by Tim Ellis
‘I don’t know, but Olga Bloch was definitely murdered. Maybe she knew who he was, and as soon as she realised her money had gone, she would have known who had taken it, so he had to kill her.’
‘It’s possible, I suppose. So, at the moment, you don’t know if it’s just one murder, or part of something more sinister?’
Dixie shook her head. ‘No.’
‘Any coffee going begging?’ Dark asked.
Dixie opened her mouth to speak.
‘I don’t think so. I nearly lapsed into a coma the last time you made me coffee.’ He glanced at Hendrik. ‘What’s your coffee like?’
‘I make a passable cup of coffee, Mister Dark.’ He headed towards the kitchen. ‘You’re right about Dixie though . . .’ He threw over his shoulder. ‘She can’t make coffee for shit.’
‘I never said I was a domestic goddess,’ Dixie called after him.
Dark grunted. ‘It’s a good job. No one would believe you if you did. So, why am I here?’
‘Wait until Hendrik comes back.’
‘You two seem to be getting on like a house on fire.’
‘He’s good for me.’
‘I’m glad. You’ll go to the doctor’s, won’t you?’
‘I’ve said I would, haven’t I?’
Hendrik came in with the coffees.
‘Okay,’ Dark said. ‘I’d like to get a couple of hours sleep before I have to go back to work, so let’s get to it.’
Dixie shuffled across to the right-hand wall. Not only were the limited details of Commander Anthony Baker’s life stuck on the wall, but there were also the details of Dark’s life with Ellie, and his daughters Cleo and Coco. ‘Look at these,’ she said, pointing to a group of three photographs connected to Ellie’s name with coloured string and matching map pins. ‘Hendrik found them.’
‘Found them! What does that mean?’
Hendrik cleared his throat. ‘I had to do some digging, Mister Dark.’
‘Digging! Where?’
‘On the mainframe server at Hendon Data Centre. I was trying to find out about Commander Anthony Baker’s police service, but his files have not only been encrypted using a 256-bit key algorithm, but they’ve also been locked up tight behind a Cisco Meraki MX Firewall and a Virtual Privacy Network. If I try to hack my way through the firewalls to access the files, I’ll set off a shitload of alarms.’
‘And we don’t want to do that, do we?’
Hendrik pursed his lips. ‘I would say not.’
‘Are all the police records behind those layers of security?’
‘No. Only the sensitive records.’
‘What about my records?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t looked for yours.’
‘All the signs suggest that Commander Baker is operating as an undercover officer, don’t they?’
‘That’s what we were thinking,’ Dixie said. ‘As far as anyone is concerned Anthony Baker is dead, and he’s been resurrected with a false identity as Samuel Henchel.’
‘It doesn’t explain how Ellie is involved though, does it?’
‘No.’
‘So, if Baker’s records were behind the firewalls, how did you get hold of the photographs, Hendrik?’
‘They were left behind in a file that I had to run an “undelete” on. Somebody didn’t clean up their digital footprint properly.’
‘And the photographs were definitely part of Baker’s records?’
‘Yes. The file path pointed to the directory where those records were kept prior to them being encrypted and moved behind the firewalls.’
Dark stood up and stared at the grainy coloured pictures. They were of Ellie, but not the Ellie he recognised. Her long blonde hair had been replaced by short black hair, and she was dressed in low-cut short dresses – a different coloured dress in each of the photographs: red, blue and black – that left very little to the imagination. She’d always looked good, but after two children it had been a few years since she’d looked that good. All three photographs had been taken, in what appeared to be, different bars – maybe the bars of hotels, but it was difficult to make out any fine detail.
The person who had taken the photographs had positioned themselves behind and to the right of Ellie, which meant that it showed her back and right side, and her reflection in the mirror behind the bar. There was no mistaking it was Ellie. In the blue photograph, she had a half-full cocktail glass in front of her, and she was smoking – Ellie had never smoked in all the time he’d known her. In the black photograph, she was sitting at the bar smiling at a man with a small bald patch spreading out from his crown who had his left hand on her thigh; and in the red photograph she had her elbows on the bar and seemed to be talking to the barman. In none of the photographs was she wearing her wedding ring.
Hendrik said, ‘I have a partial date for the photograph of your wife in the black dress – May 2004.’
‘We’d been married nearly two years by then.’ He and Ellie had tied the knot on June 27, 2002, at St Mary’s Church in Prestwich. They’d had a small reception in a local hotel afterwards, stayed the night there, and then the following morning had travelled on honeymoon for two weeks to a small fishing village in the South of France called Bouzigues, which was well known for its spectacular views of the oyster beds across the Etang, and the superb seafood.
He screwed up his face. How was any of this possible? He didn’t understand. As a police detective, he was used to not understanding for long periods of time, but this was his life he was wrestling with, or at least what he thought had been his life.
When he’d first arrived home, and found the card on the fridge just over a year ago with: DON’T TRY TO FIND US printed on it, he thought Ellie had left him and taken Cleo and Coco with her. He had no idea why she had done that, but he’d accepted it, and there was no reason to think that it was anything other than what it was. Of course, he’d tried to find them, and he’d also looked at the reasons she would have left him.
Then, on Christmas Day just gone, Hendrik had recorded a man – Samuel Henchel – entering his house with a key, walking around, writing HAPPY ANNIVERSARY on a card and leaving it on the telephone table. The two cards had been written by Henchel, and he’d realised then that his wife and daughters had not left of their own free will, but had been taken. He’d been certain of it. Why hadn’t it occurred to him sooner?
Hendrik had tracked Henchel back to the address in Kendal in the Lake District, and Dark had driven up there the following weekend. He’d seen Ellie arm-in-arm with Henchel, watched his two children throwing snowballs at each other. They looked just like a happy family, but instead of Josiah Dark framed in that picture, it was Samuel Henchel – who he now knew to be the dead Metropolitan Police Commander Anthony Baker. Ellie and the two girls didn’t look as though they were being held against their will. In the end, he’d driven away with his mind in turmoil, not knowing the difference between the truth and a lie.
Now, here were three photographs of Ellie – two years into their marriage – who he didn’t recognise as his wife. Why did she have short black hair? Why was she smoking? Where were the bars she was pictured sitting in? Why was she dressed . . . like a prostitute? Who was the man with his hand on her thigh? Who took the photographs? And why?
Chapter Four
He didn’t normally suffer from headaches, but there was a slight throbbing above his right eye. ‘Tell me those photographs are fake, Hendrik.’
‘I wish I could Mister Dark, but they’re real.’
‘What about the date?’ Dixie said. ‘Does May 2004 mean anything to you?’
‘Not off the top of my head. It was thirteen years ago. I’ll have to look in my PNBs – pocket notebooks – to refresh my memory, but I think it’s safe to say that I have no idea where she is, why she’s dressed as she is, why her hair is short and black instead of long and blonde, or what she’s doing frequenting bars with other men. Although, I think we can all make an educated guess at what it looks like she�
��s doing.’
‘Looks can be deceiving, Mister Dark.’
Dixie said, ‘Is it possible that your wife was involved in Baker’s undercover operations?’
He thought about the possibility. Ellie was fifteen years his junior. He’d been thirty-eight to her twenty-three when they’d met in 2001 at a conference on crime and policing in London. She was two years out of university having taken a degree in Operational Research focusing on maths, but on that day, she’d been employed as a waitress by the catering company who were providing food for the conference. Her long-term plan was to become a financial analyst, which is what she took up once they were married. In the early days, however, the money was poor, so she continued to work part-time for the catering company and would disappear to wherever at a moments’ notice to wait-on at events from weddings to county fairs. Once she became pregnant and a mother, she worked from home as a full-time financial analyst.
They’d got talking on the day they’d met. She’d invited him out that night, then back to her apartment. Things had continued on from there. A year later they were married.
Was it possible that Ellie had been living a life he knew nothing about? Before he’d seen the photographs, he would have said “absolutely not”, but now he had no idea what was and wasn’t possible. Who was the woman in the pictures? What was she doing? Where was her gullible husband?
‘Looking at these photographs, I’d have to say that anything was possible now. I don’t know who this woman is, but it’s not the Ellie I was married to – the mother of my children.’
‘Where do we go from here, Mister Dark?’ Hendrik said. ‘Do you want us to carry on?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’ll mean we have to investigate your wife.’
‘I know. You have my permission to do whatever’s necessary to get to the truth. I’m as curious as you and Dixie are to find out what Ellie was doing in these pictures.’
‘Even if we find out . . . she was doing what the pictures suggest she was doing?’
‘Yes.’
Dixie screwed up her face. ‘It still doesn’t explain why she left you a year ago without any explanation, took the children and went to stay with a dead man.’
‘No, it doesn’t, does it? Unless it’s all connected.’ He peered at the pictures again. ‘Are there no clues in these pictures, Hendrik?’
‘I’m seeing an old friend later today who might be able to help in that respect, but these photographs were taken using a 35mm film camera not a digital camera, and the picture quality is really poor. I have limited knowledge, but you can see they were taken in low-level light using a coarse-grained film, so the resolution isn’t very good.’ He shrugged. ‘Unfortunately, we don’t have the negatives, but I’ll give him what we have and see what he can do with them.’
‘Okay. Well, thanks for your hard work, but I need to go home and get some sleep now.’ He took a few steps towards the door.
‘There was one other thing,’ Dixie said.
He stopped. ‘Oh?’
‘Can you get me copies of anything the police have on these seven old people?’
‘If they’ve not been classified as murders, then I doubt we have anything on them at all. But having said that, do you realise what you’re asking me to do?’
‘The same thing that you’re asking us to do.’
He thought about her request for a handful of seconds and then said, ‘Once I’ve been informed by Hendrik that you’ve attended the doctors, what the diagnosis is, and the treatment you’ve been given, then I might take a look on the system if you text me their names.’
‘So, Hendrik is your snitch now, is he?’
‘If I thought I could trust you, he wouldn’t have to be.’ He carried on to the door and said over his shoulder, ‘I’ll wait to hear from you.’
Outside, he climbed into his Toyota Rav-4. It would take him about thirty minutes to drive home from Macclesfield to his four-bedroom detached house at 12 Green Oak Drive in Sale. With a wife and two growing girls it was the ideal place to call a home, but for a man without a family it was simply a place that was full of ghosts, echoes and memories.
He’d blamed himself, of course. Why else would she have left? Without any other explanation, what was he to think? They’d had many arguments about his job, the time he was away from home investigating murders, the calls in the middle of the night . . . His defence was always that she’d known what he did when she married him, so it was a bit late in the day to start having second thoughts, or trying to change him. If anything, his well-prepared defence, poured petrol on the flames. She never said as much, but in the back of his mind he had the feeling that she wanted him to pack it all in – and do what? He never asked her, and she never offered an alternative. Why would he give up what he loved to do? He was a murder detective. It was who he was. What he’d always been. Doing another job was not something he’d ever considered.
Now though, he was beginning to think that her leaving him might have had nothing to do with his job. Who was Commander Anthony Baker? How was Ellie involved with him? What hold did he have over her? Were they lovers? Had they been lovers all this time? He tried to banish the thought from his mind, but he couldn’t. Were Cleo and Coco his children? He’d never even considered the possibility that one or both of them might have been fathered by another man. Surely, Ellie wouldn’t have done that to him. An hour ago, it wouldn’t have even crossed his mind. But an hour ago, he hadn’t seen those three photographs. Now, he was prepared to think the unthinkable.
***
‘You look like shit,’ he said, as Lake trudged down the stairs into his basement office at Bootle Street Police Station.
Her freckles seemed more pronounced this morning. Her grey eyes looked almost white under the artificial light. Although she was wearing a woolly hat against the cold, the rat tails of her hair were wet. She unzipped her brown quilted coat. Beneath, she was wearing a pair of jeans with a grey jumper over a checked shirt. She resembled a waif rather than a police detective.
‘And whose fault is that? Do you know how much sleep I’ve had?’ She flopped down in the chair in front of her own desk that he’d been using to store files and other rubbish during her absence. ‘You don’t have to guess, because I’m going to tell you – an hour and thirty-five minutes. What type of boss treats his workers like that?’
‘The type of boss who doesn’t care, Lake. Sleep is a luxury the unemployed benefit from. You and I, on the other hand, are both employed by the people of Greater Manchester to catch murderers, so sleep is not something we should need or expect. Anyway, now that you are here, get your coat off and make me a coffee. After that, you can organise copies of the victim’s picture with the confidential number printed on them; arrange for them to be displayed in Marple and Marple Bridge; sort that mess you call a desk out; and then I have a long list of other tasks that need completing while I go and brief your pal the Chief Superintendent on the lack of progress we’ve made so far.’
‘Don’t you want to know what happened at Lock Number 9 after you left?’
‘Of course, but I want coffee first. An apprentice who can’t make a decent cup of coffee to get the day moving in the right direction is about as much use as a rubber nail, so coffee first.’
‘Why is all this shit on my desk?’
‘You weren’t here.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I ask for a file, you get it for me. I finish with said file, and you return it to where you got it from. You weren’t here, so I had to get my own files, but I draw the line at putting them back as well, So, now that you are here, you can return the files to where I got them from.’
‘I don’t know where you got then from. And I’m not your secretary, either.’
‘You’re right. A secretary would be a lot more, organised and have a clearer understanding of her job description. So, in the absence of a secretary, I have to make do with an apprentice who seems to be a bit slow making
coffee in the mornings.’
She glared at him, opened her mouth as if to say something, but then appeared to think better of putting her foot in her mouth and tramped through into the kitchen.
He’d had very little sleep himself. His and Ellie’s bedroom was as she’d left it over a year ago. He could have slept in the guest bedroom, but it was simpler to sleep on the sofa. It wasn’t very comfortable, but a man who was punishing himself didn’t need a double pocket sprung mattress. And now, after seeing the photographs, he’d probably been punishing himself unnecessarily.
Lake returned carrying two mugs, and swilling coffee on the floor as she walked towards him.
‘You’ll need to clean that up,’ he said, as she put one of the mugs down on his coaster. ‘The rats love coffee.’
‘Rats!’
‘And the sooner you do, the sooner you can get on with your other tasks, which are backing up now due to your disorganised way of working.’
‘Is this the way it’s going to be?’
‘More moaning and complaining! You come here to work – so work. You’ve been here fifteen minutes, and all you’ve produced so far is a mug of coffee I’d be a desperate man to drink. I’m the boss, you’re the apprentice. You seem to think I’m the one who has to make adjustments to accommodate you. Well, I can tell you that’s not going to happen, Lake. You adjust to my way of doing things, not the other way around. As the saying goes: It’s my way or the highway, and I can hear the rumble of traffic already. Now, are you going to roll your sleeves up and get to work, or start a protest group to complain about workers’ rights?’
She went back into the kitchen, returned with a few sheets of kitchen roll, dropped them on the floor and wiped the coffee spills up using her right foot.
He shook his head, but decided he’d already said enough. The slapdash way she approached tasks did not fill him with confidence. He’d no doubt have to check everything she did, which would take him twice as long as if he simply did it himself. Partners were just more trouble than they were worth.
