by Ian Mayfield
‘Sixteen, seventeen...?’
‘If that.’
‘Couple of other things,’ Jeff said, making a note. ‘I know this is hard for you. In your statement you never mentioned the second man assaulting you sexually. Now I can appreciate why you didn’t. But can you tell me, did they take the flute with them when they left?’
Mrs Beckett nodded and lowered her head, ineffably sad. Jeff saw Lucky swallow, and he understood why. The flute had been Miranda Hargreaves’s most cherished possession.
‘Can you tell us a bit about it?’
‘I inherited it from my gran. It was very valuable... a Böhm eight-key ivory flute, 1866.’
‘Many of those about?’
‘About fifty in the whole world.’
‘How much was it insured for?’
‘Ten thousand,’ she said. ‘And I suspect even that was low. Not that it mattered. I never bought another.’
‘Understandable,’ Jeff said. He waited for a beat, fighting his own feeling of sickness at what had been done to this woman, what he was doing to her all over again. He said, ‘One more thing, and then we’ll not outstay our welcome any longer. In the report it says the intruders got in through a ground floor window. Can you remember what sort of window it was?’
‘What do you mean, what sort of...?’
‘Was it double glazed, or - ?’
‘In that place? You must be joking. No, it was an ordinary, old-fashioned front room window, probably the original one.’
‘How did it open?’ He mimed something.
‘That’s it,’ she said, pointing. ‘A sash window.’
Lucky waited until they were back in the car before voicing her thoughts.
‘The accomplice,’ she said.
‘An accomplice,’ Jeff argued. ‘She said specifically they were both kids. In Denise Cole’s case the second man was older. Also, he seemed to be the one in charge. This time it was very much other way round.’
‘Same person, though?’ Lucky said. ‘You reckon?’
‘Oh, aye,’ he nodded, slowing for the turn into the main road. ‘I had me doubts before, but there’s the MO - sash window, lights extinguished - and now we know about the flute. It’s our boy.’
‘Right,’ she agreed absently. ‘Jeff?’
‘Mmm?’
‘The first guy: the, erm...’
‘Rapist.’
‘Yeah. Did he use a condom or something?’
‘FME’s report didn’t mention one.’
‘Then wouldn’t his DNA be on file? If he’s a burglar there’s every chance he’s got a club number, so we might be able to...’ She tailed off. Jeff was shaking his head.
‘Check the date of the crime report against the date in Miranda Hargreaves’s statement.’
She looked puzzled.
‘She didn’t report it for two days,’ he said. ‘By then any medical evidence was up the Swannee.’
Beneath her cinnamon skin it was hard to tell if Lucky was blushing, but her head went down and she said, ‘Oh, shit.’
‘Easy mistake to make,’ Jeff smiled. ‘Don’t worry. Done it myself enough times.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Aye.’ He stared fixedly at the road ahead. Actually he’d made a similar error over dates once, and only once, and it had almost resulted in a hit and run driver getting a free alibi. The bollocking his DI of the time had given him had ensured his unflagging thoroughness in the matter of witness statements ever since. A flash of guilt passed through him for his failure to let rip now, but Lucky deserved a break, and anyway she was keen enough without needing to be bludgeoned into learning this particular lesson.
He said, ‘We need to trace that flute.’
‘It was five years ago,’ she said, astonished. ‘How are we supposed to - ?’
‘What use’d a couple of burglars have for an antique flute?’ he declared with certainty. ‘They’ll’ve sold it on or pawned it. Prepare yourself for several hundred pointless phone calls once we get back to the nick.’
They drove on in silence for a while.
‘Seems to’ve put it behind her, though,’ Lucky said suddenly, brightly.
‘Mrs Beckett?’
‘Married, well enough off by the look of it, got a family. House in the country. All since it happened. She’s picked up her life.’
‘Aye, she has.’
‘But?’ She’d detected the dubious note in his voice.
‘You saw how hard it was for her to talk about it, even after all this time. It’ll never not be there. In her case I think she’s lucky. Her husband’s understanding and supportive, and like she said counselling’s helped.’ He sighed. Outside the sky had turned warship grey, pregnant with rain. ‘Rape gets women different ways. Some come to terms; others, it destroys them and those around them. What you can’t do is forget it ever happened.’
‘In your experience, at least?’ She spoke harshly, seeming to resent him, as a man, making such prognoses.
‘Be a remarkable woman who could,’ he said, emphasising his experience with a stern glance.
‘I - ’ She stopped. She frowned and said, ‘Oh.’
He waited, but Lucky had lapsed into a cowed silence. The outskirts of Rye gave way to muddy fields. Raindrops mushroomed on the glass. Jeff flipped on the wipers and put his foot down.
Where was he?
The question rattled endlessly around the recesses of Nina’s mind like the clickings of bats in a cave. Again she took the mobile phone from her bag to make sure it was on. She knew it was. She’d called Sandra earlier, to see if Paul had rung or turned up there. He hadn’t, Sandra had insisted, and there was no message on the machine.
It was stupid. She should be glad. He’d be sitting at home feeling like dog shit, unable to pluck up the courage to call. He’d be sweating, and serve him right. Except that perhaps he wasn’t. Perhaps he was unrepentant, out with that... whoever it was; knowing her finding out gave him an excuse to be away.
Why? came the echo. Is it me? Marriage didn’t go with the Job. She should have packed it in a long time ago, and it wasn’t as if the income was vital, not with Mum and Dad being so... She needn’t have volunteered for this pointless exercise, come to that, she decided, thumping the empty seat beside her with the palm of her hand. If she hadn’t, Paul wouldn’t have brought back that... bitch, and she’d never have known.
Why was she punishing herself? Because this was pointless. Even more so now after the information Meredith had provided. She frowned across at the house. Half past nine and still nothing. It looked as if Kim’s excursion on Wednesday was all the excitement they were going to get.
Perversely, the front door opened just as she’d resigned herself to this. Nina lowered her head, although she knew she couldn’t possibly be seen at this distance. Minus his coat, Andrew Clarke stepped out into the street and looked both ways. He seemed agitated.
Then his gaze settled squarely on the Mini and he crossed the road.
‘Shit!’
As if everything else wasn’t fucked up, now she’d blown the obbo as well. Helplessly she opened the window, sat and braced herself for the earful which, from Kim and Marie’s accounts of the man, she was sure would come.
‘Officer?’
It was a diffident voice and she turned her head in surprise. Andrew Clarke was bending down to the window. She nodded.
‘I was wondering, could you come with me, please?’
‘Sir,’ Nina said, ‘I’m here on the authority of - ’
‘I need your advice. I don’t know what to do.’
She stared at him, wary.
He sighed and a trace of belligerence crept into his voice. ‘Look, my wife’s at home. There’s nothing for you to worry about.’
‘I’d better ring my guv’nor,’ Nina said. Mr Clarke nodded and wandered a few steps down the pavement while she called Sophia and left a message. Then, having surreptitiously transferred a can of CS spray from the glovebox to her jacket pocket, she
got out and followed him into the house.
Charlotte Clarke was waiting nervously on her feet in the living room. Nina shook hands with her curtly. ‘DC Tyminski,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you’d better tell me what this is about.’
‘Sorry to trouble you,’ Mrs Clarke said. ‘It’s this.’ She gestured to a low table with a landline phone, an answering machine and three empty coffee mugs on it. She pressed a button. There was a bleep and then a man’s voice, sharp and tinny.
‘You’ll be pleased to know, Andrew, that I’ve finally tracked Deborah down,’ the voice said. ‘She’s been a very silly girl, and she knows that, but she is truly sorry. If you’d care to wait in Thornton Heath, at the southbound bus stop on the corner of London Road and Warwick Road, at about ten past midnight, you can pick her up there.’Bye.’
In the silence that followed, Nina looked from Andrew Clarke to his wife.
‘When did you play the message back?’ she asked.
‘The call came in about ten minutes ago,’ Charlotte Clarke said.
‘Why didn’t you answer it?’
‘He rang earlier and told us not to.’
‘Said if he’d talked to one of us live,’ Andrew Clarke added, ‘we could have strung him along long enough for a trace. So he told us to keep the machine on and wait for him to call.’
‘You sound like you know him,’ Nina said.
Silence.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Edward Porter,’ Andrew Clarke said.
‘Should’ve guessed.’ Kim Oliver shoved her hands deeper inside her jacket pockets and looked, once again, both ways along London Road, on a Saturday night busy even at this late hour. ‘No wonder we didn’t feel right about him.’ She glanced across the road to where Andrew Clarke stood under the bus shelter with Sophia.
‘Yeah,’ Nina said. ‘Both in Combat 18 in the nineties. Marches and rallies, football hooliganism with the Chelsea Headhunters. Would you believe he actually asked Porter to look for Debbie?’
‘You’re joking.’
‘No.’
‘Hey, so we’ve got an address?’
‘No such luck.’ Nina shivered in the breeze. ‘He got in touch through another old C18 pal.’
‘Their fucking network,’ Kim said.
‘Yeah.’
Kim looked at her watch. ‘Nothing’s happening.’
‘Night bus due in a few minutes,’ Nina said. ‘That’s if a bus is what we’re expecting. Just because he said a bus stop.’
Across the road, Sophia Beadle and Andrew Clarke watched in tense silence as it hove into view round a bend in the distance, stopped for some vociferously tipsy teenagers at a pelican crossing, and finally lumbered up to the stop.
‘I don’t see her,’ Andrew Clarke fretted. Sophia, trying to conceal her own anxiety, laid a reassuring hand on his arm.
The rear doors opened. The only person standing inside was a youth of around eighteen, who was talking over his shoulder to some others spread around seats on the lower deck. He climbed down to the bottom step and leaned out. ‘You Andrew Clarke?’
Mr Clarke started and said, ‘Yes.’
The youth held out a small buff envelope. Andrew Clarke took it and the boy disappeared back inside the bus, whereupon the door closed and it pulled away.
‘Mr Clarke,’ Sophia said.
Obediently, he stopped his nervous fiddling and put the envelope into her outstretched hand, which had a latex glove on it. She clasped the edges between her fingertips and slit open the flap with a penknife. She used a tissue to extract the contents. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Kim and Nina crossing the road in defiance of the moving traffic. Her frown deepened as she registered the contents of the envelope.
‘What is that?’ Andrew Clarke demanded in a high-pitched voice, sensing something was wrong. ‘I’ve a right to know.’
‘Mr Clarke,’ Sophia began, blue eyes seeming a cold grey under the shelter lights, ‘I wouldn’t advise - ’
But, more agitated than ever, he snatched it and looked down. His eyes narrowed, he uttered a strange choking sound and dropped it. Tight-lipped, knowing any trace evidence was now very likely useless, Sophia picked it up and showed it to Kim. Nina crowded over their shoulders.
The thing in the Polaroid photograph was barely recognisable as human. The body appeared to be naked, but there was so much blood it was impossible to be certain. Kim recognised the bed straight away, even without the hateful words painted on the wall. Across the torso and limbs were scores of thick, dark cuts made as if by the slashing of a knife. One arm lay across the midriff, perhaps where it had been lifted in an attempt to ward off blows. The groin, in a mockery of modesty, was covered by a copy of Thursday’s Evening Standard. Tarpaulin sheeting kept the mess off the mattress. Some of it must have dripped.
‘Debbie?’ Nina asked in a strangled voice.
‘I dunno.’ Kim handed her the photo and walked off, shoulders hunched. Nina peered at it. The face was that of a young blonde woman. She’d seen photos, but any doubt as to her identity was dispelled by the sight of Andrew Clarke bent double on the bus shelter seat, face in hands, Sophia next to him with an arm round his shoulders; Kim, leaning against the stop staring at them, unable to bring herself to offer comfort to the grieving father.
Week Two
Monday
A busy and frustrating Sunday had brought Sophia, Kim and Nina, at least two of them resentful for the loss of their weekend, little further forward. They’d spoken to Andrew Clarke’s C18 friend; he’d been able to tell them that he occasionally ran into Edward Porter but had no idea where he might be now. The contact information he’d given Clarke was an email address which, to their utter lack of surprise, was from a web-based mail service, untraceable.
They’d wanted to talk to Philip Meredith again but Charing Cross, understandably, felt they had better things to do than drag homeless drunks in front of a magistrate, and had released him with a caution soon after his interview with Sophia.
The first item of business at Monday morning’s office meeting was the distribution of blown-up prints of the gruesome Polaroid. Most of the team looked at their copies in grim silence. It was as they’d feared, and the fact that Meredith didn’t seem to have added much new was what depressed them most. Nina Tyminski was the first with her hand up.
‘This does support his story, doesn’t it, guv?’ she said. ‘When he says there was nobody there when he showed up?’
‘Doesn’t get us any closer to finding Porter or Debbie though,’ Marie pointed out.
‘Perhaps not.’ Sophia looked at them both. ‘We did, however, get some information from Sean Ryder, the mutual friend. He lives in Leatherhead and he told us he runs into Porter in pubs around there occasionally. I think there’s a good chance,’ she went on, amid stirrings, a sense that they might finally be getting somewhere, ‘Porter’s gone to ground somewhere in that area. I don’t for a moment suppose he’s on it, but Kim, if you could get onto Surrey County Council and get them to do a voter’s list check for him. And I’ll need someone to find out who the local estate agents are. It’s not that long since Mr Macmillan’s team lost track, so if he’s bought or rented property in the area in the last year or two, chances are someone’ll remember him.’
Nina put her hand up and Sophia wrote her name against the action on the board.
‘I had a meeting with Mr Coleridge first thing this morning,’ she announced. ‘Because of the sheer size of the task now ahead, we may have to bow to the inevitable and call in MIT, at least in an advisory capacity.’
This provoked a variety of reactions, mostly dismay. Sandra Jones said, ‘No disrespect, guv, but we are talking about murder, aren’t we? And a cold trail.’
‘All we have is a photograph and an answerphone message,’ Sophia said. ‘On that basis we can’t be sure whether Debbie’s alive or dead.’
‘She looks dead.’
The DCI ignored Sandra. ‘The boffins at Lambeth have be
en analysing the message,’ she said. ‘There’s a ninety-nine per cent certainty the call was made from a phone box on a busy main road.’
‘Narrows it down,’ Marie said. ‘How many phone boxes are there any more?’
‘Got the list here from BT,’ Nina said in a glum tone. ‘More than you’d think.’
‘What about the kid on the bus?’ Zoltan Schneider said.
‘Kim questioned him. “Some bloke” - I quote - walked up to him at a bus stop near the Elephant and Castle and offered him fifty quid if he’d drop the envelope off.’
‘Hey, I wouldn’t ask questions,’ Sandra commented.
‘Exactly.’ Sophia afforded her a brief stare. ‘A similar degree of enlightenment on the photo.’ She shrugged and raised a hand to the greatly enlarged copy on the board. ‘One thing it does explain - we think - is the rope. As you can see, Debbie isn’t tied up as we thought she might have been, but look closely and you’ll see the sheeting underneath the body is secured to the bedposts by that rope. Best guess, it’s a marine tarpaulin with metal rings round the seams for lashing down. The rope goes through four of those holes and around the bedposts.’
Marie Kirtland had her hand up. ‘If she wasn’t tied up, guv, where did the epithelials come from?’
‘Good point; that’s been bothering me too. It’s possible, I suppose, that somebody handling it at some stage managed to give themselves rope burns. We’ll know if the epithelials are Debbie’s or not when the DNA comes through.’ She hesitated again. ‘Don’t let’s get too excited about the tarpaulin. There was no trace of sea or river water on the bed, or indeed anything much, so it may be new. You’re looking at any number of marine supply shops in the London area alone, including one in Croydon. And don’t worry,’ she paused, anticipating the groans, ‘we will be checking.’
‘You’re very thoughtful-looking,’ Marie said.
Kim, who’d been still and quiet throughout the meeting, glanced up and frowned without seeming to see her. She said, ‘Sorry. ‘Scuse me,’ and stood up. She waylaid Sophia at her desk. ‘Guv,’ she said, ‘can I have a word?’
