No Body

The Woman Beside Him The man had been waiting for eleven minutes before anyone realised he was refusing to sit down. He stood beside the public counter at Kingswell police station, a folded white cane in his left hand and a woman close enough to touch his elbow, though he had drawn that elbow away from her twice. There was a narrow seating area behind him, a noticeboard carrying last month's appeal for witnesses, and a child working diligently through the clasp of her mother's handbag. Constable Price had offered him a chair. Then another. The man had thanked him both times and stayed on his feet. Melanie Brackley reached the counter as Price was explaining, for the third time, that the duty sergeant would speak to them shortly. She had been called down from an interview room to deal with a complaint that made little sense over the radio. There had been an argument about a missing woman, except the missing woman was apparently present, and somebody had used the word murder. The man turned towards Melanie's footsteps before she'd reached the counter. 'Are you the detective?' 'Detective Sergeant Brackley. Melanie's fine. Would you like to come through where it's quieter?' 'If you don't mind, I would rather say it here first. I've been trying to tell this gentleman.' 'You've told me, sir,' Price said. 'I've taken it down.' The man spoke across him, quite calmly. 'My name is Thomas Stansfield. The woman standing beside me is pretending to be my wife. I want to report that my wife has gone missing, and I'm frightened she may have been killed.' The little girl stopped playing with the clasp. Her mother caught the back of her coat and moved her towards the exit. Melanie let the public counter be quiet for a moment, partly to give Price time to redirect a man waiting with an insurance form and partly because she'd learned that interrupting a first account usually made the second one longer. 'All right, Mr Stansfield. We'll take this seriously. We can discuss it properly in private.' The woman beside him said, 'Thank you. I'm sorry about this.' Her voice was low and rather tired. 'I'm Lorna. Lorna Stansfield.' Thomas turned his head a fraction. 'No. You're not.' 'Shall we go through?' Melanie asked. Price opened the secure door and offered to guide Thomas. He declined politely, unfolded his cane and asked whether it was straight ahead. Melanie told him about the short passage and the door to the left. He walked with an efficient, practised rhythm, the cane finding the edge of a mat that curled where the carpet began. The woman followed at a short distance. She was smartly dressed, in dark trousers and a cream coat, with a leather bag that might have held a laptop. Melanie could see why the first account had confused the desk. It was very hard, looking at the pair, to imagine what proof the man expected her to find. They were given the small family interview room, which had a table, four upholstered chairs and a box of tissues so recently opened that the first tissue was still joined to the next. Melanie introduced DC Yasmin Mahmood, who came in with two paper cups and a jug of water. Yasmin was carrying the shift's less urgent jobs and gave Melanie a brief look at the doorway. Melanie shook her head: she had no explanation to offer yet. Thomas waited until everyone had sat down before making his second attempt. 'My wife has been gone since Sunday evening. The woman who came home in her place knows our address, and she has Lorna's phone. She says things that my wife would know. I do understand how that sounds.' 'When did you last have contact with the person you're certain was Lorna?' Melanie asked. 'Sunday. We had dinner together. She left after eight to see a friend. I was in bed before she was due back.' The woman across the table moved forward. 'I came home at quarter past ten. You were awake when I got in. You complained about the landing light, which you always do, even though you can't see it.' 'I complain because you leave it on and I pay the electricity bill.' He delivered it as a familiar joke, then seemed surprised to have made one. The woman's mouth lifted at the joke. Thomas put his hands flat on the table. 'My wife would have known I was joking.' 'You used to joke, Tom.' Melanie wrote down Sunday, eight o'clock. It was Tuesday just after two. If he was right, the absence had already lasted nearly forty-eight hours. She would not allow that fact to get lost inside a dispute about behaviour, and asked whether anybody had previously reported Lorna missing. 'No. I've tried calling her,' Thomas said. 'I contacted two friends yesterday. One thought I must be tired and the other asked to speak to her. This woman answered my wife's telephone and told them I was unwell.' 'I am your wife,' the woman said. 'And you have been very distressed.' 'What do you mean by unwell?' Melanie asked her. For the first time the woman hesitated. She glanced at the jug, moved it out of the way of the papers she had brought, and said, 'He hasn't been sleeping. He became frightened after something he read in the news a few weeks ago. We have had a lot of difficult conversations. Yesterday he started insisting I was a stranger. This morning he wanted me to come here to prove who I was. I thought having somebody independent talk to him might help.' 'And did you agree willingly to come?' 'Yes. Of course I did. I didn't want him out looking for somebody who isn't missing.' Thomas leaned back and angled his face towards the sound of the woman's voice. 'When you spoke in the car just now, you sounded more like her. You were making an effort.' 'You see?' she said to Melanie. 'I can't answer that.' 'We can take the accounts separately,' Melanie said. 'That will give each of you room to speak without being interrupted.' There was a pause while Thomas considered this. 'Yes. I would prefer that.' Yasmin went to arrange another room. The woman started to collect her papers but Melanie asked if they could remain on the table for now. There was a passport in a clear folder, a driving licence and a printed appointment reminder from a local dental surgery, all bearing the name Lorna Stansfield. Melanie made careful notes of what she had been shown. The passport picture was several years old. It depicted a dark-haired woman with features broadly consistent with the woman in front of her, but the photograph alone couldn't settle a contested identity. Thomas turned towards the crackle of the plastic sleeve. 'She found those in our house. Lorna keeps them in the desk drawer beside the kitchen. She knows all our passwords because she's been living there.' 'I don't know all our passwords,' the woman said, sounding exasperated for the first time. 'You have your own accounts and you keep changing them.' 'Mr Stansfield, how do you normally establish who somebody is?' Melanie asked, when Yasmin returned. 'Someone you know well, I mean.' 'By their voice, often. How they speak to me, how they approach. Sometimes perfume, or the sound of their shoes. You don't consciously decide each time you're introduced to your wife.' 'No,' Melanie said. 'I suppose you don't.' 'I'm not asking you to believe me because I have some miraculous sense that sighted people lack. I know my wife. That's the whole of it.' It was the first time he sounded angry. Melanie understood the distinction he was making. She had spoken to many people who could recognise a relative before seeing their face; none of them were required to supply a theory about how recognition worked. She asked Yasmin to take the woman to the neighbouring room. When the door closed, Thomas listened to their footsteps recede. Then he took a slim telephone from his inside pocket, found a button by touch and laid it on the table. 'If you need the number, I can read it to you. Or the phone can.' 'Thank you. Before we do that, can you tell me a little about Lorna? What she was doing on Sunday? Who she was going to see?' He gave a name without hesitation, an address he wasn't certain of and the details of a supper invitation they had argued gently about because he disliked late meals on Sundays. He was fifty-nine and had been blind since his thirties. Melanie asked about the period without dwelling on its cause. His answers were easy and practical. He travelled independently, managed his own affairs and made decisions about investments without asking Lorna to read figures out to him. She had sometimes done it, he said, and usually complained that the paperwork was boring. They had been married fourteen years and together longer, Thomas said. There had never been a formal separation. During building work he'd once gone to stay with a friend for two days because Lorna said he was making the kitchen intolerable. He'd come back when she asked, though he admitted she had been right about the kitchen. Melanie waited while he located the next thought. 'You can ask her anything,' he said. 'Favourite holiday, what she had for her fortieth birthday, which of us hated the hotel in Lisbon. This woman has the answers. She's very good at it.' 'Have you asked her questions she couldn't answer?' 'Plenty. She admits when she can't remember. So would Lorna, if she'd forgotten something.' 'Have you seen anyone else in the house? Heard another person, any unusual vehicles?' 'No. And I know what you're thinking. I have no evidence that someone forced Lorna to go anywhere. I've turned the house upside down as far as I can, and it seems perfectly normal. I don't understand how anybody could have done it.' He had said 'turned the house upside down' in the way people did, careless of the literal impossibility. Melanie found that more reassuring than his explanations of her abilities. He had spent a great deal of time thinking about how he would be perceived here. Melanie asked why he'd brought the woman to the station, and how he'd persuaded her to come. 'Because if I'd come alone, you'd have asked where my wife was, and she'd have answered the telephone and said she was at home. You might have believed her. I wanted you to see the problem.' He thought for a moment. 'I just asked her to come. She seemed pleased with the idea.' That last detail troubled Melanie more than the rehearsed credentials. A person who knew she was impersonating someone might have been reluctant to walk into a police station. Equally, a person who believed her husband was becoming confused might find the visit reassuring. Melanie couldn't decide between those explanations without doing some work. 'Have you got somewhere safe to stay tonight, if you don't want to be at the house with her?' 'It's my home as well. I'm not frightened of her hurting me.' He seemed to rethink that and added, 'I can't say I know what she's capable of. But she hasn't tried to harm me.' 'All right. We'll discuss practical arrangements before you leave.' She asked whether he had been drinking, whether he'd seen a doctor recently and whether anything else unusual had happened in the last month. The questions were ordinary ones, and she asked them in the same tone as the others. He answered without taking offence until she came to recent events. 'There was an unpleasant thing in the news,' he said. 'I suppose I haven't been quite myself since then. Lorna noticed it.' Melanie asked which story. 'A body they'd found during building work,' he said. 'Years old, apparently. It was somewhere I used to know.' He would only say that he recognised the place name, and asked her not to make anything more of it. He rubbed the seam of the telephone case with a thumb. Melanie wrote down the newspaper story. It might be relevant to his wife's account of sleeplessness, although she would need to establish exactly what he'd read and when. Yasmin came back after twenty minutes, carrying a second set of notes and a paper cup of tea she hadn't touched. The woman claiming to be Lorna had given her date of birth, National Insurance number, details of the couple's property and an account of their marriage. She had also given the name of her employer and the number of a colleague willing to confirm her identity. She believed Thomas had become fixated on the news about the recovered body, and thought his increasing suspicion was connected to that anxiety. 'Her passport is current,' Yasmin said quietly by the filing cabinet. 'She was quite keen for me to look at it. She isn't keen on us taking a photograph today.' Melanie asked what reason she'd given. 'She says we already have her passport photograph and a picture of her standing in front of us. Fair enough, up to a point. She also wants a written note saying we've established who she is.' Yasmin put the notes against the cabinet and shook her head. 'Which we haven't.' Melanie could see through the room's glazed panel that Thomas had begun speaking to the uniformed officer looking after him. He was demonstrating an accessibility setting on his phone; the officer seemed interested and was laughing at something he'd said. There was nothing in the scene that suggested Thomas required somebody else to conduct his life for him. 'What's your reading?' Yasmin asked. 'I've got two people giving accounts they think we'll accept. One might be telling the truth. Both might be mistaken about parts of it. We need somebody who can independently account for where Lorna was before Sunday night, and we need to know who was at the house. I want those calls made today.' Melanie checked the note about the old body. 'Log the news story as well. It doesn't explain where a missing wife has gone.' Yasmin offered to make the workplace calls. Melanie returned to the woman in the second interview room. Her coat was folded over her knees now and she was studying an old burn mark in the tabletop. 'Can I go home?' she asked. 'You can go home. We'll keep checking the details you've given us, and we may need to speak again. Would you agree to a current photograph, so we can compare it with pictures supplied by people who know Lorna?' The woman looked up. 'Why? You've already seen my passport. There are photographs on my phone, if those are what you want.' 'I've seen the passport. A photograph taken today could help us check the accounts independently.' Melanie waited for her answer. She considered, then agreed with a small, offended shrug. Her cooperation struck Melanie as deliberate, though people who felt wrongly suspected often behaved that way. They took the photograph without ceremony. Yasmin noted the consent and asked the woman to confirm a current contact number. She gave the one Thomas had already supplied for Lorna. When they came together in the corridor, Thomas stopped walking. The woman went towards him, apparently intending to take his arm. 'Don't,' he said. She pulled her hand back. A passing officer looked from one to the other and kept going. Melanie gave them her direct work number and the incident reference, explaining that the enquiries would continue whether or not either of them was present. She told Thomas to contact the police at once if he learned anything about Lorna's whereabouts. If there was reason to think she was being held against her will, or if he feared immediate harm, he should use the emergency number. She also advised him against trying to confront anyone on his own. He listened closely, then asked how long it would take to speak to the people he'd named. 'Some today. Others tomorrow, depending on who we can reach. I'll tell you what I can when I can.' 'And if she's been kidnapped?' 'Then the information you give us now may help us find her. It's why I want the times as accurately as we can get them.' He thanked her. The woman waited by the secure door while he unfolded his cane. Melanie offered to arrange transport so they didn't have to leave together, but Thomas said he had booked a car and would take it alone. The woman said she would drive herself. Melanie hadn't realised they'd arrived separately. As Thomas made his way through reception, Price called after him about the turn towards the exit. Thomas corrected his route without difficulty, lifting the cane over the raised edge of a rubber mat. Melanie stood with Yasmin at the inner door while the two people who claimed to be married went out into the afternoon by different routes. There were calls to make, identity documents to verify, and a house she wanted to see before anything was tidied or changed. She asked Yasmin to start with Lorna's employer and went upstairs for the photographs.