#taken

by Tony Parsons

  And enough for what Shavers wanted.

  Suddenly he was over the dock and in the well of the court. I made a move towards the exit, expecting him to make his break for freedom.

  Because the only alternative was dying in this courtroom.

  And I saw that was exactly what Ruben Shavers wanted.

  He was crossing the courtroom, away from the exit door and any hope of escape, his long strides taking him past the parallel desks of the defence counsel and crown prosecutor, their backs towards him, but the lawyers turning to look, their faces aghast at the sight of the defendant on the loose. The court registrar and court reporter were directly facing him but they shrank back behind their shared desk, paralysed, willing him to go straight past them, and he did, brushing past the bailiff standing there white-faced with shock, and the grey-wigged old judge in her red robes finally turning to look down at Ruben Shavers over the top of her glasses as he made a mighty leap, taking one step off the front of the bench to propel himself upwards and seizing the hem of her robe with his manacled hands.

  ‘Stop – armed police!’ Jackson said, stone-cold with calm, and his warning seemed to echo around the room as the armed officers at the exit door of Court Two of the Old Bailey called out the same warning a split second later.

  Shavers still had a fistful of the judge’s red robe in his hand when the single shot rang out, brain-piercing in that confined space.

  The judge, slipping out of her robes, squirmed away and was gone into the door in the wall behind her.

  You can’t hear a shot fired that close to your head without cowering and it felt like the entire courtroom ducked our heads as one as Ruben Shavers slid to the floor, the scarlet robes of the judge still held in his dead hands.

  There are Family Liaison Officers for the victims of crime.

  Some FLOs are ineffectual, all of them are well-meaning, but none of them are there for the relatives of those who commit the crimes.

  That was why I found Mrs Ruben Shavers sitting alone on the pavement outside the Central Criminal Court, overcome with shock, stupefied by it as the world rushed on around her, the police and emergency services hurrying towards Court Two while the lawyers in their wigs and robes ran for their lives in the opposite direction.

  ‘Mrs Shavers?’

  I had my warrant card in my hand. I told her my name.

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ I said.

  Then I held out my hand.

  And she took it, limp and weak and too stunned to refuse.

  ‘What’s going to happen to our children?’ she said.

  I drove her home.

  Her name was Lilly – like her daughter – and she was a former ring girl at York Hall, one of the beautiful young women who hold up the round number as they parade the squared circle.

  They still have them in boxing rings, professional beauties with nailed-on smiles, wearing minimal outfits whatever the season, but you don’t see them in many other places these days. She had met Ruben Shavers when she was eighteen and had been with him ever since.

  ‘On and off,’ she told me as we crawled through the traffic. ‘On and off and sometimes somewhere in between.’

  She did not weep for her husband. Not yet. Sometimes our tears have to wait a while.

  The flat was empty. It was a former council property in Finsbury Park that had been sold off when politicians were encouraging people to own their own homes. And although the flat was modest, it felt like a home. You could smell the musky stink of some pet rodent, a hamster or guinea pig, brooding in its little cage. Lilly Shavers was one of those women who build a home for her children even if the man of the house comes and goes, even if their relationship is on and off and somewhere in between.

  There was new tech everywhere – iPads, a couple of laptops, a giant HDTV. No toys, I noticed. Perhaps children don’t play with toys any more. The children, she said, Lilly and Louis, were staying with her mother. She sat in the living room, staring at the switched-off HDTV, while I made two cups of tea. I loaded three sugars into her cup without asking how she liked it.

  I sat in silence as she sipped her tea. I waited until she had finished it. Her breath was changing, her eyes were brighter. There was panic there now, and grief, and emotions I could not place. Lilly Shavers was coming out of shock. Her sunbed tan was a shade darker.

  ‘Did you find anything?’ I said.

  She looked at me as if surprised to find me in her home. As if seeing me truly for the first time.

  ‘When your husband was arrested,’ I said. ‘When we took Ruben. You knew he wasn’t going to be coming home for years and perhaps never coming home again. Most wives – all wives, I suspect – they would look through their husband’s personal belongings. They would try to make sense of this life they shared and maybe knew nothing about. Some men keep secrets from their wives. But all wives want to know the truth, don’t they?’

  We had drunk our sweet tea. Too much sugar, Max.

  ‘So did you find anything?’ I repeated.

  She laughed and shook her head.

  ‘You bastard,’ she said. ‘And I thought you were being nice. I thought you were being kind.’

  ‘Who was kind to Jessica Lyle?’ I said. ‘Who was nice to her?’

  We stared at each other.

  ‘I found everything,’ she said.

  She had it spread out on the marital bed, as if it was evidence for a prosecution that was never going to make it to court.

  There was a lot of paperwork. Most of it seemed to be credit card bills that she had scored with bright green marker pen.

  ‘There are receipts for presents that he never gave me,’ she said. ‘Nice presents. Jewellery, mostly. Bags.’

  She gave me a bitter look.

  ‘The things that women like,’ she said.

  The paperwork spilled off the bed and on to the carpet.

  On the bedside table there was a photograph of Ruben Shavers grinning in hospital scrubs, a new-born baby in his arms.

  ‘There are hotel bills for rooms that I never slept in,’ Lilly Shavers told me. ‘I had looked at his phone, of course, but he was too experienced to have anything incriminating on there. But I found this.’

  Near the pillow of the bed there was an old-style BlackBerry. I had not seen one of those in years. It gave me a mild pang of nostalgia, like seeing a steam train or a Spitfire.

  ‘Plenty of photos on there,’ she said, nodding at the old-style BlackBerry. ‘Some of them adult in nature. Do you know what I mean, Detective?’

  She held it out to me, this dedicated phone that she had never seen before, and I remembered the second phone of Harry Flowers, and I wondered if they had both come up with the idea independently, or if one unfaithful husband had recommended a second phone to the other, an illicit dating tip.

  ‘What is heartbreaking is that you learn to suspect everything, don’t you?’ she said. ‘I wonder if he had any feelings for me at all. I wonder if he had any love for our children. Or if all he cared about were his whores.’

  She was crying.

  ‘What was Ruben scared of?’ I said.

  Defiance and pride in her now. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘You ever see him fight?’

  It was not true. There was something that terrified Ruben Shavers. It made him too afraid to talk. And it made him too afraid to go on living.

  I gestured at the bed covered with all its paperwork of betrayal.

  ‘Is this all of it?’ I said.

  ‘Almost,’ she said.

  She went to the bedside table that displayed the picture of Ruben as a proud father.

  She opened the bedside drawer and took out a set of keys.

  She held the keys out to me.

  ‘I’m a widow, aren’t I?’ she said. ‘Wow. How can I be a widow? How did that happen?’

  I was looking at the keys.

  ‘What do they open?’ I said.

  ‘God only knows,’ she laughed.

  I took them from her
.

  A Yale and a Chubb, the brass worn smooth with time.

  A set of keys to the secret life of Ruben Shavers.

  30

  If DCI Pat Whitestone was still drinking, then she showed no sign.

  My boss was working in MIR-1 before anyone else arrived, and she remained at her desk when Joy Adams and I headed home. But Whitestone seemed weary to me, and distracted, as though the search for Jessica Lyle had worn away something inside her, and when TDC Joy and I stood before the giant map of London that covers the end wall in MIR-1, Whitestone showed no inclination to join us.

  ‘It’s really hard to hide a body,’ I said. ‘Even in a city this big. Even in a city that stretches for thirty miles either side of a river that is two hundred miles long.’

  Joy and I stared at the map in silence.

  More than any other major metropolis in the world, the map of London is splashed with green and blue.

  ‘Even here,’ I said, ‘among all these parks, woods and commons and with all those canals, rivers and reservoirs – it is so hard to hide a body.’

  ‘Because bodies decay,’ Adams said. ‘And because killers are stupid.’

  ‘If Jessica Lyle died soon after they took her,’ I said, ‘then Ruben Shavers and Derek Bumpus were almost mad with the adrenaline that comes with the terror of getting caught. If they disposed of the body in a rush – in some basement, or some skip, or some pond – then we would have found her by now.’

  ‘Because killers are stupid,’ Adams repeated. ‘And bodies decay.’

  ‘So to bury her in a graveyard makes perfect sense,’ I said. ‘What Bumpus told me – look in the graveyard – doesn’t seem like some dumb taunt. It would be perfect – to have a grave dug and ready to use as soon as they took her.’

  We stared silently at the map.

  And then Whitestone laughed.

  ‘Just how hard did Bumpus kick you in the head, Max?’ she said. ‘You’re really going to build an investigation around the word of a villain? Good luck with that.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I’m checking in with forensics down on the third floor. The CSIs found some female DNA in Bumpus’s flat. They already know it didn’t belong to Jessica Lyle, but an ID would be handy.’

  After she was gone, Adams and I continued to stare at the map of the city.

  ‘Maybe the boss is right,’ Adams said. ‘Maybe Bumpus was giving you a false lead. Maybe he wants us chasing our tails.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘He was goading me with something he knew and I didn’t. The trouble is, this is a city of graves. When Sir Christopher Wren was rebuilding St Paul’s Cathedral after the Great Fire, he dug up layer upon layer of graves, burial grounds 18-feet deep that went back more than a thousand years. Pagan dead. Roman dead. Saxon dead. Norman dead. Generations of the dead who the world had forgotten. And when they built the tube at the start of the last century, they had to drill through catacombs with walls that were made of the bones of plague victims. This is a city of ghosts.’

  ‘But he told you a graveyard,’ Joy said. ‘He wasn’t talking about some Roman burial ground, Max. He said a graveyard. And I guess that means one of the big cemeteries they built in the nineteenth century when the churchyards were overflowing with the dead. And how many of them are there?’

  I thought about it. ‘Over a hundred,’ I said.

  ‘But how could they hope to get away with burying her in a graveyard?’ Adams said. ‘That’s what makes no sense. It doesn’t matter if the grave was already dug and waiting to be used or if they did it on the night – a freshly dug grave that wasn’t meant to be there would be seen as soon as the sun came up.’

  ‘The only way to get away with it,’ I said, ‘the only way, would be to bury the body in a graveyard that is closed to the public. And there is only one of those.’

  I pointed to a patch of green in the top left-hand corner of the giant map.

  ‘Highgate?’ she said uncertainly.

  I nodded, and my skin crawled at the memory of my own personal history with Highgate Cemetery.

  I remembered the night that two men had attempted to bury me alive there. I recalled the rustle and crack of the bones that were already inside the coffin they placed me in, and I could once again smell the moist soil mixing with the expensive cologne of one of the men, and I remembered thrashing like a wounded animal in a trap inside the sealed box as the shovels above me in the land of the living dropped dirt that went splat-splat-splat on the wooden ceiling inches from my face.

  Most of all, I remembered the taste of my fear.

  I pushed the memory away.

  ‘When people think of Highgate Cemetery, they think of the big stone monument at the grave of Karl Marx,’ I said. ‘But Marx is buried in Highgate East Cemetery. That’s open to the public. The other side of the road is Highgate West Cemetery. You ever been in there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Highgate West is like a graveyard in a dream. These huge vaults and crosses and mausoleums that have been swallowed up by nature and time. All these huge, crumbling Victorian monuments surrounded by jungle. And because so much of the architecture is fragile, Highgate West is only open to small guided tours and for burials.’

  ‘Wait a minute – it’s closed to the public but they still bury people there?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Highgate West is still a working cemetery,’ I said.

  ‘How easy is it to get in there? When it’s all locked up?’

  ‘It has high walls and locked gates,’ I said. I thought about it. ‘There are anti-climbing spikes on the iron gates at the front. But no guards. The guy who owns my local gym – my friend Fred – grew up next door, in Kentish Town, and he once told me how he and his mates would sneak into Highgate Cemetery on summer nights. It was also popular with Fred and his crowd on Halloween. You can get inside if you really want to.’

  Joy Adams looked at the patch of green near the top of the map.

  ‘Then it would be perfect,’ she said.

  Our torches piercing the darkness, we climbed the steps that lead the visitor to Highgate West Cemetery up to the roof of the city.

  On either side of the steps there were giant redwood trees. Among the thick undergrowth of the ancient forest, stone angels wreathed in ivy watched our progress.

  ‘I’m glad we didn’t have to climb those bloody gates, sir,’ Adams said. ‘Excuse my French.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said.

  It had been easy getting inside Highgate West, but only because we had phoned ahead. When we pulled up outside, an elderly man with a gentle smile and a halo of white hair – one of the Friends of Highgate Cemetery, the unpaid volunteers who care for this special place – was waiting for us.

  As he opened up, I had stared at the tangle of sharp metal spikes on top of the front gates and felt the doubt creeping in. I knew from my personal experience that there were other points of entry around the perimeter of the sprawling cemetery, but nobody was going over those metal spikes in a hurry.

  And as we tramped through the darkness, Adams felt it too.

  ‘This is nuts,’ she said. ‘I mean, it’s a beautiful place, sir – I’ve never seen anywhere remotely like it – but this has to be nuts, doesn’t it? We don’t even know what we’re looking for.’

  We paused at the top of the steps.

  I stared off into the thick wild wood. In the light of our torches and the moon, there were graves marked by massive stone figures, ten times life-sized. A lion. A dog. A horse. All of them curled up and sleeping for eternity. And hosts of stone angels, some of them with the features of their face worn off by a century or more of time and weather. And everywhere the great tangled jungle of Highgate West.

  But Adams was right.

  This was nuts.

  Yet I could not shake the feeling that, if you were going to bury someone without the world noticing, then this was the best place to do it.

  We stepped on to Egyptian Avenue where the great stone catacombs,
vaults and tombs were cut into the hillside and stretched off into the distance. Beyond Egyptian Avenue there was a winding path leading downhill and back to the entrance and it seemed to urge us to go home and end this madness.

  ‘It was worth a shot,’ I said. ‘Let’s thank that nice old man and all go home.’

  We started back towards the chapel that marks the entrance to Highgate West Cemetery.

  And we were almost there when I saw it.

  A new grave, modest and modern, the stone still pure white, light years from the colossal grey tombs with their giant animals and angels swallowed by nature.

  ‘Dr Stewart McGlenny,’ Adams read.

  It was a tombstone that remembered a beloved husband, father and grandfather. He had been a doctor in his long working life and he had been an old man when he died. In his late eighties. A long life, a good life, a life filled with love and work and family. And a privileged life, too, for it is not an easy task to get permission to bury your loved one in Highgate West Cemetery.

  The dates were freshly cut on the simple white stone.

  The date he was born.

  The dash that in the end is all that remains of a lifetime.

  And the day that Dr Stewart McGlenny died.

  ‘Do you see that date?’ I asked Adams. ‘The day he died?’

  ‘It’s around a week before they took Jessica.’

  ‘It’s exactly a week. And as most funerals take place seven or eight days after a death, Dr McGlenny’s funeral must have been very close to the night they took Jessica Lyle. My guess is that his loved ones buried him the next day. And never knew that somebody had already been buried in his grave.’

  ‘I’ll check the date of Dr McGlenny’s funeral,’ Joy said, her phone already in her hand.

  ‘And then get me an exhumation certificate,’ I said. ‘Because they buried her here.’

  Our twin torch lights shone on the grave.

  The wreaths and bouquets of the old doctor’s funeral had been cleared away now. All that remained, propped up against the pure white headstone, was a small bunch of wild flowers tied with a hairband.