Late of the Payroll

An hour later, in the shelter of a three-sided hut used for storing traffic cones and road warning signs, stood Superintendent Rose. He had on a waxed jacket, still dripping with rain from the short walk from his car to this vantage point. From here he watched the gallant effort of the few Constables he could spare – aided brilliantly by two pairs of motorway patrolmen, arriving in their Range Rovers after picking up the call – as they sealed off the tunnel, and in the drowning rain erected the familiar white forensics tent, beneath which he knew nothing good ever occurred. Nearby, sheltering by their own van, scenes of crime officers were dressing up in head-to-foot overalls, preparing to scour the tunnel and the ground around the body for clues. Across the carpark a takeaway van was parked, its warm hatch thrown open invitingly, as if its very purpose were in offering golden light and hot steam to the dismal afternoon, and was finding some takers.

  Beside Rose in the shelter was Grey, a blanket around his shoulders, his shirt soaked to his skin. He had been like this when, mid-downpour, the first of the officers to hear the call had found him kneeling beside the body, as if to guard against it being washed away in the flood.

  ‘I don’t want the family knowing until he’s fit to be identified,’ offered Rose needlessly, just for something to say. ‘We can spare them the wait at the mortuary at least.’ The reciting of procedure and tradecraft could be comforting at such moments, in this case both to the Superintendent and his listener. They had been talking in this vein for five or ten minutes now.

  ‘So, he’s been out here for over two days,’ asked the Superintendent rhetorically, getting the chain of events right in his head. ‘They fought, you say, and the window gave way?’

  ‘We’ll never know for certain,’ Grey intoned robotically, his body deprived of sleep and food and even the will to go on. ‘It seems so.’

  ‘They’ve found the plastic glass panel in the bushes,’ continued Rose, ‘almost intact they tell me. Very old though, brittle, and those frames up there look thin. I don’t think it would have taken too much effort to pop one of those windows out.’

  ‘No, not very much effort at all.’

  ‘Certainly hard to prove intent though, any more than there being a bit of pushing and shoving.’

  ‘Well, we’ve only scanned the film as of yet.’

  ‘And you only see the fellow from behind, you say?’ Rose’s tone was sympathetic. ‘And we never see the actual moments of Tom being pushed, of the window giving way, of him falling? Do we even have a clear enough image to prove it was Carman?’

  ‘Sarah still has film to go through,’ Grey repeated, but at that point neither man thought it very likely this would find the proof they needed.

  ‘And we don’t know why they were fighting? Or even how they knew each other?’

  ‘But in the photos... I swear he looked in for the kill.’ Grey could not rid his mind of the CCTV image, the shot of Carman, shoulders hunched, arms readied at his sides... this would have been the moment Thomas had just vanished from in front of him, Grey realised. Nor would Carman have seen anything had he leaned out into the night to try and see where he had fallen. ‘I wonder what goes through your mind at such a moment?’

  ‘And all this happening above a motorway, with a thousand methods of escape,’ lamented Rose. ‘At least we can tell Nash now why his chief suspect chose to disappear himself. We can issue an APB.’

  But Grey was less hopeful, ‘If Nash’s operation doesn’t unearth him in the next few days then we never will.’

  ‘You mean he’ll have used his criminal contacts?’

  ‘Import and export are his stock and trade – it might not be too hard for him to hitch a ride with the next boat out. But I think it’s more likely his drug buddies will get to him before us, at least those Nash hasn’t already rolled up. A major sting, and Carman disappears two days before the operation? It makes him look as guilty as hell.’

  ‘Ironic, when that’s the one thing he didn’t do!’

  ‘Irony or not, the best we can hope for is Carman turning up dead somewhere.’

  Rose gasped at the emptiness of it all, summed up in his Inspector’s final sentence. Yet his role required he prod his finger into the Inspector’s pain a little deeper yet,

  ‘I know this isn’t the best time to bring it up, but we’ve already had a phone call from a missing person’s charity. Dare I ask?’

  ‘Isobel?’ The Inspector paused. ‘I’m afraid she panicked and ran.’

  ‘Not surprising though,’ Rose pondered. ‘I’ve seen it before with kids younger than her – you bust a gut in finding them, and then as soon as you’ve got them back to their parents they’re off again. It’s something in the blood.

  ‘Anyway,’ Rose pulled his coat around him, ready to brave the rain again, ‘I should get back to town, check up on them there. Get off home, Grey,’ he said. ‘Cornelia too. You’ve hardly slept for two days.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Over the other side, speaking to the services manager last I heard.’

  ‘How’s the protest looking?’ asked Grey, as he threw away his plastic cup and waited in vain for a break in the weather.

  ‘It’s turned into a stand off: the workers want to go in and the administrators won’t let them; and the longer it goes on the more convinced the men are that they’ve already lost their jobs.

  ‘How long will it go on?’

  ‘Until the new electricity contract is secured, and the men are insured to return – it really does come down to such things as this.’

  Grey would be off soon himself, as he gave the rain another minute to abate before leaving the shelter to its cones and traffic signs. As he stood there another officer joined him for cover, though like Grey his clothes were already soaked through. Grey knew from the station that he was a talker, and they spent a minute or two passing the time of day. Grey sensed though that the man was not there by accident; and sure enough, after a while he came round to what it was he wanted to get off his chest,

  ‘Sir, I heard Isobel was at the station this morning?’

  ‘You weren’t there yourself?’

  ‘No, I’m meant to be on leave. I drove all the way to Wales yesterday morning, and all the back last night. The girlfriend’s livid. I’ve had to leave her there. I was recalled for special duties at Aubrey’s, but was called over here at the last minute. So, is it true, that she’s back in town?’

  Grey nodded, even as he inwardly groaned at the prospect at having to explain the circumstances of her subsequent departure. But before he could begin, the Constable continued,

  ‘It’s just...’

  Grey felt a confession coming, and readied himself to be forgiving.

  ‘Well, you know how even now we still get sightings: that this person’s seen Isobel on holiday, or that person saw her in a shop? We had one this week.’

  The man looked sheepish, and no wonder, as the Inspector had not been made aware of this.

  ‘Well, I ask you,’ he continued, ‘after three years missing why would Isobel Semple pick this week to show up at Southney train station?’

  Grey felt his stomach hitting the floor. ‘Where’s the report? Forget this, go back to the station and get it for me. I need to know the date and time.’

  ‘Oh, I can tell you that. It was early afternoon, around two o’clock the lady said, while she was out shopping. And she came to see us the next day, which was my last day, so the lady saw her on Tuesday.’

  ‘And was she coming or going?’

  ‘She saw Isobel at the entrance arch, before she vanished into the crowd of other shoppers. She said she was sure it was Isobel – she used to see her walking to school past her house, you see – but it wasn’t until she’d spoken to her friend the next morning that she felt bold enough to come and tell us.’

  ‘This lady keeps wise counsel.’

  ‘She was a lovely old girl, we gave her a cup of tea. She said she knew it sounded fanciful, but she hoped she was being helpful.’

&nbs
p; ‘She was being helpful.’ Grey’s mind was racing way past this odd encounter at the train station. ‘She was being incredibly helpful.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I take it you took her name? Then send her a bunch of flowers out of petty cash.’

  ‘So it was Isobel then?’

  ‘It could have been.’

  We thought about telling you, but it’s been so long now; and we’ve had so much else going on. Have I done wrong, sir? I know I should have mentioned it...’

  ‘Not to worry, son,’ he placed a fatherly hand on the lad’s shoulder. ‘You might have told me just in the nick of time.’

  As he approached the wretched structure a services employee was putting up a sign, to the effect that for the time being the bridge would be unavailable to motorists. The man in the fast food van would be happy, Grey considered, for if nothing else his sales of coffee and hot dogs would be up, people keen to share in the warmth of grill and boiler.

  He lifted the blue tape and jogged up the stairs, before moving on toward where forensic officers were examining the tunnel down which a hundred people must have passed by since Tuesday evening.

  ‘Anything obvious?’ he asked without looking too closely, it seeing, despite the attention being aid by his colleagues, somehow inappropriate for himself to gawp and gasp over the crime scene.

  ‘Might be a bit of skin snagged on the window frame, sir,’ one of them said without turning from his task.

  ‘Excellent.’ Grey hadn’t expected there to be much here, not that he had checked very thoroughly himself before dashing down the stairs. ‘Make sure you check it against Stephen Carman’s DNA on record,’ he offered needlessly, while thinking it more likely to have been left by Long.

  ‘Will do, sir,’ answered the man politely, respecting the Inspector enough to not mind his telling him the rudiments of his job.

  Grey found Cori talking to the couple working at the services shop. Upon seeing him, the Sergeant broke off and met him in the foyer,

  ‘Hello boss, are you all right?’

  He had no vanity in front of her, not when they trusted each other so implicitly, not when they had shared so much. Few couples are as close, he had thought on many occasions. And so he did again now, finding himself standing there, jacketless, shirt stuck to his back, hair a matted tangle plastered to his scalp, trousers caught and torn at the ankle. And yet her first thought, he noticed, was not to chide him for his appearance, nor look around to see who might be seeing her stood with such a embarrassing specimen, but instead simply to enquire after his well being. He took it back and revised his observation: this was better than any couple he had ever been a part of. Yet she of course was in a marriage, this was secondary for her.

  She cut short his reverie, ‘Sir, I’ve finally got to speak to Josie, the receptionist.’

  ‘Of course, she was back on duty today.’

  ‘I’ve managed to wrangle permission from Mrs Hackett for her to leave her post awhile, and go through the CCTV records to try and find the footage of Mr Smith booking in; but in the meantime she gave me a description: he was white, late middle aged – in his sixties she guessed but could even have been older – white haired and heavily built. And that’s not all sir... he had a visitor, who arrived that day and then left with him when he checked out at about eight in the evening: a young woman, who was white, blonde, petite, in her early twenties Josie thought, but it was hard to tell as she was wearing glasses and a headscarf. She was “very smartly dressed” as Josie described her.

  ‘So,’ Cori ventured, closing her notebook, ‘it has to be her, doesn’t it?’

  Grey took a deep intake of breath, ‘Isobel was at the train station at two p.m. that day – I’ve only just found out. The desk didn’t tell us, they thought it was a crank sighting.’

  ‘Oh my. So she came to town by train,’ Cori summarised, ‘found her way to the services somehow, and then met with Mr Smith?’

  ‘And this after receiving the call from Smith that morning telling her where to meet him. They checked out at eight, you say?’

  Cori nodded.

  ‘So why,’ Grey considered, ‘was she not back in Nottingham until the following morning?’

  ‘And do you think they knew that Thomas was already... even before they had checked out of the room?’

  ‘Anything from the shop staff?’ he remembered to ask, as they crossed the same carpark he hoped soon never to have to set foot on again.

  ‘The girl there now is the one who served me yesterday; and she was there Tuesday evening. The counter does look out toward the bridge, but she doesn’t remember anything out of the ordinary, no men dashing past. She said the shifts can be long, and they read the magazines to stay awake.’

  ‘I don’t envy that job.’

  ‘Her boyfriend works there too, she said, but often doing different hours. She can’t bear the early hours shift herself though, so some weeks they hardly see each other.

  ‘Why can’t they synchronise?’

  ‘He gets more for working those hours. People do what they have to.’

  ‘Well I hope they pay him properly for it. Imagine being here at three or four in the morning, hardly a customer for hours, while she’s alone in bed – the poor devils.

  ‘Anyway,’ Grey changed tack, ‘Rose says we can knock off. We can’t know any more while they are gathering evidence over there.’

  ‘What about Mrs Long?’ asked Cori. ‘We need to tell her soon.’

  ‘Yes,’ the Inspector placed a hand on her arm, ‘but not till we have the body tidied up. What do you want to do now?’

  ‘I might go back to the hotel, see if Josie has found Smith’s picture yet. And I think you have an appointment...’ Cori nudged Grey, and nodded in the direction of her car and the figure stood beside it.

  Chapter 30 – Meeting Women in Carparks