8,39 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: Porter & Styles
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
Did she slip through the cracks, or was she pushed?When a severed hand is found in an abandoned flat, Detective Jake Porter and his partner Nick Styles are able to DNA match the limb to the owner, Natasha Barclay, who has not been seen in decades. But why has no one been looking for her? It seems that Natasha's family are the people who can least be trusted.Delving into the details behind her disappearance and discovering links to another investigation, a tragic family history begins to take on a darker twist. Hampered by a widespread fear of a local heavy, as well as internal politics and possible corruption within the force, Porter and Styles are digging for answers, but will what they find ever see the light of day?
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 566
Ähnliche
WHAT FALLS BETWEEN THE CRACKS
ROBERT SCRAGG
For my wife Nicola, my children Lucy and Jacob, brothers David and Gary, and my parents Margaret and Bob. My past, present, and future, wrapped up in one amazing bunch of people
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
May God forgive me.
He folds the single sheet of paper, places it carefully inside the envelope. He looks around the room, at everything he has built, crashing down around him.
I tried, Natasha. God knows I tried.
He moves on autopilot, shrugging his jacket off, pinching the collar to fold down the middle, letting it drape down over his arm to quarter it. He lies it by the wall, brushing away imaginary specks of dust from the spot next to it before sitting down, back flat against the cool plaster. He closes his eyes, picturing her again, smiling. Happier times before it all went to shit.
Focus on her. This is for her.
The gun feels surprisingly heavy as he cradles it in his lap. He sits like that for what feels like several lifetimes, listening to the drone of conversation from beyond the door. They will come running in when they hear the shot, but for now he is glad to be alone.
Now. Do it now. Be a man.
He clamps the barrel between his teeth, eyes scrunched shut as if in pain, thumb resting on the trigger. The tip touches the back of his tongue, and he pulls it back out with an involuntary retch. His breathing picks up pace. He has to do this now, or the coward lurking deep in his brain will make a play for life. Her face flashes in his mind again, reminding him why he doesn’t deserve to live.
It’s the only way. For her.
He blinks, tears blurring the edges of his world. He owes her this. Deep breath. On three. Inhale. Exhale.
One.
One swift movement. The end of the barrel kisses his temple this time.
Two.
He closes his eyes. He doesn’t want the last thing he sees to be a storeroom full of boxes. It should be her. He pictures her face again, sees her smile, hears her laugh. No false starts this time. He takes another lungful of air. His last. Holds it. Feels the trigger move.
Three.
There is no blinding light, only darkness, and peace.
CHAPTER ONE
The maintenance man knocked again as he pushed the door to flat 10 halfway open. It was dark inside, the flat still shrouded from the early morning sunlight by the curtains. A musty smell filled his nostrils.
‘Hello?’ he called into the silence. ‘Building maintenance; we’ve had a leak reported. Anyone home?’
No reply. He hit the light switch by the door but nothing happened.
Click, click.
He tried two more times, frowning. Still nothing. He pulled a small torch from his pocket and pointed the narrow beam inside. There was a rustling sound as he opened the door the rest of the way, a pile of papers and leaflets that had been sat behind it shuffled out of the way like a messy deck of cards. Glancing down at them, he saw a mixture of residents’ newsletters and flyers mingled in with the post, that some enterprising souls must have gotten past the secure entrance to deliver.
He walked down a short hallway, sweeping the torchlight left and right, calling out as he went. The hallway led to an open-plan space incorporating the kitchen, dining and living areas. He was no interior decor expert, but the place definitely had something of a retro feel to it.
A faint hint of an odour hit his nostrils and he stopped to look around. He wrinkled his nose in disgust as he bent over a coffee cup on the nearby bench and sniffed. Spots of brownish green mould clung to it and he stepped back out of range of the smell, noticing the thick cloak of dust on the bench as he replaced the cup in the spot that it had been protecting. He made no effort to mask his footsteps as he looked around, calling out to minimise the surprise to any occupants, but nobody responded.
He went back to the open area that accounted for most of the floor space and looked around, mentally calculating where the leak would be located from what he’d seen of the layout downstairs. As it turned out, the answer was glaringly obvious when he saw the pool of water on the kitchen floor over by two white appliances – a fridge and a freezer, he presumed. They were short stocky units, a little above waist height, pale cream in colour with matching chrome handles, doors closed on both, but the water pooled on the floor was a giveaway as to which one was the culprit. Maybe a power failure had caused it to thaw? The contents could have leaked through a gap in the door seal. The model looked like one he’d had in his first flat years ago.
He set his toolbox on the bench and lay his torch on the floor so it illuminated the area by the base of the freezer. Expecting some form of leakage, he had brought an old towel from downstairs, and laid it out now over the puddle. It’d also come in handy to soak up most of what would no doubt spill out when he opened the door. There was a token resistance when he tugged at the handle, but it opened with somewhere between a cracking and a sucking noise as the seal gave up its grip. He watched the miniature waterfall trickle over the interior edge and soak into the towel. Not as much as he’d feared, but then again most of it was downstairs now. He was less prepared for the cloying stench that made him screw his eyes closed, flinching away as surely as if he’d been slapped across the face.
He pulled the neck of his sweater over his nose and mouth, bandit style, and looked back, still wincing, at the four identical compartments inside.
Eenie, meenie, miney …
He started at the top and worked his way down, a cursory scanning of soggy bricks of cardboard packaging, looking for the source of the smell. The drawers rattled open and closed in quick succession, until he reached the fourth one. Instead of closing it, he just stared, open-mouthed, as his brain caught up with his eyes, and finally told him what he was looking at.
The act of opening the drawer had caused the severed hand inside to rock gently. Its fingers were outstretched, ready to shake on a deal. Ragged shreds of grey skin clung around the edges of the severed wrist like dirty wet cloth.
He jerked upright and away in the same motion, stumbling back into the opposite kitchen bench.
‘What the fuck?’
The words slipped out before he could stop them. He quickly put a hand to his mouth, looking around. It occurred to him that although he’d called out when he came in, he hadn’t actually looked in any of the other rooms. What if he wasn’t alone in here? What if the owner of the hand was in here somewhere? More to the point, what if the person who removed it was, too?
He stumbled out of the kitchen and down the corridor, looking over his shoulder as he did, not stopping until he reached the safety of the hallway. He jogged to the lift and jabbed the button with one hand, pulling his phone out of his pocket with the other, and dialled 999. His eyes never left the doorway. He’d not even closed up behind himself. Had no intention of going back to do so. Whatever had happened here, it hadn’t ended well for someone.
Detective Inspector Jake Porter spotted his partner waiting patiently for him by the main entrance to the apartment complex as he pulled into the last available parking space this side of the police cordon. It never ceased to amaze him how many people were content to loiter by the edge of the tape without a clue of what was going on, hoping to catch a glimpse of something worthy of gossip. On one level it was almost ghoulish, but he dealt on a regular basis with people who had far worse traits than that.
He rubbed a fist in each eye. They felt gritty and raw. He had dreamt about Holly last night. She didn’t visit him every time he slept. Probably once or twice a week, but when she did, it was like losing her all over again. That five or ten seconds of no man’s land between dreams and the real world, lines blurred between the two. The empty pillow next to him a reminder of where he was; of where she wasn’t. He almost welcomed those mornings in a masochistic kind of way. It was worth the pain to see her again, to feel for the briefest of moments that she was still alive. Almost two years without her now. After Holly’s funeral, his mum had put an arm around him, fed him the cliché of time being a great healer, but Porter was leaning more towards a term like quack. The face staring back at him in the rear-view mirror was a tired doppelgänger of the man in his wedding photos only three years back. He had spotted the first of the grey hairs amongst the dark brown a few months ago, but didn’t care enough to do anything about them. He sighed, grabbed his jacket from the back seat and headed over to join Nick Styles inside the cordon. London had almost shrugged off its winter coat, but the contrast between the heated car and the fresh February morning gave Porter goosebumps.
Styles stood with his back to the outer wall of the building, like a suspect in a police line-up. His six-four frame meant he towered above the officers who stood guard at the door. He was focused on tapping a message out on his phone and didn’t sense Porter’s approach over the ambient noise of the scene until they were practically side by side.
‘Morning,’ said Porter, tilting his head to compensate for the difference in height.
‘And there was me thinking you must have had a better offer, guv,’ Styles replied, both thumbs still pecking away at his phone.
‘Well, you know me with my packed social calendar.’
‘I may have got bored and poked my nose inside already while I waited.’
‘Come on, then.’ Porter patted him on the shoulder as he walked past him towards the door. ‘You can give me the plot summary on the way upstairs.’
Styles peeled away from the wall and followed Porter inside. Their reflections in the polished glass elevator doors made for an incongruous pairing. Styles had his weakness for all things Hugo Boss, his image neat and orderly, close cropped hair, number two all over. He had been christened office pretty-boy by a few of the older crowd, part jealousy, part banter, but he took it all in his stride. A few had referred to him as the Met’s answer to Thierry Henry, until they saw him try and play five-a-side. Porter was from Irish stock, his wardrobe more high-street fashion, and his appearance, while not unkempt, had a more lived-in feel to it; hair so dark it bordered on black, refusing to be fully tamed by gel, but with a sense of messy style to it. Styles started to bring Porter up to speed as they waited for the lift.
‘It’s one of the stranger ones I’ve seen,’ he said as he tucked his phone into his jacket. ‘Call came in from the maintenance guy. He went in to turn the water off after it started leaking into the flat below, except it wasn’t a leaky pipe.’ He paused as the lift doors opened and they stood aside to let a crime scene tech out first. The camera in their hand left no doubt as to what they’d just been up to.
‘Come on then, don’t keep me in suspense,’ Porter said as Styles hit the button for the fourth floor.
‘First guess was that the freezer had packed in, probably a while back cos those things are usually pretty robust, but the door seals do give way eventually. Turns out that there’s just no power. Not sure why yet. The freezer thawed, water ran down the front, through the cracks in the floor tiles and ended up waking the downstairs neighbour during the night.’
‘I’m assuming you’ll get to the juicy part soon?’
‘Yep. The maintenance guy figured out where the water was coming from and was about to start patching it up when he got spooked and called us.’
‘Spooked by what? What’s got him rattled? A domestic? A burglary? A spotty teenager fresh out of training could handle that. Quit stalling and tell me why we’re here.’
‘There’re no flies on you, guv,’ said Styles in mock acquiescence.
‘Yeah, yeah, I know, just the marks of where they’ve been.’ Porter finished the tired old joke for him and looked at him expectantly.
‘Sorry, I’ll quit playing. Turns out it wasn’t just food going off in the freezer. There’s a hand in there.’
That got Porter’s attention. ‘Just a hand?’
‘As if that’s not enough?’
‘You know what I mean.’
Styles nodded. ‘Yep, just a hand; female by the looks of it, and missing the little finger.’
‘Do we know whose place it is yet?’ Porter asked just as the doors opened to reveal the fourth-floor hallway.
‘The flat is registered to a Natasha Barclay and has been since 1981. You need to see this place to believe it,’ said Styles, nodding to the officer guarding the door as they each slipped into a white Tyvek crime scene suit and entered the flat.
The first thing Porter noticed was the smell. The unmistakable perfume of decay hung in the air. Without the update from Styles, he’d have put that solely down to the rotting food, but he knew better than that now. Layered over the top of that was a general sense of mustiness. He stopped in his tracks and looked around. A small wooden table six feet into the hallway had a phone handset that looked like the one his mum used to have. A visible fuzzy blanket of dust coated it and the table surface. He looked at the walls. The wallpaper too looked like a relic from a bygone era. Styles had walked on ahead of him, presumably headed for the kitchen, and Porter hurried after him.
He caught up with him in what he assumed was the main space of the flat. A dining table, clear except for an empty vase, sat over by the far wall. The relatively narrow kitchen area was bordered on two sides by worktops, with the remaining space housing two sofas and a TV that looked almost as old as Porter himself. Never mind retro, he thought, this place looks like it’s stuck in a time warp.
Styles waited patiently by the open freezer door while Porter peered inside. Each of the drawers had been pulled out to varying extents to allow for inspection of the contents. The resulting image reminded Porter of a mini staircase, with the bottom drawer practically hanging out and each of the three above it revealing less and less. The bottom drawer housed the main attraction. The hand sat in the centre of the plastic compartment. It was palm up, its fingers outstretched and curled in ever so slightly at the last joint, as if begging for loose change. The little finger had been severed at the first joint above the knuckle. It looked like a clean cut, and a small circle of bone stared up at him, a white pupil in an iris of grey flesh.
‘Ah, Detective Porter. I see you’ve found exhibit A.’
Porter looked back over his shoulder, recognised one of the senior scene-of-crime officers, Will Leonard, approaching from the hallway. It was hard not to, even with the protective mask over his face, Leonard’s eyebrows like black caterpillars marking him out at any crime scene. He had a mop of greying hair underneath the hood of his Tyvek crime scene suit, though, and Porter was convinced he dyed the brows. Why the brows and not the rest of his hair, though? One of life’s great mysteries.
‘Oh, hi, Will. Looks like a fun one here. What you thinking?’
‘Hard to say yet.’ Leonard shrugged. ‘It’s fairly well thawed now, but impossible to say how long it’s been in there until we run the usual tests, maybe not even then. I’d say a fair while, though, judging from the freezer burn on the skin.’ He pointed at the blotchy pattern across the back of the hand. ‘My guess is twelve months, maybe more.’
‘What about the rest of whoever this is? No sign of any other body parts?’
Leonard shook his head. ‘Just this for now.’
Porter turned to Styles. ‘What have we got apart from this?’
‘It’s a strange one.’ Styles shook his head gently. ‘There’s some opened mail here addressed to a Miss Natasha Barclay. Whether she lives here alone we don’t know yet, but we’re trying to track her down to ask.’
‘What about the neighbours?’
‘We’ve been knocking on doors but only been able to speak to three so far and they’ve been no help, but this is where it all gets a bit weird. Nobody’s seen her, or anyone else, coming or going.’
‘What’s weird about that? People can live in a building like this and not see each other for weeks.’ Porter walked around the living area, soaking in the details.
‘Try ever.’
That stopped Porter in his tracks. He turned back to Styles. ‘Ever?’
‘Nasty echo in here,’ said Styles playfully. ‘Yep, ever. We spoke to three other residents, one of whom has lived here since the early nineties, and not one of them can remember ever seeing or hearing so much as a mouse squeak in here. Same goes for the maintenance guy, although he’s only been here for five years.’
‘OK, that is a little strange, I’ll give you that. I’m assuming you’ve got more than just that, though?’
‘That opened mail I mentioned: there’s a bank statement, a dental appointment letter and one from a friend in Edinburgh. The thing is that they’re all dated 1983. Make of that what you will.’
Porter frowned. ‘1983?’
‘There’s that echo again.’
‘Where’s the mail? Show me.’
Styles pointed at a few sheets of paper that lay neatly stacked on the kitchen bench. Porter picked them up one at a time and scanned the contents. Sure enough there was a dental check-up arranged at a local surgery. The statement for her current account confirmed her as a Barclays customer. Porter speculated as to whether there was a connection with the surname but dismissed it as coincidence for now. He looked up again, first at Styles, and then around the room, but more closely now as if seeing everything for the first time. The TV was a big bulky thing that belonged in a museum, with knobs on the front to change channel and volume. From the pattern on the curtains and the fabric on the furniture, to the same layer of dust everywhere he looked, the flat seemed like a snapshot from the land that time forgot; a TV or film set that had just been taken out of storage to air it.
‘What do you think, then?’ Styles said from behind him.
‘I’d say we need to speak to Miss Barclay about the standard of her housework, but I have a feeling she’s not been in here for some time.’ Styles nodded and Porter went on. ‘The way the dust has built up on the surfaces, I’d say it’s been months since anyone set foot in here, at least, maybe a lot longer. Let’s just hope that wherever she is, she’s got nothing more serious than a few chores around the house to worry about.’
It took another half hour for the crime scene techs to finish up. Everything was painstakingly catalogued. Styles had joked in the past that the process was like a macabre fashion shoot, and Porter could see why. By the time the pictures were taken, the techs had dusted surfaces with fine powder like a make-up artist applying foundation. Fibres were snipped from the carpet like a hurried pre-catwalk haircut. They chose their camera angles carefully to capture every detail, like David Bailey immortalising the perfect profile.
Porter decided Styles had understated in the extreme when he had called it a strange one. Everything looked to be from that same era, from the peach, pale blue and soft green curtains to the light brown furry-looking sofa that screamed 1980s. Add that to the correspondence that hailed from the same period, and it was as if they’d travelled back thirty years when they crossed the threshold.
The bedroom did nothing to alter that perception. Porter could almost feel the dust lining his nasal passages as he breathed in. Styles moved across to the curtains and opened them with both hands simultaneously, sending wispy plumes of dust up into the air like ash from a volcano. Two of the curtain hooks on the left-hand side relinquished their grip on fabric made weak by time, and tore free of their fastenings.
Porter moved over to the wardrobe, one door slightly ajar with gauzy strands of cobweb laced across the gap like the back of a corset. He opened it slowly, watching to see if the web’s architect was at home, but there was no sign of life. Porter was no fashionista but the suits that hung in the wardrobe reminded him of some of his mum’s outfits from family pictures before he was even born, let alone a toddler. It was starting to feel like an eighties version of Great Expectations, and he’d walked into Satis House with Miss Havisham lurking somewhere inside.
Satisfied that there was nothing of immediate interest in the bedroom, they made their way back out to the kitchen area in time to see Will Leonard placing the hand carefully into an evidence bag. Porter turned and scanned the living room. It reminded him of a party he’d been at last year where a fight had broken out. An armchair lay on its side like a wounded animal. A small coffee table that had presumably been next to it was upturned, one of the legs snapped off at the halfway point. A magazine lay face down, pages sprawled open and spine pointing upwards.
He saw dark smudges on the far wall, and moved in for a closer look. The cream paint was flecked with dark spots, a night sky in reverse. A handful of evidence markers, little yellow tents, had set up camp on the carpet around a series of brown stains. All in all, the room looked like a jigsaw smashed by an angry child, none of the pieces seeming to go together just yet. He wandered over to where Styles waited at the door.
‘Let’s head back to the station then and see if we can track down Miss Barclay, or at least rustle up some family and friends to speak to.’
‘After you,’ said Styles, gesturing towards the door. Porter had just walked past him when he added, ‘Do you think the techs can manage to carry everything, or should we offer to give them a hand?’
CHAPTER TWO
Natasha Barclay was a ghost, figuratively speaking, at least. Between them they couldn’t find a single mention of her dated past 1983. Her flat was one of fifteen in a five-storey late Victorian building near Walthamstow, in North East London, built originally as an orphanage. The airy high ceilings and ornate cornices had reminded Porter a little of his own place, although he guessed his flat could fit inside these twice over.
They left three uniformed officers at the building to go door to door with the remaining eleven residents to see if anyone knew Natasha Barclay. It wasn’t out of the question that she was just a private person, and didn’t make small talk with the neighbours. The interviews with the first three residents, particularly the one who’d lived there for over twenty years, didn’t sit well with him. Sure, people led busy lives, but for those lives to have never intersected with as much as a neighbourly nod while leaving or entering the building in over two decades seemed highly unlikely. Then there was the eerie air of dormancy that hung over the place. The dated decor and coat of dust that cloaked every surface had given him the feeling that the apartment had been slumbering for some time before the leaking freezer had rudely interrupted.
They headed back to the station at Paddington Green, along Edgware Road, lined with a cultural melting pot of takeaways, competing amongst themselves to ruin your waistline. Porter’s window was halfway down, spices and fried chicken wafting in on the breeze, making his stomach growl in protest. Compressed storefronts jostled for space, offering everything from Persian carpets to a bet on the three o’clock at Newmarket. Blocks of flats had been built up behind them over the years, peering over the tops of the two- and three-storey buildings on the main road like nosy neighbours. Typical mid-twentieth-century fare, blocky and functional. The station itself wasn’t any prettier. The jutting window ledges around each floor made Porter think of the Stickle Bricks he had as a child.
As soon as they got inside, Styles disappeared into the small kitchen area, returning armed with two mugs of steaming black coffee. Porter realised he’d been staring at a smudge of dirt on the window and blinked his eyes quickly to snap himself out of it.
‘I’ve told you before, you’re wasting your time batting your eyelashes at me. I’m a happily married man,’ said Styles. After a few years working together it was impossible not to be aware of his partner’s little quirks. He jokingly referred to this one sometimes as Porter’s ‘Spidey sense’ after the Marvel comic-book hero’s preternatural ability to read situations and intuit danger. He’d seen it happen on more than one occasion where Porter had progressed a seemingly dead-end case by zoning out like that and joining dots that no one else had spotted.
‘You can’t blame a guy for trying.’ Porter took a cautious sip of the coffee before putting the cup on the desk.
‘Any flashes of inspiration, then?’ asked Styles as he settled into the seat at his desk that adjoined his partner’s.
Porter shook his head. ‘No, no, ladies first this time. You got a theory?’
‘Kind of, actually,’ said Styles. ‘Well, more of a question really,’ he corrected himself. ‘The food in the freezer – that make sense to you?’
‘I was a little preoccupied with the hand to have much of an appetite.’
‘I wasn’t fixing to make myself a snack,’ said Styles. ‘I’m talking about the packaging. I’m assuming you missed that part?’
‘Afraid so. Go on then, enlighten me.’
‘The whole scene was just odd,’ Styles began. ‘The clothes and decor you could put down to individual taste. The dust and cobwebs might just mean she’s been living somewhere else for a while, maybe with a boyfriend. The boxes in the freezer make no sense, though.’
‘How do you mean?’ asked Porter.
‘The packaging,’ said Styles. ‘It was as dated as the rest of the place. Not that I’m an expert in the field of graphic design by any stretch, but it looked ancient compared to what you see in shops today. None of it had the nutritional info on either, and that’s been stamped all over everything for years now.’
Porter raised his eyebrows as he realised what Styles was getting at. ‘So you’re saying you think no one’s been in for years rather than months?’
Styles shrugged. ‘I know stuff keeps for longer in there, but who keeps food for that long?’
‘So we’re saying nobody’s been in there since she last opened her mail?’
‘Maybe, maybe not,’ said Styles. ‘I’m pretty certain nobody’s lived there for a long time. Whether anyone has had a reason to be there or not is another matter.’ Porter opened his mouth to reply, but was stopped in his tracks when his phone started to ring.
‘Hold that thought,’ he said, holding up a finger at Styles as he took the call. ‘This is Porter.’
‘Porter? It’s Will Leonard. You asked me to call as soon as we had something.’
‘Hey, Will. What have you got?’
‘It’s only a preliminary overview, but hopefully it’ll help get you started. The prints from the hand are consistent with the few clear ones we managed to find at the flat. I wasn’t sure what we’d find with it being like a museum in there, but we got lucky. We pulled some fairly clear ones from fatty deposits around the oven, and on and around the make-up products in the bathroom, so it’s reasonable to assume that both they and the hand they come from belong to somebody who lived there. I’m going to run them now and see if we get a match.’
‘OK, thanks, Will. Anything else?’
‘We’ll be doing DNA tests on hair from the hairbrush and a swab of the toothbrush to check against tissue from the hand and the blood from the living room. Results should be back in a day or so. There’s nothing so far to suggest more than one person living there. There were a few smudges that look like they used to be prints in the other rooms, but not as well preserved as the ones in the kitchen.’
‘Good stuff. Let me know when you get the DNA tests back.’ Porter was about to sign off but as an afterthought he mentioned Styles’s theory about the food. Leonard promised to look into it and ended the call. Porter gave Styles the highlights of the conversation.
‘What you said, about the food. I hadn’t twigged to that. You’re right, it does seem weird.’
‘Oh, I’m not just a pretty face,’ said Styles. ‘What’s the plan, then, boss?’
‘First things first, we need to find out what family she has. My gut tells me that it’s most likely her hand we found. I checked with one of the lads working the scene, though, and the amount of blood and distribution on the carpet isn’t consistent with it being removed there, so it begs the questions of where and why.’
‘Speaking of the flat, it would have been a fairly pricey area to live in even back in the eighties. How does a young woman living alone afford somewhere like that?’ asked Styles.
‘Good question,’ said Porter, reaching for his coffee again. ‘You look into the property and check out her finances. See if anything shows up apart from the account with Barclays. I’ll see if I can track down her parents.’
They agreed to meet up again as soon as the officers responsible for interviewing the neighbours returned, and Styles slid his own chair sideways on its casters to park himself at his desk. Porter drained the lukewarm dregs of his coffee and got to work. He hoped tracing the parents wouldn’t prove too tricky, although these conversations were the ones he hated the most. Being the bearer of potentially bad tidings was something he’d had to do more times than he cared to remember, but he’d never get used to it. He remembered it from the other side of the scenario; seeing the blurred shape visible through his front door. Not realising that all that separated him from the blow they were about to deal to his world was an inch-thick rectangle of wood and glass. The struggle to remember what life had been like before he opened the door to see the police officers outside. The bad news they carried carved into every crease on their forehead.
Best case, Natasha Barclay had been the victim of an assault, and worst case her injuries may have been fatal. Without immediate medical attention, she could easily have bled out after her hand was removed. The fact that at least part of the attack looked to have taken place inside her home meant there was a good chance she may have known her assailant. What Porter couldn’t quite reconcile, though, was that if she was alive and well, why nobody, including her parents, had bothered helping to look after her flat. On the flip side, if something more sinister had happened, why had nobody reported her missing? The last thought that struck him as he leant forward to start the task of locating her parents was a little less palatable, but one that would need careful consideration nonetheless. What if those closest to her knew she was missing but had a vested interest in hiding that fact?
CHAPTER THREE
The canvassing of the remaining neighbours took up most of the morning, but proved fruitless. As far as they were concerned, the flat may as well have stood empty all these years, and none of them had heard of Natasha Barclay, let alone laid eyes on her. The search of her flat had yielded a few interesting snippets of information, though. The three constables returned from their door-knocking and set to work sifting through the boxes of letters, photos, and everyday detritus that had been packed up and brought back to the station. One of these included the unopened mail that had been piled like a snowdrift behind the front door. Buried in there was a series of bills from various utility companies: British Gas for power, British Telecom for the phone line, shortening to BT around the early nineties. The water bills told a tale in their own right. There was a mixture of both Thames Water Authority and Thames Water. The latter had only been founded in 1989, which lent further credence to Porter’s suspicion that the flat had indeed stood empty since before that. The bills covered the period from 1983 right through to 2012, whereupon they were accompanied by demands for payment citing a failed direct debit, and finally notices to disconnect services, and the other utilities followed suit around the same time.
Porter listened while one of the PCs, a young man by the name of Edwards, summarised what they’d found. They’d also catalogued a series of bank statements that showed the same current account as before, dated 1983. The funds, healthy at first, slipped steadily away like sand through an hourglass, without a single deposit to stem the tide, until they were depleted around the time the demanding letters started to arrive. The power had been cut, alright, but not through any fault or error of the provider.
There had been over nine thousand pounds in the account back in 1983. That would have stood out to Porter as a healthier than average balance even today. The birth certificate they had tracked down said she would have been twenty-one back then. Set against the context of her age, plus the fact the balance was from over thirty years ago, that was a staggering amount for her to have just lying around in a current account.
He was trying to figure out how to work out the modern day equivalent, taking inflation into consideration, when he heard Styles end the call he’d been making. Styles had specialised in financial crime before he’d made the move across to the Homicide and Serious Crime squad. Porter was sure that his partner was the man to ask, and swivelled around to face him.
‘Anything from the door to door?’ asked Styles before Porter could open his mouth.
‘More of the same,’ said Porter, shaking his head. ‘No one’s laid eyes on her full stop. I’ve got something you can help me with, though,’ he said, picking up the bank statement, and explaining what he was trying to do.
‘Yep, that’s easily done,’ said Styles. He turned to face his monitor and one quick Google search later, had a site up that promised to do the calculation for them. ‘How much did you say she had?’ he asked.
‘A little over nine grand.’
‘What I’d give for that now, never mind thirty years ago,’ said Styles. He tapped the figure into a box, used a drop-down menu to select the year in question, and clicked the button to calculate. He looked at the result, then sat back and whistled through his teeth.
‘That look right to you?’ asked Porter.
‘’Bout three times that in today’s money – yep, looks around what I was expecting.’
‘Where the hell does a twenty-one-year-old get that kind of cash from?’ Porter rubbed his hand over his chin, feeling tiny pricks of Braille-like stubble that he’d missed with his razor.
‘Have we found anyone we can ask the question to yet?’
Porter shook his head. ‘Not quite, but I found out a few interesting things before I got distracted with the update on the neighbours.’
He filled Styles in on the progress he had made. Starting with her parents’ details on her birth certificate, he had found Nathan Barclay first. Natasha’s father had committed suicide back in 1983, although Porter had yet to find out the exact details of where, when and how. Her mother, Anne Barclay, had died giving birth to Natasha, ending the parental line of enquiry almost as soon as it had begun. Nathan had, it transpired, remarried when Natasha was ten years old, to Mary Atkins, who took on his name and bore him a son, Gavin. The marriage had not lasted, though, and they had divorced in 1981. Porter had run a background check on Mary Barclay, and found that she now went by the name of Mary Locke, and lived at an address in Edgware.
‘I would have preferred an actual family member,’ said Porter, ‘but she’s the only person I’ve found worth talking to so far. I say we have a drive up there this afternoon. I haven’t looked for the son yet. I figure she can point us in his direction to save me a job. We should be able to get a DNA swab from him as well to see if there’s a familial match against the sample we took from the hand.’
Styles grunted his agreement before he spoke. ‘My turn now?’
Porter nodded, settling back into his chair. Styles shuffled through a small stack of paper fresh from the printer. He had confirmed with the bank that the only activity on the current account had been the direct debits that had paid the bills, and that she had no other accounts with them. Styles was always a keen advocate of following the money trail, so he’d taken a step back and looked at the flat. With no sign of a mortgage either, he, like Porter, had been curious as to how she’d financed the purchase. Lucky for him, Natasha Barclay had been organised as far as her personal affairs went, and had bank statements filed away in a cardboard box at the back of a large storage closet. There had been four deposits, adding up to a little over the purchase price of twenty-five thousand pounds. They’d all come from the same account with a payment reference starting AH and followed by a sequence of six numbers, each string of digits different from the last.
The Land Registry showed that the flat, previously owned by Atlas Holdings, had been sold to Miss Barclay in 1980 shortly after her eighteenth birthday. A quick check at Companies House showed Atlas Holdings to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Locke & Winwood, who had a head office registered to an address near Gravesend.
‘That can’t just be a coincidence,’ said Porter. ‘Same name as her stepmum.’
‘Yeah, I’ll be surprised if there’s no link there.’
Neither man had heard of either company before, but a link between Atlas and Natasha Barclay soon became a lot clearer. The list of former directors included a Nathan Andrew Barclay. The deposits in his daughter’s account had, in all probability, come from her father’s company.
‘So Daddy paid for the flat, and kept her account topped up?’ said Porter. ‘That explains that, then.’
‘Mm hmm,’ said Styles, dropping the pages casually on his desk. ‘You couldn’t even buy a garage in parts of London for that price nowadays.’
Porter shook his head, not in disagreement but disbelief. He knew it to be true and was thankful, not for the first time, for the sanctuary of his own small flat. It had belonged to his wife since long before they had first met, left to her in her grandmother’s will, mortgage free. It was a compact two-bedroom flat, but without her to share it, the space sometimes felt disproportionately bigger than it actually was. He forced his thoughts back to the present situation.
‘Why you’d want to live in a garage is beyond me, but your tastes have always left a lot to be desired. Shall we head off and see if Mrs Locke is around for a chat?’ he said.
Styles nodded in agreement, springing to his feet and grabbing his coat from the back of his chair. Porter did the same, although with a little less enthusiasm, and slipped the envelope of photos into his jacket pocket as he headed for the exit. His brief flirtation with Holly’s memory had left him, as it often did, with the surreal sense that it had all happened to someone else. His recollection of her was still so fresh, as if he had kissed her goodbye on the way out to work this morning. Many people were haunted by ghosts from their past, but Porter classed his as more of a bittersweet relationship. As much as the flashbacks were a mixture of happy memories tinged with sadness, he cherished those he had, unable or perhaps unwilling to let go just yet.
The moment had passed by the time he made it outside, and he slid into the driver’s seat of the car, closing his door at the precise time Styles pulled his shut to give one synchronised thunk. Porter started it up and pulled away without a word. Time to speak to Mary Locke, and discover whether any more ghosts would be created today once they had done so. His subconscious kicked in with the afterthought:
What if Mary Locke has been living with ghosts of her own for some time already?
CHAPTER FOUR
If the house they pulled up outside on Nan Clark’s Lane was any indication of status, Mary Locke had managed to shelter from the storm of the recession in relative comfort. They had only left the M1 a few minutes ago, but the impressive detached residence a short hop from Edgware had a secluded, exclusive feel to it. The dark wooden gates covering the driveway were closed, but the roof of a pristine white Range Rover poked over the top of them. The house itself looked perfectly symmetrical; a pair of sandstone effect columns flanked the doorway on either side, like soldiers standing to attention, with the lintel made from the same material. The matching sets of windows, three up and three down, on either side of the front doorway, acted like mirrors rather than portals into the interior, although Porter wagered that Mary Locke herself had never had to stoop to polishing them to get that shine.
He had toyed with calling ahead to check somebody was in, but that would open up a line of questioning he would rather pursue face-to-face. Porter pulled up on the opposite side of the narrow private road they’d driven up to get there, and motioned for Styles to stay in the car while he went to push the intercom button on the gate; no sense them both getting out unless they knew they’d be staying a while.
He pushed the button and held it for a three count, then took a step back. There was no immediate sign of life from inside. A double garage sat off to the left with both doors closed, no doubt harbouring an equally expensive vehicle to rival the Range Rover. There was a split second of static from the intercom, followed by a woman’s voice.
‘Yes, who’s there, please?’
‘Mrs Locke?’ said Porter.
‘Yes, speaking. Who is this, please?’ she repeated her question politely.
‘Mrs Locke, my name is Detective Inspector Jake Porter with the Met Police. I’m here with my partner, Detective Sergeant Nick Styles. We’d like to ask you a few questions about a matter we’re investigating, if you can spare us a couple of minutes, please?’
There couldn’t have been more than two or three seconds of silence before the burst of static again, but the time oozed past like treacle, making it seem like double figures. Was she thinking of an excuse not to let them in, or just a little flustered to have police on the doorstep? Whatever would the neighbours say? Porter reminded himself they were in an unmarked car, and he hadn’t been in uniform for many years now, so the secret of their visit was safe from prying eyes for now.
‘Can I ask what it’s about, Detective?’
‘It would really be a lot easier to explain if we came in, Mrs Locke,’ said Porter.
Another brief pause. ‘Do you have any identification with you, please, Detective?’
Porter fumbled in his jacket pocket and pulled out his warrant card. As he held it up to the glass eye of the intercom camera, he looked over his shoulder and gestured to Styles with his free hand that he should join him at the gate. There was a soft click followed by a low buzzing noise. Porter placed one hand on the gate and gave a tentative shove. It gave before him and swung open.
The short driveway looped around in a tight semicircle, passing the front door and curving back round past the garage doors, and exiting out through a second wooden gate. Porter and Styles walked almost shoulder to shoulder towards the door. It opened before they were halfway there, just six inches at first, then swung slowly until it was halfway open. Porter assumed the face that peered out was Mrs Locke herself, although if she could afford a house like this she may well have a maid.
From what he had read at the station, she was seventy years old, but she could have passed for a decade less. She reminded him a little of a younger version of Mary Berry, her short sandy hair cut just above shoulder length and tucked back behind her ears. Her eyes were a startling blue that demanded attention, but her body language screamed timidity, not the confidence and poise that often radiated from someone of her relative affluence.
‘Mrs Locke?’ asked Porter, just to be certain.
‘Yes, I’m Mrs Locke,’ she answered hesitantly. ‘Can I ask what this is about? Has something happened to Alexander?’ She spoke softly, with an accent that would cost a small fortune at elocution lessons.
‘Alexander?’ said Porter, looking to Styles and back to her.
‘My husband.’
‘No, Mrs Locke. This has nothing to do with him. I’m sure he’s fine. Could we come in for a few minutes?’ said Porter, looking past her into the house.
‘Of course, please, come in.’
She stepped aside to let them in, closed the door and turned to face them. Porter noticed that she seemed uneasy despite being on home turf, but then again the majority of people went through life without ever having the police turn up on their doorstep, and he put the vibe down to a simple case of nervous anticipation.
‘We can go through to the living room,’ she said, gesturing through a doorway set in the wall to their left. She led the way and they followed close behind. The room was like something from a show home. Porter wondered if the sofas had ever been sat on. The cream leather looked smooth, buttery and unblemished, free from any telltale creases or wrinkles. A pair of matching two-seaters faced each other over a glass coffee table, with a single armchair from the same range at the head of the table. Mary Locke shepherded them towards the nearest sofa and took up residence on the other, keeping a safe distance, with the no man’s land of the coffee table between them.
Porter perched on the edge of the seat, loath to lean back lest he disturb the artfully arranged cushions that looked plumper than a Christmas turkey. Styles had no such qualms, settling back into a large mocha-coloured cushion and crossing his legs as he took out a small black notepad from his jacket. Mary Locke sat upright in the centre of her sofa, back straight and hands clasped in front of her on her knees.
‘I’d offer you a drink, Detectives, but I was just on my way out so can’t talk for too long. What’s this about, please?’
‘I’ll not waste any time, then,’ said Porter, with a polite smile. ‘We’re trying to locate your stepdaughter, Natasha. There appears to have been an incident at her flat and we’d like to speak to her about it. We’re hoping you can help us reach her.’
Porter studied her face as she absorbed his words. Her already stiff posture held firm; her tongue stole out a fraction and nervously wet her lower lip.
‘An incident? What kind of incident?’
‘A possible break-in and some kind of altercation is as much as we can say right now, Mrs Locke, but we really do need to speak to Natasha. Do you know where we can find her?’
She fidgeted slightly, smoothing away an imaginary crease on her trouser leg before clasping her hands back together.
‘I’ve … not seen Natasha for a long time, I’m afraid, not since …’ Her voice tailed off.
‘Not since when, Mrs Locke?’ prompted Porter.
She looked down at the floor for a second before she met his gaze again.
‘Not since just before her father died.’
‘So that would be April 1983?’ asked Styles.
She nodded slowly. ‘Nathan died less than a week after Tash’s birthday.’ Her voice tailed off as she spoke, her thoughts clearly drifting back to a memory she would rather not revisit.
‘And you saw her when, exactly?’ Porter asked.
‘Sorry,’ she said, aware she had been starting to drift. ‘Um, let me see. I think it was the day before her twenty-first birthday. I’d gone around to drop off her birthday card.’
‘So you’ve not seen your stepdaughter in over thirty years?’ Porter asked, his tone low and even.
Mary Locke shook her head. ‘Tash and I were never what I’d describe as close. She was a proper daddy’s girl when I came along and I think she saw me as just someone who was stealing his undivided attention away from her.’ She smiled wistfully. ‘Of course, I tried to show her I wasn’t a threat, but I never quite got through to her. Nathan had always been a workaholic before I met him, and she used to get the lion’s share of what free time he had.’ She shrugged. ‘I think perhaps she found it hard to share him at times.’
‘I can understand that must have been hard, Mrs Locke,’ said Styles, ‘but if we can focus more on where she might be now. Where does she work? Is there anyone else she’s close to who can tell us how to contact her?’
‘She had a hard time dealing with Nathan’s death. The last I heard she was teaching children to speak English in a school over in Poland. She’d travelled around Europe for a while after she finished school and ended up teaching somewhere near Kraków for about six months, so I guess it was easier to go back there again instead of sticking around here without her father.’
‘Do you have an address or phone number for the school?’ asked Styles.
She shook her head quickly. ‘Sorry, it was so long ago. I don’t know that she even gave me one.’
Porter pulled the envelope from his jacket, reversing the pictures they had taken from Natasha’s flat so they faced Mary Locke, and slid them across the glass tabletop towards her.
‘These are copies of pictures we found in Natasha’s flat, Mrs Locke. Could you point out Natasha for us, please?’
Mary Locke stared at them, only her eyes moving as she flicked between them. She made no move to pick them up. Porter waited patiently, and was on the verge of prompting her when she spoke.
‘That’s her in the denim jacket. Her and Nathan,’ she said, her gaze still fixed on the picture. ‘Nathan took her to see The Rolling Stones up in Aberdeen for her birthday, the year before he …’ She left the sentence unfinished.
Porter reached across and spun the picture back round. That would make Natasha nineteen or twenty when it was taken. She had an arm wrapped around the waist of the man Porter now knew to be Nathan Barclay. They wore matching black T-shirts with the iconic tongue and ruby red lips that had long since been synonymous with The Stones. There was no mistaking them for anything but father and daughter. Her hair, so dark it was practically black, matched his, and two sets of identical blue eyes, creased at the corners at the promise of the evening to follow, stared back at Porter. He nodded a silent hello to Natasha, glad for a face to focus on. It made her finally feel real.
Porter decided to change tack. ‘You and her father were divorced when he died, is that right?’
‘Yes, we’d been apart for a few years by the time he passed away.’
‘And do you think she blamed you for the break-up?’ asked Porter.
Mary Locke paused for a moment before replying. ‘I’m not perfect, Detective. We all make mistakes. Mine was that I fell in love with someone other than my husband.’
It might just have been a trick of the light, but Porter thought it looked as if her eyes were glistening a touch more, a precursor to tears.
‘Nathan was a good man, but not always easy to live with. He’d worked hard to build up his business and by the time he … well … you know … It had been losing money long before we split up, and he’d had to sell up to pay off his debts. Things like that take their toll on any man.’
‘If you don’t mind, Mrs Locke, we don’t have much information on what happened to Nathan other than that he took his own life. Can you fill in the blanks for us?’
‘What does that have to do with Natasha?’ she asked, looking puzzled.
‘Maybe nothing’ – Porter shrugged – ‘but if nobody has seen her since around that time, it might help us understand her frame of mind, where she might have gone, that kind of thing.’
She swallowed hard. These were the types of memory that people kept locked up as tightly as possible, and stored in the darkest of recesses. Her eyes danced from side to side in short staccato movements.
‘Nathan … he, um … he shot himself. It happened in one of his warehouses.’ The glistening in her eyes finally gathered enough momentum and turned into matching menisci of tears, balancing on her lower eyelid. ‘Sorry,’ she said, forcing a nervous smile. ‘Even though we were apart by then, it was still hard, you know?’
Porter and Styles both nodded. Neither had lost a loved one this way, but they’d both seen enough people grieve over lives lost to be able to empathise. Too many, thought Porter. Still not enough to have prepared him to deal with Holly, though. No amount of consoling others could prepare you when the time came to swap places with them, to be told the news by an apologetic stranger.
There was a brief lull in the questioning while they gave her a few seconds to regain her composure. She blinked and the dam broke, solitary tears from each eye racing its rival down her cheek. She tugged at a paper handkerchief that had been hiding up her left sleeve and used it to dab at the damp tracks. Porter half expected to see a trail of coloured ones flowing out behind it, like those of a magician at kids’ parties. It reminded him of his grandmother, who always had a hankie stashed like that in case of emergencies. He waited till she’d stuffed it back into its hiding place before asking his next question.
‘Did he leave a note?’
She nodded.
‘I know it’s a long time ago, but do you remember what it said?’
‘Not word for word; it’s been so long. All I remember is something about being sorry for the hurt he’d caused his family, and that this was the only way to make things right.’
‘What did he mean by that?’ asked Styles.
She took a deep breath in and shook her head. ‘I assumed he meant that he’d lost everything – his money, the business, their financial future. I knew he’d not been himself, but if I’d only known how far he’d been pushed …’ Her words tailed off again, eyes unfocused and looking back across the years.
‘Pushed?’ asked Styles. ‘What do you mean by pushed?’
She snapped back to the present and blinked three times in rapid succession.
‘I mean just by the sheer weight of everything he had bearing down on him.’ Her words faltered a little at first but soon gained strength. ‘Anyway, I don’t mean to be rude, Detectives, but that was a long time ago and you were asking about Natasha. I really don’t have anything else to share that would help you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to head out and meet my husband. He doesn’t like to be kept waiting.’
She stood up, the clear message being that she expected them to do the same.
‘Of course,’ said Porter. ‘We don’t mean to keep you. One last thing, though,’ he said with a genial smile. ‘Your son, Gavin? Is he still in contact with his sister, and are there any other siblings?’
He could have sworn she flinched when he asked the question. ‘Alexander and I couldn’t have any more children. Not since I, uh … we lost a child. A few years before all of this happened. A son. A few weeks before he was due to be born. There were complications, and I, uh … No. No other brothers or sisters. As for Gavin, he’s not mentioned it to me if she has been in touch, but you’d have to ask him.’
‘What about friends from school or other family members? Is there anyone that she was close to who might help us get in touch with her?’
‘Not that I know of, but like I said, we weren’t exactly close.’
