Girl Gone Missing

by J M Gregson

  Lambert nodded. ‘We’ve already identified her from dental records. She was an eighteen-year-old schoolgirl from Oldford.’

  Despite himself, Saunders was suddenly and unexpectedly stricken with the pity of it, as the thing he had cut up turned suddenly from so much putrefying meat into a human creature, struck down at an age when she should have been full of aspiration and potential. He said dully, ‘You were quick. I only did the autopsy yesterday morning.’

  Lambert decided he might draw Saunders into the case if he offered a few of the facts the man seemed to find so reassuring. ‘There were twelve murders on our patch and the areas immediately surrounding it in the six weeks you gave us for the outside limits of this death. Nine of them were domestics; the other three all have a corpse present and correct. So we checked the missing persons register for our area. This girl was already registered as a MISPA — we scan the computer files automatically when we have a murder victim.’ Chris Rushton would be pleased to hear him singing the praises of the technology he often affected to despise, he thought with a grim smile.

  Saunders digested the logic of these procedures, then nodded his satisfaction. ‘Well, it was murder, I should think. She didn’t die in the Wye, this one. She was dead when she went into the water.’

  ‘Alison Watts.’ She could have a name at least, even though such things were no longer of any concern to her. ‘How do you think she died, Mr Saunders?’

  A few minutes earlier, the man behind the desk would have bridled and said stiffly that his findings were in his report. Now he said, ‘Vagal inhibition. Asphyxiation or strangling, in layman’s terms. But it’s difficult to be absolutely precise as to how this came about. The neck has been too severely eaten away by the creatures of the river, you see. I showed the police liaison officer the problem when we were doing the PM. But I could get her out again if you’d like to —’

  ‘No! No need for that. I understand the problem,’ said Lambert hastily. He found the man opposite him looking up in surprise at this unsuspected squeamishness in a senior officer.

  ‘Well. I’m pretty sure from the damage to the internal organs of the throat that she was strangled. Probably with some sort of ligature. Rope or wire, in all probability; there isn’t enough left to provide any detail of what sort of ligature, I’m afraid.’

  ‘So everything points to the fact that she’s been in the river for a long time. But she couldn’t have been dumped in the river near her home and taken this long to drift down to Chepstow, could she?’

  ‘No. We’ve had plenty of rain in August and September this year. Even if a body got caught up in debris near the bank somewhere, it would have moved down to Chepstow within a week at most, I’d say. She was weighted down, Mr Lambert. There isn’t much of her feet left, I’m afraid, but the injuries around her left ankle suggest that a rope or wire was tied round it — presumably with something heavy attached to the end of it.’

  The two of them were silent for a moment, picturing the incident two to three months ago when the body was slipped into the Wye, carefully weighted to guard against its discovery, probably somewhere near the girl’s home, thirty miles upstream of where they sat. Then Cliff Saunders said quietly, ‘I imagine the rope detached itself when the foot was no longer there to retain it. Otherwise the poor kid might still be lying at the bottom of the Wye.’ He was moved at last, this man who so spurned the use of the imagination, by his vision of the waste of this young life.

  Lambert said slowly, ‘So she was killed somewhere away from the river — we don’t know how far away — and dumped into the river at some point we may never find. Probably ten to twelve weeks ago.’ The facts were stark enough. He did not quote the statistic which showed that when murders were not solved within the first week, the chances of finding the culprit decreased sharply. No doubt a forensic biochemist was well aware of such facts.

  Saunders said, ‘She wasn’t a virgin. That’s in my report, of course. But there was no chance of establishing whether this was a sex crime, I’m afraid. The flesh was much too far gone to ascertain whether there were any traces of bruising or scratching on the inner thighs, or anywhere else for that matter.’

  ‘No, I didn’t expect there would be.’ And no semen or pubic hairs or clothes fibres from the man who had done this — if it was a man. The river had long removed such traces.

  Saunders, appreciating now how his report provided many more questions than answers for the police, said, ‘The chemists are working on her clothes, but I don’t hold out much hope for you there. Washed clean by the Wye, I’m sure.’ He had the air now of a man who wanted to help, who recognised the awful complexity of this death for the people who had to find out who was responsible for it. He weighed his thoughts for a moment, then said, almost reluctantly, ‘There’s one other thing, which is only touched upon even in my report, because it’s not a matter about which one can speak with certainty so long after death. There’s not much of the genitalia left, but I’d say from the condition of the internal organs that this was a girl who was sexually active. Frequent intercourse, I should think. Whether with one partner or several, you’ll no doubt find out in the course of your enquiries.’

  It had cost this constricted man quite a lot to move from the facts of his dissecting slab into such speculation, and both of them knew it. Lambert stood up. ‘I expect you have daughters yourself, as I have.’ Saunders nodded bleakly. ‘Thank you for your help. I don’t suppose anything more will occur to you, but if you should think of something else which might be of help, please ring me.’

  The scientist nodded. ‘Where will you begin?’

  ‘With the people who were with her last. With her family, to start with. And no doubt in due course with her sexual partner, or partners.’

  None of these, of course, might be the person who was with her last of all, the person who had abruptly stilled this young life and watched her weighted body sink into the depths of the Wye. Starting so long after the event, it might be that they would never discover that ruthless operator. It wasn’t an investigation to look forward to.

  And the victim was beginning to emerge now as a real person, not the cipher she had been when John Lambert had enjoyed the colours of the forest and the glint of the river on his way to Chepstow. The drive back to Oldford, shadowed now with this death and its consequences, would be altogether more sombre.

  Chapter Three

  IN the event, it was Bert Hook who got the job of breaking the news of the girl’s death to her parents. He took a young WPC with him and went round to the house in the early evening.

  Alison Watts had lived in a small modern house, privately owned, built in the middle eighties, when people were scrambling to acquire property, before the slump in prices which destroyed confidence and left buyers trapped in the negative equity of the following decade. These were the cheapest Oldford houses erected in that period; the builder had avoided all frills to keep his prices to a minimum, knowing that almost anything would sell to those who kept work and prospered as the numbers of unemployed rose steadily. Central heating meant no fireplaces, which in turn meant no chimneys and an unbroken roof skyline. It all added to the boxy uniformity of these neat, depressing terraces. Some of the small front gardens were still bright with the remains of summer bedding. But Number One, The Lawns, had a lawn that needed mowing and an uneven privet hedge that needed cutting. There were no flowers in its ragged borders.

  The man who opened the blue front door of the end-of-terrace house had a two-day growth of beard. Bert would have liked to ask the young woman in uniform at his side whether she thought this represented fashion, laziness, or worse, because to an old-fashioned policeman it just looked untidy. Instead, he said, ‘Mr Watts? We spoke on the phone about this. It would be better if we came inside, I think.’

  The man stared at them for a moment, then turned and led the way into a lounge that was tidy apart from the single beer-can on top of the television set in the corner of the room. They had passed a va
cuum cleaner in the hall; perhaps someone had been cleaning the place in the twenty minutes since his phone call. Hook and his WPC sat demurely at opposite ends of the sofa and Bert said, ‘I assume that you are Robert Watts, the father of Alison.’

  ‘That’s right. Well, stepfather really, I suppose, but I’ve always treated her as if she were my own daughter. I’ve been around since she was four or five, you see.’ The man was not at ease; he scratched his close-cropped hair, then let his index finger dwell experimentally for a moment on the tiny scab on his cheek, as if he wished he could prise it away and dispose of it.

  But perhaps it was a blanket hostility towards the police, or even towards authority generally. To Bert Hook, studying him closely, Watts did not seem unduly worried or distressed by this visit. Four fifths of suspicious deaths took place within the family, so until they knew more about how Alison Watts had died every member of this particular one would be inspected for any suggestion of guilt, for any sign of the knowledge that could lead the police to a solution.

  Hook’s ears had been listening automatically for sounds of movement in other rooms since they had first set foot in the hall: police personnel of any rank did this instinctively in all kinds of situations, as much from an urge towards self-preservation as anything else. This small modern house, where the thin walls and floors would surely have given away any movement, seemed very empty. Hook said, ‘Is Mrs Watts around? It would really be much better if we could speak to the two of you together.’

  ‘No. Not at present, she isn’t.’ It sounded abrupt, even aggressive. But perhaps he was just nervous, full of a sense of doom after their phone call. People usually anticipated bad news, even when they hoped desperately for the best.

  WPC Hogan, anxious to have some part in this macabre cameo — she was so new that this was her first suspicious death — said, ‘Will she be back soon? It really would be much better for you if she heard this from us, you see, and —’

  ‘Heard what?’ There was no doubt of his aggression now. Bert had met the attitude many times over the years: suspicion of the police, a reluctance to cooperate which developed into truculence. This man wanted them out of the house as quickly as possible, as if they polluted the place with their very presence.

  But Watts had lost his daughter, or stepdaughter. A girl whom he had probably loved, who had been the embodiment of his hopes for the future. Hook said, ‘When do you expect your wife to be back, Mr Watts? It really would be better if she could hear what we have to say at the same time as you.’

  ‘I don’t know when she’ll be back. Not today.’

  ‘I see. Where is she, Mr Watts?’

  The man’s face darkened. Hook was aware of the still but excited white features of Liz Hogan over her notebook. No doubt she was entertaining notions of Robert Watts as a mass murderer, who had disposed of his wife and God knew who else as well as his daughter: John Lambert always said that young police imaginations worked in full technicolour. And the gory slaughterhouse of the awful Fred West was within twenty miles of here, a perpetual reminder to the police officers in the area of the depths to which humanity could sink.

  And for a moment Watts seemed as though he was about to further such fantasies. He sprang suddenly to his feet and turned away from them, staring unseeingly through the window to where a washing line arched towards its invisible hook. He wore light blue jeans, still stiff with newness, and a sweater which was rucked up at one side. His slip-on shoes were worn a little at the heels and badly scuffed at the toes, as if he had knelt on concrete in them and never rectified the damage. The watch he glanced at now looked as if it had cost a lot more than all of his clothes. He turned back to them and said, ‘The wife’s away for a few days. I don’t know where she is, nor when she’ll be back. You’d best tell me about Alison, and I’ll let Kate know about it in due course.’

  Hook didn’t like it. He’d been prepared for grief, for hysterics, even for anger — people in the agony of grief sometimes needed someone to blame, and the police were conveniently at hand as the messengers of death. But the man clearly had a right to know: they couldn’t withhold information. He said in his soft Gloucestershire tones, ‘You’d best sit down, Mr Watts. It’s not good news we bring.’

  Watts came and sat down opposite them. He moved rather in slow motion, like a man walking carefully towards what was inevitable. It was almost as though he knew already, thought Hook. But then most people had premonitions of disaster, when their children went missing; Watts might be merely anticipating the worst, seeing the nightmares he had endured in the weeks since the girl’s disappearance become reality before his eyes. Bert said, as evenly and officially as he could, ‘A body has been recovered from the Wye at Chepstow. It had been in the water for some time. About the same period as that which has elapsed since you reported Alison to us as a missing person. It seems —’

  ‘It’s Alison, isn’t it? I knew it, all along. We tried to think it wasn’t, but I knew it, from that first weekend when she disappeared.’ Until now he had been abrupt, even hostile. Now he spoke quietly, deliberately, like one in a trance.

  Hook said, ‘I’m afraid there’s no doubt, sir. You were kind enough to give us access to Alison’s dental records when you registered her as a missing person, you see, and we’ve checked them. It’s a reliable method of identification, in these circumstances.’

  Watts stared at him for a long moment, slowly re-focusing his attention upon the world around him. He said, ‘There wasn’t much of her left, I suppose.’ Then he nodded slowly, his chin jutting out as it rose and fell, as if it were a hammer tapping the idea of the girl’s death into his brain.

  Hook said, ‘She wouldn’t have been easy to identify by the normal methods, no. But fortunately there’s no need for that, now. But we can’t release her body for a funeral yet, I’m afraid. There’ll have to be an inquest. And I’m sorry to tell you that the police will be telling the Coroner that they see the circumstances of her death as suspicious.’ He paused, waiting for a reaction. The official circumlocutions were the safest, but when people were smitten with grief they did not always understand them.

  This man did. ‘You mean someone killed Alison.’

  ‘It seems like it. She didn’t drown, you see. She was dead before she went into the river.’ Hook watched his man closely as he delivered the brutal facts. You had to assess how much people could take, when you brought news like this. But much more important, you had to watch for any tell-tale reactions which would connect a relative with a killing. This man did not seem very upset or very surprised by what they had to tell him.

  But after a moment when he stared stony-faced at Hook, he buried his face in his hands. ‘She was a good girl,’ he said in a strangled voice between his fingers. When he dropped his hands, his face was still dry, but his features were twisted with emotion. ‘Spirited, yes. What adolescent girl doesn’t give you a little trouble, cause a few shouting matches in the family? But we loved her, and she loved us.’

  WPC Hogan took her cue and made ready to record things in her still pristine notebook. ‘Then I’m sure you’ll be as anxious as us to track down whoever did this awful thing, Mr Watts. We need to speak to all the people who were in close contact with Alison in the time before she died. For a start, can you tell me what was the last time you saw her yourself?’

  ‘Yes. I saw her here at six-thirty on Friday the twenty-third of July.’ She must have shown her surprise at the immediate precision of his answer, for he added impatiently, ‘I’ve told your people all of this before. She went out on that Friday night and never came back.’

  Hook said, ‘Yes. It’s on Alison’s file as a missing person. But I’m afraid you must be prepared to go over the same ground again in the next few days, Mr Watts. Now that this has become a murder enquiry, different officers will be involved.’

  ‘More senior men, you mean.’ Watts did not disguise his contempt. ‘And I expect you’ll give the case a higher profile, now it’s murder. More kudos in
it for you lot, I expect, bringing in a killer.’

  Hook didn’t dispute it. It was all true, even if it wasn’t the whole truth. He said, ‘There are many thousands of young people who go missing, Mr Watts. Most of them turn up safe and well, eventually. There simply aren’t the resources to follow all of them up in detail. If they’re over eighteen, we don’t have the right to bring them back to their parents, unless they want to come.’

  ‘Well, this one didn’t turn up, did she? So now you’ve got a murder on your hands.’ He sounded at that moment as if that was a satisfactory outcome to him, if it embarrassed the police.

  Hook said evenly, ‘Alison was an only child, wasn’t she, Mr Watts? We shall be talking to her mother, of course, as soon as we find where she is.’ He let the words hang in the air for a moment, but Watts did not react. ‘In the meantime, we need to know the names of people who were close to her. Friends, relatives, anyone who —’

  ‘Go to the school. Ask there. I hardly saw her during the week, did I? I wouldn’t know who her friends were, what she was doing. She only lived here, didn’t she? Only came to me when she wanted money.’