by Nick Louth
A group of demonstrators had been maintaining a vigil outside the house for some days. Justice for Poppy, it was called, and they were selling pink poppies to anyone who would contribute to her fighting fund. ‘This was a woman who suffered for justice. Why on earth should she be persecuted by the police and the courts for doing the job that they should have done?’ said a grey-haired spokesman for the group when interviewed by the BBC.
The operation had to be abandoned for the day when it became clear that Poppy Tilling’s pulse was racing, and it would no longer be safe to move her.
Gillard, who had been outside watching the operation, was later called into a meeting with Chief Constable Alison Rigby, the head of Staines adult social care, the chief lawyer for the CPS and a specialist bariatric consultant from St Mary’s Hospital in London.
‘This woman is making a laughing stock of the justice system,’ Rigby said. ‘There has to be a way to arrest her without making her have a heart attack.’
‘It’s going to be difficult,’ Gillard said. ‘Some of the news organisations have rented rooms in the house opposite so they have a good view with telephoto lenses into the bedroom. Effectively that means any forcible attempt to remove her will be filmed and risks us looking brutal.’
‘This new Justice for Poppy outfit seems to have got itself organised fairly quickly.’
‘By the woman herself,’ said the head of social care.
‘I thought we’d taken her mobile phone away?’ Rigby said, looking at Gillard.
‘We have, ma’am, but she has a landline. While we can take the mobile away in the search for evidence, there is no equivalent justification to removing the landline. We’ve been advised that we cannot disconnect it. She now seems to have got herself pro bono a rather effective lawyer who has been making life difficult for us in front of magistrates every time we apply to broaden the warrant.’
‘But she can’t continue to stay there, surely, with a window missing and a section of brickwork removed? The house isn’t fit to live in.’
‘It’s arguably been that way for many years,’ the head of social care responded. ‘As she couldn’t be moved, polythene sheeting has been rigged up to protect her from the elements.’
* * *
It was on the fourth day of the stand-off, which had become a national TV spectacle, that the sad news came through that Mrs Poppy Tilling had suffered a massive stroke. This time the process of removing her was unimpeded, and after her condition was stabilised, the crane winched a platform with her, her bed and some essential medical equipment out of the first-floor window of 32 Linden Avenue. A team of ten paramedics then moved her onto a specially made gurney. Her departure by helicopter was witnessed by thousands thronging the streets, many of them carrying pink poppies.
Her death at the age of fifty-seven was announced that evening. Craig and Sam Gillard were sitting at home watching the news and it was the first item. The Home Secretary, caught by a press pack leaving a Whitehall meeting, said: ‘I am of course extremely sad to hear this news and extend my sympathies to the family. However, it is very important that we bear in mind that we should never take the law into our own hands.’
The final words were almost drowned out by a demonstrator nearby yelling: ‘Murderer! What about Justice for Poppy!’
Epilogue
Verity Winter didn’t stay long in Argentina. She was eventually tracked down to neighbouring Uruguay, from where she was extradited and sentenced to twelve years for abduction, assault and conspiracy to murder. Gary Tilling, having pleaded guilty at an earlier stage and co-operated with the prosecution, was sentenced to fourteen years, ten of them suspended, for conspiracy and manslaughter. Leticia Mountjoy submitted a statement of mitigation on his behalf, which was read out in court. The judge agreed that Gary was very much in the shadow of his domineering mother.
Leroy Ceejay was arrested in a National Crime Agency drugs raid, in which 1.6 million amphetamine tablets were discovered in a lock-up garage in south-west London. Six members of his group were convicted of dealing and possession, though Ceejay himself was cleared of all of the major charges. Anton St Jeanne’s restaurant won its first Michelin star, and now you can’t get into the place at anything less than a month’s notice. Leticia Mountjoy succeeded Verity Winter, and very much enjoys her new job. While moving in to her former boss’s office she discovered a bottle of what turned out to be Rohypnol solution in a locked drawer. Andrew Wickens was fired from the police and jailed for three and a half years for perverting the course of justice.
Gus van Steenis made his way north from Zimbabwe via Zambia and Angola to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he remains beyond the reach of British justice.
Poppy Tilling was buried in a grand piano case at Sunbury Cemetery, the closest cemetery to the place where her son Robert was last seen playing back in 1986. Her last resting place is something of a place of pilgrimage for those who have lost children, and is looked over by an alabaster angel paid for by her supporters from Justice for Poppy.
The body of Robert has never been found.
The body of Neville Rollason was cremated. Michael Jakes, the only attendee at the private ceremony, took the ashes and one night, at midnight, dropped the urn containing them into the Thames from the bridge to Tagg’s Island.
It made just a small splash.
* * *
It was Midsummer’s Night, exactly a year after the discovery of the body in the Thames. Leticia had gone to meet Anton at his restaurant, and after he had finished up, they drove along Hampton Court Road. Anton took the left turn to Tagg’s Island and parked on the bridge. It was very quiet and they both stood looking down into the water, not speaking, but reflecting upon the year that had just passed.
Suddenly there was a movement off to the left near the bank, and a splash.
‘Oh no, not again,’ said Anton.
Leticia grinned at him and looked back at the dark water. There was a silvery V sliding across the faintly rippled surface. ‘I wonder if that’s an otter,’ she said, peering out over the surface of the great river.
‘Better that than a body,’ Anton said.
‘I’ve got a good mind to come back tomorrow night with my camera and see if I can get any pictures. I know someone who would love to see them.’
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank Kate Mitchell and Andy Lynch for their wealth of experience on the probation service. Hester Russell, Head of Crime at GWB Harthills, expertly guided me on legal procedures. Dr Stuart Hamilton once again was kind enough to look over the forensic aspects, and retired detective inspector Kim Booth helped with many issues on police procedure. Other police sources have asked not to be identified, and I have respected their anonymity. Shaun Foggett of Crocodiles of the World, near Burford in Oxfordshire, advised me on the construction of reptile houses, while Craig Surfleet’s knowledge of plastering was invaluable. Rebecca Napier was kind enough to share her nursing knowledge of bariatric patients. Thanks to Tim Cary and Sara Westcott for reading the early manuscript. I am indebted to all of them, and any mistakes remaining are my own.
Tagg’s Island and Ash Island do exist, but I have simplified their geography a little for the purposes of the plot. My thanks go to Alessandra Thorbjorn for the map.
The rather surprising world of mukbang can be found on YouTube, for those with a strong stomach.
Michael Bhaskar and the Canelo team as always were enthusiastic backers of the book. Jacqui Lewis did an excellent editing job. Of course above all is my wife and first reader, Louise, to whom this book is dedicated.
The Bodies at Westgrave Hall
Don’t miss Nick Louth’s next thriller, coming in January 2021.
* * *
Air Force Colonel Lev Rossivsky checked the radar screen, picked up his largest binoculars and made his way up to the roof of the control tower of Kuznetsov Air Base. It was only a single flight of stairs, and led out onto a rough concrete roof. The wind was blowing from the e
ast again, whipping up a fine sand from the endless miles of parched scrubland and leaving a rose-tinted haze that masked the distant sparkle of Lake Balkhash, eighty miles to the south. As he put the Carl Zeiss Jena lenses to his eyes he didn’t even glance at the rusting hulks of obsolete helicopters, or the remains of the 1950s MiG-15 jet fighter that littered the base. He was looking for something that even in all his thirty-year air force experience he had never seen. The base was not much used since the fall of Communism, but still had one great asset that came into play from time to time. It had the largest runway in Kazakhstan. Today, it might well need every inch of it.
Rossivsky peered south-west, looking high in the sky for the glint of sun on aluminium. Then he saw it, a bright silver dot. He watched the approach as the aircraft grew and grew, gradually getting lower, until he could make out the six giant jet engines and could hear their approaching roar. Sixteen pairs of landing wheels appeared underneath the giant jet’s fuselage and nose. The Antonov An-225 Mriya, the world’s largest cargo aircraft, 640 tonnes fully loaded, was coming in to land. With a puff of dust, and the scream of reverse thrust, the Antonov touched down, and rumbled past him right the way to the end of the runway. Bigger than a jumbo jet, the An-225 was originally designed to deliver the Buran space plane to the Baikonur launch site nearly 1,000 miles west, when that now-obsolete project was at the frontiers of space science.
Its cargo today was nothing to do with cutting-edge science and technology, and was no product of human ingenuity.
It far pre-dated that.
Rossivsky turned his attention to the concrete apron. An olive-green articulated low-loader with military markings, growled into life. Plumes of filthy diesel smoke rose from the MAZ-239 as it began to inch forward. The transporter, designed to carry six forty-tonne T-72 main battle tanks, was being tested by an even heavier load. On its back, and in places wider than the vehicle itself, was a 185-foot-long object, roughly the shape of a giant dagger, wrapped in a silver tarpaulin. He had not seen beneath that tarpaulin, for all of the weeks of organisation that had been required to bring it here from the mine of Karabulak, 400 miles to the north east.
The low-loader approached the Antonov whose rear tail ramp had now been lowered. Four large mobile cranes were on hand to manoeuvre the object gently from the low-loader onto two specially made motorised cradles, self-propelled undercarriages each capable of dealing with a 200-tonne weight. Once the object was safely stowed on the cradles, engineers in hard hats used handheld remote controls to drive the irregularly shaped silver-sheeted object inch by inch into the belly of the aircraft. It took an hour to stow it.
The project, codenamed Millia, was the brainchild of a reclusive British-based billionaire, a man who had the money to do anything he wanted.
* * *
RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire is used to some unusual flights, but the arrival an hour before dawn of the An-225, the first ever British landing by this unique aircraft, created quite a stir. A sizeable media presence was there to see the unloading onto the specially made twenty-two axle Nooteboom low-loader and the huge convoy of cranes and marshalling vehicles which were to accompany it on its hundred-mile journey via the M40, M25 and A3. Although about the same length as a wind turbine blade, the cargo was much heavier. The convoy travelled at 10 miles an hour, accompanied by a five-mile tailback of frustrated drivers, until it finally left the A3 and headed into the Surrey countryside. The smaller roads to its final destination had been closed off in advance by arrangement with the police. The UK traffic management plan alone had cost half a million pounds, one of the smaller overheads of the exercise.
Onlookers lined the lanes as the lorry crawled the last three miles to Westgrave Hall. There, waiting for it were three giant eight-wheeled cranes, their jibs already arching into the sky over a half completed building. Teams of high-vis jacketed construction workers, helmeted in orange, oversaw the cargo’s final movement. It was a 300-yard lift from the road and into the building. That was not too far in general construction terms, but for the 240-tonne relic within, it was a monumental piece of travel. Arrangements took much of the day, and it was almost five in the afternoon, when the enormous silver-jacketed cargo was finally lifted from the low-loader, and manoeuvred across into the building that had been designed to receive it.
A lad on a bicycle stopped to watch, amazed at the hundreds of people who had gathered in this normally quiet rural lane. He pointed at the now suspended object, its huge shadow falling across the crowd in the late afternoon sunshine. ‘What’s in that thing?’ he asked no one in particular.
‘Haven’t you read the papers, Steven?’ replied Mary Hill, the verger of St Michael All Saints’ parish church. ‘It’s a giant fossil, 170 million years old.’
‘Is it a T. Rex?’
‘No. It’s a fish-eating plesiosaur, even bigger than a Tyrannosaurus.’
‘Cool!’
Mrs Hill’s husband Colin leaned towards the boy. ‘It is apparently, the largest one ever found. It used to swim in shallow tropical seas in what is now Central Asia.’
‘Why is it coming here?’ Steven replied, scratching his ear.
‘You’d better ask the Russian chap who owns Westgrave Hall,’ Colin replied.
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About the Author
Nick Louth is a best-selling thriller writer and an award-winning financial journalist. A 1979 graduate of the London School of Economics, he went on to become a Reuters foreign correspondent in 1987. He was for many years a Financial Times columnist, and a regular contributor to many other financial titles in print and online. The Body on the Island is his sixth book in the DCI Gillard crime series, and his ninth thriller overall. Nick Louth is married and lives in Lincolnshire.
www.nicklouth.com
Also by Nick Louth
Trapped
Heartbreaker
DCI Craig Gillard Crime Thrillers
The Body in the Marsh
The Body on the Shore
The Body in the Mist
The Body in the Snow
The Body Under the Bridge
The Body on the Island
First published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by Canelo
Canelo Digital Publishing Limited
31 Helen Road
Oxford OX2 0DF
United Kingdom
Copyright © Nick Louth, 2020
The moral right of Nick Louth to be identified as the creator of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Ebook ISBN 9781788637626
Print ISBN 9781800321106
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Map @ Alessandra Thorbjorn
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