The Lost Victim, page 24
Tony thought about this for a moment.
‘No. It was always something about a woman, a her, being cold or freezing. “Her eyes are open and she’s watching me,” That’s the one that used to get to me the most.’
52
The following morning, Kate and Tristan met at the campsite in Thurlow Bay. They had returned from London late the previous evening to be there when the truckloads of soil were delivered to fill the vast crack across the grass. When the soil had been dumped in a massive pile at the bottom of the road, they left a team of builders to fill the land with a digger and returned to the office. They'd planned to revisit all the evidence from the case, but Tristan's phone rang just as Kate made them tea.
‘It’s Varia on FaceTime,’ said Tristan. He answered the call, and they saw Varia was in her office. She didn’t look happy.
‘Morning. I’m glad it’s both of you. Listen. We’ve had the postmortem results on the skeleton we found in Kensal Green Cemetery. It’s not Janey Macklin. . .’
Kate and Tristan were silent for a long beat.
‘Yeah, I know. I feel the same as you two look. We used the tiny DNA sample of Janey’s blood taken from the original investigation, and also asked Janey’s mother and her sister to give us a DNA and blood sample. The skeleton – it’s not her; there’s no match.’
‘Then who did Thomas Black kill?’ asked Tristan.
‘We’re going back to reinterview Black. It could be a murder he committed, or it could be that he knew about the body being buried there by another prisoner, or a contact on the outside when he was still a free man.’
‘Does the forensic pathologist know if the skeleton is male or female?’
‘Female, and he estimates from studying the bone density and the size that it’s a girl of eleven or younger. Whoever she is, she hasn’t yet been through puberty.’
Kate and Tristan were silent and didn’t know what else to say. Varia went on, ‘Listen. I have to say that from when we found the skeleton, I’ve been trying to work out how Janey’s blood could have been in the pipe behind Reynolds newsagent if Peter Conway and Thomas Black had taken her off the street on the night of December 23, 1988, driven her south of the river, killed her and buried her on the twenty-sixth.’
Kate nodded. ‘It troubled me, too.’
‘Where does this leave the Janey Macklin case?’ asked Tristan.
‘I’ve just been assigned an expanded team, and we will revisit all of the evidence in the case file. Our first thing will be to reinterview everyone involved in the case. Roland Hacker’s funeral is on Monday 21 January. He’s going to be cremated, and there’s going to be a wake for him at Victoria House. Oh, and I managed to get a copy of the rough footage filmed for the Janey Macklin Crimewatch reconstruction.’
Kate had asked Varia to send them the footage after they’d spoken to Maxine. They’d thought it was a long-shot request.
‘How did you manage to get hold of it?’ asked Tristan.
‘The BBC archives keep everything, and we have special access to footage from Crimewatch reconstructions. It’s been digitised, along with the original reconstruction. I’ve just sent the files to your email.’
‘Brilliant,’ said Kate.
‘Can I ask, why do you want this footage?’
‘It could be nothing. When we spoke to Maxine, she said that they filmed some stuff at Janey and Maxine’s dance school which was cut from the final broadcast.’
‘Let me know if you find anything,’ said Varia, and she hung up.
When Kate and Tristan came off the phone, they were silent for a moment and listened to the wind whistling around the office, punctuated by the sounds of the digger working outside.
‘Did you expect that skeleton to be Janey?’ said Tristan.
‘I had hope, but like Varia said, it didn’t make sense that she would end up there.’
‘I thought the same,’ said Tristan, nodding. He went to the agency email and downloaded the video files from Varia.
Kate sat down beside Tristan, and they started to watch the footage. It was like a window through time, and the grimy streets of King’s Cross were captured in daylight while they filmed rehearsals of the actress playing Janey walking along Pancras Road close to The Jug. There were several minutes of out-takes with Molly, the police sniffer dog. She was shown in the backyard of Reynolds newsagent, being led to the metal drain cover and then sniffing the ground.
‘Why do you think they cut this from the reconstruction?’ said Tristan.
‘I know I worked on a case once where a Crimewatch reconstruction was made. The aim is always to present a clear message and to get the public to call in with information. Maybe the police didn’t want the focus to be on Janey’s body being in the pipe. After all, this sniffer dog traced her scent, but there was no body. And it’s only now that the blood sample they found in the pipe has been positively identified as Janey’s,’ said Kate.
The screen went blank, and they watched the footage taken at the dance school. There were several minutes of the young actress playing Janey taking part in stretches at the barre in front of a mirror. The dance studio was a huge cavernous space, and the young girls in their pink leotards were presided over by an almost comical elderly dance teacher, a rail-thin lady, immaculately dressed with her hair in a jet-black bun, and she was moving down the line of girls, tapping her walking stick to the music.
‘I wonder if that’s Glenda La Froy, the dance teacher?’
‘Which one do you think is Maxine?’ asked Tristan, peering at the screen as a row of young girls stood patiently at the barre. In a disembodied voice, the director asked them to repeat the warm-up exercises they had just done and not look at the camera.
The final few minutes of the footage showed Molly, the sniffer dog, being led into the empty dance studio on a lead. There were four takes of the same scene. In each one, Molly was brought in by her handler, and she started pulling on the lead and went straight to a spot in the corner of the dance studio where there was a door and started to bark. On the fourth take, Molly began to frantically dig at the floor in front of the door and was interrupted by a woman’s voice, off camera.
‘No! No, stop. I’m sorry. That dog is scratching my floor.’
They heard a voice say, ‘Cut.’ The camera moved slightly as a man with a clipboard entered the shot. The police dog handler came, gave Molly a treat, and pulled her away. Glenda moved into the shot with her stick, talking to the man with the clipboard.
‘This is a very expensive sprung wooden floor,’ she said, tapping it with her stick. ‘I can’t have that dog scratching at it with her claws.’
‘Where does this door lead?’ asked another voice. The camera moved to show the door, and the focus shifted slightly. The man with the clipboard walked over to the door. He crouched down and peered at the floor.
‘There’s no scratches,’ he said, his voice echoing.
‘There will be if you let that dog at it again,’ said Glenda. ‘Does the BBC have ten thousand pounds to spare?’ There was silence. ‘I didn’t think so. That’s what a new sprung wooden floor would cost.’
‘What’s through that door?’ repeated the voice.
‘That’s storage. I do know that the girls sit against that door. Maybe the dog is picking up on it. On, er, Janey’s scent.’
There was a little more muffled speech, and then the screen went blank.
Kate was sitting very still, frozen in thought.
‘What?’ asked Tristan. She got up and went to the case notes, which now covered the wall in the office.
They’d managed to get a large Ordinance Survey map from the British library of King’s Cross in 1988, and it was pinned up next to another Ordinance Survey map of King’s Cross from the previous year.
‘Where was that dance school?’
Tristan moved over to the copies they’d printed of the Janey Macklin case files, and thumbed through until he found the right page.
‘It was on Horner Mews, er, number 8,’ he said. Kate moved to the Ordinance Survey map from 1988. It was huge, a metre square, and it had a lot of detail.
‘Okay, so number 8 was at the end.’ She tapped her finger on the small squares making up the buildings on Horner Mews. ‘What was next door, at number 7?’
Tristan moved to his laptop and typed the details into Google. It took him a couple of minutes, and then he looked up at Kate. ‘It was the warehouse belonging to Gaia Tindall, the artist who volunteered at the Old Street Youth Club.’
‘That’s the link! We need to go back over the three guys, Robert, Forrest, and Roland. Their dodgy alibis for the night of 23 December 1988. Then we need to look at their movements in the days after Janey went missing. If her blood, but no body was found in the pipe five days after she went missing, then it indicates her body could have been moved. Gaia Tindall died in July 1988, but what if the three guys still had access to that warehouse? Oh my God. I think I know where Janey Macklin’s body is buried.’
53
On Monday, 21 January, Kate and Tristan travelled up to London.
They’d been working with Varia and her team on the results of their breakthrough from the Crimewatch TV footage. That morning, Roland Hacker’s cremation was being held at the City of London Crematorium in Newham, East London, and the funeral party were due to return to the pub at Victoria House for the wake later that afternoon.
At 10am, Kate and Tristan arrived at Victoria House, feeling nervous and apprehensive. The statue, Odgoad, sat on its plinth, looking a little worse for wear in the grey January light. A large police support van was parked next to it, with a shiny black forensics van, and a police officer in a smart uniform and high-visibility vest was unfurling crime scene tape and creating a cordon around the plinth.
Varia arrived a moment later, parking her car next to the police van, and she got out with DI Sean Bentley and another younger woman, whom she introduced as her colleague Detective Layla Morris. A few building residents were already peering from their windows, and some people had stopped on the steps leading up to the entrance.
‘How are you going to do this?’ asked Kate, watching as two of the forensics officers, wearing plain clothes, set up a stepladder next to the statue on the plinth.
‘First, we’re going to check the statue using ground-penetrating radar. Just to be sure.’
‘And what if we’re right? What happens next?’ asked Tristan.
Varia peered up at the grubby eight-sided die. ‘I don’t want to think that far. But that’s why forensics are here.’
They watched as the ladder was adjusted and propped up against one of the panels of the eight-sided statue. It was taller than Kate had thought. Almost two metres off the ground. One of the forensics officers was ready with a small, flat metal box.
Kate, Tristan, Varia, Sean, and Layla went to the open side door of the forensics van, where one of the officers held an iPad that showed them the results of the scan.
The forensics officer, up on the ladder, ran the box over the three panels she could reach. They watched the screen as a block of grey remained solid. After a couple of minutes, the ladder was moved to the other side of the statue. The tension in Kate’s chest was almost unbearable. She looked up and saw that more people had come to their windows in Victoria House and were peering out at the police below. The forensics officer began to scan the other side of the statue.
‘Are we sure this bloody statue is hollow?’ asked Varia, concern creasing her brow.
‘Yes,’ said Kate. ‘We tracked down details of its commission. The artist Gaia Tindall constructed Odgoad using eight triangular panels of cast concrete. They’re bolted together and then sealed with cement. If the statue had been solid and filled with cement, it would be too heavy to lift, and the plinth in the courtyard wouldn’t support it.’
Despite the cold weather, Tristan wiped the sweat from his brow. The forensics officer continued to scan the panels on the other side of the statue, and then the officer watching on the iPad shouted.
‘Go back. There’s something inside, some kind of mass.’ Suddenly, they saw a blurred, long shape, and the grey lines in the mass on the screen were distorted.
Varia looked at the screen and then back at the statue. ‘Shit. . .’ she muttered. Then louder, said, ‘Okay. Let’s get a forensics tent around it and open it up.’
As the large white tent began to take shape around the statue. A crowd began to gather on the steps behind the police cordon, and Kate saw Betty, Doreen Macklin’s neighbour, pushing Stan in a wheelchair. They were both dressed in black.
‘Hello!’ shouted Betty, waving at them and beckoning them over. Kate and Tristan moved to the police cordon. ‘What’s happening?’ she asked, her face creasing with concern.
‘We can’t say, I’m afraid,’ said Tristan.
‘That’s a police forensics tent,’ said Stan, his eyes also concerned. His white eyebrows were very long and stuck up like peaks of meringue from under the brim of his black hat.
‘We’re going to the wake,’ said Stan, pointing across the long, low building which housed the bar and social club. ‘We’ve come to pay our respects to Roland.’
‘The whole building has been invited. I stopped by to ask Doreen if she was coming. Maxine answered the door. Doreen was still in bed. Apparently, she’s not sleeping,’ said Betty. ‘We heard about the remains of that young girl. I think it got Doreen’s hopes up. Has that forensics tent got something to do with it?’
‘Yes. Obviously, you think there’s something forensic there, something which needs investigating,’ said Stan, arching one of his spectacular eyebrows. They looked at Kate and Tristan keenly.
‘I’m sorry. We’d better go,’ said Kate. They ducked back under the police cordon. The tent was now entirely constructed, covering the statue and a sizeable area around it. They were given white forensics suits to wear. A screaming whirr began as two forensics officers in white suits used a stone cutter to slice open the first panels of the statue. A shower of sparks fell onto the stone floor.
The morning was very grey, and a floodlight was switched on; the bright light gave the impression that the statue was some kind of sci-fi film prop. With a loud crack, the panel of the statue, which read ‘FUCK OSTERITY’, came loose, and it took four forensics officers to support its weight as it was lowered to the ground. The stone cutter continued to scream, and as more sparks rained down, an odd smell permeated the air of burning metal and the faint scent of rancid bacon. The second panel came away more quickly, and when it was set down next to the first, the statue looked more prominent with the top panels removed. The silence rang out as the stone cutter fell silent. One of the forensics officers in white coveralls climbed higher on the ladder and looked down inside. He was handed a light.
‘There’s something in here,’ he said, the glow from the light bouncing back and illuminating his face. ‘It’s covered in some kind of sticky resin, which looks like it’s hardened over it.’
Kate glanced at Tristan, but they didn’t dare say anything. Kate was about to ask if they could climb the ladder and look inside when a stretcher was called for. Using a pulley rope connected to a stand, a shape was slowly lifted from inside the statue. As it rose out and over the lip of the statue, it looked like a body in a shroud and coated in dust and dirt. It flexed and moved like rubber when it was lifted out by three forensics officers, guiding it on the pulley ropes above their heads. It brushed against the forensics tent’s high ceiling, then lowered slowly down to the waiting stretcher.
Kate and Tristan moved closer. They could clearly see it had the shape of a body. The feet, both together and sticking up, were prominent, and so was the shape of the head. Up close, it frightened Kate. The shape looked like it was coated in amber or beeswax and slightly translucent. Varia knelt down beside it.
‘It looks like some kind of rubber resin,’ said Varia.
‘It could be floor sealant,’ said one of the forensics officers.
‘It’s coating the whole body. Is it a body?’ asked Kate, hearing the fear in her voice. Everyone stood back as a bright light was brought down and shone over the surface. Inside, like an animal in a cocoon, they could make out the curled fingers and arms of a small body, and when the torch moved up towards the bulbous end of the mass, they could clearly see the outline of a small skeletal face.
‘It’s Janey Macklin,’ Kate said.
54
Kate and Tristan were shaking when they came out of the forensics tent. There were now several groups of people milling around the police cordon in the courtyard. It would take time for the forensics officers to break through the hardened resin surrounding the small body, but they were in no doubt that it was Janey Macklin.
They stripped off their overalls in silence and were going to wait in the police support van when they saw the funeral guests begin to arrive in a fleet of black taxis. The courtyard in front of Victoria House was built up, and it wasn’t possible to see the courtyard from the road.
Kate didn’t recognise the inhabitants of the first taxi, but when the second pulled up, she saw Robert Driscoll and Forrest Parker get out, followed by Maddie. They were all dressed in black mourning suits, and Maddie wore a diaphanous black coat with a small black hat and a veil over her face. In the eleven days since they’d had the meeting in the office, Maddie’s pregnancy was now really showing, even with the oversized coat.
Varia and her colleagues were still talking with the forensics officer, but the two uniformed officers tasked with watching out for Forrest and Robert took note of their arrival. Within a few seconds, everything seemed to escalate.
Robert reached the top of the stairs leading up from the road first and saw the vans and the white forensics tent built over the statue. Forrest reached the top of the stairs a moment later. They both stared, and twin looks of panic crossed their faces. From where they stood a few feet away, Kate and Tristan could see down to the road, where two taxis were just unloading a group of mourners, who were all filling the staircase behind Forrest and Robert.
