Saturday Requiem (20 page)

Hannah Docherty lies and stares up into the darkness. In Westow Park, children running around, little Rory, her mother, a blanket on the grass. Her mother leans in close, smelling of perfume, spices, roses.

‘Under here,’ says her mother, ‘there is a hidden river. It begins here in this park. When it rains, the park gets wet, down there at the bottom. It’s the river trying to get back to the surface.’

‘No,’ says Hannah.

‘Yes,’ says her mother. ‘Long ago it was a stream and people could walk by it and children could paddle in it but it was covered up. But it’s still here and it flows from here to the River Thames, miles and miles away.’

‘Why was it covered?’ says Hannah.

‘I don’t know,’ says her mother. ‘Maybe it was in the way.’

‘What’s it called?’

‘Effra,’ says her mother. ‘It’s called the River Effra.’

Ever since, Hannah had thought about where the river went and how it knew where to go. Later, as a teenager walking through Brixton, smoking weed with friends, she had looked up as if in a dream and seen the street sign: Effra Road. She felt as if the river had hidden and survived, then secretly followed her down the hill from Norwood.

Once she had been at a party in a squat in Vauxhall. It was the last days of the squat. They were going to be evicted. It was like a wake. She had mentioned the Effra and a shy young man with glasses and a long thin scarf and dark clever eyes had said, ‘It’s here.’

She’d said, ‘What do you mean, it’s here?’

And he’d said, ‘It runs under this building. It comes out into the Thames at Vauxhall Bridge, just over the road.’

So, as the sun came up, she and the boy had left the party and walked over the nightmarish junctions of Wandsworth Road and leaned over the railings and couldn’t see where it came out. And they smoked and looked at barges passing on the river and up at the MI5 building above them, and Hannah never saw the boy again and never saw the River Effra.

Frieda announced her name at the front desk. A young officer led her through the police station, upstairs, along a corridor that passed an open-plan office, round a corner to an office on the far side. He knocked and pushed it open. A woman was sitting at a desk, typing on a keyboard. She looked up with a frown. The officer announced Frieda’s name.

‘All right, all right,’ she said. ‘You’d better sit down.’

Detective Chief Inspector Isobel Sharpe didn’t look like Frieda’s idea of a detective. With her dark-framed glasses, her curly hair tied up in a bun, she looked more like the forbidding head of a girls’ school.

‘I hope you’re expecting me,’ said Frieda.

‘Karlsson rang me from his sick bed,’ Sharpe said.

‘He said you were the person to talk to about missing persons. He said it was your special subject.’

‘I was on a Royal Commission about them.’

‘That sounds like a good thing.’

‘It was like most commissions. It took two years and we made recommendations and nothing changed. What can I do for you?’

‘You sound a bit senior to do this. I’m interested in finding a woman. That’s probably not the sort of thing you do.’

‘I almost certainly can’t help you.’

‘Oh.’

‘But now that you’re here you might as well sit down and tell me about it.’

So Frieda sat down at the desk opposite her and said everything she knew about Justine Walsh, which was very little. When she was finished, DCI Sharpe didn’t speak for a moment. Then she tapped on her keyboard.

‘What are you doing?’

‘The national database.’

‘Are you allowed to do that?’

DCI Sharpe looked puzzled. ‘I’m a police detective.’

‘This isn’t an official police inquiry.’

‘Karlsson vouched for you. Just so long as you aren’t planning to commit a criminal offence.’ She paused, then looked at Frieda with a sharper expression. ‘You’re not, are you?’

‘Of course not.’

‘It’s just that I’ve heard about you.’ She looked at the screen with more attention. ‘There’s four Justine Walshes. A victim of domestic abuse in Stockport in 2012. Born in 1978. Another charged with fourteen counts of shoplifting in 1999.’

‘Where?’

‘Norwich.’

‘That doesn’t sound right.’

‘One more who was robbed in the street in Stockwell. She’s too old: eighty-three. And the other entry is from the early nineties in Birmingham. So there’s nothing useful.’

‘I didn’t expect anything like that,’ said Frieda. ‘She led a rackety sort of life and then she suddenly went missing. Her daughter hasn’t seen her since. I wanted to talk to you about that. Isn’t it almost impossible for people to disappear nowadays, with credit cards and mobile phones?’

DCI Sharpe pushed her chair back from her desk. She seemed almost amused. ‘That’s what people think,’ she said. ‘People ask why we don’t have a proper register of missing people, with everyone on it. Just build a bigger computer and plug it into Facebook and Twitter. Get better identity cards,
more CCTV cameras. The problem is that going missing is a bit of a philosophical problem. There are people who run away, who move away, who escape, who get bored, who go on holiday and stay there. They fall in love and run off with someone, they fall out of love and run off to escape someone. They are abused teenagers or persecuted gays or girls forced into marriage. They’re men having mid-life crises or wives tired of the husbands’ mid-life crises. They are going abroad on a gap year or they are going abroad to join an Islamist army or they are just emigrating.’

‘I get the point.’

‘I could go on and on.’

‘You don’t need to.’

‘And somewhere in all that, there are a few real missing people: people in danger, criminals on the run, Alzheimer’s patients gone wandering, lost children. That’s the problem. We used to have the National Missing Persons Bureau. Then, for reasons I never quite understood, we changed it to the UK Missing Persons Bureau. The name may have changed and the software may look different but the problem remains the same. We’ve got lots and lots of information and not much knowledge.’

‘It seems strange to me,’ said Frieda, ‘that a grown woman, a mother, with a troubled daughter, just suddenly goes missing and there’s no police investigation, no nationwide search.’

‘Because everything that you’ve told me about her, her circumstances and her family history, indicates that she’s the sort of person likely to move away, to leave her old life behind. The police might make some brief enquiries but it would quickly be designated a lost-contact case. They wouldn’t even give it a case number.’

Frieda thought for a moment. It felt like there was nothing more to be done. ‘Karlsson told me you were the expert on
finding people. It sounds more like you’re the expert on
not
finding people.’

‘Yes, Karlsson told me about you as well.’

‘You mean that I’m rude and badly behaved.’

‘He put it more gently than that.’

‘But what you’re really saying is that you can’t help me.’

‘What I’m trying to say is, first, that missing people aren’t a simple category; second, as you say, it’s harder to disappear than it used to be, so the people who manage it are really hard to find.’

Frieda stood up. ‘Thank you for giving me your time.’

‘If there’s anything else I can do, just call me.’

Frieda looked at DCI Sharpe, who was peering at her screen. Her attention was already elsewhere. ‘What if she’s dead?’

DCI Sharpe glanced up, as if it was an effort to engage with Frieda once more. ‘What?’

‘You’re right. Justine Walsh was the kind of woman who would walk out on her life. But just for that reason, she wasn’t the kind of woman who could have sustained it. She would have turned up somewhere, or run out of money and come back. Also, she was worried about her daughter. She would have checked on her.’

‘I don’t know anything about that. What I know is that people run out on their families and often they don’t look back.’

‘But what if she died?’

‘You mean if she disappeared and died and was never found?’

‘Yes.’

‘If Justine Walsh died and her body hasn’t been found after all these years then it probably never will be.’

‘There’s another category. What if she disappeared and was found but wasn’t identified?’

‘The overwhelming majority of people who are found are identified.’

‘We know that Justine Walsh isn’t in that category. And you’ve told me there’s a whole group we can’t investigate. So why not try the group we
can
investigate?’

DCI Sharpe smiled, almost reluctantly. ‘We should have had you on our commission.’

‘You wouldn’t want me on a commission. So what about it? The bodies of women that are found and not identified. Is that another group that’s too big to investigate?’

DCI Sharpe shook her head slowly. ‘No. It’s not a big group at all. You don’t even need the police database for it. Pull the chair around to this side of the desk.’

Frieda did as she was told and sat next to the detective as she tapped at the keyboard.

‘So what was the date she was last seen?’

‘I don’t know. Some time in 2001, I think.’

More tapping.

‘There we are,’ said DCI Sharpe.

Frieda looked at her screen. A collection of boxes had appeared. It looked like a social media site that might have been created in the Soviet Union. There were portraits in different styles – some looked like drawings done by teenagers or by talentless street artists. Two looked like tailors’ dummies with no features. One had just a few objects, an earring, a brooch, a belt; another contained a piece of fabric.

‘What am I looking at?’ asked Frieda. ‘Are these bodies found in London? Was that at the time she disappeared?’

‘You don’t understand,’ said DCI Sharpe. ‘This is all of them.’

‘What do you mean, all of them?’

‘These are the unidentified female bodies found since 2001.’

‘In south London?’

‘In the whole of the United Kingdom.’

Frieda looked more closely and counted the boxes on screen. ‘But there are only thirteen. I thought there’d be hundreds.’

‘I told you. It’s very rare. Take a look. If one of them interests you, click on it. Or her.’

Frieda scanned the details. Four were identified as Afro-Caribbean, one as Oriental. ‘Oriental,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know that was still a thing.’

‘We probably need to look at some of our terminology.’

Of the rest, one body had been found in Leeds, one in Scotland and one in Birmingham. That left three in Greater London, one in Essex and one with no identifying place at all. Frieda took the mouse and clicked on the last. It had been washed up on a beach in the north-east of Scotland. Probably too far away. One London body was identified as aged eighteen to thirty: too young. Frieda clicked on the Essex body. Found in a car park in 2010. Not decomposed. Of the two remaining bodies, one was described as thirty-five to fifty and ‘dark European’; the other was twenty-five to fifty and ‘light European’. Frieda clicked on the dark European. She saw what looked like a passport photograph of a round-faced woman. Below it were the words ‘Show Sensitive Images’. Frieda clicked on the words, confirmed that she was over eighteen and two more photographs appeared. The same woman, but with her eyes closed, as if she were asleep on a white pillow. Frieda looked at the text. She had been found under a road bridge in 2012. Too late to be Justine Walsh.

‘She must have come over from Romania,’ said Frieda. ‘Or Bulgaria. Or Poland. Or Ukraine. And it didn’t work out. And then she ended it and nobody came for her.’

‘As I said, it’s very rare.’

‘They were all somebody’s child once,’ said Frieda. ‘Which leaves us with one.’

Frieda clicked on ‘light European’, twenty-five to fifty. She had been found by a dog, in a shallow grave in Denton Woods, south London in April 2010. Body severely decomposed.

‘How do they know she was light European?’ Frieda asked.

‘Hair colour.’

The particulars were vague: Marks & Spencer underwear, dark trousers, light-coloured shirt. Flat leather shoes. No jewellery, no watch, nothing.

‘This one,’ said Frieda.

‘There’s no guarantee it’s her,’ said DCI Sharpe. ‘It’s a hundred to one. A thousand to one.’

‘No. This feels right. If you were in Dulwich, with a dead body, and you needed somewhere you knew you’d be undisturbed, that would be a good choice.’

DCI Sharpe looked at Frieda curiously. ‘It’s not good to dwell on these things,’ she said.

Frieda shook her head. ‘These remains. Can I get access to them?’

‘What for?’

‘We need a DNA sample. Then maybe someone can say goodbye to their mother.’

Frieda took a photograph of the bandanna with her mobile and emailed it to Saul Tait. ‘Do you remember Hannah ever wearing this?’

Karlsson was trying to read a novel. He usually read non-fiction – biographies, histories, books about science – and
was finding it a bit of an effort. He kept having to go back a few pages. When the phone rang he was almost pleased to be interrupted, but this quickly changed.

‘Mal,’ the voice roared. ‘Is that you?’

‘Of course it’s me.’

‘It’s Crawford here. What the fuck is going on?’

Karlsson held the phone away from his ear slightly. ‘I can’t really help you,’ he said, as politely as he could manage – his relations with the commissioner had been strained since he’d resigned before he was sacked, and then been reinstated because of Levin’s intervention. ‘I’m still at home with a cast. It will be a few weeks before I can return to work.’

‘I’m not talking about your leg. I’m talking about that bloody woman.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’ Karlsson did know what Crawford meant. When he talked in that tone, he meant Frieda, but he was trying to gather his thoughts.

‘Your Dr Klein. What’s she up to?’

‘In what sense?’

‘What’s she doing with that prankster?’

‘You mean Levin?’

‘Don’t play dumb. I know what’s going on. She’s been perverting the course of justice down in Thamesmead. She’s got hold of your Yvonne woman …’

‘Yvette. And I’m sure it’s authorized. But I’m not the person to ask: I’m on sick leave.’

‘I know what’s going on, Mal, that’s all I’m going to say. And tell Dr Klein from me that I’ve got my eye on her.’

‘This,’ said Shelley Walsh, in a whispering hiss, ‘is getting very irritating.’ She separated the last word out into its four syllables. ‘Why are you here a
gain
? I told you to let everything be.’

‘I know, but –’

‘And who’s
she
? Who’s
he
?’

‘This is my colleague Sasha Wells. And this is her son, Ethan.’

‘Your colleague?’ Shelley opened her eyes very wide; she raised her immaculate eyebrows. ‘And her son? Why is her son here? One of you is bad enough. What will everyone think?’ She glanced around wildly, as if there would be neighbours staring from every window.

‘Could we come in?’ asked Frieda.

‘No! I’ve said everything I wanted to say. I’ve said more than I wanted to say. I want you to leave. Now. Or I’ll call the police. And that little boy is standing on my flowerbed.’

‘The police know we’re here,’ said Frieda.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Please. If we could just come in.’

‘This has gone too far,’ said Shelley, standing back from the door so that they could file into the house. ‘Wipe your feet,’ she said to Ethan. He stared up at her with his dark, serious eyes, then shuffled his muddy shoes on the doormat.

It was eleven in the morning and the kitchen was filled with the smell of baking.

‘I won’t offer you coffee,’ said Shelley, ‘because you won’t be staying that long.’

‘Can I have milk?’ asked Ethan.

‘Milk?’ Shelley looked at the little boy as if he was speaking a foreign language.

‘We’ll get some later,’ said Sasha to Ethan, laying a hand on his head.

‘If you say “please”,’ said Shelley.

‘Please.’

She poured milk into a tumbler, almost up to the brim,
and handed it to Ethan, who drank it with his eyes fixed on her over the rim.