Marius

by Laurence Todd

  But I was more focused on the man who’d been the driver of the other car, and I was impressed by how he employed body language. He’d held his head at such an angle that no full facial image could be seen. At no time did he ever hold his head fully upwards and look straight ahead. He continually looked slightly downwards or to the side. He was deliberately using evasive tactics, like he knew he was being observed on CCTV and was trying not to be seen, and it’d been very cleverly done. Unless you’d been looking for it or, like me, trained to notice such subtle bodily nuances, you’d never realise what was going on.

  There was no doubt it was the same car which’d exploded at Regent’s Park, but was this the same person who’d emerged from the car on the Albany? I cross-referenced the images of the suspects, requesting a match, but all that could be ascertained was that both men were about the same build. No facial recognition patterns could be obtained from either camera.

  I returned to the recent CCTV. The Citroën could be seen leaving Bluewater and, by switching across different cameras, was tracked as it joined the afternoon traffic driving along the A2 towards central London and the Blackwall Tunnel. It then veered off along the A102 and followed the Millennium Way towards the O2 arena in Greenwich. The car went around the roundabout, turned left into the car park and parked near to North Greenwich tube station. The occupants left the car, bought a parking ticket and then walked across to one of the mobile refreshment stands. I noticed right away he’d removed the glasses and hat. The woman wandered off into the tube station, but Adam Redlands bought a drink and stood talking to the man behind the counter for a moment. He then followed the woman into the tube station.

  When I finally managed to capture an image of the suspect that wasn’t too blurry, though it was far from clear, I saved a copy and set off.

  We’d had a break. I knew the man Redlands had bought the drink from.

  *

  I drove to the O2 via the Embankment and through the City, parking on the Millennium Way. As I was approaching the refreshment stands, I could see the financial centres of Canary Wharf across the river. When I’d recently served for a few weeks as part of Labour party leader Ian Mulvehill’s security team, I’d once heard him describing the City of London as being the most lawless square mile in the country. After my recent investigation into the Mayor of London, James Blatchford, I was beginning to see why people like Ian Mulvehill thought this.

  The man I was here to see was behind the counter, smiling at a blonde thirty-something woman dressed in a professional business suit and high heels, and he was, as per usual, talking at a rate of knots. Tyler Watts was forty-seven and so cockney he could have been born inside the Bow Bells, rather than within the hearing of. As far as he was concerned, Bethnal Green and West Ham United were the centres of the known universe. He was forever using rhyming slang, which was a source of constant bewilderment to visitors to London. Being asked you want milk and sugar in your Rosie Lee? was guaranteed to flummox most Americans.

  I knew him from the time when I’d first become a detective, a DC. He’d been an informant to the senior detective I’d worked under, DCI Neville Thornwyn as he then was, and had provided a few good leads regarding criminal activity we’d been investigating, and through him we’d nailed a few working villains. He was the son of an old-time East End wannabe villain who, like many his age, swore he’d been on first-name terms with the Kray twins. In East End criminal society, everyone over a given age seemed to have known the Krays personally and had a story to tell about the boys, Reggie and Ronnie. I didn’t know why but, for whatever reason, lots of working villains used the O2 car park and Watts had occasionally been able to tell us who he’d seen and when. This had often been extremely useful. I waited till his customer wandered off with her hot drink.

  “Oh Gawd strewth, would you bleedin’ Adam and Eve it? It’s the Old Bill. Alright, guv, you got me bang to rights, I’ll come quietly.” He threw both arms up in the air in a gesture of mock surrender. I laughed.

  “How you doing, Tyler?” I looked around. “Chappy not in today?”

  Chappy was Chapman, his son. Quite why a born and bred, dyed-in-the-wool cockney had come to name his son Chapman I’d never understood, and I was too scared to ask.

  “He’ll be in a bit later. Out late with his bird again last night, wasn’t he?”

  “Okay. Large cappuccino, please,” I said in a posh accent. He knew I was winding him up.

  “Fuckin’ poncey eyetie drinks.” He grinned. “You want one of them, lots of Costas and places like that over there.” He nodded towards Canary Wharf. “Only good honest English teas and coffees here, mate.”

  “So, when did coffee become an English drink?”

  He laughed, pouring a black tea.

  “You got a slice of lemon for that?” I asked.

  “Fuckin’ lemon.” He laughed again. “Listen to ’im. You’re taking the Arthur Bliss, ain’t ya? This is good honest Yorkshire tea, this is.”

  “Oh yeah? When did they start growing tea in Yorkshire?” I grinned at him.

  I then became serious and took the picture from my pocket, placing it on the counter.

  “This guy here.” I pointed at Redlands. “You were talking to him last Thursday afternoon, about five thirty-ish. Recognise him?”

  He picked the blurred picture up and looked closely at it.

  “Yeah, I think so. Comes by here occasionally. I think he works over there,” – he jutted his chin towards Canary Wharf – “but I ain’t sure, like.”

  “He been back since last Thursday?”

  “I ain’t seen him since then, no.”

  “You know his name, anything about him?”

  “I don’t, no.” He shook his head. “I sometimes go several weeks without seeing him, then he’s here a few days in a row.”

  “Does he ever have a woman with him?”

  “What, a trouble and strife?” He bit his lower lip whilst his eyes looked upwards for a few moments. “Don’t recall seeing one. He’s had a youngish bloke with him now and again, bloke about early twenties, I’d say. Could be his son, looks a bit like him.”

  I remembered what the Vernons had said about him. “Does he sound Irish to you?”

  “Irish? Fuck no. Excuse my French, madam,” he said to a woman passing by. “He’s all poncey and la-di-da, speaks like he’s got a mouthful of fuckin’ marbles. He ever comes into my boozer and orders a beer sounding like that, he’d be laughed out the fuckin’ room.” He broke into a wide smile.

  “That’s the thing with you cockneys: anyone who speaks English properly without rhyming slang, you can’t understand them.” I grinned, paying for my tea. “But, seriously,” – my light-hearted tone changed – “I wanna talk to this guy. If he comes back, see if you can engage him in conversation, listen to what he says. Get a name if you can. In particular notice who he’s with, watch which direction he goes in when he leaves here.”

  He nodded his agreement. “Okay, guv, I’ll do that.”

  I didn’t have to tell him to get in touch if he learnt anything I could use.

  “Isn’t it time you covered that bloody thing up?” I said in a mock-distasteful tone, picking up my tea and nodding at the West Ham United tattoo on his left forearm, which stretched almost from his elbow to his wrist. “Doesn’t that put people off buying anything?”

  “Bloody four-by-twos, sod off back to North London.” He knew I was a Spurs fan.

  We shook hands, grinning. I left.

  *

  Smitherman called me into his office and asked what had happened last evening. I began by bringing him up to speed on my conversation with Charles Doyle and the offer to help his family in return for information. Smitherman nodded his assent. I then described my conversation with the Vernons the previous evening and their discovering Adam Redlands was a figment.

  “Can’t get a clear image of this guy on CCTV, so I’m not certain if the guy at Bluewater was the same one at Regent’s Park. They appear to be
about the same size, but that’s about all so far.”

  I mentioned the Bluewater driver had been tailed by CCTV to the O2 and a source there was keeping an eye out for him. I expressed also my dismay at looking through the CCTV for the O2 car park and noticing a gap of several hours. Asked why, management had said, as it’d been a quiet evening, the system had been shut down for a few hours around midnight for routine maintenance. Sometime in this period, the Citroën had been driven away from the car park.

  “That’s a bugger.” Smitherman was exasperated. “But we’ll keep digging. We’ll find this bloke.” He paused for a moment. “Meantime, I’ve some interesting news for you.”

  I nodded. “Okay.”

  “Dorset police exhumed the bodies of those people late last night,” he began. This I was interested in. “All five had been buried together, as it wasn’t possible to identify who was who with all of them.”

  I could imagine.

  “The bodies were taken to a lab someplace and, when the chief pathologist undertook a detailed microscopic examination of them, she made quite an amazing discovery: certainly one we should be very interested in, because it has a bearing on this case.”

  He paused again.

  “Two of the bodies had markings just under the skull consistent with bullet wounds. She thinks they were dead before the vehicle they were in went up in flames.”

  “Pardon?” I was amazed at this news.

  “It’s true,” he affirmed. “Two bodies, a male and female, both showed signs of having been shot in the back of the neck.”

  “Christ,” I whispered loudly to myself. “How can they ascertain that after all this time?”

  “I’ve no idea.” He shook his head. “That’s why she’s the chief pathologist and I’m not,” he said in such a way as to make me think he was thinking, Keep up, DS McGraw. “But, if they can identify a skull as being Richard III’s, and he died in the fifteenth century, a body only fifteen years dead shouldn’t be too difficult.”

  He then looked very serious. “More importantly, though, none of the five bodies was a child. There were five adults in those cars when they went up in flames.”

  “McGreely’s son would have been, what, about six or seven, when he died?”

  “Probably, but clearly he didn’t die, did he? At least not here he didn’t, because no child was in the car,” Smitherman said with a degree of certainty.

  Lester Dickson had said he was sure he’d seen someone getting out the car before it took off for its fateful last journey. Had it been McGreely’s son John, or maybe his wife Sinead? Had the father let the son out the car, then driven off to kill himself and another couple? Had he just left the kid by the layby whilst he’d driven away? What happened next? My mind was spinning.

  “So, what happened after the crash, then?”

  “I’ve just printed off a copy of the official police report,” he said, looking down at something on his desk, “which was written up the next day after everything’d been tidied away. It would appear there was no forensic examination of the bodies after the crash had been cleared up. Cause of death was obvious,” – he shrugged – “and the official thinking was no useful purpose would be served by examining the bodies. Made sense; several badly burnt bodies, no evidence of any foul play, why waste the taxpayer’s money?”

  I already knew this. But I was taking in everything I’d just heard and turning it over in my mind. I could see a much bigger picture beginning to emerge.

  “The initial thought was that probably the bodies were too badly burnt for DNA testing to yield anything positive, and, from what was left of the cars’ registrations, they were able to get a fix on both sets of victims, neither of whom have been seen since. So, as it appeared they knew who’d died in that explosion . . .” Smitherman shrugged, put down the paper he’d been holding and didn’t continue the statement.

  In one respect, it had been the right decision not to have a formal investigation. Five bodies, all burnt to a crisp, unrecognisable as human beings. Where there was no overt suspicion of foul play, no purpose would have served by an official post-mortem and the cost couldn’t be justified. What we now knew, though, cast a very different complexion on matters.

  “But,” Smitherman said, “the thing is, whilst one family was just an ordinary Welsh couple going on holiday, clean record and all that, nothing about them on file, the other family included a known IRA bomber amongst their number.”

  “And who’s not been seen since, has he?”

  “No, which gives a little credence to Stimpson’s belief of an IRA sleeper unit, given these two bombs have McGreely’s signature all over them.”

  “What, you think the McGreelys simply went underground and have been activated now to start up a bombing campaign?” I was incredulous.

  “Who knows? We know no child died in that explosion, so we can’t discount it, can we? The pathologist’s running some tests now to see if any DNA samples can be obtained.”

  “Is that possible after all this time?” I asked. “The bodies were incinerated.”

  “That’s what they’re trying to find out. We should know soon. If we can identify who those people were, that’d be a major step forward. But it’s an expensive process and not as easy as American shows like NCIS make it appear to be. There’s no guarantees either when bodies are as badly burnt as this.”

  I was intrigued. Who was it who’d exited the car Dick had seen? Someone had got out and whoever was driving had then set off and crashed into an oncoming vehicle, causing the conflagration which’d killed five people. One had always been assumed to have been a child, but it’d now been confirmed only adults were in the vehicles. Also, two of those persons were now known to have been shot. It was unlikely to have been the Welsh family, the Coopers, as they’d have been driving the other car. The assumption had to be that the two passengers in the Citroën were already dead when the driver pulled away. But who were they? And who was the driver?

  I returned to my desk, logged on to missing persons and requested all information on couples who’d disappeared without trace some time ago, and of whom nothing had been heard since.

  Contrary to popular belief, nobody just disappears without trace. It’s much more difficult than you might think. It isn’t enough just to move to the other side of the country and assume a different name. People still withdraw money from their bank accounts, they buy things from shops and they use credit or debit cards to buy plane or rail tickets, to pay for hotel rooms or to settle bills, and they can be traced through these. Doing this is like leaving footprints in fresh snow. People also still use the same mobile phones, and calls can be traced. For some people thinking they’ve vanished, their spending activity or phone records are the equivalent of leaving a paper trail behind them. And, even if you disappear with a huge wad of cash, making large purchases, such as buying a second-hand car with a few thousand in notes, arouses suspicion.

  It’s estimated something like 11% of all police time is spent on missing persons cases. Each person reported as being missing is put into a ‘risk category’, and police response is tailored to this. A teenage girl who’s had an argument with her mother, for instance, and stays overnight at a friend’s house without informing her parents, is felt simply to be trying to get back at her parents by worrying them silly, and this is usually classed as low-risk, because statistics show, in ninety-nine percent plus of all such cases, she returns home very soon after. But someone whose entire history points to a stable existence with no hints of anything troubling, and who then unexpectedly goes missing, leaving no traces behind, is considered to be in a higher risk category, and an investigating officer is then assigned, suggesting this is to be taken seriously.

  Despite the difficulties, for the person who genuinely does want to disappear, it can be done with enough help and foresight. Lord Lucan disappeared in the autumn of 1974 after being accused of murdering his children’s nanny. He’s never been found either, though the press speculation at t
he time was that he’d had considerable help from several influential members of the political establishment attached to the Clermont Club in Mayfair. Why this was the case has never been known.

  There were other reasons for disappearances. Elderly couples occasionally made suicide pacts, particularly if both were suffering from incurable illnesses, or if one was and the other couldn’t bear to be parted from their partner after so many years together. I knew of one couple, reported missing when I’d been a beat copper, who, it was speculated, had simply walked to the edge of a cliff near Worthing and jumped to their deaths, their bodies being carried away by the sea and never found. It was reported they’d spoken about the possibility before. They’d not even informed their adult children of their intention. They just did it.

  Within a short while, twenty-six pairs of names of people listed as missing for two years or more came up onscreen. I cross-referenced the names. In several cases, the couple had been found dead, usually some months or years later. One couple had been apprehended; they’d faked their disappearance because they’d been running a gigantic insurance scam, based on an elaborate Ponzi scheme, and had been rumbled. Both were now behind bars.

  But I was mainly interested in those couples who’d gone missing fifteen years ago and were still unaccounted for. Only three couples fitted this category.

  I focused on these. One was a couple from Gateshead, near Newcastle. Their car had been found parked up near Lake Windermere, Cumbria, and the assumption was they’d probably drowned. Another couple, from Burnley, Lancashire, had simply set off in their car and nothing was ever heard from them again, and their car was never found either. If it was possible to simply vanish without trace, they’d done it.