I Know You Know Page 8

  Jessy wakes Doris and hustles her out of the flat before Doris starts chatting unstoppably. She finds Charlie splayed out across her bed. He doesn’t like sleeping on his own. Jessy smiles at the sight of him and gets in beside him, careful not to wake him. His little face looks perfect. His thumb is in his mouth. She kisses Charlie’s forehead. She wonders what time he will be up in the morning. She feels dampness between her legs. She turns away from her son and stretches her spine and wishes she were in bed with Felix. A sudden lurch of her stomach sends her bolting for the bathroom, where she throws up the alcohol, the crisps from earlier in the evening, and the Gauloises-tinged taste of Felix, until there is only bile left. Slumped on the bathroom floor, she finds money falling out of her pocket. Three folded twenties. A fortune. From him.

  When Felix Abernathy doesn’t turn up to collect her the following night, even though she has spent ages getting ready, she refuses to take the hint that perhaps he wasn’t as keen on her as she was on him. She doesn’t think twice about the rough sex in the car park or the way he played games with her all evening. She thinks only of his looks and of the promises he’d made in the club when they were flirting. There were two that stuck with her: “I could get you some modeling work. I could introduce you to people in TV.”

  With the money he gave her, she goes out the next day and buys a new dress, a new push-up bra, a bottle of hair dye, and a lipstick. She borrows some killer heels from a mate. That night she returns to the nightclub. Felix Abernathy does a double take when he sees her, and that, she thinks as he pats the seat beside him and she walks over to take it, is a result.

  Chapter 7

  “I have an ID on Lucky John Doe.”

  Danny sticks a Post-it note in the middle of Fletcher’s computer screen. Peter Dale is written in the middle of it.

  “Why does that name ring a bell?” Fletcher peels it off.

  “Well, that’s where it gets interesting,” Danny says. “He was a con man. Pulled off a big property investment scam and was last rumored to be sunning himself on a beach in Venezuela, which is where everybody assumed he’s been since then.”

  “Except that he was six feet under.”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Well, there’s a turnup for the books.”

  Fletcher thinks for a minute, trolling his memory for details about Peter Dale. Dale’s was a high-profile disgrace locally, so it doesn’t take Fletcher long to come up with some. He can picture the unflattering photograph of Dale that ran in the papers and on the local TV news. It was a poor-quality holiday snap showing Dale standing beside a pool in swimming trunks. He was speaking on a mobile phone. He had his back to a young boy who stood behind him in tears. The image stuck with Fletcher because of that: the way Dale was ignoring the little fellow. The kid wasn’t named, so far as Fletcher can remember, and Dale had no known children of his own, but that didn’t matter. The picture made him look like as much of a lowlife as his crimes proved him to be.

  “Bald guy,” Fletcher says. “Big gut. I remember the case, but not when it was.”

  “Nineties, but let me check precisely. I’ll get the details up,” Danny says. The HOLMES database confirms what Fletcher remembers. He scans the information and feels a trip downstairs coming on.

  In the archive store in the basement of Kenneth Steele House, Fletcher requests the case materials for Peter Dale. Compared to the buzz of the office upstairs, it feels unnaturally calm down here. It’s a resting place for cold cases, and Fletcher thinks of it as an archive of failure. For every high-profile solve, there’s an unsolved crime shelved here. In each tidily filed box, Fletcher thinks, there are not just papers, photographs, and other case materials, but other things, invisible things. There are traces of the open emotional wounds an unsolved crime leaves on the families and detectives affected by it. There is also the shadow of something more rotten: the person who got away with it. Fletcher shudders. Loose ends. He cannot stand them.

  A lad who looks too young to have a job dumps a green crate containing the Peter Dale case materials onto the table in front of Fletcher. He glances quickly through the material and organizes the papers he’s most interested in roughly chronologically so he can take a closer look. He wants to try to get a feel for events as they unfolded in real time.

  The missing person report is the first document he studies. A woman called Hazel Collins made the report. It was recorded by a police constable named Joe Lansdown. Fletcher reads it closely:

  I spoke to Hazel Collins at 7:47 P.M. on 20 August 1996. She called in at the police station on East Shrubbery to express concern that she hadn’t heard from her boss, Peter Dale, for two days. She said he hadn’t turned up at work since Monday in spite of having meetings arranged, and hadn’t contacted her, which was very unusual. She said he has a mobile phone, but when she called it, it was going straight to a message service. She works with him in his office in central Bristol, and had been fielding calls from increasingly upset and angry clients who said that their money had disappeared. Hazel Collins had called at Peter Dale’s home address, but there was no answer there, and when she looked through the letter box, she could see that mail had piled up in the hallway. So far as she knows, Peter Dale lived alone. Hazel Collins works as an executive assistant for Peter Dale. She is his only employee. She states that this behavior is out of the ordinary because Peter Dale is usually in touch with her many times a day, even when he isn’t in the office.

  The rest of the report consists of a list of actions that officers took in response to Hazel Collins’s report. In the first instance, they were seeking to verify that Peter Dale was missing, not just away on a jolly for a few days.

  Fletcher notes the date with interest. Hazel Collins filed the missing person report just two days after Charlie Paige and Scott Ashby were murdered. Again, rationally, it could mean either something or nothing, but the coincidences of both location and timing have piqued his interest a little more.

  He picks up a slim brochure that’s amongst the papers. It looks very dated. It provides some information about Peter Dale’s company and is obviously aimed at potential clients. It includes a head-and-shoulder shot of Dale and one of Hazel Collins. She looks to have been in her late forties or early fifties in 1996. It’s hard to tell. She’s wearing a white cotton top that dips low, almost offering a hint of cleavage, but not quite. She’s overweight. The skin on her neck and chest is pale and putty-like. Her gold necklace looks cheap, and her hair, in all shades of gray, has been freshly brushed for the photograph. It’s blunt cut at shoulder length around the back and sides, and an uncompromising fringe obscures both eyebrows. She was either without vanity, Fletcher thinks, or without money, or both. He’d like to speak to her as a priority.

  Fletcher sifts through more papers. Some of them document the filtering of the case into the police’s awareness and the public eye. It happened rapidly. As the days went by after the missing person report was filed, more and more people came forward to say they’d been victims of Peter Dale’s scam. They weren’t rich people trying to get richer, but families and small-business owners who had been seeking to invest their money well. They were angry, bitter, and in a few cases, depending on the extent of their financial exposure, totally ruined. One committed suicide. It made for sobering reading. Fletcher was a veteran of seeing security and safety snatched from people who are living good, ordinary lives, but the calculated nature of this crime appalls him especially.

  For two or three days, as the extent of the fiscal and emotional devastation he’d caused became clearer, the police had searched for Peter Dale. It didn’t take them long to discover that his passport was missing and so was his money. He’d emptied out his business accounts and transferred the money offshore. Tracking it down was going to be complicated, if not impossible. The chances of his victims getting a penny back from him seemed vanishingly small.

  On Friday, 23 August, three days after Fletcher attended the murdered boys’ autopsies, the investigatio
n team on the Peter Dale case received a bit of information that confirmed their mounting suspicions. It was a sighting of him in Venezuela, at a marina. It was apparently from a trustworthy and independent source. At the time, Venezuela had no extradition treaty with Britain. Peter Dale was known to have visited the country previously. It was a place where a man could easily disappear and live very well if he had money, which Dale most certainly did. Fletcher flicks through the rest of the papers and wonders why police took the reported sighting so seriously, because in light of the discovery of Dale’s body, it was almost certainly cobblers.

  Fletcher takes a deep breath, fortifying himself for whatever this case will bring. He packs the papers away and signs them out. As he makes his way back upstairs, he thinks of the murdered boys again—how their case files will have been archived off-site, sealed, because their case was solved by Fletcher himself. He pauses on a landing to catch his breath and rests the crate on the banister. He feels a pulse of contempt for Cody Swift for trying to overturn stones that should be left as they are, settling quietly into the landscape until they look as if they’ve always been part of it.

  The incident room is packed for Detective Superintendent Smail’s briefing. For the first time in his career, Fletcher takes a seat facing the room. It feels good.

  It is thirty hours since the bodies of Charlie Paige and Scott Ashby were discovered. So far, the investigation feels like an explosion that’s hurling pieces of debris in every direction. News of the murders broke last night and the team have been fielding phone calls from the public ever since. Crackpots and pet theorists have been having a field day, calling in with tips, most of which everyone knows will turn out to be a load of rubbish.

  Smail stands straight-backed in front of the team. On a desk between him and Fletcher rests his policy book, in which he records every decision he makes on the case and the rationale behind it. He’s already filled a few pages as he and Fletcher have begun to impose order on the proceedings. They have formed teams to focus on victims, suspects, media, location, and vehicles. Fletcher has experienced a few moments of professional vertigo. He’s acutely aware that his new position is a new opportunity but also a new level of exposure.

  Smail addresses the team:

  “The pathologist estimates time of death for Scott Ashby to be between eight and eleven P.M. on the night of Sunday, 18 August. Charlie Paige, as we know, died at eleven A.M. on Monday, 19 August—yesterday, in other words—but we must assume that he sustained his injuries at the same time as Scott. Given what we know of the boys’ last movements, they are unaccounted for from approximately eight P.M., when one of the residents of the Glenfrome Estate saw them walking down a lane on the estate, until their discovery on Monday morning. We’ve talked to the boys’ families and broken the news to them. Members of Scott Ashby’s family have given us some helpful stuff for timelines, but Charlie Paige’s mother, Jessica, was not in a fit state for interview, so we’ll be trying to speak to her again today. We suspect that she was under the influence when we first spoke to her. Our priority now is to talk to wider family and friends of the victims’ families as well as neighbors.

  “I want teams to divide up the buildings on the estate. I want every single door knocked on and a statement taken from every single person who knows the families or may have seen the boys. People are going to be scared. Mums and dads are going to be scared. Kiddies are going to be scared. Be sensitive to that.

  “There’s no racing at the track tonight, but we’ll be interviewing there tomorrow, starting in the morning when it opens. I want statements from punters, trainers, track officials, and anyone else who knew or might have seen the boys. Particular attention needs to be paid to the kennels and the lads and lasses that work there. We’ll talk to the builders on the site next door, to everybody who uses the community club between the estate and the track, and to the residents of the houses opposite. We need to cast our net as widely as possible, as quickly as possible, and see what we catch. I want this investigation to be efficient and effective. Don’t let me down.”

  Fletcher wonders if anybody else in the room is catching a whiff of Smail’s ego. He spies Danny at the back of the room, his preferred place to sit ever since he and Fletcher were in school together. Danny will have caught it, for sure.

  The men and women disperse quickly after the meeting, once actions have been allocated and recorded. Their expressions are grim and determined. The case cuts close to the bone for everybody. Smail turns to Fletcher as the room empties.

  “Lynn Rawlins has agreed to be FLO for Jessica Paige, Charlie’s mother.”

  Fletcher nods his approval. The role of the family liaison officer is an important one, and Lynn Rawlins is perfect for it. She’s sharp enough to watch Jessica Paige like a hawk and emotionally intelligent enough to offer support.

  “Go with her to meet Jessica Paige, will you?” Smail says. “When I spoke to Ms. Paige yesterday I couldn’t get a word out of her about where she was on Sunday night. She said she couldn’t remember. Go easy on her. I want you to reinforce the message that we’ll be doing everything we can on her behalf and on Charlie’s, but try and get some sense out of her.”

  Jessica Paige’s flat is on the fifteenth floor of one of the estate’s six identical monolithic towers that loom against a turbulent cloudscape. There are two elevators in the lobby of Jessica Paige’s building. One serves the odd-numbered floors, and the other the even numbers. After snatching only four hours of sleep last night, Fletcher is grateful they’re working. He rings Jessica Paige’s doorbell three times before she answers. She looks like crap. Fletcher wouldn’t expect anybody to be looking together after losing a child, but his instinct is that there’s a deeper level of neglect on display here.

  Jessica’s hair is greasy and her skin is pallid. So far, so understandable. She’s wearing a vest top and a translucent sarong knotted around her waist so loosely it looks as if it’ll fall at any second. Okay, she got dressed in a hurry. She’s too skinny. You don’t get skinny in a day. Fletcher notes a bruise on one of her upper arms. He wants to know who put it there. There are no visible track marks, at least. If she has a drug problem, she’s not shooting up. That’s something.

  Fletcher and Rawlins follow Jessica into the flat. It’s compact. Visible from the tiny entrance area is a child’s bedroom, a bathroom that’s seen better days, a poky kitchen dominated with a two-person table against the wall, and a living space where the window opens onto the balcony. Another door is shut. Fletcher assumes it’s Jessica’s bedroom.

  She has minimal furniture. There’s one small couch in the sitting room that looks as if it might have had previous owners over a couple of decades, a TV resting on a pile of magazines, and a plastic box upturned and in use as a coffee table. The carpet is covered with garish swirls in black and yellow. There are magazines, comics, dirty cups, plates, and cutlery on the floor. A flattened beanbag pools onto the carpet in front of the TV. Its black, plasticky cover is peeling off in places, and it sits in a puddle of polystyrene balls. Fletcher wonders if the dent in the middle of it was made by Charlie. Net curtains hang across the sitting room window, smudging the light. There’s enough filtering in for Fletcher to see that the flat isn’t much different in size from Scott Ashby’s family’s place, but the state of it is shocking in comparison. Nobody who lives here takes pride in their surroundings.

  He thinks briefly of his own home. It’s immaculate. There’s not a day goes by when Mrs. Fletcher doesn’t dust or clean the kitchen floor and surfaces or run the vacuum cleaner around the place. She manages to fit it in when the baby goes down for his nap.

  On second glance, Fletcher finds one or two signs of domesticity in Jessica Paige’s flat: a monochrome poster of Audrey Hepburn looking impossibly elegant has been tacked on the wall, so Jessica has aspirations perhaps, however unrealistic. Beside it there are some childish drawings. When Fletcher looks more closely, he sees Charlie has signed his name on most of them with varying leve
ls of penmanship.

  Jessica seems sober. She sits on the sofa and pulls a blanket over her, reducing what’s visible of her to a pale face and large, dark eyes. Fletcher’s relieved she’s covered up. He’s already seen enough of her underwear. It strikes him that she’s very young to have a ten-year-old kid.

  Fletcher introduces Lynn Rawlins, but decides to do the talking himself. He’s glad Danny’s not here. Danny’s got it in him to run a bit roughshod over female witnesses. Fletcher takes a seat at the other end of the couch from Jessica. Lynn takes a seat on the beanbag. It takes her a few seconds to settle. As the polystyrene balls move beneath her, they sound like falling sand. It sets Fletcher’s teeth on edge.

  As soon as Fletcher mentions Charlie’s name, Jessica starts to cry. He watches her carefully. Her grief seems genuine, but he knows that guilt can produce grief, just as loss can.

  “Anything you can tell us could be helpful,” he says. “You knew Charlie best. Has anything come back to you about Sunday night? Anything at all?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “What, nothing?”

  “I remember getting out of the taxi and everybody was waiting there for me, but I don’t remember what happened before.” Her voice is so low it might be a whisper.

  “Did you black out?”

  “I might have.”

  “Had you been drinking?”

  She nods.

  “What’s your last memory before the taxi?”

  She shakes her head and the tears come again and seem unstoppable. Lynn Rawlins excuses herself and beckons to Fletcher to follow her into the hallway.

  “Let’s give her some time,” she says. “Leave her with me. I’ll make her some tea and something to eat and take it from there.”

  Fletcher nods. He can’t wait to get out of there.