by Tim Weaver
I went back and forth through the pictures, taking a closer look at the people surrounding her. I was looking for faces I recognized, things that might start to connect her, and other people she knew, to Richard Kite, but after a while it just became the same faces in the same sort of locations with the same cut-and-paste captions.
Then, on another run-through, a two-year-old magazine scan of her at a charity event made me stop. It was somewhere on the Southbank, a fundraiser for displaced children in the Middle East and Africa, and Russum was standing next to a fireplace, flanked by five other people: three men I’d never seen or heard of before, a woman I vaguely recognized from a morning TV show about antiques, and a fourth man in a fawn blazer. He was in his thirties, tall, a little awkward. I didn’t know him either, but I could see something in a repeated pattern on his tie.
A coat of arms.
The same one I’d seen on the doors of the Red Tree.
I dragged the picture on to my desktop and zoomed into it. The man was to the right of Russum, a good four or five inches taller, clean-shaven with brown hair that was starting to thin on top. In the caption beneath the picture, it said his name was Jacob Howson, a published author and head of department at the exclusive Red Tree School.
Was he what connected Russum to the school?
I did a search for Howson. He had a Facebook page, but his wall and all the photos were locked. Instead, I found a picture of him on the Red Tree website, among the staff photos. His book, the published author part of the magazine caption, turned out to be a biography of Joseph Conrad.
I returned to the photograph of him and Russum and started to get the feeling that there was something else in it too; something I hadn’t seen yet.
I magnified it a couple of times more before inching back out again, unsure of what I’d glimpsed. It was subtle, but it was there. I cropped in on Russum and Howson, trying to look for tells in their expressions, and then moved on to the other people in the picture, double-checking that I definitely hadn’t seen them anywhere since starting Richard’s case. I hadn’t. I was sure of it.
So what had I glimpsed?
I returned to Howson and Russum. Their stances mirrored one another, presumably at the behest of the photographer: they were facing inwards, their elbows up on the mantelpiece behind them, striking the kind of artificial pose you only ever saw in photo shoots. My eyes moved left, to the other men and woman, then back to Howson and Russum. Was it something to do with how they were positioned?
Or was it where they were positioned?
Above the fireplace behind them, above the mantelpiece that they were both resting against, was a large, golden-framed mirror. The glass was reflecting back the room they were in. I could see crowds of people in the mirror, milling around off camera – expensive suits, colourful dresses, champagne glasses.
I zoomed in a little more, in towards the rectangle of mirror between Howson and Russum, so that – by the time I was done – most of what I was looking at in the photograph was glass, except for the edges, which were taken up by the fawn of Howson’s suit and the blue of Russum’s dress. The mirror’s reflection showed a group of four people talking off camera, and then a fifth – a woman, across to the side – her head slightly bowed as she looked down at her mobile phone screen.
I recognized her straight away.
It was the woman on the Regent’s Park bench.
17
The more I looked at the image of the woman, reflected in the mirror, the more convinced I became by the idea that she was there with Jacob Howson and Naomi Russum; that this wasn’t coincidence, a quirk of fate that had put her at the same party, in the same London venue, at exactly the same time. I’d already established a connection between Russum and the woman by virtue of the fact that Russum was showing Richard Kite a photograph of her, but this confirmed a knowledge of each other, a relationship of some kind.
The woman may have been off camera, may not have been an official part of the picture that had run in British Society magazine, but it looked like she was waiting for the two of them. There was something in her stance – it was comfortable, relaxed, as if she was easy being part of the group – and in her proximity to them too, the way she was on her mobile phone, filling dead time while photographs were being taken.
They knew who she was and she knew them.
A few minutes later, Richard came through, his face pale and fatigued. I took a break from the photograph and made us both some seafood linguine for lunch, and then we sat at the counter in the kitchen and ate.
‘Sometimes,’ he said after a while, bent over his bowl of pasta, the steam rising past his face in white strands, ‘I taste things and they feel familiar to me.’
I looked at him. ‘You remember eating them?’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘No, it’s not that. It’s not like I get a clear memory of eating them, it’s more like a general sense that I like them, and always have.’
‘Like an echo?’
‘Right.’ He nodded, more vigorously a second time when he thought about it. ‘An echo, right. Food, taste – I call them “connectors”. I’m eating this and I’m thinking, “This tastes really good because I love seafood,” but I don’t have any memory of eating seafood, I just know I like it.’ He paused for a moment, furrows forming in his brow, and then speared a prawn with his fork. ‘This is a connector. This connects me back to who I was before, because I know I really like prawns.’
‘Like you know how to swim?’
‘Right.’
‘Is it just food that does that?’
‘Food definitely does,’ he said, chewing. ‘I like steak too. I love bananas – they’re my favourite fruit; I could eat them all day – and I knew I’d like them even before I tasted them. But I hate cauliflower. I’ve never eaten cauliflower since they found me, I just know I don’t like it. It’s the smell it has when it’s being boiled.’ He waved a hand in front of his face. ‘My stomach turns the minute I catch a whiff of it. That’s another connector – but a more negative one.’
‘So it’s like an instinct that kicks in?’
He nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘What else do you feel that instinct about?’
His fork hovered over the linguine. ‘I don’t know really,’ he said softly.
‘Nothing comes to mind?’
He shrugged. ‘I mean, I like books.’
‘What type of books?’
‘I really like science-fiction novels. I’m reading This Perfect Day at the moment by a guy called Ira Levin. Have you heard of him?’
‘I have. He’s a great writer.’
‘I’m really enjoying it.’
‘Do you think you might have read him before?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’
‘You don’t feel that connection?’
He shook his head. ‘No. Just a blank.’
He became quieter after that, and although he was polite and asked me questions about the house, about the people in the photos I had on display in the living room, about my work and my life in London, eventually we arrived at the question he really wanted answered.
‘Do you think you’ll ever find out?’
I looked at him. ‘Find out what?’
‘Who I am.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I do.’
I meant it, even if there were moments when I had doubts, but – as he looked at me – I got the sense that he didn’t believe me, or at least wasn’t allowing himself to believe it just yet. He’d been burned once, when he thought the media coverage would bring him an answer, a biography of who he was, a family. This time, there was something else to unnerve him as well: not only the fear that I would fail to find anything, but that someone was watching his phone – his calls, texts, his activity.
‘Do you want to crash here tonight?’ I asked him.
He looked embarrassed. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry for just turning up like this. I didn’t know what else to
do this morning. Reverend Parsons is away …’ His voice tailed off.
‘It’s fine,’ I said.
‘I don’t expect you to –’
‘Honestly, Richard, it’s fine. You can stay.’
He seemed so grateful at such a small act.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you so much.’
I told him I needed to get back to work and he offered to wash up, so I left him in the kitchen and headed back to the living room.
As I did, my phone started buzzing.
It had only been a couple of hours since I’d called Ewan Tasker, and usually – if he was phoning back so quickly – it was because the police database had an answer for me. That didn’t mean the answers were going to be good. In fact, it probably meant the woman in the photograph wasn’t on the system at all, or was simply impossible to find.
I heard movement and background noise as Tasker found somewhere quiet, and then he said, ‘Let’s start with Naomi Russum. There’s not much on her, really. Or nothing exciting, anyway. Born 13 January 1972 in Oxford, hasn’t had any cautions or arrests, hasn’t been convicted of anything. She’s the owner of a Porsche 718 and her home address is listed as Belmont Road in Clapham.’
‘What about the woman with the tattoo?’
‘Nothing you can use,’ Task said. ‘The tattoo leads nowhere – or, rather, the only place it leads is your guy, Richard Kite. There’s people with similar tats on the database, but – other than Kite – not the exact same one, and not a female who looks like the woman in the picture you sent me.’
A dead end. But, despite that, the woman had existed, had a name, a history, a family – and all of those things left trails, however well hidden.
I just had to find hers.
18
Returning to the photograph in Regent’s Park, I placed the two colour printouts side by side on the table. Did the woman work with Russum at the clinic? Did she work at the school with Jacob Howson? Could Russum and Howson have had a professional relationship as well as a social one? What did Russum do at the school?
I considered the idea that Russum and Howson might be going out, but I couldn’t find any evidence that Russum had a partner, much less that it was Howson. Although Howson’s Facebook page was inaccessible, in his profile picture and in the photo of him at the charity event, he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. That didn’t necessarily mean anything, but there was no mention of a wife or a partner in the biography he had for his book on Conrad either.
Frustrated, I returned to the woman on the bench, to the two pictures of her, one where the bird’s wings extended across the flesh at the top of her arm, the other where there was no bird and no proof that it had ever existed. Russum herself, or someone she knew or worked with, must have removed the tattoo on a computer.
As I thought of that, I thought of something else: what if a surgeon had actually removed it from the woman’s skin in real life, sometime after the picture was taken? That would explain the lack of a trail back to her in the police database, if she was even in it in the first place and if the police had had some cause to add her to the system.
Even if the removal was successful, though, and the woman in the picture hadn’t been left with scarring or changes in the pigment of her skin, it should have been obvious to investigators – if she subsequently turned up as a suspect or a victim – that, at some point, she’d had a tattoo. The fact that there was so much black in the bird, and in such a concentrated area, made it likely there would be ghosting or textural changes to the skin, however subtle. I found it hard to swallow the idea that it would get missed – or would fail to be noted.
Unless the police never realized it was there at all.
Instantly, another idea started to form.
I pulled my laptop towards me. The more the idea grew, the more I could sense something bad, a certainty built on years of following this same path into the dark. Tasker had already done a search for women reported missing using the tattoo as an identifier, but this time I took the tattoo out of the equation entirely and went searching based on physical description and approximate age only.
And not for missing women, but for unidentified remains.
It took me a while, applying and reapplying different search parameters on the Missing Persons Bureau website – but then finally I found something.
My stomach dropped.
I went back to Google, using the basic information on the MPB to search for media coverage. The first link was to a story in the Guardian, but I discovered different versions of the same event covered in other nationals as well. All of them were short, and all of them had been published on the same date two years ago: Thursday 6 November 2014.
I looked at a headline in the Mail.
GRISLY FIND AT LONDON HOUSING ESTATE
The housing estate in the headline was the Armbury in Abbey Wood, south-east London. It ran parallel to a set of train tracks which had been closed since 2014 due to the Crossrail excavation, so there was a half-mile stretch of line which no one ever used. The papers described it as a dumping ground and said that a local man, Alan Havenger, had got over the fence and on to the tracks. Witnesses told reporters that Havenger was always over there, and that, if he ever saw something he liked, he’d take it back to his flat and try to fix it up – broken lawnmowers, TVs, bicycles.
On 5 November 2014, he found a body.
I felt myself tense as I read through the rest of the article. So soon after the body was found, there wasn’t much more than basic information in the newspapers, including a vague physical description: a white female in her early to mid thirties with blonde hair. I skipped forward, trying to find the follow-up pieces that surely had to have appeared in the days afterwards – but all I got was a small piece in the Evening Standard five days on.
From that, it was clear that investigators still had no idea who the woman was. That was the reason the nationals had lost interest: with no name, there was no story. Forensics believed the victim had been there a fortnight, and the reason Havenger didn’t find her until then was because her body had been pushed into a pile of railway sleepers. And not just pushed either: shoved, crammed, squeezed until her bones snapped.
It was hard to tell what the worst bit of the story was: that, or what else was found on her body. I knew now why Tasker had failed to find a match for the tattoo on the database: because when the woman was found, she didn’t have one.
The tattoo had been cut out of her.
It had been flayed from her arm, along with similar chunks from her legs and her right arm too. It seemed obvious why: to throw detectives off the scent. Deliberately flay one piece of skin and the cops would ask why. Why that part of the body? What had been cut out? Flay three and it began to look like something else: a work of frenzy and chaos; the work of a murderer spiralling out of control.
But that wasn’t the reality.
This wasn’t someone out of control. It was a deliberate act – and it was a killer who knew exactly what he was doing.
I called Ewan Tasker back and told him what I’d discovered, and then he went to the database and found her. The case hadn’t come up in his results because the woman had never been reported missing, or as being in any kind of danger, and she had no tattoo. Because of the flayed skin, investigators had come at the injuries from the wrong direction, with the wrong type of killer in mind, and the file had been constructed from there.
‘What about the victim’s DNA?’ I asked. ‘Teeth? Fingerprints?’
‘It leads nowhere.’
‘Nothing at all?’
Tasker took a long breath. ‘Look, Raker, you know I can’t pretend I haven’t found this now. If there’s a chance we can try and find out who she is, and why she was killed – if there’s a chance to find the prick who did this – we need to take it. I can give you three or four days, a week maybe, but after that I’m going to have to pass it up the chain. I can’t in all good conscience sit on this.’
‘I understan
d.’
‘I’m sorry, old friend.’
‘You don’t have to apologize, Task.’
Tasker was giving me a week.
I had to make it count.
Part Two
* * *
Extract from No Ordinary Route: The Hidden Corners of Britain by Andrew Reece
This book started out as a travelogue, a celebration of Britain, Britons and the far corners of our country we still don’t know bout, but my meeting with my friend the journalist and broadcaster Tomas Cassell changes all that.
‘Have you ever been to the place before?’ Tomas asks me.
‘No. Never. What’s it like?’
He seems confused, which is very unlike Tomas.
‘My dad was a pilot and the RAF station was a few miles out of the town back then.’ He stops again. ‘That was how I ended up going there as a kid.’
‘What do you remember about it?’
‘Rain.’
‘Rain?’
‘It rains a lot there. Like, a lot.’
‘Well, that’s British weather for you.’
Tomas smiles. ‘Yes, I suppose.’
But then the smile fades again.
‘The people,’ he says.
‘What about them?’
‘I never warmed to them.’
‘Why?’
‘They were just very, very strange.’
Seven weeks later, I think of what Tomas said to me as the town comes into view. The approach – especially at night – feels like it goes on for ever, a journey to the edge of the world. You’ll see twinkles of light in the darkness first, stardust scattered in the folds of Mount Strathyde, and if you choose to come across the suspension bridge, built in 1985 and funded by the Thatcher government to the tune of a cool £25 million, you’ll be greeted by a Union Jack standee made from red, blue and white plastic sheep. It’s a nod to the community’s farming roots, but also an attempt to show the town as welcoming, with a knowing sense of humour.
