You Will Never Find Me (17 page)

‘I don't like being this mysterious myself,' said Mercy, ‘but there's a very delicate situation involving the safety of another boy from the Hampstead school.'

‘That wouldn't be the Bobkov boy, Sasha, would it?' asked the headmaster.

‘Why do you ask?'

‘Now he
is
a good footballer, so I'm told,' said Campbell. ‘And a good chess player. I run a chess club here, and when Valery and Sasha were at the Hampstead school they were very advanced players, far ahead of the other children, so Mrs. Demidova would bring them here.'

‘And now?'

‘Since Mrs. Demidova has moved from where she used to live in Hampstead I don't think the arrangement is so convenient.'

‘What time does school finish for Valery?'

‘Four thirty except Wednesdays, when it's two thirty.'

Mercy took a photo with her mobile phone, sent it through to Papadopoulos with an explanatory text.

She waited outside the school for Valery Demidova to come out and followed him for five minutes to an address in Welbeck Street. Mercy watched which bell he rang, waited a few minutes after he'd entered and took a closer look. The company name on the card was DLT Consultants Ltd.

 

‘There's no easy way of saying this, so I'm just going to lay the facts out as we know them,' said the translator.

There were three of them in the office: Luís Zorrita, Boxer and the translator. Zorrita looked directly at Boxer as he talked in Spanish, and although the translator spoke good English, Boxer only looked at Zorrita. The
inspector jefe
had been relieved to discover that Boxer was not completely a civilian. On the way to the Jefatura Boxer had revealed the rites of passage he'd been through to become a kidnap consultant. It was a way for both of them to avoid what was coming.

It was never easy to tell anyone that someone close to them had died. The level of impossibility to comprehend and accept was always raised with violence involved. On the two occasions in his career when Zorrita had had to explain the offensively macabre details of a body dismemberment he'd been met by total blankness on the part of the relatives. This facial blankness was just a manifestation of what was going on inside their heads: complete denial.

It was clear from their conversation in the car that Boxer spoke passable Spanish and could understand everything, but Zorrita understood the stress of these situations, which was why he had the translator present. He didn't want there to be any chink of doubt into which the human mind could dive and cut itself off from reality.

Zorrita pushed the evidence bag, which contained the passport they'd found in the inside pocket of the jacket, across the table towards Boxer.

‘Is this your daughter's passport?'

‘She probably lost it,' said Boxer. ‘Or it was stolen.'

Zorrita nodded, pulled the bag back towards him, laid it to one side. They went through the facts as they knew them, starting with Juan Martín's discovery of the black plastic bin liner. Boxer was aware of himself trying to slow things down, not wanting inevitability to gain momentum.

‘What actually alerted Juan Martín to this black plastic bag?'

‘The excitement of the dog and the very bad smell.'

‘There must have been something else for him to notice something suspicious.'

‘A human foot was protruding from it.'

Silence.

‘That would do it,' said Boxer.

The translator didn't know quite what to make of it. He knew English, but not English people so well. Zorrita ploughed on, relentless, with interruptions about time and detail from Boxer, which he patiently supplied. Occasionally he glanced at the photo on his desk of his wife and children, who were a constant presence, not just in his office but in his mind as well. His stomach winced at what was coming.

‘ . . . from their experience the forensics believe that this female had been dead for between seventy-two and eighty-four hours. The leg had been bled and had not been—'

‘The leg had been what?' asked Boxer.

‘The blood had been drained from the leg, probably from the whole body, prior to dismemberment,' said Zorrita, watching the ugliness of the crime sinking into the man's consciousness. ‘There were no bloodstains on any of the clothing within the bag.'

Boxer nodded him on.

‘They think this lower leg had been in the river for around forty-eight hours.'

‘You didn't mention any divers,' said Boxer. ‘Have you sent any in there?'

‘The divers arrived at the scene after the forensics.'

‘And what did they find?'

‘As yet, nothing. They've searched a one-kilometre stretch of the river. We're assuming that the bag was dumped into the river from the M50 motorway bridge at night. The river flows from north-east to south-east so they've searched three hundred metres upstream and seven hundred metres downstream.'

Boxer asked about the width of the river just to maintain a barrage of questions, hold back the flow of fate. He ran out of steam. Zorrita moved on to the clothing. As he walked over to the plastic sheaths hanging on a rail, he described the colour and material of the dress and jacket. He held it out for Boxer to see.

‘Both came from the shop French Connection. We've checked the product codes with the company and they inform us that these items were bought from their store in Terminal 1 at Heathrow Airport on Saturday evening.'

‘With a card?' asked Boxer desperately.

‘No, with cash,' said Zorrita, letting fall the sheaths. ‘In the inside pocket of the jacket the forensics discovered one hundred euros, a fifty, two twenties and a ten along with that British passport in the—'

In a couple of strides Boxer was at the rail. The translator flinched at the suddenness of the movement. Boxer held up the dress as if imagining it on a person.

‘This dress,' he said, ‘is just not the sort of thing she would ever wear. I've seen her in short skirts, but in a dress like this and a jacket—never. I've never seen her in anything like it. Never.'

‘I understand you were in the Puerta del Sol last night, distributing this leaflet,' said Zorrita, holding out a piece of paper. ‘You left some at the reception and with the concierge. It shows—'

‘I know . . . ' said Boxer. ‘I know. I'm just saying . . . that was something put together by her mother from receipts I found.'

‘What receipts?' asked Zorrita.

‘I found receipts in the jeans she left in her rucksack in the Hotel Moderno. They were for clothes and a pair of shoes.'

‘Where did those receipts come from?'

‘French Connection,' said Boxer, defeated by himself. ‘Terminal 1, Heathrow Airport.'

The translator was so fascinated by the intensity of the human drama he forgot to translate, but Zorrita, who had almost no English, grasped it all the same.

‘The passport found in the jacket belongs to Amy Akuba Boxer,' said Zorrita, looking down on his desk.

The plastic sheath fell from Boxer's hands. He stormed over to the desk, stared down at the passport again, open at the ID page inside its plastic evidence bag.

Amy's unsmiling face looked back at him.

‘Is that your daughter's passport?' asked Zorrita.

D
o you have something of your daughter's from which we could extract a DNA sample to confirm the identity of the body?' asked Zorrita.

No response. Boxer stood, hands splayed on either side of his daughter's passport, his head hanging down as if its weight had become a terrible burden. Zorrita pitied him, couldn't help but despise himself as he went on: ‘In order to release the body we're going to require a DNA—'

Zorrita stopped as his huge desk was shunted forward about an inch by the intensity of the sob that racked Boxer's frame. Zorrita was about to reach out a hand and take hold of the Englishman, but stopped himself as he realised that this was a man who was used to keeping his emotions under control, used to suppressing all personal feelings, who had now come across something too big to contain. What stopped Zorrita was that he'd never been with the pain on the inside. He still had his parents, siblings, wife and children. He was a homicide detective who was a personal tragedy virgin and something told him this man wasn't. Boxer's shoulders heaved another brutal sob that once more inched the desk towards him.

Had Zorrita been able to look inside Boxer at that moment he would have been mystified by the colossal Gothic darkness within. He would have expected a wincing rawness, a laceration of all that was good, but not a bottomless black chasm. Surely that would come later, with the realisation of loss, the terrible emptiness, the endless longing for that unattainable fullness. The unfillable gaps of empty shoes, limp dresses, a hollow in a mattress.

He moved around the desk, lifted Boxer away from the table and got him onto a chair, which the translator, snapping out of his paralysis, held steady. They studied him as if he was a drugged tiger, fascinated but wary. His face was strangely still and dry of any tears while his body seemed to be under tremendous strain, as if trying to withstand some terrible G force.

‘Are you feeling all right?' asked the translator, unused to these emotional crises in his work.

‘No, I'm afraid I don't,' said Boxer, his body smoothing out as if suddenly weightless.

The translator and Zorrita exchanged looks. ‘You don't what?' the policeman asked.

‘I don't have any sample from which you might be able to extract my daughter's DNA.'

‘What about her mother?' asked Zorrita. ‘Are you living together or . . . '

‘We're separated. Amy lives with her mother but . . . ' Boxer struggled to find words, ransacked his mind for correct terms. ‘Amy left home,' he said, ‘and her leaving was extremely thorough.'

‘I'm not sure what that means,' said the translator.

‘It means she was punishing us,' said Boxer. ‘She removed all traces of herself. She took everything out of the house—old toys, clothes, drawings, the lot. She vacuumed everything up in her room, every hair from her head, the whole house.'

‘Then we'll establish her identity with a sample from you.'

‘I think I'd better speak to her mother before anything else happens.'

‘Of course,' said Zorrita. ‘We'll leave you to do that. Use the phone on my desk. We'll wait outside.'

Boxer pulled himself up to the desk and wondered how he was going to do this impossible thing: tell Mercy. His mind was flying off on tangents, remembering when he'd been told something that had inspired intense grief thirty-seven years ago. He pulled himself back to the task. He had to find Mercy first. He decided on Makepeace. Get her back to the office, tell her there. Then call Mercy's Aunt Grace and ask her to look after her.

Makepeace came on the line. They knew each other.

‘How's it going, Charles?'

‘It's not good, Peter.'

‘Oh Christ.'

‘Do you know where Mercy is?'

‘I can find out.'

‘I don't want to tell her . . . tell her this thing when she's on her own out in the street somewhere. I want her to be with people.'

‘I'll bring her back to my office.'

‘I'll get someone from her family to be there with her.'

‘When you know, give me a name and I'll alert security.'

‘What I'm going to tell her is very hard, Peter,' said Boxer. ‘It looks like Amy's been murdered.'

‘What do you mean by “looks like”?'

‘A body has been cut up and disposed of in a river.'

‘My God.'

‘What's been found is a leg, the clothes she was wearing and her passport.'

‘I'm sorry, Charles. I'm so sorry.'

‘They're searching the river now, looking . . . looking for . . . '

‘Yes, I understand,' said Makepeace, who knew how impossible it would be for any parent to have to say ‘the rest of her'.

‘Call me when Mercy's with you and I'll speak to her.'

Boxer put the phone down and went out into the corridor. Zorrita was up by the stairs on his mobile.

‘They're calling her mother back to her office and I'll speak to her then,' he said.

Zorrita turned, hung up. They went back into his office.

‘That was the head of the diving team,' said Zorrita. ‘They've been searching near the bridge further upstream where another motorway crosses the river. They've found a second bag, identical, which had partly split open. The forensics are looking at it now.'

 

‘I want to go to the toilet,' said Sasha, who'd worked out that there was a microphone in the room and they could hear him remotely.

After a minute the door opened and he was handed a cardboard bottle.

‘What's all this about?' said the voice. ‘You just been . . . less than an hour ago.'

‘I want to go number twos,' said Sasha.

‘What's that?' said the voice.

‘Er, a shit,' said Sasha, thinking that was more their language.

‘O.K.,' said the voice. ‘I'll take you for a shit.'

The man hauled him off the bench, shoved him towards the door, opened it for him. They shuffled into a room where the walls were also wood-panelled. The man reached over his head, pushed another door open and Sasha felt cool air on his face. He was shunted sideways into a second room only a few metres across and through yet another doorway where he ran into something like a washing machine.

‘Go to your left. The toilet's at the end.'

Sasha put his hands out, trailed them along the wall on his left and other electrical goods on his right. His knee hit the toilet. He put the seat down and turned.