The Body Under the Bridge

by The Body Under the Bridge (epub)

  The PC, whose name was Andrea Kirkland, sat down and unlidded one of the coffees. Gillard took the other, which turned out to be a rather velvety macchiato. For five tranquil minutes they sat and ate, discussing family, friends and hobbies. He offered her the last biscuit, which she declined. Mount Browne is a land of no second chances, so Gillard popped the morsel into his mouth. The moment he’d done so, Rainy Macintosh wandered in.

  ‘Ah, workshy corner,’ she announced. ‘And no bickies left.’

  Gillard had heard of Rainy’s good-natured insubordination, and smiled it away. ‘Any progress on the CCTV?’

  ‘Aye, sir. But not of the kind you would like.’

  ‘Did she stay on the train at Waterloo and go back towards Guildford?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, we checked that first. Unless she stayed in coach seven, with the non-working CCTV. In which case she could be fucking anywhere, pardon my French, sir. So we’re being methodical. She got on at Clandon and we’re doing each station in turn on the way up to London, just in case she got off. We’ve split the work with the BTP. We’ve done Horsley, Effingham Junction, Cobham, Oxshott, Claygate. BTP’s working on the stations heading down from London.’

  ‘I just do not understand how she could have vanished into thin air.’

  ‘Personally I think she’s trying to disappear. Maybe she slipped into the toilet to change into a hoodie and jeans,’ Rainy said.

  ‘She’d still have had the violin with her,’ Gillard reminded her. ‘It’s her most valuable possession, apparently.’

  ‘Maybe it was just an empty violin case, which she stuffed her clothes in.’ Rainy shrugged her shoulders. ‘I don’t know, maybe she’s a magician. She’s got the hat, after all.’

  * * *

  The press conference at six o’clock and the attendant publicity brought forth dozens of fresh sightings of a young woman who was by all accounts striking as well as distinctively dressed. Gillard read through the notes on the clipboard which summarised titbits of information gained so far. While a couple of dozen witnesses had called the information line to say they had seen her get on the train, there were only five who had seen her come in to their coach from the adjacent one. These all agreed that she had taken a seat right at the back. Witnesses generally had a hazy idea of which coach they were in, but from their accounts some could be presumed to be in the carriage with the defective CCTV, number seven. They all described the woman squeezing into the corner, and leaving her violin and a small rucksack on the aisle seat next to her.

  Frustratingly, there was a considerable difference of opinion over where she got off. Three said they had no idea, one suggested Effingham Junction, which was only two stops from where she got on, another said Clapham Junction, while the final one was certain she had not passed him to exit before he left at Waterloo. The discrepancy between the journey of the phone and the journey of the woman seemed if anything to be getting wider.

  Gillard sighed and made his way to the surveillance suite in the forensic unit. Near the back there was the wave of an arm from DC Carrie Macintosh, like a schoolgirl trying to attract the teacher’s attention.

  ‘Sir, I’ve got her. She got off at Earlsfield, the stop before Clapham Junction. Come and have a look.’

  Gillard looked over her shoulder and watched the young woman leaving the train. The timestamp on the CCTV said 16.37. Beatrice made her way along the island platform, and down a flight of stairs towards the exit. ‘I’ve got her coming out through the barriers onto the street, too, if you’d like to see that?’

  ‘Fantastic work, Rainy,’ he said. ‘There’s only one problem. Two minutes later, someone else who was still on the train sent a text from her phone to say she was arriving at Clapham Junction.’

  ‘Och, she’s a wee witch and no mistake. Vanishes into thin air one minute, but later manages to be in two places at once. I wonder what else she can do?’

  * * *

  When Gillard got home, just before ten p.m., Sam was on the phone but blew him a kiss. She wordlessly guided him back into the kitchen, and indicated to him the moussaka leftovers which just needed reheating. She was clearly in listening mode to one of her large circle of female friends. The exclamations of excitement and approval she interjected as she wandered around with the cordless were an intriguing little detective puzzle in their own right. Gillard often tried to figure out who his wife was talking to based on her tone of voice and the subject matter. To her parents it would be matter-of-fact, flat tones, interspersed with eye-rolling for his benefit. Her mother’s health issues generated the most extreme of these reactions. By contrast her closest friends merited a glass of wine, sips alternating with chuckles and squeals of delight, while she sprawled on the settee, snuggling down for a long session.

  This was different. The tone was more surprised, more formal, yet still gushing. ‘No! Really? Oh that’s wonderful. Did he?’ Gillard gave her a mute query, and she mouthed a reply. He didn’t recognise the name. Helen, was it or Ellen? Summoned by the microwave ping, he waved his fingers and blew her a kiss as he retreated back into the kitchen. He left Sam and her friend to their own devices for the next half an hour, suddenly feeling overworked and friendless, eating alone, staring at the oven whose digital clock announced that there were less than ten hours before he had to return to work.

  ‘So sorry, Craig,’ Sam said, while her husband was stacking the dishwasher. ‘That was Ellen.’

  ‘Do I know her?’

  ‘You met her once, at Georgia’s party a couple of years ago. Big glasses, big hips, a bit loud?’

  Gillard nodded, though he could only vaguely recall the woman.

  ‘She’s met a new man, who sounds amazing, and she is utterly in love. She’s dropped two dress sizes. She has always struggled with her weight.’

  ‘How do you know her?’

  ‘I trained with her. She’s not a PCSO anymore, she’s a receptionist at a vet’s in Bedford. We’re good friends on Facebook.’

  Gillard wilted under the blizzard of factoids, but tried to store them away in case he was tested on them later. Sam continued Ellen’s tale of being wooed: the surprise bunch of roses, the surprise holiday in Morocco, the makeover and spa weekend and so on.

  Later, when they were in bed, Sam told him she had invited Ellen and her new beau over for dinner on Saturday. She smiled sweetly at him, an unspoken request for the workaholic detective inspector to take an evening off.

  ‘I’m sure it’ll be fine if we find the violinist alive,’ Gillard said. He summarised the case for her. ‘Anyway, it’s looking increasingly likely that she is just playing silly buggers. For what reason I have no idea.’

  She put her arms around him, and the warmth of her body and their cosiness together culminated in a bout of gentle, unhurried lovemaking. He fell asleep with her hair fanned across his face, his arm around her shoulder.

  He was awoken by his mobile on the bedside table. It was 1.47 a.m. He levered himself upright to glance at the caller. A withheld number. Something made him feel this was important, so he took the call anyway.

  A woman with a pronounced German accent requested that he hold the line for the Minister of Justice. Shit. Gillard slipped out of bed as Karl-Otto Ulbricht came on the line. ‘Mr Gillard, I have only just had the chance to look at the CCTV you sent me.’ His voice was stern, with a tremble of upset or possibly anger. ‘You didn’t tell me that you had undertaken a reconstruction of my daughter’s travel.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand,’ Gillard replied as he walked out onto the darkened landing, stark naked, and gently closed the bedroom door behind him. ‘We haven’t reconstructed her movements.’

  ‘So how do you explain these falsified videos?’

  Gillard suddenly imagined the chief constable right in front of him here on the landing inspecting his naked scrotum prior to removal, if he had by some error sent the wrong video clip to Germany’s justice minister. ‘Sir, what I thought I sent you was a series of clips of
your daughter entering Clandon station, boarding the train, and her departure from the platform at Earlsfield.’

  ‘Yes, but who is it? She is wearing my daughter’s coat and hat and carrying her violin.’

  ‘I’m sorry, are you saying that the woman on the train is not your daughter?’

  ‘Of course that’s what I’m saying. It’s not her.’

  ‘But, sir—’

  ‘It’s not her, do you hear me? It’s not her! I had expected better from the British police.’ He hung up.

  Shit shit shit.

  Sam called out to him. ‘What is it?’

  ‘That was the German Minister of Justice Karl-Otto Ulbricht.’

  ‘Calling you? Oh my God!’

  ‘He claims the woman on the train is not his daughter.’

  ‘Huh? Who is she then?’ Sam asked.

  ‘That’s a very good question.’

  Chapter Four

  Friday

  ‘Didn’t any of you morons check?’ Alison Rigby was roasting the entire incident room team, more than twenty people. It was 6.30 a.m. Each and every one of them had been summoned for an early meeting at Mount Browne, so that the chief constable would herself have an answer to offer the minister at the start of the German working day, which was seven a.m. British time.

  ‘Ma’am, with all due respect, we did check,’ Gillard said. ‘We have three pictures of Beatrice Ulbricht from her friends, one of them wearing the same distinctive hat and coat. What we don’t have, precisely because she is wearing this broad brimmed hat and had her collar turned up, are any good facial images from the CCTV to check them against.’

  ‘You are clearly all bewitched by the hat, coat and violin, aren’t you?’

  ‘Ma’am, to be fair,’ said Carrie Macintosh, ‘this person, whoever she is, has not only the clothes and the possessions, but the phone of the missing woman. It’s a very elaborate and pointless exercise, surely, to impersonate her?’

  ‘Elaborate, yes. Pointless, maybe not. You are supposed to be detectives,’ Rigby said, lasering the entire room with her blue stare of death. ‘And detection is built on evidence. You made assumptions, and then built on those assumptions. Surrey Police has already squandered a thousand man hours on this case. Add to that British Transport Police, the Met and God knows who else. Everyone has been deployed to crawl all over footage from the railways, footage that we now know is not of the missing girl.’

  ‘It will still be relevant, because—’ Macintosh interjected.

  ‘Shut up, detective constable. The valuable first few hours and days of the hunt for a missing person have been wasted because we have been looking in the wrong place. Yes, whoever is impersonating her will be relevant eventually. But whoever did this must have intended to waste an awful lot of police time and energy and, because of your incompetence and failure to make basic checks, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. You should all hang your heads in shame.’

  Rigby, casually dressed in sweatshirt, jeans and trainers, stalked around the room staring at each detective in turn. Very few could meet her gaze. ‘Herr Ulbricht told me that his daughter is a little shorter than this woman, and she walks in a different way. Her hands are different. The minister rang to tell me this at three o’clock this morning.’

  Gillard raised his hand to speak. ‘Ma’am, we have the seat cover where the impostor sat. We haven’t done anything with it yet, because we didn’t think we needed to, but I shall get it sent off to see if we can get a DNA trace.’

  ‘That’s a good start,’ Rigby said. ‘The Met have interviewed her fellow quartet members, but I’m unsure whether they have seen any of the CCTV. Let’s make sure that we can get the father’s impressions corroborated.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Gillard said.

  * * *

  There was a collective sigh of relief as the chief constable walked out. Eye-rolling stares were exchanged, early morning yawns that had been kept stifled groaned out, eyes rubbed, coffee – even the vile police issue substance – urgently sought. Rob Townsend sprawled on his chair, his arms and legs splayed out. He looked utterly rogered. Gillard knew that the young research intelligence officer was still more than a little distracted by his relationship with the much-fancied crime scene investigator Kirsty Mockett. His self-confidence had grown, even as the quality of his work had deteriorated. What he was now about to be told would hopefully wake him up.

  ‘I’ve been having a think about this phone of Beatrice Ulbricht’s that travelled up to Brentford without her.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Townsend said, stifling a yawn. ‘Doesn’t make sense. Someone was on the train with her phone after she left at Earlsfield.’

  ‘No, Rob. I don’t think there was anybody using her phone by the time the train approached Clapham Junction.’

  ‘What about the text sent then? The cell site analysis showed it was sent in the vicinity of Clapham Junction, at about the time the train was pulling in.’

  ‘You’re forgetting one thing, Rob,’ Gillard said. ‘Something that you as our chief geek should know. When I looked at my own phone today, I found there was a setting to pre-set a text to go at a particular time. The message that was being responded to was received before Beatrice even got on the train. So the text could have been prepared, by her or someone else, before our mystery woman boarded the train.’

  Townsend pursed his lips. ‘I suppose that’s possible, but why?’

  ‘False trail, Rob. As Rigby said, someone wants us to think that Beatrice got as far as London, and if she is missing, that is where they want us to look. Both the carefully placed phone, and our mystery woman’s journey are designed to build that piece of fiction. That would only make sense if Beatrice actually disappeared before she got on the train. And if that’s true, she’s in the middle of our patch. In Surrey.’

  Townsend stroked his chin thoughtfully. ‘Deductive reasoning, yes.’ He yawned, and then realised something. ‘Forgot to mention that forensics finished with Beatrice’s phone late last night, so we can now have a look on the SIM card.’ He rubbed his hands together in anticipation. ‘We might be able to prove your point about the delayed texts.’

  ‘Did forensics find any dabs?’

  ‘The phone was smeared in Coke and coffee, probably from being in the bin, so not much survived. Still, they managed to lift a few. There’s nothing that obviously matches any criminal records, except for the lady at the waste transfer station, she’s got a bit of form from twenty years ago. Anyway, all the partials are now being looked at in Lewes to see if we’ve got anything else, which could take a few days, but they tell me not to raise our hopes.’

  Gillard nodded. ‘Someone going to this trouble is not going to leave their dabs on the phone, are they?’

  ‘Well, the impostor girl wasn’t wearing gloves.’

  ‘True, but we’ve never seen her handling the phone.’

  ‘Someone was.’

  ‘Rob, there was an incredible level of preparation for this. That’s why I am now much more worried about the young lady.’

  * * *

  The Royal College of Music allocated Gillard a practice room for him to interview the other three members of the Lysander String Quartet. The large airy chamber had a high window which illuminated a beautiful old harpsichord as its centrepiece. But what the detective wanted from them required their eyes rather than their ears. Do you recognise this woman? That was the simple question he put to them. Karen Ellsworth, Ignacio Vacelar and Teus Zukowski, all in their twenties, sat together at a couple of folding tables, watching CCTV footage that the detective played on his laptop. The two male musicians looked up as soon as they saw the woman walking across the rainy car park at Clandon railway station. ‘That’s her,’ said Ignacio, a slightly built Spaniard with a morose expression.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Gillard asked.

  ‘Well, the hat, the coat and scarf are hers—’ Teus said.

  ‘They are, but this woman is slimmer, maybe younger than Bea
trice,’ said Karen.

  The three musicians then discussed elements of their friend’s hair and clothing, without coming to a firm conclusion. Gillard switched to the footage on the train, which was a little clearer because the angle was lower. He froze at a frame in which part of the woman’s cheek and eye could briefly be seen.

  ‘My God,’ Teus said. ‘It is someone else.’

  Ignacio nodded his agreement. ‘She’s stolen Beatrice’s Politi.’

  ‘Her what?’ Gillard asked.

  ‘Her violin. It’s a 1932 Enrico Politi, made in Italy, worth many thousands. I recognise the case. This woman is swinging it about like it’s a cheap handbag. See, there! She just dumped it on the seat next to her.’ He shook his head as if this was the biggest part of the crime.

  The other two nodded their agreement. ‘We do not know who this woman is.’ Karen pointed accusingly at the screen. ‘But she is not our Beatrice, and she is not a musician.’

  Only then did Gillard tell them that Beatrice’s own father had agreed with their conclusion. The detective fast-forwarded through most of the rest of the CCTV footage, showing them a few salient moments of her movement through the carriage and ending with her departure from Earlsfield station.

  ‘Anything else you can tell me about her?’ Gillard asked. ‘I mean, are you sure none of you have seen this woman before?’

  ‘It’s difficult to tell,’ Ignacio said. ‘But no one at the college comes to mind.’ He looked to his colleagues for confirmation, and they nodded.

  The detective spotted Teus feeling for Karen’s hand beneath the table, and giving it a squeeze. They exchanged wan smiles. Emotional preparation for bad news.

  ‘So this woman robbed Beatrice of her clothing?’ Karen asked.

  ‘She may have come across it by other means. It’s clean and undamaged, which we have to see as a good sign.’