The Body Under the Bridge

by The Body Under the Bridge (epub)

  Rob Townsend meanwhile had broken into Halliday’s laptop, and opened up a large spreadsheet with colour-coded columns, each headed with a woman’s name, and a series of dates marked on the rows. ‘This is the master spreadsheet, which details exactly who he’s seeing, when, and which particular set of lies he has told them. He has written and presumably memorised everything he learned about their families and life history, so he doesn’t get mixed up.’

  ‘Incredible,’ Gillard said.

  ‘Aye, our Mr Halliday made a note of the wedding anniversary of Ellen Bramley’s parents, even though he only dated her for a few months,’ Rainy said. ‘Whereas my ex, bless his cotton socks, was married to me for a decade and couldn’t even remember my birthday.’

  Perry looked closer, and saw that his wife’s name was on the second column, and his daughter’s on the ninth. ‘Good grief, how many women were there?’

  ‘Aha,’ said Rainy. ‘We are not yet sure. We have just found in here a wee set of bank cards relating to somebody called Geraint Harris, of Telford, Shropshire, someone we hadn’t heard about, who had been buying the freezers and chillers. We traced the address and rang Geraint’s wife, Sophie, who isn’t even on this sheet. She hasn’t seen her husband for more than a week. We haven’t broken the news to her yet, not until we’re absolutely sure he’s the same person. Mrs Harris may have been targeted originally because she had a significant lottery win eight years ago. She turns out not to have seen her husband for over a week. She thought he was visiting his sick sister in Colorado, where she is undergoing expensive medical treatment.’

  ‘That’s a lie he told to many of the women,’ Gillard said.

  Rainy smiled. ‘It’s clever because it provides not only a motive for being a bottomless money pit, but it proves what a wee angel he was, looking after his sister. In fact there is no sister. The photos he used to back up this lie, of him sitting at her bedside, are actually of a paralysed woman called Valerie Turner, who lived in Nottingham but died in 2017. It’s at an early stage, but Nottinghamshire Police is already investigating whether she was defrauded of her half million accident compensation two years before her death.’

  ‘What a bastard,’ Perry said.

  ‘So Geraint Harris was in Telford? That’s where the black Range Rover is registered to,’ Townsend said.

  Gillard smiled. ‘We had assumed it was a cloned plate. Still, Gary Harrison, Gabriel Hallam, Geraint Harris. There’s a certain pattern here.’

  ‘Until we come to Kyle Halliday,’ Rainy said. ‘He is the central pivot of the whole spiderweb of lies and fantasy, because of the property he leased from Angie Wright, which enabled the entire seduction operation. Claire Mulholland and I interviewed her again this morning. Her ladyship is being a lot more cooperative now, though she’s still defending Halliday and is reluctant to see him for the piece of scum that he was. He first leased the railway arches from her husband twelve years ago to store the big freezers in, but after a while wormed his wee way into her marriage. Her husband divorced her in 2011, and gave her the crappy end of the property portfolio. Our love rat then leased three or four additional out-of-the-way places from her, which he used mainly for sleeping with other women.’

  ‘I don’t know how he had the time,’ Perry said. ‘Just being in one relationship is hard enough work.’

  ‘The answer is that he didn’t have a job,’ Rainy said. ‘Years ago he was a telecoms engineer, repairing handsets, and later a chef at a college. He got some basic qualifications soon after leaving the army, but presumably found defrauding women was an easier life. The international telecoms consultancy is a fiction, just like the sick sister fable, and the even more preposterous story about being an undercover agent in Afghanistan, which according to the spreadsheet is one that he told your daughter.’

  Perry shook his head in disbelief.

  ‘Halliday wasn’t a husband or a dad, and wasn’t involved in providing for or supporting anyone but himself,’ Rainy said. ‘He seems to have lived entirely on money cadged, borrowed or stolen from the various women in his life, who he moved between on a rota that was set down on his spreadsheet. That was his career, and it was pretty much full time. We know about the fourteen grand he took from Ellen Bramley, and we can see from the Geraint Harris accounts that he has had over a hundred and fifty grand from his wife in the last year. There was a lot of money coming in, but just as much going out. The numerous cars, the jet ski, and so on. He regularly booked himself escorts too, according to the Geraint Harris cards.’

  Gillard turned to look at Perry, who shook his head ruefully. ‘I don’t think Mel would have given him anything. She is pretty shrewd.’

  The other detectives looked meaningfully at each other but said nothing.

  ‘Sam had always told me what a fragile ego Gary Harrison had,’ Gillard said. ‘Charming at first, paying lip-service to women’s rights and equality, but it was always to an end. She felt used by him, as if he owned her.’

  ‘Until you turned up,’ Rainy said. ‘I’ve been giving this some thought. I’m sure that’s why you were targeted. He’d probably never lost a woman to another man before, and even though it was years before, he couldnae handle it. I’m sure that’s the motive for targeting you and Sam. He was after revenge.’

  ‘And any woman who resisted, got murdered,’ Perry said.

  Rainy snorted in disagreement. ‘You didn’t even have to resist. Valerie Turner died a year after her compensation was paid. It seemed like natural causes, but there’s an incriminating note on the spreadsheet giving a “termination day” for her.’

  ‘Rainy, that’s great work you’ve done,’ Gillard said.

  ‘Well, he seemed to write everything down, so once we cracked the access code with Rob’s help, this whole Pandora’s box of crime just opened up on the laptop. According to both Ellen Bramley and Angie Wright, they never knew when he was due to arrive. But he was careful to be considerate and charming,’ Rainy said, her eyebrows raised in bemusement. ‘Let me read you something from Valentine’s Day this year, when our wee love rat was as busy as a blue-arsed fly. “Posted roses for Ellen, Sophie and Vanessa. Massage (!) with Mel 11.40 a.m. at Wholebods, lunch after at Creighton Hotel…”’

  ‘The absolute bastard!’ Perry exclaimed. ‘I’d got Valentine’s Day off, but Mel turned down my offer of lunch because she insisted she had a client who booked in months ago!’ He stood up, his face flushed.

  ‘Och, I’m sorry, John.’

  ‘It was a bit thoughtless, Rainy,’ Gillard said, as he watched Perry storm off.

  ‘I’ll just finish this wee bit while he is not here. “Dinner with Angie (bring jewellery) at Gilded Swan, room booked. Two a.m. slipped out for Vanessa: ten-minute BJ in back of car”.’

  Gillard looked over his shoulder where Perry was no longer visible. ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t want to have heard that either.’

  ‘The guy was a machine,’ Townsend said softly, with a hint of admiration.

  Gillard retorted: ‘Well before you start getting envious, young man, let’s recall that he was a multiple murderer, a kidnapper and rapist.’ He turned his focus to the laptop. ‘What have you got for the date that Beatrice Ulbricht died?’

  ‘Ah yes, we’ve got something on this.’ Townsend moved the cursor across to Angie Wright’s column, and a large comment box opened up for the day in question. ‘“Argument with AW”, which I assume is Angie Wright. “Arranged to meet call girl at Excelsior. No show. Driving back saw enticing girl in hat at bus stop. Offered her a lift. Quite a bit of resistance, bitch squirted pepper spray. Lost my temper and squeezed too hard, so sadly she’s got to join Mum”.’

  ‘In the freezer,’ muttered Gillard.

  ‘There’s something else that I wouldnae let John know,’ Rainy said. ‘There’s a so-called termination date for Vanessa on the spreadsheet. It was to be tomorrow.’

  * * *

  Rainy Macintosh eventually tracked Perry down in the canteen to apologise for her cra
ss insensitivity. ‘I’m really sorry,’ she said. ‘Maybe you shouldn’t have sat in on that part of the investigation.’

  The detective inspector shrugged. ‘It’s just so humiliating.’

  ‘Well, maybe I’ve got something to cheer you up. It looks like your hunch was correct that the murderer was related to Jane Morris. He calls her Mum in his own spreadsheet, and we now have some science to prove it. The familial DNA test you asked for came in a wee while ago. Halliday has got a forty-four per cent match to her, which is within the range of mother–son connection. We should follow it up with a mitochondrial test to be sure.’

  He emitted a small smile, but the rest of his face remained dour.

  ‘I also looked in more detail at the register of births around the time that Jane Morris disappeared. A child was registered as Graeme Garrison in Wandsworth, parents given as Linda and Harold Garrison, six months before wee Jane vanished. That presumably was the child in the pram. Graeme left school at sixteen, and that’s the last trace of him. I think that must be when he changed his name to Gary Harrison. There is no trace of it, because as I’ve discovered you don’t have to formally notify anybody unless you do it by deed poll. I reckon he took a couple of years to shake off the family association, and then he joined the army under the same Gary Harrison name.’

  Perry nodded. He’d seen close up that Halliday was a man who gave women what they wanted. Yet in the end, he took each of them for all the money that they had. He turned honest women into liars, clever women into fools, and independent women into helpless supplicants.

  He went home to meet his daughter, pushing his way through a crowd of reporters that had gathered in Romney Crook now that the press blackout had been lifted. Vanessa was there with family liaison officer Gabby Underwood. She was snuggled up under a blanket on the settee, and without make-up looked lost and innocent, the little girl he always pictured in his mind. There were tears in her eyes and as he smiled at her, she put out her arms to him.

  ‘Dad,’ she said. ‘I am so sorry.’

  He sat next to her and embraced her, the prodigal daughter finally back at home.

  * * *

  Later that week, Gillard found himself accompanying the chief constable to RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire. A private flight had been laid on to take the body of Beatrice Ulbricht back to Germany for burial. The two police officers stood on the chilly windswept apron by a small jet, alongside a group of Beatrice’s closest British friends and colleagues. Among them were the three remaining members of the Lysander String Quartet. In the distance, a sleek hearse led a cortège of vehicles towards them. The polished black Jaguar came to a halt and four uniformed pallbearers got out and slid the coffin from the back. Beatrice’s parents emerged from a following vehicle. As they did so, the sound of a solo violin soared above the distant traffic.

  Karl-Otto Ulbricht put an arm around his wife. They watched the coffin being gently slid onto the conveyor which took it almost silently into the belly of the aircraft. As the ramp withdrew, and then closed like a giant mouth, many of those watching embraced each other, and quietly cried. Gillard blinked too, his vision smearing. This was not only sympathy with those close to her but also a measure of guilt for his own failure to apprehend the killer before he had struck several more times. It was only yesterday when he had met the parents of PC Lynne Fairbanks, still struggling to come to terms with the death of their daughter. Her funeral would come next week, along with that of Yvonne Fairfield and of Jane Morris. His own aunt had narrowly avoided that fate, still in a coma, her condition stable.

  Claire Mulholland had told him that after three years Yvonne’s mother had ceased the daily emails beseeching her to think about her missing daughter. She had rung Claire yesterday and thanked her for giving her the peace of knowledge.

  ‘There is some kind of closure now,’ she had said.

  Epilogue

  Melanie Perry was charged with murder, but admitted the lesser charge of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. The trial created a huge public debate. In the middle of the judge’s summing up someone shouted out from the public gallery: ‘She shouldn’t go to jail, she should get a bloody medal!’ This didn’t just sum up the public mood but that of the jury too, who, ignoring the comprehensive evidence of premeditation, acquitted her. For manslaughter, she was sentenced to three years.

  Sam Gillard was slow to recover from her horrific confinement of more than thirty-six hours in the steel box. The sensory deprivation, the panic-inducing claustrophobia and the feeling of freezing water mounting slowly towards her gagged mouth reappeared nightly in horrific dreams for many months. Counselling and therapy helped, and she was eventually able to describe her ordeal.

  One of Sam’s first trips out of the house in those difficult early months was a trip with Gillard to visit John Perry and his daughter Vanessa, who were also rebuilding their lives. Later Sam would go to visit Melanie Perry at HMP Bronzefield women’s prison, partly to thank her, but also to share her experiences of being a victim of the same devious criminal.

  * * *

  On a beautiful spring day towards the end of May, Sam Gillard sat with her husband in the garden of the Royal Oak pub not too far from where they lived. The first parasol-like leaves of the horse chestnut trees had emerged, fresh and green and fragrant. The psychotherapist said she was making excellent progress, and most nights she no longer suffered nightmares. Despite that, she had been advised not to try to return to work too early. The chief constable had given Craig generous compassionate leave, and more to the point had insisted he take all of it.

  Sam sipped her gin and tonic, and eyed the man who had saved her from being drowned in darkness. ‘Okay Craig,’ she said. ‘I’m ready to hear the details.’

  He had promised to fill her in on the various bits of the investigation which had not been made public but wanted to wait until she felt she could hear it without becoming upset. Today, finally, she did feel ready.

  Her husband took her hand and stroked it gently. ‘As far as we can work out,’ he said, ‘Graeme Garrison became Gary Harrison at eighteen, and Geraint Harris six years ago. That was the first proper false ID, when he started to get all the utility bills with his name on in Telford, that subsequently allowed him to get a passport under that name.’

  Sam shook her head. ‘So even in the year or so that I went out with him, he was already married to Mrs Harris under another name?’

  ‘I guess so,’ Gillard said. ‘And he was dating others. He’d already destroyed the marriage of Angie Wright, and was siphoning off money from a disabled woman in Nottingham. The family and two kids in Croydon, which he had mentioned when he was working at the college in Bromley, turned out not to exist.’

  ‘Sophie Harris was the first, then?’

  ‘Yes. He must have read about her and the lottery win. The story she tells is that he fell off his racing bike in front of her car, just as she was pulling out of a minor road one evening. She felt terribly guilty and gave him a lift to hospital. He must have played up his injuries, because she offered him money not to report the accident. She’d been drinking, and already had plenty of points on her licence. She said he was utterly charming about it and gradually worked his way into her affections. She was flattered, because she’s at least fifteen years older than him, and at first he didn’t seem interested in her money.’

  ‘Typical Gary, all charm at first.’

  ‘Like all the others, she just accepted that he would be away several nights a week. Sophie Harris said that he had gone to Miami for jaw surgery in 2018, which is where he got his teeth changed so radically. I think she paid for it.’

  ‘And the woman in the suitcase?’

  ‘PC Lynne Fairbanks. I think he might have been a bit disappointed how at little knowledge he could get out of her about the state of the investigation.’

  Sam took another sip. ‘He was obsessed with getting back at you, Craig. He asked me a lot of questions when I was captive in
that awful garage, about you and about the state of the investigation. I don’t think he ever wanted me for who I am, but just couldn’t bear the idea that I’d chosen you over him.’

  Gillard gave a wan smile. ‘It just showed he’d never grown up. He had such a big inferiority complex that he could only feed it by trying to sleep with as many women as possible.’

  ‘I do remember,’ Sam said, ‘that he hated his family and never wanted anything to do with them because they were brutal to him as a child. Only in the army did he ever feel that he belonged. I’m surprised he ever left.’

  ‘He got a dishonourable discharge after only a few months, that’s why,’ he said. ‘A sexual offence of some kind, unsurprisingly.’

  ‘There was something else I heard when I was held captive. It was about Beatrice Ulbricht. He’d had some kind of row with Angie on the Sunday evening, and had gone out to meet an escort at a hotel, but she didn’t show. On his way home he saw Beatrice at a bus stop where he gave her a lift. Of course being Gary he thinks women will just melt at the first thing he says. But when she refused his advances she fought back like crazy apparently, kicking and punching and using pepper spray. He complained that it got sprayed all over the car, and wouldn’t come off. I think that’s why he dreamt up this elaborate plot to have the vehicle stolen from him.’

  ‘And of course helped by Vanessa, who worshipped the ground on which he walked,’ Gillard said. ‘When we talked to her, she said that they practised the theft manoeuvre for half an hour on an old airfield until she got the feeling of the vehicle.’

  After lunch, they finished their drinks and drove off for an afternoon together in the warm sunshine. They found themselves at the pleasant riverside village of Lacey Dutton. They walked over the Loxcombe Bridge, now fully repaired, and strolled along the embankment where inquisitive ducks gathered at the water’s edge hoping to be fed.