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44
June 2019
Samuel
It took a full twenty-four hours for us to obtain a warrant to look at Libby Jones’s bank details. During those twenty-four hours, we received the report from the arborist. He confirmed that the trees overhanging the house on Cheyne Walk were indeed London planes, trees of heaven and Persian silk, the exact trees that had formed the basis of the mulch found attached to the remains of Birdie Dunlop-Evers.
We had what we needed. Proof that Birdie’s body had been kept on the roof of number sixteen Cheyne Walk. I experienced a warm feeling of euphoria and sat at my desk smiling for a while.
Donal and I return to Cheyne Walk now, to join the crime scene detectives and Saffron Brown, the forensic investigator.
‘Hi, Sam,’ says Saffron. ‘Good to see you.’
‘Good to see you, too,’ I say and I notice Donal mouth the word ‘Sam’ at me and smile strangely whilst wriggling his eyebrows. I roundly ignore him and turn back to Saffron.
‘I am very sorry for leaving footprints on the roof. I hope it hasn’t hindered your operation?’
‘Not at all, Sam. No problem. But come and look at this.’
We follow her to the bottom of the garden, just past a tree with a circular bench built around it. Here there is a tall wall, grown over entirely with a thick, ropey wisteria. Another forensic investigator is crouched down over a flower bed, pulling items from the soil on to a sheet of plastic. My stomach lurches with shock and I hear Donal gasp.
Bones.
Small white bones.
‘Not what you’re thinking, Sam, don’t worry,’ says Saffron. ‘They’re actually cat bones. Look, here, the skull?’ She picks it up and shows it to us. It is clearly the skull of a small animal and I breathe a sigh of relief.
‘And look,’ she says, guiding us to a spot closer to the back of the house. ‘See this?’ She points at a rectangle of soil. ‘This is where Justin Redding’s herb garden used to be. And these’ – she indicates a pair of large terracotta pots – ‘are the pots that theAtropa belladonnawas grown in, that the owners and the mystery man used to poison themselves with back in 1994.’ She beams at me and I can tell she is loving the unfurling gothic narrative almost as much as I am.
Donal and I leave Saffron and her team there and return to thestation, where we re-examine the police reports from the time of the ‘suicide pact’ bodies being found.
PCs Robbin and Shah had been the first to enter the house the day of the anonymous phone call. They had been followed later on by a crime scene team, and a special family liaison officer called Felicity Measures who dealt with the baby, and the two older Lamb children, Henry and Lucy, had never been traced. The house, according to the police reports, had been filled with strange suggestions of a somewhat cult-like history. The suicide note had been initialled by the dead: ML, HL, DT. Missing persons reports had been extensively trawled at the time looking for someone with the initials DT who matched the mystery corpse’s approximate age and appearance, but no one had ever been found and the search was abandoned three years later.
Miller Roe’s article in theGuardiansuggested a similar dead end during his own investigation in 2015. Although the last line of the article held a glimmer of tantalising hope:
And then, just last week, I found a possible DT. A family man, arrived from France in 1988 at the age of forty-two with his wife and two children, but never heard from again. Only when his mother was close to death in 2006 was a missing person report filed, but the police were unable to trace him and now in 2015 neither am I. So, another dead end, another unpassable road, another mystery to add to the unending mysteries in the case of Serenity Lamb and her rabbit’s foot.
But Miller Roe has still not replied to my email, and he is still not answering his phone. In desperation I ask for his address to bebrought to me from the system. I am told he lives in South Norwood, and I waste an hour of my life driving there and back only to find his flat locked and empty. The upstairs neighbour tells me that Miller Roe doesn’t spend much time at home these days, that he lives mostly with his girlfriend. I ask the neighbour if he knows where the girlfriend lives, and he does not but he tells me that he will be sure to tell Miller that I came, if he ever sees him again.
But finally, an hour ago, the financial report came through and although I am alone at my desk behind a closed door when it arrives, I cannot help but shout out and punch the air and spin in a circle on the toes of my left foot while making strange sounds because there it is, in monochrome on the screen of my computer. On the same day that Libby Jones had the princely sum of £7.45 million paid into her current account, she transferred two separate payments into two other bank accounts of £2.48 million each.
The name on the first account is Miss Marie Valerie Caron. The name on the second account is Mr Phineas Thomson. The name Phineas rings bells. I feel I have heard it before recently and I flick through my notebook, urgently, trying to dislodge the memory. And there it is, written in capitals and underlined: ‘I AM PHIN’. These are the words that Donal had found scrawled on a skirting board at Cheyne Walk, the words I photographed. ‘I AM PHIN’. At the time the words meant nothing. But now they mean everything.
I stride from my office and into the investigation room towards my colleague, Maura. I bring the banking report up on to her screen and I show her the names.
‘Maura,’ I say. ‘I need you to find out everything there is toknow about these people. Absolutely everything. Including on social media.’
Then Donal and I get back into a car and head out to St Albans once again.
Libby is not at her flat. But I remember her mentioning that her friend Dido is the head designer/owner of the kitchen showroom in the centre of the town, so we drive over there and park outside. After we enter the showroom, Dido comes out to us from her office at the back and looks at me with that same wary gaze she had two days before.
‘Oh. Hello?’
‘Good afternoon, Miss Rhodes. I’m sorry to disturb you at your place of work, but we are looking for Miss Jones and she is not at her apartment and she is not answering her phone and we really do need to talk to her as a matter of some urgency. Do you happen to know where she might be?’
The kitchens displayed in Northbone Kitchens’ showroom are very beautiful. I find that I am running my hand unthinkingly along a creamy marble countertop and quickly remove it. I think of my own kitchen counters which are made from a plastic material designed to resemble small blocks of wood and feel suddenly that they are looking dated and that maybe it is time for an upgrade. I pick up a card from a small box on the creamy marble counter and hold it between my thumb and the tip of my middle finger.
Dido shrugs. In fact, she does not just shrug but she heaves her entire upper body up towards her ears, turns up her hands, palm first and protrudes her lower lip. ‘No idea.’
