Jake didn’t find new cleaning staff before the weekend, so he, Kate, and Tristan spent Friday and Saturday getting the caravan-site shop open and the eight caravans ready for guests.
Kate slept in late on Sunday, and just after her swim, she got a call from Alan Hexham, asking her for lunch, saying he had information on David Lamb and Gabe Kemp.
Kate had never been to visit Alan Hexham at home. He lived alone in a large redbrick house in a smart, leafy suburb of Exeter. He was a tall, broad man with a thick, bushy graying beard and a jovial face. Kate often wondered if he used his personality to deflect from all the death and destruction he saw every day as a forensic pathologist.
When he opened the front door, a bouncy Labrador puppy came bundling out, and the delicious smell of something roasting in the oven wafted behind him.
“Hello, hello, do come in,” Alan said. “Down, Quincy, down!” he added to the Labrador, who had started to hump Kate’s left leg. He pulled the dog away.
Alan’s house was eclectic—filled with bookcases and antique wood furniture. He took them through to the kitchen, which to Kate seemed very posh with a bright-green AGA and a vast Welsh dresser filled with willow-patterned plates. Hanging from the ceiling above the work surfaces were all sorts of copper pans and colanders.
“I know you don’t drink, but I’ve just had an awful thought. Are you also a vegetarian?”
“No. I eat meat,” said Kate, fending off Quincy, who seemed fixated with her left leg.
“Quincy likes you,” he chuckled. “I don’t often have the pleasure of good-looking ladies for lunch!” He picked a giant beef knuckle out of a pot on the stove, checked it was cool, and threw it down. They watched Quincy as he grabbed it and retreated to the corner to chew. “I’m roasting a goose, if that sounds good?” said Alan, licking the beef juice off his fingers.
“That sounds divine,” said Kate. She’d been living off things on toast for the last couple of days.
Over lunch, Kate filled Alan in on the details of the case and how David Lamb and Gabe Kemp fit into the jigsaw.
After what Kate thought was the most delicious meal she’d had in years, they came through to the sitting room with cups of coffee.
“My contact in CID managed to find criminal records for David Lamb and Gabe Kemp,” said Alan, handing her two dog-eared cardboard files. “The most revealing stuff is contained in the witness statements, which give us a gold mine of information about the young guys’ backgrounds.” He leaned down and scratched Quincy’s belly as Kate read the witness statements.
In 1995, when he was sixteen years old, Gabe Kemp had raped a fourteen-year-old girl at a local park and spent eighteen months in a young offenders’ institution. The information about his background was from the police report and subsequent police interviews.
Gabe had come from a low-income single-parent family. He’d been born in Bangor in North Wales. His father had left the scene early on and gone to work on construction sites in Saudi Arabia. His mother had been long-term unemployed and died of a drug overdose just after his sixteenth birthday.
Gabe was released from the young offenders’ institution in the summer of 1997, and he moved to Exeter and got a job in a gay bar called Peppermintz . . .
Here we go again, thought Kate. Another clue leads us back to Noah Huntley. She made a mental note to follow up again on the Peppermintz link and carried on reading.
Peppermintz was raided by the police just before Christmas 1997, and Gabe was arrested for possession of cocaine and ecstasy. He pleaded guilty and got a three-year suspended sentence. It looked like he kept out of trouble, because that was the last entry in the police report, and Kate knew that Gabe had gone missing in April 2002.
Kate turned to the second report for David Lamb. In June 1997, just after his seventeenth birthday, he was arrested at a house in a suburb of Bristol in conjunction with the death of a fifty-five-year-old man called Sidney Newett. Sidney’s wife, Mariette, was away on a trip to Venice with the Women’s Institute. Sidney Newett was found dead in the back garden of their semidetached house, naked from the waist down. He had a large amount of alcohol in his blood, and cannabis and ketamine. The police released David Lamb after twenty-four hours. The charges of manslaughter were dropped when the postmortem revealed Sidney had died of a heart attack, but David was charged with possessing an illegal substance, and he got a six-month suspended sentence. He also got a formal caution ten months later, in April 1998, for soliciting, but it didn’t state exactly what the circumstances were or who the other person was.
“What about George Tomassini?” asked Kate.
“There’s no criminal record for George,” said Alan, sipping his coffee. “And you say that these young men are now on the missing persons database?”
“David and Gabe are. I think Joanna Duncan was looking into their disappearances, and had perhaps discovered foul play when she went missing. That’s the theory we’re working on,” said Kate. Alan nodded.
“What else do you need?” he asked, seeing Kate was poised to ask a question.
“It’s very broad. I’m thinking the bodies of these guys might have been found. They had no dependents, so they may have gone unidentified.”
“Did you know, on average, around one hundred and fifty unidentified bodies are found every year in the UK?”
“That’s less than I thought. The missing person statistics each year are off the chart.”
Alan nodded. “Yes. Some of the bodies found are complete, and sometimes it’s just parts. Did you know it tends to be dog walkers, joggers, or mushroom foragers who find them?”
“Mushroom foragers? Is that a thing?”
“Of course, especially here in the countryside, outside big cities. You don’t find many people doing it in Mayfair or Knightsbridge. The majority of bodies, or body parts, are found in autumn or late winter, when the foliage has died back.”
Alan had been scratching Quincy’s fluffy belly the whole time he was talking, and the little dog was now snoring.
“Would you be able to do a search for me, from 1998 to 2002, for unidentified remains?” asked Kate. “That would cover the time period when David and Gabe went missing.”
“Over that time period could mean over six hundred bodies and remains,” said Alan. “I do have an awful lot of work trying to keep up with current deaths and postmortems.”
“I know, but what if I could give you very specific criteria within that time frame? The search area would just be the southwest of England. Males, between eighteen and twenty-five. Over six foot tall, with dark hair, who might have been sexually assaulted. Who might have had a criminal record for soliciting or drugs. And good looking. Maybe not that last one. You can’t put ‘good looking’ into a database. It’s subjective . . .”