30
There was a Starbucks about three miles north. I left the car in a multi-storey a mile down the road. If I was driving one of their vehicles, it made it easier to find me. I’d noticed a satellite tracking sticker on the front windscreen. If they were smart — which they were — they’d call the tracking company and locate the car.
I chose a sofa at the rear of the coffeehouse with the least amount of lighting above it, and sat with my back to the wall. I used their wi-fi connection to log into my Yahoo. In my inbox there was an email from Cary. The subject line was Pic. Underneath, he had written: This doesn’t exist on the server any more — if you want another copy, tough. It’s gone.
I dragged the attachment to the desktop and opened it up. It had been blown up big. At its default size I could make out the side of Alex’s face and some window in the background. I took it down in size.
The photograph was much lighter. Alex’s face was more defined. I could make out the scar on his right cheek, the one he’d got playing football as a kid, and could see his hair properly now. It wasn’t shaved, as it had been when Mary saw him, but it was cut so close his scalp reflected light coming in through the window. Cary was right. It was taken at an odd angle. It looked like Alex might be on the bed while the photographer — maybe Myzwik — was on the floor.
I looked at the view through the window.
Beyond the veranda, beneath the endlessly blue sky, just a tiny speck in the corner of the photograph, was another patch of blue. A different shade. I moved closer to the screen and zoomed in.
Sea.
The room overlooked the sea.
Then I noticed something else. I resized the picture, and zoomed in on the window pane on the left-hand side. There was a reflection in the glass: veranda railings looking out over a hillside covered in heather; a sign nailed to a railing, reading backwards in the reflection. I flipped the photo to reverse the picture, and the writing read the right way.
LAZARUS.
A couple of days before I’d seen the same name on Michael’s mobile phone.
I got a second coffee and called Terry Dooley, one of my old contacts at the Met, to tell him the car I’d hired the day before — still in Bristol — had been stolen.
‘You don’t call me for months and then you call me up to tell me your hire car’s been stolen?’ Dooley said. It sounded like he was having lunch. ‘Fuck do I care?’
‘I can’t get down to your hole in the ground to report it. So, I need you to fill in the paperwork for me.’
He laughed. ‘Do I look like your secretary?’
‘Only when you’ve got your lipstick on.’
He said something through a mouthful of food. Then: ‘Davey boy, you and me used to have an understanding. You scratched my back by leaking a few case details as and when I needed you to, and I scratched yours and got you what you needed on whatever investigation tickled your fancy. Now?’ He paused. Continued eating. ‘Now you ain’t got anything I want.’
‘You still owe me.’
‘I don’t owe you shit.’
‘I’ll email you the details, you fill out the form for me and liaise with the rental company, and I’ll carry on pretending I don’t know where Carlton Lane is.’
He stopped eating.
Carlton Lane was where Terry Dooley and three of his detectives were one night about four years before I left the paper. There was a house at the end, hidden from the street by trees, that doubled up as a brothel. One of Dooley’s detectives ended up having too much to drink and punched a girl in the face when she told him he was getting a bit rough. She got revenge the next day by leaking enough details to the newspaper to protect her income and the brothel while landing Dooley and his friends in serious trouble. Luckily for Dooley — and his marriage — the call came through to my phone.
‘You gonna use that on me for the rest of my days?’ he said.
‘Only when I need something. So you’ll do it?’
He sighed. ‘Yeah, whatever.’
‘Good man, Dools.’
‘Just send over your fucking shit, Raker.’
And then he hung up.
I emailed him all the information he’d need to complete the paperwork, then called the car rental company to fill them in, and request a replacement car. They said I’d have to pay an excess on the stolen vehicle, but because I’d taken out premium insurance cover when I’d hired it, the amount would be minimal. Next, I called Vodafone. I told them my phone had been in the car when it was stolen and asked them to redirect all incoming calls to the new phone. They set it up there and then.
After that, I put the two files Cary had sent on the table in front of me.
The first was Myzwik’s. It detailed his record before and after prison, right up until his body was discovered in the reservoir. There was a black-and-white photograph of him from his last arrest. The file confirmed that Myzwik’s body was brought ashore by police divers after part of his coat had been spotted floating on the surface of the water. They’d found his credit cards in a wallet on the other side of the reservoir. Forensics had worked on the recovered hands, but a definitive fingerprint match couldn’t be made, owing to the amount of time the body had been underwater.
Then something hit me.
I reached down into the holdall, took out Alex’s file, and flicked to the odontologist’s findings. Teeth had been found in Alex’s stomach and windpipe. Although the intensity of the fire had shrunk some of them, a fairly precise approximation of his jaw had been reconstructed. This had allowed for eventual identification. At the bottom, before the two pages that were missing, I found what I was looking for: only two teeth had been left in his skull, both loose, both less damaged by the fire. Both had traces of bonding glue — used to secure braces — and an etching agent, which prepares the enamel for sealant. This was consistent with orthodontic work Alex had had as a child, which was why I’d skim-read it the first time round. But now I noticed a pattern: like Alex, Myzwik’s identity had been confirmed using dental records; and, like Alex, he had been found with bonding glue on one of his teeth.
But not just on the enamel.
In both files, in both pathology reports, traces of the same bonding glue had been found on the root of the tooth as well.
Oh, shit.
Parts of the odontologists’ findings were missing from both files; but wherever they’d gone, and whoever had deleted them, they hadn’t got rid of enough. Because I knew what I was looking at now.
Myzwik couldn’t be fingerprinted because the longer the body was in water, the less accurate the technique became; without a face, no one could ID him either. And as Alex’s body was more skeleton than flesh, burnt black from a two-thousand-degree fire, dental records were all anyone had to go on.
Except, like Myzwik, Alex’s teeth weren’t his.
And neither was his body.
The second file was much thinner than the first.
Leyton Green owned two electronics stores in Harrow, and a third in Wembley. The night he died, he’d been driving a dark blue Isuzu Trooper. It was new, bought the week before from a dealership in Hackney. The police had done some background checks on the vehicle, toying with the idea of the murder being related to the purchase of the jeep. But, like everything else in the case, it was a dead end.
The report detailed the night Green was hit by the silver Mondeo. Eyewitness accounts were thin on the ground. A couple of people identified the Mondeo. No one could identify who was driving it.