You Will Never Find Me (31 page)

‘If she's a drug user . . . people like that don't get reported missing unless she had someone close.'

‘Like Amy, you mean?'

‘It's a thought,' said Chapel. ‘Depends how far out of the woodwork she's prepared to come.'

‘I'm sorry, Roy. I know I should have kept you better informed, asked you to stand down when I thought she'd been murdered, but as it turns out you've been doing the right thing. How's it been going digging up leads on Amy?'

‘I interviewed her friend Karen and a couple of other girls they hang out with. I've got all the names of the clubs they went to. I've also got a timeline of those nights they went out with each other and looked at the times when Amy split from the group and how long they were apart. And there was one occasion when Amy disappeared completely, never came home.'

‘That came out when we first reported her missing to the police,' said Boxer.

‘There's not much I've been able to find out about that night,' said Chapel. ‘What I have done is drawn up a maximum radius of operation given the timings. I've also analysed musical tastes, see if Amy differed from the others. She was more into electronic trance music. Take a few pills, disappear into the sound. Don't come out of it for hours. Absorb the music rather than listen to it.'

‘I didn't know that. Mercy's never mentioned it,' said Boxer. ‘You might want to look at comedy clubs doing stand-up, too. Open-mike nights when newcomers can get an airing.'

‘All right, that's good. Interesting to know she was into that.'

‘She did a schools' night at the Comedy Store and it went down well apparently. Once you've felt that kind of attention as a kid, it can be addictive. This is the first weekend since she disappeared.'

‘She's thought this out, Charlie. If she's sensible she'll keep a low profile for longer than a week.'

‘Unless she thinks we're still looking for her in Madrid.'

‘By the way, I'm not going to go round these clubs myself. No one's going to talk to a fifty-five-year-old ex-copper.'

‘So who've you got in mind?'

‘My son, Tony. He's twenty-four. Unemployed. Needs the money. And he knows the scene. You met him the other day helping me pack up the office.'

‘What do you want to pay him?'

‘He'll be happy with fifty quid a night plus expenses,' said Chapel. ‘It's not like he won't be enjoying himself.'

Boxer hung up as he arrived at the Royal Free Hospital, found his way to ICU.

Through the glass he could see that Esme was breathing on her own. The nurse came alongside and explained that the brain scan had gone well and they'd taken her off the ventilator at around two o'clock, a couple of hours after the dialysis finished. From now on she was under observation. It was just a question of getting her to regain consciousness.

Boxer went into the unit, sat by her bedside, took her hand. He told her the whole story in all its detail. As he drew near to the end he bent down and put his lips close to her ear.

‘I know you love her, Esme. I know it's been your little secret, that you've hidden from me just how much you love her. She's part of you, isn't she, Esme? So I just want you to know I've had the results of the DNA test on the tissue samples that were taken from the body part. They couldn't match her to me or to Mercy. You know what that means? It means that Amy is not dead. The body found with her clothes and passport did not belong to her. She's alive. Did you get that, Esme? Amy is alive.'

There was a fluttering as of an insect on Boxer's cheek. A little wetness. He pulled back to see that her eyes were open. He looked into them. The same green as his own.

‘Welcome back,' he said.

I
t's going to cost a little more,' said the concierge from the Hotel Moderno, sitting opposite Raul Brito, beers between them.

‘Like what?'

‘A hundred.'

‘This crisis, you know, it's getting me down,' said Brito. ‘It's like every word costs money these days.'

‘They're taxing gossip now,' said the concierge, ‘on advice from the Troika. They know the Spanish can't live without it.'

‘You know, if I wasn't such an arsehole I'd believe you.'

Raul Brito was not like the young journalists at
Interviú
; he was an old-fashioned newshound. He used his computer only to file his stories and read match reports about his beloved Real Madrid, although he actually preferred to sit in a café with his copy of
Marca
and join in the endless speculation.

‘So what's the extra I'm paying for?'

‘The father stayed at the hotel too. I got copies of both their passports.'

Inside the envelope the concierge had photocopies of Amy and Charles Boxer's passports, their registration forms, their home addresses and signatures. Brito handed over two fifties, no further questions.

 

‘We've got something,' shouted the diver, breaking the surface, tearing out his mouthpiece.

Inspector Jefe Luís Zorrita raised his arms, saluted the teams. It had been a long, hard and fruitless day. After yesterday's gruesome find of a bag containing the girl's thighs and buttocks under a bridge north of Perales del Rio near Villaverde, they'd gone further north to a major junction with four crossing points, where a team of divers had spent most of the day and found nothing. The other team went south of Perales del Rio on the M301 with instructions to search the river wherever the road crossed water. Four separate dives failed to produce anything. The two teams reached San Martín de la Vega in the late afternoon with nothing to show.

It was a long way south to the next crossing point. Zorrita and the divers hovered over the map and decided to head north to Vallequillas Norte, check those two crossing points and call it a day. The first point seemed the most likely dropping zone and they made a dive there. There were no forensic teams with them so they carried large plastic evidence boxes in their vehicles.

Finally they'd got lucky.

The diver brought the bag to the riverbank and put it straight into an evidence box. Zorrita put on a pair of latex gloves and undid the knot at the neck of the bin liner. The light was fading and he asked one of the divers to hold a torch.

‘This is it,' he said. ‘The one we've been waiting for. The girl's head and there's a handbag in here too. Send it back to the lab straight away.'

His sub-inspector sealed the box and carried it away. From the car he called the forensic team and asked them to wait in the lab.

It was nearly an hour's drive to the Unidad Policía Científica on Calle Julián Gonzalez Segador, which meant all members of the forensic team were suited up and ready to go. They opened the box and laid out the contents of the bin liner. A female head with hair roughly chopped off. Two upper arms, elbow to shoulder, a pair of black shoes and a small black handbag.

‘There's something weird about the eyes, don't you think?' said Carmen, one of the female technicians. ‘They shouldn't be as bright as that. The cornea should be cloudy by now.'

The senior forensic scientist took a closer look with some magnifying specs.

‘Coloured contact lenses,' he said, ‘to make the eyes look light green.'

‘Do you mind if we take a quick look at the contents of the handbag?' said Zorrita.

The forensics emptied it out. One compact. One lipstick. One fold-up hairbrush. Three condoms.

‘What were you hoping for?' asked the forensic.

‘Some form of identity.'

‘What about the passport we found on Wednesday morning?'

‘The tissue sample from the leg didn't match either parent's DNA,' said Zorrita. ‘She was carrying the girl's passport, but it wasn't hers. As you can tell from those contact lenses, she was pretending to be someone else: a girl called Amy Boxer, who had green eyes. Now we've got to find out who she really is.'

‘There's probably an internal zip compartment in the handbag,' said Carmen.

The forensic scientist went back to the bag, found the zip and retrieved a UK passport.

‘Chantrelle Taleisha Grant,' he said.

Zorrita asked him to spell it, read out the number and issue date, which he took down in his notebook. He held up a shot of Amy Boxer alongside the undamaged photo of Chantrelle Grant to compare. There was a likeness, not startling but enough.

‘Imagine those eyes as light green,' said Zorrita. ‘Let's compare Chantrelle's passport photo to the head we've just found.'

The features of the severed head had not decomposed, but the skin colour and texture was like grey putty. For the passport photo her hair had been tied back away from her face.

‘There's a similarity in face shape,' said the forensic scientist. ‘The ears match and eyebrow to hairline is the same. No distinguishing marks in the photo, though. I wouldn't like to commit myself given the history of this case.'

‘That damage to her face . . . ?' said Zorrita.

‘The coroner needs to take a look at that, but it doesn't look like the cause of death to me.'

‘Any signs of other damage?'

‘Not on the skull. I wouldn't say the cause of death was a traumatic blow to the head, but you never know.'

The forensic scientist was turning the head around in his hands. He was experienced, had spent thirty years looking at these sorts of things.

‘We're going to have to wait until morning now, aren't we?'

‘For the coroner to do an autopsy? Yes. He'd probably want to see a torso, too. Internal organs. Look at this on the neck,' he said, pointing out two nicks on either side over the carotid arteries. ‘Just as we thought: the killer bled the body out before he cut it up and dumped it.'

Zorrita walked the length of the table looking at the remains of a life. ‘What about the arms?' he said. ‘Any distinguishing marks on them?'

‘There's a vaccination mark, and we have a tattoo on the outside of the . . . left arm. A red and black five-pointed star. If you can match that to the butterfly we found on the buttock yesterday . . . '

‘In the back of a British passport there's an emergencies page,' said the sub-inspector, looking at his smartphone. ‘There should be the names and addresses of two relatives.'

The forensic flicked through to the back page.

‘Alice Grant, and there's a London address.'

 

Any self-respecting journalist had direct contacts in the homicide squad of the Cuerpo Nacional de Policía and Raul Brito was no exception. But he also knew that wasn't enough, that there were lots of groups handling many different cases, and that to really develop a breaking story he needed to know what was happening before most people knew it had happened. This meant he had a network that spread through communications centres, suburban police stations, forensic teams and coroners, as well as the justice system.

One of the linchpins of this network was his niece Luz, who worked in the main Madrid police communications centre, which handled requests from all the patrol cars in the city and surroundings. She was one of the first people Brito contacted after his meeting with Jaime and Jesús, while waiting for the concierge from the Hotel Moderno to turn up. Luz knew about the first body part found near Perales del Rio as she'd been on the early shift on Wednesday 21st March, and by the time her uncle called she was even able to tell him about the second bag and the extra team of divers who'd been assigned and where they were working. All Brito had to do was ask her to call him when she heard if any of the diving teams found anything else and where they were going to take it, with as much detail as possible. To Luz and her colleagues this was a harmless game which made them feel a little important—that they were somehow involved in breaking news stories.

At around seven o'clock Brito got the call from Luz, who was off work and at home but had left instructions with her colleagues to keep her informed. This meant that Raul Brito was the first outsider to know that a third bag had been found, that it contained a girl's head and a handbag, that it was being taken to the forensic lab on Calle Julián Gonzalez Segador in a car containing Inspector Jefe Luís Zorrita, his sub-inspector, and even who the driver was. Unfortunately he knew none of these officers, but within half an hour he managed to find out all the names of the people on the forensics team. And one of them, Carmen, he did know.

*

‘The Mercedes CLS was found in Cromwell Avenue, a residential street in Highgate,' said Mercy to the assembled Crisis Management Committee in Netherhall Gardens. ‘DS Papadopoulos has done a door-to-door on all the houses with a sightline of the car and has two witnesses who saw a large lone male getting out of the car wearing a black overcoat, black gloves, grey trousers and a grey tweed trilby pulled down low over his forehead. He locked the car and walked off in the direction of Highgate Hill. The car has now been removed and is undergoing forensic examination. We've taken samples of Sasha's fingerprints from this house and we'll see if we get a match with any in the car.'

‘What about Jeremy Spencer?' asked Kidd. ‘Any news on his murder?'

‘They haven't found anybody who saw or heard anything yet. All we know is that last night Spencer did erg training with a friend at the Imperial College boathouse gym on the Embankment at Putney. He left there at 10:15
P.M.
and would have been home within five minutes. There's no sign of forced entry so either he knew his assailants and let them in, or they already had keys made, possibly with the assistance of Irina Demidova. Given that he died from drowning and was probably in the bath after his workout, it would suggest the latter scenario is more likely.'