‘Or they were keeping a watch on the fort somehow, I don’t know. I just don’t believe the timing was a coincidence.’
‘I don’t like it either,’ Clarke said flatly. ‘But the alternative is that someone came out here to deliberately execute a detective inspector. And two civilians, given half a chance. What would they gain by that?’
‘To keep anyone from knowing what was inside.’
‘And shooting a police officer’s really going to keep a lid on that.’
Her voice was heavy with scorn, but she had a point. Even if Lundy’s murderer had succeeded in killing all three of us, the tower would have been searched as a matter of course when Lundy didn’t report in. Shooting him had only escalated the situation.
‘I didn’t say it made sense,’ I said wearily. ‘But our boat was moored outside, so it was obvious someone was here. If the intention wasn’t to kill us why come into the tower?’
‘I don’t know, Dr Hunter, all right? If I did I’d be a hell of a lot closer to catching the bastard!’ Clarke massaged her temples, taking a second to compose herself. ‘Look, we know someone was keeping ammunition and probably a shotgun at Edgar Holloway’s house. Maybe they wanted another hiding place now that’s gone and panicked when they realized someone was out here.’
I remembered the persistent attempts to get through the bolted door. That didn’t seem panicked to me, but there was no point labouring the point. Clarke didn’t have any more answers than I did.
‘What about the stain on the floor?’ I asked. ‘Is it blood?’
A gust of wind blew a sheet of rain under the tower on to us. She didn’t seem to notice. ‘We think so, but I doubt it’ll tell us much. It’s probably from either Emma Derby or Mark Chapel, but between the rust and the salt air we’ll be lucky if we can say which.’
‘I think it’s Mark Chapel’s.’
Clarke regarded me. ‘I’m listening.’
I’d had plenty of time to go over it while I’d been watching the crabs. It was better than thinking about Lundy lying in the tower. ‘You know it’s probably his body we found on the barbed wire?’
‘I’ve been briefed,’ she said irritably. ‘Go on.’
‘Someone hit him hard enough in the face for a piece of bone to be driven into his brain. An injury like that would have shattered his nose. It’d have bled. Perhaps not a lot if he died straight away, but enough to explain the patch of blood.’
‘You’re saying he was killed here? That’s reading a hell of a lot into one bloodstain.’
‘Not if you take into account the multiple fractures on Chapel’s body. They were the sort you’d expect from a fall, and one hip was literally wrenched from its socket. That would take a huge amount of force. I couldn’t work out how it could have happened until I came here.’
I indicated the scaffold-like arrangement of landings and ladders descending from the tower’s entrance.
‘That’s high enough to do it,’ I went on. ‘The easiest way of getting his body down from the tower and into a boat would be to drop it from the top. It’d have tumbled against the ladder on the way down, and if a foot got caught between the rungs the momentum would snap bones and dislocate the hip.’
A fall like that would also explain why Chapel’s cervical vertebrae were broken while, except for its facial injuries, his skull remained undamaged. Like his limbs, his head would have been twisted and jerked around like a rag doll’s during the descent, with enough force to break his neck. From that height his skull could easily have been fractured as well, but my guess was that either the fall had been checked by his leg catching on a rung, or else his head had been cushioned by an arm when it hit the steel platform.
I stayed quiet while Clarke frowned up at the dripping underside of the tower, thinking it through for herself. I’d worried at first over why anyone would take a body all that way into the Backwaters instead of dumping it at sea. But the reasoning wasn’t hard to follow. This close to shore there’d be a good chance it’d be washed up somewhere along the coast. Weighting it down was another option, but as silted up as the sea was around here there’d be no guarantee low tide wouldn’t expose it.
In the Backwaters, though, there was a good chance the body would never be found. And even if it was there’d be no reason to associate it with the sea fort. While it wouldn’t have been practicable to remove all traces of habitation from the tower, once anything identifying had been disposed of – with the exception of an overlooked lens cap and a small stain in the rust – it became an abandoned camp rather than a crime scene. There’d be no reason to think Emma Derby and Mark Chapel had ever been there.
And nothing to link Leo Villiers to any of it.
I looked across the sea towards the house on the promontory. It seemed shrunken from down here compared to the view from the tower window, blurred by spray and rain.
‘They were blackmailing Villiers, weren’t they?’ I said.
If I hadn’t felt so exhausted I might have realized something was off from Clarke’s sudden stillness.
‘Why do you say that?’
I was too tired for games. ‘What else could this be about? If they just wanted somewhere to meet they could have used the boathouse. They didn’t have to come all the way out to a sea fort. OK, Chapel might have liked the whole pirate radio thing, but enough to camp out here? And right opposite Leo Villiers’ house? They didn’t do all this for fun. They were spying on him.’
It was the only explanation that made any sense. The long-lens photographs Emma Derby had taken, even the video camera Chapel had stolen from work, it all pointed one way. The pair had used the sea fort as a hide, staking out Villiers’ home so they could observe him from a distance. And he’d killed them for it.
Clarke’s face was a mask. ‘What could they have seen worth blackmailing him over?’
That was where my reasoning broke down. Political ambitions or not, Villiers didn’t seem a natural fit for blackmail. He’d seemed almost to cultivate a bad reputation, flaunting his indiscretions rather than being ashamed of them.
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘He’d have destroyed any photographs or footage that was on their cameras. And any backups would have been lost in the burglary.’
‘Burglary?’
It was obviously news to her. But then a DCI probably wouldn’t have been told about a petty crime spree. ‘The Trasks had all their computers stolen. Not just them, there was a spate of burglaries around the same time.’
‘When was this?’ she asked sharply.
‘Not long after Emma Derby went missing,’ I said, feeling the fatigue that had been clogging my mind begin to fall away. ‘You think that was why they were stolen? The other burglaries were just a smokescreen?’
Clarke ignored the question. ‘Would she have any other backups?’
‘Not that I know of. Rachel – her sister – told me they don’t have the password to any cloud storage.’
And if Emma had printed out any hard copies, she wouldn’t have kept them at home where her husband might find them. In all probability they’d have been with Chapel at the sea fort, from where Villiers would have taken them, along with the cameras.
Evidently Clarke was thinking along the same lines. ‘Shit.’
Until now I’d been numb. Since Lundy’s shooting I’d felt trapped in a bubble, watching events around me without feeling a part of them. Now it burst.
‘You can’t keep this quiet any longer,’ I said, my voice harsh. ‘People need to know that Villiers is still alive.’
Clarke looked out over the windblown sea. ‘It’s not that simple.’
‘Why? Jesus, what more does he have to do?’ I didn’t care how powerful Sir Stephen Villiers was, even he couldn’t muzzle this any longer. ‘This isn’t just about Emma Derby any more. He’s murdered three, no, four other people that we know of! He shot a police officer, for Christ’s sake!’
‘You think I need reminding?’ Clarke flashed back. Our raised voices drew lo
oks from two CSIs on the upper gantry. ‘I’ve known Bob Lundy for fifteen years! I went to his granddaughter’s christening, so don’t think for a minute I’m not going to shift heaven and hell to catch the bastard who shot him! But it wasn’t Leo Villiers.’
I stared at her. Belatedly, I remembered the phone call Lundy had received earlier, how he’d explained that we had to go back. We’ve had this all wrong. All of it.
‘How do you know?’ I asked, my anger draining away.
Clarke glared for a moment, then turned away with a frustrated shake of her head.
‘Because he’s been in custody all morning.’
28
LATE THAT MORNING, a woman had pushed open the heavy glass doors and walked into the police headquarters building. The young constable behind the desk was on the phone. He glanced at the woman, noting in a not entirely professional assessment that she was attractive and well dressed as he gestured that he wouldn’t be long. The woman waited patiently, but as the call went on the PC detected signs of nervousness. And impatience. One hand was knotted whitely on the shoulder strap of the Hermès bag; the long fingers of the other tapped a staccato rhythm on her arm.
Finally, the young constable ended the call and turned to her. The woman was very striking. Mid-thirties, model tall, with thick, almost black hair and great bone structure. Her clothes were well cut and obviously expensive, and although he didn’t know what perfume she was wearing, the PC decided he liked it. He leaned on the counter, giving his best smile as he asked how he could help.
The woman’s voice was a surprise, low and honeyed. And hesitant. She told him she wanted to speak to either DCI Clarke or DI Lundy. Only those two would do, she said, with a hint of attitude. When he asked for more information, she declined, repeating again that she would only speak to Lundy or Clarke. This time it wasn’t a request, and the PC’s smile dimmed. He stopped leaning on the counter.
There was something vaguely familiar about her, he realized. Retreating behind his usual desk formality, he picked up a pen and asked for her name. When she told him he thought he must have misheard. He asked her to repeat it, and this time there was no mistake. The young PC stared at her, open-mouthed.
Then he snatched up the phone.
Lundy was unavailable. He was on his way to the Backwaters to meet me, and it would be some time before the message reached him. But by luck Clarke was already at headquarters, preparing for what promised to be a terse budget meeting. Distracted and already in a bad mood, when a detective sergeant said there was someone asking for her at the desk downstairs, her response was typically curt. Then he told her the visitor’s name.
Clarke cancelled her meeting.
In the observation booth, Clarke stared at the monitor showing the woman sitting in the other room. The visitor tried to seem calm, but her demeanour gave her away. She drummed her fingers, shifting uncomfortably in her chair as she glanced uneasily at the video camera. By now word had spread, and other officers had crammed into the observation booth to see for themselves. It wasn’t every day someone supposedly dead strolled into a police station, and certainly not like this. Recovering from her own shock, Clarke ordered everyone out except for those directly involved with the investigation. Then, taking a few moments to compose herself, she squared her shoulders and went into the interview room.
The dark-haired woman looked up warily as the DCI entered. They’d met before, although Clarke wouldn’t have recognized the person sitting in front of her. Not in a million years. Now she knew who it was, though, knew what to look for, there was no doubting it. Still, the formalities had to be dealt with.
The woman lifted her chin when Clarke asked who she was. There was a mixture of nervousness and defiance as she met the detective’s gaze.
‘My name’s Lena Merchant,’ she said. ‘But I used to be called Leo Villiers.’
The cold and rain were forgotten as I stared at Clarke. ‘You’re serious?’
It was a stupid thing to say, but I was still stunned. The DCI looked as if she was having a hard time accepting it herself.
‘Very. Villiers is transsexual. Or transgender, I should say. That’s the big secret he’s been hiding. He’s still pre-op but he’s undergoing “transition”, I think it’s called. He – or she, I suppose, now – spent the last few weeks at a private clinic in Sussex. Sort of a retreat for people with gender identity issues who want privacy and space. Those who can afford it,’ she added, with something like her normal acidity.
I was struggling to take this in. ‘That’s where he’s been all this time? Since he disappeared?’
‘That’s how it looks. He’d cut himself off from any outside contact, so he’d no idea what was going on. He was there when Emma Derby went missing as well, that’s why he wouldn’t provide an alibi. He couldn’t admit where he’d been without revealing he was transgender, and he wasn’t ready for that then. I don’t think he intended to come out like this now, except he saw a news report yesterday and read about his own body supposedly being found in the estuary.’
Christ. Lundy had been right about Villiers hiding something. It just wasn’t what everyone thought.
‘Do you believe him?’ I asked, not entirely convinced even now.
Wisps of ginger hair whipped unheeded across her cheeks as Clarke considered. ‘We still need to verify it. But yes, I do. The clinic backs up his story, and he’s agreed to release his medical records. It’s not surprising his father didn’t want anyone seeing them. It’s all in there, going back years. Villiers was referred to a psychiatrist after a failed suicide attempt, and it came out he’d always felt he was female but didn’t want to admit it. Even to himself, which given his background I can’t say I blame him for. Doesn’t alter the fact he was a shit, but it starts to explain why.’
It did. I’d come across transgender patients when I was a GP. The fact that someone could be born with a gender identity that didn’t match their biological sex was recognized medically, but society was slower to accept anyone it perceived as different. Although there was more awareness now, some people still chose to keep their condition a secret.
But this showed Leo Villiers’ behaviour in a whole new light. Not just the blatant womanizing, which now seemed like a desperate attempt at denial. Suddenly the drinking and depression, even his supposed suicide note, took on a whole new relevance. He hadn’t been planning to end his life, just change it.
As Lundy said, it was all about perspective.
I looked through the blurring rain towards the house on the shore. ‘That’s why he was being blackmailed.’
Clarke nodded. ‘He was sent pictures last year. Someone had photographed him through the windows, putting on make-up and a wig, trying on dresses. There was an anonymous letter claiming there was video footage as well, and that everything would be put online unless he paid half a million within the week.’
‘He didn’t know who sent it?’
‘No, but he guessed Emma Derby was involved. She was a photographer and had access to his house while she was doing the interior design. Villiers had a dressing-up room where he kept his women’s clothes but he left it unlocked one day while she was there. He thinks she must have found it and put two and two together. And I think now he was telling the truth when he denied they’d been having an affair. Not for lack of trying on her part, apparently, so she’d a motive to want to hurt him.’
I thought about what Rachel had told me about her sister, remembered the carefully posed self-portrait in the boathouse. Emma Derby would have been angry and humiliated to be turned down by Leo Villiers, which showed the public scenes and frosty atmosphere reported by witnesses in a very different light. It hadn’t been the end of a relationship, but the rejection of one.
‘What about the half-naked woman the cleaner saw in his bedroom?’ I asked, already having a good idea what she’d say.
‘That was him. Or rather her.’ Clarke shook her head. ‘He’d started to get careless. He was finding the whole charade h
ard to sustain by then, and when he got the blackmail demand he panicked. He didn’t have that sort of money to hand, so he basically ran away. Took himself off to the clinic to try and decide if he wanted to transition or not. In the end he didn’t feel ready to commit, and came back home expecting the shit to have hit the fan. Which it had, just not how he expected.’
God, I thought, trying to imagine it. Villiers had exchanged one nightmare for another. Instead of having his secret made public he’d found himself the main suspect in Emma Derby’s disappearance. And he couldn’t prove his innocence without revealing his secret. For the first time I felt something I wouldn’t have believed myself capable of feeling for Leo Villiers.
Sympathy.
‘So why did he wait so long before going back to the clinic?’ It was still too much of a leap to think of Villiers as ‘she’.
‘He was a mess,’ Clarke said simply. ‘He’d no idea what was going on, and now there were all these questions and pointed fingers to cope with as well. He was drinking and on tranquil-lizers, and says he really did consider suicide. We were almost right about that much, at least. The final straw was when his dog died.’
‘His dog?’
‘I know.’ Clarke gave a wintry smile. ‘He got it as a pup when he was kicked out of university, and according to him it was the only thing that didn’t care who or what he was. When it had to be destroyed he says something snapped. He stayed long enough to bury it and then just walked away. Literally. Got on a train and left everything behind. House, car, money, the lot. He says he doesn’t want anything to do with any of it any more.’
Clarke sounded sceptical about that much, at least. But put in this new context Villiers’ reaction didn’t seem hard to understand. Sometimes all it takes is one final stress to bring everything crashing down. And while our circumstances were very different, I didn’t find it hard to imagine a life becoming so unbearable that the only way to survive was to walk away from it.
I’d once done the same thing myself.