(1998) Denial (42 page)

The first beads of perspiration were already popping on the detective’s forehead as he lumbered back into the room gripping the tops of two Styrofoam coffee cups in one hand. He put them on the table, and showered down beside them an assortment of plastic spoons, sugar packs and creamer tubs. Then he closed the door and lowered his hefty frame into the chair opposite Michael.

‘Going to be a warm one,’ he said, standing up again, briefly, to switch on the fan. He pulled out a handkerchief,
mopped his brow, then ran his massive hands through his light fuzz of close-cropped fair hair.

Michael watched him warily, mindful of the blazing row they’d had on the phone yesterday afternoon, when the detective constable had told him that so far he’d done nothing to follow up Michael’s missing-person report. Today, the policeman seemed surprisingly receptive to him.

‘I hear you had a bit of an incident on your radio show last night?’

‘Yes.’

Roebuck peeled away a foil lid, and poured creamer into his coffee. Then he tore open a sugar pack and tipped that in. His eyes rested on the tape cassette, and the envelope containing the printout from Beamish, which Michael had laid on the table.

‘My fiancée was listening to it, Dr Tennent. She heard your conversation before it was cut off.’

‘What did she think?’

‘She’s a police officer, she works for the CPU – the Child Protection Unit,’ he added, when he saw Michael’s blank look. ‘She listens to a lot of phone calls of people in distress. She said in her opinion that this young lady, Miss Capstick, sounded in deep distress. Would you agree with that, sir?’

The detective’s eyes, in contrast to his almost clumsy-looking frame, were hard, quick-moving and intelligent. Michael could see this man turning mean in any circumstance that required it. And he was aware now that he was being scrutinised carefully.

He removed the spectrum analysis printout from the envelope, and talked the detective through it.

Roebuck opened his folder and jotted down some notes on a pad. Then he looked back at Michael. ‘Are you able to account for your whereabouts on Sunday afternoon and night, sir?’

Michael stared back at him. It was a fair question, sensible police procedure, yet in this context, and probably because his patience was frayed with tiredness, it angered him. ‘Probably not, no,’ he said, testily.

There was a lengthy silence, disturbed only by the hum from the fan, and the riffling of the edges of the report in its draught.

He stared Roebuck back in the eye. ‘Want to lock me up as a suspect?’

‘I don’t think so, sir.’ Roebuck smiled, his tone conciliatory.

‘But it’s crossed your mind?’ Michael said.

After a moment of hesitation, the detective said, ‘I’d be failing in my duties if I didn’t consider all possibilities.’

‘So that means you are at last concerned that something might have happened to Amanda Capstick? Good, I’m delighted. It’s only taken four days.’

Roebuck gave him a wry smile of acknowledgement that he’d walked into the trap. ‘I’d like to listen to the tape.’

Michael removed it from the box. The detective put it into one of the twin decks, and ran it.

When it reached the end, Roebuck nodded in thoughtful silence, then he said. ‘The spectrum analysis shows the tape has been edited, through mismatches in the silences, you said?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mr Beamish has worked for us in the past. He’s good.’ He stirred his coffee, then drank some. ‘Did you bring a photograph of Miss Capstick?’

‘Yes.’ Michael was encouraged by his attitude this morning. From the same envelope as the spectrum analysis, he produced a handful of photographs Amanda’s mother had given him, and pushed them across the table.

Roebuck sifted through them. ‘She’s a very attractive young lady.’

‘She is.’

‘I’d like to get posters put up in all the areas where she was last seen. Presumably her family have no objection to publicity?’

‘None.’

‘We’ll try to get her picture up on the missing-person slots on television covering this area.’

‘If she’s been abducted she could have been taken out of this area.’

‘We’ll go as wide as we can, sir.’

‘What else are you going to do?’

‘I’d like the names, addresses and phone numbers of all her family, friends and acquaintances.’

Michael produced the printout Lulu had already prepared from the envelope and handed it to him. ‘What else will you do?’

‘I’m going to take a look at our own missing-persons records and see if there are any similarities that could link them.’

‘Link them to what? To the pattern of a possible killer?’

There was another silence, broken only by the hum of the fan and the riffling of paper.

‘You’re not going to give me some crap about it being too soon to start jumping to conclusions, are you, DC Roebuck?’

The policeman ejected the tape from the machine and slipped it back into the box. ‘Do you have a back-up copy of this?’

‘Yes.’

‘We’ll make another.’ He tapped the edge of his cup. ‘You want to talk straight, Doctor, so let’s be open with each other. This tape changes everything, all right?’

Michael nodded grimly.

‘And there’s something else, which I’d like you to keep to yourself. I’m not telling this to the press because it wouldn’t be in our interests at the moment. I don’t want to distress you more than you already are, but since you want me to be open . . .’ He picked up a plastic spoon then put it down again. ‘There are some parallels here with another missing-person inquiry. A young woman editor at a publishing house, who went missing three weeks ago.’

‘Tina Mackay? The one who’s been in the news?’

‘Yes. She’s a similar age to Miss Capstick. Also a professional woman, attractive, similar build. She disappeared without trace, with her car.’

‘None of that publicity’s helped you?’

‘Not in Tina Mackay’s case so far, no.’

‘Are you treating it as a murder inquiry?’

‘We’ve set up an incident room, and we’re giving it the same attention we would give a murder inquiry, if that answers your question.’

‘And are you going to set up an incident room for Amanda?’

Their eyes locked. Roebuck said, grimly, ‘I’m going to show this tape to my governor this morning. I’ll do everything I can.’

‘You’ll keep me informed?’

‘Yes.’

They stood up and Roebuck escorted him through to the main entrance. Then he took Michael’s hand and shook it firmly, looking into his eyes once more, this time with deep concern. ‘Call me any time, Dr Tennent. Day or night. All right?’

Michael thanked him, and left.

Beneath the lurid glare of the mid-morning sun, the slack sea water in the harbour was the colour of tinned peas.

Glenn Branson watched the steady stream of bubbles a hundred yards out from the dock wall where he was standing, breathing salt air richly tanged with rotting seaweed, rusting oil-cans and freshly sawn timber, thinking about Cora Burstridge.

The tide on the far wall was down to the low-water mark. A gull swooped low then rose again; several more sat in the water, rich pickings from this busy port. A crane winched a container from the hold of a freighter lying low on its Plimsoll line, flying a Norwegian flag. A tiny harbour patrol boat chugged past, dwarfed by the freighter’s bulk. Ripples of wake bobbed the red buoys that marked where the two police frogmen were diving.

Sandwiched between a bunkering station and a lumber depot, behind the green screens they had erected an hour ago, were parked two police cars, a white crime scene investigators’ van, the diving team’s grey van, and a dark blue van belonging to a local firm of undertakers.

Danny Leon, the informer whom Glenn and Mike Harris had brought down from Luton prison yesterday, had given them the unwelcome news that the reason they couldn’t find a second key witness for Operation Skeet, Jason Hewlett, was because he was at the bottom of the harbour, without an aqualung. He had drawn a diagram showing the exact spot. Any minute now and they would find out whether he had told them the truth.

Hanging around, waiting with him, were a police photographer, two crime-scene investigators, two undertakers
who looked as out of place as extras hanging around a film set, Glenn thought, and Glenn’s immediate boss, Detective Sergeant Bill Digby.

Digby, in a brown suit and golf-club tie, feet apart, hands behind him, like a soldier at ease, crinkly black hair gleaming in the sunlight, shrugged and said, ‘So far, Glenn, all you can produce is one small strip of cloth retrieved from a loft, and an unreliable, elderly witness, who may or may not have seen a man on a fire escape.’ He turned to the detective constable and gave a twitch of his trim moustache.

‘Don’t forget the Babygro, sir, the one she had bought that afternoon for her baby granddaughter. I think that’s very important.’

‘There’s been nothing from the post-mortem?’

‘No, Sarge.’

Digby pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. ‘Glenn, do yourself a favour and forget about Cora Burstridge.’

‘Her funeral’s tomorrow. I –’

The detective sergeant gave him an interrogative look.

Glenn hesitated, then said, ‘I know it would cause distress to the family, but I’d really like to have the funeral delayed.’

‘What’s that going to achieve?’

‘It could save an enormous amount of hassle if . . .’ he was going to say, ‘if there were any further developments’, but decided not to. Digby wasn’t in a good frame of mind, and he was going to be in an even worse one if the informer was right about Jason Hewlett.

And, he thought, dispirited, perhaps the sergeant was right. He stared at the bubbles and wondered if maybe he was obsessed with this because it was Cora Burstridge. Was her fame clouding his judgement, making him unable to accept that she really had taken her own life?

Digby was sending him clear signals that he disapproved of his giving all this time to the actress’s death, and even the governor hadn’t responded with any great enthusiasm to the form Glenn had put on his desk.

Cora, you are being cremated tomorrow and I’m fast running out of road. I’ve done my best for you, and I don’t know how much more I can do
.

A sudden eruption of bubbles. The surface of the water between the diving buoys turned to a roiling, milky foam. A frogman’s hooded, masked head, broke the surface, then the other’s. The first raised a hand in the air and signalled a thumbs-up to the shore.

Then a third head broke the surface between them. Except that this head wasn’t wearing any mask, or any skin, or any hair. It was a bare white skull.

Glenn edged closer to the wall and peered down now, watching the divers in a mixture of horror and near disbelief. The skull was still, bizarrely, attached to its clothed body.

There was a flurry of activity around him as the undertakers rapidly pulled on white protective suits, as did the two crime-scene investigators. Then all four ran down the steps to a ledge in the harbour wall and helped the divers wrestle the corpse onto dry land.

The smell hit all of them simultaneously. Glenn turned away, close to retching, and saw Digby react in the same way.

‘Fuck me!’ Digby said, pinching his nose shut.

Glenn pinched his nose shut, too. That putrid-fish stench of death again, but unbearably strong. Looking down at the ledge, he could see why.

The body was in leather motorcycling gear, which had bloated right out. The hands were covered in leather gloves, the feet in boots. Wound several times around the midriff, pinioning the arms and legs was a length of anchor chain, which was also wound and secured around a small concrete breeze block.

The skull, protruding from the collar, and completely bare looked ludicrously small for the body, as if it had been stuck on as some appalling sick joke.

‘Been there three weeks,’ Digby said, grimly. ‘Crabs have picked his head clean.’

‘You reckon that’s Jason Hewett?’ Glenn asked.

‘Want to go and check the body for some ID?’

Glenn swallowed. ‘I’ll get some overalls and gloves.’

Digby said, quietly, ‘Take a good look at him, lad. Remember him, next time life throws you a curve. OK?’

The detective constable stared back at his sergeant, uncertainly. ‘Remember him, Sarge?’

Digby nodded. ‘Just remember him. You’re all chewed up because you think I’m not being fair to you over Cora Burstridge. Next time you think life’s a bitch, just remember how lucky you are that you’re not that sad bastard lying down there.’

I don’t think Cora Burstridge was very lucky either, sir
, Glenn wanted to say, but didn’t.

Instead he went, silently, to the crime-scene investigators’ van in search of the protective clothing and face mask they had laid out for him.

After his ward round, Michael looked at his list of patient appointments for today, then frowned at his secretary, who was pecking at her keyboard. ‘Terence Goel again? It’s Thursday – he only came on Tuesday. Why the hell’s he coming twice in one week, Thelma?’

In her nervy, defensive manner, she said, ‘Well, you do have several patients who you see twice a week.’

‘I can do without this one today.’

She looked at him with quiet sympathy. ‘I’m sure he needs you, Dr Tennent. All your patients need you very much.’

He felt so drained that he was close to tears. He turned away so she couldn’t see his face.

‘Mrs Teresa Capstick – Miss Capstick’s mother – phoned you about ten minutes ago, wondering if there was any news.’

Crushing a tear with his eyelids, he said, ‘I’ll call her.’ Then he stepped out of her office and into the corridor.

‘Dr Tennent?’ Her tone softened.

He stopped. ‘Yes?’

‘I’m sure that Miss Capstick will turn up safe and well.’

‘I hope.’

‘Shall I send Mrs Gordon in?’

His first patient of the day, Anne Gordon, suffered from desperately low self-esteem. It was nine thirty, and he was fifteen minutes late for her after his drive across London from Detective Constable Roebuck, and a problem in one of his wards. She would be thinking she did not matter to him, and this was why he was keeping her waiting.