’m here, you’re safe—
EP: He’s going to die
[crying]
EP: There’s so much blood. I can’t help him. I can’t—
CC: OK, Ellie? I want you to open your eyes. Ellie. Open them now.
67.
Mae
Inside the windowless interview room, the duty solicitor folded her arms across her chest. It was, Mae noted, the one who always managed to have a rod up her arse about something.
‘Was that your superior I saw outside?’ she wanted to know. ‘Because I’d like to ask her if there’s a good reason it’s you doing this. Given the history. Other than revenge, I mean?’
Mae ignored this and sat himself opposite Cox. Took the time to make himself comfortable. Crossed his ankles, leaned back, rolled his neck a few times. The light on the recorder told him he was all set, and while Mae fixed Cox with his best angle-grinder stare, Kit introduced the interview, repeated the formal caution. Cox, his hair dishevelled, shifted in his seat and looked around.
Kit waited for a beat, then dipped her head, trying to scoop Cox’s eye contact away from Mae. ‘Please confirm that you have understood.’
Cox blinked at her, nodded. Kit repeated her question firmly, gesturing to the recorder. ‘You need to say it, Dr Cox.’
‘I … yes. I have understood, yes. Is that OK?’
Mae cleared his throat and leaned forwards, forearms resting on the table between them. ‘How about we start with what you were doing driving Matthew Corsham’s car from your little lookout spot on Abson Street to the derelict yard in Feltham.’
Cox looked from Mae to Kit then back again, confusion ruching his forehead. ‘Genuinely and sincerely,’ he said, enunciating every syllable with care, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘We’ll need the specific details of this accusation, please,’ the solicitor said coolly.
‘I was rather hoping you’d be able to fill us in on that.’ Mae didn’t take his eyes from Cox.
But the solicitor crossed her arms and huffed with indignation. ‘We’re not here for a fishing exercise. The charges you brought last night don’t mention anything about—’
‘OK then,’ Mae said, shuffling the papers in the folder and pulling out a second bundle. ‘Let’s try … oh yes. Matthew Corsham’s NHS-issue laptop computer. The one you got your assistant to deliver back to the hospital when you realized they were getting itchy about it being missing.’ He squared the sheets on the table and waited.
Cox bit his lips a few times, eyeing them both. Then he said, ‘I stole it.’
The solicitor lunged forwards, looking like she’d just vomited in her mouth. ‘Wait. Hold on, what—?’
But Cox put both his hands up. ‘I did. I’m going to be honest here. I want you to know that. I have made some bloody … stupid mistakes,’ he said, like he was dragging the words out of a very dark place. ‘But if I don’t admit to the things I have done, you lot are going to think I’m responsible for much more. Much worse. So let’s start there. I’m happy to admit that all of the recordings in the van are my doing, no one else knew about any of that. But I had to do it that way. The moment they knew I was around they would have raised hell, or disappeared, and I would never have got the evidence I needed. Honestly, I know nothing about any car. I knew Matt had one but nothing else. But the computer … I can tell you about that.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Matthew called me, a week ago. Said he’d been suspended, that he was going to get the sack. Someone at work had reported him for having indecent material on his computer. He obviously hadn’t put it there himself. Well, I say obviously, but it was obvious to me. But he wanted to take the computer in, let them look at it exactly as it was, without wiping it or doing anything to get rid of what was on it. He said he had nothing to hide and that the best approach was to just go in and be absolutely honest. But he knew there were going to be questions asked, so he said I should probably pre-empt it. Get a lawyer. Talk to you lot.’
Mae folded his arms. ‘But you weren’t going to let that happen.’
‘Not at the time, no. I knew how bad it would look, and you have to remember what happened the last time I found myself in a room like this,’ he said, glancing at the cameras in the corner of the IR, then at Mae. ‘I tried cooperation and honesty last time. Didn’t serve me so well. So I begged him to just delet
e it all—’
‘Because you knew there were images of yours on there that were going to be found,’ Kit said.
Cox looked away.
Mae waited. ‘So then what happened?’ he asked eventually.
‘I went to his boat, the day before he went missing, and I took it.’
‘He knew you took it, you know,’ Mae said. ‘The moorings manager saw you do it. He told Matthew he saw you.’
‘I’m aware of that.’
Mae sat back. ‘See, there’s something wrong there. If you stole my laptop, and if I knew you’d stolen it, I’d be round your house with a baseball bat faster than a coked-up Uber.’
‘I’d ask you to refrain from threatening my client,’ the solicitor said.
‘He wasn’t threatening me,’ Cox said. Everyone turned to look at him: traditionally it wasn’t the done thing for the suspect to take the side of the police during their interview. ‘Well, you weren’t,’ he repeated. ‘But the point is, Matthew knew what was on that machine. The obscene material involving children – which was nothing to do with me, and I’m certain was also nothing to do with Matthew, for the record – he wanted to just get the machine back without causing a fuss.’
This was a far cry from how Mae had expected the interview to go. He took his time making a couple of notes, then said, ‘Let’s go back a little way. Tell me about how you knew Matthew Corsham in the first place.’
Cox shifted in his seat, relaxing a bit with the new line of questioning. ‘It was a couple of months ago. I just got a call. Out of the blue, really. I thought it was … I don’t know, a joke, or something to start with.’
‘Why would you think that?’ Mae asked.
‘Because I’d given up hope of finding her. I’d tried, many, many times after her suicide attempt, after she came out of hospital, but both she and Christine appeared to have vanished into thin air. Then I got this call from Matthew. He had some queries, he said, from a professional point of view, and could I answer them.’