Mimic Page 14

  ‘I’m sorry. I really don’t know what you’re talking about. I have to go now. Excuse me.’

  Coates showed no sign of moving as he watched the emotions play across her face in fascination.

  ‘You’re free to do as you please,’ he told her, the kettle twitching in his hand.

  Marshall remained where she stood, unwilling to pass within such close proximity of him:

  ‘I can’t get by.’

  ‘Of course you can,’ he assured her, smile collapsing as he watched her lift her collar up to her mouth.

  ‘I can’t get out,’ she said loudly. ‘I need help.’

  The front and back doors burst open simultaneously as Chambers and Winter rushed inside, surrounding their prime suspect in his own kitchen.

  ‘You OK?’ Chambers asked her on noticing the wet blood on the floor.

  She nodded and moved over to stand beside him.

  ‘I’ll be taking those Custard Creams now,’ Winter told Coates, but knew in his heart of hearts that it hadn’t been the Schwarzeneggerism he’d been aiming for.

  Placing the kettle down on the surface, Coates regarded his guests in turn:

  ‘Ah. Chambers.’ He nodded in greeting. ‘And Detective Constable … Adam Winter,’ he recalled, as if it all made sense now. ‘I thought we had moved past this.’

  ‘We were in the area,’ Chambers shrugged. ‘Thought we might come and collect our friend.’

  ‘And the dog,’ Marshall added, gesturing to the terrified animal in the corner.

  ‘And the dog,’ Chambers agreed.

  ‘The animal stays with me,’ Coates told him simply. ‘I suppose I’d be wasting my breath to ask whether you have a warrant to be in my house?’

  Their lack of response was answer enough.

  ‘Then I demand that you leave. Goodbye,’ he said curtly before turning to Marshall. ‘It was a pleasure seeing you again, Jordan,’ he smiled before herding them out, watching from his broken front door as they crossed the garden.

  But as they reached the gate, Chambers stuck his fingers into his mouth and whistled loudly:

  ‘Come on, boy!’ he called, the puppy tearing down the hallway, barging past Coates, and following them outside without needing to be asked twice.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Marshall as they piled into the van.

  Winter started the engine: ‘Where to?’

  ‘Just get us out of here,’ replied Chambers, watching Coates watching him as they pulled away.

  ‘Cellini?!’ bellowed Chambers as Winter parked up opposite a recreation ground, now pretty confident he was missing something.

  ‘I knew he’d approve,’ argued Marshall.

  ‘It was too much too soon, and it blew your cover!’

  ‘It wasn’t that,’ sighed Marshall, knowing the truth wasn’t any better.

  ‘Either way,’ said Chambers, ‘we’re done.’

  He climbed out, slammed the door, and walked away.

  ‘… Cellini?’ asked Winter as the dog jumped up to claim the vacant seat.

  ‘I didn’t realise he knew,’ she said, pressing her sleeve over the painful cut to her hand.

  ‘Coates?’

  ‘Chambers,’ she answered sadly, watching him pace the treeline. ‘Perseus with the Head of Medusa. The night he was attacked, I think that’s what the killer was trying to recreate – his third “work of art”.’

  ‘Medusa?’ asked Winter. ‘As in … snakes?’

  ‘And the fresh head of an enemy,’ she nodded, reaching for her sketchbook, only to realise that in her haste to leave she’d forgotten it in Coates’s kitchen.

  ‘Jesus,’ huffed Winter.

  ‘It’s him – Coates,’ Marshall said decisively, an image of Tobias Sleepe’s broken body falling uninvited into her mind. ‘It’s always been him. And now I’m even more sure of it. That wasn’t the same Robert Coates I met seven years ago.’ She paused, trying to organise her thoughts. ‘I mean, it was the same man, but it wasn’t the same person, if that makes any sense?’

  ‘None at all.’

  ‘That wasn’t even the same Robert Coates I saw at the nursing home earlier.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘That I think I know why Henry John Dolan’s girlfriend didn’t recognise the picture I showed her … Coates is a chameleon.’

  ‘A chameleon?’

  ‘He assumes personalities, alters his appearance, he becomes whatever somebody needs him to be.’ She turned to Winter, who looked a little out of his depth: ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think … we should tell Chambers.’

  They climbed out beneath a tree so red it tainted the light around it, and made their way over, while their new pet burned off some energy.

  ‘You all right?’ asked Marshall.

  ‘Just needed a couple of minutes,’ said Chambers. ‘This was a mistake. It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have let myself get sucked back in. And it was all for nothing anyway.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say all for nothing,’ argued Winter. ‘We did get a dog out of it,’ he pointed out, watching it chase a squirrel up a tree … then do an enormous poo.

  Chambers looked unimpressed.

  ‘And I got this,’ announced Marshall, taking a crumpled letter from her pocket and handing it to him. ‘His mother’s been renting an allotment in West Putney since before he was born,’ she explained. ‘Maybe you weren’t wrong to be looking for something that day you dug up his garden … I wonder if you were just digging in the wrong place.’

  CHAPTER 20

  Having waited over seven-and-a-half years for so significant a break in the case, Chambers felt it a little anticlimactic when the address at the top of the stolen letter led him to a drab hallway in the bowels of the Wandsworth Borough Council offices. From behind a, surely unnecessary, security window, the woman on the desk had instructed him to take a seat, the council leaders apparently expecting their constituents to storm in and rob the Parks and Open Spaces department of their dubious treasures at any moment.

  With time being of the essence, Robert Coates no doubt already phoning in his complaints and instructing his bulldog of a lawyer, they had a matter of hours to come up with some tangible evidence before red tape and disciplinary proceedings rendered their prime suspect untouchable. So, the team had split up. While Chambers followed the allotment lead, Marshall and Winter had gone back to Tall Oaks Nursing Home to pursue her theory, Coates’s mother seeming a logical place to start.

  The stale stench of a thousand cigarettes announced the arrival of the begrudging ‘volunteer’ who came out to deal with him. Unashamedly scratching the exposed underside of his beer belly, the man reread the crumpled letter:

  ‘Plot eight-six-one,’ he said in greeting, shunning social niceties. ‘That’s errrrrr … Doverhouse Road.’

  He handed the letter back to Chambers and went to walk away – another job well done.

  ‘Great,’ said Chambers, getting up. ‘Let’s go.’

  The man looked as though he’d just been slapped.

  ‘I’m going to need you to take me there,’ Chambers clarified. ‘… Right now.’

  ‘Did you crack a window?’ asked Marshall after flashing her badge at a member of the nursing home staff and requesting to be taken to Mrs Coates.

  ‘I told you,’ Winter replied defensively, ‘I barely hit it!’

  ‘I meant for the dog.’

  ‘Oh. Then yes.’

  Someone came to escort them down the corridor: ‘Hi! I’m Maisey!’ the woman greeted them as if they’d just arrived at a house party. ‘I’m Meredith’s primary carer. Come with me. I’ll show you to her room.’

  The yin to Marshall’s yang, the woman seemed off her face on the joys of life – the sort of person who took photographs of flowers and nursed birds with broken wings back to health – well-meaning but oblivious to the world that would one day eat them up and spit them back out.

  ‘Oh, who dropped that?’ asked the bubbly carer, stopping a
head of them in the corridor. A little too large for her uniform, she struggled to pick the hairbrush up off the floor, exposing her lower back to Winter and Marshall in the process.

  ‘Is that … Marvin the Martian?’ asked Winter on being confronted with the unusual tattoo.

  ‘Yes, it is!’ Maisey smiled. ‘Are you a fan?’

  He looked a little awkward: ‘I mean, as much as … anyone is.’

  ‘I hear Mrs Coates can be a bit of a handful at times,’ said Marshall, breaking up the inane conversation but being careful not to mention how she knew that to be the case.

  ‘Oh, she’s a lovely lady,’ Maisey told her. ‘But yes, she has her moments. That’s why I took on the role as her primary carer. You know, her son once told me that there were only two people he’s ever met who are better with his mother than he is, and I was one of them.’ She smiled proudly. ‘It’s the little things like that, that make it all worthwhile. Right. Here we are,’ she said, knocking twice before entering Meredith Coates’s private room, where the elderly woman was lying on her back staring vacantly at the ceiling.

  ‘I’m afraid this conversation is confidential,’ Marshall told their escort.

  ‘Of course. Then I won’t come in or she’ll want me to stay,’ whispered Maisey.

  ‘Thanks for your help,’ said Marshall, closing the door on her before taking a seat beside the bed. ‘Mrs Coates?’ she asked. ‘… Mrs Coates?’

  The frail woman turned her head but then looked through her as though she wasn’t even there, lost somewhere within her own mind.

  ‘May I call you Meredith?’ she smiled, recognition flickering across the blank face. ‘Meredith it is. I’m here to ask you some questions about your son.’

  While Marshall persevered with her futile endeavour, Winter moved over to the dressing table. Catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror, he self-consciously brushed his hair forwards, pausing to check his receding hairline didn’t look any worse than the last time he’d checked. Forcing himself to focus on the more imminent problem, he turned his back to it, subtly sliding the top drawer open a crack to find a collection of nighties and underwear inside. Pushing it closed, he moved on to the next one down: more clothes. Unable to reach the bottom drawer discreetly, he quickly knelt down and pulled on the handle …

  As he stood back up with an old photograph album in his hands, something dropped out onto the floor. He stooped down to pick it up.

  ‘Ummm, Marshall,’ he interrupted, handing her the envelope of more recent pictures that hadn’t yet made it into the album’s yellowed pages, the first of which captured a handsome-looking Robert Coates with his arms around an attractive woman. They appeared genuinely happy. ‘Looks like she might’ve been one of his students,’ he told her when the second photograph showed the same woman wearing a graduation gown, Class of ’94 written across a banner in the background.

  After sharing a significant look at this latest development, Marshall turned back to the elderly woman:

  ‘Meredith, can you tell me who this is?’

  Raising a shaky hand to the picture, she replied: ‘That’s my Robert.’

  ‘But the woman?’ she asked patiently. ‘Who is Robert with?’

  Catching the vulnerable woman in a fleeting moment of lucidity, Marshall watched her smile sadly before meeting her eye for the very first time:

  ‘… Eloise. Such a wonderful girl.’

  ‘Eloise? Do you happen to know her last name?’ Marshall asked softly.

  She shook her head: ‘She used to visit me.’

  ‘Here? When was the last time she came to see you?’

  And with that, she was gone again, a blank expression spreading across her face as if she’d just been reset.

  With a hefty sigh, Marshall got back up and joined Winter as he flicked through the delicate photo album, the assorted pictures of Robert Coates from over the years looking more like those of a set of brothers, his appearance going through drastic changes, weight fluctuating, his taste in clothes varying from home-made hippie hemp to smart business attire and hitting every trend in-between.

  ‘We’re going to be needing that,’ Marshall told him quietly, checking the coast was clear as Winter stuffed it inside his jacket.

  Huffing with every step, the groundsman led Chambers through a gate to an unremarkable patch of land:

  ‘Eight-six-one,’ he announced, already reaching for his next cigarette.

  A rickety shed presided over some browned vegetables, spent for the year, and a tangle of brambles laying siege to the neglected far end.

  ‘Do you mind?’ Chambers asked him, gesturing to a spade in the adjacent plot.

  The man shrugged, evidently not giving a damn.

  Collecting the tool, Chambers returned to the same spot, driving it into the damp earth as he began to dig.

  The nursing home’s old visitor books were stored off-site. And without even knowing which year to start looking through, it felt a dead end under the time-sensitive circumstances.

  ‘You take the van to the university,’ Marshall told Winter as they hurried out into the car park. ‘Find out anything you can about this Eloise.’

  ‘OK. Just one thing … I’m a security guard, not a police officer right now.’

  ‘So improvise! Use your imagination. We’re running out of time! And I need the photo album.’

  Unzipping his jacket, Winter handed it over: ‘Why? Where are you going?’

  ‘If we want to get the case reopened, we need to link Coates to the Henry Dolan murder,’ she explained. ‘And this is going to get us our positive ID.’

  The rusted metal struck something solid just three feet below the surface.

  Tossing the spade aside, Chambers dropped to his knees and leaned into the hole. Excavating the rest by hand, the patch of chalk-white almost looked to glow against the dirt as he brushed it clean. Digging his fingertips below the smooth surface, he carefully pulled it from the earth: no more than a few inches long, sharper at one end, it was undoubtedly bone.

  Leaping to his feet, he looked out across the deserted allotments for his resentful borough council representative:

  ‘Hey!’ Chambers called to get the man’s attention. ‘Can you drive that?’ he shouted, pointing to the mini-digger by the entrance.

  Armed with three photographs of Eloise, Winter entered Birkbeck College still trying to come up with a way of walking out of there with personal information on a student without a badge, let alone a warrant. His most promising ideas so far: the estranged relative routine, pulling the fire alarm, or (and this one was admittedly dependent on a vast and wide-ranging number of factors) … seducing the filing clerk.

  Approaching the main staircase, he slowed to a stop and then retraced his steps back to a huge trophy cabinet. Holding one of his photos up to the team picture of the women’s lacrosse champions 1992, he looked between the young woman lifting a gold cup above her head – to the graduation picture – and back again, a caption below reading: Eloise Brown (Team Captain).

  ‘Huh,’ he smiled, feeling pretty pleased with himself. ‘That was a freebie.’

  It seemed to have gone dark in the space of the ten-minute taxi ride. Climbing out in front of the beauty salon, Marshall tried the door to find it locked, a lopsided Closed sign reminding her to check the time. Cursing under her breath, she rapped against the window until she was finally bathed in light as three immaculate faces peered out at her.

  ‘I’m sorry to turn up like this unannounced,’ said Marshall, sitting down opposite Dolan’s former girlfriend for the second time in as many days. ‘But I need to ask if you recognise any of these people’ – these people seeming simpler than trying to explain it was all the same man.

  Rita began flicking through the photograph album, Marshall losing hope as she watched photo after photo being dismissed … But then she turned back a page and squinted down at one of the pictures:

  ‘This one,’ she said, tapping her blood-red nail against it.


  ‘You’re absolutely sure?’ Marshall asked her.

  ‘One-hundred-and-ten per cent,’ she nodded. ‘That’s him. That’s Henry’s “special” friend.’

  The cold had set in, making his leg ache, the tablets just about holding the pain at bay. Barely able to grip his coffee, Chambers watched the team of council workers excavate the site by torchlight. Two diggers had been shifting earth for the past couple of hours while others dug by hand, the commotion attracting an audience of bored teenagers and gossiping residents from the houses behind. The patrol cars he’d requested had cordoned off the area and, thus far, done an admirable job of keeping people away.

  ‘Excuse me, Detective,’ said a man covered head-to-toe in dirt. ‘You wanted to know when the first quadrant was cleared?’ he asked, looking a little traumatised.

  Chambers nodded and followed him down into the five-by-five-metre patch carved out of the ground, stepping carefully through the carpet of bones, the skeletons of dozens of animals, many still perfectly assembled – a mass grave accrued over years.

  ‘How many more diggers can you get here?’ he asked the man.

  ‘Quadrant three’s almost done,’ he replied. ‘Two’s not far off. I think we can do it with what we’ve got.’

  Chambers stared out over the sea of allotments with a pang of guilt. Sheds bordered by evenly spaced fences. It looked like a miniature village in the darkness:

  ‘That’s just tonight’s job,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow we start on the rest.’

  ‘Errrr … I’m sorry?’

  ‘You heard me. Rip it all up.’

  The dog had curled up in the footwell, the U-Drive van a surprisingly cosy way to spend the evening, with the heater billowing hot air into the cabin and the engine rumbling gently beneath them. Winter had parked them up beneath the same tree as earlier, the quiet park just around the corner from Coates’s house a logical place to rendezvous with their Metropolitan Police contingent.

  The dog lifted its head when there was a knock on the glass.

  ‘Marshall?’ a uniformed officer asked when she wound down the window.

  ‘Yeah?’