Evil in Return (26 page)

Back outside in the sunshine, he breathed in the warm air and followed the narrow path that skirted the lake until he came to the boathouse. It too was built of stone, with gates and a landing stage on the water, and an upper storey above. A balcony spanned the width at the front, with two large windows and a door. The stone facing looked in a poor state of repair. As with the church, panes of glass were broken or missing and the large wooden gates sagged on their hinges, green with mould and rotting where they touched the water. A newish-looking sign had been fixed to one side of the stairs with the words ‘DANGER KEEP OUT’, no doubt put there by the hotel management, worried about public liability. He was surprised that they hadn’t bothered to restore the building. He had never been keen on messing about in boats, even as a child, but it seemed such a shame to let everything decay away. However, tastes had changed. The slow, quiet pleasure of taking a boat or a punt out on a lake on a summer’s day was something rarely appreciated any longer. With the golf course and the spa to keep them occupied, the guests probably never bothered to venture this far from the hotel. Careful where he put his feet, he climbed the wooden stairs to the first floor. The small terrace was sheltered by the overhanging roof. It stood several metres above the water and commanded a clear view of the entire lake, as well as the chimneys and gables of the main house in the distance. It would have been easy to hide from view behind one of the pillars and he wondered if somebody had been there early on that long-ago morning. Fleming had said he had the impression someone was watching as the five men stood around the girl’s body deciding what to do. Had they also seen Wade and Logan row out into the middle of the lake and dump the girl’s body?

The door was ajar and he pushed it open and went inside. The floor was covered in a thick carpet of dead leaves. An old-fashioned punt and a rowing boat lay under one of the windows, together with a jumble of wooden paddles, all beyond use. A few oars hung on the back wall, the blades inscribed with the names of school and university eights printed in faded gold lettering on the blades. All the inscriptions dated back to before the First World War and he felt for a moment as though he was in a time warp, as though nothing of consequence had happened to the house since. Perhaps all hope had died with the death of the only son.

Whoever had written the email to Paul Khan had stood right there too. He glanced out of the window across the lake and wondered how many people had known about the crypt and the boathouse. Given the sort of life Fleming and his friends had led, the field was an open one. He thought of the girl’s clothing lying in a neat pile somewhere in the middle of the floor here. Why neat? Surely most teenagers didn’t bother with tidiness, particularly not in that sort of situation. What had she been doing in the boathouse and why had she left her things there when everybody else had undressed beside the lake? Maybe she had been there for some reason before the party, but if so, why had nobody recognised her?

He heard a shout and looked out of the window. Roberts was jogging towards him, waving. Two of the divers had surfaced in the middle of the lake and were talking to the man in the RIB.

‘We’ll have to get that coffee later,’ Roberts called out, as he came out onto the terrace. ‘Looks like they’ve found something.’

29

Tartaglia stared down at the collection of discoloured bones laid out on the gurney. For all he could tell, the girl might have been in the lake for two hundred years rather than barely twenty. It was early evening and he was waiting for Arabella Browne in a small antechamber of the mortuary at Flax Bourton, just outside Bristol. She had left him to take an important call from London and had been gone a while. He was wondering how much longer he could last. The mortuary building was new and state-of-the-art, but the smell of the place was getting to him worse than usual. The small room was lined with fridges and he felt claustrophobic. An autopsy was in full swing in the adjoining theatre. Against the background of running water and the buzz of a saw, he could hear a woman’s piping, nasal voice giving a detailed account of where she had been to dinner and what she had eaten the previous night. His head still felt thick and it was as if each sound was magnified.

They still had no idea who the girl was, but after a cursory examination the anthropologist had confirmed that the skeleton belonged to a female, between five-foot-two and five-foot-four, aged somewhere in her mid to late teens. A more detailed examination would follow, but it certainly seemed likely that she was the girl Fleming had originally discovered by the lake. The search team were still out combing the lake for the rest of her things, but in amongst the mess of mud and bone in the plastic wrapping, Browne had found a pair of gold earrings, each set with a dangling purple stone. Hopefully, they would help identify her. One thing they now knew for certain: her death was no accident. Browne had found a blunt trauma fracture at the back of her skull and her hyoid bone was also fractured. The girl had been strangled.

Alex Fleming said that he hadn’t noticed any injuries when he found her, which was just plausible. If the blow to the head had happened more or less at the same time that she was strangled, there was unlikely to have been a great deal of blood. Also, the water in the lake could have washed any blood away. That was assuming Fleming was telling the truth. If not, the possibilities opened up. Wade and Black had both described her body as being muddy and said that her hair was matted with mud and waterweed, as though she had been lying in the shallows of the lake at some point. She could have gone swimming and been attacked when she came out. Or she could have been attacked and then dumped in the lake in an attempt to hide the body.

Tartaglia had seen many cases of manual strangulation, all bar one of them women. Although many were the result of domestic violence, there was often a sexual motive and he wondered if this had been true for the girl. Whatever had happened, unless the force of the blow to the back of the skull had knocked her out, she would have struggled. There might have been physical signs – discoloration or possibly bruising to her neck – as well as abrasions, cuts and scratches either made by the killer, or by the victim as she tried to defend herself. How could Fleming have noticed nothing? The blow to the head had been straight on, not angled from above. Given the girl’s small stature, the most likely explanation was that she had fallen backwards with some force and hit her head against something hard like a rock, although he didn’t remember seeing anything like that around the lake. He pictured a scene, a man’s large, strong hands around the girl’s slender neck, maybe he was on top of her, forcing her down, throttling her, she hitting her head. In his mind, she was being raped and the man on top of her was Alex Fleming. They would arrest him straight away. Hopefully, now that they had found her and had an idea what had happened, they would be able to force a confession out of him.

The two women in the adjoining theatre had moved on to speculating about the sexual attributes and abilities of a male colleague. It was all getting too close to home and, even though he had no choice, he felt like an eavesdropper. There was still no sign of Browne and he decided to go outside and call Steele with the news. He needed some fresh air to clear his head and, more than anything, he needed a smoke. He walked out of the room and through the front doors, looking back briefly at the uninspiring modern building, recently completed and tacked on like a prosthetic limb behind the late-Victorian coroner’s court. Browne had been extolling the new facilities inside like a backpacker in a suite at the Ritz, but he couldn’t get excited. Outside, it was an unhappy architectural marriage. The new wing lacked any sort of vision and was the usual compromise of the bureaucratic planning process. He wondered how the residents of rural Flax Bourton felt about it. In a way, it might have been better to bulldoze the whole thing and start from scratch.

He sat down on the front steps, lit a cigarette and dialled Steele’s line. She picked up immediately.

‘It’s Mark. I—’

‘I was just about to call you,’ she cut in. There was urgency in her tone. ‘Where are you?’

‘At the mortuary in Bristol. Why?’

‘You’d better get back here right away. Daniel Black has been murdered.’

The words hit him like a body blow and he closed his eyes. ‘Shit,’ he said. He put his forehead in his hand and took in a lungful of smoke. His fears had been realised and he felt the dull tug of remorse. If only they had put Black under surveillance or offered him protection. It wasn’t his call but maybe he should have said more. He wondered how Steele was feeling. Panicked, he imagined. She wasn’t the emotional type and it was difficult to tell much over the phone, but it was what every detective feared. Neither of them had felt much empathy for Black, but that wasn’t the point. It was another senseless killing that, in his view, should have been prevented.

‘What happened?’

‘He was found floating face down in the lake in St James’s Park. Same MO. Single shot to the head, point blank range, castrated, just like the others. He was in the water, near the edge . . .’

‘Like the girl.’

‘That’s right.’ He heard a sigh before she added: ‘Any more news your end?’

‘Yes. That’s why I was calling you. It looks like she was murdered.’

‘God . . . here was I hoping for some good news for a change.’

‘Sorry. She was hit on the back of the head and the hyoid’s fractured.’

‘So, she was strangled.’ There was a pause, followed by another deep, heart-felt sigh. ‘Damn. That’s all we need. You’ve told the locals to keep it quiet? The press are scenting blood and I don’t want any link whatsoever with what’s going on here.’

‘I’ve spelled it out, don’t worry. The DI down here doesn’t seem to know much anyway.’

‘Good. Where are Sam and Justin?’

‘Last time we spoke, still going through the missing person files.’

‘Well, you’d better leave them to it and come back here. The girl’s the least of our worries.’

‘But we’ve got to find out who she is. She’s the key to this whole thing.’

‘You may be right, but I need you here now. Sam can look after things that end for the time being. I’ve got the Chief Super on my back asking why we didn’t stop this from happening. The press are going to have a field day when they find out.’

He made no comment. It wasn’t right to say I told you so, however much he’d like to. Even though he felt she should have pushed harder, the blame lay squarely at Clive Cornish’s door. Hopefully, his boss, Detective Chief Superintendent John Manners, would work it out. If not, somebody, somehow, would have to tell him. Cornish was a liability.

‘You’re sure it’s the girl’s body?’ she asked, almost as an afterthought.

‘As far as we can be, at this point.’

‘Right. We’ll round up Fleming and Wade straight away. And you get yourself on a train to Paddington PDQ.’

It was half past seven in the evening. The sun was low in the sky, light filtering through the trees opposite into the front of the bar where Donovan was sitting. She could see Chang pacing up and down outside in the street, where it was quieter, using his BlackBerry to find them rooms for the night. She took a large sip of her margarita and sighed. It had been a while since she had had a cocktail and margaritas were her favourite. She loved the tang of the salt, coupled with the sharpness of the lime-juice, the kick of tequila just behind. The news of Daniel Black’s murder had cast a pall over everything. Tartaglia had called her with the details on his way back to London by train. She could hear the anger and frustration in his voice and she couldn’t blame him. In his view, sheer financial considerations had cost a man his life. Even more than before, the pressure was on to find out everything they could about the girl before something else happened. But there was nothing else she or Chang could do until the morning.

The bar was in The Mall, right in the heart of Clifton village. She had often gone there for a drink or a bite to eat when visiting Claire, all those years ago. The name had changed, probably many times since, as had the décor, but it still had a nice, airy atmosphere, with a high ceiling, old wooden floors and mirrors. The food chalked up on the board looked appetising and good value. Apart from a couple, holding hands across a table in one corner and a man on his own reading a book, the place was empty. Maybe it was always quiet on a Sunday night, but she was grateful for it. It was also good to have some space for a change. The music was loud, some sort of bland techno jazz that was not generally her thing, but for once she found the repetitiveness calming. Her thoughts turned momentarily to Tartaglia, wondering yet again who the dark-haired woman was. Then she stopped herself. What was the point? Luckily, she had been so busy all day she had barely had a second to think about him.

Being a Sunday, it had taken a while to get the old files sent over from storage. They had then spent the rest of the afternoon going through everything in a dark, airless office. The main problem was that nobody they had spoken to who had been at the party could remember exactly when it had taken place. There seemed to have been many parties at the house that summer. The only thing Fleming and the others had been sure about was that it had happened after their final exams. She had checked with the university and discovered that final exams for the many different faculties were staggered over several weeks, with the university breaking up for the summer towards the end of June. According to Wade, who seemed to have the best memory, the five had stayed on at the house until a week or so after the end of term, so the time window was quite wide. To complicate matters, people were often reported missing days or weeks after they had actually disappeared. It was also possible that the girl might have gone missing some time before she turned up at the party.

Using the physical description provided by the anthropologist, they had checked all open missing persons files for the whole of the Bristol area for a three-month period up until the end of July 1991 and had come up with two possible matches. The first was Cassandra Mayhew, a first year History student who had disappeared on the second of June, in the middle of her end-of-year exams. She had been living in a hall of residence in Clifton and had been reported missing by a friend, another girl on her course. She was just eighteen, five-foot-two, slender build, and described as having mid-length, slightly wavy brown hair. In the photo attached to the report, she had a fresh-faced, innocent quality, with dreamy eyes, and no make-up. The summary report mentioned the fact that, as a young teenager, she had been treated for depression and anorexia. Her friends had said that she was very worried about failing her exams and had recently broken up with a boyfriend.

The second possibility was Danielle Henderson, a fourteenyear-old who had last been seen on the morning of June twentieth chatting to a friend outside the school gates. She had been reported missing by her mother, Susan, when she didn’t come home that afternoon. Although she wasn’t at the university, Bristol Grammar School was situated on the edge of Clifton, right behind the main university buildings, so it was easily possible she might have come across one of the students at some point. She was described as being five-foot-four, with blue-grey eyes and longish, dark blonde hair. There was no mention of her build. The photograph attached to the report showed her in school uniform, with her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. Her face was pretty and childishly round, with dimples showing as she smiled sweetly for the camera. She looked young for her age, particularly given the way girls dressed now. The report mentioned the fact that her parents were divorced and that she had quarrelled with her mother shortly before she disappeared. She had also often talked about wanting to run away, some said to be with her father, and the friends who had been interviewed seemed less concerned about her whereabouts than her mother was. The view expressed by the officer writing the report was that there was a strong possibility that this is what she had done.

It was impossible to know if the photographs in the reports were recent at the time the girls went missing or, indeed, good likenesses that their peer groups would recognise. Families usually wanted to portray their loved ones in the best light possible and their choice of photographs could often be misleading. At first glance, either of the two might have fitted the basic description given by Fleming and the others, although Cassandra, or Caz as she had been known, seemed the more likely candidate, given her age and the fact that she was at the university where she might easily have come across one of the five men or their friends. Speaking to the girls’ families was the next priority and she had tasked Jane Downes back in London with the job of tracking them down from the old information in the files.

She had just finished her drink when Chang reappeared. ‘Good news,’ he said, coming over to where she was sitting. ‘I’ve got us two rooms a few minutes walk from here. Fifty quid each, including full breakfast. How’s that? One of them even has a view of the Suspension Bridge.’

She smiled. ‘Sounds good to me.’ Luckily, following past experience, she had thought to bring a toothbrush and a change of clothes in case she had to stay over.

‘We can go over there any time.’