by Tim Weaver
Returning to the Beatrix Steards file, I refocused on Adrian Vale and began reading about how his father had been a manual labourer and his mother had cleaned rooms at an old hotel on Main Street, close to Union Station in downtown LA. I read about how he went to local elementary, middle and high schools, and had been such an outstanding student, and achieved such impressive results, that he was able to apply for and secure a full scholarship to Stanford University, where he studied at their prestigious Law School. After completing his degree there, he then applied for another scholarship, the Marshall, which at that time awarded thirty US-based students a bursary in order to continue their studies at a British university for up to two years. When Vale was selected, he chose to do Politics at King’s.
According to Home Office records, he flew into Heathrow on 28 June 1986 and had listed a house in Clapham as the place where he was staying. That was backed up by a contract that Smoulter had pulled from the local authority in Lambeth, which included Vale as one of three tenants paying rent on a house in Cask Lane, a road at the south end of Clapham High Street.
Much of the rest of the information that Smoulter had gathered on Vale felt at best extraneous and at worst irrelevant: other places that he’d travelled to on the same passport; a history of part-time employment he’d listed on an application he made for a weekend job at a pub near the Elephant and Castle; the contact details of his mother, who was – by 1987 – a widow; and purchases he’d put on a debit card, which rarely got more exciting than weekly grocery shopping and ATM withdrawals.
There was one photograph of him.
It was taken from his passport, the whole first page photocopied. Dark-haired and handsome, he appeared athletic, his chocolate-brown eyes pinpricked with tiny blobs of light, his jaw strong and square, the muscles at his neck developed enough to confirm a love of working out. In fact, he looked more like a poster boy for weight training than an academic superstar, but a superstar he obviously was: one of his lecturers told Smoulter that Vale was ‘one of the brightest and most purely talented students I’ve ever had the pleasure to teach’. When the lecturer was asked by Smoulter how he would describe Vale as a person, the response was just as unequivocal: ‘He’s a lovely young man: humble enough to sit and listen when he doesn’t know something – and admit that he doesn’t, which takes just as much modesty – but confident enough to argue a point when he strongly disagrees.’
I wrote down the quote and switched tack.
Smoulter had tried to pursue the idea that, because Vale had admitted to finding Beatrix attractive, it in some way implicated him in her disappearance. In the days after his interview with Vale, he’d returned to Robert Zaid, another of the students on the Politics postgrad, and the person who first suggested that Vale might have liked Beatrix; or ‘fancied her’, in Zaid’s words. It was a comment that Zaid, from what I could see, had made only in passing, and without being one hundred per cent certain it was true, but it was a comment that Smoulter had zeroed in on and which, over the course of those first few weeks, became a central pillar of his search.
Unlike Adrian Vale, Zaid hadn’t come from a working-class family: his father was from Iran, a multimillionaire who’d made his money in oil and construction, and who – after the 1979 revolution – had settled permanently in Camden Town. Zaid’s mother, whom his father had originally met at Princeton while they were both studying there, was a former model from Budapest. Robert Zaid was born in Tehran but had been educated in England from the age of eleven, attending a boarding school in Gloucestershire. After A levels, he chose to read History at King’s.
That was the course on which he’d met Beatrix.
Smoulter hadn’t conducted an official interview with Zaid, but there were a few notes, including one quote that Smoulter had directly attributed to Zaid, and that he’d written in the margins of the file, verbatim: I didn’t mind Adrian. I never had a problem with him at all. But he could be a bit weird sometimes. Like, there was this night when Beatrix, me and a couple of others were walking back from the pub and one of the guys turned around and said, ‘Isn’t that Adrian?’ And we all looked around, and it was definitely Adrian, but when he saw us, he darted off into this side street and didn’t appear again. I remember saying to Beatrix, ‘That was a bit odd,’ and she said, ‘Not if you know Adrian Vale, it isn’t.’
So was this the reason that DS Smoulter had dug his nails into Vale and refused to let go? Zaid’s comments seemed to suggest that Vale might have been following – possibly even stalking – Beatrix, and it wasn’t only Zaid who believed Vale liked her: a couple of other friends were spoken to by Smoulter and they all said similar things. Ultimately, it didn’t amount to much more than hearsay, and it would never form the basis of any genuine prosecution, but it built a broader picture, and especially showed how Vale seemed to exist on the periphery of the group. Still, even if Vale had liked Beatrix, even if he had followed her, did that make him responsible for her disappearance? The quote Smoulter had written down from Zaid made Vale’s behaviour sound weird, but being weird didn’t make Vale guilty.
I could see that the investigation started to stall pretty soon after. A week passed, and then a month, and then three, and the search for Beatrix Steards continued to go nowhere. The last entry of any significant kind – rather than bland statements about there being nothing new to report – was on 12 October 1989.
That was when Adrian Vale died.
31
Vale had still been living at the same address in Clapham, was unmarried with no children, and, apart from a short stint in April and May 1989 working part-time as an archivist at the British Library, appeared to have struggled to find work after finishing the postgrad in June 1988.
Despite his academic brilliance, he’d also had few, if any, close relationships. When interviewed by police, the two men he rented a room from in Cask Lane said they barely talked to him, or saw him, in the entire time he was sharing with them. Perhaps that, and the lack of employment, was a contributing factor in what happened next, perhaps the fact that he was so far away from home, or perhaps none of it, but somewhere in the time after he ceased to be a student, his life must have taken a turn, because Vale hadn’t passed away due to a physical disease. He hadn’t become a victim of a crime or been in a car accident. He’d lost no battle with his bones, or his blood, or his internal organs; just his head.
He’d committed suicide.
His body was found on the East Sussex coast, where majestic chalk cliffs rose out of the sea to heights of five hundred feet. The actual date of his death was hard to pin down because there were no witnesses, but after a father and son – sailing past an isolated cove in their boat – spotted a body on the shore, a pathologist suggested it could have been there for up to two months. It was hard not to feel sorry for Vale, despite the lingering suspicions that Smoulter had had about him: not a single person had reported him missing, even the people he shared a house with, and about thirty feet from his body, police found his wallet. There was a suicide note inside that he’d failed to finish. It talked about how lonely he was and how much he missed his mother, who’d died the January before.
I leaned back on the bed.
There was nothing in the casework that directly connected Beatrix Steards or Adrian Vale to Patrick Perry or the other residents of Black Gale. There wasn’t even a hint of a geographical tie-up either: the disappearance of Beatrix Steards, the suspicions about Vale, as well as his subsequent suicide, had all taken place hundreds of miles from the Yorkshire Dales. The timings were all way off too: when Beatrix went missing in 1987, when Vale jumped to his death in 1989, Black Gale didn’t even exist. It would be three decades before its residents vanished.
So why the hell was Patrick so interested in Beatrix?
I began robotically tabbing back through the pages of the file, but I was only half concentrating. My mind was turning, full of static and noise, heavy with questions that still lacked answers and didn’t look any closer to ge
tting them. Where were the links? Where was Patrick’s motivation for digging around in a thirty-year-old case? Where were the reasons for what happened at Black Gale, for the hidden audio devices inside the houses? Who was Isaac Mills?
And then everything shifted into focus.
I was on the first page of the interview transcript, looking at the questions from Smoulter and the answers from Adrian Vale. I’d already been over them once – but now I realized I’d missed something.
In the transcript, the three people in the room during Vale’s interview were listed as SMOULTER, VALE and SOLICITOR. But, at the top, in a line along the edge – the point size not just small, almost imperceptible – was a list of their full names: DS Stuart Smoulter. Adrian Garcia Vale.
And then the third.
The name of Vale’s solicitor.
Jacob Pierce.
It took me only a second to place the name, and when I did, I felt a prickle in my scalp. Pierce was the person that Ross had mentioned on the phone to me earlier.
He was the man Isaac Mills worked for.
The man who ran Seiger and Sten.
Clear: Part 2
1985
Los Angeles | Tuesday 30 July
In a flat voice, Hayesfield said, ‘You don’t think Donald Klein’s our killer.’
It was a statement, not a question.
‘No,’ Jo replied. ‘I don’t believe Klein was the one who shot Gabriel Wilzon.’
‘So he helps some asshole fill a tub with acid, watches as this mastermind puts a bullet in the Wilzon kid’s face, and then Klein drives up to Runyon Canyon, goes for a midnight walk and pops one in his own skull because – what? – he feels so guilty?’
‘Or he couldn’t see an end to it.’
‘An end to what?’
‘To the killer threatening his mother.’
‘Klein cares so much for his mom that he blows his brains out?’
‘If he’s dead, he can’t be blackmailed.’
She kept her voice calm, quiet, as if she absolutely believed that she was right, but here, in this moment, as Hayesfield glared at her from across the desk, as she articulated her thoughts for the first time, her certainty began to grey: she was frightened that she’d called it wrong, frightened that the sympathy she’d felt for Ray Callson had helped cloud her judgement; she was frightened that she’d just set herself back months, maybe years, and that all the reservations that had been expressed about her, about her abilities as a cop, about the limitations of her sex – all the things that had been discussed in front of her and behind her back – would now be used as a way to articulate her inadequacy.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘LT, I know it’s not what you want to hear.’
‘You’re damn right it’s not.’
‘There’s just something off –’
‘I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,’ Hayesfield said. ‘I’m going to pretend you haven’t marched in here and tried to screw up a perfectly good case with some half-baked, feel-it-in-your-waters horseshit about an evil genius. Your wit at the motel is a creep who says he might have seen a station wagon, but will have no credibility on the stand. Ballistics match. Klein’s got a record and his prints are all over that acid. It’s done, Kader. You closed this thing last week.’
‘I’m not sure Wilzon’s American.’
‘So? Do you need to know where he came from to know who killed him?’
‘That’s what I’m saying: I don’t think Klein killed him.’
Hayesfield’s gaze didn’t shift an inch, even as his mouth stiffened and his lips blanched. In a tight voice, he said, ‘Wilzon’s an illegal – is that what you’re saying?’
‘We lifted a partial from one of his fingers,’ Jo replied, ‘and it matches another we found at the motel – so we’ve managed to build a clear, usable print. But that’s been a total dead end. Nothing from dental either, nothing from the autopsy, and I spoke to the INS and no one matching his description has entered the country through any airport or –’
‘So he was here illegally?’
She paused, nodded. ‘I think he might have been, yeah.’
‘And he was Hispanic – that’s correct, isn’t it?’
She knew exactly where this was going now.
‘Is he Hispanic?’ Hayesfield said again.
‘Yes,’ she replied.
‘So you’re telling me that we’re going to unravel an entire case – one in which we can put the killer at the scene – because you want to go on some crusade to find out the name of an illegal who probably swam across the Rio Grande last month, and who you’ll never be able to ID anyway because most of his face is melted off? We don’t even know if he came from Mexico, Kader. He could have come from anywhere. And even if he did, the Mexicans literally won’t give one single shit about helping you.’
‘It’s not necessarily about ID’ing Wilzon.’
‘Then what’s it about, Kader? Enlighten me.’
‘It’s about finding the person who really pulled that trigger.’
He smirked. ‘This “mastermind”.’
Hayesfield’s gaze didn’t leave hers.
‘And what are the LAPD saying about the suicide?’
‘The detective there believes the same thing I do,’ Jo replied.
‘Great. And what’s his name?’
‘Ray Callson. He’s a detective over in Hollywood.’
Hayesfield frowned. ‘Callson?’
She nodded again.
This time, Hayesfield didn’t say anything. Instead, he peered out through the blinds, as if searching the squad room for something, and then tapped on the glass. A few of the detectives on the floor looked up from their desks, including a well-groomed, grey-haired Latino man in his late forties, who Jo knew was called Gary Perez. He was the one Hayesfield was trying to alert. And then, as Perez got up and started coming towards the office, she remembered something else: Perez had been one of the detectives Callson had told her he’d worked with before at the Sheriff’s Department. He’s a good kid, Gary, Callson had said. Decent. Principled.
‘Bring that copy of the Times,’ Hayesfield shouted at Perez.
Perez double-backed, looking confused, and scooped a copy of the LA Times off his desk. When he got to the doorway of Hayesfield’s office, he nodded at Jo and then reached across her and gave the paper to the lieutenant.
It was yesterday’s edition.
‘Perez, you said last night that you worked with Ray Callson, right?’
Perez looked between them again, thrown.
‘Right?’ Hayesfield pushed.
‘Ray?’ Perez said. ‘Yeah, we worked on a body dump last year. The vic was left on Lake Hollywood Drive, but she lived up in Santa Clarita, so Callson called me and –’
‘You rate him?’
‘Callson?’ Perez nodded. ‘Yeah, he was good police.’
Hayesfield had begun to leaf through the Times and, as he found the page that he was looking for, something registered with Jo, something that Perez had just said.
Callson was a good cop. Was.
Hayesfield laid the paper down in front of her and pointed to a column on the right-hand side, halfway in. COP ‘COULDN’T LIVE WITHOUT LOVE OF HIS LIFE’. Jo saw the words, the opening paragraph, but barely took any of it in. She looked up at Hayesfield, at Perez – still standing in the doorway – and back to the article. No. Ray’s wife, Georgette, had died in a nursing home in Hancock Park over the weekend. When staff had found her, they’d found Callson too. Jo looked at Perez again, and he shrugged at her, still not understanding what was going on. No, this can’t be true.
Callson had been found lying next to his wife, holding her hand.
He’d deliberately overdosed on sleeping pills.
‘You can go.’ Hayesfield’s voice brought her back, and she saw Perez leave, taking the newspaper with him. ‘The case is cleared, Kader.’
Callson is dead.
The sadness lingered for a second, and then
the anger took over. It filled her head like the impact of an explosion – static, noise, heat – and she shot a look at Hayesfield, one he immediately saw the animosity in. His own expression tightened.
‘You got something you want to say, Kader?’
She didn’t respond.
‘You don’t think I’ve got the balls to fire you – is that it?’
Again, she said nothing.
‘Your man Callson is dead, so the LAPD are going to be about as interested in his theory as I am in yours. You’ve got Klein, you’ve got Wilzon – the case is finished.’
She looked at the map, at the scene where a sticky note should have been.
‘He was in a tub of acid,’ she said. ‘He was shot in the face.’
‘We got people being shot in the face all over the city.’
‘He’s a victim, regardless of where he came fr–’
‘Don’t play that weepy shit with me.’
She pressed her teeth together, rage pulsing in her throat.
‘Klein went down for possession,’ she said.
‘So?’
‘He was just a pothead in the wrong place at the wrong time –’
‘I don’t give a shit, Kader. Okay?’
He yelled the words at her this time and, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a few of the men – out on the floor – look their way. The argument on the Stalker team died down. Everyone was listening. Aware of it, Hayesfield lowered his voice but lost none of his steel: ‘I got thirty-seven unsolved homicides where we can’t get witnesses to cooperate with us because they’re so shit-scared of gang reprisals. One in three of the murders we actually proceed with is getting kicked back to me by the DA because they don’t think we’ve got enough evidence. We’re digging week-old gunshot victims out of rock houses, we’ve got ODs absolutely everywhere, I’ve got drugs on every block and bodies on every sidewalk. I haven’t got enough cops to deal with that, let alone this son of a bitch who’s running around breaking into people’s homes, raping and murdering anything with a heartbeat and then disappearing into the night like David fucking Copperfield. I mean, I assume you’ve heard of the Night Stalker, Kader? I just want to be sure here, because I know you didn’t make the cut, so maybe you’re struggling to understand the sheer scale of the manhunt we’ve got going on here, but if you think – given everything I just said – that I’m going back to Santos today with one less closed case than I had yesterday, you’re out of your fucking mind. So do me a favour: save the Sherlock Holmes shit for playtime, when you get home to your kid. The case is done. Forget it – or clear your desk.’
