‘I knew I knew him but I couldn’t place him,’ Mogford said.
‘But then you did place him,’ Heap said.
‘From the Save Salthaven Lido Campaign, yes.’
‘Not before?’
‘Not that I’m aware of,’ Mogford said.
‘Not from that beach holiday you went on?’
‘Was he on that?’
‘Was that your first visit to the health club?’ Gilchrist said.
‘It was. First and last.’
‘Why did you go?’
‘Check it out. I wasn’t impressed so I didn’t go back.’
‘You didn’t go specifically to see Mr Gulliver?’ Heap said.
‘Why would I want to do that?’
‘You tell us, Mr Mogford.’
‘Well, since it’s your proposition not mine that I went specifically to see Mr Gulliver, I think you should answer that. Why would I want to see him?’
‘Perhaps you were asked to have a meeting with him?’ Gilchrist said.
‘I don’t know about you but I’m not in the habit of conducting meetings in Jacuzzis.’ He leered. ‘Not business ones anyway.’
Gilchrist was having trouble matching the cocksure man slouched in a man-sprawl in front of her with the voyeur who had a breakdown in Crete.
The custody room door opened and Sylvia Wade, blushing, put her head in the room. Gilchrist turned and shooed her away. The door closed but Wade’s face was still visible in the viewing rectangle at head height, peering in.
Gilchrist turned back as Heap said: ‘Mr Mogford, we’re hoping to solve these crimes today. With your help, sir.’
‘Solving things. That’s the human neurosis, right there: the need to find a solution. Sometimes, you know, there just isn’t one.’
‘Not in our line of work, Mr Mogford,’ Gilchrist said.
‘Well, no. In your line of work, if I understand the statistics correctly, it’s more that crimes aren’t solved rather than that they are not soluble. I understand your clear-up rate is pretty abysmal here in Sussex.’
‘I can’t comment on that,’ Gilchrist said. ‘But I can guarantee we are going to clear up these particular crimes.’
‘Well, that’s good news, Detective Inspector – I’ve got your rank correct, I hope? Very good news.’
‘But, as DS Heap mentioned, for that we require your help.’
‘Happy to be of service,’ Mogford said.
‘Excellent, Mr Mogford,’ Gilchrist said. ‘So we need to keep you here longer for a formal interview—’
Sylvia Wade tapped on the window. Gilchrist turned and glared at her. When she turned back Mogford showed his teeth.
‘This seems pretty formal,’ he said.
‘Mr Mogford,’ Gilchrist continued. ‘We’re concerned that you are implicated in – may indeed be the perpetrator of – four linked deaths, excluding the disappearance of Genevra Flynn.’
‘You say there have been four linked deaths?’ Mogford said. He shook his head then gestured to Sylvia Wade’s face at the window. ‘You can get that, you know.’
‘Yes, four linked deaths, Mr Mogford,’ Gilchrist said, indicating to Heap to go and see why Wade was so keen to interrupt their interrogation.
‘You lot can’t get anything right, can you?’
‘Excuse me?’ Gilchrist said, then turned when Heap came back in, a frown on his face. Mogford gave that chilly smile again.
‘I think you’ve just discovered it’s five linked deaths.’
Bob Watts found Derek Neill sprawled on the sofa of his apartment. Watts had been phoning him without success then decided to nip downstairs to knock on his door. The door was ajar. Watts pushed it half open and peered in. The window was open, the curtain billowing. He could see an empty bottle of wine and two glasses on the coffee table by the sofa. He saw Neill sprawled on his couch, a fogged-up clear plastic bag over his head, taped around his neck. If that was the cause of death, he’d been suffocated.
Watts stepped into the room and surveyed the scene. He’d seen death before but it was always a sobering thing to see someone you knew suddenly inanimate. He called for an ambulance then dialled Gilchrist. He was diverted to Sylvia Wade. He left a message with her then stood by the body.
The ambulance and the police came at pretty much the same time. Watts didn’t recognize the policemen but it seemed they recognized him. He gave them what information he had, suggested they too called Gilchrist. Then he went back to his own apartment to await developments.
TWENTY-ONE
Gilchrist couldn’t figure out Harry Mogford. Why did he alert them to the death of Derek Neill? Just arrogance? In the absence of any forensic evidence, without a confession it was going to be hard to link him to the deaths.
She stood by her office window looking out at the blustery swell. Mogford was still in the interview room but he had lawyered up. It was going to take a lot of painstaking work to build a case against him.
Her phone rang. Frank Bilson.
‘Any sign of Mogford in Derek Neill’s apartment?’ she said.
‘That’s for your fingerprint people to figure out, dear heart,’ Bilson said.
‘Dear heart’ was a new one but Gilchrist let that go.
‘We don’t have enough to arrest him so we can’t get his DNA or fingerprints because he won’t allow us to take them,’ she said. ‘We’re stymied unless we can get a confession.’
‘That’s for you to achieve—’
‘Dear heart. Yes, I know. I get that. OK. Thanks.’
She started to put the phone down.
‘Are you still interested in the results of the swabs of Mrs Medavoy’s house?’
‘Mrs Medavoy?’
‘The house where Roland Gulliver was water boarded and stabbed.’
‘Yes, yes – do you have something?’
‘We have a Bill Clinton moment.’
‘You’re going to have to explain that, Frank.’
So he did.
Mogford sat in the interview room staring at the wall, thinking about what he’d accomplished. God he hated those people and their lifestyles. In Crete one thing he could clearly remember was how they thought he was ‘straight’ and boring because he didn’t go along with their hedonism. And that Rasa was a snooty bitch but they had the temerity to call him stuck-up. Gulliver’s had been the most laborious killing. He’d been in Gulliver’s house when that ditzy woman had arrived with her bottle of wine. He’d doctored both drinks when they’d gone into the bedroom. He was expecting them to take longer but Gulliver had come back almost straight away. Mogford had hidden until he figured the roofies had worked.
But then he’d found her address on her driving licence and thought it would be a good idea to lug them both round to her house without being seen. He got to work on Gulliver in her bathroom with the wet towel so Gulliver would know what it was like to drown. The stabbing was on impulse since Gulliver didn’t seem sufficiently contrite. He’d got a bit carried away that evening, one way and another.
The others had been much easier. Ridiculously so and, therefore, perhaps, not so enjoyable. More like ticking them off one by one. Although he’d really enjoyed seeing to that stuck-up bitch, Rasa. He’d decided that instead of her drowning in water like poor Genevra he’d drown her in her own blood.
Frank Bilson peered through the viewing window in the interview room door.
‘I won’t do the obvious jokes about not recognizing someone with their clothes on,’ he said.
‘I’m relieved,’ Gilchrist said.
‘It’s the man from the sauna.’
‘Thanks, Frank.’
She led him in with Heap and two constables bringing up the rear. Mogford looked up with a supercilious grin on his face. Gilchrist read him his rights then Bilson took the DNA swab from in his mouth.
Gilchrist, Heap, Wade and Bilson all piled into Bob Watts’s penthouse apartment. Wade kind of tiptoed to the window and just stared out, seemingly awestruck by the vi
ew. Bilson stood close behind her, murmuring ‘very nice, very nice’ and Gilchrist couldn’t work out whether he was admiring the view or Wade’s rather nice arse.
‘Is it enough to convict him for all of it?’ Watts asked Gilchrist once they were all settled with a range of drinks. Wade turned out to be a vodka and tonic girl; Bilson and Heap were both on some exotic bottled beer from some northern microbrewery.
‘Well, he pretty much fessed up to all of it except Genevra Flynn,’ Gilchrist said.
‘Yes – who is this Genevra Flynn?’ Watts said.
‘She was at the swimming camp with Harry Mogford, apparently left with Mogford on a boat they borrowed/nicked but then disappeared. Mogford told Tamsin Stanhope when she found him alone in Hania, where he’d docked the boat, that she’d died stung by jellyfish, but that was the fate of poor Lesley White. Whether he killed Genevra on the boat or she came back to England and disappeared we don’t know. The Greek authorities don’t keep track of the comings and goings of EU citizens.’
‘She’s a sad case,’ Heap said. ‘Her ex-husband, who abused her, is dead.’ He saw Watts frown. ‘Natural causes. She had no friends from work as far as we can tell – her husband discouraged that – and no family. DI Gilchrist and I think Mogford probably drowned her somewhere between the swimming camp and Hania but we have no way of knowing.’ He shook his head. ‘She remains one of the many unmourned disappeared in the world.’
‘It’s all wrapped up then?’ Watts said.
‘We never got closer to William Simpson,’ Gilchrist said. ‘We think he is tangential. And the under-age gang who attacked Kate are up in court soon so that won’t be easy for her.’
Watts nodded. ‘So how did you get Mogford?’
Gilchrist tipped her wine glass towards Bilson. ‘Take the stage, Mr Bilson,’ she said.
‘It was a Bill Clinton moment,’ Bilson said.
‘Ah,’ Watts said, nodding. ‘Rasa?’
‘Mrs Medavoy,’ Bilson said.
‘Ah,’ Watts said again.
Gilchrist looked from one to the other. ‘How come everybody but me knows what a Bill Clinton moment is?’ she said plaintively.
‘Only you can answer that, Sarah,’ Bilson said. ‘I’d like to think it relates to a certain innocence but it also speaks to a lack of awareness of world affairs.’
‘Affairs in more than one sense,’ Watts said. ‘Short version: Clinton was allegedly fooling around when president with a young female staffer. The proof it happened was his semen on her dress.’
‘I still find it perverse it was on Mrs Medavoy’s dress,’ Gilchrist said.
‘A multiple killer and perverse do go together,’ Bilson said mildly. ‘He almost got away with it because he was obviously very careful. The spot of semen is minute – but that’s all we need to establish DNA.’
‘Mrs Medavoy was drugged, right?’ Watts said. ‘He raped her while she was unconscious?’
‘Mrs Medavoy has no awareness of that,’ Gilchrist said, ‘and a physical examination revealed no sign of trauma in her vagina. Time has passed but, even so, probably not.’
‘Except now she’s traumatized at the thought of what went on while she was drugged,’ Heap added quietly.
‘Masturbation, then,’ Watts said.
Bilson nodded. ‘Quite commonly linked to criminal acts,’ he said. ‘Amateur burglars end up either masturbating or evacuating their bowels. Sometimes both. But in this case, I think he was overexcited by what he had done to Roland Gulliver – the stabbing more than the drowning – and needed some other release. Mrs Medavoy was unconscious and helpless but even in his intoxicated state he knew enough not to leave evidence by raping her. So he did the next best thing. And he was obviously careful about that too. Probably he had his handkerchief to hand. Except for this one, tiny amount.’
There wasn’t really any way to follow that so they all took sips of their drinks.
‘And has he said why he killed them all?’ Watts asked.
‘I’m not sure he knows why,’ Gilchrist said. ‘He told me what he called his mantra, the thing that he lived by, but that didn’t really explain it.’
‘What was the mantra?’ Bilson said.
‘Never forget; never forgive.’
EPILOGUE
Kate Simpson trembled as she stood on the pebbly beach at two in the morning. Shakespeare Beach, Dover. The starting point for every modern attempt to swim the Channel. She’d got the call from her boat pilot, Ronny, at eleven p.m. to say the conditions were right and to get herself ready and down to the harbour. She was already ready. Physically, aside from the Vaseline she needed to smear over the parts of her body that might chafe, she was as ready as she was ever going to be. Mentally the best she could be.
She was wearing only her normal swimming costume, her bathing cap, ear plugs and goggles. She had two light sticks attached to her, which gave her body an odd glow. The moon was hidden behind clouds and that somehow made the grating roar of the pebbles as the water rushed onto the beach sound even louder. The water seemed dark and threatening.
Her pilot boat bobbed in the water around fifty yards out, drawn into shore as far as was safe. There was a spotlight on the roof, at the moment pointing up into the black, starless sky. On the boat she could see dear Bellamy and Bob Watts and Sarah Gilchrist and a couple of people from the Channel Swimming Association who were there to monitor her swim. She hadn’t invited her mother. And certainly not her father. This was her team. Her support. And they were such supporters.
Yet never had she felt so alone. Never had she felt so reliant entirely on herself.
It was twenty-one miles to the beach at Cap Gris, Calais. It could take her anywhere between twelve and twenty-one chilly hours, depending on how she caught the currents and what the weather decided to do. The first five would be in utter darkness, although the pilot boat would be able to keep sight of her because of the light sticks. All those hours for her to see for herself what she was made of.
There were big waves coming in – the sea was what Channel swimmers called lumpy. She saw the pilot reach for the spotlight on the roof of the boat and angle it down and back so that it shone down on the water she was about to enter. It was time. She gave a little wave, saw all on board the ship wave and heard the guttural roar of ‘Go Katie!’
She stepped into the cold, surging water, dropped down into a low dive. Twenty-one miles. Starting now.
Swimming with the Dead Page 22
