‘How on earth did Jane Morris and Beatrice Ulbricht end up in the same car?’ Perry asked.
Gillard stroked his chin. ‘If your body is also the impostor on the train, then it’s possible Beatrice’s hair was on the coat she used. I think it’s quite a neat idea.’
‘But that doesn’t square with her being Jane Morris. Someone magicked out of the past to commit a crime in the present. It’s not possible.’
‘Claire Mulholland is convinced the perpetrator is a woman,’ Gillard said. ‘Maybe two women.’
‘Okay, I’m all for female empowerment,’ said Perry. ‘But whether she’s right or wrong we’ve still got the same problem.’
Gillard tapped his fingers on the desk. ‘There’s only one answer. It is Jane Morris, the DNA and the resemblance can’t both be wrong. But we have to explain how the corpse is so well preserved after nearly four decades.’
‘Freezer?’
‘No. I worked on the Franklin case in Esher back in 2009, where the wife had kept the dead husband in her freezer in the garage for eighteen months. Once forensics thawed him out he looked in a far worse state that Jane Morris does. There’s a reason why you’re supposed to eat frozen food within three months.’
‘So what can it be, then?’
‘Embalming. That’s my guess.’
Perry sighed. ‘So our perpetrator isn’t only forensically aware, good with mobile phones and electronics, but also knows how to preserve a corpse.’
‘Maybe time to check out funeral directors,’ Gillard said.
* * *
Boatswain Chris Marshall steered his Zodiac inflatable expertly along the edge of a mass of tangled tree boughs and branches that seemed to embrace the full width of the river. He was about a mile downstream from Lacey Dutton, and had that morning been involved in the recovery of seven cars, vehicles that had originally been jammed against the arches of various bridges, but as the water level had dropped had the space to float through to the next obstruction. A few had even made it over the weir. Fortunately, none of them had contained a body. What he was working at now was potentially more troublesome, with too many underwater obstructions to allow the inflatable to make any progress. Divers from Police Scotland had been working all morning, picking through this great Sargasso mat of detritus, much of which had accumulated against a fallen riverbank sycamore. The huge tree, well over 200 years old, had acted like a giant net, hooking in everything that would float: fence panels, broken caravan sidings, polystyrene, and enough pub garden furniture to host a wedding reception. For those underwater, it was dangerous and awkward work, always the risk of a tree rotating and trapping a diver. The water beneath was still thick with silt and visibility was non-existent.
Marshall saw that one of the divers had raised his hand. He seemed to have made his way almost to the middle of this tangled mass. He was pointing at something and beckoning, but Marshall couldn’t bring the Zodiac any closer to get a better view. The frogman moved, clambering partially onto a submerged bough. His weight rotated the entire floating tree. As his side dipped, on the far side of the trunk another branch lifted, dripping from the river. Hooked over it a second arm could now be seen. This one was not sheathed in a wetsuit, but bare, pale and slender. It lifted in a balletic arc, a graceful female hand giving the briefest flick of acknowledgment, before it slipped between the twigs and slid back into the water.
Chris Marshall knew whom he was searching for. In his remembrance of this moment years afterwards he would sometimes wonder whether he had imagined the hand grasping a violinist’s bow, or whether what he had seen was simply a long twig, caught between her lifeless fingers.
* * *
PC Lynne Fairbanks and DC Carl Hoskins stood outside the front door of 16 Wensleydale Walk, Woking and surveyed the drive from which Kyle Halliday had attempted to save his two-year-old Mitsubishi Warrior from being stolen. It was late afternoon, just over a week after the incident. They pressed the doorbell, and the victim himself eventually opened it. He was leaning on a metal crutch, wearing jeans and a loose checked shirt. His left wrist was still bandaged, his right ankle too.
‘Ah, better late than never,’ he said affably, as he hobbled backwards to let them in. In the flesh he was quite a hunk, Lynne thought. Dark wavy hair, penetrating hazel eyes and an easy smile.
‘We’re sorry about that,’ Hoskins said.
They followed him into the house. His movements were limited; he couldn’t put any weight on his ankle, and the obvious pain showed through the smile. ‘I’m surprised that nobody’s been round to check for fingerprints on the door handles and stuff,’ Halliday said. ‘I mean, it’s more than a week.’
Hoskins gave an expansive shrug. ‘CSI is a bit stretched at the moment, as you might have heard with the kidnapping and all. There’s no point doing it now of course, as we’ll only get the dabs of you and your missus.’
Halliday sighed, then caught Lynne’s eye. ‘Well at least there was one advantage of you lot being asleep at the wheel. I wouldn’t have wanted the CCTV I sent you being shown on Crimewatch. I would have been highly embarrassed,’ he said. ‘I’ll think twice next time about being Mr Have-a-Go. I’m still in agony.’
Hoskins laughed. ‘Nobody wants their meat and two veg flashed around on the teatime news.’ He didn’t mention that almost everybody in CID had enjoyed a good laugh at it, particularly some of the female officers who seemed quite impressed with what was on view, considering the number of times they had crowded round a screen to watch it on slow motion. ‘Besides, as I said before, your car is probably already in a container on its way to Albania or somewhere like that.’
‘I’ll miss it,’ he said. ‘I did loads of work on it, spent thousands. All wasted.’
Lynne already had Halliday down as a petrolhead, having seen the brand new Mercedes saloon and one-year-old Range Rover crowded onto the small drive. ‘You’ll be covered on insurance, I imagine,’ she said, offering him her business card. She had seen the video, and copied it onto her personal phone to show her friends. ‘Let me know if you need more details from us.’ Their hands touched briefly, his finger stroking the interior of her palm.
‘Thank you. I’ve already got my claim in,’ he said with a smile. ‘Of course they give you the run-around, bloody insurers.’
‘You need better CCTV, mate,’ Hoskins said. ‘And a proper burglar alarm. It’s not uncommon for professional thieves to break in for keys for top end cars. If you had a second camera you might even have caught the approach on foot of the thief. There would at least be an idea what he looked like.’
Halliday shrugged. ‘I already gave you a description. White bloke by the face, prop-forward sized, with a ski mask or something. I told you about that car coat, with the stripe.’
‘Yeah, you have,’ Hoskins said. ‘But you can tell a lot from CCTV. The way they walk, stuff like that.’
Halliday nodded, and then asked: ‘So how are you doing finding this German woman?’
Lynne was about to issue the usual disclaimer about not discussing current cases when Hoskins said. ‘Well, between you and me, we’ve been given the right run-around. Not made much progress.’
Halliday shrugged, thanked them, and hobbled his way to show them out. Once the door had closed, Lynne said: ‘I didn’t think you were supposed to tell them anything.’
Hoskins’ eyes slid sideways to the young woman. ‘Just a bit of banter. Does no harm. He seems like a nice bloke. Clearly fancies himself.’
Lynne was aware that Hoskins had left a conversational gap for her opinion about Halliday. He was never interested in her opinion on the case, so she wasn’t going to share on this. ‘Don’t you hate these new estates?’ she asked, casting her eyes across the road. ‘Hardly a blade of grass, and most of the trees are stumps.’
‘Yeah, DI Perry lives just down the road. Dunno why he’d shell out for one of these. All balsa wood frames, tiny rooms, built on the hurry-up.’ Hoskins sniggered, and inclined his head back towards th
e door behind them. ‘Do you think his knob is still raw?’ he whispered.
‘What a charming thought,’ Lynne muttered, rolling her eyes, and strode back to the car. She had decided long ago that Hoskins was a sexist pig, with little piggy wandering eyes. The less time she spent with this repulsive man, the better.
‘Wait for me,’ said Hoskins, staring at his phone. ‘Got to get back right now. They’ve found another body.’
‘Is it Beatrice?’
He nodded.
‘Oh no,’ Lynne said. ‘That’s so sad. The poor girl.’
‘It’s the way of the world, love. If the world wasn’t like that, we’d be out of a job.’
Chapter Ten
Hoskins got back after Gillard had already begun the presentation to a packed room. ‘As everybody will be aware, this is just the outcome that we feared,’ he said. Many of the officers were visibly upset, and not just the women. Working on crime quickly erodes and numbs human emotion, replacing it with a weary cynicism, oiled by the kind of dark humour that gets you from day to day. But every so often, the humanity of a potential victim reaches across the boundaries, rekindling feelings and the unlikeliest kinds of hope. It is always manifest with child abductions, the quintessence of innocence facing an unknown evil, and often with the elderly, when attacked in their own homes. Over the last week or so Gillard had seen so many of his colleagues almost visibly willing Beatrice to be safe and alive, volunteering extra hours to make it so. The discovery of her body now seemed the cruellest of fates.
‘The body was lodged under a tree a mile downstream from Lacey Dutton, which is why it had not been spotted. It was freed by divers an hour ago.’ He posted up some enlarged images of the corpse, still wearing a bra but no other underwear. Considering the substantial amount of time she may have spent in the water, the features were still surprisingly recognisable.
It was clearly Beatrice.
‘Poor kid,’ Hoskins muttered.
‘At the chief constable’s request, these two investigations are now being unified, as Operation Hawkeye,’ Gillard said. ‘I will remain senior investigating officer, DI Perry will be in charge of any further flood recovery developments, working with DI Mulholland. Other reporting lines will remain unchanged.’ He turned to a whiteboard on which the new developments had been scribbled up.
‘News management is vital. Christine McCafferty and her team will confine themselves to the bare bones, which is that the search has been scaled down following the discovery of a body which is believed to be that of the missing German music student. That is embargoed until six o’clock tonight, so no mention of it to any of your sources until the family has been informed. We will then be asking for information about anyone who saw her in the vicinity of Lacey Dutton in the last week.’
Gillard handed over to Claire Mulholland, who detailed the public response to the TV reports showing footage of the woman on the train. ‘It’s been a nightmare to be honest,’ she said. ‘Almost all of the respondents have simply guessed about a physical resemblance to someone they vaguely know. Local police forces all over the country have then been trying to establish the current and previous whereabouts of those identified people. It’s a slow task.’
There then followed reports from other team leaders, including Rob Townsend on computers, as well as the CCTV and ANPR searches which had been broadened.
Macintosh had a hand up. ‘Yes, Rainy?’
‘Are we not going public about the wee blonde girl in the yellow Allegro?’
‘At this stage, no. Once we have the results of the autopsy, and can get our heads around the bizarre results of the DNA test, we might be able to make further progress.’ He pointed at the whiteboard. ‘First, what we all have to get our heads around is this: two women, one a twenty-five-year-old German music student missing for five days, and the other a fifteen-year-old missing thirty-seven years, seemingly turn up in the same vehicle, in the same flood, at the same time. From the state of the car we know they didn’t drive there – the flood simply lifted the vehicle off the caravan site where it had stood unused for several years and carried it away towards the Lacey Dutton bridge.’
Rob Townsend had his own suggestion. ‘Maybe the same person killed them both, and stuffed them into that car.’
Gillard nodded. ‘It’s the obvious answer. The trouble is, assuming the second body genuinely is that of Jane Morris, that indicates the first of the crimes was committed as long ago as 1982.’
‘Some murdering pensioner, then?’ came a voice from the back.
‘But however old he is, he has a young female confederate who is happy to help in misdirection.’
That quietened the room completely.
‘What’s next?’ Perry asked.
‘We’re going to hope that Beatrice’s body has retained some forensic clues to where she’s been for the last week. Dr Nina Summers will be doing the autopsy.’ He looked at his watch. It was just after five. ‘My next job is to go to the hotel in Guildford where Beatrice’s parents are staying and break the news.’
* * *
A soft knock at the hotel bedroom door was quickly answered by Ulbricht, a balloon of brandy already in his hand. He offered Gillard a drink the moment he arrived, and showed him into the room. The detective was accompanied by Family Liaison Officer Gabby Underwood, a woman trained to deal with the emotional fallout they knew was coming. The top floor suite where the Ulbricht family was staying had been turned into a shrine to their daughter. A dozen framed photographs sat on the grand piano, and on a coffee table sat a laptop with her YouTube channel playing on a loop.
Mrs Ulbricht was already seated, and had just begun to rise when Gillard suggested they should all sit down. ‘I’m afraid we have finally got some news for you.’ He said nothing more for a moment, just watched as the patrician visage of Karl-Otto Ulbricht reddened, crumpled and distended, like time-lapse photography of a dying leaf. His shoulders narrowed, shook and an undulating wheeze squeezed out somewhere from his lungs.
‘A body has been found which we believe to be her,’ Gillard said. ‘I’m very sorry.’
‘My Beatrice, oh my Beatrice,’ he whispered, grasping from the piano a large portrait of his daughter. He embraced it tightly, arms folded around, eyes squeezed shut. Gillard heard a crack, the portrait glass. A glinting shard clinked to the floor by his feet. Lisbeth Ulbricht sat still and pale, her eyes brimming and then overflowing, tears tracking down her handsome face. She had already known. Only her husband had hung on to hope, which had just shattered in his arms.
Wednesday
Rainy Macintosh was doing her usual morning check through the weirdos and loonies who had sent messages to the various helplines. One member of her team had forwarded one email and marked it urgent.
You’ll not get me Craig, but I’ll get you. IC
She recalled that someone signing themselves IC had sent a previous personalised message which she had forwarded to Gillard. Looking back at the reply, she saw that the detective had acknowledged and filed it, but said he was unaware of a personal connection. She walked across to his desk, which was unoccupied, and was told that he wouldn’t be in until midday.
‘Dental appointment,’ Carl Hoskins said.
‘I’ve got this,’ she said, showing him the printout. ‘It’s from a Samsung phone. Seeing as it’s a threat, I could try and trace it.’
‘It’s up to you,’ Hoskins said, clearly indicating that he wouldn’t have bothered. ‘We get lots of that type of shit.’
‘I’ll go and see Rob.’
She found the young research intelligence officer bent over his desk with a huge stack of electronic data requests to look at. She added hers to the pile, but reminded him that it included a threat to Gillard. ‘We’d never forgive ourselves if something happened,’ she said. Getting only a grunt by way of reply, she wandered away muttering sarcastically to herself. ‘Aye, thank you Rainy, I’ll be sure to look into it. Yer wee fucking dobber.’
* * *
>
Wednesday morning, bright and clear, and the chance to breathe. Craig Gillard stood up on the pedals as the slope got too demanding even for the lowest gear. Getting out on his road bike was precious time. Since the Beatrice Ulbricht case had begun, there had been barely an hour for him to get the exercise that he felt he needed. This wasn’t just about the body, but letting the mind breathe, unpacking stress and complexities and really getting a chance to think. He wasn’t one of those cyclists who ploughs on along major roads, doggedly breathing in noxious traffic fumes. He always preferred minor lanes, cross-country routes going nowhere, even if that meant he couldn’t keep up the speeds that the smoothest tarmac offered.
Years ago, he’d been able to get out regularly on Sunday with a group of other off-duty officers, but now pressure of work meant you could never be sure anyone was available. More often than not he just slotted in a quick solo ride when he could. Today was one of those stolen moments. A dental appointment at 10.15 allowed him a free two hours beforehand.
He was just a few miles north of Redhill, heading up on the North Downs on a tiny, steep road between Bletchingley and Caterham. The wonder of this lane was that it took you over the M25, and its belching perma-jams, on the kind of winding and barely used route that many drivers would be surprised to find still existed so close to the capital.
It was on the very steepest part of the hill, a slope of nearly 17 per cent, that he could hear the approach of a vehicle behind him. There would be no room or visibility to pass for a couple of hundred yards. Not every motorist had the patience to accept being slowed to seven or eight miles an hour behind a cyclist on a steep hill. The engine note alone, high revs and a big engine, communicated the mindset of the following driver. He had learned to read that many years ago.
But the impact from behind took him completely by surprise.
The Body Under the Bridge Page 11
