You Are Dead (41 page)

“This is a murder inquiry, Brigadier. I would appreciate your full cooperation. You might not think that information you have is relevant, but we need to know everything and then we can decide.”

“I appreciate that, Detective Sergeant, but I am bound by the law. I have reluctant permission from the Headmaster to talk to you about Edward Denning, but not anyone else.”

Potting stared at him for a moment. Roy Grace had warned him earlier today about difficulties in dealing with schools like this, and the slightly high-handed attitude of this man was increasingly irking him. The power of the
old boy
network. He sipped some of his tea and swallowed the soggy morsel of biscuit that he hadn't extricated. “I understand that venerable establishments like this operate under a certain code.”

“Code?” Andrew said.

“You think you're above the law—that you operate under some kind of privilege. You might throw pupils out, but you'll never let them down. Would that be a fair summary?”

“I can assure you that is not the case.”

Potting tapped his own chest. “Actually, Brigadier, I'm the one to give the assurances that this is not the case.” He looked at his watch. “I can have a team of officers here with a search warrant within ninety minutes. We'll remove all your computers and all your files, if that's how you want to play it? Wouldn't look too good if the press got to hear about it. Top people's school raided by the police. I think a few of the papers would have a field day.”

Neville Andrew gave a nervous flick of his tongue, wetting his lips. “Well, I've never heard it put like that.” Then he smiled. “I'm sure we can sort something out.”

“Good,” Potting said. “It would be extremely helpful to our inquiry if you did not withhold any information, however irrelevant you feel it might be, or however protected by any Act of Parliament.”

“Regarding Crisp's contemporaries?”

“We need to know everything we can about Crisp and I need to talk to anyone who was in contact with him during his schooldays. To start with, is there anything in Edward Denning's—or Crisp's—past behavior at this school to suggest an erratic nature of any kind?”

The Bursar peered at his screen. “Well,” he said. “I have copies of his leaving reports from his housemaster—the teacher here who would have known him best. It has always been a tradition here at The Cloisters for housemasters to write one report for the pupil—and his or her parents—and another for our records only.”

“And?”

“I'll read the one for his parents to you, first.
Enigmatic and unpredictable as ever, he fits into no known mold, and has clearly taxed his tutors' powers of prophecy. He carries many grudges, as if he feels the whole world is against him. A medical career seems inevitable, although there may be a number of false starts.
”

Potting wrote it down verbatim.

“Now,” said Andrew, peering at the screen. “This is the one from his housemaster for the school records only.
Edward Crisp is a very strange individual. Impossible to get close to him, or to even know what he is thinking. He keeps to himself, seems to have few friends, and, frankly, I find him deeply disturbed and lacking in empathy. I put some of this down to the split-up of his parents' marriage, and some of it down to a very traumatic incident in his life in the winter of 1976 when he witnessed a young girl drown in a recreational lagoon in Hove. During his early days here, he was bullied by a number of boys. Not to put too fine a point on it, and I have no medical training to substantiate this, but I would say that Edward Crisp displays classic symptoms of a sociopath. I am sure he will ultimately be successful, because those with sociopathic tendencies are able to play the game of getting to the top better than anyone else. But I'm not sure I would ever want to be one of his patients should he pursue a medical career.
”

Potting pursed his lips. “Well, that doesn't paint too good a picture of him. But it fits. What about his missing contemporaries?”

“Well,” Andrew said, a little hesitantly. “As it happens, the timing of your visit is rather coincidental. Only this past week I've been preparing a report on his housemates in his particular year. It would seem there are three boys who were all direct contemporaries of Edward Crisp in Lark House who seem, literally, to have vanished off the face of the earth. It's really quite odd.”

“Odd in what sense?” Potting pressed. “Mispers—as we call missing persons—are very common. Thousands of people are reported missing in the UK every year. A large number are still missing after one year. So three doesn't strike me as being particularly notable.”

The Brigadier frowned. “Direct contemporaries of Crisp, from the same house? I'd say that was very odd. Old boys die, sadly, or they emigrate overseas. But normally we're able to trace most of them—we are pretty thorough.” He tapped his keyboard and peered at his screen again. “What flags up these three is that each of them was reported missing to the police, by their families, and to our knowledge they've never been found.”

“How many pupils are there in Lark House?” Potting asked.

“Well, it's one of the smaller houses. There were seventy-eight boys there in Crisp's year. So three missing is quite a high proportion and I would imagine a high proportion compared to the national average—the appalling statistics you've just given me.”

“Missing, presumed dead?” Potting asked, increasingly interested now.

“Well, I can't answer that. But they all came here in 1974. None of them have been heard of for more than twenty years. They were all in their late twenties or early thirties at the time of their disappearance.”

“And each of them friends with Edward Crisp, Brigadier?”

“I can't tell you if they were friends. They were all slightly older—a year or so—and of course when you are thirteen, a year's age difference is a big gap.”

With his pen poised, Potting asked, “Can you give me their names?”

The Bursar hesitated again, then said, “Felix Gore-Parker, Marcus Gossage and Harrison Chaffinch.”

Potting wrote them down. Then he gave the Bursar his mobile phone number, in case he thought of anything else, and went back to his car. He sat for some moments looking at his notes before starting the engine. As he drove out of the school grounds he felt distinctly more uneasy about Crisp than when he had arrived.

He pulled over and phoned Roy Grace.

 

90

Saturday 20 December

At a quarter to six Roy Grace thanked Potting and ended the call, then updated Glenn Branson. The two detectives were seated in the tiny front office of the Roundstone Caravan Park, watching the bank of CCTV monitors that covered the entrance and much of the floodlit grounds for any sign of movement. Watching for a man whom Haydn Kelly had predicted might be walking almost exaggeratedly upright, with his feet splayed out widely.

“
Classic symptoms of a sociopath?
” Branson said. “Aged eighteen?”

“Sociopaths present from the age of four,” Grace said. “A lot of them are cunning at hiding it.”

“Sounds like a smart teacher.”

Grace shrugged. “Perhaps. Three contemporaries of Crisp missing without trace. What's all that about? Coincidence?”

“They were all male. Doesn't fit the victim profile of females with long brown hair.”

“No,” Grace replied, pensively. He was thinking back to his conversation with former Inspector Ron Gilbart. Had Crisp killed that girl at Hove Lagoon, as Gilbart had suspected? Had he killed three fellow pupils subsequently? What could have been his motive? Bullying? Surely not. Had the three men planned to disappear together for some reason? To become mercenaries? And had no one at the time connected them?

He phoned the researcher, Annalise Vineer, at the Incident Room, gave her the names of the three missing young men, and asked her to find out everything she could about their case histories.

It was fully dark outside now, and they had not seen a soul in the past hour. As Natalie Morris had told them, apart from a handful of permanent residents, the place was deserted at this time of year. There would be a few arriving over the Christmas period, perhaps half a dozen at most.

He phoned Cleo's mobile, but the line was crackly and it was hard to hear her.

“Well, we're still here,” she said, sounding tired but cheerful. “I'm trying to get sorted but we're still in complete chaos—oh, apart from Marlon who is fine in his swish new tank!”

Grace smiled. “I'll be there as soon as I can, but it'll be late, I'm afraid.”

“How's it going?”

His phone started beeping. “I'll call you straight back,” he said, then took the incoming call.

It was Haydn Kelly. “Roy, I've now completed the gait analysis comparison with the footage of Dr. Edward Crisp, and the footprint in the oil sludge in Logan Somerville's underground car park. I'm afraid, because of the quality of the print in the oil, I have to allow a fair margin for error. There are enough similarities to establish a likeness but not for a complete match beyond all reasonable doubt. Around a fifty to sixty percent probability.”

“Which means getting on for a fifty-fifty chance that it's not Dr. Crisp, right?”

“Yes,” the forensic podiatrist said, apologetically. “That's about the size of it.” Kelly paused. “Or put it another way, getting on for a fifty-fifty chance that it
is
Dr. Crisp, as he cannot be excluded on this basis.”

Grace masked the disappointment in his voice that the comparisons were not more certain. “Well, that's helpful, Haydn. It's not conclusive, as you say, but it's one more pointer in his direction.” As he ended the call, he heard a car pull up outside.

Both detectives went to the front door and outside into the darkness.

A young, enthusiastic uniformed constable, Pete Coppard, ran toward them brandishing a piece of paper, a huge smile on his face. “I've got it signed, sir, Detective Superintendent Grace! The search warrant. JP Juliet Smith signed it for me—she was so helpful!”

Moments later eight officers from the Local Support Team, in body armor, approached Unit R-73. They were followed by Grace and Branson huddled against the freezing cold in their coats. A frost was already starting to coat the ground. One dog handler had been dispatched to cover the rear of the mobile home and the other the main rear entrance to the park, just in case the helicopter had missed someone inside, who made a run for it.

The first two LST officers climbed the steps at the front, paused for several seconds, then one swung the bosher at the front door. It bounced off it. The officer behind him then placed both arms of the hydraulic ram against the sides of the door frame and fired it up. The frame creaked and groaned, then buckled.

The first officer swung the bosher again, and this time the door budged a fraction, with paint flaking off. He swung the bosher again, then again, the door giving way a fraction more each time. Then he stopped to take a breather. “What the sodding hell is this?” he said. “Fort bloody Knox?”

He swung the yellow bosher one more time and the door gave way, violently slamming right back on itself. Instantly two more LST officers scrambled up the steps and entered.

Grace, standing back, saw flashlight beams piercing the interior as the initial assessment was made.

After about thirty seconds, interior lights flickered on. The LST Inspector, John Walton, a tall, lean, highly experienced public order policeman, appeared at the door. “No one here, sir,” he said to Roy Grace. “Bit of a weird place though!”

Grace stepped inside, followed by Branson. The interior felt much larger than it had appeared from outside, and felt even colder than outside; it was like an icebox. He wrinkled his nose at a faintly rancid smell, like days-old spilled milk that had not been properly mopped up. There was a seating area around a wooden dining table, on which was a tall stack of newspapers and a tower of box files. Opposite was a built-in sofa that probably converted into an extra bed, Grace thought, on which were more box files stacked up. There was a large, wall-mounted television, with a tidy galley kitchen area just beyond it. Through an open concertina-door he could see a bed. He clocked it all, but barely took any of it in. It was the walls he could not stop looking at.

“Shit,” Glenn Branson said, peering down at the date of the top newspaper. The headline story was the suspected abduction of Logan Somerville. “This is last Saturday's—he's been here recently.” He pulled on gloves and began leafing through the pile.

Grace barely heard him. His eyes scanned the walls. Almost every inch of them, and the windows, with their closed shutters, was covered with photographs, all the same eight-by-ten size. Each was tagged with a typewritten note and date. Headshots of young women, their ages ranging from late teens to mid-twenties, Grace estimated. Some were tight close-ups, some showing part of the upper body as well. Photographs taken mostly outside, in public places—in many were recognizable backdrops of Brighton and Hove. The one common denominator between all of the women was their hairstyles.

Each had long brown hair.

A chill rippled through Grace. He stood still, staring around, and shivered from the cold, and from what he was looking at. In the silence he heard a clicking sound from the fridge, then a low hum as it started up. He peered closely at one photograph, a smiling woman in her early twenties, wearing dark glasses, and read the note that was attached as a strip to the base.

July 23rd 1983. On Volks Railway. Ainsley? (snk) V.

Further along he saw photographs of two different women from different months in 1984. Between them was a gap, where a photograph had been removed. There was another gap further along the same section. Katy Westerham and Denise Patterson, he wondered?