Lost (22 page)

I need to see Joe again. He has the sort of brain that might be able to make sense of this. Somehow he can join random, unconnected details and make it look like dot-to-dot drawings that even a child could do.

I don't like cal ing him on a Saturday. For most people it's a family day. He picks up before the answering machine. I can hear Charlie laughing in the background.

“You had lunch?”

“Yeah.”

“Already?”

“We have a baby remember—it's strained food and nursing home hours.”

“Do you mind watching
me
eat?”

“No.”

We arrange to meet at Peregrini's, an Italian restaurant in Camden Town where the Chianti is drinkable and the chef could have come straight from central casting with his walrus mustache and booming tenor voice.

I pour Joe a glass of wine and hand him a menu. He soaks up his surroundings, col ecting information without even trying.

“So what made you choose this place?” he asks.

“Don't you like it?”

“No, it's fine.”

“Wel , the food is good, it reminds me of Tuscany and I know the family. Alberto has been here since the sixties. That's him in the kitchen. You sure you won't eat something?”

“I'l have pudding.”

While we wait to order, I tel him about the DNA tests and the bikini. The likelihood of other letters is now obvious.

“What would you have done with them?”

“Had them analyzed.”

“By the same lab.”

“Maybe I didn't want anyone to know about the ransom demand. I would have put them somewhere safe . . . in case something happened to me.” Joe nods and stares into his wineglass. “OK, show me your wal et.” He reaches across the table.

“I'm not worth robbing.”

“Just give it to me.”

He thumbs through the various pockets and pouches, pul ing out receipts, business cards and the plastic that pays for my life. “OK, imagine for a moment that you don't know this person but you find his wal et on the ground. What does it tel you about him?”

“He doesn't carry much cash around.”

“What else?”

This is one of Joe's psychological games. He wants me to play along. I pick up the receipts, which have dried into a clumped bal . The wal et was in the river with me. I peel them apart. Some are impossible to read but I notice half a dozen receipts for takeout food. I bought a pizza on September 24. When Joe came to see me in the hospital he asked me the last thing I remembered. I told him it was pizza.

Glancing at the table, I feel depressed. My life is piled in front of me. There are business cards from rugby mates; a discount voucher from some random shop; a reminder note from British Gas that my central heating needs servicing; a Royal Mail receipt for registered mail; my driver's license; a photograph of Luke . . .

It's a snapshot taken on the seafront at Blackpool. We were on a day trip and Daj is wearing a dozen petticoats and lace-up shoes. Her hair is hidden beneath a scarf and she is scowling at the photographer because my stepfather has asked her to smile. Luke is swinging from her hand and laughing. I'm in the background, staring at the bottom of one of my sandals as if I just stepped in something.

“You were always looking at the ground,” Daj used to tel me. “And you stil managed to fal over your own feet.” I remember that day. There was a talent competition on the pier. Hundreds of people were sitting in the sun listening to amateur Joe Blows singing songs and tel ing jokes.

Luke kept tugging on Daj's hand, saying he wanted to sing. He was only four. She told him to be quiet.

Next thing we were watching this guy in a checked jacket and slicked-down hair pul ing faces and tel ing jokes. He suddenly stopped because a little kid had walked right onto the stage. It was Luke with a blond cowlick and ice cream–stained shorts. This comedian made a big fuss about lowering the microphone so he could ask Luke a question.

“Wel now, little boy, what's your name?”

“Luke.”

“Are you here on a holiday, Luke?”

“No, I'm here with my mum.”

Everyone laughed and Luke frowned. He couldn't work out why they were laughing.

“Why are you up here, Luke?”

“I wanna sing a song.”

“What are you gonna sing?”

“I don't know.”

They laughed again and I could have died, but Luke just stood there and stared, mesmerized by the crowd. Even when Daj dragged him off the stage and they al clapped, Luke didn't wave or acknowledge them. He just stared.

Joe is stil sifting through the contents of my wal et. “Everyone leaves a trail,” he says. “It isn't just scraps of paper and photographs. It's the impression we make on other people and how we confront the world.”

He glances to his right. “You take that couple over there.”

A man and a woman are ordering lunch. He's wearing a casual jacket and she's dressed in a classic A-line skirt and cashmere sweater.

“Notice how he doesn't look at the waiter when he's being told the specials. Instead he looks down as though reading from the menu. Now, his companion is different. She's leaning forward, with her elbows on the table and her hands framing her face. She's interested in everything the waiter says.”

“She's flirting with him.”

“You think so? Look at her legs.”

A shoeless stockinged foot is raised and resting on her partner's calf. She's teasing him. She wants him to loosen up.

“You have to look at the whole picture,” says Joe. “I know you can't remember things—not yet anyway. So you have to write things down or make mental notes. Flashes, images, words, faces, whatever comes to you. They don't make sense right now but one day they might.”

A waitress arrives at the table with a plate of sardines.

“Compliments of the chef,” she says.

I raise my glass to Alberto who is standing in the kitchen door. He thumps his chest like a gladiator.

Sucking fish oil from his fingers, Joe begins to focus on the bikini and who might have had it. Mickey was wearing very little when she disappeared and her beach towel became the most important piece of evidence against Howard.

Al investigations need a breakthrough—a witness or a piece of evidence that turns theory into fact. In Mickey's case it had been her striped beach towel. A woman walking her dog had found it at East Finchley Cemetery. It was heavily stained with blood, vomit and traces of hair dye. Howard had no alibi for when Mickey disappeared and had been working at the cemetery in the days that fol owed.

A precipitin test confirmed the blood on the towel to be human—A negative, Mickey's group (along with seven percent of the population). The DNA tests were conclusive.

Without hesitation, I ordered a search of the flower beds and recently dug graves. We used ground-penetrating radar and Caterpil ar diggers, as wel as SOCO teams with hand spades and sieves.

Campbel went bal istic, of course. “You're digging up a fucking cemetery!” he yel ed. I had to hold the phone six inches from my ear.

I took a deep breath. “I'm conducting a limited search, Sir. We have the cemetery records showing al the recently dug graves. Anything that doesn't match is worth investigating.”

“What about the headstones?”

“We'l try not to touch them.”

Campbel began listing al the people who had to sanction an exhumation, including a County Court Judge, the Administrator of Cemeteries and the Chief Medical Officer of Westminster Council.

“We're not snatching bodies or robbing graves,” I reassured him.

Eighty feet of lawn and flower bed had been dug up by then. Paving stones were propped against wal s and turf rol ed into muddy faggots. Howard had helped plant the garden two months earlier for Westminster in Bloom, a flower competition.

Twenty-two other sites were also excavated within the cemetery. Although it sounds like a clever hiding place, it's not an easy thing to conceal a body in a graveyard. First you have to bury it without anyone noticing, most probably at night. And it doesn't matter if you believe in ghosts or not, very few people are comfortable in cemeteries after dark.

A media blackout covered the dig, but I knew it couldn't hold. Someone must have phoned Rachel and she turned up that first afternoon. Two police officers had to hold her back behind the police tape. She fought against their arms, pleading with them to let her go.

“Is it Mickey?” she yel ed at me.

I pul ed her to one side, trying to calm her down. “We don't know yet.”

“You found something?”

“A towel.”

“Mickey's towel?”

“We won't know until—”

“Is it Mickey's towel?”

She read the answer in my eyes and suddenly broke free, running toward the trench. I pul ed her back before she reached the edge, wrapping my arms around her waist. She was crying then, with her arms outstretched, trying to throw herself into the hole.

There was nothing I could say to comfort her—nothing that would
ever
be able to comfort her.

Afterward, I walked her up to the chapel, waiting for a police car to take her home. We sat outside on a stone bench beneath a poster on the noticeboard, which said, CHILDREN

ARE THE HOPE OF THE WORLD.

Where! Show me! You can want them, worry about them, love them with al your being, but you can't keep them safe. Time and accidents and evil wil defeat you.

Somewhere in the restaurant kitchen a tray of glasses shatters on the floor. Diners pause momentarily, perhaps in sympathy, and then conversations begin again. Joe looks across the table, inscrutable as ever. He'l say it's the Parkinson's mask but I think he enjoys being impenetrable.

“Why the hair dye?” he asks.

“What do you mean?”

“You said there were traces of hair dye on the towel. If Howard snatched Mickey off the stairs and kil ed her in his flat, why bother dyeing her hair?” He's right. But the towel might have been stained earlier. Rachel could have colored her hair. I didn't ask her. I can see Joe filing the information away for future reference.

My main course has arrived but I'm no longer hungry. The morphine is doing this to me—ruining my appetite. I rol the spaghetti around a fork and leave it resting on the plate.

Joe pours another glass of wine. “You said you had doubts about Howard. Why?”

“Oddly enough, it's because of something
you
once said to me. When we first met and I was investigating the murder of Catherine McBride, you gave me a profile of her kil er.”

“What did I say?”

“You said that sadists and pedophiles and sexual psychopaths aren't born whole. They're made.”

Joe nods, impressed either by my memory or by the quality of his advice.

I try to explain. “Until we found Mickey's towel, the case against Howard was more wishful thinking than hard evidence. Not a single complaint had ever been made against him by a parent or a child in his care. Nobody had ever cal ed him creepy or suggested he be kept away from children. There were thousands of images on his computer, but only a handful of them could be classed as questionable and none of them proved he was a pedophile. He had no history of sexual offenses, yet suddenly he appeared, a ful -fledged child kil er.” Joe peers at the wine bottle wrapped in raffia. “Someone can fantasize about children but never act. Their fantasy life can be rich enough to satisfy them.”

“Exactly, but I couldn't see the progression. You told me that deviant behavior could be almost plotted on the axis of a graph. Someone begins by col ecting pornography and progresses up the scale. Abduction and murder are at the very end.”

“Did you find any pornography?”

“Howard owned a trailer that he claimed to have sold. We traced the location using gas and dry-cleaning receipts. It was at a campground on the South Coast. He paid the fees annual y in advance. Inside there were boxes of magazines mostly from Eastern Europe and Asia. Child pornography.” Joe leans forward. His little gray cel s are humming like a hard drive.

“You're describing a classic grooming pedophile. He recognized Mickey's vulnerability. He became her friend and showered her with praise and presents, buying her toys and clothes. He took her photograph and told her how pretty she looked. Eventual y, the sexual part of the ‘dance' begins, the sly touches and play wrestling. Non-sadistic pedophiles sometimes spend months and even years getting to know a child, conditioning them.”

“Exactly, they're extremely patient. So why would Howard invest al that time and effort into grooming Mickey and then suddenly snatch her off the stairs?” Joe's arm trembles as if released from a catch. “You're right. A grooming pedophile uses slow seduction not violent abduction.” I feel relieved. It's nice to have someone agree with me.

Joe adds a note of caution. “Psychology isn't an exact science. And even if Howard is innocent—it doesn't bring Mickey back to life. One fact doesn't automatical y change the other. What happened when you told Campbel about your doubts?”

“He told me to put my badge down and act like a real person. Did I think Mickey was dead? I thought about the blood on the towel and I said yes. Everything pointed to Howard.”

“You didn't convict him—a jury did.”

Joe doesn't mean to sound patronizing but I hate people making excuses for me. He drains his glass. “This case real y got to you, didn't it?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“I think I know why.”

“Leave it alone, Professor.”

He pushes the wineglasses to one side and plants his elbow in the center of the table. He wants to arm wrestle me.

“You don't stand a chance.”

“I know.”

“So why bother?”

“It'l make you feel better.”

“How?”

“Right now you keep acting as though I'm beating up on you. Wel , here's your chance to get even. Maybe you'l realize that this isn't a contest. I'm trying to help you.” Almost immediately my heart feels stung. I notice the bitter yeasty odor of his medication and my throat constricts. Joe's hand is stil waiting. He grins at me. “Shal we cal it a draw?”

As much as I hate admitting it, Joe and I have a sort of kinship—a connection. Both of us are fighting against the “bastard time.” My career is coming to a close and his disease wil rob him of old age. I think he also understands how it feels to be responsible, by accident or omission, for the death of another human being. This could be my last chance to make amends; to prove I'm worth something; to square up the Great Ledger.