Outside the Lines (Forensic Handwriting Book 6), page 11
“Gawd, I thought you’d never ask.”
“What did you think of the handwriting Pflueger sent?” Claudia asked once they each had a glass in hand.
Daphne set the spoon on the Aga cooker and turned off the gas under the gravy. She dried her hands on a tea towel, plucked a pair of reading glasses from a pocket in her apron, perched them on her nose and turned to the counter behind her.
“Not much to go on, is there?” she said, peering at the first of the two sheets Pflueger had emailed. She had printed them out for Claudia. “Odell was still a schoolboy when he wrote this one. I’m a graphologist, not a document examiner, but how can an essay written by a fourteen-year-old boy be compared to adult writing?”
“Exactly. It’s not suitable material to compare to something written thirty years later. Pflueger is either stupid or simply drowning in arrogance to give an opinion on something like this. He was right about one thing, though, the second sample is a lousy copy.”
Daphne switched pages and shook her head. “It’s a nastygram Odell apparently wrote to an old girlfriend. Why on earth would she give it to the television people?”
“Some people just want their five minutes of fame.”
With a sound that clearly stated what she thought of publicity-seekers, Daphne handed the papers over and turned back to the stove.
The handwriting on the first page was as childish and undeveloped as one would expect from a teenage boy. The topic of the essay was, British Opresion of the IRA. Apparently, Odell’s activism had started young, before he’d learned to spell “Oppression” correctly.
Claudia had to strain to read the second sample, a few scribbled words on what appeared to have been a small scrap of paper: You’re suffocating me, Tanya. Leave me the hell alone. With no signature and no date, there was no telling when it was written, but the handwriting was far more adult than the other one.
“I’d be embarrassed to share that if someone wrote it to me,” Claudia said. “The pressure looks so light. I could adjust the contrast on the computer, but as it stands I would consider it too faint to use for a comparison. I think it was written in pencil. Anyway, it’s just a handful of words. You’d have to be a crystal ball gazer to get much out of that.”
“Well, if Pflueger had any kind of balls he wouldn’t have gone on the telly with that opinion. It’s a crying shame, but at least what you said cast doubt on what he said.”
“Joel won’t be too thrilled about having his case discussed on TV, but once word gets out, there’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle.”
“Will he be annoyed with you for talking about it?”
“I didn’t give anything away that hasn’t been discussed in the American media. I’m sure he’ll understand I was in a difficult position.” Claudia turned the stink eye on her friend. “Which is why I don’t like off-the-cuff interviews.”
“Sorry, love,” Daphne said, sounding not the least bit contrite. “I should have given you a bit of notice.”
“Oh well, it’s not the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”
As she set the table for dinner, Claudia continued pondering the penciled note and the man who supposedly had written it. Though the lightness of the copy made the text hard to decipher, the wide spaces between the words was plain enough. “He’s a loner who needs plenty of elbow room,” she mused aloud. “It’s consistent with the geocache note in California, but not the one found after the sundial explosion. It’s hard to believe Pflueger really thinks they were written by the same person.”
Daphne carried the pot of potatoes to the sink, steam rising up and enveloping her face as she drained the boiling water. “Give me the bottle of milk from the fridge, would you, luv? I’ve already got the butter out.” Claudia handed her the bottle; Daphne poured some into the pot and began to work the masher. “What did the sundial note look like?”
“It was an altogether different style. Of course, we can’t reliably determine gender from handwriting, but it was a more feminine hand—rounded, not linear, like the one in California. The spacing was more compact, too, and the words had a stronger degree of connectedness. They were nothing alike.”
“Thank God no one was hurt when that second bomb went off.”
“Joel’s FBI friend told him that the two devices were different in construction, but both carried about the same explosive force.”
“Scared all the neighbors out of bed. The bomb was on a timer set for half-past two in the morning.”
“That would get me out of bed, too.”
Daphne shook her head and made a sound of disgust. “That poor old sundial was over a hundred years old. It sat in the garden all those years until this bloke comes along and blows it to smithereens. I saw it all on the news. Bits of stone blasted all around the garden—a lovely garden it was, too. Glass from the French doors on the terrace shattered everywhere. And the gnomon—”
“Wait, what’s a gnome got to do with a sundial?” Claudia broke in.
“Not a gnome, a gnomon. It’s the marker piece—I know this because I happen to have a sundial in my garden. Anyway, it turns out they come in different shapes, and the one in that garden was bronze, cast in the form of an arrow. They found it embedded in the trunk of a walnut tree near the back fence. If anyone had been in the way when it hit they would have been killed.”
Curious to learn more about the story, Claudia looked it up on her tablet. The fine hairs rose on her neck as she read that the Victorian garden in which the sundial had once stood was the residence of the local director of a subsidiary of the American company, Agrichem.
Certainly no coincidence.
Reading on, she saw, as Poppy Adair had said, that it was several days later that the note was discovered in a geocache not far from the house and reported to the authorities. In the same way Chad and Amy, the American geocachers, had made the connection, the Englishman who found the container had put two and two together and telephoned police.
The article quoted the note inside the container: ‘Agrichem must be stopped from killing off the wildlife.’ It was accompanied by a photograph of a small stuffed hedgehog whose cloth belly was slit open, the stuffing bulging out in a gross unspoken threat.
Late that night, having coordinated the eight hour time difference so she would catch him when he would be getting ready for work, Claudia spoke with Jovanic via web cam. When she mentioned the Agrichem connection it came as no surprise to him, so she guessed that he and Mike Chapman had been in touch. He told her there was nothing new on the mailbox bombing and there had been no sightings of Dax Odell since his departure from LAX.
Downplaying Poppy Adair’s ambush, Claudia let him know about the TV interview, but he was distracted, in a hurry. His team was investigating a new drive-by shooting and had been forced to relegate the Vasquez homicide to the back burner. They knew who the trigger man was in the drive-by, so he figured it would make for a quick wrap-up. They exchanged ‘I love you’s’ and clicked off, promising to talk more the next day.
Claudia and Daphne arrived at the St. George early for the final day of the conference. After her keynote presentation, Claudia returned to her seat to the sound of enthusiastic applause, noting that Hewett Pflueger had already taken his leave. A deliberate snub? Probably.
She gathered her notes and placed them in their folder, her mind returning to the two bombings. If Dax Odell had not written the second note, then who had? And that was assuming Odell had written the first one. The short note to the ex-girlfriend was the only handwriting available for comparison, and that was not enough to reach a strong conclusion regarding authorship.
She was pondering this problem when her silenced cell phone buzzed in her pocket. A text from Jovanic’s FBI friend, Mike Chapman: “Got some Odell writing. Meet to discuss?”
Slipping out of the meeting room and into the lobby, Claudia tapped in Chapman’s number. “Should I pretend not to be excited that you found some of his handwriting?” she asked when he answered the call.
“Why would you do that?”
“I know how buttoned-down you feds are. It might look unseemly if I jumped up and down, squealing in delight.”
Chapman chuckled. “Oh yeah, we couldn’t use your help if you were unseemly.”
“Okay, I’ll contain myself. What have you got?”
“Can you come to my office? I’ll show it to you then.”
“I’m at a conference near Bloomsbury for the rest of the day. Can we meet after that?”
“Sure, that’ll work. I—wait, hold on …”
She could hear muffled voices as Chapman covered the phone to speak to someone. Then he came back on the line; his tone had changed. “I’ll get back to you,” he said abruptly. The line went dead.
After the final speaker had wrapped up and the BIG Chairman had closed the event, Daphne and the organization’s treasurer went off to settle their account. Waiting in the lobby, Claudia wondered what had taken Mike Chapman away so abruptly. She had heard nothing further from him in the four hours since their call.
“Come on then,” said Daphne, buttoning her coat and pulling on gloves. “I’m knackered.”
“You must be. Let’s stop at that pub on the corner. I’ll buy you dinner and a glass of wine.”
“Sorry, luv. I’ve got a foul headache coming on, can’t bear the thought of food.”
They pushed through the hotel’s front door to a blast of cold air. Claudia coiled her scarf around her face, pulling it up to cover her nose and mouth. “Good lord, it’s freezing.”
“Never mind, we’ll be home soon. I’m going to toddle off to bed straight away, if you don’t mind fetching your own dinner.”
“Of course I don’t mind.”
It was not yet five o’clock as they descended the front steps of the hotel, but already the street was cloaked in darkness. Grateful the rain had slowed to a light drizzle, they hurried around the corner to St. Pancras International where they would catch the Tube back to Sidcup.
Inside the warm terminal, Claudia stuffed her scarf and gloves into her pocket. This part of the journey meant ten minutes on the Tube before switching to the overground railway. She dreaded the claustrophobic feeling that going down the steep staircases gave her, borne along on the wave of passengers into the depths and through the maze of subterranean corridors.
Londoners had used the Tube tunnels as shelter during World War II. Scenes from a documentary of the Blitz had haunted her for weeks. For fifty-seven consecutive nights, air raids had sent thousands of families into the makeshift bomb shelters. Mothers, children, old people, carrying what they could—blankets and packets of biscuits, a teddy bear or doll, crowding into these very tunnels.
She could almost feel their terror; it seemed to linger in the walls. How they must have prayed to escape the missiles raining down on them by Hitler’s Luftwaffe. The miles of Underground platforms were their refuge. But had they feared being trapped by the explosions rocking the city above? The documentary showed Balham Station, where a bomb had penetrated thirty-two feet underground, killing sixty-eight people sheltering there…hoping they again would get to see the light of day.
“Please mind the gap.”
The prim, recorded voice jolted Claudia back to the moment. Looking like an enormous caterpillar, the red face of their Tube’s driving car appeared at the mouth of the tunnel. The train slid into the station and came to a stop with a hiss of the pneumatic doors opening.
She followed Daphne through the surge of commuters onto the train, where her friend collapsed, pale and clammy, into the nearest open seat.
“Are you okay, Daph?” Claudia asked with concern.
“I feel rotten.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Don’t worry, luv.” Daphne closed her eyes. “I’ll be all right once I get some paracetamol in me.”
Claudia’s eyes flicked past two young men across the aisle who were chatting in low voices, to the wide windows behind their heads. The curved station wall outside was close enough to touch if she could have reached through the window. She could hardly wait to switch to British Rail Overground where she could watch the towns fly past without the stifling feeling of the Tube.
To distract herself, she engaged in a game of guessing what her fellow passengers’ handwriting might look like: a woman in a sari, her face half-covered by a veil, staring down at her hands. Her writing would look tired and droop downwards, perhaps in depression. The businessman in his expensive suit, gaze buried in a newspaper, briefcase guarded between his feet. Hmm…with those lips pinched tight, she decided, he wrote with tense, angular forms and sharp edges.
At the far end of the compartment, a couple lost in each other’s eyes. Hard to come up with anything on them. Two teenage girls, their voices loud enough for everyone to hear every word of their conversation. Claudia wanted to knock their heads together and suggest they learn some manners. They would have ‘all about me’ bubble writing. She moved onto the tough-looking dude in a leather jacket and a tall purple Mohawk—were those still in fashion? Mohawk Boy would use a writing style like his hair; spiky, running all over the place, aggressively demonstrating his independence.
Claudia glanced back at the two men across the aisle, heads close together. They were talking in low voices, but the conversation seemed to have the intensity of an argument. One of them punctuated his comments with sharp, stabbing gestures. That could mean heavy pen pressure, signifying someone who would never forget an insult or a compliment. The event would be re-experienced in living color, even years later.
The train slowed to a stop at Leicester Square. The two men rose and headed to the exit still bickering. The doors closed, and as they pulled away from the station, Claudia lost interest.
A middle-aged woman plopped into the seat vacated by the men. “Oww,” she muttered, shifting sideways. She reached behind, and said, “Eh, what’s this, then?”
Daphne opened her eyes and sat up with a groan. “What’s the matter?”
The woman was holding a phone, which she had just sat on. “Must have fallen out of a pocket.”
“There were two men sitting there,” said Claudia. “It’s probably theirs.”
“You’re an American, are you?” the woman said.
“Yes, just visiting.”
“My sister lives in America. San Diego.”
“That’s about ninety miles south of where I live,” said Claudia. “What are you going to do with the phone?”
The woman looked at it, a brand new Android. “I’m going to leave it right where I found it. Silly buggers ought to be more careful; these things are so dear, hundreds of pounds.”
Daphne squeezed Claudia’s arm. “I’ve got to get some paracetamol. Let’s get off at Charing Cross. There’s a Boots Chemist in the terminus.”
“Fine with me,” said Claudia, glad for any excuse to leave the Tube.
Three minutes later, they were first out the door and heading up the tunnel that led to street level. “Can you make it up the stairs all right?” she asked.
“How feeble do you think I am, you silly cow?”
Claudia grinned. “Keeping a British stiff upper lip, are you?”
Daphne landed a light punch on her arm. “Do shut up and get on with it.”
They climbed the three flights of stairs that would take them where shops and take-away stands lined the terminal: Burger King, Funky Pigeon, The Pasty Shop.
Claudia spotted the Boots in the corner. “Look, there’s a bench outside the store. Why don’t you sit down, I’ll fetch the Paracetamol for you.”
“Thanks, luv. There’ll be another Tube along in a few minutes.”
Claudia hurried to the drugstore and grabbed a bottle of water and a small packet of paracetamol, the British equivalent of acetaminophen.
“That’ll be one pound sixty-four,” said the shop assistant at the checkout. It sounded like a lot for the two items, but not knowing whether the price was reasonable or not, Claudia dumped several coins on the counter and sorted through the unaccustomed currency for the right amount while the assistant shoved her purchases into a bag.
She pushed through the shop door and spotted Daphne through the bustle of passengers, fingers pressed to her temples. Claudia had taken only a few steps toward her when a tremendous boom sounded from somewhere far below. The building shook like an earthquake.
But London didn’t have earthquakes.
For about five seconds there was silence. Then the screaming began.
CHAPTER 12
The lights in the terminal flickered and went out, leaving behind the sounds of panic. Moments later they were back on, revealing frightened commuters rushing toward the “Way Out” signs.
Claudia’s ears were ringing as she hurried over and helped Daphne up from the bench.
“Just a problem with an electrical panel,” a railway worker in an orange vest was telling a group of passengers. “Nothing to worry about, the trouble is farther down the line.”
“Do we really have to go back down there?”
“It’s the fastest way home,” Daphne said. “Let’s get down there before it gets too crowded.”
They were down the first flight of stairs to the tunnels when a second blast from below rocked the building.
“Let’s get out of here,” Claudia urged.
As if coming out of a trance, Daphne swung around. “Come on, follow me.”
Back in the terminus people were streaming through every exit. Claudia and Daphne went out through the Boots, where there was an exit to The Strand. Outside, they saw a dozen or more uniformed police officers running into the station through the main entrance.
