The Body Under the Bridge

by The Body Under the Bridge (epub)

  Did he hate her? Certainly tendrils of hatred had coiled around his heart, but it was no longer the dominant feeling. The most powerful emotion was one of being expelled from the household that he had thought he headed, like a piece of waste. For the last few days since their monumental row, he and Mel had avoided each other. Him tiptoeing, her slamming. It really should have been the other way round. Wasn’t he the innocent party? Wasn’t it him that had been wronged?

  He had in his shed just the weapon to bring Mel to her senses. The temptation to march into the kitchen and toss Vanessa’s cards onto the kitchen table would undoubtedly bring Mel’s affair with Halliday to a crashing end. But he retained just enough sense to know that his wife would not thank him for bringing her this terrible news. She would hate him all the more for it. Shooting the messenger. And in all this, he knew that he didn’t want there to be any more hatred between them. Despite her infidelity and her cruelty, despite everything, Perry still loved her. He wanted nothing more than to fall asleep and wake up to find that Halliday’s emotional carpet bombing of his family had all been a nightmare.

  So when he walked into the kitchen at 10.45 p.m. he said nothing about his discovery. He simply gave a neutral greeting and then asked: ‘Have you heard from Vanessa?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m thinking we should report her missing,’ he said.

  She looked at him, and raised the cup of camomile tea to her lips. ‘You’re doing this deliberately, aren’t you? You know she’s been away this long before, and always comes back. But if you bring in all your mates from the police station, you’re back in control, aren’t you? Detective Inspector John bloody Perry.’

  ‘Mel, they won’t put me in charge of the case. I would have thought you would have welcomed this.’

  ‘The bloody press will be on it, though, won’t they? A policeman’s daughter gone missing. Let’s dig into the family. Let’s see who’s got the big secret. My love life will be in the tabloids.’

  He looked at her with fresh eyes. ‘I never realised how selfish you were.’

  She stared levelly at him. ‘It’s about her, not me, you idiot. We’ll lose her forever, don’t you see? You don’t begin to understand our daughter. She’s got some of my streak of independence, and dragging her back home when she is not ready—’

  ‘Mel! None of her friends have seen her either. Not Becky, not Steve. When she went off on one of her grand disappearances in the past, at least one of her friends knew where she was.’

  ‘Well, maybe she’s got a new exciting boyfriend,’ Mel said, one eyebrow raised provocatively.

  Perry shook his head. If only you knew.

  * * *

  Claire Mulholland watched DCS Rajinder Otara set up the incident room meeting for one a.m. in Mount Browne’s biggest conference room. On three separate whiteboards he had written up everything they knew about the four interlinked crimes: the abduction and murder of Beatrice Ulbricht, the discovery of the body of Jane Morris, the attack on Trish Gibson, found bludgeoned in her car, and finally the abduction of Samantha Gillard. On a fifth board, at the centre of the room, he had written everything that they knew about the abductor. The one thing they were missing was a decent photo. Research specialists had dug up some old photos of Gary Harrison, when he was in the army, and later amongst a row of cooks in a South London college. Nothing recent. They were now trying to find his old army pals to see if they had any. It was a slow process, even with their resources, and they just didn’t have any time.

  When Otara was ready, he called in the entire nightshift team. That included a dozen NCA plainclothes officers as well as various technical specialists who were looking at the electronic and forensic evidence. Surrey’s team included DI Claire Mulholland, plus DC Carl Hoskins, who was concentrating on the murder of Gillard’s aunt, and a handful of uniformed officers. Claire looked around at all the experts and specialists, and knew that Gillard would have loved to have been there.

  Otara called them to order. For a man who had been continuously on duty for thirty-six hours, he looked remarkably fresh. Clear-eyed, trimmed beard, crisply ironed shirt. It all projected competence.

  ‘I just want you to hear the latest, for those who have been stuck in their own silos for the last five or six hours. One, is that the women’s underwear recovered from the bus stop in Westmeare produced a DNA match with Sam Gillard. The last message to Craig Gillard, from her phone, was made from the same bus stop. So we can be sure that the messages Gillard has received on his home phone are indeed from the abductor. Two, we made very quick progress on the phone number provided by Ellen Bramley.’

  ‘Sorry, can you just remind me who she is?’ asked a sleepy-looking male officer.

  ‘She’s an old friend of Mrs Gillard, a former colleague from her days training as a PCSO, who had been dating a man called Gabriel Hallam.’ The DCS pointed to one of the whiteboards where the name had been written in marker pen at the centre of a web of arrows and question marks. ‘She got in touch with Craig Gillard when she heard on the grapevine that her friend Sam had been abducted.’

  ‘Oh yes, now I remember.’ Sleepy rubbed his five o’clock shadow.

  Otara continued. ‘She contacted Craig yesterday evening, and following his advice surrendered her phone at Bedford Police Station, and we were immediately able to analyse it. We are now working on the assumption that Gabriel Hallam is a pseudonym, because we cannot find any banking, residential or location data for this name, apart from this one burner phone which is currently switched off.’ He looked over at the two female officers who had worked through the night to try to track down this information, and they nodded.

  ‘His name seems to exist only on social media,’ said one of them. ‘We believe this woman was deliberately groomed by the abductor in order to piggyback on her connection to Mrs Gillard. That’s how he found her home, and learned details about her movements and those of her husband.’

  Otara turned to a male officer, DS Stephen Dodd. ‘What is the latest on the mobile ANPR trawl, Steve?’

  ‘We got more than a dozen hits around the bus stop at about the time the message was sent. None match any vehicles of interest, as of now. The Warrior seems to have disappeared. We’ve managed to eliminate three or four local Westmeare residents from those hits, after house-to-house visits. The best connection we have is a black Range Rover, registered to an address in Telford, Shropshire, to a Mrs Sophie Harris.’

  ‘That’s no good. It’s a hundred and fifty miles away,’ Hoskins said. ‘Could it be a cloned plate?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Dodd said. ‘Anyway, this vehicle was picked up four times on our back roads network.’ He turned to a female officer across the room. ‘Sally, have you managed to overlay the Range Rover’s movements onto a cell site analysis for the Hallam phone?’

  ‘I have.’ Research Intelligence Officer Sally Rickard asked for the lights to be dimmed so she could project a map from her laptop. ‘As you can see, we cover everywhere from Woking and Lacey Dutton in the west of the county, right the way across to Chipstead, near Gillard’s home, and Caterham in the east. Unfortunately, we only have a very few data points. The red dots are the ANPR hits, and the blue squiggles are the cell site paths for the phone. The question we have to ask ourselves is this: what is the probability that this phone was in the vehicle? Now apart from the Westmeare bus stop, which is an almost exact coincidence of the two colours in time and place, all the others have a time and geography disconnect. The good news is that there is not a single impossibility.’

  A hand went up at the back. ‘Sorry to be dim but—’

  ‘Right, let me explain,’ Rickard said. ‘If we had a cell site flash in Woking at, say, noon, and an ANPR hit forty miles away in Caterham five minutes later, I think we can all agree that would be an impossibility. So all of our observations show the phone may have been in the vehicle we’ve identified. We’d need many more observations to prove the thesis, but it is the most likely.’

  ‘Th
at is all very impressive,’ said Otara, who was sitting on a desk close to one of the whiteboards. ‘But the working assumption of this analysis is that the phone remains with the vehicle.’

  ‘That’s implicit,’ Rickard said.

  ‘But if you cast your mind back to the earliest events, and the tracking of Beatrice Ulbricht, we know the phone was separated from the individual for long enough to waste a week of police time looking in London for her, when she was actually here in Surrey.’

  ‘But unlike that case, I don’t think our suspect knows we have this phone trace,’ Rickard said.

  ‘Don’t bet on it,’ Otara replied. ‘He’s smart.’ He turned back to the other officers. ‘What’s the latest on the cold case?’

  Rainy Macintosh put up her hand. ‘I’m waiting for DI Perry to forward me some historic documents. He’s off tonight—’

  ‘Off? Why now of all days?’ Otara asked.

  ‘It’s compassionate leave, family trouble, apparently. DCS Dobbs said it was okay, because this is the least urgent part of the case.’

  ‘Speaking of which, where is Dobbs?’ Otara asked.

  ‘Och, I think he’s tucked up in bed,’ Macintosh replied.

  * * *

  Perry had agreed to stay out of the marital bedroom, and he certainly wasn’t going to sleep in his daughter’s room knowing what had gone on in that bed. The sofa downstairs was comfortable, but he had a sudden image of Halliday making use of it with Vanessa. He swore softly to himself as he padded about, realising that Halliday had not only screwed everybody in the Perry family bar him, but may well have used every piece of soft furniture to do it on. That left the futon in the box room, which also doubled as his study. Seeing as it was too cramped for sleep, it was an unlikely choice for sex. That’s where he would lie.

  Sleep eluded him. He had a huge workload that he was paying far too little attention to, and his personal life was falling to pieces. After three or four hours thinking about it, tossing and turning, he put on a bathrobe and tiptoed to his daughter’s room. There must be some clues in there to her whereabouts. He eased open the handle, and closed the door behind him before putting on the light. Going back to first principles, he’d know how far she could have got if he knew which of her possessions were missing. The room had been tidied up since he’d last seen it. The mattress was made up with fresh sheets and pillow cases. The bin had been emptied. There was a small metal chest of drawers by the window, which had a certain household notoriety. Stick-on ‘no entry’ signs were all over it, the drawers locked. There would be answers in there for sure, but he would leave that until last. He peered into her wardrobe, standing on tiptoe to examine the top shelf. There were women’s magazines, blouses, skirts, jeans, a few hats and a collection of bags.

  The trouble was that he had never noticed her clothing, luggage or even her phone. He had no idea what might be missing. Mel had claimed, after helping him yet again to find his reading specs, that he was so unobservant that it was a joke him becoming a detective. Mel was the opposite. She would know which were Vanessa’s favourite clothes and bags, but as they barely cooperated about sharing the same kettle, doing an exact inventory of their daughter’s possessions would be a big step. While lying awake, he had conceded some of Mel’s points about the dangers of officially reporting her missing, particularly the involvement of the press. There was a middle way. He could trace her phone and her bank cards on the quiet. That could provide reassurance without a huge fuss. Better still, he should get a colleague to do it. It wouldn’t do to be discovered working on a personal project when he had a double murder to investigate, though heaven knew Radar Dobbs was a pretty slack boss.

  He knew just the person who could help them. Not his kind of policeman, but a known quantity. DC Carl Hoskins. He’d ring him first thing.

  Newly enthusiastic about finding his daughter, DI John Perry set about using a nail file to pick the locks on the chest of drawers. The bottom drawer gave in easily. Inside were various bits of make-up, some pills he didn’t recognise in a foil packet, and a small plastic bag with a dozen mauve tablets in it. Certainly illegal. He blinked at the foolishness of youth. The top drawer took longer but eventually relented, though he was sure it would never be able to be locked again. There were two large packets of condoms and various feminine hygiene items. The second drawer held firm, and he was forced to retreat to the kitchen in search of a screwdriver. When he finally broke the lock, at 4.37 a.m., he found the drawer contained only one thing, a bulky plastic bag. Inside it was a brown curly wig.

  Why did his daughter, with her gorgeous blonde wavy hair, need a wig?

  He jumped back as the realisation hit him. He went back to the wardrobe, on tiptoe again and pulled out from the back of the top shelf a brimmed hat, a fedora. Holding it out in proper light he could see it was mauve. Maybe Mel was right. He hadn’t clocked it when he first looked.

  Vanessa had Beatrice Ulbricht’s hat.

  Everything now made sense.

  All that exhaustive work to identify the girl on the train, and the answer was so incredibly close to home. It was Vanessa, disguised in a wig. Which meant that Kyle Halliday wasn’t just an immoral wrecker of marriages. He was a murderer. Perry’s own daughter was in love with him, and had helped to foil the investigation of a missing woman.

  * * *

  Gillard hadn’t been sleeping well himself, and had been working the phones until one a.m. To be woken now by a call at 4.45 a.m. made him leap from the bed. At this time it was either going to be very good news about Sam, or very bad news.

  When he heard it was Perry on the line, he was unsure which way it would go. ‘Craig, my daughter is missing, and I’ve just discovered a wig and a mauve fedora in her room.’

  The detective chief inspector listened with incredulity as the details and implications of Perry’s discovery poured out. ‘Hell, I’d been thinking about Kyle Halliday on and off for days. But now it all makes sense. He’s the man we’re looking for, he’s been sitting there right at the centre of this web of intrigue, and we keep missing him.’

  ‘I’m so worried about Vanessa. My wife always assumes she can look after herself, but this is something else.’ His voice sounded shaky.

  ‘All right, John. I’m coming over right now to your home. I’ll be there in less than an hour. In the meantime, call in the details to the incident room. I think Rainy Macintosh is on duty tonight. We are going to need warrant applications for Halliday’s home address, Hallam’s address in Fleet, and the industrial unit. You start the process and I’ll follow up with Rainy on the hands-free to make sure we’ve got everything we need.’

  Gillard was already dressing at top speed before he cut the call. Perry had sounded decidedly shaky, which was hardly surprising if you’ve just realised your daughter is in cahoots with one of the most devious and dangerous murderers ever known. They didn’t even dare discuss the awful possibility that she too may have become a victim once she had outlived her usefulness to him.

  That put Perry and him in the same boat. Halliday had them both by the short and curlies. In Sam’s case, she had just twelve hours to live unless he could find her.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sunday morning

  The GCHQ technical boffin arrived at Surrey Police headquarters at dawn, as suddenly as if materialising from another planet. DI Claire Mulholland was just finishing her overnighter on the Sam Gillard abduction, when someone from reception buzzed up to say a Dr Chris Steele was there to see DCS Otara. Claire looked out of the window into the car park. The visitor section was darkened and empty, and she knew most of the vehicles in the staff car park, which was dominated by the new red SUV of Chief Constable Alison Rigby. Intrigued, Claire decided to put aside the paperwork and go down herself rather than try to find Otara.

  Claire won her bet with herself. The only person in reception was in his early twenties, had short hair, meticulously parted, thick glasses and a worn suit. On his lap was a hefty silver box, like that use
d by photographers. She walked over and said: ‘Dr Chris Steele? I’m DI Mulholland.’

  The man look confused. ‘No, I’m Brian Hutton, emergency bollard replacement…’

  Claire became aware of a figure at her shoulder, and turned. ‘I’m Chris,’ said a woman in her late thirties. ‘I was in the loo,’ she said, faced with Claire’s perplexed expression. Dr Steele looked every inch the high-flying businesswoman, power dressed in houndstooth skirt and square shouldered jacket, heels and understated pearl earrings. Her eyes were feline and pale green.

  Claire made her apologies to the bollard man and led Steele upstairs, where they were joined by Alison Rigby, dressed down in white blouse and black slacks, who ushered them into a secure but rather gloomy windowless conference room. Already seated there were DCS Raj Otara and Rob Townsend. Claire was surprised that everyone but her seemed to know this was happening. Indeed, the chief constable seem to be visibly excited by the presence of a spook, especially a glamorous female one. Another glass ceiling smashed, perhaps.

  ‘There are now three mobile phones we need you to look at,’ Otara said. ‘The first, which we already told you about, was used to leave a message from a bus stop in Westmeare yesterday afternoon. The second was used by the suspect to ring his former girlfriend Ellen Bramley on a number of occasions in the last few months. That device has been switched off for two weeks. The third, which we’ve only heard about an hour ago, is an iPhone belonging to Vanessa Perry, who is believed to have been assisting the suspect, Kyle Halliday, evade capture. None of the devices are on at the moment.’

  Dr Steele nodded. ‘We’ve identified device one as a cheap Samsung running Android. The exact technical spec is here.’ She passed across to Otara a technical looking sheet, which he then passed on to Townsend. ‘Let me get HQ to examine the others. What exactly are your requirements for the first device?’