‘There’s another anomaly,’ says Oliver Rabb, adjusting his crooked bowtie and dabbing at his forehead with a matching handkerchief.
When I don’t answer he keeps talking. ‘Tyler turned on his mobile and turned it off again at 7.35 a.m. It was on for just over twenty-one seconds.’
The information rises and falls over me.
Oliver is looking at me expectantly. ‘You wanted me to check for anomalies. You seemed to think they were important. I think I know what he was doing. He was taking a photograph.’
Finally there is awareness. It’s not a grand vision or a blinding insight. Things have become clearer, clearer than yesterday.
Gideon took photographs of Julianne and Charlie. He used a mobile phone camera, which had to be turned on for the pictures to be taken. The anomalies can been explained. They support a theory.
Oliver follows me upstairs, through the incident room. I don’t notice if detectives are back at their desks. I don’t notice if my left hand is pill rolling or my left arm is swinging normally. These things are unimportant.
I go straight to the map on the wall. A second white pin is stuck alongside the first. Oliver is trying to explain his reasoning.
‘Yesterday’s anomaly happened at 3.07 p.m. The mobile was turned on for fourteen seconds but he didn’t make a call. Later, he transmitted a photograph from the same phone to your wife’s mobile. Afterwards, he left the handset on a bus.’
He pulls the image up on screen showing Charlie with her head encased in tape and a hosepipe in her mouth. I can almost hear the rasp of her breath through the narrow opening.
‘The second anomaly was this morning, just before he sent another photograph- the picture of your wife. It explains things.’
Gideon knew police could trace a mobile every time he turned it on. He didn’t make mistakes. In each case he turned on the mobile phone for a reason. Two signals. Two photographs.
‘Can you trace the signals?’ I ask.
‘I was struggling when there was only one, but now it might be feasible.’
I sit alongside him, unable to comprehend most of what he’s doing. Waves of numbers cross the screen as he quizzes the software, overrides error messages and circumvents problems. Oliver seems to be writing the software as he goes along.
‘Both signals were picked up by a ten metre GSM tower in The Mall, less than half a mile from the Clifton Suspension Bridge,’ he says. ‘The DOA points to a location west of the tower.’
‘How far?’
‘I’m going multiply the TOA- Time of Arrival- with the signal propagation speed.’
He types and talks, using some sort of equation to do the calculation. The answer doesn’t please him.
‘Anywhere between two hundred and twelve hundred metres.’
Oliver takes a black marker pen and draws a large teardrop shape on the map. The narrow end is at the tower and the widest part covers dozens of streets, a section of the Avon River and half of Leigh Woods.
‘A second GSM tower picked up the signature and sent a message back but the first tower had already established contact.’ Again he points to the map. ‘The second tower is here. It’s the same one that carried the last mobile call to Mrs Wheeler before she jumped.’
Oliver goes back to his laptop. ‘The DOA is different. North to north-east. There’s an overlapping connectivity.’
The science is beginning to lose me. Rising from his chair again, Oliver goes back to the map and draws a second teardrop shape, this one overlapping the first. The common area covers perhaps a thousand square yards and a dozen streets. How long would it take to doorknock every house?
‘We need a satellite map,’ I say.
Oliver is ahead of me. The image on his laptop blurs and then slowly comes into focus. We appear to be falling from space. Topographical details take shape- hills, rivers, streets, the suspension bridge.
I walk to the door and yell, ‘Where’s the DI?’
A dozen heads turn. Safari Roy answers. ‘She’s with the Chief Constable.’
‘Get her! She has to organise a search.’
A siren wails into the afternoon, rising from the crowded streets into a coin-coloured sky. This is how it began less than four weeks ago. If I could turn back the clock would I step into that police car at the university and go to the Clifton Suspension Bridge?
No. I’d walk away. I’d make excuses. I’d be the husband Julianne wants me to be- the one who runs the other way and shouts for help.
Ruiz is alongside me, holding on to the roof handle as the car swings through another corner. Monk is in the front passenger seat, yelling commands.
‘Take the next left. Cut in front of this bastard. Cross over. Go round this bus. Get that arsehole’s number plate.’
The driver punches through a red light, ignoring the screeching brakes and car horns. At least four police cars are in our convoy. A dozen more are coming from other parts of the city. I can hear them chattering over the two-way.
The traffic is banked up along Marlborough Street and Queens Road. We pull on to the opposite side of the road onto the footpath. Pedestrians scatter like pigeons.
The cars rendezvous in Caledonia Place alongside a narrow strip of parkland that separates it from West Mall. We’re in a wealthy area, full of large terraces, bed amp; breakfast hotels and boarding houses. Some of them are four storeys high, painted in pastel shades, with outside plumbing and window boxes. Thin wisps of smoke curl from chimneys, drifting west over the river.
A police bus arrives carrying another twenty officers. DI Cray issues instructions, unshakeable amid the melee. Officers are going door to door, talking to neighbours, showing photographs, making a note of any empty flats and houses. Someone must have seen something.
I look again at the satellite map unfurled across a car bonnet. Statistics don’t make science. And all human behaviour cannot be quantified by numbers or reduced to equations, no matter what someone like Oliver Rabb might think. Places are significant. Journeys are significant. Every excursion or expedition we take is a story, an inner narrative that we sometimes don’t even realise we’re following. What was Gideon’s journey? He boasted that he could melt through walls, but he was more like human wallpaper, able to blend in and become simply background while he watched houses and broke into them.
He was there when Christine Wheeler jumped. He whispered in her ear. He must have been somewhere close. I look at the terraces, studying the skyline. The Clifton Suspension Bridge is less than two hundred yards to the west of here. I can smell the sea stink and gorse. Some of these addresses are likely to have a view of the bridge from the upper floors.
A man rides past on a bicycle with elastic around his trouser legs to stop the fabric getting caught in the chain. A woman walks her black spaniel on the grass. I want to stop them, grasp them by the upper arms and roar into their faces, demanding to know if they have seen my wife and daughter. Instead, I stand and study the street, looking for something out of the ordinary: people in the wrong place, or the wrong clothes, something that doesn’t belong or tries too hard to belong or draws the eye for another reason.
Gideon would have a chosen a house, not a flat; somewhere away from the prying eyes of neighbours, isolated or shielded, with a driveway or a garage so he could take his vehicle off the road and move Charlie and Julianne inside without being seen. A house that is up for sale, perhaps, or one that is only used for holidays or weekends.
I step across the muddy patch of grass and begin walking along the street. The trunks of trees are wreathed in wire and the branches shiver in the wind.
‘Where the hell are you going?’ yells the DI.
‘I’m looking for a house.’
Ruiz catches up to me and Monk is not far behind, having been sent to keep us out of trouble. I keep looking at the skyline and trying not to stumble. My cane click-clacks on the pavement as I head down the slight hill past a row of terraces and turn into Sion Lane. I still can’t see the bridge.
The next street across is Westfield Place. A front door is open. A middle-aged woman is sweeping the steps.
‘Can you see the bridge from here?’ I ask.
‘No, love.’
‘What about the top floor?’
‘The estate agent called it “glimpses”,’ she laughs. ‘You lost?’
I show her the photographs of Charlie and Julianne. ‘Have you seen either of them?’
She shakes her head.
‘What about this man?’
‘I’d remember him,’ she says, when the opposite is probably true.
We keep moving along Westfield Place. The wind is whipping up leaves and sweet wrappers that chase each other along the gutter. Abruptly I cross the street to a brick wall with stone capping.
‘Give me a leg-up,’ says Ruiz, before stepping into Monk’s cupped hands and being hoisted upwards until his forearms are braced along the white painted capping.
‘It’s a garden,’ he says. ‘There’s a house further along.’
‘Can you see the bridge?’
‘Not from here, but you might be able to see it from the top of the house. There’s a turret room.’
He jumps down and we follow the wall, looking for a gate. Monk is now ahead. I can’t match his stride and have to run every few yards to catch up.
Stone pillars mark the entrance to a driveway. The gates are open. Tyres have crushed leaves into the puddles. A car has been here recently.
The house is large and from another age. Overgrown with ivy on one side, it has small dark windows poking through the leaves. The roof is steep with an octagonal turret on the western corner.
The place looks empty. Closed up. Curtains are drawn and leaves have collected on the main steps and entrance portico. I follow Monk up the steps. He rings the doorbell. Nobody answers. I call Charlie’s name and then Julianne’s, pressing my face against a slender pane of frosted glass, trying to catch the tiny vibrations of a reply. Imagining it.
Ruiz has gone to check out a garage at the side of the house, beneath the trees. He disappears through a side door and then appears again immediately.
‘It’s Tyler’s van,’ he yells. ‘It’s empty.’
My head fills with tumbling and leaping emotions. Hope.
Monk is on the phone to DI Cray. ‘Tell her to get an ambulance,’ I say.
He relays the message and snaps the phone shut. Then he raises his elbow and drives it hard against the glass pane, which shatters and falls inward. Reaching gingerly inside, he unlocks the door and swings it open.
The hall is wide and paved with black and white tiles. It has a mirror and an umbrella stand, as well as a side table with a Chinese takeaway menu and list of emergency numbers.
The lights are working, but the switches seem to be camouflaged against the floral wallpaper. The place has been closed up for the winter, with sheets and rugs covering the furniture and the fire grates swept clean. I imagine figures lurking unseen, hiding in corners trying not to make a sound.
Behind us a trio of police cars streams through the gates and up the gravel driveway. Doors open. DI Cray leads them up the front steps.
Gideon said Julianne and Charlie were buried in a box, breathing the same air. I don’t want to believe him. So much of what he said to people was designed to wound and to break them.
I stand swaying in the dining room, watching a spill of light from the patio doors. There are muddy footprints on the parquetry squares.
Ruiz has climbed the stairs. He calls to me. I mount the stairs two at a time, gripping the banister and dragging myself upwards. My cane falls from my hand and clatters down the steps to the black and white tiles.
‘In here,’ he yells.
I pause at the door. Ruiz is kneeling beside a narrow cast iron bed. A child is curled on a mattress, her eyes and mouth taped shut. I do not remember uttering a sound, but Charlie’s head rises and turns to my voice and she lets out a muffled sob. Her head rocks from side to side. I have to hold her still while Ruiz finds a pair of dressmaking scissors lying on a thin mattress in another corner of the bedroom.
His hands are shaking. So are mine. The blades of the scissors open and close gently and I peel back the tape. I am staring at her with a kind of wonderment, mouth open, still not able to believe it’s her. I meet Charlie’s blue eyes. I am seeing her through a shining fluid that will not be blinked away.
She is dirty. Her hair has been hacked to her skull. Her skin is torn. Her wrists are bleeding. She is the most beautiful creature to ever draw breath.
I crush her to my chest. I rock her in my arms. I want to hold her until she stops crying, until she forgets everything. I want to hold her until she remembers only the warmth of my embrace and my words in her ears and my tears on her forehead.
Charlie is wearing a bathrobe. Her jeans are on a chair.
‘Did he…?’ The words get caught in my throat. ‘Did he touch you?’
She blinks at me, not understanding.
‘Did he make you do things? You can tell me. It’s OK.’
She shakes her head and wipes her nose with her sleeve.
‘Where’s your mum?’ I ask.
She frowns at me.
‘Have you seen her?’
‘No. Where is she?’
I look at Monk and Ruiz. They’re already moving. The house is being searched. I can hear doors being opened, cupboards explored, heavy boots sound from the attic and the turret room. Silence. It lasts half a dozen heartbeats. The boots start moving again.
Charlie puts her head back on my chest. Monk comes back with a set of 24” bolt cutters. I hold her ankles still as he eases the jaws around the shackles, pushing the arms together until the metal breaks and the chain snakes to the floor.
An ambulance has arrived. The paramedics are outside the bedroom door. One of them is young and blonde, carrying a first aid box.
‘I want to get dressed,’ says Charlie, suddenly self-conscious.
‘Sure. Just let these officers take a look at you. Just to be sure.’
I tear myself away from her and go downstairs. Ruiz is in the kitchen with Veronica Cray. The house has been searched. Now detectives are scouring the garden and the garage, poking at dead leaves with heavy boots, squatting to peer at the compost heap.
The trees along the northern border are skeletal and the shed has a derelict forsaken look. A wrought iron table and matching chairs are rusting under an elm tree, where colonies of toadstools have sprung up after the rains.
I walk out the back door, past the laundry and across the sodden lawn. I have the uncanny sense of the birds falling silent and the ground sucking at my shoes. My cane sinks into the earth as I walk between flowerbeds and past lemon trees in enormous stone pots. An incinerator built from breezeblocks is against the back fence, alongside a pile of old railway-sleepers meant for garden edging.
Veronica Cray is alongside me.
‘We can have ground-penetrating radar here within the hour. There are cadaver dogs in Wiltshire.’
I stop at the shed. The lock has been smashed open in the search and the door sags on rusting hinges. Inside smells of diesel, fertiliser and earth. A large sit-on lawnmower squats in the centre of the floor. There are metal shelves along two walls and garden tools propped in the corner. The blade of the shovel is clean and dry.
Come on, Gideon, talk to me. Tell me what you’ve done with her. You were talking half-truths. You said you’d bury her so deep I’d never find her. You said she and Charlie were sharing the same air. Everything you did was practiced. Planned. Your lies contained elements of the truth, which made them easier to maintain.
Leaning on my cane, I reach down and pick up the padlock and broken latch, brushing away mud. Tiny silver scratches are visible against the tarnished metal.
Then I look back into the shed. The wheels of the mower have been turned, wiping away the dust. My eyes study the shelves, the seed trays, aphid sprays and weedkiller. A garden hose is looped on a metal hook. I follow the coils, growing dizzy. One end of the hose droops downward against the upright frame of the shelf.
‘Help me move the mower,’ I say.
The DI grabs the seat and I push from the front, steering it out the door. The floor is compacted dirt. I try to move the shelf. It’s too heavy. Monk pushes me aside and wraps his arms either end, rocking it from one side to the other, walking it towards the door. Seed trays and bottles topple to the floor.
Dropping to my knees, I crawl forward. The compacted earth becomes softer near the wall where the shelf used to stand. A large piece of plywood has been screwed into place. The hosepipe hangs down the plywood and seems to disappear inside it.
I glance back at Veronica Cray and Monk.
‘There’s something behind the wall. Get some lights in here.’
They won’t let me dig. They won’t let me watch. Teams of two officers are taking turns, using shovels and buckets to scrape away the floor. A police car has been driven across the lawn and its headlights are allowing them to see.
Shielding my eyes to the brightness, I can see Charlie through the kitchen window. The blonde paramedic has given her something warm to drink and wrapped a blanket around her shoulders.
‘Someone you love is going to die,’ Gideon told me. He asked me to choose. I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it. ‘No choice is still a choice,’ he said. ‘I’m going to let Julianne decide.’ The other thing Gideon said was that I would remember him. Whether he died today or spent a lifetime in prison, he wouldn’t be forgotten.
Julianne told me that she didn’t love me any more. She said that I was a different person to the one she married. She was right. Mr Parkinson has seen to that. I am different- more pensive, philosophical and melancholic. This disease has not broken me against a rock, but it is like a parasite with tentacles coiling inside me, taking over my movements. I try not to let it show. I fail.
I don’t want to know if she’s had an affair with Eugene Franklin or Dirk Cresswell. I don’t care. No, that’s not true. I do care. It’s just that I care more about getting her back safely. I am to blame, but this is not about seeking redemption or easing a swollen conscience. Julianne will never forgive me. I know that. I will give her whatever she wants. I will make her any promise. I will walk away. I will let her go. Just let her be alive.
Monk calls for help. Two more officers join him. The digging has exposed the lowest edge of the plywood. They’re going to rip down the wall.
Dust and dirt reflect in the beams of the headlights, penetrating the cavity. Julianne’s body is inside, curled in a foetal ball, with her knees touching her chin and hands cradling her head. I catch a whiff of the urinous smell and see the blueness of her skin.
Other men’s hands reach into the cavity and lift her body out. Monk takes her from the others and carries her into the light, stepping over a mound of earth and placing her on a stretcher. Her head is encased in plastic tape. The headlights have turned her body to silver.
A blonde paramedic pulls a hose from Julianne’s mouth, replacing it with her lips, forcing air into her lungs. They’re cutting the tape from her head.
‘Pupils dilated. Her abdomen is cold. She’s hypothermic,’ says the paramedic, yelling to her partner. ‘I got a pulse.’
They roll Julianne gently onto her back. Blankets cover her nakedness. The blonde paramedic is kneeling on the stretcher putting heat packs on Julianne’s neck.
‘What’s wrong?’ I ask.
‘Her core body temperature is too low. Her heartbeat is erratic.’
‘Make her warm.’
‘I wish it were that easy. We have to get her to hospital.’
She’s not shivering. She’s not moving at all. An oxygen mask is pulled over her face.
‘Coming through.’
Julianne’s eyes flutter open, blind as a kitten in the brightness. She tries to say something but it comes out as a weak groan. Her mouth moves again.
‘Charlie’s safe. She’s fine,’ I tell her.
The paramedic issues instructions. ‘Tell her not to talk.’
‘Just lie still.’
Julianne isn’t listening. Her head moves from side to side. She wants to say something. I press my cheek close to the oxygen mask. ‘He said she was in a box. I tried not to breathe. I tried to save the air.’
‘He lied.’
Her hand snakes out from beneath the blankets and grabs my wrist. It’s like ice.
‘I remembered what you said. You said he wouldn’t kill Charlie. Otherwise I would have stopped breathing.’
I know.
We’re almost at the doors to the ambulance. Charlie comes sprinting out of the house, across the grass. Two detectives try to stop her. She feints left and goes right, ducking under their arms.
Ruiz hooks her around the waist and carries her the final few yards. She throws herself at Julianne, calling her Mummy. I haven’t heard her use the word in four years.
‘Be careful. Don’t squeeze her too hard,’ warns the young blonde paramedic.
‘Do you have children?’ I ask her.
‘No.’
‘You’ll learn it doesn’t hurt when they squeeze you hard.’