by Steve Mosby
‘No idea. She didn’t know what it meant either. Or else she can’t remember.’
‘And why?’ Pete folded his arms. ‘Why do all this to someone?’
‘Lots of sick people in the world,’ Greg said.
It was my turn to ignore him. Instead I explained what Eileen had told me: that the story might touch on the truth without necessarily being entirely accurate; that some of the details might be true, but not the whole.
‘If the ambulance story is right, there’s at least two people involved: the “kind” man in the back, and the driver, who could be the one who cut her. For the rest of it, all I’d be prepared to say is that I think it’s likely she was abducted by someone, probably held underground somewhere – a basement, perhaps – and the scars speak for themselves. Beyond that ... possibly a religious element, but I wouldn’t be confident.’ I felt a bit awkward, as though I were attempting a profile. ‘I have this on advice, by the way.’
‘From who?’
‘I talked to Eileen Mercer. I don’t have a background in counselling, and I wanted an expert opinion before I went back for a second interview.’
‘Eileen,’ Pete said. ‘Right.’
‘Charlie Matheson is vulnerable, possibly delusional. I decided I needed some advice.’
The room was silent for a moment. I could see that the mention of his former boss’s wife had rattled Pete a little. He and John had been friends once; I wondered whether they’d even stayed in touch after the events of a year and a half ago. Or perhaps Pete was thinking of all the ways he didn’t quite measure up to the shadow Mercer had cast. The rest of us were silent with him. I had no idea what Greg and Simon were thinking. For my part, I was thinking that I probably shouldn’t have mentioned it.
Eventually Pete shook his head slightly.
‘Okay. We’ve all got our actions and priorities. We’ll resume at five, unless anything changes in the meantime. Let’s find out who the original victim was. And where the real Charlie Matheson has been all this time.’ He looked up at the plasma screen, talking almost to himself now. ‘And let’s find out why.’
Mark
The missing
Shortly after the briefing was finished, I got a call through that Paul Carlisle had arrived in reception. I went down to meet him. Despite being dressed in jeans and a jumper now, he somehow looked even more dishevelled than yesterday. They hadn’t been sleeping well, he’d told me then, and if anything, it appeared that the situation had worsened. His hair was in disarray, and there were dark rings around his eyes. The man looked haunted. I supposed he was.
‘Thanks for coming in, Paul,’ I said, when we were safely ensconced in an interview room. I’d got a glass of water for him, but so far he’d left it untouched on the table between us. ‘And thank you for this.’
I passed him the piece of paper that he’d given me yesterday: the photograph of his wife.
‘I wanted to show you a picture myself. It’s of the woman in the hospital. Do you mind?’
It felt polite to ask even if we both knew he didn’t really have much of a choice.
‘No. Let me see.’
‘I should warn you, the injuries she’s received might be a little shocking at first glance.’
‘It’s fine.’
I handed him a printout I’d taken from the interview footage. It was the image Greg had singled out, where Charlie now was holding her head in the same position as Charlie then. I thought the resemblance was incontrovertible, but then I hadn’t known her two years ago, and I wanted to see the reaction of a man who had.
Despite the apparent bravado, Carlisle took the piece of paper hesitantly. I watched his face as he looked at it, noting his obvious determination to remain impassive. Perhaps he thought there was no way this could really be Charlie, not after everything that had happened, but he seemed set on denying it regardless, as though by pretending this wasn’t happening he could somehow make it go away. The realisation that he couldn’t hit him immediately. I watched him struggle to control his emotions. Maybe he could keep his expression blank, but there was no way to hide the way the colour drained from his face.
He was silent for a few moments.
‘It looks like her,’ he said finally. ‘But I can’t be sure.’
‘No? Take your time, Paul, please.’
‘I don’t need any more time.’ He handed the printout back to me. I waited a second before accepting it. ‘It looks like her, but it’s impossible to tell from a photograph.’
‘Would you be prepared to see her in person?’
‘No.’
It had been an off-the-cuff idea – I hadn’t been planning on taking him to the hospital, not necessarily – but the speed of his reply surprised me.
‘I know this is hard,’ I said.
‘Do you? Do you really?’
For a moment I considered saying actually, yes, and telling him about Lise, but I stopped myself. It was too personal to divulge, but more to the point, did I really know? Lise hadn’t returned from the dead. If she was haunting me now, it was as a memory, and while that might be disruptive in its own way, at least a memory didn’t threaten to turn up on your doorstep.
‘I know this isn’t going away,’ I said. ‘And I think we both know that the woman in the photograph I just showed you is your wife, Charlie Matheson.’
‘You’re telling me now? You were asking me before. And I’m saying I’m not sure.’
‘All right.’ There didn’t seem any point in pressing it, especially as I couldn’t force him to go to the hospital. ‘But I want you to understand what I said. This isn’t going away, Paul.’
‘I know.’
He sounded utterly miserable. While I understood and sympathised, it took me back to what Charlie had said in the interview this morning about his reaction to the news. Oh? Not pleased, then? She might as well have said, The man who I loved, and who loved me, would prefer that I was dead. And the harsh reality was that that was probably partly true.
As if reading my mind, Carlisle started talking.
‘I mourned for her, you know? I grieved. It felt like the heart had been ripped out of my life. At the funeral, I tried to speak – to read a speech – and I couldn’t because I was crying so much.’
‘I understand.’
‘And what the fuck was I supposed to do? Do that for ever? I moved on. Jesus, I’m sorry, it feels like I should be sorry, like you’re expecting me to be sorry, but what else should I have done?’
‘Nobody’s blaming you for that, Paul.’
‘And now ... this.’
‘I understand,’ I said again.
‘How? How can this have happened?’
‘We don’t know yet.’
I ignored his tacit admission that it really was happening. He gestured to his face, moving his hand around to indicate the scars he’d seen. He spoke quietly.
‘Why would someone do that?’
‘We don’t know,’ I said again. ‘And so I have to ask. Paul, can you think of any reason why someone might want to hurt your wife?’
He lowered his hand, looking aghast now.
‘God, no.’
He talked a little more about how ridiculous the idea was, and I believed him. On the surface, there was nothing there to go on. I already knew that neither of them had ever been in trouble with the police before. Charlie had been a postgraduate secretary in the sociology department at the university; Carlisle was a manager at a pharmaceutical company. As far as I could tell, they were both above board. Just normal people.
At the same time, the question Pete had asked at the end of the briefing had stayed with me. Never mind for a moment what had happened to Charlie Matheson; why had it happened? Not in the specific sense of the perpetrators’ motives for putting her through what they had, but the question of why they had targeted her in particular? Because it seemed clear that she hadn’t been chosen at random. There had to be a reason why, out of all the possible people who could have been abduct
ed, they had singled her out.
But if so, Carlisle didn’t seem to know.
‘She had no enemies,’ he said. ‘Ask anyone. She could be quite forthright. She had a temper, you know? But it was more confidence than anything else. Nobody hated her.’
I nodded. Ask anyone. Tomorrow I would have people do just that. Friends, colleagues, the lot. But for the moment, I thought Carlisle was telling the truth, at least as far as he knew it.
‘There’s one more thing,’ I said.
‘Oh God.’ He looked at me with a mixture of exhaustion and anger. ‘What?’
‘The day of the accident. She left for work as usual in the morning?’
‘Yes.’
‘But she called in sick.’
‘Yes. I know that.’
‘And you have no idea where she went that day, or what happened to her?’
‘No.’
He leaned back and folded his arms. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen a man look so tired and defeated. For a moment he seemed almost scared. But then he delved into the blackness of that past time, and when he spoke next, I saw a trace of the man who had loved and grieved and mourned.
‘I guess none of you cared enough to find out.’
Let’s find out who the original victim was. And where the real Charlie Matheson has been all this time.
Easier said than done, of course. By the time we reconvened in the operations room at five, we were hardly any further forward than when we’d started.
‘It would have been a bit of an ask anyway, after two years,’ Greg said, ‘but there’s no CCTV along the stretch of ring road where the accident took place. More depressingly, the park’s also a total bust.’
He’d worked through all the gathered footage and come up with nothing. Plenty of vans, of course, and even two actual ambulances, but none that appeared suspicious or that stopped anywhere nearby. While it was still possible that one of them was our vehicle, Charlie had clearly been dropped off from the road with no camera coverage. It seemed to confirm what Simon had said earlier about the organisation and attention to detail of whoever was behind her abduction and reappearance. They – and I was assuming at least two perpetrators for the moment – weren’t about to make a trivial mistake like being caught on film.
Of course, that didn’t mean they hadn’t been caught at all.
I said, ‘I’ve got two officers working the nearby blocks of flats. Wherever the van stopped, someone would have had to carry her on to the field, and that’s the kind of thing people would remember if they saw it.’
‘It’s also the kind of thing people would have reported at the time,’ Pete said.
‘True. But it’s still our best chance now the CCTV’s come back clean. We’ve also got a placard out for witnesses on the high street. Early days, but we’ve had nothing back yet from either action.’
I’d also had someone compile a list of all the hospitals within a radius of roughly one hundred miles and begin calling round. Although Dr Fredericks claimed to have checked this, I doubted he’d have cast his net quite so wide, and I was keen to eliminate the possibility that Charlie really had been a patient somewhere all this time, and that the story she’d given us was a total concoction. It wouldn’t explain the scars, of course, or the victim found at the original scene, but I wanted to open up every route available to me. Nothing had come down that one so far.
‘In terms of the identity of the victim found at the scene of the accident, again I’ve drawn a blank. I’ve looked at the missing persons reports from a couple of months around that date. There are a lot.’
A surprisingly high number, in fact, but once I’d filtered for age, sex and physical appearance, there were far fewer to deal with: only three women who might conceivably have been mistaken for Charlie Matheson after receiving such a head injury and being found in such circumstances. But all of them had since been accounted for.
‘So either I’ve not gone back far enough,’ I said, ‘or we’re looking at a victim who for some reason wasn’t reported missing at the time – or at least not until much later. So that’s the next stage. Expanding it out along those lines.’
Which would not be easy. The sort of people who could go missing without being reported tended to be the ones who had already dropped off the radar of society: the lower edge of the sex industry; the homeless; immigrants without official records. It wasn’t a task I was relishing.
‘And Carlisle?’
‘Is not happy about the situation,’ I said.
Pete grunted. ‘That’s understandable, I guess. His new partner’s pregnant?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, the whole thing certainly sucks for him, doesn’t it? But at least Charlotte Matheson is still alive, and she’s our main responsibility right now. Any idea of motive?’
I shook my head. ‘Carlisle’s got nothing. And as far as I can tell, there’s nothing obvious about either of them. I’ll get someone on to their acquaintances tomorrow, get them all talked to. Because there has to be some reason that someone chose her.’
‘Yes,’ Pete said.
‘There’s something else too. A detail in the file I saw at the time. It niggled at me when I first read it, but I didn’t appreciate the significance.’
I told them about the information in the report about Charlie’s missing day: that she’d called in sick to work on the morning of her abduction, but according to her husband had left as usual.
‘Again, Carlisle’s got no idea,’ I said. ‘And at the time, it was just a discrepancy. But obviously, given what we know now, that’s important.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘I’ll go back to her tomorrow morning,’ I said. I would have to be careful, of course, but that detail could be the key to all of this. ‘And I’m going to find out where she really was that day.’
Groves
I’ve been through hell, sir
The end of the day.
It felt to Groves as though it had gone on for ever. The discovery of the burned material at Angela Morris’ house had knocked the energy out of him. At the train station, the concourse was busy with a thrum of people, but the sound of their mingled conversation and rolling suitcases drifted around him, only half heard. He bought coffee and a newspaper, then headed through the barriers, out into the cool waft of air on the platform. His train was waiting on the left, doors open, the interior sickly and yellow in the gloom.
Inside, a handful of other travellers were spread out down the carriage, tops of heads visible above the seat backs. Nobody was talking; there was just the quiet vibration of the engine, low and ready and somehow everywhere at once. Groves wandered a little way down the carriage and found a seat. The table in front of him was covered with an old newspaper, the pages splayed out at weird angles. He scooped them together and pushed them on to the seat opposite, then spread out his own and had a sip of coffee so hot that it set his upper lip singing.
He had his back to the doors, but still, he was suddenly aware of a presence behind him. Some kind of difference in the air quality, perhaps. He turned around in his seat and saw that a man had got on and was now leaning over and talking to a young woman sitting closer to the doors.
The man was probably in his early twenties at most, but looked considerably older. Along with the patchy stubble of a teenager, he had the sallow skin and mussed, lank hair of an addict. He was dressed in faded army fatigues, the green fabric greasy-looking in places, and he had a grey knapsack slung over his shoulder. He was bent over beside the woman, intent on her, his hand circling the air on a scrawny wrist. The woman was doing her best to ignore him: headphones in; staring studiously at the iPad she was holding.
Begging for change, Groves thought. Some of the homeless people did it here – paid for a platform ticket and harangued a captive audience for as long as possible before security staff moved them on. But this man was also just by the doors, and the train was about to leave. It was perfectly possible for him to make a last-minute grab fo
r that iPad, leap off and dart back towards the crowds. Which was what some of the homeless people also did.
Groves stood up and walked down the aisle towards them.
‘Everything all right?’
The girl looked up at him a little helplessly, not wanting to say no for fear of provoking the man, but clearly not wanting to say yes either. The expression on her face answered Groves’ question as far as he was concerned. The man straightened up and turned to him as he approached.
‘Police,’ Groves said. ‘You shouldn’t be on here and you know it.’
He was expecting the standard junkie four-step defiance. When you tried to move people on, they tended to keep a certain distance and say they weren’t doing anything wrong; then they demanded an explanation and complained; then they insulted you; finally, when you moved towards them, they ran. But instead of doing any of those things, the young man looked helpless. In fact he looked like he was about to cry.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Thank God! I’m sorry. Please help me, sir.’
His reaction pulled Groves up short.
‘I can’t help you, mate, sorry.’
The man took a step away from the woman, holding his hands up. There was a desperate expression on his face, as though this was his last chance and he needed to make Groves understand.
‘I just need fifty pence.’
For a second, Groves stared into his eyes. Although watery, they were the exact same clear blue that Jamie’s had been, and beneath the grime, his hair was the same length and colour. In fact, up close he looked a lot younger than Groves had first thought – late teens, maybe younger. Too old to be Jamie grown up, of course, but close enough to cause a momentary jolt – for the ridiculous idea this could be him to briefly enter his mind.
Groves shook it away.
‘Sorry, mate. You need to get off now.’
‘Please. It’s so important.’
‘I can’t help you.’
How could fifty pence be so important anyway? It wouldn’t help the boy in any realistic way. And yet there was something about the desperation on his face. For whatever reason, he clearly believed that it would make all the difference in the world to him. Maybe it was that, or just the partial resemblance to Jamie, but Groves found himself reaching into his pocket.
