She was impatient to hear what he had to say, but he fetched a decanter of Scotch and poured a good measure.
‘Would you like one?’
‘No, thank you. Please, this is very important, Mr Markham. If you recognize this man-’
‘Just a second… I need a drop of water with this.’
Anna wanted to scream, but he came back quickly.
‘Okay. I have to piece this together because it was a long time ago, but…’
He picked up Henry Oates’s photograph.
‘Remember I said that I had to dismantle a wall at the Jordans’… well, I was wheeling the bricks out to my van, as they were nice old ones and I knew I could re-use them and… he came up to me and asked if there were any odd jobs I could give him.’
‘You never mentioned this before?’
‘No, the reason being he wasn’t employed to work at the Jordans’ and without this photograph… I just didn’t think. I gave him twenty quid to help stack up the bricks in the back of my van.’
‘Do you remember his name?’
‘Yes, Henry… Christ, I am so sorry, but you know, when I was first questioned I’d finished off the garden work at the Jordans’ almost six months previously and I was expanding my own company. I mean, if they’d shown me this photograph of course I’d have said something, but it was really more to do with where I was on the day Rebekka disappeared. I gave them the names of the guys who had helped me on the job and they were questioned, I think, but this…’
‘So on this day when he helped you wheel out the bricks, did he go into the Jordans’ back garden?’
‘Yeah, he would have had to, shit!’
‘Is that the only time you saw him?’
‘No. It must have been about one, maybe two weeks later that he turned up here looking for work. He looked down on his luck, I felt sorry for him and paid him fifty quid to clear out our septic tank as it was blocked up.’
‘How did he know where you lived?’
‘From the time before with the bricks. He came back here in the van to help me unload them. I was going to give him more odd jobs to do but Mum had a set-to with him.’
Mrs Markham walked back in with a towel.
‘Have they marked the sofa? How many times must I tell you to always keep the kitchen door closed as they dive in here at the slightest opportunity. You’ll have to hose them down, they’re filthy.’
‘Mother, do you remember this man?’
Anna couldn’t believe it. Mrs Markham picked up the photograph and pulled a face.
‘Yes I do, ghastly creature, I wanted him off my property. You remember I found him skulking around in the kitchen. He smelled dreadful and I said to him, what do you want, and he said a glass of water, I said I had taken a jug out not ten minutes before. It was the time the septic tank was blocked.’
Anna stood up and took a deep breath.
‘Could you both please sit down, this is very important. The man you have both recognized is a suspect in a murder enquiry. It is imperative I get the dates and times you remember seeing him as we believe he could have been involved in Rebekka Jordan’s and another girl’s disappearance.’
‘Oh God, this is terrible. He was in my kitchen!’
She grabbed Andrew’s Scotch from his hand and downed it in one.
Over at the multi-storey car park, Barolli now knew the dates when Henry Oates had worked on the construction site. The last one was the day after Fidelis Julia Flynn was known to be alive. They’d established that Oates was working the ticket machine area alone, with Pavel occasionally checking on him. His job, which he had completed, had been to finish digging out the area then pump in two foot of ready-mix concrete. He was supposed to turn up the next day when the cement was dry to help tile the floor, but he never showed up at the site again.
The archaeologists were almost finished with their GPR analysis and had found nothing that might suggest that a body was buried under the concrete. They told Barolli, who had remained at the scene throughout, that there was nothing more they could do and once they had finished the last section they were going to call it a day. Barolli then rang Mike Lewis to give him the bad news. Mike was naturally very disappointed but thought it strange that if Oates had abducted and murdered Fidelis he should turn up for work the next day, especially if he’d actually buried her there. The day’s events suggested that Oates might have hidden her body elsewhere. Before hanging up, Mike asked Paul to keep the two archaeologists on site as he not only wanted to come and thank them personally for their time and effort but also to seek their advice on further searches of the area.
By the time he got there the archaeologists had set up arc lights and one of them was in the lift shaft.
‘Wasn’t the lift built before Oates ever worked here?’ asked Mike.
‘Yeah, and we weren’t going to bother looking, but I remembered a manslaughter case I was involved with a few years back,’ Barolli began.
‘Paul, this is a murder enquiry…’
‘I know, but the job was a health and safety case. Engineer was working on a lift that had broken down between two floors. He left the door open, no safety tape, no nothing, some poor bloke walked straight in and fell three floors down to the bottom of the shaft.’
‘And your point is…’
‘There’s a recessed area, like a car inspection pit, below the ground floor, big enough to put a body in. So we thought it was worth a look. The archaeologist’s taken a hand-held radar down with him.’
Mike was impressed and patted Paul on the back. They watched the monitor screen, grey and fuzzy as the GPR inched slowly across the lift-shaft floor.
‘I’ve been staring at this all bloody day,’ Barolli moaned.
The lead archaeologist pointed to the screen.
‘We’ve got something.’
Barolli and Mike leaned closer, not really sure what they were looking at. The archaeologist hit a button on the laptop and a three-dimensional image started to appear. Like an ominous shadow a dark shape began to form. They were unable to detect exactly what it was, just that it was some kind of figure just below the surface of the concrete.
‘Is it what I think it is?’ asked Mike.
‘That’s what I’d expect to see with a buried body,’ said the archaeologist. ‘As to who it is… well, that’s up to forensics and pathology.’
Barolli gave Mike an admiring glance. He had certainly grown in confidence – maybe not having Langton breathing down his neck all the time was paying off.
Although time was of the essence, it was almost dark and the archaeologists had been working all day, so Mike was hesitant about continuing the work through the night. The two archaeologists were both now on a high and keen to keep going. It was agreed that they would get some colleagues in to continue the excavation while they took a couple of hours’ break.
‘This is gonna cost,’ Barolli said.
‘I know,’ said Mike slowly, ‘but I think we may have just found Fidelis Julia Flynn.’
Chapter Ten
It was 7 p.m. when Anna joined the entire team in the incident room as Mike was giving a briefing update. He brought out photographs of the lift shaft and a copy of the picture from the monitor screen showing the shrouded shape encased in concrete. The identity could not be confirmed until they had completed the excavation and removed the body to the mortuary for full forensics and a post mortem examination. Digging out the body was not going to be an easy task and would take some time. Not only were they working in a confined space using specialist cutting equipment, but the archaeologists would have to slowly and painstakingly cut round and under the body to try and remove it as a block.
He explained all that he and Barolli had learnt about Oates’s employment on the site. On the day Fidelis disappeared he had completed digging out the ticket machine area and left work at six in the evening. The next day he filled it with ready-mix concrete pumped in by hose from a truck and was due to return the following day but he never turned up for work again. Mike went on to say that as the car park was near completion the site barriers had been removed and overnight security consisted of a guard in a Portakabin who was supposed to patrol the grounds every hour.