Malcolm Lowry was missing. No one was saying it, but everyone was thinking it. Losing Eli had triggered the breakdown we’d all known was coming since his wife had filed for divorce a month before. He’d been in hospital with chest pains within hours, signed off by the end of the day, and by the end of the next he was holed up in a static caravan on the Welsh coast, ignoring all offers of counselling and pleas to go back to hospital. After a week he’d stopped returning anyone’s calls, and within a fortnight he’d fallen off the grid altogether.
I learned this from Jennifer Riley, as I stood open-mouthed in the shambles of an incident room trying to figure out exactly who was in charge. Jenny and I came up through training together; she was always a couple of steps ahead of me, always seemed more suited to the touchier, feelier side of the job. And now, true to that, she was hugging me tightly, telling me how glad she was that I was back, how much she’d missed me, and how was I, and how sorry she was, both as my friend and now also apparently as my acting DCI, that she’d thrown me straight into the deep end without offering any briefing or preparation or indeed any kind of communication as to what the hell was going on. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again, plucking one of her long copper hairs from the side of my face. ‘I know it’s my arse. To be honest, everything’s my arse right now. I’ve only been active on this for a week. Look at the state of the place. This whole thing’s been a fuck-up from the start. No offence.’
I scanned the room, the rogues’ gallery of whiteboards lined up along the wall beneath the windows, each plastered haphazardly with photographs, names, dates, but nothing, as far as I could see, of any real substance.
On one, the sorry, bedraggled mugshots of Kerry Farrow and Samantha Halloran, two working girls at the bottom of their profession and the top of their narcotic dependency, and both missing within weeks of each other. Fairey and I, at the height of our differences, had been working on Kerry’s disappearance when I was seconded to the search for Erica Shaw.
Erica’s face, full and pouting and framed by a long, dark mass of tight curls, shared a board with her best friend Sarah Abbott and former schoolmate Caroline Gray – both of them tall, slender, high-cheekboned and blonde and missing from within a couple of miles and less than a week of one another – and Rachel Murray, who wasn’t missing at all when she died. Below them, a column of faces; girls of a similar age, with glowing hair and sparkling eyes and perfect white teeth beaming from school photos and portfolio shots. Beside each, a town: Reading. Bristol. Portsmouth. Guildford. Bradford. Chelmsford. A lot of Fords, I noted, shuddering at the photo of the white Transit van beside the e-fit of That Man on the third board.
Nothing in that face I recognised, or in the half-dozen views below it of the inside of the metal cage I now knew to be secreted under his garage. But there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that whoever and wherever he was, he was behind those girls’ disappearances.
On the fourth board, Mark Boon. A fright of pumpkin orange hair and an impetuous sneer. And below, with a gashed cheek and bloodshot eyes, the same face staring up from the floor, dark and unseeing atop a body that faced resolutely down.
And finally, blown up from their personnel files, Fairey and Keith’s ID photos, the only note below their names a giant black question mark in an emphatically drawn circle.
‘Do you want to talk me through it?’ I said.
Jenny nodded. ‘I’ll get us a coffee first though, yeah?’
‘Tell me what you saw this morning,’ she said, sipping from a mug that read Despite the look on my face, you’re still talking.
My mug had disappeared from the kitchen, so she’d given me one that said I’m not dead yet, which made me laugh, but not in a good way. ‘It’s John’s car,’ I said. ‘Whether the remains are his and Julian’s, I have no idea. It’s a bootful of calcined bone, shards of it, bits and pieces. Whether it’s two bodies’ worth, or whether it’ll even be possible to piece it all back together, God only knows. Either way, it’s obviously a deliberate act, I’d say fuelled by a lot of accelerant.
I don’t know what temperature you need to melt steel and cremate bodies, that’s not my field, but it was a hell of a fire. Twisted the whole frame of the car. And, you know, what or whoever burned up in there, they were in the boot. So there’s that.’
Jenny nodded quietly, her eyes dark, her thoughts her own. I sipped my coffee. It needed more sugar and less milk, though I was sure I’d watched her make it the same way she always had.
‘Also, we’ve got tyre tracks,’ I said, swiping open my phone and loading the photo to show her. ‘At the burn site. Landowner says they’re nothing to do with him, but they’re clear; clear enough to get a brand and size, at least. Sandra’s got Jim processing them. May give us something.’
‘What’s your instinct?’
‘I don’t know.’ My instinct was still in intensive care, is what it felt like. ‘How is it that we weren’t able to track John and Julian?’ I asked her.
‘We were,’ she said. ‘There was no tracker in the car, but we pinpointed the phone signals as soon as we knew they were missing. They were at that house the day before you—’ Her eyes flicked away for the briefest moment. The slightest hitch in her breath. ‘Before what happened. But the last signals came from right here, at five in the afternoon. We knew that before it all went down, I think.’
We might have done. ‘I don’t remember,’ I said, and left it at that.
‘No,’ she nodded. ‘Well, that’s yet another thing that muddies the waters. They were out there, but as far as we know they came back. Just, nobody ever saw them again.’
I didn’t know what that meant, or why it only cemented the connection in my head, but it did. I studied the e-fit again. It was utterly generic. Just a nothing face. Two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth. A chin. Some hair. ‘How,’ I said, ‘can we not have a better picture than that? It could be anyone.’
Jenny nodded and put her coffee down on the table between us, a spark of triumph returning to her eyes; a question she could answer. She flipped open her laptop, tapped in her password, opened a folder and spun the machine around so we could both see it. ‘We’ve got a driving licence,’ she said, opening a scanned image of a photo card. ‘The two vehicles we recovered are registered to this guy. You know the name: Thomas Reed. Look familiar?’
I laughed. The man had a full beard and shoulder-length hair, his dark eyes all but hidden behind two great draped curtains of it. ‘Jesus Christ,’ I said, cheaply.
‘I know, right?’ She clicked through to an image of a passport in the same name, with the same photo. ‘If I was religious I’d call it a miracle, because this Thomas Reed doesn’t exist. Or not any more. He died of whooping cough in 1980. Unlike . . .’ next image, a second driving licence, same photo . . . ‘James Faulkner, who drowned at the age of three.’ Click. Another passport. ‘James owns the house and the sixty acres around it.’
‘What about bank accounts?’
‘We haven’t found those yet. And neither of these characters is paying any kind of income tax. HMRC have nothing registered at the address. But also, he was holding keys to at least eight other properties.’
‘So, what, he rents out houses? He’s a landlord, maybe?’
She shrugged. ‘Right now, there’s no money trail at all. No mortgage, no car payments, no credit cards . . . If we had him actually buying something, then maybe, but short of tracing
