It was inconceivable that both lifts had descended empty at the same time. Someone had to have activated them. Stanley began to growl, giving her away. She snatched him up and, rushing across the marble floor, shouldered her way through to the stairwell. Behind her she heard the same hush. The lift doors were closing.
Up or down? Stella made a snap decision and ran up the stairs to her flat rather than down to the basement. Fifty steps versus ten. After twenty, her legs became leaden as if she were wading through water. Stanley had gone quiet, but with every step he got heavier. Her rucksack, weighed down with her laptop, bumped against her spine and her boots scraped on the concrete stairs, giving her away. All the time the lift must be travelling upwards, faster than she could run. Or it had gone down. She had no way of knowing.
Each floor was numbered, which was lucky because Stella soon lost count. She couldn’t keep up her pace. Her lungs bursting, she had to stop. She stood for a moment, trying to get her breath, her chest heaving with hot pain. Hearing nothing, she edged to the banister. She looked up and then down, scared of seeing someone patiently waiting, looking out for her.
No one need do that. They would know exactly where she was.
Stella powered up the last flight and flung herself through the door at level five. She raced along the carpeted corridor, feeling for her key with her free hand. She hit the lock, missing it. She inserted it at the same moment as the lift doors were opening.
Stella tumbled into her hall and kicked shut the door behind her. Terry hadn’t trusted CCTV or electronic locking devices; all you need is a power cut, he had said. As she turned the keys in the two extra five-lever mortice locks, she silently thanked him for advising she fit them, along with the London bar that made jemmying the door impossible.
Stanley leapt down and trundled off down the hall and into the living-dining room, tail twirling like a flag. Slumped against the front door, her heart still pounding, Stella heard sloshing from the kitchen as he guzzled from his water bowl. Business as usual. She stumbled into her study, the ‘second bedroom’ opposite the living room, and took out her laptop. The lifts must both be faulty, she assured herself.
She began to close the blind and stopped, her hand on the cord.
A man stood on the path leading up from the gates. Only because she hadn’t yet switched on the study light could she see him, because with no security lights it was dark outside. Tall in a long black coat, hands in his pockets. Jack. Full of relief, Stella reached for the window lock; she wouldn’t bang on the glass and disturb the neighbours. The key was in the living room.
She waved. Jack didn’t respond, although she was sure he could see her. He hadn’t been there when she arrived – she would have seen him and he would have called to her. He had a key to the basement, so he could get inside. She got out her phone and texted him. Her fingers trembled and she made several mistakes before managing: Are you ok?
Nothing in his body language intimated he had received the text. No light glowing in his pocket. She dialled his number.
‘This is Jack, who are you? Tell me after the beep.’
She would have to go down to get him.
Stella was about to open the front door when her phone lit up.
Fine. You? Jack didn’t waste words.
Why are you here?
She froze. There were two watching eyes at the top of the phone screen. It must be William – he was stalking her. She was startled by the ping of a text.
Why are any of us here? Jx
Stella went back to the study and, neighbours or not, raised her hand to bang on the glass.
Jack had gone.
39
Saturday, 26 October 2013
Gender
Male
Age range
20 to 40
Ethnicity
White European
Height (cm)
172
Build
Medium
Date found
30/9/1988
Estimated date of death
Late 1987 (possibly October)
Body or remains
Body – skeletal
Circumstances
A male body was found in Chiswick Tower in Chiswick Lane South
Possessions
Empty bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne
Hair
Medium-length brown
Facial hair
N/A
Eye colour
Unknown
Distinguishing features
No tattoos
Clothing
Casual Millets anorak, zip-up front, size 44; beige cotton trousers size 32 (brand name Racing Green); braces – blue; kipper tie – blue; leather brogues, leather uppers, plastic soles – black (brand name Clarks); crew-neck jumper – turquoise (brand name Reiss)
Hose
Calvin Klein blue Y-fronts with red piping and waistband. White socks
Jewellery
Gold metal ring engraved with ‘x’ in centre of which tiny diamond. Gents Timex wind-up watch, no numerals, markings dabbed with luminous paint. Black leather strap with lighter stitching
On a trawl of the Missing Persons’ Bureau website, Jack examined pictures of dead faces – reachable by surmounting several warnings to stop the unwitting stumbling upon one. ‘Glove Man’ had been submitted by the Metropolitan Police on 30 September 1988. No picture, as Lucie had said. Jack thought the pencil sketch familiar, it could have been any one of his male passengers – that parade of faces on platforms when he pulled into stations.
After a year in the empty water tank, the man was beyond recognition. Jack could imagine the skeleton, wrist bones poking from the ‘casual Millets anorak’, the fabric fusty and faded, nibbled by mites. Grey bones mapped with scraps of brown leathery skin, a skull tufted with ‘medium-length brown hair’ the consistency of dried grasses. A skull’s bared-teeth grin, which always struck Jack as gleeful rather than sinister. The empty eye sockets would have gazed back sightless. The man had died alone and unheard, perhaps unloved. After decades it was unlikely he would be matched with a missing person. Missing, but not missed. Once upon a time, over fifty years ago, Jack hoped there had been a celebration of Glove Man’s birth. His individuality, the man he had been in life, was distilled on a website database to his taste in champagne.
Jack leafed through Lucie’s file. ‘If you find out who he is, he’s mine, darling.’ Side-stepping credit suited Jack. Stella had been uncomfortable when he’d asked her take the kudos for their work on the Rokesmith and Blue Folder cases. The Detective’s Daughter Does Dad Proud had been one of Lucie’s headlines. Stella had only agreed when he pointed out the merits of anonymity: he could work incognito.
An hour ago Stella had texted enquiring if he was OK. She might be feeling guilty at going behind his back and – a classic tactic – projecting her guilt on to him. Jack had hoped she would suggest he came over to see her; although it was the middle of the night he could do with one of her shepherd’s pies. They had much to debrief. But she must be avoiding him.
The first article Lucie had written on the case was printed in the Chronicle the week after the corpse was found and was headed ‘Who Is the Man in the Tower?’ Jack sang under his breath:
‘The man in the moon
Came down too soon…’
The man in the tower hadn’t come down sooner or later. The file included torn leaves from Lucie’s notebook. He read that ‘the corpse’s jumper was knotted around his neck, although anorak zipped up’. This wasn’t on the website, probably because it wasn’t relevant to identification. Lucie had got it from Terry. She had said that the knotted jumper suggested a jaunty, laconic mood far removed from screaming in a concrete chamber until the heart gave out. Jack agreed that it belonged with quaffing champagne, if it had been drunk and had not evaporated over the months. The man had put on his anorak without unknotting his jumper and putting it on first. Lucie said this showed he must have died soon after he knew he was
imprisoned. The night of the hurricane would have been cold; crazy to have a sweater, she had said, and not wear it.
Jack had momentarily forgotten he was in the room where the man had died. Not a room then, a concrete tank that for a year had served as a tomb. The place on the floor where the body had been was in shadow. The glow from his laptop drew the curving walls closer. He thought of a cardboard tube rolled tighter and tighter until there was no room to breathe.
He went to the door and, getting down on his hands and knees, shuffled across the floor. Oak boards laid over the concrete base were warm. A heat-exchange system took water from the Thames to cool and heat the tower.
In 1987, little had been done to the 5,000-gallon tank. According to Lucie’s notebook, slats beneath the ceiling, glazed with red-and-yellow-coloured panes of glass, were part of that first tranche of development and not in the original tank.
The tower’s designer – given its function Jack presumed it was an engineer rather than an architect – would have dispensed with conceits like a cupola on the roof. Access to clean the tank would be through a hatch in its ceiling; there was no sign of it now. The ceiling was over a metre above Jack. He was tall and could easily get to a hatch using a stepladder, even a chair. In 1987 the man had only a champagne bottle. If there had been a hatch it would have been out of his reach.
Why was he there? In the second article covering the inquest, Lucie – keeping within legal bounds – speculated on suicide. As she had told him, the man had no identification, a typical suicide trait. He had bought the champagne either with the right money, or returned to his home after buying it and left his wallet there before going to the tower. Every so often there were stories of people lying dead in their homes for months, even years. Neighbours would claim that the person had kept themselves to themselves. The inoffensive, it seemed, were less missed than the argumentative, boundary-disputing ones. Neighbours had assumed they were on holiday or had moved without saying goodbye. Glove Man must own his home or the police were right and he had no home. Otherwise someone was chasing some serious rent arrears.
If he had been murdered, a careful killer would remove anything incriminating or that would hasten the identification of the victim. The body was the biggest clue in a murder. Lucie believed it was murder and eventually Terry had agreed.
Jack rubbed his eyes. It was ten past three and he was driving in a few hours. He reflected that cases were like number-nine buses, not like trains: you waited for hours, then two came along at once. A man in a tower and a man under a train.
Lucie was convinced that the killer was a woman, whoever had shared the champagne with the victim. She had conceded that the man might be gay, but attributed the tidy scene to the feminine touch. Terry had agreed. A tidy man himself, Jack didn’t share this logic.
Why not take everything with her? Terry had countered. Lucie had thought of that. She said the imagination behind the killing was a woman’s. Carefully, she had constructed a suicide scene for the police. The man climbed the tower once. At the top, he had opened the bottle and toasted himself and his shit life. He had swallowed a handful of tablets and drunk the contents of the bottle until he lost consciousness. But his attire suggested panache, respect for style and ritual, ‘strolling out’ rather than going out with a bang. The killer hadn’t legislated for a heart attack brought on by terror or the grazed and bloodied fingers. Lucie’s notes reached a definite conclusion: Glove Man was having an affair and was murdered by his lover. One day Lucie would write the book, she said.
Jack saw there might be something raw and romantic about drinking champagne and making love in an abandoned water tower high above the city. The lack of windows would put him off, but there would be no need to give false names at a hotel or make up some story that the staff clearly did not believe. It was also possible that their relationship was legitimate: sex in a tower to spice up a stale marriage.
For the past few hours he had been dwelling on a case that wasn’t just cold, it was cryogenically so. Apart from hiding in a cupboard from his co-detective in the house of a possible suspect, he hadn’t progressed the Frost case for which they would be paid. All he had done was to betray the person he cared for most in the world. He could at least look at what he had found there.
He grabbed his coat from the bed and went through the pockets. The piece of paper with the marks on the desk was not in any of them. He flopped on to the bed, head in hands.
The sink’s glugging brought him back to the present. He went into the kitchen. The tap wasn’t dripping, although the bottom of the sink was wet. He hadn’t run the tap since he came home. The last time was when he washed his Shreddies’ bowl at 5 a.m. yesterday morning; it couldn’t be damp from then. There must be a problem. He would have to contact the consortium about getting in a plumber. He hadn’t the spirit to appreciate the humour of there being a leak in a water tower. To stop the glugging, he did as Stella had and turned the tap on full and then turned it off. The pipes made a dull clunk. Stella had explained it was an airlock caused by two taps in a building being turned on at different times. At the time he had accepted her explanation about two sinks, but it didn’t make sense: there was only him. His father would have understood how the tower worked. They had never had to call in a plumber or electrician when he was alive.
Jack returned to his laptop. He opened Outlook and addressed an email to Stella. Too late to text: she would be in bed.
Let’s meet to take stock of what we have so far, he pecked at speed with two fingers, using one of Stella’s phrases to reassure her. Tomorrow. I’m on the Wimbledon line, finish late afternoon. He was about to say he hoped the cleaning was going well, but she would think that odd. She cleaned somewhere most days.
I’m upset you didn’t tell me you had changed your mind about pretending to be a cleaner— Jack stopped. He was about to say Stella was his lodestar and she had let him down. He pressed ‘delete’ and the cursor chewed up the last sentence. Better to say it in person. He sent it off and, returning to the Missing Persons’ site, picked up Lucie’s file.
There was nothing in any of her pieces or on the website about a used condom. ‘On the right as you go in,’ Lucie had told him, keen for Jack to match up his new home with the ‘murder’ scene. Terry’s theory, she said, was that the man and his companion arrived and left separately, her first, leaving him to clear up. It explained the bottle and condom (only once, poor chap, Lucie had crowed): he had been about to stuff everything into the bag when the door shut. Later someone had taken the bag away. It had never been found. It would be at the bottom of the Thames, Lucie said.
She had said the door couldn’t have blown shut in the hurricane and, looking at it now, Jack could verify that. It was at the top of the spiral staircase, out of the draught.
The prime suspect was an absence. Another kind of missing person. In the intervening decades no one had come forward to rule themselves out or hand themselves in. Perhaps the person had not intended to kill the man – he or she had expected him to get out. Or had planned to return but the hurricane had stopped them. People had died that night – perhaps the phantom companion had been one of them? Terry had conjectured that it might have been kids messing about and, finding the man dead, they had fled in panic, one of them dropping a glove. Lucie had decided that the glove was a ‘red herring’ left by kids who had nothing to do with the man being trapped. They had never claimed it for fear of being accused of murder.
The police had appealed to local sex workers, asking if anyone had had a client who had taken them to the tower. All had said no and that if asked they would refuse the job however high the pay. This made it unlikely that a woman had murdered her client.
The glove, black leather with a popper fastener and a crown motif indented on the cuff, came from Marks and Spencer and according to the label fitted boys aged between ten and fourteen. Terry had told Lucie it had lain along the man’s spine, fingers pointing towards his head. The police withheld this information,
as possible leverage with a suspect. Jack was surprised he had told Lucie. Being a journalist, she couldn’t boast trustworthiness among her good points.
The police traced all the customers who had bought gloves in this range from the Marks and Spencer on Chiswick High Road with cheques, Access, Visa or American Express, but it yielded no leads. With such a wide time frame for culpability, alibis were meaningless. Nine of the 121 children for whom the gloves had been bought had lost one or both since purchase. Of these, three boys and a girl lived near the tower and of them, three – not the girl, Jack was gratified to read – were frightened of heights so incapable of making the precarious climb. The girl had lost her glove on a trip to the science museum. Lucie had added in the margin of her notes that Terry said her glove was later found.
Nearly thirty years later, he imagined Mr Glove Man still filed unidentified in a drawer at Hammersmith Mortuary.
Jack scribbled ‘glove owners’ list’ on his pad to follow up. The man hadn’t been wearing a ring; no spouse had reported him missing. Perhaps they were separated or the woman had already died and he was a widower looking for new life. Too many possibilities.
The website had a picture of the Timex watch and, as soon as he saw the simple dial, Jack recognized it. He shut his eyes and saw the ‘TIMEX’ written under the twelve. Like Glove Man’s, this one had only a six and twelve with no date.
Jack’s first watch had been a wind-up Timex. His father had had a Timex given to him by a German client, but it had a chequered band across the face. The trouble with having a photographic memory was that his mind was full of images most of which were of no consequence. In the eighties, there must have been lots of men, apart from himself, his father and the dead man, who wore Timex watches.
The Detective's Secret Page 20
