by Dan Waddell
The details of the night before were still hazy – it seemed a different age, not a matter of hours – but one episode seeped back into his mind. He needed to mention it. ‘At the newspaper library, when I was waiting for some files, I did a search on DCI Foster on the computer.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Heather said. ‘Why?’
He shrugged. He didn’t know. It was just something he did with people he’d met, whether on the Net or in the archives.
‘Don’t know. Something to do. I don’t know anyone else who might have appeared in the national press during the last decade.’
‘You found out about his dad, didn’t you?’
‘You know about it?’
‘We all do. I wasn’t on the team at the time, but I heard all about it. They didn’t charge him, so he kept his job. It’s that simple.’
Nigel was not convinced but saw no profit in prying further. Heather was looking at him.
‘He makes no secret about it: he knew his father was going to kill himself and he didn’t try to stop it. That’s not the same as killing him yourself. His dad wanted to die. Foster let him. For some people that’s what any loving son would do; for others, it’s tantamount to assisting suicide. Someone at the top took the former view. I think they were right.’ She took another swig of tea then looked at him, her brow furrowed. ‘So if I poked around in your past, what would I find, Nigel?’ she asked, sitting back on the sofa.
‘Nothing much,’ he muttered.
‘Well, you had a job at a university, then the next minute you’re back in your old job as a genealogist. Sounds interesting to me.’
This was the one subject he wanted to avoid. He felt that after Heather had been open about Foster, he could not clam up. But how much to tell?
‘I met someone. It didn’t work out,’ he said.
‘ “Didn’t work out” so badly that you left your job? That’s some “didn’t work out”.’
‘Let’s just say, all of a sudden, the past seemed a more inviting place,’ he said.
She scanned the room, the teeming shelves, the old cases and chests on the floor, the sepia-tinted photographs, the array of vintage clocks and watches, none of which told the right time.
‘Seems like it always has,’ she said.
14
Foster was back at the morgue. I should get myself a bed here, he thought. A visit to the Gents and a quick glance in the mirror showed it to be an appropriate place to be – his skin was the colour of ashes, deep gashes of black under his eyes. Some of those on the slab looked better than he did.
He got there as Carlisle was finishing the autopsy on the tramp.
‘Anything new?’ he asked.
‘He wasn’t hanged to death, that’s for sure,’ Carlisle said. He pointed to the neck. ‘There’s no fracture of the vertebrae. But then, if a drunken tramp were to commit suicide, one would hardly expect an expert job. But there is no mark from the rope around his neck, which there would have been if the noose had been applied before death, and no sign of bruising either. No signs of any capillary damage in the heart, lungs or eyes – or anything else that indicates asphyxiation. The only visible marks on the body are quite severe pressure sores on his buttocks and shoulder blades, congruent with spending a lot of time on his back.’
‘Bed sores?’
‘Yes.’
Foster knew that a lot of those who slept rough, and fell ill and became more immobile, suffered these sores. Pavements, cardboard boxes, tended to do that to damaged bodies. Though this guy did not look like the sort who’d been outstaying his welcome at death’s door.
‘So what killed him?’
‘Heart failure.’
‘You sure?’
‘Almost certain. What caused it is less clear. All the internal organs were in good condition, including the heart. It seems as if it just failed. We’ve sent some specimens out to toxicology. That may give us more of a clue.’
Foster looked at the body, the well-tended hands and feet, the clear skin. ‘Doesn’t that strike you as odd? A derelict from the street in good working condition? No enlarged heart, no cirrhosis of the liver, no blood thicker than porridge? What did he drink on the streets? Wheatgrass juice?’
Carlisle pulled a face. ‘I can only tell you based on what I see: his body is in good condition, exactly what you would expect of a healthy man in his forties. Though there are signs of drug use, specifically a few marks on the arm. He could be diabetic, of course…’ His voice tailed off; he moved to the arm and picked it up. ‘The reference was scratched on with a smaller implement than the one used on Darbyshire.’
‘Like a Stanley knife?’
‘It’s consistent with the use of that, yes.’
‘So there was a reference, but no stab wound and no mutilation?’
Carlisle shook his head. ‘I’ve checked the entire body. He possesses every fingernail, eyelash and tooth he should.’
Why stage the hanging, Foster thought? There was no reason to cover the murder up, not when you’ve carved a message on one part of the body. Had something gone wrong?
Carlisle removed his gloves with an urgent snap. ‘I need a cup of coffee,’ he said. ‘Then I have another body to look at. Care to join me?’
‘Yes to the coffee, no to the body. Not until you’ve finished, anyway.’
The two men turned to walk to the door. Foster stopped.
‘You’ve done with this guy?’
‘Not sure there’s much more I can do. Not until we get the results from toxicology.’
‘Good. If it’s all right with you, I’ve got someone outside who’s here to clean him up.’
Carlisle bristled. ‘He’s been washed thoroughly,’ he said, defensively.
Foster shook his head. ‘No, I mean a different kind of clean-up.’
The embalmer worked with great care and gentleness. She was a dowdy, motherly woman with a round, cheerful face that seemed at odds with her profession.
‘Sometimes I like to speak to them as I work,’ she had warned Foster when she arrived.
‘Feel free,’ he replied. ‘Not sure you’ll get much conversation.’
She stroked the dead man’s tangled, bedraggled hair. ‘Let yourself get in a bit of state, didn’t you?’ she said in a sing-song voice.
She brought over the tap used to hose down the tables. Shielding the dead man’s face with her hand, she carefully wet the hair with a few gentle squirts. Then she applied shampoo, working it into the scalp with her fingers in circular motions, rinsing it off with the tap. She produced a comb from her bag and straightened the hair, breaking up knots with a few stern strokes. With a pair of barber’s scissors she started to trim away.
‘Can’t say I’ve ever had to just cut someone’s hair and give them a shave before,’ she said, without looking at Foster. ‘Usually the last thing I do after they’ve been prepped. If they need it, of course.’
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘No, it’s quite nice, to be honest. I used to do this a lot back in the days when it was common to have an open casket or viewings and you had to make the deceased look the best you could. But less and less now. People don’t want to see their relatives or friends once they’ve passed over. They cut themselves off from death.’
For a fleeting second, Foster recalled standing over the body of his dead father. In his professional life he had seen countless dead bodies, hundreds, but nothing had prepared him for the effect of seeing the lifeless body of the man he had loved and idolized.
‘Who is he?’ the embalmer asked, stepping back to admire her work between snips.
‘We don’t know,’ Foster said, back in the present. ‘That’s why I asked you to come and do this. We hope it’ll help.’
In less than five minutes the hair was neatly cut. Then she produced a bar of shaving soap and a brush and with some hot water lathered up the man’s beard. With a few gentle strokes of a razor, she began to remove it.
‘Why not just use an electric shaver?’
Foster asked, marvelling at the almost tender way she cupped the man’s chin in her hand as she shaved him, a world away from the clinical way that bodies were usually dealt with in the morgue.
‘Never shaves as close,’ she added, the serene smile still on her face. Soon the beard was gone. ‘There you go,’ she said.
Foster said goodbye, showing her out.
He returned and stood at the end of the table, by the man’s feet. He looked at his face. The jawline was firm, the cheekbones prominent, not sunken. He was looking at the face of a dark-haired man in his mid-forties. The state of the hands and feet, his teeth – yellow-tinged but well maintained – the shape of his face, all indicated a man who had taken care of himself before he fell into disrepair. Foster guessed a white-collar worker of some sort – a man who, until recently, lived in comfort.
At the incident room Foster pinned two pictures of the tramp – one unkempt, one groomed – and one of the unknown dead woman to the whiteboard. The room was quiet, most of the team out pounding the streets around the previous night’s crime scene in search of a break. The morning had brought nothing new: no witnesses, though Drink-water had brought in the garage owner and Foster was waiting for news on his interview.
After fetching a coffee, he went to his desk and sat down at his computer. He called up the missing persons database. Beside his keyboard he laid out a freshly printed picture of the groomed corpse. He narrowed the search by entering what he knew of the body: male, caucasian, aged between forty and fifty, black-grey hair, five feet ten inches in height, brown eyes, average build. Under distinguishing features he mentioned the birthmark on his back, thankful for the latter detail because it would take thousands off the search results.
There were fifteen hits.
He called them up. All but one carried photos. Each time the image loaded on the screen, Foster enlarged it and held up the picture of the tramp to one side, eyes flicking between the two. Most were palpably different men, but the two he thought might possibly match up were put aside for closer inspection.
Then he saw him. Graham Ellis. A passport picture. The similarities between the two men were striking. The shape of the face, the thin lips…
There was a knock on his open door: DS Jenkins. She nodded a wordless greeting.
‘How’s Barnes?’ he asked.
She shrugged. ‘Pretending he’s fine. He needs time to digest it all. I offered him counselling…’ Her voice tailed away, sensing his distraction.
‘Look at this,’ he said, turning his screen to face her.
She came forwards and leaned on the desk.
‘Now look at this.’
Foster held up the photograph of the unknown corpse. Heather’s eyes flicked between the two for some time. She stood up.
‘They look alike,’ she said. ‘Who’s the dead man?’
‘That dead man is the same tramp we found swinging in the playground in Avondale Park.’
‘He scrubbed up well.’
‘Well, he’s no tramp, that’s for sure. Or if he was, not for very long.’ He looked at the screen once more. ‘And if he’s the same guy as the one here, then two months ago he was working at a firm of solicitors in Altrincham.’ He continued to look at the screen. ‘What I don’t understand is why he was hanging in the first place. Post-mortem says he was dead fifteen hours before we found him, so he was killed a fair few hours before he was strung up. In which case, why do it?’
‘To make it look like it was suicide, not murder?’
‘But where does that fit in with everything else we know about the killer? He carves references into his victims for us to see. Why be shy about actually killing someone?’
‘It was his first. Perhaps he wanted to put us off the scent for a few days. It worked.’
It was a pertinent point, delivered with no sense of self-justification, though he would not have blamed her if she had. But he did not agree.
‘No, he wasn’t trying to cover anything up. The opposite, I reckon: the hanging tells us something.’
‘What was the cause of death?’
‘Heart failure. Cause unknown. Tox might tell us more.’
He made a mental note to chase up the toxicology report on Darbyshire. They had had long enough; it was time to start shouting at them to get their arses in gear.
‘Do we have any ID yet on last night’s victim?’ Heather asked.
Foster shook his head slowly. ‘Carlisle’s doing her as we speak. There’s a whole pile of missing person reports out there. Start with the most recent. Call Khan back in to give you a hand.’
Soon after Heather left, his phone rang. It was Drinkwater calling in from Acton. The garage owner was proving of little use. He had an alibi that stood up.
‘Get a list of everyone who’s ever rented the place,’ Foster said.
They were still looking for the way in. Something had to give somewhere, he thought, if they kept pressing.
He looked once more at the details of the missing solicitor on screen: ‘There is great concern for Graham Ellis, who has been missing since 25th January. He was last seen drinking in a pub near his home in Altrincham, Cheshire.’
His firm was Nicklin Ellis & Co; he was a partner. Foster rang directory enquiries and was put through to their offices. It was Sunday, but he thought it was worth a try.
The message kicked in. The office was closed, as Foster expected. However, as he hoped, there was a number to ring in case of emergency. He dialled it.
‘Tony Penberthy.’
The voice was eager, young.
‘Hello, sorry to trouble you on a Sunday.’
‘No worries,’ Penberthy replied, with a hint of an Australian accent. ‘How can I help?’
‘I was hoping to have a word with my usual solicitor, Graham Ellis.’
‘He’s not on duty at the moment, sir. But I’m sure I can be of service. What’s the problem, Mr…?’
‘Foster,’ he answered, seeing no reason to lie. ‘It’s a bit delicate. Without sounding rude, I’d rather chat to Graham about it. Should I call back tomorrow?’
There was a pause at the other end.
‘Look, Mr Foster, there’s a problem here. You see, Graham Ellis has gone missing.’
‘God. When?’ Foster winced at his poor acting skills.
‘A little over two months ago. Came as a real shock.’
‘I bet it did. He just vanished?’
‘He was drinking in the pub across the road after work with a few of us. Seemed fine. Left to go home. Never seen since.’
‘We were friends in the past. Lost touch. No one’s heard anything?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I hope he’s OK,’ Foster added, remembering he was posing as a concerned member of the public, not a detective.
‘Yeah,’ the Australian said.
‘You don’t sound too convinced.’
There was a pause. Foster wondered how far to push it. The Australian seemed garrulous and he knew that, as a breed, solicitors weren’t allergic to the sound of their own voices.
‘Well, the word here is that he’s taken his own life.’
‘He didn’t strike me as the suicidal type,’ Foster added, wondering what the ‘suicidal type’ actually was. It didn’t matter. It kept the conversation going. Better this than being passed around the local nick in search of whichever copper took the report and filed it in the bottom drawer.
‘Yeah.’
He sensed the solicitor’s unease; he changed tack. ‘I’d like to send his wife a card, share her concern. Do you have an address?’
‘He was divorced.’
‘Really?’
‘Last year. Very messy.’
Foster scribbled a note. ‘Poor bloke,’ he muttered.
‘He had a tough time of it,’ the Aussie replied.
‘He was always a big drinker.’
‘He was still putting it away. Especially during the last year or so. We reckon after leaving us he went back to his local and s
ank a few more, then decided he’d had enough and got a train somewhere.’
Foster knew that if the man downstairs was Graham Ellis, then whatever problems he’d found in the bottom of his glass that evening, he’d been going home to bed when he left that pub. But he never made it. Foster badly needed an ID of the body.
He ended the call and set about contacting West Midlands Police. But just as he was about to dial, the phone burst into life. It was the desk sergeant at Notting Hill police station. They’d had a walk-in, a man claiming to know about a possible murder. He was insisting on speaking to someone senior.
‘The man has a package with him, sir,’ the sergeant said, quietly yet forcefully.
When Foster arrived with DS Jenkins at Notting Hill, the man was sitting in an interview room nursing a cup of tea. He was dressed casually, yet still appeared smart: brown cords, navy-blue jumper over an open-necked shirt, a mane of dark hair that flopped occasionally over his brow. His face, shapeless yet with skin so clear it was hard to determine his age, eyes watery-blue, seemed familiar to Foster.
On the table was a shoebox.
‘Sorry to keep you,’ Foster said, introducing Heather.
The man nodded, smiled briefly. His eyes were vacant, the face white. He seemed in a daze.
‘Simon Perry,’ he said slowly, mechanically in a clear voice that indicated a wealthy upbringing.
The name was vaguely familiar, too, but Foster’s eyes were drawn to the container on the table.
‘What’s in the box, sir?’ Foster asked.
Each word he said took time to penetrate the field of shock and bewilderment that seemed to envelop Simon Perry. Eventually he spoke without emotion or expression.
‘My sister’s eyes.’
‘Are you the only person who’s handled this?’
‘That I’m aware of, yes.’
‘We’ll need to take your prints,’ Foster said. ‘Rule out which are yours.’
‘Of course.’
Foster pulled on a pair of latex gloves, and lifted the lid.
The bottom of the box had been padded with a bed of cotton wool. Resting on it were a pair of eyes. Foster could not believe the size: the whites were the size of golf balls, part of the optic nerve trailing behind them pathetically. He realized just how much of the eye was out of sight. They seemed intact, which indicated great care had been taken during their removal. There was little colour to them, a blue tint to the iris perhaps: presumably whatever pigment had been there had vanished in the hours since their removal.
