The Body Under the Bridge

by The Body Under the Bridge (epub)

  More dead ends.

  It was clear that Gary Harrison had reinvented himself under another name, was almost certainly in another relationship, and quite probably some way away from this, his old stamping ground. There were pages and pages of Gary Harrisons on Facebook, on LinkedIn, in the National Archives, and presumably in phone books and electoral registers across the country. In all probability the man himself would not be found under this name in any of these places. With enough resources, and lots of time, it might eventually be possible to find him.

  They just didn’t have enough time.

  And the abductor might not even be him.

  It was at that point Gillard decided to abandon the search for Harrison and concentrate on more promising leads. If there were any.

  * * *

  Gillard was dreaming about one of their holidays, a five-day trip to the Arctic Circle to see the northern lights. He could almost feel the warmth of Sam’s hand in his as they crunched through the thick snow, towards the soft shimmering searchlights that seemed to emanate from the pine forests ahead. Wakefulness slid like a knife between his ribs, the realisation of her absence. He was in his own bed, but lying on Sam’s side, clasping one of her navy blue pullovers to himself as if it was a hot water bottle. The aroma of her enveloped him, a comforting miasma.

  He had let himself in at midnight, having driven around the Chipstead area trying to spot any suspicious vehicles. It was of course a complete waste of time, as he didn’t know what he was looking for. Gillard had parked the Vauxhall in an adjacent street and walked back, just in case someone was watching his home. Rigby didn’t want him staying there, but she could hardly prevent him from doing so. The PC was no longer stationed at the door, seeing as he wasn’t expected to be there. In theory, back home and on his own, he was at risk.

  Well, bring it on. He was ready.

  The largest carving knife in the house was on his bedside table, and he was wearing a tracksuit and socks. Not for him the fate of poor Kyle Halliday, skin ripped on the road while trying to save his car. If whoever had taken Sam wanted him too, he would go down fighting.

  Now he heard again the noise that had woken him, which in his dream he had interpreted as the breaking of an icy Arctic crust. It was something at the back door. Leaping from the bed, knife in hand, he opened the bedroom’s casement window which looked down over the back door.

  Of course. Trish’s bloody cats. Not fed for a day or so, and now trying to get into his home through the cat flap which he had glued up months ago. Napoleon, the green-eyed ginger tom and leader of this feral brood, cried up at him. No human can quite match the sense of entitlement of a cat.

  He suspected he would get no sleep now.

  * * *

  Seven a.m. on a cool Saturday morning in April found DI John Perry sitting at his desk at Mount Browne, looking at all the DNA tests that had been ordered for both the Ulbricht and Morris murders. The vast majority of positive results were elimination samples, where a CSI technician or a police officer had left traces on evidence. DC Hoskins, for example, had managed to leave a DNA sample on Beatrice Ulbricht’s multi-coloured scarf. Gillard had left his traces on the inside of the evidence envelope in which Beatrice’s hair had been found. Perry himself had left a trace on the cardigan which had been found on Jane Morris’ body. Unfortunately the tiny amount of blood trapped under the fingernail of the middle finger of Beatrice Ulbricht’s left hand had been too degraded by contact with water to yield a reliable DNA sample.

  What he really needed was to find the location where Beatrice had been strangled: a house, a bed, even a car seat. A genuine crime scene where there was a good chance of the attacker having left his DNA. They already knew that it could not be Adrian Singer’s house. Neither his DNA nor hers had been found anywhere that did not match the story he had told. The gap in Beatrice’s life between her disappearance late on Sunday and her failure to arrive at the concert on Tuesday night was like a yawning chasm in the evidence record. After mulling all this over for half an hour, Perry turned his attention to Jane Morris. For all the fact that this was a very cold case indeed, the line of inquiry seemed more straightforward. He went to the forensic lab and asked the male technician to fetch one of the six DNA samples taken from Morris by Dr Delahaye.

  ‘What kind of test are you after?’

  ‘Familial,’ Perry replied. ‘I want to find out if anyone whose DNA we have in any of these linked enquiries is related to her.’

  ‘Okay. We’ll be lucky to get that back by Monday,’ the technician said.

  Perry returned to his own desk, and once again flicked through the hundreds of microfiche documents he had photoed and copied onto his datasticks, hoping for some kind of inspiration. There was one very short witness statement from someone called Betty Garrison. It wasn’t a name he had heard before, and the statement merely said that she hadn’t seen her granddaughter Jane for five days before she disappeared. Ah! Betty was the missing girl’s grandmother. The statement gave her date of birth as 9 December 1918. The chances were that she was no longer alive. Still, worth checking out.

  * * *

  A phone call cut into Gillard’s slumber. He was shocked to see that it was a quarter to eleven on Saturday morning. He answered sleepily, propping himself up in bed. ‘Hello Claire, any news?’

  ‘We’ve picked up a text from Sam’s phone to your work mobile.’

  Gillard was instantly awake, and very glad that Claire had the good sense to monitor traffic over the phone he’d been forced to surrender. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said that she is “under the bridge”.’

  ‘I mean what exactly did he say?’

  She read out the exact text.

  Under the bridge/ That’s where you’ll find her/ cold, with the fishes/ drowned by your own hand. IC

  ‘Shit.’ The only bridges that he could think of were at Lacey Dutton, the Loxcombe and the Gorlaston, near which two bodies had already been recovered. Could she be alive if she was there? It could equally be a bridge near where they lived in the Banstead or Chipstead area, anywhere over a river where fish could be found.

  ‘Craig, we’re tracing Sam’s phone as we speak. Maximum priority. I’d pre-arranged it with the service provider even though the phone has been off since she disappeared. We should get a cell site analysis within the hour.’

  Gillard rubbed his face, trying to coax his brain to perform. ‘We can do better, Claire. There’s GPS on it—’

  ‘The Google geolocation is encrypted though,’ she said. ‘We tried this before, it takes weeks and the involvement of lawyers—’

  ‘No, listen. Sam has the Android Find My Phone app on her laptop, which CSI has. We don’t have to break into the Google geolocation. The GPS data is copied into the app. Speak to Rob Townsend, he knows how to do it. We can extract the data remotely, unless the phone has been tampered with and some of the apps close down.’ He picked his way through the various bits of paper on the bedside table until he found Sam’s laptop password. He then read it out to Claire. ‘CSI may already have got into the device, but if not, this will get you in.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ Claire said. ‘Okay, I’ll get onto that. What are you going to do?’

  ‘What can I do? I’m going to drive over to Lacey Dutton and have a look around the two bridges, maybe get some ideas.’

  Gillard hung up and rubbed his face. He’d been awake until at least five, tossing over in his mind all the various possibilities. That he’d had fallen asleep until mid-morning shocked him.

  * * *

  The detective was in the shower when the phone went fifteen minutes later. Heedless of the water over the bedroom carpet, he lurched out of the cubicle and grabbed his mobile. It was Claire.

  ‘We’ve got a trace,’ she said excitedly. ‘You’re not going to believe this, but Sam’s phone was on Sandy Lane, just outside the University of Guildford Law Department, when that message was sent.’

  ‘What?’ Gillard knew the b
uilding. Just two minutes’ walk from Mount Browne. Sandy Lane was the shared access road to Surrey Police headquarters. ‘There’s ANPR in the university car park!’ he said excitedly.

  ‘Hold on, Rob’s right here telling me something,’ she said. There was a bit of background noise and some raised voices. And then Claire’s exclamation. Gillard was shocked. He had never heard her use the F word before. Certainly not twice in one sentence. There was a huge amount of background hubbub, raised voices. If he didn’t know better, he’d say it was panic.

  ‘Claire? Claire? What is it?’

  She took a few seconds to answer. ‘Craig, sorry, I’ve got to go. Whoever’s got the phone is here, in the building.’ It sounded like she dropped the phone on the desk. He could hear her still, but faintly, calling someone else. ‘Rob? Rob? New message. No, now!’

  The line went dead.

  Gillard rang Claire’s number, but the line was busy.

  The last thing she had said that made any sense was: here, in the building. All sorts of scenarios were running in parallel in Gillard’s overactive brain, but the most worrying was a US-style mass shooting. Why else would this man go to the very heart of Surrey Police? Maybe he was an ex-cop, or even a current officer. Only that would explain what was going on.

  One thing was certain. Everything had changed. His place was not skulking around at home, even if that’s what the chief constable demanded. It was to be with his colleagues. It was to be at the centre of the action, looking for his wife.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Gillard now regretted parking in the adjacent street last night. It took a minute’s sprint to get to the Vauxhall, and get moving. He flipped on the blue lights and siren, and left rubber on the road as he tore off on the journey to Mount Browne. That should save him ten minutes on the usual forty to get there. As he drove, he tuned into the police radio monitor which allowed him to overhear the uniforms talking to each other. It was clear that a search was taking place at Surrey Police headquarters. Reading between the lines of the laconic and formulaic interchanges, it was clear that whoever the intruder was, he had not yet been spotted. There was no mention of gunfire.

  His phone in the hands-free cradle, Gillard tried twice to get Claire and failed. He then tried Research Intelligence Officer Rob Townsend. There was no reply. Of course as this was his personal mobile, it would come up as an unidentified number in most of his colleagues’ handsets. Right now no one would have time for dealing with strangers.

  Foot to the floor, the Vauxhall was soon at the A23 junction with the M25. Traffic reports confirmed that London’s orbital motorway was clear between junctions seven and ten, but it was always a risk. The blue lights cleared traffic more effortlessly here than on any A road. He was about halfway when Claire called him back.

  ‘What in the hell is happening, Claire?’

  ‘Sorry, Craig. We’ve got two dozen uniforms crawling all over the building. It’s bloody mayhem.’

  ‘Have you found him?’

  ‘No. The GPS trace on Sam’s phone shows it’s here, somewhere in the CID building, and has been for half an hour. There were only a couple of guest passes granted today, officers from Essex, and they are now down in reception. The cell site analysis confirms what the Find My Phone app is telling us. The GPS resolution is about five metres, so whoever’s got it should be visible.’

  ‘Sorry, I’m not getting this,’ Gillard said. ‘You’re saying the phone has walked itself into the building on its own?’

  ‘Well, obviously not. But we’ve had another text message since it got in. “Catch me if you can”. He’s obviously taunting us.’

  ‘We know these messages can be sent in advance, and this guy is capable of organising it,’ Gillard said. ‘But someone, possibly unwittingly, has brought the phone in.’

  ‘Everyone is being escorted out of the building in rotation so they can isolate who it is. It’s massively disruptive. All the incident rooms are going to have to be searched.’

  ‘Don’t you see, Claire? This is another subterfuge. This is our perpetrator telling us he can run rings around us. And while Surrey Police is busy examining its own orifice, he’s probably doing something else, somewhere else.’

  All he could think of was Sam. Hostage somewhere. Dead or alive. Under the bridge with the fishes.

  * * *

  Detective Constable Carl Hoskins lifted his legs and rotated in his chair. His jaundiced eyes took in the major incident room, the central hub of this ever-broadening murder inquiry. First into Beatrice Ulbricht, then Jane Morris, and now the abduction of Samantha Gillard.

  ‘I don’t get this,’ he said to Rob Townsend, the only other person remaining. ‘There’s no one been in this room today that doesn’t come in here every day. There’s me, Perry, Mulholland, Michelle Tsu and you,’ he said.

  Townsend, arms folded behind his head, scowled at the screen. The GPS map of the movements of Sam’s phone showed it in Sandy Lane at 9.34 a.m. and inside the building within half an hour. ‘Yet it says it’s definitely either here or in the corridor, or maybe upstairs in the storeroom, and it’s not moving anymore. It can’t be downstairs because apart from reception there’s only that big meeting room, and it’s been locked all day.’

  ‘But what gets me is who brought the fucking thing in?’ Hoskins said. ‘Find the person, find the phone. I mean, any of us would notice the weight of a phone if someone slipped one into our pocket, wouldn’t we?’

  Townsend nodded. He’d already been through his own briefcase, and the drawers on his desk. Several of the drawers were locked, belonging to officers who weren’t on shift, but by the same token no one could have put a phone in them.

  One thing that they were all grateful for was that it was a Saturday. Alison Rigby wasn’t in to witness the perpetrator making a fool of the entire force. If they weren’t able to crack this quickly, the chief constable would inevitably hear about it and would begin banging heads together.

  ‘It would really help,’ Townsend said. ‘If the phone finder app used the full GPS trace. If we had altitude, for example, we would instantly know which floor it was on.’

  Perry and Claire Mulholland came back into the room, having been cleared of inadvertently carrying the phone. ‘Any progress?’ Perry asked.

  ‘Nope,’ Hoskins said, taking another spin around the room on his chair.

  ‘What about a drone?’ Perry asked. ‘It could have been dropped on the roof.’

  ‘Good thinking,’ Hoskins said. ‘I’ll take the lift.’

  * * *

  The detective constable was not fond of heights, and the flat roof of this, the highest building on the Mount Browne campus, reminded him of that fact. Keeping away from the two-foot high parapet at the edge, Hoskins made his way past the ranks of solar panels, looking underneath to see if anything had been deposited. The one place you couldn’t easily check was the top of the emergency exit onto the roof. There was an aluminium ladder screwed to the wall, but that was a bit too exposed for him. Besides, from the trace on the app, the phone should be roughly in the middle of the roof, not on one edge.

  He was getting ready to go down, when he heard a car race into the car park. He looked across and spotted Gillard’s Vauxhall. It didn’t surprise him for a moment to see the detective chief inspector unable to stay away. By contrast old Radar Dobbs, despite being SIO, claimed to be working from home. Hoskins had had his run-ins with Gillard, and just a month ago had seen an attempt on the detective chief inspector’s life result in the death of his colleague DC Colin Hodges. But he trusted Gillard’s instincts like he trusted his own mother. The arrival of the best detective he had ever worked with gave him renewed confidence that they could crack the case.

  * * *

  At reception, Gillard confronted Ray Collins, a Mount Browne lifer with a gigantic beer belly and a fondness for sweets. Collins knew every officer in the building.

  ‘I can’t let you in, sir,’ Collins said. ‘I think you know why.’

>   ‘It’s all right, Ray. But I understand there’s a kerfuffle about my wife’s phone being loose in the building.’

  Collins sucked in his cheek. ‘I’ve no idea what is going on, and I guess I’m not supposed to talk to you about it. But yeah, there’s something happening.’

  ‘Is there anyone here who isn’t normally about?’

  ‘We’ve been through that, sir. Two guests from Essex Police, but they never even stayed in this block.’ He tapped a fat finger on the edge of the desk. ‘They had a meeting in forensics.’

  Gillard looked around. ‘Get any post today?’

  ‘A bit, mostly internal. Some stationery from a commercial delivery.’ He indicated behind him a box that looked like printer paper, which had been shoved aside under a desk.

  ‘Just the one? Seems a bit odd.’

  ‘Who cares? The resource manager isn’t in until Monday. He’ll log it in and find out if it was what we expected.’

  ‘May I?’ Gillard asked.

  Collins shrugged. ‘Be my guest.’ He bent over, and heaved the heavy box onto the counter where Gillard could see it. As he was doing so, Claire descended the stairs and greeted Gillard.