Salt Lane

by William Shaw

  Digging in her bag again, Cupidi pulled out the envelope and removed the photograph. ‘Oh. And there’s this.’

  She stepped forward to the whiteboard and added it to an empty space on the right of the picture of the face of the dead man.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a photo that was recovered from Hilary Keen’s caravan. She kept it above her bed.’

  ‘Her kids? I thought she only had one,’ said Ferriter, peering at the photo.

  ‘Maybe. But neither of them is Julian, I don’t think. He was taken away from her when he was two. They’re older.’

  ‘They look like brothers.’

  ‘I don’t know who it is or where it was taken,’ said Cupidi. What if Julian had other brothers, she wondered? He would want to know.

  ‘What does that say? “We are water”? What’s that?’

  There was a pause until McAdam spoke: ‘I’m not entirely sure I see the relevance, frankly.’

  ‘Neither am I,’ said Cupidi, staring at the photo. ‘Frankly.’

  McAdam turned to Ferriter. ‘So tell me why you think the two deaths are connected?’

  ‘I didn’t say that at all. The point is, we can’t assume Stanley Eason killed Hilary Keen, can we?’

  ‘And if that’s true,’ said Cupidi, ‘then we can’t rule out that the two deaths are not linked in some way.’

  McAdam nodded slowly. ‘Will you look into that, then, Alex? If there’s something that links Eason to the death of Hilary Keen, find it. If there isn’t…’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Given that we have seriously limited feet on the ground, we’ll concentrate our other efforts on the murder of the young man, around which there is considerable sensitivity right now. Right. Actions.’

  Ordering officers to widen the cordon around Horse Bones Farm and question the locals within a three-kilometre radius of the murder location, he picked out one of the older men to look at the gang angle. ‘Get on to the Regional Organised Crime Unit. Cannabis farms, heroin, trafficking. Ask them what they’ve got. Get it all written up on HOLMES before you make a move. Any questions? Oh. And one more task. Who hasn’t got enough on their plate?’ McAdam looked around the room, searching for another officer to give the job to. ‘We need someone to research the North African angle.’

  ‘North African?’

  ‘Yes. Find local communities. Liaise with them. See if anyone knows the victim and can identify him.’

  Cupidi looked around the room. Everyone had already been given tasks. She sighed, raised her hand. ‘I’ll do it.’

  He nodded, snapped his laptop shut and stood.

  Afterwards, in the Ladies, standing in front of the mirror, she called to Ferriter, who was sitting in a cubicle behind her. ‘What is it about Moon, sticking up for him like that? “My fault, sir.”’

  ‘It was my fault. I said I’d do it.’

  ‘It was his job. Not yours. He’s lazy.’

  ‘You don’t know him. He’s nice. He’s asked me out, Saturday.’

  There was the sound of a flushing toilet.

  ‘Did he now?’

  ‘Nothing serious, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously. You were right about one thing, though. We can’t be sure it’s Eason.’

  Ferriter emerged and turned on a tap with her unbandaged hand. ‘We’ll know when he wakes up, though, won’t we?’

  ‘So far, I’ve not heard anything about any bruises on Hilary Keen,’ said Cupidi. ‘And no obvious sign of trauma. We still don’t know how she died. It’s incredibly frustrating. We don’t know anything about her.’

  ‘Weird, isn’t it?’

  ‘And like you said, whoever put her in the water knew exactly what they were doing.’

  ‘Did I say that?’

  ‘In as many words. To my daughter, the day before yesterday.’

  ‘Yeah. I suppose I did. What is it about this one?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s like… you’ve made this woman your personal thing, haven’t you?’

  Cupidi didn’t respond at first. She put her hands under the tap and cleaned them slowly, feeling cold water over her hands. ‘It’s always like that, with a murder, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Ferriter.

  ‘When we were at my mum’s, you asked about that photo. Alexandra, my aunt.’

  ‘Sorry. Yes. None of my beeswax.’

  ‘At the age of sixteen, she disappeared. They didn’t find her for days. When they did, they discovered she’d been sexually assaulted, then left, naked in a ditch.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘Yes.’ Cupidi put her hands under the dryer. ‘Big thing for my mother, obviously, growing up with that happening.’ She spoke over the roar of hot air. ‘It wasn’t like she talked about it, but it was always there.’

  The penny dropped. ‘You were named after a murdered girl.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You grew up with that story?’

  Cupidi nodded.

  ‘Jesus. That’s a bit fuckin’ weird, isn’t it? Shit. Sorry. Didn’t mean to put it like that.’

  ‘Yes. It is.’ Cupidi took her hands away from the dryer and the room was suddenly quiet again. ‘A bit fucking weird.’

  ‘Sorry. Didn’t know.’

  Cupidi paused. ‘I don’t usually tell people.’

  Fumbling with her bandaged hand, Ferriter unzipped her cosmetics bag. ‘Eason had a temper on him, didn’t he?’

  ‘Exactly. He might have been capable of murder, I just don’t see him planning something that carefully. Not so that we’re still trying to figure out how she died.’

  Ferriter tugged the cap of an eyeliner pencil with her mouth. When she had removed it and put it on the sink, she spoke again. ‘When I was assigned to you, I thought you didn’t like me,’ she said.

  ‘Who says I do?’ said Cupidi, unsmiling.

  Ferriter laughed, a high, tinkly laugh, and set about touching up her eye make-up, one-handed.

  SIXTEEN

  Cupidi spent the rest of the morning alone in the incident room, answering other people’s phone calls while she worked through a list of council services, agencies and refugee charities. It was slow work. The men and women she spoke to were either evasive or outwardly hostile to her because she was a police officer looking for information about migrants.

  ‘That’s not the kind of information we share,’ a nice middle-class woman at a charity in Canterbury told her.

  ‘I’m not asking for your bank account details. I’m just trying to talk to a few people.’

  ‘Perhaps if you put the request in writing?’

  A man from the Border Agency at Dover was more helpful. ‘Yeah. Most weeks. North Africans all claim asylum of course. It’s a joke.’

  ‘And where do they end up?’

  ‘All over the place. They’re here for a few hours and then we send them on. Some to detention centres, some to hostels. A load get carted straight off to the Removal Centres. We’ve got a few short-term holding places where we’ll keep them while they’re being processed. Loads of the ones we release abscond anyway before their asylum hearings. You wouldn’t believe the half of it.’

  ‘So he might have been through your hands. Or another centre?’

  ‘Have you checked his fingerprints on the database?’

  ‘There’s nothing.’

  ‘Not one of ours, then. We fingerprint all of them.’

  ‘So if this guy’s an illegal migrant, he’s one of the ones who got through without you knowing?’

  ‘Don’t quote me on that, but it’s entirely possible. There’s only a handful of us. What do you expect? Come on down. Not now – there’s a ferry just coming in on the tide. Best time today is around four. Warn you, though, it’s pretty basic here.’

  Afterwards, a half-eaten cheese sandwich from Greggs in one hand, she spent half an hour improvising a poster, using the photograph of the man and Google Translate to turn the phrase ‘Do you
know this man?’ into Arabic and hoping that what she was pasting made some kind of sense. Then she added Uzbek, Kurdish, Pashto and Persian, just for the hell of it.

  On her way to Dover, she stopped in Sandgate. The dental practice had tracked down Hilary Keen’s former dentist: the one who had retired. She had just moved into a flat there.

  A modern block, five storeys high, on a sweep of coast away from the more run-down bits of Kent’s seaside; the kind of place people went to die. The dentist lived on the third floor. She buzzed Cupidi up. The stairs smelt of disinfectant and nylon carpet.

  They stood in her small living room staring out at the sea through the large French windows that opened onto a balcony that was just wide enough for a small table and chair.

  ‘Wonderful view,’ said Cupidi.

  ‘Isn’t it,’ said the dentist, as if she needed persuading. ‘It’s not often quite this blue. They say it’s going to rain this afternoon. Tea?’

  The flat had been newly painted. Photographs of children and grandchildren had been carefully hung on the wall, alongside a chubby gilded plaster angel.

  ‘You were Hilary Keen’s dentist?’ she called through the door as the woman boiled the kettle in her kitchen. ‘Can I show you a photograph? I should warn you, it’s of the victim after she died. And she had been in the water for several days at this point.’

  Cupidi waited until the woman had returned with a teapot, cups and saucers, and then lifted up the picture.

  ‘Yes. That’s her.’

  ‘You’re sure? That’s the woman you treated?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Do you remember any conversations you may have had with her?’

  ‘She wasn’t really the type to have conversations with. She was very quiet.’

  It was just what the doctor had told Ferriter. She kept herself to herself.

  ‘Anything at all?’

  ‘But I do recall she had awful teeth.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I had put crowns on quite a few of them. Veneer too. I don’t remember how many.’

  ‘That must have been expensive.’

  ‘God, yes. It was. Hundreds and hundreds, all told. It would have been thousands altogether over the years I worked on her. Doesn’t come cheap.’

  ‘So she had money?’ Cupidi thought of the caravan parked in a squalid yard. Curious.

  ‘Must have done. Biscuit?’

  Cupidi declined. The cheese sandwich she had eaten in the office still sat heavily in her stomach.

  ‘Do you remember how she paid?’

  ‘How she paid? No. That was usually dealt with by the front desk. I remember she always asked how much it was going to cost, though, before I went ahead and wrote it down in her diary. As if she wasn’t sure she would have enough.’

  ‘Or as if she needed to know how much cash to bring?’

  ‘I suppose, yes, maybe.’

  A pair of yachts moved slowly across the water in front of them, about a quarter of a mile out at sea. Again, it suggested that money might have been the motive. Eason was broke; Keen kept cash. Then again, where was Keen getting that kind of money from? She didn’t have a bank account. There was no record of her paying tax on any income. So was she doing something off the books that paid her good amounts of cash?

  ‘How long had she been at your practice?’

  ‘I think about five years. Possibly six. Lord, I remember her turning up and thinking, there’s some work to be done here.’

  Cupidi said, ‘So you would have been passed the records from where she’d come from?’

  ‘Well. Yes and no. I think she must have been phobic. She hadn’t been to a dentist for about thirty years. We eventually got her records, which is a miracle in itself, but they were so old and she’d lost so many teeth since that time, they weren’t worth having.’

  ‘Really? So she hadn’t been to a dentist in that long?’

  ‘It happens. You should have seen the inside of her mouth.’

  ‘Five years, you said?’ She had registered with her GP around the same time, Cupidi remembered them telling her. The GP had said the same. She hadn’t seen a doctor for years.

  ‘I don’t know if it’s relevant, but I think she might have been a drug addict,’ said the dentist. ‘Former drug addict, that is.’

  ‘Really?’ Cupidi leaned forward.

  ‘You come across people with teeth like that, occasionally. Heroin users as a rule. Amphetamines, sometimes. They don’t look after themselves, I suppose. I’ve heard that opiates can affect your ability to salivate which means bacteria breed in the mouth more.’ She made a face. ‘Not sure if that’s true or not, but hers were absolutely awful.’

  ‘But she was fixing them? So presumably she was clean by that point?’

  ‘Yes. I assume so. I never saw her… intoxicated, if that’s what you mean.’ The dentist sat with her saucer in her lap, her cup in the air. ‘You know, I’m bloody glad I don’t ever have to look inside a mouth like hers again. It was foul. Years of it, I’ve had. I won’t miss it.’ And she laughed.

  Cupidi walked down the stairs. Keen may have lived in a small caravan, but she had money – or so it seemed. So if she wasn’t poor, why was she living like that?

  She walked to the road and bought herself an ice cream, then sat on the concrete sea defences trying to eat it before it melted, looking at the still sea.

  Afterwards she licked her sticky hand and called the London number of the pathologist; she was surprised to be put through straight away.

  ‘Do you know when you’re going to submit the final report on Hilary Keen?’

  ‘Actually, I’m glad you called,’ the man said, which was unusual in itself. Normally the pathologists hated officers pestering them.

  ‘Why? Have you found something new?’

  ‘No. That’s the point. Still nothing at all.’

  ‘I thought you meant—’

  ‘However, I saw on the news you’ve got the killer. Has he confessed? I don’t mind saying, I’d be deeply interested to know how he killed her.’

  Cupidi blinked into the glare of light off the sea. ‘Conventionally, that’s supposed to be the other way round. You’re supposed to tell us.’

  The man giggled. ‘Yes. Rather. However, this is an interesting one.’

  ‘And the problem is, our suspect’s not saying anything at all. He’s in a coma.’

  ‘Back to the drawing board, then. Fascinating.’

  ‘So you’re still not at all sure how she died?’ She was used to the fact that initial reports from pathologists had a scientific caution about them. But within a few days they were often at least favouring a hypothesis.

  ‘No. And I’m getting the sense that you’re not, either. Let me guess. As the suspect was injured during the arrest, there’s a certain amount of pressure to wrap this up?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Oh dear. Well, I can’t help you there, I’m afraid. I can only say what I see.’

  ‘But she didn’t drown.’

  ‘One hundred per cent not. She was almost certainly dead when she was put in the water. She wasn’t breathing, at least.’

  ‘Wait,’ she said. She was thinking. ‘The fact that you can’t work out how she died… Is that significant?’

  ‘That is a much better question. Is it significant? I don’t know, yet. But it’s certainly interesting, isn’t it? We still don’t have any idea how she died, you see? Beyond indications of some hypoxia in the fingertips – and even that is difficult to assess because of the post-mortem interval – her body is healthy.’

  ‘Hypoxia. Which is an indication of suffocation?’

  ‘Correct. Or hypothermia. Less likely, given that it’s July. But even then, this is not on a typical scale. That might be because of the fact that the body was in relatively warm water for the length of time it was – or that it’s not even a significant indicator. We don’t know.’

  ‘How often does that happen?’

  ‘I m
ean, it’s common enough for us not to be a hundred per cent certain. We can only ever suggest. But this one is certainly interesting. As I said, if we could find out how he killed her, we might have a clue what to look for.’ And he laughed abruptly.

  ‘One more thing. Were there signs she was a heroin addict?’

  ‘Not “was”. Had been, yes. Signs of scarring in veins on her arms and legs. Historic damage to the septum. Some damage to the kidneys.’

  She sat in her car for a minute with the windows open, writing notes, thinking. From her bag she pulled out the photograph of the dead woman’s face; the one the police artist had used for a sketch. She stared at it for a while.

  Hearing a thump, she looked up to see a herring gull standing on the bonnet. It was huge and beautiful, pure white feathers with dashes of colour on its beak, but also somehow primitive. They looked at each other for a few seconds, then she stuck out her tongue at it, switched on her windscreen wipers, and the startled bird flew off up into the air.

  It was a room, with a pile of blankets, jugs of water, a bible and a copy of the Koran, a few leaflets and not much more.

  ‘There you go. These ones –’ he pointed to four young dark-skinned men lying on the floor – ‘were in a parcel truck on this morning’s tide. They’re from Niger. Those two over there are more what you’re looking for.’

  Two older men sat on plastic chairs on the other side of the room. They looked red-eyed and exhausted.

  The Border Agency man was large, a little overweight, but strong-looking for his age. ‘They were hidden under a tarp at the back of a flatbed,’ he said. ‘Got them with the CO2 detection gear. You poke it up into whatever you can’t reach. They had plastic bags over their heads to try and stop themselves breathing. Good thing we found ’em. Probably be dead otherwise. It happens.’

  The men looked passive. They smiled at Cupidi with slightly bewildered expressions on their faces.

  ‘Just, like, plastic bags from some French supermarket. They say they’re both from Tripoli. One had a passport, but it was fake. Only their word for it. Could be from anywhere, really. But they say Tripoli and they’re in with a chance, at least.’

  Both men were scrawny: one was older than the other, grey-moustached, wearing a pink rugby shirt that looked donated, the other smaller, less worn-looking.