Murder of a Dead Man (8 page)

‘Obviously not.’ Dan continued to flick through the papers. ‘But there’s something else – something the super in the Crawley Woods station mentioned –

a clipping from a newspaper.’

‘Giving a clairvoyant’s number?’

‘What would we do without your humour, Peter?’ Anna tossed her cup into the bin.

‘It’s a report on pioneering surgery. Face transplants for burns and accident victims.’

‘I’ve heard of partial transplants – that woman in Paris…’

Dan cut Anna short. ‘Apparently a complete face transplant can save years of surgery. A face from a compatible donor can, in theory, be grafted on in one. Ears, nose and all, which would cut down on the bone grafts and screw-in ears used for burn victims at present.’

‘Spare us the details.’

‘Squeamish, Anna?’ Peter needled.

‘I’ve just eaten.’

Trevor slid off Anna’s desk and paced to the window. ‘You think this Tony was wearing Anthony George’s face?’

‘It’s an interesting theory, and one the team holding the open file on the George face-theft case are considering,’ Dan said.

‘Science fiction,’ Peter scoffed.

‘Science fact, once articles like these are published. You can bet your last pound that before publication there’d been one or two cases where the technique had been tried and tested. Right, early start tomorrow.’ Dan looked to Trevor. ‘First thing in the morning you and I will visit Patrick to see if he’s come up with anything new on our victim, and also run this,’ he held up the report, ‘by him. Then we go to the police laboratory. Peter, you and Anna drive to Crawley Woods and interview as many of these informants as you can and, if you have time, check with the hospital Anthony George died in.’

‘After two years, what do you expect us to find?’ Peter asked.

‘You might be Drug Squad, but you’re experienced enough to know it when you see it.’

‘I thought I’d been drafted in to check out Tony’s drug pushing activities,’ Peter didn’t expect an answer to his complaint.

‘Will this warrant an overnight?’ Anna asked.

‘If you’ve leads to follow. Best pack a bag.’

‘Goody.’

‘This is work.’ Dan looked sternly from Anna to Peter.

‘I can’t speak for Anna but my intentions are strictly honourable,’ Peter protested. ‘Besides, by the time the force has finished with me I’m only good for sleeping.’

‘All sleeping time cancelled until this case is solved. Pick you up at eight tomorrow, Trevor?’

‘No one rang in from Jubilee Street?’ Trevor abandoned what was left of his coffee on the windowsill.

‘No one has a living room down there, let alone a television,’ Peter reminded.

‘There’s one last job you can do today, Trevor.

Call on the retired policeman, Inspector Edwards.

He lives on the marina, just across the road from your place.’

‘It’s midnight.’

‘He’s an ex-copper, he knows the score, he’s expecting you.’

‘Serves you right for leaving me to hold the fort all alone,’ Peter grinned.

‘Peter, you and Anna come with me to Jubilee Street. We’ll take a hostel each and interview the inmates who weren’t there last night.’

‘You weren’t joking about cancelling sleeping time were you, Inspector?’

‘The one thing you’ll learn, Anna, is that there are no jokes on Serious Crimes except the ones played by the punters on us.’ Dan shooed them out of the door.

Inspector Edwards lived on the third floor of a luxury block of flats facing the open sea. It was a five minute walk from Trevor’s house, and he was tempted to see Lyn first. Then he remembered Dan.

The Inspector knew where he was going. If anything cropped up he was quite capable of phoning him and if he hadn’t spoken to Inspector Edwards there’d be hell to pay.

Turning the wheel left instead of right, he pulled up in the “Residents Only” parking bay of Grenville Court and cut his engine. He stepped out of his car, locked it and looked at the sea, and the renovated Victorian terrace that fronted it. His house was the third in the row. All the windows were shrouded in darkness. There was no point in rushing the interview. Lyn was in bed.

Pocketing his keys, he walked up to the foyer.

The night porter had locked the internal doors, but he could see him, peaked cap pushed to the back of his head, sitting behind a desk reading the
Sun
. He pressed the buzzer. Without bothering to use the intercom, the porter rose from his chair and unlocked the door.

‘Sergeant Joseph?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mr Edwards is expecting you. Third floor, apartment seven.’

Trevor took the stairs. Six months ago he hadn’t been able to take a step unaided. He’d only discarded his walking stick three weeks ago, and he still missed it. Multiple fractures of the legs didn’t heal easily, but exercise was supposed to quicken the process. The door to the apartment opened seconds after he rang the bell.

‘Sergeant Joseph?’

‘Trevor. It’s good of you to see me at this hour, Inspector Edwards.’

‘Plain Mr will do now, Sergeant. But please, call me Ted. Come in.’

The ex-Inspector was a tall, spare, upright man.

His living room was expensively furnished in a minimalist, masculine style. Deep grey carpeting, navy-blue drapes framing picture windows with sea and marina views, and four blue leather recliner chairs grouped around a glass coffee table. A television and DVD recorder were housed in a cabinet large enough to hold discs. There was nothing else. Not a single picture or photograph, nothing to give a hint as to the character of the owner.

Typical retired policeman, Trevor decided.

Casualty of the force in the relationship stakes.

Nothing to do, nowhere to go, no partner to love, just television to watch, and public-spirited telephone calls to make in the hope that he could be of use to his ex-colleagues. This man had lived for his work and now had a great hole in his life.

‘I remember only too well what it’s like, starting a new investigation. Would you like something to eat or drink?’ Ted offered. ‘Coffee?

Tea? Or, if it’s the end of a long day, something stronger?’

‘Coffee would be fine, thank you.’

‘I made some sandwiches,’ Ted called back as he disappeared into the kitchen. ‘We don’t often use this place and when we do we tend to eat out, so I can’t offer you anything substantial.’

“We!” Trevor looked around again for evidence of a woman’s touch.

Ted reappeared with a tray of plates, knives, mustard, milk, sugar and two porcelain cups and saucers. He set it on the table, returned to the kitchen and brought in a cafetiere of coffee and the sandwiches.

‘This isn’t your home?’ Knowing what apartments on the marina cost, and what inspectors on the force earned, Trevor was surprised at the mention of another place.

‘My wife calls it our summer place, but after living on a farm all her life she can’t stand it here.

To be truthful I think she prefers animals to people.

We rent it out, and use it for house exchanges abroad. Now that I’ve retired we do a fair amount of travelling. My wife has handed over the management of her farm to her son, but she still breeds dogs and horses, so when we’re in the UK

we tend to live in the country.’

“Her son” – a late second marriage?

‘But it’s useful during the sailing season.’

‘You have a yacht?’ Trevor was interested in Ted. He represented a rare glimpse of life after the force.

‘Racing dinghy. My interest, not my wife’s. But when she inherited this place from her father the two seemed to go together. He bought the apartment as an investment three months before he died and never set foot in the place. He would have hated it.

Like my wife he was more a country than a water and concrete person.’

‘That’s one way of describing the marina.’

Trevor revised his initial impressions.

‘I’ve just had the boat overhauled in dry dock ready for the first race of the season and I wanted to see it put in the water myself. Stupid really. Chap who looks after it for me is more than capable. It was a long, cold day so I thought I’d have a few drinks,’ he opened the cabinet and pulled out a brandy bottle, ‘watch some TV and have an early night. Then I saw the news flash.’

‘You headed the team on the Anthony George case?’

‘Yes, not that we gave it all the manpower or attention it deserved. The George case came when we were already working on half-a-dozen top priorities. Like everyone else, I assumed whoever did it was a nut. One of the tabloids mentioned black magic and rumours started flying thick and fast.

Then, about a year after it happened I saw a newspaper article.’

‘Inspector Evans had a faxed copy.’

‘Says something for the station I worked out of that it’s still in the file.’ He poured a generous measure of brandy into his coffee and offered the bottle to Trevor who shook his head. ‘I thought there might be something in it, but there was no programme of face transplants in the UK at the time.

I spoke to a plastic surgeon in Harley Street. Top man, he agreed face transplants were feasible in theory, but you’d need to remove the donor face carefully. And keep it in exactly the right conditions until it could be used. I showed him photographs of Anthony George’s corpse. He agreed it could have been a surgical removal, but it could also have been done by someone with knowledge of skinning animals. Without first-hand examination it was impossible to tell.’

‘Was there a PM?’

‘For the heart attack. But we didn’t consider the possibility that the face had been surgically removed until I saw that article, and by then George had been cremated. The pathologist who saw the body said that the face had been removed with a sharp blade, possibly scalpel, possibly knife. I studied his report, but the case wasn’t homicide and with three murder investigations on my hands, the theft of Anthony George’s face didn’t seem all that important at the time. I’m not apologising for relegating it to open file status. We were short-staffed, and orders came down from above to prioritise.’

‘What about George’s relatives?’

‘There were none to speak of. His mother was terminally ill with cancer. Her doctor wouldn’t allow us to interview her. She died not long after.’

‘Girlfriend?’

‘His partner ran a pub around the corner from George’s office. He was distraught at the time but when I called in there just before I retired, there was another young fellow around.’

‘His name?’

Ted shook his head. ‘I can’t remember. But it will be in the file.’

‘What about an inheritance?’

‘If you’re thinking about someone going to all this trouble to impersonate him, forget it. I travelled down that road and ran into a stone wall. Anthony George was comfortably off. With insurance policies he left about two hundred thousand. It all went to the mother.’

‘And when the mother died?’

‘I checked on that too. She left half a million. It was divided equally between The British Heart Foundation and Cancer Research.’

‘No other beneficiaries?’

‘Her cook, maid and gardener received relatively small amounts, but nothing spectacular.’

Ted heaped three sandwiches on his plate and sat back in his chair. ‘It was eerie seeing that face again tonight.’

‘You’re that sure it was George?’

‘Absolutely,’ he replied with the confidence of a trained eye. ‘I studied that face for weeks after that article was published. I sifted through dozens of photographs of Anthony George – I was winding down to retirement and things were going at a slower pace then,’ he explained in answer to Trevor’s quizzical look. ‘I even pinned one photograph above my desk. Apart from the features, the man in that video had the same mole high on the right cheek, the same scar below the bottom lip. It was in his passport as a distinguishing mark.

Someone, I think it may have been his mother’s solicitor, told me that he’d fallen and put his teeth through his lip as a child.’

‘You really do know that face.’ Trevor took a sandwich.

‘If you’d stared at it as long as I had, Sergeant, you would too.’

‘I have a feeling I may be going to do just that,’

Trevor replied.

Trevor opened his front door at half past one. As Dan was picking him up in the morning, he left his car in the road so Lyn would be able to get hers out of the drive if she was on early shift. Lyn had emptied and restacked the dishwasher, the kitchen work surfaces had been cleaned, and the remains of the meal they had eaten earlier, cleared away.

Creeping up the stairs, he opened the bedroom door quietly. Moonlight shone through the French windows, throwing the shadows of the balcony’s wrought iron scrollwork into the room. Lyn was lying on her side, the duvet pulled to her chin, her eyes closed. He picked up the alarm from his bedside table and carried it into the bathroom lest the noise of setting it disturb her. Too tired to shower, he stripped off his clothes, threw them into the linen basket and cleaned his teeth. Inching back the duvet he lay alongside Lyn, waiting for his body to warm to her temperature before daring to touch her. But sleep overtook him before he summoned the courage to place his arm around her waist.

The alarm woke him. He fumbled for his clock only to realise the ringing had come from Lyn’s side of the bed. He turned over and saw her back disappearing through the bathroom door. He went into the other bathroom. Since early morning shifts had created problems, he had kept a selection of his toiletries in there. He heard her splashing in the bath as he showered. Perhaps if he dressed quickly and made breakfast it would go some way towards appeasing her.

Five minutes later, dressed in light-coloured slacks and dark open-necked shirt he opened the fridge door. Nothing but party leftovers. He moved the cling-film back from a salad bowl. It would last today but no longer. He took out eggs, butter and coffee, scrambled the eggs, put bread in the toaster, and had it all ready, waiting on the table when she came downstairs.

‘Breakfast?’ he held his breath, hoping she’d smile.

‘I haven’t time.’

‘It’s only six-thirty.’

‘I promised to pick one of the girls up. Her car broke down yesterday.’