Evil in Return (14 page)

17

As soon as he got back to the office in Barnes, Tartaglia went looking for Steele. She was at her desk, ploughing through a pile of papers, eating an egg mayonnaise sandwich. He wondered if she had skipped lunch or was merely hungry. Unlike most of the women in the office, who seemed to be on a permanent diet, she had a healthy appetite and didn’t seem to care what she ate or when. It also had no impact on her broad-shouldered, athletic figure.

She looked up. ‘There you are, Mark. I’ve just had Jim Grainger on the phone, saying that you’ve been roughing up one of his DIs.’

‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that.’

‘He said you were very aggressive. I told you to go easy, not throw your weight around.’

‘I didn’t. But the woman wouldn’t listen.’ He explained what had happened at the boathouse.

Steele finished the last bite of her sandwich and wiped her mouth and fingers quickly with a paper napkin. ‘OK. She sounds wet behind the ears and I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. And if they screw up, it sounds like it will fall on us to clear up the mess. If Jim starts sounding off again, I’ll let him have it with both barrels.’

‘Just tell him we got off on the wrong foot.’

She waved him away with her hand. ‘Rumour has it he’s put in for early retirement. He’s feeling a bit sensitive about life at the moment. Doesn’t want to go out with egg on his face. Now tell me why you think the two murders are linked.’

He explained what Arabella Browne had found, as well as the circumstantial evidence of the missing phone and the position of the body, then filled her in on his trip to Paul Khan’s apartment.

‘You think it’s the same hand?’

‘I’m sure of it. The post mortem’s sometime this evening.’

‘OK. I’ll need Arabella’s summary report before I can speak to Clive. In the meantime, we’ve got more than enough to keep us busy. Let Grainger’s team clear the ground for us and you stick to the Logan murder. So long as they cooperate and share information, it’s no skin off our nose.’

‘Yeah, so long as they do.’

‘If you encounter any problems, let me know and I’ll sort it. Now, what’s happening about finding the elusive Alex Fleming?’

‘Still no joy. We’re trying to get an address for him through his agent. We thought it was faster at this point than trying his bank. The address they had on file is an old one and the man who handles him is out of the office at the moment. We’ve left messages and they say he’ll get back to us at some point later today.’

‘Someone must know where to get hold of him.’

‘His agent seems our best bet. In the meantime, there’s one other thing Arabella mentioned. If you remember, Logan’s body was damp when she found it.’ Steele nodded. ‘Well, this one was even wetter, although she says it was only the upper body. Both bodies had restraint marks and one of Logan’s wrists was fractured, as though he’d struggled hard. Both bodies smelled strongly of urine. The best explanation is that they were both tortured.’

‘Waterboarding, you mean?’

‘Something like that.’

She gazed at him thoughtfully, head slightly to one side. ‘If you’re right, it changes everything.’

He nodded. ‘It isn’t just about punishment or revenge. Both men had something the killer wanted. There’s got to be a connection.’

‘What the hell are we going to do?’ Alex asked. A copy of the late edition of the
Evening Standard
belonging to one of the waitresses lay folded in front of him. The headline
ANOTHER LONDON SHOOTING
danced before his eyes. He was standing behind the bar, phone clamped to his ear, trying to block out the voices of a group of diners who were sitting just through the arch. A fresh peal of laughter drowned Tim’s reply.

Alex crouched down. ‘Say that again?’

‘I said, what do you mean?’ Tim was in the car, talking over the loudspeaker, and his voice sounded distant over the background drone of the traffic outside.

‘Danny was really worried.’

‘I thought you said he didn’t say very much.’

‘He never says very much, but I tell you, he was worried. He said that on the message Paul left him he was worried too. He said that someone was trying to stir up stuff about Ashleigh Grange. It all ties in with what happened to Joe.’

‘Why did you let Danny go?’

‘I didn’t have a choice. One minute he was there, next he’d buggered off. He didn’t even pay for his drink.’

‘Where on earth are you?’ Tim said gruffly.

‘Still at work.’

‘I think we should talk about this later. Why don’t you come over?’

‘I can’t. The guy who was supposed to be on duty’s rung in sick and I have to cover. I’ll be here until late. I think we should go to the police.’

‘And say what, exactly?’

Alex hesitated, suddenly unsure. What would they say? That they’d known both Joe and Paul, that someone was sending funny emails? What else could they say without it all spewing out, and if it did, did it matter . . . He was getting to the point when he almost didn’t care.

‘We could tell them about the emails.’

‘I told you before, they’ll find out by themselves. There’s no point our getting involved.’

‘Maybe they won’t make the connection. First Joe, now Paul. There’s got to be a connection, hasn’t there?’

There was a pause before Tim replied. ‘Maybe, maybe not.’

‘There has to be. Will it stop here? Or will it be Danny or me or you next?’

‘You’re being melodramatic. As I said before, it’s just a silly prank gone wrong.’

‘Not any longer, it’s not. It’s not a joke. Who’s doing this, Tim? Why?’ He heard his voice rise to a wimpish whine.

‘What phone are you calling on?’

‘One of the restaurant lines. I switched my mobile off. The police keep ringing me.’

‘Honestly, Alex, I wouldn’t call from a public place, if I were you. And I wouldn’t use your mobile.’

‘Great. So what do you suggest?’

‘Go and get one of those pay-as-you-go phones until this all dies down.’

‘Dies down? Unfortunate choice of words.’

‘And don’t use your oyster card either. They can use it to trace you.’

‘When you spoke to Paul—’

‘I didn’t speak to Paul. We kept playing phone tag. I never managed to get hold of him.’

‘Tell me again what Paul said about the email he had had.’

‘There’s nothing much to tell. All he said in his message was that he’d had a funny email and did I know anything about it. He was quite guarded, and contrary to what Danny said he sounded more intrigued than rattled. Naturally it made me think of the one you told me Joe had received, but I may have got the wrong end of the stick.’

Tim’s tone lacked a sense of urgency. Didn’t it mean anything to him? Now Alex wondered again if Tim was behind the emails.

‘But he mentioned Ashleigh Grange to Danny. It says in the paper that Paul was shot. There was a whole load of stuff about gun crime. It’s just like with Joe.’

‘Look, I doubt if they have the full picture just yet. It could just be a terrible coincidence.’

‘And what if it isn’t? What are we going to do? I still think one of us should speak to the police.’ A noise behind him made him turn around. One of the waitresses was putting a drinks order on the clipboard and gave him a funny look. He wondered how much she had overheard. He walked away to the other end of the bar, out of earshot. ‘I think we should all sit down and talk this through sensibly first,’ Tim was saying. ‘We may be jumping to conclusions. I’ll try and get hold of Danny. Do you remember the name of his company?’

‘I heard it was going down the pan.’

‘Me too, or at least that’s what Paul said when I saw him at Fi and Bill’s wedding. He’d sunk quite a sum of money into it and sounded pretty worried.’

‘What about Fi? She must have an address or something for Danny.’

‘Good idea, I’ll try her. I’m on my way back to London now so let’s meet up and work out what to do. Call me at home tomorrow, first thing. In the meantime, Alex, for God’s sake don’t do anything stupid.’

18

After his talk with DCI Steele, Tartaglia went along the corridor to his office, where he found Sam Donovan kneeling on the carpet beside Logan’s suitcase and trunk. The usually tidy room looked like a charity shop, with piles of books and clothing stacked everywhere on the floor. He was amazed to see how much stuff could come out of a single trunk and one suitcase. It looked as though Donovan would be a while before she had finished checking and logging everything and he wondered if he would be able to get any work done in such chaos.

‘How are you doing?’ he asked, trying to hide his impatience as he picked his way across the floor to his desk.

She was patting down a heavy winter coat to see if anything was hidden in the pockets or seams. ‘Nothing interesting, so far. Just a load of winter clothes, that’s all. There were some papers and personal stuff in the trunk that I’ve put on your desk for you to look at when you have a moment.’

He squatted down and ran his eye over the piles of books. They were mainly biographies and paperback classics, all looking well worn. They gave no insight into Logan’s more recent interests. ‘Have you found anything that might have some bearing on the second book?’

‘No.’ She folded up the coat and put it on the floor with the rest of Logan’s things. ‘I found some old scripts, but nothing like a book, and not even a memory stick.’

‘What’s this?’ he asked, picking up a scrapbook from off the top of one of the piles.

‘Just press clippings and stuff from his acting days. Nothing to do with his writing.’

He flicked quickly through it, but the cuttings were old and, as Donovan had said, all related to Logan’s acting career. The two thick lever arch files underneath contained bank statements going back several years, plus income statements, haphazardly filed, with wodges of stapled receipts, presumably for Logan’s tax returns. He put them back and sat down at his desk. An old cigar box sat on the top of the things Donovan had left for him to look at. It was secured by a couple of old rubber bands, which snapped when he tried to peel them off. Inside he found a quartz paperweight in the shape of a frog, an old fountain pen, a penknife with a horn handle, and a couple of postcards of paintings by Turner, which were blank and dog-eared. The corners were studded with small holes as though they had been fixed to a pin board at some point and it reminded him of the board above his desk in his university digs that he had covered in postcards and photos. He picked up the frog and turned it over slowly in his hand, feeling its cold, smooth surface, wondering if Logan had once done the same. It was a motley collection of objects, with no apparent significance, and gave no better understanding of the man. But at least they had more of a personal flavour than the possessions retrieved from the boat.

At the bottom of the box was a large folder full of photographs. He spread them out on his desk like a pack of cards, and gazed at the black and white ten-by-eight professional shots of a younger, leaner Logan in his acting days, and snapshots from school and university. Amongst them he found a photo of a blonde-haired woman with a small boy on her knee. The woman’s hair and clothing were dated and he assumed it was a picture of Logan with his mother. He remembered that Logan had been an only child. Another photograph caught his eye. In it, Logan looked to be in his late teens or early twenties. Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, he was standing at a bar with his arm clasped around a man with thick, reddish-brown hair. They were grinning, and each had a pint in his hand, raised to the camera. Tartaglia wondered if the other man was Alex Fleming. If so, he had known Logan a long time. He put it aside to show Minderedes. He had just pulled out a photograph of a line of snow-covered cars parked in front of a terrace of Georgian houses, when Donovan looked over his shoulder.

‘That’s Windsor Terrace. It’s in Bristol.’

‘You know it?’

‘Claire had a flat there when she was at university.’

‘I’d forgotten she went to Bristol.’

She nodded. ‘So did Joe Logan, according to the bio on his book jacket. But he was a few years older than she is, so I doubt she knew him. I’ll ask her later.’ She picked up a pile of clothing from the floor and transferred it back to the suitcase.

‘How are you getting on with his book?’

‘I’ve only just started. I tried reading it in the car coming back from Dorset this morning, but I started to feel sick, so I had to stop.’

‘Don’t blame you. I can’t read in a car either.’

‘I’m usually fine, but Justin was driving rather fast and there wasn’t a single decent, straight stretch of road until we hit the M3.’

As he tucked the photographs back in the folder, he noticed an envelope at the bottom of the box. It had been addressed to Logan at St Thomas’s school. Inside was a letter written in a large, childish hand:

Dear Joe Thanks for your note. Here’s a copy of the article you mentioned. As you can tell, it’s a subject close to my heart. I’d love to hear what you think and if you want any more info, let me know. It would be good to talk and I’ll give you a call in the next few days. I can also put you in touch with Jennifer, if you like. I’m sure she’d be happy to speak to you and I promise to respect your need for privacy.

Anna

Clipped to the back of the letter was a computer printout of an article from one of the dailies dated earlier that year, with a small headshot of Anna Paget, uncharacteristically smiling. He gazed at the letter for a moment, not sure what to make of it. He was sure she had only mentioned writing to Logan once.

‘What’s that?’ Donovan asked, looking over from the pile of books she was cataloguing. ‘Take a look.’ He stretched over and passed her the letter. ‘What’s bothering you about it?’ she asked, after reading the letter.

‘I don’t know. Something she said doesn’t add up.’

‘Does it matter?’ she said, handing him back the papers.

He shrugged. ‘Maybe not. It may just be an innocent mistake. It just bothers me that she got a detail wrong.’ He unclipped the article and started to read:

MISSING PEOPLE

With renewed calls for a national database,

Anna Paget asks what are we

doing to keep track of them?

When Kirstie Jenson’s remains were discovered last week in a shallow grave beside the busy A4, near Marlborough, Wiltshire,

it ended an 11-year wait for her parents, John and Diane Jenson. They no longer need to listen out for the phone, or the sound of her key in the door, or scan each crowded street for her face. That nightmare is over. Although their worst fears have come true, at least they finally know where their daughter has been all this time.

The promising undergraduate was last seen getting into a car with an unknown man outside a nightclub in Swindon town centre on 31st October 1999. She would still be missing now if it hadn’t been for some heavy rain, and a local man who pulled over by the roadside to relieve himself. In the last eleven years, countless people have whizzed back and forth past that spot, unaware of what lay so close. It’s a sobering thought. In our daily journeys to and from work, or school, our trips to the shops, to the pub, or out for a meal, how many of us unwittingly pass by the remains of the missing?

Every year, in the UK, nearly a quarter of a million people are reported missing. Almost all are found within a year, with three-quarters in the first 48 hours. But according to research, the longer someone is gone, the more likely they are never to be found. Yet only a handful of cases trigger the sort of newspaper headlines and publicity that could help trace them. The rest just slip between the cracks. What’s even worse, more than half of the 2,000 or so who disappear for good each year are assumed to be dead. That’s over 10,000 people who have died unaccounted for since Kirstie Jenson got into the wrong car. Where are they all? And what are we doing to find them?

Missing people range from the very young to the very old and the reasons why they disappear are many. This means that there is no single easy approach to finding them. It also blurs the focus of what needs to be done to improve the current situation. To make matters worse, not all people who disappear are reported to the police. But looking at the research, one thing is striking. Roughly two thirds of those reported missing each year are under 18, with twice as many girls as boys. Even if they haven’t been abducted, what chance of long-term survival do these children have, once they are off the radar? And what about the family and friends who are left behind in limbo? What are we doing for them?

Jennifer Collins’s only daughter Laura left home one morning 5 years ago on her way to school, never to be seen again. ‘Each waking hour is torment, but I’ve never given up hope,’ she says. ‘Her bedroom’s just as she left it, ready for her if she ever comes home.’ She describes her life as being on hold. Her marriage broke up a year after her daughter went missing, then she lost her job and had a breakdown. ‘I live every day as it comes, just waiting in case there’s news. I know it’s unlikely to be good, but I still hope. The worst thing is not knowing what happened to Laura.’

For a lucky few, there is a happy ending. Sabine Dardenne and Laeticia Delheze were both rescued from the clutches of the Belgian paedophile and murderer, Marc Dutroux. Jaycee Lee Dugard, in the US, was discovered alive eighteen years after she was abducted from a school bus stop. Such cases give hope to every desperate parent of a missing child. Although John and Diane Jenson will never see Kirstie again, they are lucky compared to some. At least they finally know what happened. For the majority, there will never be that closure. However, a lot could be done to increase the odds . . .

Tartaglia sighed. He had read enough and stuffed the papers back into the envelope. The call for a national database wasn’t new, and with over fifty police forces in the UK and no centralised system, it was justified. But as always, a shortage of funds coupled with the lack of a clear-cut message or a high profile lobby group won out over logic in the political debate. From his early days in CID, he remembered the case of a young Asian girl who failed to come home from school one day. She came from a tight-knit Muslim family and, according to everyone they spoke to, was not the sort of person to go missing and cause her parents worry. After making enquiries, the general assumption was that she had had a row with her parents and walked out. Echoing the Fred and Rosemary West cases, he later discovered that two other girls of a similar age had disappeared without trace in the same area of west London. But by that time it was too late, and short of pulling down each house or digging up every back garden in the area, there was nothing they could do. The disappearances weren’t broadcast as it was thought best not to panic the public. As far as he was aware, none of the girls had ever been found. Things had improved over the years, but as Anna said, the missing still slipped ‘between the cracks’.

‘Interesting piece?’ Donovan asked, as he put the envelope back on the pile.

He nodded. There was genuine feeling in the writing and, whatever else he thought of Anna, she had gone up several notches in his estimation. ‘What’s particularly interesting,’ he said, ‘is that Joe Logan circled the first paragraph as well as highlighting the line, “How many of us unwittingly pass by the remains of the missing?”’

‘You think he was going to write about the subject?’

‘He was certainly curious about it. At least I now think I know how she got him to agree to an interview.’

His phone started to ring. He picked up and heard Gerachty’s voice at the other end.

‘I thought you’d like to know, I’ve just been interviewing the anonymous caller,’ she said, not bothering with any greeting or preamble. ‘Her name’s Mandy Wilson and she’s a new member of the rowing club. She was one of three women there last night and she caved in pretty quick when we told her we had the voice recording and prints. It turns out she’s been having an affair with Craig Sykes, the club secretary,’ she continued, rattling through it at top speed, in a flat tone of voice, as though ticking a box. ‘Instead of going home to his wife and kids after the practice session, he took her out for a curry. When they’d finished, they decided to go back to the club for a nightcap, or something. Anyway, when they got there, they found the door was closed but unlocked. They thought the barman had forgotten to lock up. Reading between the lines, they were pretty pissed, or at least she was. She had quite a hangover today, looked positively green. If the killer was still there, he must have heard them coming.’

‘Did they notice anything else that was odd?’ he asked, when she finished the account.

‘Apart from the door being unlocked, no. Like you said, they didn’t turn on the lights as they didn’t want anyone knowing they were there. She said she and Craig went out onto the balcony to look at the view, then they decided they fancied something more to drink. She volunteered to go and get it, which is when she tripped over the body. At first, she thought it was one of the other members who’d had a skinful and gone to sleep behind the bar. It was so dark, she couldn’t see anything much. She remembers noticing that the fridge lights were out, which she thought was a little odd. I don’t know what bit of Paul Khan she touched, but she said he felt warm.’