Moving Target (13 page)

Leland started to rise. “I’ll get my coat,” he said.

“No,” Ali told him. “You stay here. I want Maisie Longmoor to dish some dirt. She’s a gossip at heart, but your father was murdered, and she didn’t mention a word about that yesterday. She may not be willing to talk about it to your face, but behind your back she’ll blab to her heart’s content. Later, we’ll have our debriefing over dinner here at the hotel—fillet of beef with all the trimmings.”

“Are you sure about going to Jordan’s on your own?” Leland asked. “You’ve never been there. I could come along and show you the way.”

“Not to worry,” Ali said. “My GPS knows all.”

“Should I call them and let them know you’re coming?”

“No. I’m going to practice being an ugly American and drop in unexpectedly. They’re more likely to talk freely if I have the element of surprise on my side.”

“All right, then,” Leland agreed. “It’s odd. I know that I’ve asked you to look into this for me, but I find myself of two minds about it. I want to know and I don’t want to know.”

“Both reactions are entirely understandable,” Ali said, “but I’m coming down on the side of knowing rather than not knowing.”

She called for the car and went downstairs. Once she was in it, she used the GPS, but her first destination wasn’t Jordan’s-by-the-Sea. Instead, she drove the Land Rover through the jumble of curving downtown streets to the Central Police Station at the far end of Stafford Road. The entryway lobby was the same as that of every other police
station Ali had ventured into over the years. The space had started out grand and ended up grimy. The granite tiles in the floor were worn down and pitted with long use, and the clerks minding the front desks now did so from behind a wall of bulletproof glass.

Ali approached the part of the window marked
RECEPTION
, behind which sat a woman wearing a black hijab. Everything about her, including the frown on her face, indicated that she was there to rebuff casual visitors rather than welcome them.

“May I help you?” she asked.

Ali had already determined that her best course of action was to simply brazen it out. “Is there a homicide investigator on duty?”

“You’re here to report a homicide?” the woman asked.

“No, I wish to speak to a homicide investigator.”

“About a current case?”

“No,” Ali answered, pulling out one of the High Noon business cards B. had given her to carry in her purse. “It’s about a very old case here in Bournemouth, one from almost sixty years ago.”

“Do you have specific information about this case?” the clerk asked.

Intent on wearing the clerk down, Ali kept a cheerful smile on her face and made sure her tone of voice was pleasant rather than confrontational. She expected that the clerk was used to sending people packing after one or two questions. Ali was prepared to ask as many as it took to get past the gatekeeper.

“No,” she said. “What I have are specific questions about the case. So let me ask this another way: Does the Bournemouth police department have a cold-case unit or else someone who would be able to look up the pertinent records from a case back then?”

“This isn’t the U.S.,” the woman answered shortly. “We don’t do cold-case files.”

“But I’m sure you have detectives,” Ali continued, smiling. “The city of Bournemouth must have at least one of those.”

“Wait here,” the clerk said, giving up. Taking one of Ali’s business cards with her, she huffed off.

Five minutes or so elapsed before a door from the interior of the building opened, and a woman walked into the lobby, peering around. She was a decade or so younger than Ali. She wore glasses and her hair was pulled straight back into a bun. She was a plain-looking woman, and the way she dressed was all business. When her searching gaze finally landed on Ali, she came forward briskly, offering a hand and a disarmingly bucktoothed smile.

“I’m Detective Sergeant Elkins,” she said. “Marjorie. I understand you’re inquiring about one of our cold cases. Are you a journalist, by any chance? If you are, you should be working with our media relations people.”

“I’m here on behalf of a client, the son of a homicide victim,” Ali said. “My client’s name is Leland Brooks. His father’s name was Jonah Brooks. He died on the first of October 1954. My understanding is that the case was never solved, and the son, my Mr. Brooks, would like to know what progress, if any, was ever made toward closing the case.”

Marjorie Elkins smiled. “Nineteen fifty-four? That’s a bit before my time, but if you’ll come with me, let’s see what we can find.”

Marjorie led Ali through a maze of dingy intersecting corridors before taking her into an office space that would have reasonably handled the presence of four cubicles but was far too small for the eight gunmetal-gray desks that had been crammed inside it. The room was lit by a series of long overhead fluorescent tubes, one of which was winking in preparation for going out entirely.

Ali knew that back in Prescott, Arizona, at the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department, this kind of homicide group-grope office arrangement was called the bull pen. She had no idea what it was called in Bournemouth, but the result was the same: too many people, too little space, and zero privacy.

There were four guys, all of them in shirtsleeves, chatting around the desk closest to a windowed interior office from which their commanding officer no doubt held forth. The casual chitchat ended as Ali and Marjorie Elkins entered. Ali would have had to be blind and deaf
not to notice the air of hostility suddenly loose in the air. Unfortunately, that kind of toxic atmosphere was something Ali recognized all too well: Before Marjorie Elkins’s unwelcome arrival on the scene, this room had most likely been an all-male preserve. The four guys watched the new arrivals in that obnoxiously assessing way that some men do when women, strangers or not, walk past them. Ali wouldn’t have been surprised if one of them had cut loose with a wolf whistle.

Marjorie’s desk was in the far corner of the room, pushed up against a wall with a window. At some point in the dim past, the glass had been painted over in a vile shade of green. In a room that was decorated with industrial-strength testosterone, her desk was the only one with a few softening elements, including a tiny lit Christmas tree and a collection of framed photos that featured a boy whose bucktoothed smile clearly pronounced him his mother’s son. Some of the pictures were official school photos; others featured him in a series of soccer uniforms. It was like seeing him age in fast-framed photography from a preschooler to a confident-looking young man.

“My son, Aiden,” Marjorie explained, motioning Ali into a side chair. “You know the drill,” she added. “Single mum and all that. He’s a good lad, though. Off to university next year.”

Ali nodded. “I do know the drill,” she said. “I put in some time as a single mother myself.”

“Which means you work at a crap job to keep body and soul together, but you get to go home to your kids at night, right?”

Ali nodded. Nothing more was said, but that small exchange was enough to put both women at ease, an outcome that was most likely not the one the clerk out front had expected.

Marjorie took a seat on a grungy rolling chair that was probably several decades old and frowned in concentration while studying Ali’s business card. “What’s High Noon?” she asked. “I mean, besides that old Gary Cooper/Grace Kelly movie? My grandfather loved that movie. He had it on video. After my grandmother died, he watched it day in and day out. That song, you know.” She hummed a few bars of “Do Not
Forsake Me, Oh, My Darlin’.” “That one always made him tear up.”

“This High Noon takes after that one,” Ali explained. “It’s sort of like the movie: It started out as a single good guy taking on a collection of bad guys. Now he deals mostly with with cyber bad guys.”

“Cyber security?” Marjorie asked.

Ali nodded. “The man who founded it, B. Simpson, is my fiancé.”

“What exactly does High Noon and cyber security have to do with Mr. Jonah Brooks, who died here in Bournemouth in 1954?”

“His death has nothing to do with cyber security. Our interest in Mr. Brooks is a private inquiry we’ve undertaken on behalf of a longtime family friend, your homicide victim’s son Leland. He emigrated to the U.S. after a family quarrel and shortly before his father’s death. After that, he was estranged from his family until recently. He’s only just now learned of the homicide, and we’re trying to glean whatever details we can.”

“Let’s give it a try,” Marjorie said. Turning to the surprisingly old-fashioned computer terminal on her desk, she logged in and sat with her fingers poised over the keyboard. “What was the victim’s name again?”

“Jonah,” Ali told her. “Jonah Andrew Brooks. His date of death was October first, 1954.”

Marjorie typed, waited a few moments, then looked up at Ali, shaking her head. “I was afraid of that,” she said, standing up. “No results. What that means is that none of the information has been uploaded to the computer.” At first Ali thought she was being dismissed, but she was wrong. “That means we’ll have to do this the hard way,” Marjorie added.

“What does that mean?”

“We go down into the dungeon and dig through the boxes.” Marjorie cast a critical look at the black knit pantsuit Ali had worn on the plane and to visit the cemetery earlier that morning.

“It’s quite musty down there,” she cautioned. “You might want to change into something a little more workmanlike.”

Ali was worried that any delay might cause her to miss the opportunity to visit the evidence locker. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “The Highcliff is a name-brand hotel. I’m sure they have adequate laundry facilities.”

The two women rode downstairs in a rickety elevator. When they reached the basement, Marjorie showed her credentials to a clerk seated just outside the folding grille. After signing Ali in, they entered an immense room where an eerie light was cast by a series of naked bulbs that hung on aged cords and cast small halos of light on rank upon rank of heavily laden metal shelving.

“This is the central storage facility for all of Dorset, not just Bournemouth,” Marjorie explained. “It never was an actual dungeon; we just call it that. In this climate, it takes a lot of work to keep things dry enough so whatever’s stored in the boxes doesn’t get ruined. Most everything from the early seventies on has been digitized. Cases earlier than that are digitized as the time and monies become available. These records go all the way back to the 1880s. There’s been talk of transferring some of these earlier records to an interested museum, but so far, no one has been able to figure out how to make that happen.”

Obviously, Marjorie had known in advance that the lighting would be several levels below adequate. Leading the way unerringly through the maze of shelving, she pulled a small flashlight out of her pocket and used that to illuminate the labels on the astonishing array of boxes. “Here we are,” she said at last, looking around. “Now that we’re in the fifties, it should be right around here somewhere.” Moments later, she located the applicable box. The one labeled Jonah Andrew Brooks was in the middle section of a bottommost shelf. “Got it!” she exclaimed. “Amazingly enough, it wasn’t misfiled.”

Marjorie pulled the cardboard container out, leaving an empty-toothed gap behind on the shelf, then she hefted the box to her shoulder. “There are some library tables over there on the side,” she said. “Believe it or not, they come equipped with better lighting. Let’s go have a look.”

Seated side by side like a pair of schoolgirls, Ali and Marjorie sorted
through the contents of the box, starting with the murder book. According to that, the victim, Jonah Brooks, age fifty-five, had been reported missing by his wife, Adele, on Saturday morning, October second, after he failed to come home from a business meeting on Friday evening. He had met with a Mr. Alexander Harrison, at Mr. Brooks’s print shop in Bournemouth, to discuss engraved invitations for Mr. Harrison’s daughter’s upcoming wedding. After finishing their business, the two men had stopped off at a pub on Yelverton Road for dinner.

According to the barman, the two men left at about eight-thirty in the evening. That was the last time Jonah Brooks was seen alive. Two children playing on the beach found his body washed up under the pier in Bournemouth on Sunday afternoon. At first he was thought to be a drowning victim, but an autopsy showed that he had died of blunt force trauma to the head prior to going into the water. There were defensive wounds on his arms, hands, and chest that indicated Jonah had tried to fight off his attacker. Three days later, his bloodstained Jaguar sedan was found abandoned miles away on a street in Southampton.

At the time, the incident was thought to be a simple robbery gone bad. The victim’s Bulova watch and his wallet, thought to contain a considerable amount of cash, were both missing and never located. No suspect was ever identified.

Jonah had been a well-respected local businessman. The case remained unsolved, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Family members, including Jonah’s two sons, were routinely questioned, but when their alibis checked out, they were taken off the suspect list. There was some mention of a family squabble with a third son who had left home under a dark cloud of some kind. One of the detectives, after noting that the quarrel had resulted in a change in Jonah’s will, had attempted to track down Leland. Later, it was learned that at the time of the murder Leland had already embarked on his transatlantic crossing. As a result, his name was removed from the list of possible suspects.

There were notations in the murder book all through the last few
months of 1954 and into 1955. By the end of 1955, the notations became far more sporadic, mostly on the anniversary dates of the homicide. The last notation by a detective was dated 1961.

Having skimmed through the murder book, Ali and Marjorie turned their joint attention to the other items in the evidence box. Sealed in clear plastic was the tab from the King’s Arms for Friday, October 1. The bill was for two roast beef dinners and four pints of ale. Jonah Brooks evidently paid for both himself and Mr. Harrison.