by Nick Louth
Kletz then went to the kitchen, brought out a biscuit tin and took off the lid. Inside were lots of small polythene bags with tablets inside. ‘What about these? When were you going to tell me about this?’
‘Jesus, Kletz. Give me a chance. It was a last-minute opportunity.’
‘But what if the police come back for a search? How on earth are you going to explain them?’
Juliette looked heavenwards. ‘I’ll take them to Matt’s this evening, okay? I don’t know why you feel the need to panic.’
Kletz shook his head. ‘What if he did kill someone? Sitting there with his music blaring out, like he owns the world. What if they discover your connection to him?’
‘Are you ever going to put a sock in it?’ she said, angrily. ‘Such a worrier!’
‘Yeah well, Juliette, the difference is that I have done time inside. You never forget the noise, you never forget the fear, and you never forget the smell of the shared bucket.’
Chapter Four
It was five o’clock in the afternoon when Cottesloe and Wickens arrived at the terraced house in Walton-on-Thames where Michael Jakes lived. It was their second attempt to visit him that day after his call to the information line. They needed to ring the doorbell several times before a dishevelled figure emerged to let them in. Jakes was about thirty, tall and skinny, his greasy shoulder-length hair and untidy beard flecked with what could have been paint. He ran his hands through his locks as he turned away and tried to find somewhere for the two officers to sit. He had clearly been asleep. He offered coffee and they accepted.
His eyes unnerved them. One seemed to continually drift upwards, and then jerk back to its original position. The officers must have been staring because Jakes said: ‘I suffer from vestibular nystagmus. It affects my left eye. People often think I’m looking at something over their heads. It doesn’t affect my vision too much because I rely on my right eye.’
‘Is there no cure?’ Wickens asked.
‘That’s an interesting philosophical point. I would say it’s the attitude of others that needs curing. As I said, my vision is largely unimpaired though I do suffer from vertigo from time to time. I’m luckier than many others who have a similar condition.’
The two police officers then asked what he’d seen the other night, and he gave them as detailed an account as he could. ‘So just to be clear,’ Cottesloe said. ‘You saw a vehicle leaving the bridge shortly after you heard the splash.’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you describe it?’
‘No. It was quite far away by the time I saw it. I just saw the rear lights and the right indicator, which seemed a bit fast.’
‘Malfunctioning, you mean? Flashing at a higher than normal speed.’
‘Yes. Perhaps its own version of nystagmus.’ He smiled.
‘And this vehicle was not present when you arrived on the island?’
‘No. I would have had to walk past it on the bridge.’
‘And what time was this when you arrived?’ Wickens asked.
‘I don’t know. All I remember is the time of the splash because I looked at my watch. It was 1:56 a.m.’ He tapped his wrist.
‘How could you see?’ Cottesloe asked.
‘Head-torch.’ Jakes touched his own forehead.
‘How long after you arrived on the island was that, would you say?’
‘Ten minutes, fifteen perhaps.’
The two officers were briefly stuck for further questions. ‘So you do a lot of late-night cycling, I understand?’ Cottesloe said eventually as he cast a jaundiced eye over the untidy living room. There were books everywhere, more than the home-made plank and brick bookcases could hold, plus a few dirty dishes, one of which was being eaten from by a small grey cat.
‘I think better at night,’ Jakes said. He went out and brought back two grubby mugs of black coffee. ‘I like to go somewhere quiet, and the riverbank is normally pretty empty at that time.’ His voice was cultured, and thoughtful.
Wickens stroked the cat, which was purring contentedly, and took a quick glance at the statement that had been taken over the phone. ‘You say on here you talked to one of the houseboat residents?’
‘Yes. He seemed to have heard something too.’
‘What is your occupation, Mr Jakes?’ Wickens asked. He was expecting something academic, given the house and the accent. The answer really surprised him.
‘I’m a plasterer.’
The two policemen looked at each other. At least it explained the blotches in his hair and on his fingernails. They had both assumed he was working on a DIY project.
‘Would you recognise the houseboat resident again?’
‘I think so.’
Once they were on their way back in the patrol car, Cottesloe tuned into the radio news. There was a report about the impending release of Neville Rollason from prison.
‘That’s so wrong,’ Cottesloe said. ‘After what he did.’
Wickens flexed his fists. ‘I’d kill him given half a chance. Give me half an hour in a cell with that bastard, and it would all be over. I need my kids to be safe.’ He tapped the centre of his chest.
Cottesloe shook his head. ‘Yeah, but you won’t even know where he is. They’re bound to give him a new identity to fox the vigilantes.’
‘Why are they protecting him?’
‘Oh dear, Andy. How long have you been a cop? Since when has the criminal justice system ever listened to the likes of you or me?’
* * *
Gillard called an initial incident room meeting for three o’clock and roped in Detective Constables Carl Hoskins and Carrie ‘Rainy’ Macintosh. Rainy was fascinated by the tale that Gillard told as he presented the witness statements collected by Cottesloe and Wickens.
He dealt the photographs of the dead body out to the two detectives. ‘There’s plenty to look at, I think you’ll agree. What most interests me are these mesh marks, which he’s got all over. To me it looks a little like a fishing net or maybe chain-link fencing, but I’m open to other ideas.’
‘That’s fantastic cyanosis,’ said Rainy, pointing to the purple stain visible across the face, neck and upper chest. ‘The guy is almost incandescent. It’s like he’s a wee toothpaste tube and all the blood got squeezed to the top.’ Rainy had been a junior doctor in Glasgow for several years before finally throwing in the – presumably bloodstained – towel in search of something a little less stressful and with significantly shorter hours. The fact that she chose to become a police officer caused some of her colleagues to question her judgement, but in the six months she had been with the Surrey force, she had proved diligent, intelligent and marinated in the same kind of dark humour as theirs, required to get through the worst shifts.
‘What does the pathologist say, sir?’ Hoskins asked.
‘I’m waiting for his call. It may be hours yet.’ Gillard looked up at the clock.
‘Well, I’m no pathologist, but I’d say this wee fella was asphyxiated. He didnae drown.’
The two other detectives stared at her.
‘Och, I’m just gassing, sir. But when I was training in Glasgow we had an exam question about the Ibrox disaster back in 1971. Sixty-six dead, crushed when a terrace collapsed. I saw the photos. I was only twenty-one. You dinnae forget them in a hurry. Some of them looked a bit like this.’
Gillard pursed his lips. ‘Okay, that’s interesting. Any ideas, Carl?’
Hoskins inclined his head, and said: ‘Could it be, sir, that this is some kind of industrial accident involving an illegal immigrant? The body being dumped, simply because that’s the most convenient way to be rid of him without any awkward questions being asked by the authorities.’ Hoskins was shaven-headed and overweight, with a weakness for the stodgier offerings at Mount Browne’s cafeteria. Consistently underestimated by colleagues, his diligence on the boring hours of CCTV checking, the bedrock of modern detective work, was valued by Gillard. It more than balanced out the off-colour jokes he was prone to letting slip
.
‘It’s entirely possible, Carl. As I say, we’ve had no one report him missing, which might well indicate he was here illegally.’
‘So what’s the next step, boss?’ Rainy asked.
‘I’ve got an underwater search team looking around both Tagg’s Island and Ash Island, to see if we’ve missed anything in the water, particularly netting. They are also going to check if there are any industrial water intakes nearby on the river, anything industrial that might be connected to this.’
‘What about us?’ Carl asked.
‘We need to speak to the witnesses again,’ Gillard said. ‘There seem to be some inconsistencies. Rainy, I’d like you to follow up on the public appeal this evening, and feed back useful information to the officers going door-to-door. Carl, I want you to look at the ANPR.’
Hoskins was not enthusiastic. ‘There’s bound to be thousands. That’s a heck of a busy road.’
‘I know but we can narrow down the time slot. And I have a couple of ideas for which hits will be relevant.’
* * *
Gillard and Hoskins sat side by side at twin computer terminals, scrolling through pages and pages of registration numbers, hits that had been made on the two number plate recognition cameras on Hampton Court Road. The detective chief inspector sorted it by the timestamp on the left of each entry. ‘I want you to check every hit from half eleven at night until three the next morning.’ He scrolled up screen after screen. ‘Okay, that’s twelve pages of records. We’ve got one camera a mile to the left of the Tagg’s Island turn-off, and one on the Hampton Court bridge 400 yards to the right.’
Hoskins sagged at the prospect as he hit the print button. ‘That’s over 600 records, sir. What are we looking for?’
‘Ignore any vehicles that hit both cameras in quick succession, that’s through traffic. Prioritise any that tripped only one camera. The best would be two hits on the same camera pair, once in each direction. That might indicate a there-and-back journey to the island, or somewhere close to it. We may pick up some residents too, but that’s no bad thing. Anyone about at that time might have seen something.’
Hoskins nodded. He never failed to be impressed by his boss’s analytical mind. There was a tool on the system that would flag up vehicles that had hit two specified cameras. Gillard showed him how to use it, and clicked search.
‘That’s not so bad,’ Gillard said, as a result came up. ‘You’ve eliminated 579. That’s only twenty-seven to check. Bear in mind that some of these will only have hit a single camera once, but it could still be through traffic.’
‘Yeah, the A308 continues north from the roundabout, and those vehicles would miss the camera on the bridge.’
They both squinted at a Google map that showed the three main arterial routes joining at a roundabout. ‘Anyway, see how you get on with that,’ Gillard said.
* * *
Six o’clock on Saturday afternoon. The lurid photographic enlargements from CSI were laid across Gillard’s desk, like a pack of horror cards, eight inches by ten of glossy gore. A life ended, presumably, in terror and agony. Someone nobody missed, and somebody hated. Disposed of like rubbish, tossed into a river. What had caused that diamond pattern on his body? In any criminal investigation there are theories and speculation, ideas and hunches. None of it gets you anywhere until you have some firm facts, some clear evidence, to act as foundations. All he had so far was a splash.
The ringing phone rescued him. Dr David Delahaye.
Gillard was always glad to speak to the Home Office forensic pathologist. On every cadaver he cut through to demonstrable fact, separating assumption from observation.
‘I’ve had a quick look at the chappie,’ he said. ‘My report won’t be ready for a couple of days. But here’s what you need to know to begin your other enquiries.’
Gillard reached for a notepad. ‘Go ahead.’
‘The deceased was probably mid-fifties or so, and seems to be of East Asian origin. Chinese, Japanese, Korean perhaps. In my opinion he had already been dead for several hours before he found his way into the River Thames.’
‘What about those impressions on the body?’
‘I’ll get to that. First things first. What I can tell you for certain is that he didn’t drown – there was no evidence of significant liquid in the lungs, nor of the characteristic foam that one gets in the airways. The cause of death was almost certainly compressive asphyxia.’
‘You mean he suffocated?’
‘Yes, a particular form of suffocation. He simply couldn’t expand his lungs enough to breathe. The symptoms were quite clear, indeed spectacular: profuse petechiae in the conjunctiva and strong cyanosis in the head and neck. Pressure on the thorax was sufficiently intense to reverse the blood flow in some important veins and arteries, some of which can be seen in the upper body. There was also a distended jugular vein in the neck, which again would be caused by excessive pressure. Those conclusions are reinforced by evidence of damage to the body. A broken collarbone, two cracked and one detached rib, plus extensive evidence of bruising on the thorax.’
‘Did the netting cause that, do you think?’
‘Hold on. I think you’re jumping to conclusions, Craig. Let’s disentangle, if we may, those two observations. We cannot automatically assume the marks on the body were connected with the cause of death.’ Delahaye’s habitual caution was informed by knowing that any conclusion needed firm forensic foundations. They might have to be defended under the most rigorous cross-examination.
‘Sorry, David.’
‘Let’s start with what the body is telling us. Compressive asphyxia. The best-known examples were those in the Hillsborough disaster, fans crowded against others for several minutes. The only case I have personally dealt with was in Southwark in 1993. An arrested youth dying when a large police officer knelt on his chest, making inhalation impossible. It usually takes some minutes to kill this way. There are numerous high-profile arrest death cases from the U.S. The literature is extensive. However, although I haven’t yet had chance to review it, I have to say at the outset that the trauma to the body appears to be so severe that I suspect it is beyond human agency.’
‘You mean an accident?’
‘Possibly. Industrial or mechanical, almost certainly. Now that would be unusual for machinery. We must be careful to distinguish between compressive asphyxia, the kind a python would use on its prey, and its cousin traumatic asphyxia. Road accidents, where a vehicle occupant is crushed, say, underneath a lorry, are usually traumatic asphyxia: catastrophic pressure to the chest. The classic cases of traumatic asphyxia are seen where victims are trapped under vehicles that fell off hoists or ramps. In such cases you tend to see other crush injuries, which are not present on this victim. Gouges, grazes, puncture wounds as well. But in this case I would provisionally lean towards some kind of gradually applied but sustained mechanical force.’
‘I keep thinking of the victim being trapped in a net at a weir, or some industrial water intake,’ Gillard said.
‘I did too, initially. But there is no water in the lungs. As I’ve said, he didn’t drown. Despite the alluring fishing net ideas, we have to follow the forensics. While he may have still been alive when he was in the water, if so his head must still have been above the surface at the point of death.’
‘And he couldn’t shout for help because he couldn’t breathe.’
‘Precisely. But, as I say, that is just one possibility. He may well have been dead before his body hit the water. There is no way of knowing, forensically.’
‘The lack of clothing is interesting though,’ Gillard said. ‘If he wasn’t swimming, why wasn’t he clothed?’
‘Not my job to speculate,’ Delahaye said. ‘Now, about those cyanosed contusions. The mesh pattern, as you will have seen from the photographs, is pretty extensive. Whatever it was, he seems to have pretty much been wrapped in it. The pattern is regular and found on most parts of the body.’
Gillard said: ‘Trying
to think about death prior to the river: maybe he was gradually rammed by a car into a chain-link fence?’
‘Possibly, but presumably there would be fence marks only on one side of him. Anyway, that’s your job to figure out. I can only describe to you what has happened to the body. I found quite an array of textile fibres in the nose and mouth, which I’m going to send off for testing.’ He paused and then asked. ‘Any progress on who he is?’
‘None at all that I’m aware of,’ Gillard replied. He pulled up the rather sketchy details that Cottesloe had produced so far. ‘He doesn’t tally up with any of the existing missing persons in our area in terms of appearance, and no one has called in to say he is missing in the last twenty-four hours. I suppose I had better order a mitochondrial DNA test so that we can look for relatives.’
‘If no one comes forward to claim him, you might want to consider stable isotope analysis, which should narrow down where he had originated from even more closely.’
Gillard nodded, recalling that a hit-and-run case that he had been involved with was partially solved by this technique. Stable isotope analysis examined the isotopes of carbon, ingested with food and drink and then trapped in hair, bones and teeth. These are cross-referenced to the geology of particular areas of the world and give a surprisingly accurate trace of exactly where a particular person lives. Only a few universities had the facilities to undertake the analysis, and it always took several weeks to produce results.
‘One other thing, Craig. I found a tumour in his liver the size of a cricket ball. Poor chap might not have known, but wouldn’t have lived long anyway.’
‘Not much comfort in that. All right, I need to get the ball rolling on the tests.’
Gillard knew that Rigby had ordered a public appeal for witnesses this evening and that would be followed up by a door-to-door. The Thames is home to hundreds, particularly in this bucolic locale. Narrowboats, houseboats and barges, as well as some glorious riverside properties. It wasn’t called the Thames Riviera for nothing. There was money here, and power. Motive, maybe. Quite a few who lived along this desirable stretch of river had heard something. A splash. Someone must have seen it.
