by Tim Weaver
‘What wasn’t?’
‘The photograph of Penny I put in the notebook. It had been removed.’
‘Someone had taken it?’
He nodded again.
‘Do you think it was Marek?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you look around for the picture?’
‘I searched everywhere, but it was gone. I couldn’t understand it. I was so upset. Then I saw there was a Post-it note at the back of the notebook, poking out of the top of it like a bookmark.’
He shuffled another printout out of the pack and held it up for me. The yellow Post-it note had been taped to it.
Go to the police and you’re dead
It was hard to rip my eyes away from it, and when I did, I immediately thought of the flowers Howson had left on the railway line, and the messages he’d written on the cards. I miss you. Please forgive me. I’m so sorry. I looked at him, wondering for a minute whether this could all be some elaborate lie he was spinning. But it didn’t feel like it. It felt like he’d written those cards to her because, by failing to go back to the police, he’d utterly betrayed the woman he’d loved.
I moved my thinking on to Naomi Russum. She must have been passed the photograph by Marek. But why would he give it to her to show to Richard Kite? What did that make their relationship? Professional? Personal? Both? It was why Howson had seemed like he was hiding something earlier when I told him Russum had a picture of Penny: he knew I must have been talking about the one he’d had stolen. He must have been trying to work out why Naomi Russum had ended up with a copy of it.
However it had arrived in her possession, I now knew why Penny had never been identified: Howson didn’t go back to the police, so she was never registered as missing, and everyone else just believed she’d resigned. And the things she had in common with the body on the railway line – her DNA, her features, her hair and eye colour – were never brought to light. But there were still questions. Penny was killed over a year before Richard Kite ever came on to the scene, so what – apart from the tattoo they shared – connected them? Was that why Richard’s phone was being tracked? Was it because there was something damaging about Marek – perhaps about Naomi Russum too – buried in his head and if he remembered it, they’d need to do something about it quickly, before it caused them too much harm?
If that was true, he was in more danger than I thought.
I looked at Howson.
‘I read about Penny in the papers a couple of days after she was found,’ he said. He’d become emotional again. ‘It wasn’t big news because the media had no pictures of her. I mean, it’s not like they could show crime scene photos. The way they described her, some of the injuries she had …’ He ground to a halt, his chin against his chest. ‘The police didn’t know who she was, so they couldn’t go to friends, to me, and get a photograph of her for the media to print. That was why no one at work, no one she spent any time with – anyone but me, really – ever made the connection. But I knew. I knew it was her.’
‘Whoever killed her cut out her tattoo.’
He looked at me, fresh tears in his eyes; nodded once. He’d read about the skin flayed from her body. He was smart enough to have put two and two together.
‘Did she ever talk about that?’ I asked.
‘About the tattoo?’ Howson shook his head. ‘Not much. I asked her about it, but she just said it was something she’d got when she was a teenager.’
Howson had mentioned that Penny was an only child, so she and Richard weren’t brother and sister – but what if they’d been part of the same social circle or lived in the same place? Could the tattoo have been a regional symbol of some kind?
‘Did Penny ever say much about her childhood?’
‘She didn’t like to talk about it.’
‘How come?’
‘She just didn’t.’ He frowned, as if trying to draw his memories to the surface. ‘She’d talk about her dad sometimes. That was the main thing. He went missing when she was really young. I think she was three.’
I looked at him. ‘Her dad disappeared?’
‘That’s what she told me.’
‘What else did she say about him?’
‘That was it. Just that it happened when she was young.’
‘Did he ever turn up?’
‘I don’t think so, no.’
‘Anything else you remember her saying?’
As he gave it some thought, I tried to work out if the disappearance of Penny Beck’s father might be connected to this. I couldn’t see anything obvious, but that didn’t give me much comfort: her dad had vanished – and so had she.
‘She was born in London,’ Howson said.
I noted it down. ‘So did she grow up here too?’
‘No. Her family moved when she was a couple of months old to some tiny farming town called Sophia. I think it’s up north somewhere, because she said it always rained there.’ I thought of Richard Kite’s memory of the beach, and something he’d said to me the first time we met, when describing it: The skies are grey. It’s really miserable, it’s drizzling.
‘She was never specific about where this place was?’
‘No,’ Howson said. ‘I tried to bring it up once, to ask her where exactly it was, and she said, “Why are you even interested? It’s the most boring place on earth.” But I was interested because I could never find that place on any map.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘See for yourself.’
I went to my phone and put in a search for towns in northern England and Scotland called Sophia. It took all of five seconds to find out that Howson was right.
When I looked at him again, he shrugged. ‘It always felt like I was on the outside looking in when it came to her childhood. I’d spend the entire time trying to piece things together from the tiny fragments she gave me. Like, the town was called Sophia. That was one thing. And her father used to work here in London in some boring office job, but quit to go and farm sheep up north – that’s another. Her father disappeared, that’s a third, and her mum remarried some guy called Jack. Four. And the fifth thing was that she had a stepsister called Beth, but they ended up having a big falling-out.’
‘About what?’
‘Penny never said. She just said they didn’t speak any more.’
A disappearance of someone close to her, a falling-out, a town that wasn’t on any map – the last one in particular rang alarm bells. To me, it suggested that, at best, Penny had been sidestepping the truth, at worst lying about her background. The only question that remained was whether the lie had a direct relevance to her murder, or to the case of Richard Kite.
I chewed on it for a while and then returned to the idea that Richard and Penny knew each other, had moved in the same social circles, had perhaps even been in a relationship. If Howson was right and Penny had moved north with her family when she was still a baby, then that could easily have been where she and Richard met: in the town, whatever its real name, in which Penny’s father was a sheep farmer. Maybe I could locate Penny’s stepsister there too. Except some things still didn’t sit quite right. If Richard had family up north, why hadn’t they come forward in the time since he was found? They surely would have picked up on the media coverage if they were looking for him. Also, why would Penny even lie about the name of the town in the first place? And if Richard was from up north, why didn’t he have a northern accent?
That made me think of something.
‘How did Penny speak?’
Howson frowned at me. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, what sort of accent did she have?’
‘Oh.’ He nodded. ‘She worked hard to hide it but, occasionally, it would slip. It was weird, actually. I’d never heard anything like it before. She was well spoken mostly, but –’
‘Sometimes her R’s would come out hard?’
‘Yes.’
‘Like she might be from the West Country?’
‘Yes,’ he said, his fr
own deepening. ‘Yes, that’s it.’
Now I knew for sure: Penny was from the same place as Richard.
27
Richard Kite and Penny Beck came from the same part of the country.
But which part?
I looked at Howson’s three photographs of her.
In one, Penny was a little younger, maybe late twenties, and was sitting on some steps with the Millennium Bridge in the background, her skin shining in the sunlight. She seemed different. Dressed in a cream blouse with a ruffled neck and a tan skirt, she had none of the weariness of the Regent’s Park photograph; in that one, she was two or three years older and looked plainer, more fatigued. Something had disturbed her. From all that Howson had said so far, it sounded like she’d never told him what.
In the shot taken by the Thames, she was immaculate, a cord of blonde hair formed into a French braid that traced the arc of her forehead. Her smile was so broad and full and bright, it was like an internal lamp had snapped on: it lit the green of her eyes, it brought colour to her cheeks; in a way, it changed her entire physical appearance. It was the same in the others, one of her in a rose garden, and the other – a selfie – taken by Howson himself, his arm visible at the very edge of the shot.
‘What’s that?’
He followed my gaze to the thin pile of papers he’d separated out from the others and placed beside him.
‘Accounts,’ he said.
‘That’s what Penny found in the school’s security suite?’
‘Yes,’ Howson said again. ‘She discovered that there were seventeen years of Red Tree business on Marek’s computer. He’d kept it all without anyone even knowing. All the money the school raised, all the fees they were being paid, all the donations they received. It was all on his hard drive.’
‘Why?’
‘So he knew everything that was going on. Because he thought it might be useful, or a bargaining tool, or a way to exert pressure.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But what I do know is that there’s something hidden in it.’
‘In what?’
‘In the records he kept. There’s a pattern – or was – and Penny found it.’
‘What’s the pattern?’
‘Between September 2000 and January 2003, the Red Tree was paying money into three offshore bank accounts.’
‘Why would they do that?’
‘Exactly,’ Howson said. ‘Independent schools like us, we’re registered as charities, right? So we already receive an eighty per cent cut in business rates. What would be the point in setting up offshore bank accounts – which are there to help you avoid tax – when we’re hardly paying any tax anyway?’
I thought about it – but not for long.
‘Because the offshore bank accounts don’t belong to the school.’
Howson nodded. ‘Right. It wasn’t the school that was trying to be opaque with its money. It was Marek. He used the Red Tree as cover to shift his own cash around.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. Not fully.’
‘And no one at the Red Tree is aware of this?’
‘No,’ Howson said. ‘Marek’s careful. Everything was done from the security suite that only he has access to. Anything that reaches Roland’s desk, Marek will have checked over first. You saw how he was at the school. You saw how Roland was around him. When even the headmaster is scared of him, who’s going to ask questions about Marek? And even if anyone did look closer, he’d soon know. He has access to all the logins, to all the email accounts, all the data, everything. No one can catch him out.’
‘But Penny did.’
‘I don’t have the whole picture,’ he said, talking faster now. ‘These’ – he held up the printouts to me – ‘they’re just fragments. Scraps. Pieces of the puzzle that Penny was putting together, but they’re as much as I’ve been able to glean from the things she left behind. What I do know is that Penny found out about the payments that were being made from the school to those offshore accounts, and she discovered that they were always made at the same time: the tenth of the month, every month, for twenty-nine months.’
‘How much are we talking?’
‘About twelve thousand pounds a month, split into three chunks of four grand – so three hundred and fifty thousand pounds in total.’
‘Was Marek stealing money from the school?’
‘No, that’s the thing. The same amounts were coming into the school the day before they were transferred out again. What I mean is, on the ninth of every month between September 2000 and January 2003, twelve thousand pounds would be paid into the Red Tree, and the very next day, it would be split up into four-grand chunks and then fired off into the three offshore bank accounts.’
‘Who was paying the money into the Red Tree?’
‘I don’t know. It’s impossible to say because it was physically being paid into a bank by someone, at a branch, not transferred from another account. All I have to go on is a name written on one of the financial statements: Caleb.’
‘That’s what Penny wrote down?’
‘Yes,’ Howson said. ‘I tried to look around for who this “Caleb” might be but I’m afraid I didn’t get very far.’
He handed me all the papers he’d collected, including the accounts. It was a mess of handwritten notes, sheets full of numbers, and printouts that made no sense. If Howson, one of the people who’d known Penny the best, had struggled to grasp the complexities of what was written here, it would be even harder for me. I didn’t know how Penny Beck thought. The fact was, I didn’t know her at all.
I spent a couple more minutes flicking through the papers, reading notes she’d made in margins, entries she’d underlined.
‘Where did she leave all of this?’ I asked.
‘She hid everything by spreading it out, but then, by chance, six months after she was killed, I found some notes in a novel she loved. Just left there, obviously in an attempt to hide them. A couple of months after that, I went to open a chest of drawers in my bedroom and the runner got stuck. So I loosened it and managed to lever the drawer out. Taped to the underside of the drawer were some bank statements’ – he gestured to a photocopy I was holding of the Red Tree’s accounts from May 2002 – ‘with Penny’s writing in the margins. After that, I tore the house apart looking for other things, and what you have in your hands is the sum total of what I found. There could be more, but I’ve no idea where.’
She’d gone to the effort of hiding what she was finding – not just to protect Howson, but to protect herself too. As I continued to leaf through the paperwork, I eventually ended up back at the sheet with Caleb written at the top. Did all of this come back to that name?
‘This is absolutely everything you found in the house?’
He nodded. ‘Everything.’
‘And you’ve no idea where the rest of it is?’
‘Maybe there isn’t a rest of it.’ He shrugged. ‘If there is, she’s hidden it too well. Or it’s shredded, or thrown away, or lost.’ He pointed to the printouts again. ‘This is as much as I’ve managed to collect together in the two years since she died. This is as good as it gets – and I’ve had to work so hard even for this much.’
‘She never told you about what she was doing, even once?’
‘No.’
‘Why wouldn’t she tell you?’
He looked into his lap. ‘I’m not sure she trusted me.’
‘Why not?’
‘I think she worried that I’d accidentally drop her in it at work. I would never have done that knowingly, but I wasn’t as smart as her; not as discreet or cautious. Ultimately, I think she was protecting me against myself – if I didn’t know anything, I couldn’t place myself in trouble, or jeopardize her search.’
‘But a search for what?’
‘That’s the thing,’ he said. ‘I just don’t know.’
The search for wherever the name Caleb led.
We fell into silence, Howson staring off into space, me going through the pape
rwork, trying to find things that might mean something: a hint, a tip, a lead.
Then there was a knock at the door.
28
Howson’s eyes widened, a sudden panic in his face.
I held up a hand to him, trying to calm him down, and then moved to the door, inched it open and looked through the gap.
Richard Kite smiled at me.
‘Phew,’ he said, clearly relieved that he’d got the right place. ‘Sorry it took me so long. I got confused on the Tube. I changed at Bond Street – but I took the northbound Jubilee line instead of the southbound one.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said, and let him in.
He and Howson stared at each other, and I knew instantly that inviting Richard here was of little or no value: he didn’t know Howson, and Howson didn’t know him.
‘Richard, this is Jacob,’ I said, pushing the door shut.
He nodded at Howson. ‘Hello.’
‘Who the hell is this?’ Howson responded.
Richard looked rattled, intimidated by the welcome he’d been given, uncertain of who Howson was and why I’d asked him to meet us here.
‘You remember that I asked you about a man called Richard Kite?’ I said to Howson. His eyes shifted between me and Richard. ‘Well, this is him. Richard suffers from dissociative amnesia. He can’t remember who he is or where he came from.’
Howson looked at me like I might be joking.
‘I’m pretty sure that Richard came from the same place as Penny,’ I said, and handed Richard one of Howson’s photographs.
He took the picture from me.
