What Falls Between the Cracks

by Robert Scragg

  Porter frowned. ‘1983?’

  ‘There’s that echo again.’

  ‘Where’s the mail? Show me.’

  Styles pointed at a few sheets of paper that lay neatly stacked on the kitchen bench. Porter picked them up one at a time and scanned the contents. Sure enough there was a dental check-up arranged at a local surgery. The statement for her current account confirmed her as a Barclays customer. Porter speculated as to whether there was a connection with the surname but dismissed it as coincidence for now. He looked up again, first at Styles, and then around the room, but more closely now as if seeing everything for the first time. The TV was a big bulky thing that belonged in a museum, with knobs on the front to change channel and volume. From the pattern on the curtains and the fabric on the furniture, to the same layer of dust everywhere he looked, the flat seemed like a snapshot from the land that time forgot; a TV or film set that had just been taken out of storage to air it.

  ‘What do you think, then?’ Styles said from behind him.

  ‘I’d say we need to speak to Miss Barclay about the standard of her housework, but I have a feeling she’s not been in here for some time.’ Styles nodded and Porter went on. ‘The way the dust has built up on the surfaces, I’d say it’s been months since anyone set foot in here, at least, maybe a lot longer. Let’s just hope that wherever she is, she’s got nothing more serious than a few chores around the house to worry about.’

  It took another half hour for the crime scene techs to finish up. Everything was painstakingly catalogued. Styles had joked in the past that the process was like a macabre fashion shoot, and Porter could see why. By the time the pictures were taken, the techs had dusted surfaces with fine powder like a make-up artist applying foundation. Fibres were snipped from the carpet like a hurried pre-catwalk haircut. They chose their camera angles carefully to capture every detail, like David Bailey immortalising the perfect profile.

  Porter decided Styles had understated in the extreme when he had called it a strange one. Everything looked to be from that same era, from the peach, pale blue and soft green curtains to the light brown furry-looking sofa that screamed 1980s. Add that to the correspondence that hailed from the same period, and it was as if they’d travelled back thirty years when they crossed the threshold.

  The bedroom did nothing to alter that perception. Porter could almost feel the dust lining his nasal passages as he breathed in. Styles moved across to the curtains and opened them with both hands simultaneously, sending wispy plumes of dust up into the air like ash from a volcano. Two of the curtain hooks on the left-hand side relinquished their grip on fabric made weak by time, and tore free of their fastenings.

  Porter moved over to the wardrobe, one door slightly ajar with gauzy strands of cobweb laced across the gap like the back of a corset. He opened it slowly, watching to see if the web’s architect was at home, but there was no sign of life. Porter was no fashionista but the suits that hung in the wardrobe reminded him of some of his mum’s outfits from family pictures before he was even born, let alone a toddler. It was starting to feel like an eighties version of Great Expectations, and he’d walked into Satis House with Miss Havisham lurking somewhere inside.

  Satisfied that there was nothing of immediate interest in the bedroom, they made their way back out to the kitchen area in time to see Will Leonard placing the hand carefully into an evidence bag. Porter turned and scanned the living room. It reminded him of a party he’d been at last year where a fight had broken out. An armchair lay on its side like a wounded animal. A small coffee table that had presumably been next to it was upturned, one of the legs snapped off at the halfway point. A magazine lay face down, pages sprawled open and spine pointing upwards.

  He saw dark smudges on the far wall, and moved in for a closer look. The cream paint was flecked with dark spots, a night sky in reverse. A handful of evidence markers, little yellow tents, had set up camp on the carpet around a series of brown stains. All in all, the room looked like a jigsaw smashed by an angry child, none of the pieces seeming to go together just yet. He wandered over to where Styles waited at the door.

  ‘Let’s head back to the station then and see if we can track down Miss Barclay, or at least rustle up some family and friends to speak to.’

  ‘After you,’ said Styles, gesturing towards the door. Porter had just walked past him when he added, ‘Do you think the techs can manage to carry everything, or should we offer to give them a hand?’

  CHAPTER TWO

  Natasha Barclay was a ghost, figuratively speaking, at least. Between them they couldn’t find a single mention of her dated past 1983. Her flat was one of fifteen in a five-storey late Victorian building near Walthamstow, in North East London, built originally as an orphanage. The airy high ceilings and ornate cornices had reminded Porter a little of his own place, although he guessed his flat could fit inside these twice over.

  They left three uniformed officers at the building to go door to door with the remaining eleven residents to see if anyone knew Natasha Barclay. It wasn’t out of the question that she was just a private person, and didn’t make small talk with the neighbours. The interviews with the first three residents, particularly the one who’d lived there for over twenty years, didn’t sit well with him. Sure, people led busy lives, but for those lives to have never intersected with as much as a neighbourly nod while leaving or entering the building in over two decades seemed highly unlikely. Then there was the eerie air of dormancy that hung over the place. The dated decor and coat of dust that cloaked every surface had given him the feeling that the apartment had been slumbering for some time before the leaking freezer had rudely interrupted.

  They headed back to the station at Paddington Green, along Edgware Road, lined with a cultural melting pot of takeaways, competing amongst themselves to ruin your waistline. Porter’s window was halfway down, spices and fried chicken wafting in on the breeze, making his stomach growl in protest. Compressed storefronts jostled for space, offering everything from Persian carpets to a bet on the three o’clock at Newmarket. Blocks of flats had been built up behind them over the years, peering over the tops of the two- and three-storey buildings on the main road like nosy neighbours. Typical mid-twentieth-century fare, blocky and functional. The station itself wasn’t any prettier. The jutting window ledges around each floor made Porter think of the Stickle Bricks he had as a child.

  As soon as they got inside, Styles disappeared into the small kitchen area, returning armed with two mugs of steaming black coffee. Porter realised he’d been staring at a smudge of dirt on the window and blinked his eyes quickly to snap himself out of it.

  ‘I’ve told you before, you’re wasting your time batting your eyelashes at me. I’m a happily married man,’ said Styles. After a few years working together it was impossible not to be aware of his partner’s little quirks. He jokingly referred to this one sometimes as Porter’s ‘Spidey sense’ after the Marvel comic-book hero’s preternatural ability to read situations and intuit danger. He’d seen it happen on more than one occasion where Porter had progressed a seemingly dead-end case by zoning out like that and joining dots that no one else had spotted.

  ‘You can’t blame a guy for trying.’ Porter took a cautious sip of the coffee before putting the cup on the desk.

  ‘Any flashes of inspiration, then?’ asked Styles as he settled into the seat at his desk that adjoined his partner’s.

  Porter shook his head. ‘No, no, ladies first this time. You got a theory?’

  ‘Kind of, actually,’ said Styles. ‘Well, more of a question really,’ he corrected himself. ‘The food in the freezer – that make sense to you?’

  ‘I was a little preoccupied with the hand to have much of an appetite.’

  ‘I wasn’t fixing to make myself a snack,’ said Styles. ‘I’m talking about the packaging. I’m assuming you missed that part?’

  ‘Afraid so. Go on then, enlighten me.’

  ‘The whole scene was just odd,’ Styles began.
‘The clothes and decor you could put down to individual taste. The dust and cobwebs might just mean she’s been living somewhere else for a while, maybe with a boyfriend. The boxes in the freezer make no sense, though.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ asked Porter.

  ‘The packaging,’ said Styles. ‘It was as dated as the rest of the place. Not that I’m an expert in the field of graphic design by any stretch, but it looked ancient compared to what you see in shops today. None of it had the nutritional info on either, and that’s been stamped all over everything for years now.’

  Porter raised his eyebrows as he realised what Styles was getting at. ‘So you’re saying you think no one’s been in for years rather than months?’

  Styles shrugged. ‘I know stuff keeps for longer in there, but who keeps food for that long?’

  ‘So we’re saying nobody’s been in there since she last opened her mail?’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not,’ said Styles. ‘I’m pretty certain nobody’s lived there for a long time. Whether anyone has had a reason to be there or not is another matter.’ Porter opened his mouth to reply, but was stopped in his tracks when his phone started to ring.

  ‘Hold that thought,’ he said, holding up a finger at Styles as he took the call. ‘This is Porter.’

  ‘Porter? It’s Will Leonard. You asked me to call as soon as we had something.’

  ‘Hey, Will. What have you got?’

  ‘It’s only a preliminary overview, but hopefully it’ll help get you started. The prints from the hand are consistent with the few clear ones we managed to find at the flat. I wasn’t sure what we’d find with it being like a museum in there, but we got lucky. We pulled some fairly clear ones from fatty deposits around the oven, and on and around the make-up products in the bathroom, so it’s reasonable to assume that both they and the hand they come from belong to somebody who lived there. I’m going to run them now and see if we get a match.’

  ‘OK, thanks, Will. Anything else?’

  ‘We’ll be doing DNA tests on hair from the hairbrush and a swab of the toothbrush to check against tissue from the hand and the blood from the living room. Results should be back in a day or so. There’s nothing so far to suggest more than one person living there. There were a few smudges that look like they used to be prints in the other rooms, but not as well preserved as the ones in the kitchen.’

  ‘Good stuff. Let me know when you get the DNA tests back.’ Porter was about to sign off but as an afterthought he mentioned Styles’s theory about the food. Leonard promised to look into it and ended the call. Porter gave Styles the highlights of the conversation.

  ‘What you said, about the food. I hadn’t twigged to that. You’re right, it does seem weird.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not just a pretty face,’ said Styles. ‘What’s the plan, then, boss?’

  ‘First things first, we need to find out what family she has. My gut tells me that it’s most likely her hand we found. I checked with one of the lads working the scene, though, and the amount of blood and distribution on the carpet isn’t consistent with it being removed there, so it begs the questions of where and why.’

  ‘Speaking of the flat, it would have been a fairly pricey area to live in even back in the eighties. How does a young woman living alone afford somewhere like that?’ asked Styles.

  ‘Good question,’ said Porter, reaching for his coffee again. ‘You look into the property and check out her finances. See if anything shows up apart from the account with Barclays. I’ll see if I can track down her parents.’

  They agreed to meet up again as soon as the officers responsible for interviewing the neighbours returned, and Styles slid his own chair sideways on its casters to park himself at his desk. Porter drained the lukewarm dregs of his coffee and got to work. He hoped tracing the parents wouldn’t prove too tricky, although these conversations were the ones he hated the most. Being the bearer of potentially bad tidings was something he’d had to do more times than he cared to remember, but he’d never get used to it. He remembered it from the other side of the scenario; seeing the blurred shape visible through his front door. Not realising that all that separated him from the blow they were about to deal to his world was an inch-thick rectangle of wood and glass. The struggle to remember what life had been like before he opened the door to see the police officers outside. The bad news they carried carved into every crease on their forehead.

  Best case, Natasha Barclay had been the victim of an assault, and worst case her injuries may have been fatal. Without immediate medical attention, she could easily have bled out after her hand was removed. The fact that at least part of the attack looked to have taken place inside her home meant there was a good chance she may have known her assailant. What Porter couldn’t quite reconcile, though, was that if she was alive and well, why nobody, including her parents, had bothered helping to look after her flat. On the flip side, if something more sinister had happened, why had nobody reported her missing? The last thought that struck him as he leant forward to start the task of locating her parents was a little less palatable, but one that would need careful consideration nonetheless. What if those closest to her knew she was missing but had a vested interest in hiding that fact?

  CHAPTER THREE

  The canvassing of the remaining neighbours took up most of the morning, but proved fruitless. As far as they were concerned, the flat may as well have stood empty all these years, and none of them had heard of Natasha Barclay, let alone laid eyes on her. The search of her flat had yielded a few interesting snippets of information, though. The three constables returned from their door-knocking and set to work sifting through the boxes of letters, photos, and everyday detritus that had been packed up and brought back to the station. One of these included the unopened mail that had been piled like a snowdrift behind the front door. Buried in there was a series of bills from various utility companies: British Gas for power, British Telecom for the phone line, shortening to BT around the early nineties. The water bills told a tale in their own right. There was a mixture of both Thames Water Authority and Thames Water. The latter had only been founded in 1989, which lent further credence to Porter’s suspicion that the flat had indeed stood empty since before that. The bills covered the period from 1983 right through to 2012, whereupon they were accompanied by demands for payment citing a failed direct debit, and finally notices to disconnect services, and the other utilities followed suit around the same time.

  Porter listened while one of the PCs, a young man by the name of Edwards, summarised what they’d found. They’d also catalogued a series of bank statements that showed the same current account as before, dated 1983. The funds, healthy at first, slipped steadily away like sand through an hourglass, without a single deposit to stem the tide, until they were depleted around the time the demanding letters started to arrive. The power had been cut, alright, but not through any fault or error of the provider.

  There had been over nine thousand pounds in the account back in 1983. That would have stood out to Porter as a healthier than average balance even today. The birth certificate they had tracked down said she would have been twenty-one back then. Set against the context of her age, plus the fact the balance was from over thirty years ago, that was a staggering amount for her to have just lying around in a current account.

  He was trying to figure out how to work out the modern day equivalent, taking inflation into consideration, when he heard Styles end the call he’d been making. Styles had specialised in financial crime before he’d made the move across to the Homicide and Serious Crime squad. Porter was sure that his partner was the man to ask, and swivelled around to face him.

  ‘Anything from the door to door?’ asked Styles before Porter could open his mouth.

  ‘More of the same,’ said Porter, shaking his head. ‘No one’s laid eyes on her full stop. I’ve got something you can help me with, though,’ he said, picking up the bank statement, and explaining what he was trying to do.

  ‘Yep, that’s e
asily done,’ said Styles. He turned to face his monitor and one quick Google search later, had a site up that promised to do the calculation for them. ‘How much did you say she had?’ he asked.

  ‘A little over nine grand.’

  ‘What I’d give for that now, never mind thirty years ago,’ said Styles. He tapped the figure into a box, used a drop-down menu to select the year in question, and clicked the button to calculate. He looked at the result, then sat back and whistled through his teeth.

  ‘That look right to you?’ asked Porter.

  ‘’Bout three times that in today’s money – yep, looks around what I was expecting.’

  ‘Where the hell does a twenty-one-year-old get that kind of cash from?’ Porter rubbed his hand over his chin, feeling tiny pricks of Braille-like stubble that he’d missed with his razor.

  ‘Have we found anyone we can ask the question to yet?’

  Porter shook his head. ‘Not quite, but I found out a few interesting things before I got distracted with the update on the neighbours.’

  He filled Styles in on the progress he had made. Starting with her parents’ details on her birth certificate, he had found Nathan Barclay first. Natasha’s father had committed suicide back in 1983, although Porter had yet to find out the exact details of where, when and how. Her mother, Anne Barclay, had died giving birth to Natasha, ending the parental line of enquiry almost as soon as it had begun. Nathan had, it transpired, remarried when Natasha was ten years old, to Mary Atkins, who took on his name and bore him a son, Gavin. The marriage had not lasted, though, and they had divorced in 1981. Porter had run a background check on Mary Barclay, and found that she now went by the name of Mary Locke, and lived at an address in Edgware.