The Body Under the Bridge

by The Body Under the Bridge (epub)

  ‘This is Kevin’s patch,’ she said as they splashed through. The ancient mildewed caravan that was Kevin’s home had survived the inundation because of its berm of sandbags, but his garden, as Deirdre called it, which ran for twenty yards towards the river’s edge, looked like it had been swatted by some giant hand. The smooth mud was sprinkled with plastic bottles, lumps of polystyrene, and broken branches from the willows further upstream.

  ‘That was where the Allegro was for the last however many years,’ she said, pointing to the middle of the quagmire. ‘He lost his Vauxhall Nova too, that’s the one that worked.’

  ‘Just to be clear, you say Kevin was with you throughout the flood?’

  ‘Yes. He was backwards and forwards with ropes and sandbags. He did a great job considering he normally doesn’t shift from sitting on his arse watching TV.’

  ‘And there was no young teenage girl staying with you, or with Kevin?’

  ‘No. But I might recognise her if you have a photo.’

  ‘Not with me.’ Gillard did indeed have an image on his tablet, but as it was of the face of a corpse, he didn’t feel he could share it. That would eventually be Perry’s decision as SIO for this case.

  ‘Is there any other access here, apart from past the site office?’ Gillard asked.

  ‘Yes, the riverside path, which is actually a drive for two of the bungalows, went right past here.’ There was no sign of it. ‘I think a big chunk of the bank has disappeared,’ she said. ‘We owned it and we want it back.’ She barked a brief sarcastic laugh. They made their way carefully down towards the river’s edge.

  Gillard opened up his Ordnance Survey map. ‘So there was vehicular access?’ he asked.

  ‘Not after four o’clock on Sunday, I wouldn’t have thought. Mike and Betty in the first bungalow said the waters were up to their front step. By midnight they were halfway up her new kitchen units.’

  ‘Did you see any vehicles or any strangers on the site in the run-up to the floods?’

  She shook her head. ‘We had four bookings over the weekend. One was a regular from the statics, but everybody else from the lower pastures we brought up into the office once the river came over. Three cars got washed away, but we managed to save the Dutch camper van.’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’

  She blew out a huge vape cloud and watched it dissolve in the now bright blue sky. ‘We’ll carry on camping,’ she said, and smiled at him, a survivor’s mask that covered the pain. ‘You’ve got to keep going, haven’t you?’

  * * *

  Kevin O’Connell arrived pretty promptly at Epsom Police Station to give a statement. DI Claire Mulholland met him at the reception desk and escorted him into an interview room. O’Connell was a rough-looking slab of a man, in his early twenties and over six feet tall. He had a shaven, lumpy head and one of those bushy dark beards that looked like it had been bought from a joke shop and glued on. His stained trousers sagged, and as he sat at the interview table they revealed a wedge of hairy bottom, and stretched across it the word Friday on the purple waistband of his day-of-the-week underpants. Claire had bought her own teenage son a seven-pack of the same cheap brand, to remind him to change them every day. And like with O’Connell, the waistband day was always wrong. She reflected that unchanged underwear were worse than stopped clocks, only right once a week.

  ‘That body was nothing to do with me,’ he blurted out before the interview had even started.

  Claire sat on the other side of the table and reassured him that he wasn’t being accused of anything at the moment. ‘We know the car wasn’t a runner. We just want to know how the girl came to be inside it.’

  O’Connell had brought in all his documents, which supported his mother’s contention that the car had been bought two years ago for cash as a non-runner. ‘Originally the bodywork wasn’t too bad as it had been stored in a shed, and I’m pretty good mechanically,’ O’Connell said. ‘I thought that if I could get it running, and get in some of the spares, I’d be able to sell it for a fair bit. The old Austin Allegro is a classic car.’

  Claire inclined her head dubiously. ‘So where was the vehicle kept?’

  ‘Under a carport behind my caravan.’ He described the location, within ten yards of the river, easily accessible from the riverside path, and because all the rubbish containers were kept there, screened from the rest of the caravan park by a row of leylandii. ‘There used to be a wire fence at the edge of our land, but it kept getting trodden down. So when the river flooded right up, there was nothing much to stop the car being floated off.’ He paused. ‘So have you got a photograph of her, then? The woman what was found inside?’

  Claire knew they would get to this point, but couldn’t show him either the historical photograph or the picture of the body. ‘It’s not the kind of image we can share at this stage.’

  He shrugged and looked disappointed. ‘Was she sleeping in there? In the car?’

  ‘We don’t know. It might be somewhere that you would shelter just to get out of the rain, if it was unlocked.’

  ‘Yeah, not all the locks worked, so you could always get in. It was dry inside, all the seats were in good condition.’

  Claire hoped that the girl had got in the car herself, but she had wanted to revisit Gillard’s theory that she might already have been dead, taken out of one vehicle and dumped into the Allegro. ‘Your mum said it is possible to get a vehicle down the riverside path, right?’

  ‘Yeah, easy. The path is only an extension of the gravel drive that goes to a couple of other riverside houses. That’s how the Allegro got in there in the first place. I towed it in. Still, it would have been a bit more challenging during the rain and the floods. Not impossible, but you would have needed a four-wheel-drive, a good one, and a bit of confidence, I’d say. You’d have to know what you’re doing.’

  Claire nodded. She believed O’Connell. On the balance of probabilities, this seemed like an unfortunate accident. She hoped the post-mortem would confirm it.

  * * *

  The delayed incident room meeting turned out to be frustrating. Gillard had called in dozens of CCTV recordings from the Earlsfield area. Public safety cameras at traffic lights and Pelican crossings, bank security footage and ATM cameras, internal video from off-licences and betting shops, anything that might give even a glimpse of a woman in a mauve hat and rainbow-coloured scarf. DCs Carrie ‘Rainy’ Macintosh and Carl Hoskins had worked all weekend coordinating the surveillance team, and had got a chain of four cameras which tracked the Beatrice impostor under the railway bridge heading north along Garratt Lane for a quarter of a mile until she turned right into Algarve Road, a tree-lined residential street. That is where she disappeared from view for good.

  There were far fewer resources where the fake Beatrice’s journey began. There were no CCTV cameras on the roads approaching Clandon station. The first glimpse of her approaching in the rain on the Tuesday afternoon was in the station car park. Gillard described to the assembled detectives how he and Claire Mulholland had driven all round the village of Westmeare, the last place that the real Beatrice Ulbricht was seen. They had visited plenty of quiet lanes and sunken rural drives where a body might easily be abandoned, while uniformed officers had leafleted and knocked on doors around the village. There were no obvious fresh leads.

  ‘What about the London angle?’ Hoskins asked.

  Claire, who had been coordinating with the Metropolitan Police, answered that. ‘None of Beatrice’s fellow musicians are in the frame on this. We don’t believe that the answer to this crime will be found within her musical community.’

  ‘What about Adrian Singer?’ Rainy asked. ‘He’s a wee bit creepy.’

  Gillard shook his head. ‘He may be the best suspect we’ve got, but he came out clean, forensically. There was no trace of Beatrice’s DNA upstairs in his home, only on one dining chair and one seat cushion from the sofa, which matches his story that she came round for dinner and then left. His car showed som
e of her DNA on the passenger seat, but nothing in the rear seats or boot.’

  ‘So do we really believe that she was just randomly snatched from a bus stop?’ Rainy asked. ‘It doesn’t quite fit with all this elaborate cover-up and the impostor. That speaks of weeks of planning, surely, yet it happened within two days of her disappearance.’

  Gillard nodded. ‘That’s an excellent point. I think the word to discard here is “randomly”. It just doesn’t fit. There has to be a reason.’

  * * *

  At two p.m. DCI Gillard Skyped Dr David Delahaye at Redhill Hospital, before he performed the post-mortem. The forensic pathology consultant appeared to be sitting in a small windowless office. Leaning forward into the fisheye lens his square spectacles and balding dome made him look like he belonged in a flying saucer. The right-hand side of the computer screen was dedicated to the photographs that they were sharing.

  ‘This is the dead girl,’ Delahaye said, as a close-up image of her face flashed up. Alabaster skin, bluish lips, eyes closed, dark blonde hair. But the overwhelming impression was of innocence; pure, fresh, and preserved for ever. The pathologist flicked through a series of images taken on arrival at the mortuary. They were mostly of her face. The last few were full body. Her clothing was intact, a woollen cardigan over what looked to be a white blouse, a pleated skirt, fawn tights and no shoes.

  ‘No make-up,’ Gillard said.

  ‘Unpierced ears, no nail varnish,’ Delahaye added. ‘She may be even younger than she appears. She is the typical height of a thirteen-year-old. Forensically speaking, what we are missing, if she drowned recently, is foam. It would be normal to find froth in the mouth, and upper airways. I will perhaps be in a better position to assess this once I’ve opened her up. Froth in the smaller airways, oedema, even overinflation would give us a better guide.’ He looked up at the detective. ‘However, as you may know, determination of drowning is one of the trickiest areas in all pathology. Immersion in water can kill in many ways, not just by filling the lungs with water. Hypothermia, stress, hypertension and cardiac arrest can all kill, particularly someone who may be trapped in a partially submerged vehicle.’

  ‘Not a nice way to go,’ Gillard said.

  ‘There aren’t too many of those,’ the pathologist said, peering over his spectacles. ‘Well, I tend not to see them anyway. This’ – he tapped the screen with a ballpoint pen – ‘would not be one of them.’

  ‘How long had she been in the water?’

  Delahaye offered a weary look. ‘You know full well we can’t be precise about it, but unofficially I think we can bracket it. The corpse’s core temperature was similar to that of the water she was recovered from, so she must have been dead in it at least a couple of hours. But from these photographs, and a brief external inspection, I would hazard a guess that it was less than twelve hours. There are few observable signs of the deterioration that one would expect.’

  ‘One other thing,’ Gillard said. ‘I found some longish dark hairs entangled in the same vehicle, which are clearly not from this victim. I’ve asked the lab to copy you in on the DNA results.’

  ‘Thank you. We could do without any more victims.’ He paused and then asked: ‘Any luck with finding Beatrice Ulbricht?’

  ‘None, really. We’ve reached a hiatus. We know there was an impostor on the train, a woman who went to enormous trouble to draw our attention away from the Westmeare area of Surrey. We guess she had an accomplice too, although we’re still hazy about how that would work.’

  ‘I met Beatrice, two years ago,’ Delahaye said.

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yes. She hadn’t yet set up the Lysander Quartet, but was one of those jobbing semi-professional soloists that village music societies rely on. She came down to play for us in Kent, and we put her up in the spare room. She is, and I refuse to use the past tense, an absolutely delightful woman. Funny, self-confident, charming, full of joie de vivre. And I have to say that the Bach solo violin sonata that she played, for all the fact that it was not quite technically perfect, was so beautifully cadenced emotionally that most of us were in tears.’ He blinked a few times. ‘If she is not found alive, I’m going to ask somebody else to do the post-mortem. I don’t think I could bear to do it.’

  * * *

  ‘I’m so sorry to hear this, Ellen.’ Sam Gillard was on the phone to her friend, having seen a rather forlorn Facebook post after many days of no contact.

  ‘I don’t understand it. I did everything he wanted me to do,’ Ellen sobbed. ‘I knew he was always travelling, and I accepted that. I knew he could only come over one or maybe two nights a week, and I accepted that. I started going to the gym as he suggested, and dieting. I dropped two dress sizes. Even the sex stuff…’

  ‘What did he make you do?’ Sam asked, her interest piqued.

  ‘I don’t want to say. It didn’t feel right, but I was so… so, relieved that anybody wanted me after all this time.’

  Sam realised she’d never even seen a picture of Gabriel. When Ellen had come over for dinner she said that he hated having his picture taken because of a scar. It wasn’t even a bad scar, Ellen had said.

  ‘You’re better off without him,’ Sam said.

  ‘But I don’t want to be without him.’ The tears began again.

  With other friends Sam had also seen this kind of process at the death of a relationship. How longing and pain dominated at the start, and that learning to hate, even for a while, made you feel better. Hatred was the blister that protected the wound, useful for a while, but damaging if retained permanently.

  ‘I gave him money too,’ Ellen said. ‘It was just a loan.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘It’s not about the amount, it’s the breach of trust.’

  ‘I agree, but are we talking a hundred pounds, or more?’

  ‘It was the money left to me by my grandmother, for a deposit on a house. More than £14,000. It’s all I have.’

  ‘Oh Ellen.’ Poor, poor woman, taken for a ride by an utter bastard. Sam waited for her friend’s sobs to subside. ‘Ellen, you can’t let him get away with this. Give me his full name, address, phone number, place of work. I’ll report it for you—’

  ‘No, I’m sure he’ll let me have it back. It’s just awful to have to ask.’

  ‘Ellen, trust me. Gabriel is never going to give you your cash back. If we act quickly, you might have a chance. But if you wait, well, there’s a good chance he will get away with it.’

  ‘I love him, Sam. How could he do this to me?’

  ‘Get real, Ellen! This is what some men do.’

  ‘Sam, please don’t be horrible to me.’ Ellen said in a meek voice.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Sam realised that she was already nurturing a sizeable abscess of loathing for Gabriel, a man she had never met. As she rolled her mouth around her anger, feeling the texture and sensitivity that had once been very familiar to her, it flared into impatience with Ellen.

  Her friend might not be ready to go ballistic, but she was. She would mention it to Craig.

  * * *

  Arriving home at a reasonable time, Gillard interrupted Sam showing their home to potential purchasers. It was a pretty standard three-bedroom semi-detached, but had attracted no firm offers in the months that it had been on the market. The market was soggy, the estate agent said, but there were other factors that Craig preferred to blame. His aunt Trish lived opposite in a bungalow she had bought shortly after the infamous Devon hit-and-run court case in which she was involved. She wanted to be close to her only nephew, but Gillard found her devious and manipulative, a baleful influence. She had been caught leaving messages on the windscreens of potential purchasers’ cars warning them about undisclosed damp problems in the property. She was doing everything possible to stop them leaving.

  The prospective buyers, a Nigerian dentist and his Indian-born wife, seemed quite interested, especially now that Sam had persuaded her husband to knock ten grand off the price. After they had left, G
illard embraced his wife and suggested they go out for a meal at the local trattoria. Sam, who had picked up a couple of ready meals on her way home, quickly agreed. ‘I never say no to an offer like that, Craig. I never know when the next chance will be.’

  She was about to head upstairs to change out of her jumper and jeans when her husband scooped her up and kissed her on the nose. ‘You look lovely as you are.’

  ‘You’re wearing a suit and tie, and I’m in trainers,’ she said.

  ‘The head waiter will just assume you’re my niece. Besides, if we head off right now, we can walk – it only takes twenty minutes, so we’ll still be in time for the early bird offer and we can share a bottle of wine.’

  ‘No early incident room meeting tomorrow, then?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Not so far, but things can always change.’

  Sam settled for the minimum refresh of eyeliner and lipstick, and as they walked down their drive and out of the cul-de-sac, he grasped her hand. To her, it was a good sign. When Craig was relaxed he was much more fun to be with. She liked him to be hers, not a possession of Surrey Police. She could admire his professionalism and his investigative brain, but at the end of the day she loved him for the more caring side of his personality.

  After their meal of seafood fettuccine and grilled halibut, followed by chocolate sponge, Sam took her husband’s hand across the table and asked what he was thinking.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about you. It was something that Karl-Otto Ulbricht said, about how much he regrets not having made the time in his life to answer the emails and texts that his daughter sent him. It’s the busy life, of course, and we all suffer it. God knows, I’m as bad an offender as he is, leaving everything for you to fix, from the broken window in the garage right through to showing round potential buyers for the house. But I can pay you attention, and I will.’