Recalled to Death

by Priscilla Masters

  The officers smiled at him. Bald and plump, under five foot six inches tall, Freddie was one of those people with a wonderful talent for making you smile. Maybe it was his face, stuck in an almost permanent grin, or maybe it was his constant merry quips that took the drama out of any situation.

  While he was snapping away, Talith looked at Roberts with concern. ‘What’s the matter with you lately, Geth?’

  Roberts shrugged. ‘Nothing,’ he said, eyes scanning the garden, his face pained and his features tight. He and Talith had always been good mates, both of them at the same point in their lives – about to take relationships further. Except … PC Gethin Roberts looked at his pal but didn’t feel quite the same warmth towards him. He looked around him. Once he’d thought he and Flora might have a garden like this. Now he was not quite so sure. She’d recently gone all negative with him. They’d been going out for more than five years. She’d always been wide-eyed, innocent, easy to impress. But she’d changed. She didn’t even want to … well. He met the sergeant’s eyes, flushed and shrugged. ‘Leave it,’ he said gruffly, staring down at his big policeman’s shoes. Somehow even they didn’t see quite so great and impressive these days.

  Freddie had finished his work. He was packing his equipment away. ‘I’ll get these sorted,’ he said cheerfully, ‘and email them across.’ He held out his hand to shake. Gethin Roberts caught a flash of a wedding ring. No wonder he was so bloody cheerful, he thought, and felt sour inside.

  He and Talith had a superficial look around the shed, moving bags and equipment, sprays of Pathclear, Weed ’n’ Feed, trowels and garden forks. They took the sun lounger outside and shook out all the blankets. There appeared to be nothing of their man’s personal effects except, stashed in a corner, they found one paltry possession: a grubby pink comb with a couple of teeth missing.

  He bagged it up and put a label on it, his frown deepening.

  There didn’t seem to be much for the CS guys to find here. Best seal it up and have a word with the boss. No point wasting public money.

  Randall had driven to the mortuary and was currently staring down at the dead man’s face. Pale fish skin. Eyes forever shut. Mouth almost closed, chin held up by a bandage, but he could just see a wad of cotton wool that had been placed inside the mouth. ‘To mop up any secretions,’ Sullivan had explained.

  Mercifully, the neck wound had a dressing over it. Pointless, yes, but it at least concealed the ugly gash. ‘No point in stitching it up,’ Mark Sullivan had remarked cheerfully. ‘It isn’t going to heal.’

  Randall shivered. He could feel the chill of the corpse-fridge emanating from Charles like the miasma from a medium’s ghost, wrapping cold fingers around him.

  ‘Who are you, Charlie, boy?’ he asked.

  Mark Sullivan, in blue scrubs, was standing behind. ‘You’d have a bloody shock if he answered.’

  Randall simply blew out a frustrated breath and the pathologist continued, ‘No luck then with his ID?’

  ‘Not so far.’ Randall’s eyes moved down over the white paper shroud to the label tied around the big toe of Charles’s left foot, the ultimate indignity, and on it no name, simply:

  Body 301

  Cause of death: Homicide.

  Date of Death: Thursday, 11 September

  Post-mortem: Monday, 15 September

  Sex: Male

  ID: Unknown

  It was not much of an epitaph and brought home the man’s complete anonymity, which, according to the few witnesses who had known him alive, was just what he’d wanted. Why else would he keep his name a secret? More than ever, Randall wanted to find out who he was before they put him six feet under. He didn’t want him in an unmarked grave.

  Mark Sullivan put a friendly hand on his shoulder. ‘I’ve got some news about the prosthesis, though not our man’s identity. It was used in Switzerland in the nineties so I think skiing was responsible for the fracture.’

  Randall nodded. ‘We’ve had that confirmed by someone who knew him.’

  ‘Someone knew him?’

  ‘Yeah. He did some gardening for her. But here’s the thing, Mark. She didn’t know his name. He never told her.’

  ‘Odd.’ Then he grinned at Randall. ‘So my guess was right. It was the result of a skiing accident. I only wish I’d put money on it.’

  But Randall obviously wasn’t himself. He simply grunted, failing to rise to the bait.

  Mark Sullivan looked at him for a moment before he continued, ‘They use a different prosthesis nowadays, so we can be fairly sure of the period of the injury.’

  Randall turned around. ‘Do they keep records?’

  ‘Yes, but they don’t seem to be able access them just at the moment, so we’re no further forward.’

  Randall was irritated. ‘Don’t they keep a database?’

  ‘Yes – somewhere – but there are a lot to get through. There are a lot of skiing accidents, Alex. Their records are not on a computer database so it’s a matter of going through them by hand.’

  He gave Randall a swift glance. Definitely not himself.

  As though to underline that, Randall looked down at Charles and felt a sudden burst of frustration. ‘Who are you really?’ Then, ‘Who were you? What were you? Why has it been so important to keep your identity a secret?’

  The pathologist gave a chuckle. ‘He’s not going to tell you, Alex. You’re going to have to find out through good detective work. And where does the “Charlie” come from?’

  Randall pushed the shelf back into the mortuary fridge. ‘Martha,’ he said. ‘She calls him Charlie.’

  Mark Sullivan was curious. ‘Why?’ He slammed the door shut.

  ‘Well, Charlie Chaplin, the tramp, you know?’ Randall followed the pathologist back into his office and they sat and had a companionable coffee together.

  Mark Sullivan started asking questions. ‘You know nothing more about him, Alex?’

  ‘Well – a little. Not very much,’ he admitted. ‘The nuns knew him but it doesn’t seem they ever really engaged him in conversation, although they say that Charles was a Catholic. I wonder whether he ever made a confession.’

  ‘Are they and the woman he gardened for the only ones who knew him?’

  ‘No. The girls at McDonald’s gave him chips sometimes. A lorry driver gave him a lift out to Moreton Corbet. It seems to have been pure chance that he ended up there. The woman he did some gardening for was an ex-headmistress and he dossed sometimes in her shed. Oddly enough, she described him as cultured.’ He smiled to himself. ‘That’s why I think “Charlie” is a little irreverent. “Charles” seems a bit more dignified.’

  ‘I see. Any other clues?’

  Randall shook his head and sat back in his chair. ‘What I want, as well as his name, is his backstory. I want to know why this man, who appeared to know about gardening and hummed opera and went skiing, became a vagrant in the first place. And even more than that I want to know who cut his bloody throat.’ He put his coffee cup back on Mark Sullivan’s desk and rose. ‘I ought to be getting back,’ he said. ‘I won’t find my answers here.’

  ‘You might,’ Sullivan rejoined, seeing him to the door. ‘You never know.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  The follow-up visit to McDonald’s wasn’t a great deal of help. One girl, Lisa, appeared to remember him but had obviously classed him generically as ‘one of the tramps’ and not paid particular attention to him.

  PC Delia Shaw decided to visit the charity shops to see if anyone could identify the coat and trousers The Man had been wearing. This was the fourth one she’d visited that morning but really she should have started here. The shop, on Wyle Cop’s steep incline, gave the clue. It was called Missing, and its windows sported photographs of people with the text, Lost to their families. Underneath the pictures and text was another objective. Help us to reunite them.

  She pushed open the door. In her heart of hearts she was dubious that this line of enquiry would bear fr
uit. The Man might have been given it by anyone or even stolen it from one of the clothes depositaries which had appeared at the recycling plant, in town car parks and outside supermarkets. Even if he had acquired it from a charity shop, she didn’t think the assistants would necessarily remember him. There was a huge turnover of part-time helpers in these shops. Even if the assistant did remember him, chances were that she wouldn’t be able to add anything to their paltry store of facts about the dead man. So as she approached the sales desk she was not optimistic, until she showed the assistant a picture of the coat and watched her eyes light up in recognition. Shaw was due some luck and she felt hopeful. Then reality stepped in. The Man, whom DI Randall appeared to now call ‘Charles’ for some God-knew-what reason, had made a deliberate attempt to keep his identity a tight secret. He’d never told anybody his name or any of his personal details. Having succeeded in keeping his secret for a number of years, he was hardly likely to have blabbed it all out to the girl behind the counter in a charity shop. Even if the shop was called Missing.

  It was hard to say exactly how old Phoebe Walker was. Perhaps in her late thirties, but possibly younger. She could have been in her forties or even her fifties – a big woman who wore big boots and a full-skirted homespun dress, and tied her hair back in a thick brown ponytail with an elastic band.

  PC Shaw held up her ID and said her bit. ‘We’re investigating the death of a vagrant whose body was found in this coat. We’re wondering whether it came from a charity shop …’ She looked around vaguely. ‘Perhaps yours or one of the others.’ So far, although the assistants in every shop had displayed prurient curiosity, no one had given her any information. And she was losing heart.

  Phoebe Walker examined the coat slowly and very carefully, her mouth pursed and her hands touching the rough tweed. ‘I gave it to him,’ she said tentatively, as though she expected a scolding for her actions. ‘I didn’t think Mr Knebworth would mind. The man looked cold and, after all, our charity’s aimed at the homeless and people with no fixed abode.’

  PC Shaw took a leap into the dark. ‘Did you give him a pair of trousers too?’

  The girl nodded. ‘They belonged to Mr Knebworth,’ she said and repeated, ‘I didn’t think he’d mind.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  PCs Sean Dart and Gary Coleman were down amongst the homeless in Silks Meadow, a small field in Frankwell near the new council offices. Most of them had erected some sort of home – a sheet of plastic, a bin liner over a sleeping bag; a few had a huddle of blankets, while others simply sat, head in hands. It was eight p.m.; dusk gave the field an air of surrealism, of faded lives, of hopelessness, squalor and despair. The weather was cool but not cold and yet there was a depressingly damp chill that seemed to emanate not only from the nearby river and the ground but from the people themselves. There was a strange feeling of absence, of a void, a vacuum of life which both PCs found disturbing.

  Walking through the damp field, they had a feeling they had entered the land of the undead. That they were walking through war-wounded men after one of the great slaughtering battles: the battle of Shrewsbury, the Somme, Dunkirk. It was as if life and hope had been sucked out of them by events. Some of them met them with red eyes, but most looked away. A vague scent of marijuana clung to the air. Many were smoking, roll ups mainly; a few swigged from bottles. The background sound was a soft mumbling but there was no conversation. No words. They mumbled to themselves and spoke inside themselves, not to each other. There was no communication. Most patently didn’t want to engage with the two officers either.

  So Coleman and Dart strode through the field, taking care not to step on the few who were already unconscious, stretched out face up as though sunbathing on a beach. Even though the two officers were in uniform, wearing Day-Glo vests as well as a girdle of equipment, which clanked as they walked, many seemed not to notice them, aiming their gazes beyond them as though the two policemen were invisible or perhaps not in their world.

  Perhaps they inhabited an alternative universe. Even though one of their loose family had died a violent death, no one seemed to be interested in the intruders or want to engage with them. They addressed a few but there was only negation, a shaking of heads followed by a drop of the face and a shrug. No one told them anything. PCs Coleman and Dart looked at each other, incredulous. They simply couldn’t believe it. By their calculation The Man had been hanging around Shrewsbury for around five years. The nuns’ statements combined with the vague statements from the girls at McDonald’s suggested this, even though he had only been helping Genevieve Dreyfuss out for three years. He had certainly been one of their number for a while, yet amongst his fellow vagrants no one seemed to want to find out who had killed him.

  Except … He was young – looked no older than fourteen, with darting blue eyes and a mop of sandy hair, sitting on the grass propped up against a litter bin. Unlike the others, he didn’t smell unwashed, but of deodorant. His clothes, ripped jeans and a hoodie, were relatively clean and his eyes held a spark of something. Life? He eyed the two officers uncertainly then nodded. They waited for him to say the first word.

  ‘You ’ere about him? The one what got …’ He drew his finger deliberately and slowly across his throat.

  They nodded, resisting the temptation to play stupid, ask him about whom or to alternatively play the policeman and question him about his age, his name, his origins.

  They simply prompted, ‘Did you know him?’

  As expected, this provoked a shifty gaze out across the river where Darwin’s sculpture rose like a dinosaur’s curved spine. ‘Sort of.’

  More or less the answer they’d been anticipating.

  Gary Coleman hunkered down beside him. ‘What did you know about him?’

  The blue eyes turned shifty.

  Coleman tried again, appealing for information. ‘We haven’t even been able to find out his name,’ he said.

  The boy’s eyes were bright. ‘He used to talk in his sleep, you know. I heard him.’

  Coleman struggled to appear nonchalant. ‘Did he say anything that might help us find his killer?’

  ‘I don’t know, do I?’

  Inside, Coleman almost groaned. He had to put this on – this bravado. ‘What did he say?’

  The boy looked at him, frowning, as though disturbed by his story. ‘Stuff like he’d scream and say “not you” and then he’d say “splash”. And then, “Take the money. Have it. Have it all.” Then, “Knock, knock, knock, I must finish these shoes.” He mimicked a soft, wild voice, his accent and words different from his native tongue. He was a good mimic.

  ‘And then …’ He hesitated, suddenly realizing this had a value. The sparkle in his eyes was now pure greed. Was there anything in this for him?

  Dart fingered a twenty-pound note. It’d go on smack or hash, spliffs or fags and cider, the banquet of the vagrant, but hey … He handed it to him.

  The boy took it, scanned it as though examining it for fraud. Cheeky bugger, Coleman thought. Then the boy half closed his eyes and sniffed as though already breathing in a joint.

  They wouldn’t get much more out of him, was Coleman’s next thought. He was wrong.

  Their boy spoke again. ‘“One hundred and five, north tower,”’ he said, adding his own interpretation. ‘I reckon the poor guy’d been in prison for some time.’

  But Coleman and Dart knew he hadn’t. They’d have had his fingerprints if he had, but no need to say this to the lad. ‘Did he ever say a name?’

  ‘Yeah. Lucy. He cried it a couple of times but when he woke up and I asked him who Lucy was he looked blank.’

  The two officers exchanged puzzled glances.

  ‘Anything more?’ PC Sean Dart asked, but the boy shook his head.

  ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Nuffin.’

  They took his details and advised him to use the shelter as a base for applying for work. This earned them a glance that would wither a flower. Before they left, Dart bent over and spoke softly in the boy’s ea
r. ‘Is there anyone looking for you?’

  Unexpectedly, the boy’s eyes filled with tears as he shook his head. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘You’re sure there’s no one out there wondering where you are who would want to know you’re safe and well?’

  Again the boy shook his head, and they left. They hadn’t got much but it was something more to add to their paltry little stack of knowledge.

  ‘Did you get it all down?’

  Sean Dart nodded. Every word,’ he said.

  Friday, 19 September, 9 a.m.

  It had been in desperation that Randall had released pictures of the child’s shoe and also of the war medals, but it had brought in a shower of phone calls all telling them the same thing – details they already knew about the various campaigns for which the medals were awarded. Though their callers were trying to be helpful, not one of them was able to shed any light on the identity of Charles and Randall felt even more frustrated. They’d been deflecting phone calls from ex-servicemen for hours. Maybe releasing pictures of the medals hadn’t been such a great idea after all.

  He listened with interest to Coleman and Dart’s account of their walk amongst the homeless but could not make any sense of it. His eyes narrowed at the description of Miss Dreyfuss’s garden shed but, like Roberts and Talith, he agreed that there wasn’t much point in stripping the place bare. It sounded as though they had done a pretty good job. They gave him the comb almost apologetically and assured him there was nothing more to find.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘For now we’ll seal up the shed. If we need to we may get the crime scene investigators to run through it but …’ He made his decision. ‘For now we’ll wait.’

  Randall was silent for a moment, his gaze wandering around the room. Then he spoke abruptly. ‘I thought I’d go back out to Moreton Corbet this afternoon. I want to speak to Mr Sharp. Come with me, PC Dart.’

  Sean looked startled at this but nodded. He felt a little apprehensive at the invitation. Was it a chance for DI Randall to make some negative observation? He didn’t want to move on. He’d found a niche here. OK, he wasn’t exactly welcome yet but he thought he could carve a life out here and leave the past behind him. He clung on to his mantra. After the nightmare comes the dream. And he knew who he was dreaming about.