Wally let go of his sister’s hand and opened the door.
After the cramped confines of the back seat, he was overwhelmed by the space surrounding him. The car was parked off the courtyard of a large farmhouse, at the end of a lane. A mass of trees, just enormous, swaying shadows, stood behind him. Inside, he’d felt like they were protected, invisible, but now he saw how exposed they were. The moon hung over them like a spotlight, rendering the house, the yard, the car, in astonishing detail.
He caught his own reflection in the window and took a step back, away from everything he knew, into wide open, panoramic fear.
* * *
IV
Vanishing Act
1
I was watching Sutty through the corner of my eye. He was massaging the lumps about his face, neck and shoulders. Shape-shifting. After weeks of unbroken heat he was starting to look and smell like the larval stage for something else entirely. It felt like we were both changing.
We’d established that 4B, the room where Cherry had been staying, was an illegal sublet. When we’d traced the woman responsible for the building, she’d been shocked to find that someone was actually living there and, although I was relieved that Cherry’s wasn’t the body found in the canal, it left us with nothing. Just a vague description from Collier, a street-name.
Sutty and I were waiting in Karen Stromer’s office, where she’d agreed to meet us. Although I knew we were there to discuss her findings on the smiling man, I couldn’t help but feel nervous. The humiliation of the night before was still on my mind.
Sutty stopped playing with himself and started searching idly through his pockets. When he didn’t find what he was looking for he sighed, half-stood and leaned across Stromer’s desk. He picked up a ballpoint pen and started cleaning his ears out with it.
‘Looking for your on-switch again, Peter?’
We turned to see Stromer, closing the office door behind her. If Sutty was fazed he didn’t show it. Instead he collapsed back into his chair, wiped the pen on the desk’s edge and inserted it into the other ear. Stromer walked round her desk and sat down. She wouldn’t look at me and couldn’t look at him, so she addressed herself to the space between us.
‘For obvious reasons, I’d like to make this as brief as possible,’ she said, opening a report and searching for a pen. Sutty offered her the one out of his ear but she ignored him, fished inside her pocket for a biro and made a note. ‘With that said, we have rather a lot to discuss. The cadaver—’
‘Layman’s terms, Doc. Aidan hasn’t got his dictionary.’
Stromer paused for a moment and then continued. ‘Our unidentified man is one of the more fascinating specimens I’ve examined in recent memory.’ She spoke with a professional detachment, as though he was an inanimate object. ‘There are so many irregularities that one almost doesn’t know where to begin …’
‘Could one give us the cause of death?’ said Sutty.
‘Preliminary bloodwork suggests multisystem organ failure.’
He made a noise. ‘And can you tell us what caused the cause of death?’
‘Not as stupid a question as you make it sound, Peter. In a word, no. We’re still awaiting the toxicology report, but I believe we’ll find a foreign agent or agents in the soft tissue.’
‘You think he was poisoned?’
‘I’m almost certain of it, but that isn’t what I called you here to discuss.’ Her eyes flicked on to me for a moment and I started to sink. Stromer had said if she found drugs she’d feel compelled to report my trying to access the crime scene. That, coupled with my performance the previous night and Parrs’ renewed interest in me, spelled trouble. I was relieved when she went in a different direction entirely. ‘Are either of you familiar with the concept of the missing missing?’
‘No,’ said Sutty. ‘We’re not not.’
‘Missing persons who are never reported missing,’ I said. ‘As such, they don’t appear in any database. No one’s looking for them and if they’re found deceased, with no ID, they’re generally just referred to by their clothes, or some other distinguishing feature …’ Stromer looked at me, finally, as I tried to summon a case. ‘… the lady in the Afghan coat?’
‘An enduring example,’ she said, turning to Sutty. ‘The lady in the Afghan coat was killed whilst hitchhiking on the A1 in the seventies. She’d spoken to a lorry driver earlier that day who said she had a foreign accent, that she introduced herself as Ann. The vehicle that struck her was never identified, never found. More crucially than that, no one ever reported a girl matching her description – young, pretty in a boyish way – as missing. She had an NHS filling in her teeth and wore a long Afghan coat with French supermarket-brand jeans. She wasn’t wearing any shoes …’ Stromer paused. ‘It’s funny the little details that you remember. There are hundreds of such cases every year, with few, if any, ever resolved.’
‘Stop,’ said Sutty. ‘My bedsores are weeping …’
‘I just want to be certain that you’re familiar with the concept before I continue.’
‘Course,’ he said. ‘Sonny and Cher.’
Stromer nodded. ‘Although I never cared for those nicknames.’
Sonny and Cher were two unidentifieds from my first year on the force. A woman’s body had been recovered from the River Irwell, in a pronounced state of decomposition. She’d been stabbed so many times that the pathologist stopped counting at a hundred, and there were the remains of a black bin bag wrapped around her head. Because the body had drifted through various jurisdictions, no force or department wanted to accept responsibility for her. It was decided that the caseload would be distributed evenly, and she was nicknamed ‘Cher’ to reflect this. No one matching her description was ever reported missing, a fact that became more confounding when the body of a little boy was recovered from the same river, some weeks later. Tests showed that they were mother and child, and so he was given the nickname ‘Sonny’.
It seemed impossible that no one but their killer noticed they were gone, but the e-fit of her face, the appeal for information, and even a TV reconstruction, was met with something like the sound of one hand clapping. The missing missing were people who dropped off the face of the earth and kept on going, with no one in their lives who noticed, or no one in their lives who cared. When they were found dead, with no means of identification, it was almost as though they’d been born that way.
‘We already know he’s not been reported missing,’ said Sutty.
‘It’s a little more complicated than that,’ Stromer replied.
‘How?’
‘It’s my opinion that this man has gone to great lengths to obfuscate his identity.’
I cut in before Sutty could object to her choice of word. ‘You said there was no ID on his person?’
‘And the labels have been carefully unstitched from his clothing. That’s the least of it, though. Our man’s fingerprints have been surgically removed.’
We were all silent for a moment.
‘Post-mortem?’ said Sutty. ‘Gangland stuff?’
‘The scar tissue indicates that the surgery took place some time, perhaps even some years, prior to his death. It stands to reason that our man was a willing participant in events, given that kind of timeline. Gangland stuff seems unlikely to me.’
‘Surgery,’ I said. ‘That implies, what, doctors, a hospital? I assume it’s not something you can just go private for?’
‘I use the term surgery simply because I don’t know what else to call it. In anything like a gangland body-dump we’d see, perhaps, the hands completely removed from the body. In some instances the fingertips themselves clipped off with pliers. This is much more advanced, much more thoughtful. And done some time before the man died, most likely with his consent.’