The Body on the Shore Read online

  He had arranged with DI Claire Mulholland and the liaison officer Gabby Underwood to meet Young’s widow at half past two. He was early. The street was quiet on a Sunday, and as he sat in the car he swiped through on his iPad a fair amount of the background material that Claire had dug up. The couple had two young children, a very large mortgage and enough additional debt to be a concern. The life insurance coverage, too, had raised Gillard’s eyebrows: half a million, in addition to mortgage protection cover. The policy had been taken out seven years ago.

  When Claire and Gabby pulled up they went together to the door and rapped sharply with the knocker. A slender woman came to the door. Gillard had been warned that Laura was a beauty, but he still hadn’t expected the delicate perfection of her bone structure to eclipse the baggy paint-stained overalls and the dabs of paint in her thick dark hair. Even the smudge of butterscotch-coloured paint on her cheek looked fetching. It made him want to gently wipe it off.

  Gillard offered his condolences, and they were all led through a kitchen where half the floorboards were missing and a great harness of electrical cables was revealed by a missing splashback, through to a back room where there were dust sheets on a three-piece suite.

  ‘I’m carrying on on autopilot,’ she said, explaining the brush in her hand. ‘We were halfway through painting the hall. I don’t know what else to do. I had started on the paperwork, official letters to banks and insurers, but it’s so upsetting to keep writing “Peter is dead”. I’m signed off work for a month, and the kids are with my sister, and it’s got to be done.’

  The next 20 minutes were spent in some gentle guidance, principally from Gabby, about what would happen next, the role of coroners, the eventual release of the body for burial, and the role of victim support, both officially through the police and via the various charitable organizations. Laura nodded, but appeared to have glazed over.

  ‘Laura, I wonder now if we could ask you a few questions about your husband?’ Mulholland said. When she asked how they had met, Laura described a summer evening on the south bank of the Thames where they found themselves among mutual friends after an art exhibition and got talking. Laura had been a student, due to go back to Peru in a year, but she fell for him immediately and just wanted to stay in London.

  ‘It was a fairy tale for me,’ she said, her soft brown eyes welling up.

  ‘Tell me what you know about his origins,’ Gillard asked.

  ‘In Kosovo? Not much. Terrible things were happening, things he didn’t want to be part of. There was always this melancholy about him when I asked him about his family and what happened to them, so in the end I stopped asking.’

  ‘There was a grandmother, I believe,’ Gillard said. ‘Did you meet her?’

  ‘Only once. I think she wanted him to go back, and they argued. She died several years ago. I offered to go with Peter to her funeral, but he wouldn’t go back.’

  ‘Can you think why anyone would like to kill him?’

  She sat looking at the floor for a long time, chewing her lips. ‘He came here to escape the violence, the tit-for-tat cycle of vendettas that came with the war. He just wanted to live. But there had been family troubles too, that came through very strongly. Blood over there is not only thicker than water, it dries harder than stone. It was a saying he used. The stains can never be washed clean.’

  ‘Are you telling us he might have known he was in danger?’ Mulholland asked.

  ‘I think he knew it was possible. He wanted to protect me from all of this, but naturally I worried. The trouble is, I don’t know. Or I didn’t know, until now.’

  ‘But who would target an orphan?’ Mulholland asked.

  Laura looked up. ‘I actually am not sure he was an orphan.’

  * * *

  Gillard and Mulholland continued to try to tease out background facts from Laura Diaz. There was no single revelation that transformed the case, just a series of details that illuminated Peter Young’s world view: that one day, quite possibly, he would be killed. He wanted to shield her and his children from that, it was clear. One piece of evidence was the fact that when he and Laura married, she and the children took her maiden name. Another was the size of the life insurance on him, with her as beneficiary. There was also the fact he had moved home half a dozen times in the last six years, renting each time. As Laura described it, the purchase of this house was a result of her pleading, and represented the only time he’d agreed to put down roots.

  She took them on a tour of the house, showed them the home office where he sometimes worked, the pictures on the windowsill of Peter and the children, an album of Peter receiving architectural accolades and awards. For all his care, these were high-profile events, at least within the industry. A professional trying to find him had plenty to go on. Peter Young had done everything he could to protect his family. But clearly he could not protect himself.

  The one comment she had made that they couldn’t get any further detail on was Laura’s assertion that he might not be an orphan. When Gillard asked why she felt this, she shrugged and said she wasn’t sure, it was just a feeling.

  ‘Did he ever talk about his parents?’ Mulholland asked.

  ‘He mentioned his mother from time to time. I don’t think he liked his father at all. At first I thought he must’ve been abused, something like that. In the early years I was curious about his origins but frightened of losing him if I tried to get him to talk.’ She looked up at them and said: ‘When you love somebody, you don’t keep prodding at the one place that gives them pain, you embrace them wholeheartedly to draw them away from the hurt.’

  Laura agreed to let the two detectives go through her husband’s paperwork. She brought down an old battered suitcase and placed it on the kitchen table. ‘You won’t find much, believe me – I’ve been looking too. There’s no birth certificate, no passport until his first British one. There are copies of some of the adoption documents that Barnardo’s had. That’s pretty much it. Not a single family photograph.’

  Gillard thought that there must be more, even if Laura was not aware of it. There were two kinds of deception that might have been at play here. His deceiving her and her deceiving them. On balance he expected there to have been more of the former than the latter. Either way, Peter Young remained a man of mystery.

  * * *

  The original asylum decision paperwork had shown that the 15-year-old Peter Young had demonstrated to the assessors a genuine and well-founded fear of persecution. It had taken just over a year to come to that decision, which made him eligible to stay in Britain. Exactly what Young had said to the interviewing social workers was not clear, as only a summary of the decision had been retained on the Home Office computer system. Mulholland had a request in to Barnardo’s to unseal their full paper case notes but the process, even for officials like the police with privileged access, was not always straightforward.

  By the time Gillard got home at eight in the evening, he was exhausted. Sam met him at the door with a long kiss and a glass of chilled white wine. ‘I’ve missed you,’ she said. Gillard had met Sam a couple of years previously while working on the Martin Knight murder case. She had originally been a police community support officer, but had now taken a civilian call handler job for the Met Police. Over a meal of crispy belly pork, ratatouille and baked potatoes, he shared his misgivings about the Young murder.

  ‘If we can’t find out a bit more about his origins, it leaves us completely in the dark about the motives for the killing. Given that it seems to have been a professional hit, we may not make enough progress with forensics to give us a clue. Despite CCTV all over the place we have no idea what the assailant actually looks like.’

  In less than 12 hours he was able to revise that assessment.

  Chapter 5

  A dark, rain-drenched Monday did nothing for the attractiveness of Roosevelt Avenue. It was 7.15 a.m. and traffic was backed up across Hampton Court Bridge and on the route into Surbiton and Kingston which led, on progre
ssively wider and more congested roads, into south-west London. Craig Gillard was sitting in his unmarked car, illegally parked half on the pavement outside the tattoo parlour opposite HDG+. Temporary ANPR cameras had been set up by pedestrian traffic lights at either end of the avenue to catch the licence plate details of every vehicle that normally traversed the road at this time of day. Tweedledum and Tweedledee were, he hoped, ensconced in the Khazi going through the backlog of CCTV footage. Gillard expected they would be well into the first bacon butty of the day. Nobody liked to use computer terminals after them: the peppering of crumbs, the drops of coffee and the sheen of grease on the keys. During the Martin Knight investigation, Gillard had once poured out a good quarter-cup of coffee from a faulty keyboard into the bin in the incident room where Hoskins and Hodges had pulled a long overnight shift.

  The thought of sizzling bacon stuck in Gillard’s head. Where on this street of estate agents, opticians, betting shops and travel agencies might there still survive a greasy spoon? The traditional British café, where tea was as dark as coffee and came in chipped mugs, where toast was square and white, where sausages spat and bacon hissed, and condensation fogged the windows. While he was lost in a reverie of breakfasts past, an old-fashioned red double-decker bus rumbled to a halt on the other side of the road.

  It took a good few seconds for the penny to drop.

  A double-decker! But there aren’t any on these routes, that’s what Hodges had said.

  Gillard grabbed his raincoat from the back seat and leapt from the car, out into the pelting rain. He zigzagged his way through stationary traffic to the bus shelter outside HDG+. The bus was already pulling away and he had to run, dodging pavement puddles, to get level with the doors at the front. Banging on them got him nothing but a mouthed rebuke and angry hand gestures from the driver. It was only 50 yards further on, when the bus was again in a queue and Gillard could press his Surrey Police ID card against the glass, that the doors wheezed open.

  ‘The next one is in less than five minutes,’ the driver yelled, indicating with his thumb the bus stop behind. ‘Why don’t you read the sign? I don’t go to the terminus. Last stop is half a mile up here at Fallowfield Library.’ He pointed angrily further up the road.

  Once Gillard had introduced himself, the tirade stopped. ‘What service is this?’ he asked.

  ‘Like it says on the signs, it’s the 989.’ Belligerence had returned to the driver’s face.

  ‘I didn’t have chance to read it,’ Gillard said. ‘Does it run on Fridays?’

  ‘The service is a daily, like it says at the stop.’

  ‘But not with double-deckers. I didn’t see any over the weekend.’ Gillard saw there were only three or four passengers downstairs.

  ‘No, mate. It’s only during the school run, up until 8.30 a.m. weekdays, during term time. Now if you’ve finished—’

  ‘No, I haven’t. Reverse back to the bus stop, please. I want to go upstairs.’

  The driver looked as if he just been asked to fly the bus to the moon. ‘I can’t fucking reverse, because of all the traffic behind me, can I?’

  ‘Yes, you can and you will, unless you want to spend some time down at the station with me. I’ll go behind and direct traffic to overtake you.’

  With the worst possible grace, the driver complied, cursing under his breath as he reversed towards the kerb, while Gillard walked behind the bus and firmly gestured for traffic to overtake. The ‘verbal’ that he got from irate drivers who resented this besuited man’s apparently self-appointed authority was quite enough to convince Gillard that he never wanted to be involved in traffic policing.

  Finally, the bus was right outside HDG+ with two single-deckers behind, blocked from reaching the stop. He got angry glares from the other drivers, the other passengers waiting to get off, and those passengers at the bus shelter who were waiting to board the following buses. ‘You wait here,’ he told the recalcitrant driver as he climbed the stairs to the upper deck. It was empty of passengers, an oasis of calm compared to the grief he’d been given on the street.

  He sat on the left-hand side, next to the inward-folding quarter-light windows. Once he’d wiped off the condensation, he could clearly see the bullet-pierced window at which Peter Young had sat, the holes about level with Gillard’s eye. It was a perfect place to shoot from. With his phone, he took a picture of the window at HDG+.

  This was it. The killer could have been upstairs on a double-decker bus.

  * * *

  It was a bad-tempered and soaking-wet detective chief inspector who strode into the Khazi, catching Tweedledum and Tweedledee with their feet up and coffee halfway to their lips.

  ‘A bit damp, sir?’ Hoskins said, eyeing the dirty black marks on the bottom third of his boss’s Burberry raincoat. Hodges, who unlike his colleague had looked first at Gillard’s glowering expression, said nothing, but pulled his feet off the desk and straightened the tie which had sagged around his thick neck.

  Gillard unbuttoned his soaking coat and tossed it onto a chair between the two detectives. ‘I’ve just taken short ride on a double-decker bus that stops right outside Peter Young’s office. Or perhaps I imagined it, because according to you, Hodges, there are no bloody double-deckers on this route.’

  ‘Ah. That’s what it says here,’ Hodges said, grabbing a pile of documents and pulling up a Transport for London PDF on his screen.

  ‘That’s why detectives occasionally get off their arses and go and check,’ Gillard said. ‘I just have. There are three reconditioned 1990s double-deckers used by Arriva on this route because there are several schools which have pupils arriving in the morning at about the same time. The school finishing times are staggered, so it’s much less of a problem in the afternoon. We didn’t see the double-deckers over the weekend for obvious reasons, and we wouldn’t see them during school holidays either.’

  ‘That’s very impressive, sir.’ Hoskins said, trying to put as much psychological distance as possible between himself and his errant colleague.

  ‘There’s more to do, Carl. I want you to chase up Arriva for any CCTV they have on those double-deckers. Get CSI to check them over quickly, just upstairs – the three rows of seats on the left underneath the openable windows. That shouldn’t take too long.’

  Hodges was being a little more truculent. ‘With all due respect, I still don’t see a bus being empty enough for a hit man to use.’

  ‘Well, we shall see, Colin. Because you and I are going to catch that bus tomorrow morning.’

  * * *

  ‘Who’s got my sodding car keys?’ DI Claire Mulholland yelled up the stairs of her home. There was no reply. It was almost eight o’clock on a Monday morning, and none of her three kids were up. Tom, 19, should already have left to attend a training course as a chef, but had come in at 3 a.m. What in hell can anyone do until 3 a.m. on a Sunday night? Collum, aged 17 going on 6, would by now have been sitting at the breakfast table shovelling in gargantuan amounts of cereal while working his phone and ignoring everyone else. Claire recalled he had a hefty essay to hand in this morning. History? English? She was only sure that it had not yet been written. The only person who was sitting at the table was Kyra, her three-year-old granddaughter, whose yoghurt and banana breakfast, prepared by Claire, seemed mostly to have ended up inside Dexter, the family’s ever-hungry Irish wolfhound. Claire’s daughter, Mary – or Maz as she insisted on being called – who was Kyra’s mother, was still in the main bathroom trying to set the world record for hot-water hogging.

  ‘Maz, did you borrow my car?’ Claire yelled again, while pushing the dog’s snout off the table. She absolutely had to be out of the house in ten minutes. There was a reply, of sorts, from the shower, but so indistinct as to be incomprehensible. Kyra was singing along to something on the small television which had been squeezed onto the work surface. The big TV in the lounge was also on, but nobody was watching it bar a coterie of Kyra’s dolls snuggled up together under a blanket.

  Ma
z eventually thundered downstairs, dripping, her body barely wrapped in one small towel and her hair wrapped, turban-style, in another. ‘I didn’t take it, Mum. It was probably Tom.’

  Claire had just prepared a packed meal for Gaz, her plasterer husband who as usual had left at six this morning and would come back at lunchtime to pick it up. For everyone else she had freshened up the leftovers of yesterday’s pasta with some fragments of smoked salmon off-cuts that were on special in the Spar shop just round the corner from the Peter Young crime scene. With a dollop of crème fraîche, only one day past the sell-by date, and chopped into it the apple that Kyra hadn’t eaten on Friday because Maz had forgotten to pick up her lunch, this would be enough for the kids tonight while she was interviewing Peter Young’s widow again.

  ‘Tom, if I have to come up there to look for my car keys, I’m going to Taser you,’ she bellowed. A minute later she did run upstairs and knocked on his door. Getting no reply, she burst into his bedroom and flung open the curtains. His whined but wordless complaint was the same tone Dexter used when lobbying for his dinner. Claire noticed there was a girl somewhere under the covers with him, judging by the red toenails, shoulder tattoo and blond head which were partially visible. His bedroom looked, as it always did, like the target of a very hurried but thorough burglary. Some black lacy underwear dangled from the light shade.

  ‘Hello, Tom, hello Miss Elaneous,’ she said wickedly as she grabbed the car keys. ‘Tom, you’ll be late.’