by Steve Mosby
Disgusted, and perhaps not thinking straight, she had taken the whole rotten bundle downstairs and set it alight out here on the patio. Staring down at what was left of it now, she said in that same calm voice:
‘The worst thing is that I understood.’
Groves left it to Sean to prompt her.
‘You understood?’
She took a deep breath. ‘As much as you can when you come from a loving home. My parents were good people. Are good people. They never even smacked me, never mind anything else. Eddie’s ... weren’t like that. Like I said, he was troubled.’
No excuse, Groves thought.
No excuse.
‘Was he seeking help?’ Sean said. ‘Treatment, I mean. If he knew he had this problem.’
‘No. Although I think all this’ – she gestured at the burned material helplessly – ‘was partly his way of doing that. Exposing himself to it, maybe, like some kind of test. Or exploring it as safely as he could, without hurting anyone.’
It always hurts someone. But Groves said nothing. He was remembering his impressions of Edward Leland when they’d left the ruins of his sad little house – that it was no kind of life, sitting there getting so drunk that you forgot you’d lit a cigarette and just fell asleep. Now he imagined Leland drinking to blur the memories and the shame, and maybe even his instincts, under the haze of booze.
‘So ... he cried,’ Sean said.
‘Yes.’ Morris nodded fiercely, as though the reaction might mitigate him somehow. ‘He begged me to let him stay. Actually, no, the first thing he did was beg me not to tell anyone. I said I was going to, even though I knew I wouldn’t. But there was no way I was going to let him stay. I couldn’t bear to have that stuff hidden away in the house, and it would have been there if he was. Just hidden away inside him instead. Inside his head.’
Groves looked down at the charred pile of magazines and printouts that rested on the barbecue grille. It was impossible to make out much of what was there. A sheet was angled out halfway up; it looked like the corner of a crudely drawn comic, but most of the detail was lost in the brown curl the fire had made of it.
‘He went on about his childhood,’ Morris said. ‘He promised to get help. The proper kind this time. But he would never have done that. Why would he have changed now, after all these years?’
Why indeed?
‘He was always burying it. What happened to him, it got buried beneath the drugs, the alcohol. And then this.’ She gestured at the barbecue. ‘He spent so much of his life burying things, and it would have been too much to ask, wouldn’t it? For him to start digging it all up again.’
Groves eyed the burned material – he refused to think of it as pornography – and realised there was probably no longer any evidence for what Morris was telling them aside from her word. She had destroyed it. He tried imagining himself in her position, and could understand why she had, but he couldn’t excuse it. Leland had collected this somehow, and now they had next to no chance of finding out where from or from whom. And she hadn’t reported it. If Leland hadn’t died, who knew what he might have gone on to do?
He had died, though, and he’d suffered a terrible death: most likely cut to ribbons and then set on fire. Groves tried to tell himself the man hadn’t deserved that. That nobody did. And of course, it was true. Leland had deserved to be brought to justice, not the appalling things that had been done to him instead.
He kept telling himself that.
‘Ms Morris.’ Sean put his hands in his pockets and looked miserable. ‘I’m going to need your whereabouts for the day and night of the twenty-ninth of July. Dawn to dawn.’
‘That’s easy enough. I was at work for most of it. I have two jobs. I probably caught an hour or two of sleep in the middle.’
Groves picked up a rusty pair of tongs and very gently nudged the stack. The crisp edges fluttered into the basin, and the thought came unbidden:
Were you in there, Jamie?
He looked up at Angela Morris. She still seemed detached from what was happening, although it was clear that below the surface she was struggling. She had not meant to do wrong, of that he was sure. But she had. He tried to think of what to say to her. What was the right thing – the kind thing – to do?
‘I’m sorry you had to see all this, Ms Morris.’
Sean stared at him for a second, perhaps waiting for more – for an explosion – but that was all Groves had. A moment later, Sean took his hands out of his pockets.
‘I’m sorry too, Ms Morris.’ The steel in his partner’s voice surprised even Groves. ‘But I’m going to need you to come with us.’
Mark
The briefing
Early afternoon, and we were gathered in our private operations room. It was large enough to seat twenty officers, but for now there were only the four of us, spread out at different desks. The blinds had been drawn, but one was slightly askew, letting a slice of bright sunlight through on to the carpet. Perhaps the only broken thing in the department so far, I thought.
A large part of the far wall was taken up by a plasma screen. Two photographs, arranged side by side, loomed over us from it: Charlie Matheson, then and now. The image on the left was scanned from the piece of paper Paul Carlisle had given me; Greg had searched through my interview footage for a corresponding angle and extracted a still. With that, and displayed as large as this, it was more obvious than ever. They were the same person.
Pete walked to the front of the room.
‘Okay, we’ve got a lot to get through here.’ He ran his hand through his hair, already looking harried. ‘Mark will deal with the interviews in a few minutes, but for now, let’s start at the beginning. Two years ago. Simon. Talk us through the accident report and post-mortem from back then.’
Simon stood up.
‘There’s really not very much to tell.’ As always, he spoke quickly and precisely, forcing you to pay attention in order to keep up. ‘I’m sure you’ve all read through the file, and there’s little more to it than that. There wasn’t much in the way of real investigation, because why would there be? I’ll run through the photographs of the crime scene, and the ones from the autopsy. I’m aware that we’re not sure of the identity of this victim, so I’ll still refer to her as Matheson for the time being.’
He talked us through the accident, using his tablet to display a map of the terrain where it had occurred, showing the apparent path of Charlie’s vehicle, finishing with the sight that had awaited the first officers to arrive on the scene. The photographs from the file were familiar to me by now, but the blown-up autopsy shots of the unidentified dead woman made the damage to the body even more vivid and horrifying. They seemed to fill the room.
‘The cause of death is fairly obvious,’ Simon said. ‘At least superficially. Certainly nobody could have survived those injuries, and from blood loss at the scene they were judged to be contemporaneous. According to the records, Matheson had been dead for about an hour and a half by the time her remains were transported to hospital.’
Pete frowned. ‘Run through the timescale.’
‘The accident occurred at roughly eight ten p.m. The body arrived at the hospital at nine thirty-seven. The scene had to be processed, of course: photographed and so on. That took about an hour and a quarter. Officers were on scene within ten minutes of the incident. It all fits with the coroner’s initial and secondary estimations.’
Greg held up a pen.
‘How do we know it was within ten minutes?’
‘The accident was called in,’ Simon said. ‘Another driver saw it happen. There was a phone call to emergency services immediately afterwards.’
Pete said, ‘And the driver?’
‘Didn’t remain at the scene.’ Simon nodded, agreeing that it was a meaningful detail. ‘And he was never traced. The call wasn’t recorded, of course – or if it was, it’s long lost. It was a man; that’s the only detail we have. And given the time that’s passed, that’s all we’re likely to find o
ut.’
‘Greg?’ Pete looked at Greg, who was now rotating back and forth on his chair, holding the pen to his mouth.
‘Get me the details and I’ll see what I can do.’ He sighed. ‘But Simon’s right. It’s two years. I’d take it for granted that any data trail is long gone.’
‘Do it anyway. Any CCTV cameras on that stretch of the ring road?’
Greg shrugged. ‘I’ll find out. But again, it’s two years.’
‘Yes. I know that.’ Pete frowned. ‘It’s a coincidence, isn’t it? The driver should have stopped. That would be your instinct, wouldn’t it? Any normal person would. Instead, he phones it in, drives away, and nobody ever thinks to trace him. If we’re assuming someone else was involved at the scene – that it was staged – then that’s our chief suspect right there. Driving off into the sunset as we speak.’
‘Driving off into the sunset two years ago,’ Greg said.
Pete ignored him and turned back to Simon.
‘Okay. We know someone died, but let’s assume for the moment that it’s fishy – that it wasn’t an accident, and that it was staged somehow. Is that possible?’
Simon pursed his lips, considering it.
‘Not my area of expertise, so I couldn’t say for sure. But I would guess that yes, in theory, it’s possible. Matheson – by which I mean our dead woman – definitely went through the windscreen, but she might already have been unconscious or dead in the driver’s seat.’ He glanced down at his notes. ‘The passenger door was open when the vehicle was found. If someone chose the spot carefully, made the right calculations, they could have sent the car over the embankment and jumped out. If they jammed the accelerator, they could have removed the evidence afterwards. It would be a fairly daring manoeuvre, let’s say, but not impossible.’
‘Could she have been unconscious or dead already?’
‘The toxicology reports all came back clean: no alcohol; no drugs.’ Simon looked at the image of the woman’s body on the screen. ‘But given the severity of the injuries – I mean, you can see she could easily have been struck on the head beforehand. It could even have been a fatal blow. The crash would have obscured the damage.’
Across the room, Greg clicked the pen against his teeth.
‘Like a shotgun blast on a paper cut.’
‘Yes,’ Simon said. ‘Thank you for that evocative image, Greg. Something like that.’
‘And the remains were cremated?’
‘That’s correct.’
‘Right.’ Pete folded his arms and sighed. ‘Let’s get a possible name for her, then. Any women missing from around that time? Mark?’
‘Not had time yet,’ I said. ‘I’ve got Paul Carlisle coming in soon, but I’ll do it straight afterwards.’
It would involve a trawl through the archives, but it should be simple enough, especially if I narrowed it down to women matching Charlie’s age and basic physical description. And given the cremation, and the time that had passed, it was probably our only real shot at identifying the woman who appeared to have died in Charlie Matheson’s place.
‘Good,’ Pete said. ‘Anything else from two years ago to discuss?’
Nobody said anything. I couldn’t help noticing how slightly helpless Pete seemed – how the authority of heading an investigation could sometimes appear beyond him, as though he was secretly hoping that someone else would step up and take the lead.
‘Okay. Let’s move into the present, then. The other end of the case. Greg?’
‘Yep.’
Greg stood up quickly, using the pen to tap the tablet he was holding. A second later, the screen on the wall changed to show a map of the area: a satellite image with the roads outlined and named and various landmarks detailed. He zoomed in on the image slightly, and it took a second to resolve, the text flicking up piece by piece. The curl of Town Street, with all the shops named, stretched across the screen before forking into two separate streets towards the top.
Greg scribbled on his tablet, and a cross appeared towards the bottom of the screen on Town Street.
‘This is Addison Grocery, where the woman was found,’ he said. ‘So this is an absolute point in our trace. According to the witness statements from the attending officer – which are second-hand; just what people told him at the scene – she was seen coming from this direction, and she appeared to be drunk or troubled in some way.’
He added a few dashes towards the fork higher up the screen, to represent the direction from which Charlie Matheson had arrived at the scene.
‘I’ve chased up the attending officer. Obviously, at the time he didn’t realise there was anything unusual going on, and the upshot is that we don’t have any details for those witnesses. Crowd gathered; crowd left. We can advertise, of course.’ Greg glanced at me. ‘I presume we’ll be canvassing anyway?’
I looked at Pete. ‘If I can get the money and manpower.’
Pete grunted.
‘Anyway.’ Greg added another cross towards the top left of the screen, beyond the fork, on a triangular area of greenery. ‘Based on the woman’s story, this is likely where she woke up. It’s a stretch of grassland. Extends to the church over there, and then to these tower blocks on the right. So there are roads on all three sides, and footpaths criss-crossing it. It’s a couple of hundred metres each side along the roads, so not huge.’
‘CCTV?’ Pete said.
‘Getting to that.’ Greg tapped his tablet and a series of camera icons appeared on the screen. ‘As you can see, we’ve got cameras along both main roads. We’re checking those for a two-hour period around the woman’s appearance. We’ve already got her on Town Street, and traced her back from there. Observe. I’ll play it forward, obviously.’
He tapped another couple of times and set a video running: a stitched-together patchwork of footage from different CCTV cameras. The first scene showed Charlie emerging from the park dressed in the strange white clothes she’d been found wearing. The footage was relatively dim, and so the clothes stood out: bright and shining; radioactive almost, as though she was being displayed in night vision. She stepped hesitantly on to the pavement out of the shadows cast by the trees behind her. It was a sunny afternoon, but even from a distance you could tell she was shivering, hugging herself slightly.
And it reminded me – immediately and unavoidably – of Lise. Rather than an actual memory, it was an impression of some long-ago morning. Unlike Sasha, Lise had always slept in, and I was usually up before her. I could picture her now, dressed in a long shirt, still half asleep and groggy, walking into our front room as precariously as Charlie Matheson now returned to the world onscreen. Awake but still half dreaming ...
Stop thinking about her.
I shook my head. Concentrated on the footage.
For a few moments Charlie stood still, looking this way and that. She appeared lost and unsure: searching for a clue as to which way to go, but lacking any criteria with which to decide. Eventually she made her choice and began walking in the direction of the camera. As she approached it, passing gradually underneath it and then disappearing, the distress on her face was clear. She was tottering slightly.
‘You can see how disorientated she is,’ Greg said.
‘Which would fit with what she told me,’ I said. ‘She said it was an overwhelming experience for her. I think there’s a good chance that she’d been drugged in some way.’
‘Toxicology?’ Pete said.
‘Blood tests at the hospital came back clean. But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. They weren’t testing for everything at that point. Could easily have left her system, or not been picked up.’
‘Right.’
Onscreen, the clip changed to a new angle, showing Charlie, more obviously staggering now, moving on to the end of Town Street. She barely reached the grocer’s. As she half collapsed there, beside the trays of fruit and vegetables, the impression I got was that her will to keep moving had finally run out. That she had gone as far as she was able.
I watched as a crowd began to gather around her.
‘Okay.’ Greg tapped his tablet, and the film paused. ‘Like I said, we’re running through the footage we’ve got from around the park, looking for any vehicle that resembles an ambulance. An ice-cream van. Anything. But to reiterate, we’ve only got coverage on two of the roads. If she was dropped off via the third, we won’t get the vehicle.’
‘Then something tells me we won’t get it,’ Simon said. ‘Given the level of organisation required to fake a car accident and hold someone hostage for two years, this is not an individual who is likely to fall at the dismount.’
None of us said anything. Because assuming all that, he was quite right.
I was up next. Unlike Simon and Greg, I didn’t really need to use the screen; the interviews were on file, and they could watch them at their leisure. But I did click through so that the display returned to the two images of Charlie Matheson’s face side by side: one clean and clear and slightly fierce, the other scarred and confused and frightened. Then I talked through the scant details that she’d given so far about her period of incarceration and the time around it, concluding with my general impressions of her.
‘I don’t think she’s lying,’ I said. ‘ Whatever actually happened to her, she genuinely believes she’s been dead for the last two years. She still claims to remember the accident.’
Pete frowned.
‘Is it really possible to convince someone of that?’
‘If they’ve been placed under enough duress, and had the story drilled into them over and over again, then it’s possible they would give in and accept it as true. Torture, sensory deprivation, repetition. It all plays a part, and that’s what she’s been describing to me. Taken as a whole, and carried on for long enough, it would give someone a powerful incentive to go along with what they were being told.’
‘What about asking us for mercy?’
