The Body Under the Bridge

by The Body Under the Bridge (epub)

  Hey there Craig, here’s a clue! IC

  Rainy flicked through the video, which was of Beatrice playing the Sibelius violin concerto at a church hall in Streatham, South London, last November. There was nothing obviously different about it, except the unusual personalisation of the message. She would forward it for his attention.

  * * *

  The back roads around Westmeare led to some of the most rural areas of the county. Craig Gillard and Claire Mulholland sat in his unmarked Vauxhall, parked in the bus stop from which Beatrice Ulbricht may well have disappeared, raking over what little evidence they had. They had been driving around for an hour, looking for any clues to what an angry young woman might have decided to do after leaving a nearby house.

  ‘All right,’ Claire said, looking down at her list. ‘Mobile reception is pretty poor just here, I’ve only got one bar on mine. There is a taxi firm in the village, a one-man band who was on an airport run on the evening in question. He claims not to have received any calls from Beatrice, and of course that checks out with her own mobile. The next nearest firms are in Guildford, ten to fifteen minutes away.’

  Gillard nodded, his fingers gripping and ungripping the steering wheel. ‘We’ve got thousands of hits on the ANPR cameras around Earlsfield, not surprisingly, but the nearest camera to here is four miles away on the A25. We haven’t had any number plates that crop up on both. There are only three CCTV cameras in the village, one covering the pub car park and two at private homes. Uniforms are checking to see if they picked up any passing traffic.’

  She leafed through the various sheets. ‘Mr Edward Lightfoot, seventy-seven, driving his van, said he saw a young woman with a hat, scarf and violin standing at the bus stop in Shere Road in the pouring rain a bit before eleven p.m. He guessed that there wouldn’t be any more buses that day, and had considered stopping to give her a lift, but decided not to.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He didn’t want any accusations, that’s what the statement says. “I felt guilty even considering it. But after what happened I feel even worse.” He says he’s got a granddaughter of Beatrice’s age.’ She looked up at Gillard.

  ‘Do we have the number plate of his van?’

  Claire shook her head. ‘Not on here.’

  ‘What idiot did the interview?’ He looked across at the uniformed officer’s name, but didn’t recognise it. ‘Okay, let’s get it and find out if the van flashed up on any ANPR in Earlsfield on Tuesday afternoon.’

  ‘Not got much, have we?’ Claire asked.

  ‘Let’s pray for forensics first thing tomorrow.’

  * * *

  Gillard drove Claire back to her home at Staines that evening. It was raining heavily yet again, and while stuck in heavy traffic they listened to the Lysander Quartet’s first and only CD, which he had bought for ten pounds from Karen Ellsworth when he last interviewed her. He was no expert on Bach string quartets, but he found himself enraptured by the beauty of the playing.

  ‘Mind if we have the weather forecast on?’ Claire said, eyeing her boss suspiciously. ‘There is supposed to be a warning over the next couple of days.’

  He nodded and switched to the radio. The outlook was every bit as bad as she had predicted, with an unusually deep depression sweeping in from the Atlantic. High winds with localised flooding was inevitable, the forecaster said.

  ‘A bit more than April showers,’ Claire said.

  ‘I hope it stays dry Sunday morning,’ he said. ‘I’m teaching Sam to rock climb. She’s done indoor ascents with me a few times, but I wanted to get her used to the feel of real rocks under her fingertips.’

  Saturday

  Craig Gillard had rarely played the car park game, sucking up to your boss by having your vehicle seen prominently at work at some unearthly hour. But arriving at 6.15 a.m. inevitably made him look like he wanted to impress. It was almost two hours before his shift was due to start, but he wanted to get an early look at the forensic tests that had been run overnight at Mount Browne’s own lab. As he slid the Vauxhall into a nicely prominent slot near the entrance, he couldn’t help noticing the chief constable’s car was already in her reserved space.

  Perhaps she’d been there overnight?

  He made his way over to her vehicle, and pressed his ear to the bonnet. He heard the characteristic ticking of a cooling engine. Arrived within the last few minutes, then.

  Gillard walked into reception to find the chief constable and four other people standing with mugs of coffee. He immediately recognised the sleek patrician features of Karl-Otto Ulbricht. A handsome and well-coiffed woman next to him he assumed must be Mrs Ulbricht. The other two were multi-lanyarded young men with the alert keenness of officialdom: one seemingly from the German justice ministry, the other from Whitehall.

  ‘Ah, Craig,’ Rigby said. ‘Just the person to guide us around the forensic centre, where I believe we are expecting results, am I right?’

  Utterly blindsided by this early arrival of heavies, Gillard asked for a minute to make preparations. He walked calmly until he was through the first double doors and out of sight, and then sprinted to the forensic centre. It took him three hasty attempts to punch in the correct code. Senior forensic officer Petra Amin looked up at his arrival. ‘Ah, Craig. We do have some results—’

  ‘Thank God. The parents of the missing girl are in reception right now, I need some progress to offer.’

  Petra spread her hands and widened her eyes. ‘Okay, what have we? Yes, not too much from Adrian Singer’s home, I’m afraid. No blood, no semen, no signs of struggle. We got plenty of DNA which is being tested at the outside lab, and we should get results by mid-morning. A couple of the techies worked overnight on Singer’s computers. Nothing incriminating so far, I gather. The satnav on his car shows only local use in recent days.’ She looked up. ‘Does that help?’

  ‘Not a whole lot.’

  He noticed Petra looking over his shoulder. ‘Incoming, watch out,’ she said.

  He turned, and saw the chief constable leading in the missing girl’s family.

  From somewhere, he dragged together a one-minute presentation of the evidence he had just been told about. He hoped it would sound like he was familiar with every aspect of it. He watched as Beatrice’s father translated his words for the benefit of Mrs Ulbricht.

  ‘We are doing everything we can,’ Gillard said. It sounded like an apology.

  ‘Who was it who was impersonating my daughter, wearing her clothes and carrying her violin?’ Mr Ulbricht asked. It was an entirely reasonable question. Gillard just wished he had an answer.

  ‘We’re still working on that.’

  Mrs Ulbricht looked directly at him. She had pale blue eyes and quite chiselled cheekbones beneath her silvery blonde hair.

  ‘Do you think our daughter is still alive?’ she asked in accented English.

  ‘There is hope,’ he said. But in truth there wasn’t much.

  * * *

  It was a disconsolate DCI Gillard who returned to the incident room, looking for something – anything – to distract him from his gloom over the case. DC Carl Hoskins looked to be afflicted by the same miasma. He was sitting slumped over his terminal, playing and replaying some very dark CCTV footage.

  ‘What’ve you got there, Carl?’

  ‘Probably nothing. This is a camera from a residential address in Westmeare, on a side road not far from the bus stop where we think Beatrice was waiting. There are only two vehicle movements on the side road during that time, one of which is from the drive where the camera is located. But look at this,’ he said, pointing the tip of the pen at something in the top left-hand corner of the fisheye lens image. ‘That is a concave blind spot mirror, for the householder to be able to pull out and see traffic coming from the left.’

  ‘The left would be towards the main road?’ Gillard asked.

  Hoskins nodded. ‘You can see the passing of vehicles on Shere Road as kind of dark dots preceded by the halo of headlamps. They are
absolutely tiny. If we were in the original Blade Runner then I’d just be able to zoom right in, and identify every vehicle that passed.’

  ‘Yeah, but at least we’re not forced to have sex with robots.’

  ‘Huh, you’ve clearly not tried to get my Brenda going before an early shift,’ Hoskins muttered.

  ‘Too much information, Carl,’ Gillard replied, then added, ‘Unlike almost every other part of this bloody case.’ He sighed heavily. ‘I think we’ve got some image enhancement software in-house now, I’ll check with Rob Townsend.’

  Gillard found the research intelligence officer slouched in the surveillance suite, yawning extravagantly, sipping some posh bought-in coffee. ‘Yes, I’ve got a 2019 version of Close Focus,’ he said. ‘It’s supposed to be the best there is.’ He had huge bags under his eyes.

  ‘Well, we’ve got a real challenge for it.’ Gillard rang back to the incident room, and got Hoskins to email the CCTV link to Townsend. The young detective constable used the largest, most high-definition screen in the room, and pulled up the half-hour footage. Even on this screen, the blind spot mirror was no bigger than a thumbnail at the edge of the image.

  ‘I’m not sure we’ll get anything,’ Townsend said. Using his cursor he outlined an enhancement focus box around the mirror, clicked on maximum magnification, and blew it up until it filled most of the screen. At this magnification it looked like a jumble of grey circles. ‘The CCTV is from a pretty good domestic system, but there’s not much more than a hundred pixels for the mirror. You won’t see anything.’ He clicked to let the sequence run, which simply illuminated the occasional lateral passage of brighter then darker blobs.

  ‘It’s not entirely useless,’ Gillard said. ‘We can distinguish between left-to-right and right-to-left movement, and each pairing of light and then darker blobs indicates a vehicle passing. So we can still count the passage of traffic past the Shere Road bus stop, which is just up thirty yards or so to the left.’

  ‘I’m not sure how much that is going to help,’ Townsend said, looking up at his boss.

  ‘It might do. Let’s go back to basics. I’m assuming we believe Singer’s account of Beatrice leaving his home, because we have an independent witness who saw her at the bus stop just before eleven p.m. This elderly man, Edward Lightfoot, says he didn’t stop, but presumably somebody else did shortly afterwards. I don’t believe Beatrice would have waited more than an hour when it was clear the bus wasn’t going to come and she was unable to get a taxi. So she might have hitched a lift. So between eleven and midnight, we can count the vehicle movements in each direction. That in itself is useful. But given that the bus stop is only thirty yards out of shot, we should also be able to detect whether vehicles were slowing down to stop, by measuring the passage of the dark and light blobs across the screen. Does that make sense?’

  Townsend was nodding in agreement, wide-eyed with appreciation for cold, hard logic.

  ‘I’ll send in Hoskins to assist. Take an hour and see what you can manage,’ Gillard said, patting the young detective on the shoulder. ‘And do try to get some more sleep, young man. I need you fully awake and on the ball.’

  * * *

  It was only half an hour later when Rob Townsend messaged Gillard to say he’d managed to make some progress. When the detective chief inspector arrived at the surveillance suite, Townsend proudly displayed a much clearer picture of the blind spot mirror. Though vehicles still moved across as blobs of light and dark, it took much less imagination to see them for what they were.

  ‘How did you do that?’ Gillard asked.

  ‘The enhancement focus box has a probability sampler, which allows the subdivision of individual pixels. Though the camera never recorded this kind of detail, the processor can do a statistical likelihood of what the picture was trying to show. It’s a bit like predictive texting, where the computer suggests what to say.’

  ‘That’s great.’

  ‘I also think I know when Beatrice was picked up at the bus stop.’ He pointed at the screen, as he ran a five-second segment of the footage. ‘You can see this dark blob which slows down, and there’s even a light grey blob behind which could be brake lights. The time is 11.17 p.m. There is no other vehicle on her side of the road which shows the same characteristics.’

  ‘Fantastic. You now think we can distinguish between large blobs which could be a van or truck and smaller ones?’

  Townsend blew a sigh. ‘I’ll give it a go, boss.’

  * * *

  Gillard sat with Claire in the Mount Browne canteen at noon, him with a rather chewy Saturday special of lasagne, she with a dry chicken salad. These were good culinary reasons why it was the one place they wouldn’t be ambushed by the chief constable or her VIP visitors. The two detectives had shared all the latest snippets on the Beatrice Ulbricht case, and felt they were running out of evidence to examine.

  ‘Only one eyewitness to seeing her at the bus stop,’ Gillard said. ‘Given the distinctive hat and violin case, that indicates she may not have been there for very long. We think we have a vehicle slowing down for her, caught in the blind spot mirror, at 11.17 p.m. But we haven’t got any idea of make or registration number. Rob’s newly inaugurated “blob-size analysis” says it certainly wasn’t a small saloon, and could possibly have been an SUV, people carrier or van. But that still doesn’t get us very far.’

  ‘I can’t tie any of that up with the door-to-door enquiries,’ Claire said. ‘The team has visited every house in the village, as well as the pub. She wasn’t seen, full stop, anywhere except at the bus stop, and then just by the one witness.’

  ‘Do we agree that she is dead?’ Gillard asked.

  Claire nodded. ‘I’d love to be wrong, and we mustn’t exclude the possibility, but there’s been no ransom approach to the family.’

  ‘We’ve had all the DNA tests back now, and as we suspected there is nothing that matches anyone on the national database.’ Gillard described how he had been present when CSI sprayed a reactive substance called BlueStar all over Adrian Singer’s house, garage and shed. This product, the modern successor to Luminol, was designed to react with even the slightest dilute trace of blood to give a luminescence that can be detected by the naked eye. ‘If there had been even a speck, we would have found it.’

  ‘Maybe he just strangled her,’ Claire said. ‘No blood.’

  ‘It’s possible, though Beatrice wouldn’t have been a pushover with her Aikido skills. Singer looks more the cerebral type. Besides, that thesis leaves our witness to Beatrice at the bus stop as an anomaly. Singer could only be the perpetrator if somehow she returned or was brought back to his house later on.’ Gillard shook his head. ‘I think Singer is in the clear, and short of digging up his garden and emptying the septic tank there’s not much more we can do. I am now moving more towards the idea that she was picked up at the bus stop shortly after arriving there. I do think we can sketch in some things about our abductor.’

  ‘Go on then.’

  ‘Male, driving a van or SUV, physically capable, with a close confidante or girlfriend who would be willing to act as his stooge for the train charade. He has a good understanding of how the police work, a particularly good knowledge of mobile phones, including delayed texts, and at least the rudiments of cell site analysis. Those things I’m confident of, but here’s where I get to guessing: I think he may be a local man, otherwise why create the false trail to London? My gut feel is that he is a sexually-driven attacker, who has the confidence to make an opportunistic assault, knowing he has places nearby to either hide or dispose of a body.’

  He looked at Claire to assess her response.

  ‘I’ve a simpler idea,’ she said. ‘Our killer is a woman – the very same woman we saw on the train.’

  Chapter Six

  Gillard spent Saturday afternoon with Claire driving around the leafy vicinity of Westmeare looking for locations where a body may have been disposed of. They had visited a couple of dairy farms, a trout hatchery
, a builder’s yard, and many streams and rivers, all swollen by the recent rain. Meanwhile, Claire had fleshed out her theory. A woman had stopped at the bus stop, given Beatrice a lift and taken her home to kill her. Gillard had listened patiently, but then answered with statistics: female on female stranger killings were almost unheard of. If a woman had killed or abducted Beatrice, then she would have to have had a much stronger motive. To the usual emotions of love and jealousy could perhaps be added musical rivalry. But nothing on any of the interview notes, either their own or those conducted by the Met Police, had given even a hint of this. All they were left with was conjecture.

  The life of a detective is full of hours and days which seem pointless, until suddenly a clue appears. But on this weekend afternoon, fate had not cooperated. Gillard had dropped Claire back at Mount Browne to pick up her own car, then headed home. He’d been aiming for seven, but it was nearly nine p.m. when he finally arrived.

  Sam had earlier sent him a couple of texts to remind him about that evening’s dinner party, but once she revealed that Ellen’s boyfriend had been forced to cry off too, he knew the pressure on him was off. It was now a girls’ night in, and his attendance he knew from experience could only detract from the quality of the conversation, and inhibit revelations. That didn’t stop Sam from glaring at him as he opened the door and let himself in. ‘At least home-made pâté doesn’t spoil,’ she said, as she gave him a perfunctory kiss. ‘The main course is a different matter. Halibut doesn’t like to be kept waiting.’ And neither do I, was the not-very-hidden subtext.