Denial of Murder (7 page)

‘None, sir. The driver wore gloves as I said and the front-seat passenger kept his hands out of sight,' Trelawney explained. ‘They were definitely aware of CCTV.'

‘Very well, thank you for telling me,' Vicary replied. ‘I'll record this information or non-information in the file, but you'll be faxing me a written report anyway?'

‘Of course, sir,' Trelawney confirmed. ‘It'll be with you later today.'

‘Thank you … Oh, Mr Trelawney,' Vicary caught Trelawney just before he hung up, ‘it's just an interest of mine … but your accent, mild as it is …'

‘Cornwall, my handsome,' Trelawney replied with good humour and in an exaggerated accent. ‘Padstow, to be exact.'

‘Ah … I thought Devon or east Cornwall.' Vicary allowed his smile to be ‘heard' down the phone line.

‘Well, you were almost correct there, my handsome – north-east Cornwall. But I'll write this up asap and fax it to you directly.'

‘Appreciated. Thank you.' Vicary replaced the handset gently. He had very much enjoyed the brief conversation with DC Trelawney from Padstow, and he felt greatly uplifted by it.

The man ambled slowly out of the side door of the building and stepped on to Turner Street. He wore corduroy trousers, rolled up at the bottom in the form of rough turn-ups, brown shoes, a lightweight summer jacket and a flat white golfing cap. He had an ex-military khaki canvas knapsack slung over his left shoulder. The man turned right towards Whitechapel Road and when he got there turned left and kept close to the line of buildings as much out of the way of the other foot passengers as he could. He did not particularly enjoy the view of the Gherkin as he walked. He felt it was a monstrous building, very symbolic of the plethora of new buildings which he felt were ruining London, making the lovely old city slowly vanish. He once again noticed how that part of London in which he was walking had now been strongly given over to the influence of Islam: there were huge Mosques, for example, and many buildings that were originally public houses were occupied by businesses selling Asian clothing or halal meat. As the man approached Aldgate East Underground Station he crossed Whitechapel Road and walked into the White Hart, one of the few remaining public houses along the road. In the cool and calm interior of the pub he ordered a beer and chose to remain at the bar rather than sitting down. The man would cut a modest figure to the casual observer, with a barrel-chested upper body, short legs and standing just five feet six inches tall. As was his wont, the man kept himself to himself and avoided eye contact with other patrons. He was a man minding his own business and he clearly expected other people to mind theirs. He attracted little attention from the patrons, most of whom just glanced at him once and then forgot him, thinking as any observer would be forgiven for thinking, that he was just an ordinary ‘geezer', having a beer or two at the end of the working day, on his way home to the ‘trouble and strife', middle-aged, scratching pennies, but still able to afford to eat and still able to afford a few beers. The man the other patrons were in fact glancing at once and then forgetting was John Shaftoe, MD, MCRP, FRCPath, Home Office registered forensic pathologist.

John Shaftoe remained in the White Hart until approximately 6.30 p.m., at which time he reasoned that the rush hour, which he often referred to as the ‘crush hour', would have largely subsided. He walked back across Whitechapel Road to Aldgate East Underground Station and took the Metropolitan Line to King's Cross, from where he took the mainline service to Brookmans Park. From Brookmans Park Railway Station he walked in a slow, ambling manner over the footbridge and into the centre of the village, then arrived at a gentle incline that was Brookmans Lane, observing, as he always did, the well-set detached houses on either side of the road, some with single driveways while other properties had U-shaped ‘in and out' driveways. Shaftoe felt, once again, particularly envious of the owners of houses on the northern side of the road whose properties backed on to the golf course and which would never be built on. Not in his lifetime, anyway. He walked on, up to nearly the very top of the lane and then turned right down a single driveway and let himself into the house. His wife greeted him warmly and helped him out of his summer jacket as he hung his knapsack on a clothes peg. ‘Good day, pet?' she asked warmly.

‘So, so, pet,' Shaftoe replied, sitting down on a wooden chair in the hallway and tugging at his shoelaces. ‘I went in early, as you know, to look at a decayed corpse which had been pulled out of the river and, in the event, got called out to attend a recent corpse.'

‘Oh, my …' His wife sighed.

‘Yes. He was quite a young bloke; forty … he'd been battered over the head. I was able to wrap that up before lunch, and then I addressed the decayed corpse which I had intended to do first thing. Unlike the first corpse, I couldn't determine the cause of death. He had no identification and no distinguishing features. They'll give him a name and bury him in a pauper's grave.'

‘I always find that upsetting.' Linda Shaftoe shook her head slowly. ‘Dying … nobody misses you … nobody knows who you are … nobody cares … Just given a name and buried, and forgotten.'

‘It happens, pet.' Shaftoe slid his feet into an old and very comfortable pair of slippers and stood up. ‘It happens … especially in large cities. Folk come from all over to live in the cities looking for anonymity, and they find it. They find it all right.' He smiled at his wife. ‘Do you feel like touching base, pet?'

‘Oh aye … let's do that,' Linda Shaftoe replied enthusiastically. ‘We have not done that for a while.'

‘Right, I'll make a point of coming home early one day this week and we'll go out somewhere for the night.' Shaftoe beamed at his wife, pronouncing ‘right' as ‘reet' and night as ‘neet'. ‘I'll leave before the crush hour – so long as I miss it, that's the important thing. What's for supper?'

‘Cottage pie.' Linda Shaftoe turned and walked to the kitchen. ‘I know it's summer, but I also know how much you like your cottage pie.'

‘Champion, pet,' Shaftoe smiled at her, ‘just champion.' Linda Shaftoe was the same age as him, also from Thurnscoe and also the child of a coal miner whose father had hoped his only daughter would marry a ‘lad with a trade': a fitter, an electrician or a plumber – anything but a coal miner. He was subsequently a man who could not contain his glee when he found that his beloved daughter had ‘pulled' a doctor, and not just a doctor but an ‘ologist'. Not only that, the ‘ologist' in question was not ‘stuck up' with a posh accent but a ‘right good lad from the next street'. So ‘our Linda had done herself proud'. Perfect. Just perfect.

Early that same evening, Harry and Kathleen Vicary strolled contentedly arm in arm from their terraced house in Hartley Road, Leytonstone to the Assembly Rooms in the town centre. They sat near the back of the six rows of seated persons as the guest speaker was introduced. After being introduced the speaker said, ‘Hello, my name is Felicity and I am an alcoholic,' upon which the Vicarys and all other persons in the room, save the person who had introduced her, replied, ‘Hello, Felicity', and then listened as Felicity, a slight figure in a scarlet dress, recounted her journey from the gutter to her divorce, then to becoming a ‘dry' alcoholic who was by then in full control of her life. After the talk Harry and Kathleen Vicary joined others for a coffee and a biscuit and a chat.

Upon leaving the Assembly Rooms the Vicarys went to the Wagon and Horses pub and joined the quiz team to which they belonged, drinking tonic water while the other members of their team drank beer. Their team was eventually placed fourth out of eight teams when the results were announced, but Harry Vicary felt that fourth was perfectly respectable. It was not the winning that mattered anyway, so he believed, but the taking part. It was also the small items of knowledge he never failed to pick up on each and every quiz night which added to the enjoyment. As he and his wife walked slowly back home through a balmy summer's evening, Vicary pondered that he had, that evening, learned that a ‘Fletcher' was an arrow-maker in Medieval times, and during the round on the Great Fire of London in 1666, he had learned that Samuel Pepys had buried a Parmesan cheese in his garden to preserve it from the flames. Interestingly, he had also learned that the fire was sometimes known as ‘the food fire' because it had started in Pudding Lane and had eventually died out in Pie Lane.

G
eoff ‘the milk' Driscoll hummed a catchy tune to himself as he turned his milk float off the Ridgeway and into Lingfield Road. The first thing he did as he straightened the float was to check the road surface ahead of him for any footwear lying upon it. He smiled gently as he saw that the road surface was clear of any debris, although the remnants of the blue and white police tape which had enclosed the area where, twenty-four hours earlier, he had found the corpse of the man, still hung from the shrubs, utterly motionless in the morning air. His discovery of the body had caused a stir in the dairy and that morning, as he was loading up the float, he had enjoyed much attention from his fellow rounds men who had pressed him for details.

Driscoll proceeded up Lingfield Road and then slowed the float to a halt as he saw the body. It was lying precisely where he had found the other body of the man but between two cars which had been parked closed to each other, thus concealing it from view until Driscoll was almost alongside it. A pair of red shoes lay on the ground nearby. Unlike the body he had found the previous day this one was female and, also unlike the body he had found the previous day, this body was Afro-Caribbean.

‘This,' Driscoll murmured softly to himself, ‘just cannot be happening to me.'

He applied the handbrake of the float, stepped out of the vehicle and walked, calmly this time, up the steps he had run up the previous morning. Once again he knocked at the door of the large Gothic Victorian house with its complicated roof line and turret windows, and once again the door was opened, casually so, by the same, tall, well-built man who wore the same blue paisley patterned dressing gown. ‘Sorry, Squire,' Driscoll said, employing a familiarity of address he had not used the previous morning, ‘but you are just not going to believe what I have found on the road outside your house.'

Once again the householder remained utterly calm, then he nodded slowly and said, ‘I will call the police,' before shutting his door on Driscoll.

It was, once again, the dawn which woke Tom Ainsclough, as it so often did because of his wont to sleep with the curtains of his bedroom open. He rose slowly, feeling utterly refreshed after a solid eight hours of deep sleep, and sat on the edge of his bed. He half turned, placed his palm on the other side and found that it was still warm from Sara, who had quietly left the house without waking him, having lain there. Ainsclough stood at the window and looked out across the suburban garden to Lambeth Hospital where Sara would be, by then, working as a staff sister. Ainsclough washed, dressed and breakfasted. He then left the upper portion of the house, taking the stairs down to the common hallway he and his wife shared with the Watsons, who were the mortgagees of the lower conversion of the house. The Watsons were also a young and childless couple, who had proved good neighbours. The wife of the union was, like Sara Ainsclough, also employed as a nurse at Lambeth Hospital.

Ainsclough departed the house, turned left and walked up the Victorian terraced development that was Hargwyne Road, intending, as usual, to take the Underground from Clapham North into central London and to New Scotland Yard. As he walked he thought, once again, that he and Sara working shifts, sometimes arriving as the other was departing, was what kept their marriage healthy, in that they saw just sufficient of each other to maintain a sense of mutual intrigue.

Harry Vicary smiled warmly and leaned back in his chair. ‘Well,' he said, glancing briefly to his left out of his office window at the River Thames and the buildings opposite before returning his attention to his assembled team of officers, ‘the two murders are either connected, or somebody has got it in for poor old, sunny old, leafy old Wimbledon. Any suggestions? What does the team think?'

‘They're both connected, sir.' Frankie Brunnie returned the smile. ‘They have to be.'

‘Of course they are.' Vicary leaned forward and rested his elbows and forearms on his desktop. ‘And the car, also burned out in the same place that the car was burned out the previous evening.'

‘The same two streets,' Penny Yewdall confirmed. ‘That's more than a coincidence.'

‘We can also consider the possibility that someone is sending us a message,' Tom Ainsclough offered.

‘Either that,' Victor Swannell also leaned forward in his chair, ‘or it is just plain sloppy on the part of the felons. That would be my guess. They might have realized that that part of Wimbledon is a good place to get in and out of without being picked up by CCTV cameras, they know the routes in and out, and they have discovered all those overgrown front gardens to hide in. They did it successfully one night, and so they decided to dump the second body and torch the second car in the same two locations but, by doing so, they have invited us to link the victims. Quite a serious mistake on their part.'

‘Or someone is sending us a message, as Tom suggests,' Penny Yewdall added.

Vicary sipped his tea. ‘Sadly, I have to report that the police helicopter wasn't available last evening; it had a pressing errand involving the chase of a high performance car … a stolen high performance car, the driver of which was intending to carve up all the traffic on the North Circular. It couldn't be diverted to search for infra-red images of people playing hide and seek in suburban front gardens south of the river. So, if there is a connection between Gordon Cogan and last night's victim, we must find it ourselves.' Vicary paused. ‘Tom and Penny … I want you two to stay teamed up.'