The Unquiet Dead (32 page)

He stepped back, wounded, then turned and disappeared down the stairs. Jessie closed the door, stumbled down the hallway and literally fell into bed. That night she, at least, slept like the dead. The restful dead.

In the morning Jessie woke with a much clearer head. She walked through to the sitting room to retrieve the information from Burrows, but couldn’t see it. She found it on the kitchen table with a note from Bill. Jessie reached for the cafetiere and waited for her soldiers to arrive. By nine, Niaz, Burrows and Jessie sat on the floor of her living room peering over the contents of two battered jiffy bags that held the secrets of the Nancy Scott-Somers kidnapping. With a stroke of genius, Burrows had signed out the evidence bags collected during the case. These were stored separately from the files themselves and Moore had not had the good sense to put in a request herself. Jessie was still within her orders. She had not gone anywhere near the family. The thinning jiffy bags didn’t contain much, but what they did could end the quest for proof that the man in the morgue, the man they had pulled out of a disused pit, was indeed the man who had kidnapped the Scott-Somers’ daughter.

Inside the polythene bag were Nancy’s clothes. There was also a picture of her wearing them. For the first time Jessie looked into the child’s eyes. Angelic was right. She had huge blue eyes and bouncing blonde curls, her mouth was a perfect rosebud, her cheeks round and freckled. A picture-perfect little girl holding an innocuous daily newspaper. Except Jessie knew that the photo was proof of life and what it captured was a nightmare. Of course the little girl could identify her captor – who else had taken the photo? Looking large and grotesque next to the dainty floral dress and red-leather buckled shoes were Malcolm’s trainers. His not-so-lucky shoes. As well as evidence from the tread, forensic scientists had matched dirt from Nancy’s clothes with dirt from the shoes. The same dirt was found in the disused farm building that housed the partially filled well down which Nancy had been hidden. Photos of the scene showed a wooden structure with beams and a corrugated iron roof. On the beam that passed directly above the well hung the skeleton of a cat, its four limbs pointing down to the black hole beneath.

In the final zip-lock bag was the one piece of written evidence in the whole case. A hand-delivered, unaddressed envelope containing neatly typed instructions for the drop. The money was to be taken to a green-field site in Essex, the exact grid reference was to follow. Nancy would be waiting in one corner of the field; all Mr Scott-Somers had to do was leave the money in the opposite
corner and walk clockwise around the perimeter until he reached his daughter. The kidnapper had added a warning. The field was 128 metres above sea level with a 360-degree view of the surrounding, flat, arable land. Any sign of police, back-up or intervention of any kind, and neither Scott-Somers nor his daughter would make it out of the field alive. Jessie assumed that the grid reference had subsequently been relayed over the phone. She also had to assume that Mr Scott-Somers followed Hoare’s instructions to the letter. He got his daughter and himself out of that field alive.

All the evidence had been dusted for prints. None had been found. Jessie returned to the only piece of written evidence and began to wonder whether science, not faith, could show her the way, expose the truth and shed some much-needed light on this dark and sorry tale.

Niaz drove Jessie back to Lisson Grove while Burrows paid a visit to the forensic lab. Now that she had him alone, she wanted to know what Niaz had discovered about the elusive Scott-Somers family.

‘They are very reclusive, with the exception of the younger daughter Charlotte, who frequently makes the society pages. Rumours abound of a family curse.’

‘Based on what?’

‘The origins of their enormous wealth.’ Niaz explained that the Scott-Somers had made it rich
by buying tracts of bombed-out London after the Second World War and, so the story went, bulldozing the bodies into the rubble without ceremony in order to turn a quick profit. According to Niaz, it was a much debated subject, fuelled by Miss Charlotte’s penchant for spiritualists, charms, crystals and spells, and interviews with the press in which she claimed to have been told by mediums that a lot of angry, displaced people were bearing down on her.

‘Do you believe in all that?’ asked Jessie.

‘I do not believe in curses, but neither do I underestimate the power of them. The idea of a curse is simply a fixation in an already unsettled mind. But with enough telling and retelling, the sense of the curse can grow strong enough to plague all who are told. At that point it becomes self-prophesying.’

‘Especially if some medium tells you you’re surrounded by angry dead people.’

‘Spiritualism can be a reassuring substitute for the vacancies in people’s lives. Perhaps Charlotte Scott-Somers feels she is missing something.’

A childhood, by the sounds of it, thought Jessie. ‘Exactly. They play on people’s loss and confusion. No one goes to a medium because all their relatives are well and happy and life is good. You go looking for answers. It’s etched on the faces of all the people who go in and out of the room. They will cling to anything. There should be a law against it. What’s the difference between the old travelling
salesman and his elixir of life and the spiritualist? Very little. I don’t think there’s anything reassuring about that.’

‘Why did you go?’ asked Niaz.

Jessie crossed her arms defensively and looked out of the car window.

‘We weren’t talking about me.’

‘Were we not?’

… It was a year after her mother died. She was desperate. Jessie hadn’t received a single sign. No unexplained incident that she could cling to for proof of life eternal. No dream. No sleepy whispered message. Just the endless dull thud when she woke and realised it was all true. Someone had taken her mother away. A friend had given her the number. A friend she could no longer remember the name of. She made an appointment. Three times she went to the address. Three times she chickened out. She saw all the other people. Loss is as powerful as bad body odour. The fourth time, she went in. It was so obvious afterwards what had happened. She was in her mid-twenties. She was lost. She was unmarried. She probably had no kids. She was a professional but she wore a piece of jewellery that didn’t fit the time or her age. Clearly she’d lost her mother. Add on twenty odd years – unlikely to be a motorbike crash, so statistically you’re looking at cancer.
Your mother says she’s glad to have her hair back
. Wham. Bam. Jessie reeled. She was furious with the pious woman who
sat opposite her, she was furious with herself and she was furious with her mother who’d refused treatment and died quickly, but with a full head of hair …

‘Your mother died, didn’t she?’ asked Niaz gently.

See, thought Jessie, watching the flyposters whip through her line of vision. Even Niaz could see it.

‘We’re nearly there,’ she said. ‘You’d better tell me about Mrs Romano.’

Mrs Romano had been reported missing, just once, by the daughter of her mother’s sister. At least someone in Mrs Romano’s family had given her a moment’s thought. Originally she came from York. It was probable she’d been cut off when she moved south and married an Italian. As Niaz said poignantly, ‘You know what people can be like.’ Jessie didn’t doubt Niaz knew exactly what people could be like every day of the week. The police had been given very little to go on and the search soon dried up because there were no suspicious circumstances, Mrs Romano wasn’t a minor and, most importantly, she had left of her own free will. Unsurprisingly, it never got as far as the Met. Until there was a national missing person’s register, people were going to remain lost, MIA, or, like the headless woman found in the ditch near Jessie’s home, unclaimed.

Niaz parked the car. ‘Are we going to question him about this now?’

‘Indirectly. I’m more interested in his notebooks.
When he was trying to force them on us, it was like the scene in
Green Card
where Depardieu tries to force that elaborately created photo album on the immigration officer as proof …’ Jessie saw Niaz’s look of incomprehension. ‘I always thought it was a carefully constructed alibi, and now I’m sure he’s hiding something. Ian Doyle, aka Malcolm Hoare, couldn’t have got very far that day; someone must have found him. All those police and paramedics probably scared him into the basement. What if someone went looking for him, some of that angry mob who later set up a vigil outside the baths, or the Romanos themselves? We need to find the inconsistencies, but I don’t want Romano to know we are suspicious, so let’s keep the information about his wife’s cousin to ourselves.’

They walked up to the now-familiar door. Jessie knocked, but there was no answer. She looked at her watch and decided to wait. They asked a couple of passers-by whether they knew where Mr Romano was, but it was all the same around there: everyone was deaf, dumb and blind when it came to dealing with the police. An hour slowly passed. The only sign of Mr Romano was the pile of mess in the kitchen, which seemed to have grown since their last visit. It wasn’t particularly odd to find someone out during the middle of the day, but something about Romano’s absence and the filthy kitchen made Jessie feel a little uneasy.

‘Perhaps you should go back to the station and
start tracing Mrs Romano’s cousin. Can you drop me back at the flat? I’m going to stay on the Scott-Somers case.’

‘I cannot imagine anyone from that family going to Marshall Street Baths,’ said Niaz. ‘They have their own swimming pools. Several, in fact.’

‘Exactly. They have the sort of money people in the revenge business are after, and people in the revenge business get everywhere – for as long as it takes.’

Niaz looked back through Romano’s window, ‘Do you think people in the revenge business might know people in the security business?’

‘Two vendettas,’ said Jessie, following his gaze.

‘One victim.’

‘There is never only one victim, Niaz.’

‘I’d like to speak to Dr Turnball, please?’

‘Who may I say is calling?’

‘Detective Inspector Driver, West End Central CID,’ said Jessie, pulling her legs up under her and dragging a notebook across the bed. She took a pen from behind her ear.

‘May I say what it is in regard to?’

‘Nancy and Charlotte Scott-Somers.’

The secretary sounded confused. ‘Are they patients of the doctor?’

‘I think so.’

‘If you’d just like to hold on, I’ll see if he’s free. He is very busy,’ she said, politely alerting Jessie to the possibility that the doctor would not take
her call. But he did. Within seconds.

‘I’m hoping this isn’t bad news,’ said Dr Turnball.

‘No, I’m simply trying to locate Nancy Scott-Somers.’

‘Excuse me one moment.’ Jessie heard the receiver being placed on a hard surface. An instant later a door closed. Jessie hoped this was a good sign. He retrieved the phone.

‘Why are you trying to find her?’

‘Well, it’s a bit complicated.’

‘Most things are with that family,’ said the doctor. ‘Try me, I’m something of an expert, albeit a reluctant one.’

‘We have found a body which I believe to be Malcolm Hoare.’

‘Well, well, after all these years, he finally turns up. How did he die? Somewhere alone, I hope.’

‘Yes, somewhere alone.’

‘And what has this got to do with Nancy?’

‘He was tied up, in chains, his hands held high above his head, then dropped into a hole. Sound familiar?’

‘Good God – you think this is a revenge killing, after all this time?’

‘Actually, he’s been dead fourteen years.’

‘Even so, it sounds a little tenuous.’

‘He died on February 23rd – still sound tenuous?’

‘Detective Inspector Driver, I can entirely see why that would arouse your suspicions, but there is something you should know about Nancy: she
had the heart of an angel, really, she was the sweetest child. I swear to you, that girl couldn’t kill a man. Especially not that man – he was huge.’

Until that moment, Jessie hadn’t actually imagined
Nancy
killing him. She’d been stuck on the idea of vengeful parents. In her mind’s eye, Nancy remained the traumatised ten-year-old, unable to conceive of revenge, let alone haul a grown man up on to a hook, or lower a lid that took four policemen to lift. But of course Nancy wouldn’t have been ten at the time. She’d have been twenty-three. And Malcolm Hoare was no longer a great bear of a man, able to snatch his prey at will. He’d wasted away to nothing and his gammy leg would have made him an easy target. Even angels fall.

‘Undoubtedly, he ruined her life,’ the doctor continued, ‘but she remained decent to the core. She pretended to be happy for her family’s sake, but I know she never stopped wetting her bed or having nightmares. It was always the same bad dream: she was dying, alone, surrounded by dead cats. That’s what terrified her most – dying alone. You have to believe me, she simply couldn’t kill a person.’

‘So you looked after her for a long time.’

‘I helped when I could. Once a nanny telephoned me in the middle of the night; they thought Nancy was having an epileptic fit. When I arrived a few minutes later, her eyes were wide open, her body was rigid and she was screaming. I’ll never forget the feel of her skin – she was as cold as a cadaver
and slick with sweat. It was a dream from which we could not wake her. I’d seen it in babies before, but never a fourteen-year-old.’