by Tony Parsons
And a pink pair of ballet shoes made of satin and leather.
31
‘Open it up,’ DCI Whitestone said.
The yellow bulldozer’s diesel engine howled as its digger sank into the surface of the old doctor’s grave.
The lights of the CSIs encircled the site and drenched it in a dazzling white glare. Uniformed officers and the blue-suited CSIs hung back behind the lights, all of them staring at the grave. The top part of the bulldozer turned sideways, thick clumps of earth falling away from the overflow, and dumped its load of soil to one side. Already a hole was opening up in the grave. The bulldozer emptied another load. And then another.
And then it slowed and stopped.
Ropes were lowered into the grave.
A coffin was lifted out.
Shockingly, the wood was untarnished and the brass handles still gleamed like a picture in an undertaker’s brochure. It still looked brand new.
Whitestone did not look at me. It was impossible to look away from the grave that was being opened up before our eyes.
‘Don’t be wrong, Max,’ she told me, still not looking at me.
I stepped to the edge of the open grave. Six feet deep but showing nothing but earth. The bulldozer moved forward again, struggling for traction on the cemetery’s steep sloping path. It sank its digger into the open grave and clawed away only a scraping of dirt.
‘Stop,’ I said. ‘We need shovels.’
Whitestone gave the nod and two suited CSIs in their facemasks and blue nitrile gloves and boots eased themselves into the grave with their shovels. They tossed just a few loads of dirt on the side of the open grave and paused.
‘There’s something down here,’ one of them said.
And now we were all at the edge of the open grave.
All of us staring down at what had been buried beneath the coffin.
A patch of white plastic, picked out by a dozen torchlights.
‘Get back!’ one of the CSIs was shouting, suddenly furious, and then they were pulling the soil away with their gloved hands until what was revealed was another kind of coffin.
We don’t call it a body bag.
We call it an HRP – a Human Remains Pouch – and this one had black webbing handles that the CSIs used to pull it away from the earth that held it. More hands reached down to help take the load.
The HRP was pulled from the open grave.
And Whitestone looked at me again.
‘This was never just an abduction, Pat,’ I said. ‘This was always a hit. The plan was never kidnap. The plan was always murder.’
And then Frank Lyle was pushing through the crowds, his face drained of life under those pitiless lights.
‘Jessica!’ he said. ‘Jessica! What did they do to you? What did they do?’
I took him in my arms.
‘Listen to me,’ I said, but there was nothing to say to him, and there was nothing reassuring for him to hear.
And so I held him close and I let him weep, and he pressed his face into my chest so that the world would not witness his tears.
And as the CSIs carried the white plastic HRP down to the waiting mortuary van with its blacked-out windows, the black van looking self-consciously staid surrounded by all the swirling blue lights of our vehicles, I was grateful that this broken man would be spared one last horror.
The task of identifying his daughter.
Because by this time there would no longer be enough of a beloved daughter for him to identify. It had been too long. That young woman had gone forever. Dental records and DNA would be enough to spare them from that terrible goodbye. The parents of Jessica Lyle would not be asked to look upon her face one last time.
How long had she been gone?
It was less than a month but it felt like more than a lifetime.
‘Everyone loved her,’ her father said.
‘I know they did, Frank,’ I said.
And as I held Frank Lyle against me, his face buried in my chest, I could feel the metal in my jacket pocket, the keys to the secret life of Ruben Shavers, digging deeper into my flesh.
32
In the morning DCI Whitestone and I made the ten-minute walk from West End Central in Savile Row through St James’s Park to the Westminster Public Mortuary on Horseferry Road.
The black Bentley Bentayga was parked on a double-yellow line outside.
Mo Patel saw us coming and quickly tapped on the rear window, a nervous little Buddhist monk of a man.
Harry Flowers got out and came towards Whitestone. I put myself between them.
‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ I told him.
‘I just want to see Jess,’ he said, his voice cracked with grief. ‘I need to see my girl.’
‘Not going to happen,’ Whitestone said.
I pushed him away and we carried on into the mortuary.
Flowers shouted after us. ‘Don’t forget who owns you,’ he told Whitestone.
I turned back to him, but she took my arm.
‘Not now,’ she said.
We signed in at the desk for the Iain West Forensic Suite.
And as we got into the lift for the basement, I could see Harry Flowers on the far side of the plate glass, staring at us.
DCI Pat Whitestone did not look at him.
But she knew he was still there.
‘You ever work a stalking case?’ she said.
I nodded. ‘Some.’
‘It’s never over, is it?’ she said. ‘Not until someone is dead.’
We stood in our blue scrubs and hairnets, the temperature in the Iain West Forensic Suite as always just one degree above freezing, and we waited for the verdict of Elsa Olsen, forensic pathologist.
There was a single stainless-steel bed in the room.
But it held nothing but a metal bowl.
Elsa smiled with polite apology, like a dinner party hostess whose main course is going to be unexpectedly delayed.
‘The body I have examined is too far gone to tell us the full story,’ she said, no trace of her native Norway after an adult lifetime in London. ‘It has been in the ground for – I would estimate – somewhere between three weeks and a month.’
I felt my stomach fall away.
How long have we searched for you, Jessica?
A shade over three weeks.
We waited.
‘Nature is very efficient at breaking down a body that has been buried in soil,’ Elsa continued. ‘Inside a coffin, any coffin, decay would take a lot longer. And many years longer in a coffin made of something like oak, like the coffin of Dr Stewart McGlenny. But the body you found beneath Dr McGlenny’s coffin was in a thin HRP and so nature worked a lot faster, although nowhere near as fast as if the body had been left above ground or in water. But the more advanced decomposition, the harder it is to answer the four questions of death,’ Elsa said. ‘Cause? Mechanism? Manner? Time? I can take a good guess at the time because a body begins to decompose four minutes after death and then follows the same four stages wherever it is buried – autolysis, bloat, active decay and skeletonisation. After around one month, between stages three and four, the body starts to liquefy. And that is what is happening to this body. Which is why a visual ID is impossible.’
‘But the rate of decomposition is consistent with the time of Jessica’s abduction?’ Whitestone said.
Elsa nodded. ‘But cause, mechanism and manner are impossible to gauge from the autopsy. There was no visible skeletal damage that could have been caused by a weapon. The skull was intact. No ribs were broken. But after autolysis – the initial decay, the chemical breakdown of tissues and cells – we lose a lot of the story because there is so much less to analyse. The heart stops pumping and blood stops circulating and the cells are deprived of oxygen and the dead lose their voice, or at least they find it much harder to tell us their story.’
I shivered in the freezing room.
‘I can no longer look at lividity, rigor mortis, body temperature, cadaveric spasm,
the contents of a stomach or what I find in the fingernails,’ Elsa said. ‘No skin cells, no blood, no semen. The usual clues have all evaporated into eternity. In the end, there is only decay. At first the dead speak very clearly to us. But then they slip away.’
The newly dead do not go far, I thought.
‘But – just to confirm, Elsa – the timing works perfectly for us?’ Whitestone said. ‘Just give me that, will you?’ She shook her head. ‘Why can’t you say it?’
‘Because even the timing becomes problematic after a corpse is this old,’ Elsa said. ‘It could be three weeks old. It could be six. But the internal organs decay in a very specific order. The very last to decay is the uterus in a woman and the prostate gland in men. The organs that bring life are the last to decompose in death. And the uterus in the body you found is the only internal organ that is still intact. I can say that the subject is a young female in her twenties who died within seven days of the night that Jessica Lyle went missing.’
I looked at Whitestone and she nodded.
What else did we need for identification?
‘But there is one big problem,’ Elsa said. ‘I have the dental records of Jessica Lyle. Her parents went to a lot of trouble to take care of her teeth. She didn’t have one cavity.’
‘What does that mean?’ I said.
‘The body you found had a poor person’s teeth,’ Elsa said. ‘There are fillings, gaps, a broken crown. And one of these.’
With a long thin pair of tweezers, Elsa reached into the stainless-steel bowl sitting on the stainless-steel bed and extracted something.
She held it up for us to see.
A single white tooth with what looked like a grey metal screw on the end.
‘This is a dental implant,’ Elsa said. ‘From the cheaper end of the market. My lab tells me it was made in Riga.’
‘Latvia,’ I said.
‘But if the body wasn’t Jessica Lyle,’ Whitestone said, ‘then who was it?’
And suddenly I saw it clear.
‘Her name was Minky,’ I said. ‘She was a dancer at the Western World. She went out with Derek Bumpus and then she went missing around the same time that they took Jessica.’ I turned to Whitestone. ‘That female DNA they found at Bumpus’s apartment? We need to check it out again.’
I remembered Snezia telling me that Minky had probably gone home or landed a rich man or simply moved on.
‘The truth is that nobody cared about her,’ I said. ‘They looked for her. But they just never looked hard enough.’
33
We picked up Joy Adams from West End Central and drove out to Harry Flowers’ home.
The last time I had seen it, the house was full of wedding guests and there was a marquee on the lawn. Now the house was shuttered and the marquee was gone and the only sign of life was Mo the driver cleaning the black Bentley on the gravel drive.
Whitestone and Adams stayed in the BMW when I got out to talk to Mo, and he paused from his cleaning to watch me coming. He looked at me and then up at the house.
‘They’ve gone away,’ he said. ‘There’s nobody home.’
That wasn’t strictly true. I could see a group of men in loungers by the swimming pool, staring at their phones, billowing clouds of smoke coming from their vapers.
More of Mo’s cousins. New help to replace the old help now that Ruben Shavers and Derek Bumpus were off the payroll.
‘That’s OK, Mo,’ I said. ‘Because it’s you I want to talk to.’
He placed his wash mitt on the edge of his bucket.
‘You always got on well with Ruben Shavers, didn’t you?’ I said.
He nodded cautiously, running the palm of his hand over his shaven head, leaving a few soapy suds on his gleaming scalp.
‘Because Ruben treated you like a human being,’ I said. ‘So you liked him. That’s human nature, Mo. We like the people who like us. But Derek Bumpus bullied you and made fun of you and was rude to you.’
‘I try to get on with everyone,’ Mo said.
‘But I saw it myself,’ I said. ‘Bumpus – Big Del – called you Osama bin Laden. He called you a Paki.’
I indicated the men by the swimming pool, who were all watching us. ‘When Snezia was moving out and Meadow was moving in, I heard him say that he never knew al-Qaeda did removals.’
‘Bin Laden was a Saudi,’ Mo said. ‘They were all Saudis, those men on that day. It was nothing to do with my people. I tried telling him that. But he was an uneducated person and he did not listen. None of them ever listen. Saudis attack America and Bush and Blair send their armies to Iraq. But Iraqis didn’t cause 9/11.’
He picked up his wash mitt and nervously wrung it out.
‘But Ruben wasn’t like Big Del,’ I said. ‘When he was alive.’
‘No,’ he said, and his eyes shone with a stab of pain. ‘Ruben was a good man. Under it all.’
‘Ruben liked you too,’ I said. ‘He spoke to me about you once.’
‘He did?’
I nodded. ‘When I went to the yard. Auto Waste Solutions. That’s where Ruben talked to me about you.’
Mo lifted his head, waiting.
I nodded at the Bentley. ‘Ruben told me you let him use the car on special occasions,’ I said.
The driver glanced anxiously at the empty house.
‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell anyone,’ I said. ‘But it’s true, isn’t it?’
‘He took good care of the car. And he was my friend.’
‘And Ruben Shavers liked women, didn’t he?’
‘Many women!’ Mo said, grinning with admiration.
‘And what I think is, on these special occasions that you let him have this beautiful car, he wanted to impress some woman.’
‘It didn’t happen very often. Only with a special lady.’
‘But it happened?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Ruben couldn’t bring the car back to you, could he? He could never return it to you. Because then the boss would have known that he borrowed it. And then both of you would have been in big trouble, right?’
He nodded.
‘So I am guessing that, if Ruben couldn’t bring the car back to you, then you had to go and collect it from him.’
‘Yes.’
‘And I think – just like Harry Flowers – Ruben had a place where he would see his women without his wife knowing.’
He was guarded now.
‘And do you know what, Mo? I think I’ve got the keys to this place.’
We stared at each other.
‘And you’re going to take me there,’ I said. ‘Ruben Shavers’ secret flat.’
Mo looked at Whitestone and Adams watching from the BMW.
‘And if you don’t, Mo, then what I am going to do is arrest you as an accessory for murder.’
‘I didn’t hurt anyone!’
‘Doesn’t matter, Mo. Doesn’t matter a damn. If the law thinks you aided and abetted someone guilty of murder, then it’s as if you committed the murder yourself.’
I let him think about it for a while.
He didn’t have to think about it for very long.
‘I’ll follow you,’ I said, heading back to the BMW. ‘You take the Bentley.’
We drove from that leafy little corner of the suburbs to the Broadwater Farm estate, Tottenham.
The Bentley idled at the foot of a monstrous tower block that had begun to rot from the moment they put it up. Ten years after it was erected, back in the Seventies, the authorities decided that the only thing to do with it was demolish it. But somehow, they never did. So it had stood here rotting for the last forty years.
A flock of young kids on bikes checked us out. They were unimpressed.
Because they had seen this car before.
And although they were unimpressed they still lingered, waiting for something to happen.
The tower block was within walking distance of the home that Ruben Shavers shared with his family. It could not have been more
convenient for a secret life.
Mo buzzed down the window of the Bentley and it didn’t make a sound.
‘Top floor,’ he said. ‘The last flat at the end of the corridor.’
The keys were in my hand now.
‘Did you ever go up there?’ I said.
He shook his head.
‘No, but Ruben told me. He was proud that he had the top flat. Good view. He called it the penthouse.’
We all looked up at the concrete block of flats stabbing itself towards the sky.
Joy Adams almost smiled. ‘Penthouse,’ she said. ‘Nobody has a penthouse in this neck of the woods.’
‘You can go now, Mo,’ I said. ‘We’ll be in touch.’
The Bentley drove away, escorted by the flock of small boys on bikes.
‘Do we want back-up?’ Adams said.
I shook my head.
The keys to the secret life of Ruben Shavers were in my hand.
‘Nobody up there is going to hurt us,’ I said.
We came out of the lift on the top floor.
The wind whistled down those walkways, as it had for a lifetime, and as it would until they finally tore this place down.
We walked to the end of the corridor.
I took out Ruben’s keys and slipped them into their locks.
First the Chubb.
Then the Yale.
We pushed open the door and went inside.
A long, lithe woman was looking out of the window, the palms of her hands pressed into her back, trying to relieve the aches and pains of a dancer.
For a moment I could not speak. I was suddenly aware of my heart in my chest and the only sound was the distant buzz of the traffic far below and the blood in my veins.
‘Jessica,’ I said, and the young woman turned. ‘We’re police officers.’
She stared at us as if she might be dreaming. I saw the blue and white packets of prescription medicine scattered across the coffee table. Xanax.
‘Where’s Ruben?’ she said.
Whitestone looked at me.
Ruben.
‘Shavers can’t hurt you,’ Whitestone said.
