The Shadow at the Door, page 7
‘Raker,’ he said when he answered, ‘you’re not cancelling on me, are you?’
‘Would I do that to you, Task?’
‘It depends on what kind of shit you’ve landed yourself in this time,’ he replied. Tasker had seen the full force of some of my cases, and the impact they’d had on me.
‘Sorry to call so late,’ I said.
‘It’s not even 10 p.m. I’ve got plenty more UK Gold to go yet.’
Ahead of me, traffic began to slow.
‘Would you have a second to check something for me?’
‘A database search?’ Tasker replied.
‘Only if you’ve got time.’
‘Yeah, I can check it remotely. Give me a sec.’
I heard him moving between rooms and heading to his office. As a consultant, the Met had given him login credentials for the Police National Computer, as well as the Police National Database, which held ‘softer’ intelligence – stuff like allegations about someone that didn’t result in an arrest, or concerns passed on by social services or schools. The government was in the process of combining the two into the newly renamed Law Enforcement Data Service – but as with anything driven by the government, it was lagging behind deadline.
‘Okay,’ Tasker said, ‘what’s the name?’
‘It’s two, actually. The first is Carly Wolstene.’
I spelled it out for him.
I heard him tapping a keyboard and then, after a pause, he said, ‘Carly Maria Wolstene. Born 4 January 2000. Do you want the address listed here?’
I told him I did and it was the address I’d already been to.
‘Apart from that,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing. She’s clean.’
I tried to think whether that made things better or worse: if she was clean, it supported the residual worry I’d had all along that this was a blind alley, a lead based on little more than her pocketing my business card; on the other hand, if she had no record, it didn’t necessarily discount her involvement in something or mean she was innocent – it just meant that she’d never been caught. I moved things on with Tasker and said to him, ‘Okay, the second person has the same surname. He’s her brother.’
‘First name?’
‘Miles.’
Again, there was a brief pause as Tasker entered the name.
‘All right, this is a bit more promising.’
I felt a surge of anticipation.
‘Miles Avery Wolstene, born –’
‘Avery?’
‘Yeah. Why, is that significant?’
Robbie Avery Building Services.
‘It might be,’ I said to Task. ‘What else is there?’
‘Born 17 October 1997. No actual recordable offences – no arrests, nothing in the way of cautions, reprimands or warnings – but there is something in the PND.’
‘What is it?’
‘A suspicion more than anything.’ I heard Task tap a couple of buttons. ‘Four months ago, his father died in Canary Wharf. He was head of HR for the AS City Bank group. Middle of March, this guy jumped off the roof of their building and landed on the glass roof of a restaurant about forty floors down. The whole family – including your Miles Wolstene – told the cops that the suicide came out of nowhere.’
‘What was the name of the father?’
‘Robert Wolstene. He was fifty-three.’
Robert.
Or Robbie.
‘You said the “whole family” felt the suicide came out of nowhere?’
‘That’s what it says here.’
‘So who does that refer to?’
‘Both the kids, obviously, plus it looks like Robert Wolstene had two older brothers. They basically said the same thing.’
‘No mother on the scene?’
‘Says here she died when Miles and Carly were in their early teens.’
That explained why Carly’s mother hadn’t made it into any of the pictures that she’d posted on Instagram. I was more interested in the timings, though: Wolstene jumped off a roof in March – and then Paul disappeared less than a month later. Did it mean anything if one died and another vanished within four weeks of each other?
‘Anything suspicious about the mother’s death?’ I asked.
‘She killed herself in their garage. Carbon monoxide poisoning.’
‘And forensics backed that up?’
‘Yes. Apparently, she was a manic depressive, so something like that had been on the cards for a while. That’s what it says down here, anyway. But I guess your brain – at this point – is fixating on the fact that Mum and Dad both took their own lives.’
It was an obvious thing to zero in on.
‘We looked into that too,’ Tasker said.
‘“We” now, is it?’
He laughed. ‘The royal “we”. Yeah, detectives searched for possible links, but there didn’t seem to be any. Her death was only a matter of time according to Robert Wolstene and her side of the family. But his death hadn’t been expected at all.’
I saw a layby up ahead and pulled into it. Grabbing my notebook, I wrote down what Tasker had told me. ‘So you said there was suspicion about Robert’s suicide?’
‘No, he jumped all right, and he left a note behind at home to tell his kids that he loved them. Hold on, there’s a copy of it here.’ He paused for a moment. ‘“To my wonderful children, just know that I will always love you.” It wasn’t the actual death that was suspicious, it was more that the cops don’t seem to have believed that Miles was being a hundred per cent honest with them. Nothing specific – more a general air of distrust.’
‘Was it something he said – or didn’t?’
‘Hard to say because there’s no transcripts, but in the notes here it looks like they felt he was holding back on them. As in, maybe his father’s suicide hadn’t come out of the blue.’
I tried to bring it all back to Paul Conister.
What if Miles Wolstene was the man outside the house that night? It was a big stretch, based on no actual, provable evidence. All I knew about him so far was that he might be a liar: he’d created letterheads and business cards for a fake company, and the cops thought he might have lied to them, or held back, about his father’s suicide. From photographs I’d seen of him, he was the right build and age profile for the watcher in the CCTV footage, and he would have had access to a Tarrington Motors jacket through Carly. But if it was him, could he really be the man responsible for Paul’s disappearance? Why target Paul in the first place? Did he blame Paul for his father’s suicide?
I looked at the names in my notebook and realized how little I still had, and how thin the case was. At the top I’d written Paul Conister. Lines were coming off to Carly and Miles Wolstene, and to Robbie Avery Building Services. I added Robert Wolstene under the names of his kids and put question marks next to all of them. But there was no direct line between Paul Conister and Robert Wolstene. The only line I could draw was from Paul to Carly, and only because they worked at the same place.
‘Anything else on this Robert Wolstene guy?’ I asked.
‘No record, if that’s what you mean.’
‘You said he worked for AS City Bank?’
‘Yeah, he’d been there since 2006.’
Idly, I circled his name, my mind still turning over.
‘According to the background we did on him, Wolstene was also on the board at Fulham.’
That stopped me. ‘As in, the football club?’
‘Yeah. He was a non-executive director.’
The same club Paul supported.
I put the notebook down, thanked Tasker for his help, and then dialled Maggie Conister’s number. She picked up straight away. It sounded like she was driving.
‘Are you okay to talk?’
‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘I’m just on my way back from the gym.’
I flicked back a few pages and was now looking down at the list of names that Maggie had given me of the friends Paul had gone to see Fulham with at weekends.
Wolstene wasn’t on it.
‘Have you ever heard of a Robert Wolstene?’ I asked.
‘Wolstene?’ she repeated.
I spelled it out for her.
‘Oh, wait, he was one of the guys at the football, wasn’t he?’
‘You mean, one of the guys Paul went with?’
‘No, not exactly. Robert Wolstene was high up in HR in some banking firm. I think he died a few months back, actually. I remember Paul telling me something about it. Anyway, Robert was on the board of Fulham for a long time, I think, and a while ago – this must have been a year ago, maybe more; I mean, it could have been much more – I remember he started talking to Paul about sponsorship.’
‘As in, shirt sponsorship?’
‘I think so. I just remember they met at some social function somewhere and then they got together quite a few times after that to talk about Tarrington possibly sponsoring the club. It didn’t happen in the end. Paul said it was way too expensive.’
‘You said “guys” earlier.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You said, Robert was “one of the guys at the football” just a minute ago. So, do you mean Robert started hanging around with the friends Paul went to games with?’
‘No. Robert’s crowd were a separate lot. The blokes that Paul used to go to the games with were much older friends – they all went to university together. No, they had nothing to do with Robert. What I meant is, Robert had his own group of mates, they just happened to be Fulham supporters too – and I remember Paul met up with them a few times.’
‘Do you know the names of any of Robert’s friends?’
‘No, sorry. I never met them. I never even met Robert himself, not face to face. He called the house a few times and I picked up, because I remember we spoke on the phone, but I never met him or the friends.’
I thought about the incoming calls I’d seen on the Conister’s landline statements: there had only been five, and four of the numbers were withheld. I’d assumed they’d all been sales calls. But maybe they’d been Wolstene.
I tried to work out whether that mattered or not.
‘I think there were three of them, though.’
‘Three of them?’
‘Robert’s group of friends at Fulham. The ones that he introduced Paul to. For some reason, I’ve got the number three stuck in my head. I think Paul must have said there were three of them – plus Robert – at some stage, otherwise I don’t know why I’d remember it.’
It was vague, but I made a note of it anyway.
‘What about Robert Wolstene’s kids? Do you ever remember meeting them?’
A confused pause. ‘No. Why?’
‘I was just wondering.’
She was quiet for a moment. I felt uncomfortable at shutting her down and keeping information back from her, but I needed to know where I was being led first. Maggie asked, ‘Does Robert Wolstene have something to do with Paul disappearing?’
‘Wolstene died before Paul went missing,’ I said.
‘Yes, of course,’ she replied.
But it was obvious what she was thinking.
That wasn’t the question she’d asked.
15
I got up early, showered, and then sat at the breakfast bar in the kitchen. I’d put all the pictures I’d taken – at the Conisters, of the CCTV video I’d watched at the school, and of the rooms of Carly Wolstene’s flat – on to my laptop, and as the sun poured in through the front windows, I slowly started cycling through them.
I had a video and some stills from the surveillance footage of the unidentified man, and – after rewatching the film and again not being able to tell for certain if it was Miles Wolstene or not – I switched to the stills. They were no less clear, just frozen versions of the individual frames I’d cycled through in the footage, but I could zoom in and manipulate them a little easier. One particular split second focused my attention: it was just as the man rounded the corner, into Kilgor Terrace. For a brief moment, he was caught on the edges of a pool of light, formed by one of the nearby street lamps.
Only one side of his face was visible.
Even that was blurred: the further in I got, the more the image pixelated; the further out I went, the clearer it became – but the angle of his head, the way his face mostly pointed away from the camera lens, made it look a lot like Miles Wolstene.
I returned to the shots I’d taken inside the Conisters’ and Wolstenes’ homes, looking for things I might have missed, particularly things that might in some way connect the two families. The only thread I had tethering them together at the moment was the fact that Paul Conister and Robert Wolstene had known each other – had, according to Maggie, become quite friendly – in the months after Robert Wolstene had tried to pitch a possible sponsorship deal for Fulham FC to Paul. What happened between them after that?
Was it the reason Wolstene killed himself?
Was it the reason Paul eventually disappeared?
It didn’t fit perfectly, given that, at the time of Paul going missing, Robert Wolstene had already been dead for nearly a month, but I couldn’t discount the idea entirely. I also couldn’t discount the idea that Miles Wolstene was somehow involved in both cases, and possibly in at least one death: his father’s, and maybe Paul’s too – because three months on from him vanishing, and with no sign of him since, it was a distinct possibility that Paul was deceased. Add the fact that Miles could easily be the man in the CCTV footage, and that his sister had worked with Paul at Tarrington Motors, and the questions were building.
There was something else that continued to bother me too: why I felt like I’d met Carly Wolstene before. I’d tried to tell myself that she must only look like someone I’d known or met, because I couldn’t think where in my life I might have come into contact with her before. I’d compiled backgrounds on her and her brother, on their father as well, and not only did none of it ring any alarm bells – it did, genuinely, appear as if Robert Wolstene’s suicide had come out of nowhere – I also couldn’t see where their lives and mine may have intersected.
That meant I needed to keep looking.
Miles Wolstene was the assistant manager of a restaurant just off Leicester Square. I arrived at the house in Wandsworth early, to ensure I was there before either he or his sister had left for work. I parked in the next street along, and when I got back to their road, Miles was already on his way out. He didn’t have a car and probably wouldn’t have used one anyway: getting into the centre of London was easier on the train, even on a Saturday morning.
He walked ahead of me, headphones on, totally oblivious to what was around him. Outside the station, he paused momentarily to check his phone and then went from Wandsworth Town into Waterloo, getting the Northern Line from there. I followed him the whole way, keeping my distance, unsure exactly what I expected to find out. Once he arrived at work, he would be gone for the day, and that would make this whole tail worthless – but, more than anything, I just wanted to get an idea of who he was, how he looked, his behaviour and his routines.
It was obvious Carly and he were related. In the photographs I’d seen of them on Carly’s Instagram page, I knew they shared the same green eyes, and had similarities around the nose and jaw too. He was good-looking like his sister, and both had the same build.
Nothing happened between Wandsworth and Waterloo, but as soon as we arrived at the Tube, on the northbound platform, something changed: he made for a specific carriage right at the end, despite four others being closer. As I followed him, slipping into the next carriage down from him, I watched him find a seat, swing his bag around to his front and fish out a copy of a book about cinema in the 1940s and ’50s. I wouldn’t have made anything of the fact that he’d grabbed a book, or gone to the end carriage, if I hadn’t seen what came next: as the train slid out of the station, his eyes shifted from the pages of the book to a woman sitting opposite him. She was a petite blonde, strikingly pretty, and was reading a biography of the film director Robert Hosterlitz. I knew Hosterlitz’s work, and knew that his most lauded films, including seven-time Oscar winner The Eyes of the Night, were made between 1949 and 1953.
Miles had chosen his own book deliberately.
The woman must have sensed she was being watched, by both of us, because she looked up from the biography, first at Miles – who smiled at her – and then in my direction. I’d already turned away by then, my eyes on the darkness of the windows as we carved through the earth. But I kept my gaze on her reflection as she returned her attention to Miles. Instantly, he started instigating a conversation with her, gesturing to her book and then to his, and – for the first time – I felt a flutter of disquiet: to know what the woman would be reading, or at least the type of book she’d be reading, to know which carriage she’d be sitting in, that she’d be here on a Saturday – it would surely have required a period of reconnaissance.
It meant he’d seen the woman before.
He’d noticed her, and he’d watched her. He’d taken note of what she read, where she sat, what days she worked. None of that made him guilty of anything in the eyes of the law – not yet – but it painted a picture of who he was, and it was a picture way clearer than anything I’d had of him until now. Because he may or may not have been the man in the CCTV footage; the fake business cards and headed paper he’d hidden may or may not have mattered; getting close to the woman, bringing out a book he knew she would respond to – it could just have been an innocent way to initiate a conversation with her. Or perhaps there was nothing innocent here. Perhaps all of these acts mattered.
Perhaps Miles Wolstene was a fraud, or a liar.
Or something much worse.
16
I followed Miles Wolstene to the restaurant he worked at, a high-end Italian place just behind the National Portrait Gallery, and then watched him through the windows. The manager must have been off because it looked like Miles was in charge for the day: he spent the first ten minutes pointing waiting staff to different tables, and then another twenty writing out the day’s specials on a chalkboard. Just before 11.30 a.m., he finally opened the doors. The restaurant didn’t close again until 11 p.m., so even if he wasn’t doing the entire shift, it didn’t seem likely he’d be going anywhere for a while.
