by Rob Wyllie
It had been DC Ronnie French, one of his deadbeat colleagues in deadbeat Department 12B, who had first brought the case to his attention, although it could hardly have been described as a case at that stage. French was quite new to the department and had come with a reputation. Of course everyone in 12B had a back-story, but French's was less complicated than most. He was simply useless.
It was a few days earlier, and Frank had arranged to meet him in the same room where he now sat. The DC had been waiting for him when he got there. Fat and scruffy, French was approaching his fiftieth year and spent all of his waking hours dreaming of his impending early retirement after a long and undistinguished career in the ranks. He had greeted Frank with a perfunctory 'Morning guv,' his face carrying the same sullen expression it had carried for the past thirty years. Frank had known it wasn't personal. He was like that with everybody.
'Morning Frenchie,' he had said, casting him a mildly disapproving glance. It had often occurred to him that he might well end up looking like the DC in a few years’ time if he didn't do something about it, although he recognised that dispassionate observers might already mistake them for twins.
'So what have you got for me? Something interesting, that's what you said on the phone.' It would have needed to have been something bloody earth-shattering to get the perma-bored French off his fat arse. That was why Frank had gambled it would be worth a meeting, and he wasn't to be disappointed.
'Yeah guv, quite interesting I think. A suicide that might not be a suicide. A mate of mine down the club brought it to my attention.'
And that was where it had all started. A suicide that might not be a suicide. Better known as a murder.
The victim was one Chardonnay Clarke, a pretty young woman of just twenty-three years of age. Correction, not just pretty, but absolutely stunning. She was the niece of a friend of Ronnie French's mate, all members of the Romford snooker club where seemingly he spent most of his leisure time. And whilst her name might have suggested otherwise, she was no stereotypical Essex girl. According to the brief background notes that DC French had thrown together for him, this was a very bright lady, with a string of A levels and a first-class Honours in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University. Frank didn't know too much about academia, but he had read somewhere that an Oxford PPE degree was about the most sought-after and prestigious qualification you could get. Not bad for a plumber's daughter from Romford, that was for sure.
After Uni, she had gone to work for one of these international banks down at St Katherine's Dock, although as Ronnie had put it, it wasn't a real job, but one of these fake intern things where your rich daddy paid for your place. Except, and this was something that had particularly caught Frank's attention, Chardonnay Clarke didn't have a rich daddy.
It had occurred at around six-thirty in the evening, Tower Hill tube station still packed with returning commuters anxious to get home after a long day in the office. The eye-witness accounts were both hazy and contradictory, which didn't surprise Frank in the slightest. One was adamant that her movement had been chillingly precise and deliberate, that she had waited until the train emerged into the station before stepping off the platform to her death. Another said she had wavered uncertainly before toppling over, as if she was drunk or drugged.
In her handbag they had found her smartphone, still open on her Facebook timeline, where apparently she had been about to tell the world that life had become too painful to bear and so she had decided to end it all. I'm sorry, I just can't go on, that's all it said. But for some reason, she never got to press 'Post'.
The police were called of course, but there was no reason to suspect foul play. Interestingly though, or at least interesting to Frank, the post-mortem did find traces of cocaine and heroin in her blood stream. A speedball, that's what they called it on the street, a powerful cocktail of two class A drugs that was as likely to give you a heart attack as give you a thrill. But the Coroner had been unwilling to speculate whether that had contributed to her death, either in the physical or psychological sense.
According to her father, her new job had rather gone to her head and she had started moving in what he called a 'fast set.' Over-paid bankers, wankers more like, with Ferraris and fancy penthouse pads. That's how Terry Clarke had described them, but he had been adamant that his daughter was a good girl and certainly wasn't into drugs or anything of that nature. Frank gave a silent laugh at that. The parents were always the last to know.
And that was it, as far as the authorities were concerned. A tragedy for the family, undoubtedly, that's what the Coroner had said at the inquest, but nothing to suggest anything else, especially after the discovery of Chardonnay's virtual suicide note. So the case was closed even before it was opened.
A suicide that might not be a suicide. But what was the evidence for that, other than the father's insistence that his girl had everything to live for and so why would she do herself in? Frank hadn't known Chardonnay, but he had researched the stats, and if her death had been self-inflicted, then it was definitely an outlier. It turned out there was about six thousand suicides in a typical year in the UK and of them, more than three quarters were male. It was a bit of a sweeping statement, but generally speaking women didn't top themselves. That was especially true for young women under the age of twenty-five.
But it wasn't just the statistics that had driven Frank to dive deeper and deeper, getting him to where he was now. Firstly, he bloody hated drugs and what they did to people's lives. For him, it was personal, and as long as he could draw breath he would pursue the scumbags who made their livings from that pernicious trade.
Secondly, it was that photograph of her that French had sent him. Because Chardonnay hadn't just been pretty. She was an off-the-scale beauty, super-model stunning, and in his book, girls like that just wouldn't kill themselves. No way.
And the third thing, and this was the one which really sent him off on what he knew might well turn out to be a wild goose chase, was that he remembered an item that had caught his eye nearly nine months ago in the Evening Standard. About a good-looking young lad who had thrown himself in front of a tube train. He could remember at the time looking at the striking photographs of the boy and thinking exactly the same thing as he was now thinking about Chardonnay Clarke. Lads like that didn't just go out and kill themselves.
Which is why he had found himself on a government website, scanning the London suicide data for the past year, because that would tell him if his opinion, rooted in common sense, was backed up by the statistics. It was a surprise to him when he found out that the capital had the lowest rate of any region in the country, at around four per hundred thousand of population. It was less of a surprise that the highest region was Scotland, where the rate was exactly four times higher at sixteen suicides per hundred thousand. Having grown up there, he could understand why. It could be grim up in Pict country.
Searching deeper, he had found the evidence in a particular government chart that supported his hunch. In the last year, just forty-nine people under the age of twenty-five had taken their own lives in London. True, every one told a heartbreaking story, but statistically, it was insignificant. As he had suspected, Chardonnay Clarke was an outlier.
A quick call to the Coroner's office had confirmed what he had hoped. Yes, they did keep data records on each case, confidential data he as a serving police officer could request access to. Containing everything he might need except their identities of course, because this data was, what was it they called it? Anonymised, that was it. But that didn't matter at this stage.
He couldn't really explain what he expected to find out from the data. There was just something in the fact that most under twenty-fives didn't do this, so maybe he would discover something that stood out by looking at the few who did. He recalled that there had been a spate of recent incidents where seemingly level-headed youngsters had been encouraged to take their own lives through muddle-headed social media campaigns. Was Chardonnay's case o
ne of them, he wondered, and were there any others like it? Maybe that other guy from a few months ago was one. He'd need to do a bit of digging to find out his name, but that shouldn't be too difficult. That was what he was looking for, patterns and connections. It might lead nowhere, but it was as good a place as any to start.
The only problem was, the data would doubtless come on a spreadsheet, and Frank didn't do spreadsheets. But that didn't matter, because his wee pal Eleanor Campbell did. If there was anything to be found, she would help him find it. And just two days after he had made the request, the spreadsheet had landed in his inbox.
This morning he found the young forensic officer at her adopted desk on the ground floor, and, as was often the case, on her phone. Eleanor's official location was at the main labs over at Maida Vale, but she preferred to be tucked away out of sight and out of mind in Atlee House, a preference that Frank liked to use to his maximum advantage. From her tone, he guessed that she was speaking to her sort-of boyfriend Lloyd, but you didn't need to be a Detective Inspector like him to figure that one out. Because Eleanor was always talking to sort-of Lloyd. A situation that he intended to take full advantage of.
He signalled her to hang up. She responded with her trademark scowl and kept talking.
'Yeah, Lloyd, look, I don't want to talk about this now...No way... look, I've told you a gazillion times before, that's never going to happen...no, I'm not doing that, like never... I've got to go...no, not tonight, not ever I said... Lloyd, no forget it...'
'Problems?' Frank knew he was on safe ground with this, because there always seemed to be problems between Eleanor and her on-off boyfriend.
'He's an idiot.'
'Seems that way,' Frank said, giving a sympathetic half-smile, 'but you know, you really shouldn't be talking to him on police time.' They both knew what that meant. She was expected to trade compliance for him looking the other way.
She heaved a sigh. 'Ok Frank, what do you want?'
He smiled back at her. 'That's my girl. So I've got a wee spreadsheet from the Coroner that I'd like you to help me with. I remembered you told me once about some sort of data matching you could do with this Excel thingy?'
'Yeah, I remember,' she said, without enthusiasm. 'So how many records does it have? Millions I expect.'
'Records?' Frank said. 'If you mean how many lines, forty-nine.'
'Forty-nine?' she replied, with visible relief. 'That's like nothing. Send it to me and I'll take a look.'
'How long do you think it will take to find any patterns?' Frank asked. 'A couple of days I suppose?'
She gave him a scornful look. 'Yeah, more like two minutes, if there's only forty-nine rows. Are you still hiding away in that corner office upstairs?'
'Working away, you mean. Aye, I am.'
'Whatever. So, I'll come and see you when I find something.' He noted with some satisfaction that she said when not if. He wasn't surprised, because if there was one thing he knew about Eleanor Campbell, it was that she didn't lack self-belief.
True to her word, it was barely ten minutes later when she marched into the little meeting room, her laptop under her arm.
'That was quick,' Frank said. 'Find anything?' He knew she would have, otherwise she wouldn't be here.
'Yeah, like it was simples-ville. It took me longer to walk up the stairs than find it.'
'And?'
'And there's two records that might be connected in some way to your girl. Row eight and row twenty-four. Look, I'll show you.'
She placed the laptop on the desk facing Frank and opened the lid.
'They pull together a lot of other data from the credit-checking agencies databases and other places,' Eleanor said. 'Data augmentation they call it. I don't know why, they just do.'
Frank didn't know either, but he suspected it was so the public health authorities could look for patterns too, in their case ones that might help them target their preventative education programs. Things like background and occupation, to see if certain groups were particularly susceptible to giving up on life. He seemed to remember it used to be farmers and dentists who were the worst for some reason. Maybe they still were.
'So things like the cause of death, obviously, but lots of other things like their schools and unis, who they work for, their jobs. Lots of weird stuff like that.'
'And you said you found some matches?' Frank said. 'Yeah, that's right. Twelve on the first pass. That was on method. That's what they call how they done it.'
'So twelve poor sods decided to end it all by stepping in front of trains.'
'Yeah, and like it splits the data between underground and overground for some reason. Underground is the most popular.'
Frank shook his head. 'Bloody hell Eleanor, these are real people, with families, kids, everything. I'm not sure popular really describes it.'
'I didn't mean anything by it,' she said, her tone defensive. 'What I mean is more of them jumped in front of a tube train than overground. Eight out of twelve.'
Frank nodded silently to himself. Every now and again the radio travel bulletins would report travel disruption on the Underground because the police were dealing with an incident. It was never spelt out, but everyone knew what it meant.
'So then I was looking for a match on the maximum number of data elements,' Eleanor said. 'I wrote a macro.'
'Sorry?' Frank said.
'A macro. I got it to like search for matches automatically. Gender, occupation, town of birth, things like that.'
He didn't even pretend to understand what she was talking about.
'Aye, well I'll have to take your word for that. But come on, tell me more.'
'Yeah, so although the data is anonymised, it was easy to work out which one was Chardonnay. From her age, town of birth and like obviously the method. You see, here she is here. Row twenty-four.'
Frank nodded. 'So then you just got your wee macro thingy to go and find other lines that were a close match, is that how it works?' Too late, he saw what he had done. Just. It didn't take much to offend her, he knew that from bitter experience, and then she could get difficult. Difficult, as in down tools and walk off the job difficult.
'Just? Like you think this stuff is easy?' Not more than one minute ago, she herself had said that it was, but Frank knew he wasn't going to get anywhere by reminding her of that.
'No no, of course not,' he said, backtracking. 'A little slip of the tongue, that was all. Of course it's not easy. I couldn't do any of this, no way.'
That seemed to satisfy her. He had found that shameless grovelling often did.
'Yeah, I know you couldn't. So anyway, I ran the macro with the maximum matches setting and that's how it found the other record.'
'Row eight. The other person.'
'Exactly. So there was matches on like four columns. Method, University, Occupation and some weird one called Parental Socio-economic Group. I've no idea what that is.'
'Right, that's very interesting,' Frank said. 'So does this mean that the other lad killed himself in the same way as Chardonnay? I guess it must do.'
'Correct,' Eleanor said. 'Fatal trauma inflicted by a railway vehicle.'
'And the Uni?'
'Yeah, same. Oxford.'
'And occupation?' Frank said. It was more a statement than a question. 'Do we know who they worked for?'
Eleanor shook her head. 'It says they were interns. I don't know what that is. And no, it doesn't give any info on who they worked for.'
'And then that last one. Socio- whatever. What does that say?'
'I've like no idea what this means either,' she answered, frowning. 'It just says C2.'
But Frank knew what it meant. Socio-economic classification C2, Skilled Manual Workers. Plumbers and brick-layers and electricians, the solid back-bone of the country. Men and women who were good with their hands. Like Chardonnay's dad Terry. And not exactly the background you expected of students at Oxford, no matter how much they tried to deny their elitism.
He thanke
d Eleanor for her help, smiling as he escorted her to the door, then closed it behind her. This was very interesting, no doubt about it. Two young working-class kids who had smashed through the class barriers to win places at a prestigious university. Two kids with door-opening qualifications taking the first steps of what was almost certainly destined to be glittering careers. And two young people who had decided that life was no longer worth living. Now he recognised that old familiar feeling in his gut, the one that screamed something isn't right.
A suicide that wasn't a suicide. Except now it seemed there might be two of them. Now he'd need to make a proper effort to find out who that other lad in the paper was.
Chapter 3
The foyer of the Park Lane Hilton was a hubbub of activity, as hundreds of investors milled around, chatting and sipping coffee, waiting for the Brasenose Investment Trust quarterly update to get going. Maggie noted that they'd had to book one of the bigger conference rooms with the capacity to seat a thousand delegates, such was the popularity of the event. Since yesterday's meeting with Hugo Morgan, she'd done some reading up on his firm, enough to discover it was the absolute darling of the small investor community. And why wouldn't it be, given that those who had been in from the start had seen the value of their shares increase ten-fold? Not a bad return in eight years and way above the FTSE gains for the period. It was no wonder that Morgan was revered as a superstar of the industry, and in just a few minutes she would get the opportunity to see him performing for his adoring fans.
Jimmy had been tasked with completing their registration formalities, which was no more difficult than giving their names to one of the girls at the reception desk and in return being issued with a smart lapel badge on which their name was printed. Jimmy being Jimmy, it was no surprise to her when she glanced over to see that he was in conversation with Harriet Ibbotson, he giving every indication of listening intently as she spoke, she gushing with ill-disguised adoration. Looking round, he caught Maggie's eye, raising an arm in greeting before strolling over.