Lost and Never Found

Book 3: DI Wilkins Mysteries

by Simon Mason

Genres: Police Procedurals

Synopsis

Oxford, city of rich and poor, where the homeless camp out in the shadows of the gorgeous buildings and monuments. A city of lost things - and buried crimes.

At three o'clock in the morning, Emergency receives a call. 'This is Zara Fanshawe. Always lost and never found.' An hour later, the wayward celebrity's Rolls Royce Phantom is found abandoned in dingy Becket Street. The paparazzi go wild.

For some reason, news of Zara's disappearance prompts homeless woman Lena Wójcik to search the camps, nervously, for the bad-tempered vagrant known as 'Waitrose', a familiar sight in Oxford pushing his trolley of possessions. But he's nowhere to be found either.

Who will lead the investigation and cope with the media frenzy? Suave, prize-winning, Oxford-educated DI Ray Wilkins is passed over in favour of his partner, gobby, trailer-park educated DI Ryan Wilkins (no relation). You wouldn't think Ray would be happy. He isn't. You wouldn't think Ryan would be any good at national press presentations. He isn't.

And when legendary cop Chester Lynch (Black female Deputy Chief Constable from the wrong side of the tracks) takes a shine to Ray - and takes against Ryan - things are only going to get even messier.

Release date: January 18, 2024

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 400

Sample

One

The illegal car wash on the southbound road out of Oxford is the cheapest in the city, a makeshift compound of oily puddles and streams, slick and black under dripping awnings. Here, hour after hour, cars shunt slowly across the concrete, while dozens of men and women in waterproofs and galoshes crowd round them with hoses and sponges, soaping, spraying, wiping, rinsing. Occasionally these people speak to each other, brief asides in a language that might be Russian or perhaps Albanian. Mostly they are quiet. They are tired, bending and reaching in unvarying routine as the cars creep past: the saloons, the four-­by-­fours, the station wagons, hatchbacks, minivans, coupés, sedans. They know them all, these cars, all the brands and models; they have seen them all many times.

But they have never seen a Rolls-­Royce Phantom. Here it comes now, on this slush-­coloured February morning, enormous and otherworldly, gliding on to the splintered, streaming forecourt, one hundred per cent out of place, a visitation from another dimension; and the men and women stop to look. They have never seen anything so strange, that huge boat-­like hull, that unearthly colour – crystal over Salamanca blue – the whole flowing technology uncannily natural, like the movement of blossom in a breeze or waves on the surface of the sea. They are seeing these things for the first time, vividly, and will remember them later, when the police arrive to take their statements, as they will remember the driver, a woman of complete self-­possession, who sits behind the wheel, ignoring everything, obliviously performing neck exercises. Though they never look at her directly, the car-­wash men and women take in everything about her: her elfin face, ragged-­chic blond hair, distant blue eyes, small pointed chin. A young face, though she is not young; she looks like a child left in charge of the family car. They watch her from the corners of their eyes when she gets out and walks slowly over to the picnic tables set up at the edge of the compound to wait while the interior cleaning is being done. She stands there in a pool of greasy water, wearing elegantly tight-­fitting olive-­green slacks and an expensively simple blue sweater, and a touch, here and there, of bespoke jewellery, slim, modest, remote, her eyes strangely vacant, as if her mind were fixed on something else entirely, as if she existed without any connection to the current moment; until, at last, a man detaches himself from a little group of workers and walks across the wet compound towards her.

Two

That evening, in the famous auditorium of Oxford’s town hall, the Thames Valley Police gala dinner was taking place. At ten o’clock it had been proceeding, in formal mode, for more than three hours, and now, in the unstructured gap between meal and speeches, it was starting to lose its shape. While the stage was being prepared for the award-­giving, the diners, sitting twenty to a table under the intricately decorated ceiling, removed their jackets, undid their waistcoats, discreetly adjusted their ballgowns and gave rise to an impressive babble. People wandered about; some had to go outside. Liqueurs were served; the room was warm and dimly lit and loud.

At a table almost in the middle of the crowded floor, DIs Ryan and Ray Wilkins (no relation) sat with their partners, trying to keep a conversation going with Detective Superintendent Dave ‘Barko’ Wallace. Wallace was a copper of the old school, a wide man with a thick neck, outspread thighs and a seal-­like body not shaped for tuxedos. He sweated steadily from his shorn head down, his small eyes angry and vigilant, as if intent on catching someone out. He was a bore. Ryan noticed his apparent inability to blink and wondered if it was a Govan thing, like his gargling accent or intimidating silences.

Ryan was good at noticing things, he looked at them quickly along a jabbing length of bony nose and the details stuck to his eyes. He sat contentedly with a can of energy drink, which he’d had to bribe a waiter to bring him, idly scratching, noticing his girlfriend Carol’s left thigh, suddenly pale and bare where her dress had fallen to one side, the result of a nervous restlessness. He noticed movement at the back of the stage, and nodded towards it.

‘Wonder Woman flown in.’

Ray released his wife’s hand and turned in his seat. Both he and Diane were London-­Nigerian, highly educated and elegant with it; Ray in particular was a stylish dresser, wearing tonight a silk tuxedo with blue and maroon floral patterns and black satin lapels. He had one of those handsome faces in which all the features seem to come together in a common purpose: the boy-­hero jaw, the shapely mouth, intelligent eyes. By contrast, Ryan looked like the trailer-­park kid he was, badly finished off about the chin and ears. He had a sort of borrowed look about him. His suit – rented, of course – was slightly big, and itchy around the groin.

Barko said, unblinking, ‘You referring to Deputy Chief Constable Lynch?’

On stage, there were two people. One was the Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire, a former banker, now carnivalised in eighteenth-­century tunic, complete with cap, sash and ceremonial sword. The other was the guest speaker of the evening, a shortish, powerful-­looking woman dressed in a black leather jacket and jeans, strikingly at odds with the evening dresses on display everywhere else. She was listening, or perhaps not, to the Lord Lieutenant, her face impassive behind Aviators.

Barko said, ‘Son, that lady’s had more commendations than any other serving officer in this force. Big ones. Silver Medal, Bravery Award.’

‘CBE,’ Ray said.

Ryan shrugged, peered into his can, tilted it far back, swallowed, gave a little grimace.

Perhaps Barko would have said more; he leaned towards Ryan with sudden intent, but at that moment the on-­stage microphone came to life with a screech, like a hideous malfunction of the pleasant hubbub, and everyone turned again, wincing, towards the stage and the legendary figure of Chester Lynch, standing there alone now, relaxed in the limelight of their attention. She was still wearing her Aviators. Ryan remembered then that Barko had long ago served with Lynch’s unit, perhaps even before the creation of the Chester Lynch legend, when Lynch was not yet the gloried maverick she would become; and he wondered what their relationship had been like. Carol turned to him and, as she smiled with that dazzling mouth, he saw in her eyes something else, some strangeness – mild panic almost, or judgement. Then Lynch began her address.

‘Didn’t want to come here, do this.’

Her voice was the well-­known gravel-­chewing cockney drawl, her face the familiar carved oddity, all planes and angles, not so much handsome as riveting. Riveting was the quality she cultivated. Her skin was so black it was almost purple.

‘Make a little speech, hand out an award. Didn’t want to do it.’

She left long pauses between her sentences, silences which no one disturbed.

‘They said, “Come on, Chester. You’ll see all these beautiful people. The young men,” they said. “The women. The whole force has got good-­looking,” they said. It’s true, by the way. But that’s not why I come.’

She shook her head slightly, looking down at them.

‘They said, “It’ll be a spectacle.” Spectacle’s actually the word they used.’ She snorted lightly. ‘They talked about the meal, the braised beef cheek, sautéed whatevers, the canapés, the Krug . . . Don’t know what else. Candied fruits, is it? Snuff? They said, “It’ll be elegant.” Do I look like I’m interested in elegant?’

She gestured slightly, contemptuously, at her clothes.

‘They told me they’d make everything easy, send a limo. You know the sort of thing – champagne on ice in a little silver bucket; peanuts in one of them lead-­crystal tumblers, weigh a tonne in your hand.’

She took off her Aviators, slowly folded them and put them carefully into the inside pocket of her jacket. ‘Well. I didn’t come for the ride. I didn’t come for the nibbles. No.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I’ll tell you why I come.’

She looked round the auditorium. Thirty seconds seemed to pass. No one breathed.

‘I come because you’re fucking brilliant people. My people. That’s why I come.’

There was applause, then – a lot – and she stood, drenched in it.

‘Alright, alright,’ she said. ‘Calm the fuck down.’

Laughter. The laughter of the willing.

‘It’s not about me,’ she said. ‘But they told me I got to say something about myself anyway. You know, by way of introduction. A few words. It’s nonsense, I know that – stupid – you don’t need to tell me. No one needs my story; you’ve all got your own. Still. They did ask. And I can do it in three minutes.’

She took a breath, looked around.

‘Grew up in Walthamstow. Scholarship girl at the university here. Wanted to be a copper, became a copper. Came to serve here in, I think, early 2002, worked the beat four, five years. Did some training, got some skills. Same as you. Did a little time in Violent Crime, got moved on – some of you heard about that. Ups and downs. Had some ideas – about street crime, vagrancy and so on. Put them into action, got some results. Got kicked in the coccyx by austerity, like everyone else. Then they put me in charge of this National Uplift thing. Well, I’m a black woman, aren’t I? See me on television, in between the sitcoms and the documentaries about endangered types of moth.’

She looked at them with what seemed like the purest anger.

‘Best years of my life? No question: working the beat, up at Rose Hill. Learned all the important stuff then. Make the tough choices. Take the difficult decisions. Why? They’re the ones get results. Don’t matter what they call you, and I’ve been called some things – on the street, in the boardrooms – I know that, I got the nicknames. Don’t matter. Don’t even matter if there’s truth in the nicknames. Results, that’s the thing. That’s what I’m about.’

She shrugged modestly, buttoned her leather jacket.

‘End of speech.’

Her watch was a heavy metal thing, chunky on her wrist; it caught the light as she lifted it.

‘Two and a half minutes. Result, right there.’

More laughter, a murmuring of appreciation.

‘Anyway,’ she said, picking up the trophy that had been at her feet and casually waving it to and fro, ‘speaking of results, there’s a young man here tonight . . .’

Ryan stopped listening, went back to noticing Carol, who sat vividly next to him in her evening dress of electric-­blue silk. She’d relaxed a little. They’d been seeing each other only a few months and they were still in the first phase of their relationship: he was living in a state of constant sexual emergency. God, she was built. Nine years older than him, thirty-­seven, with one ex-­husband and two kids, sharp-­faced, alarmingly erotic, shockingly straightforward. She liked to shock, in fact. It was part of her attraction. She’d grown up wild in Didcot and other places, messed about, missed a lot of school, but now she owned four florists and lived in a converted farmhouse on the edge of Kennington. She had the business smarts big time, and the things that go with it – organisation, toughness, energy, a little bit of aggression. All in all, Ryan wasn’t at all sure why she’d picked him out. They’d met one morning outside the infant school, where he was waiting with little Ryan to pick up his niece, Mylee. He hadn’t even given her some old chat, they just talked about the kids, and something clicked, some weird mechanism pulled them together, set them going, all the way from St Swithun’s Primary School to the fifty-­fourth Thames Valley Police gala at the town hall.

Chester Lynch was still talking, but Ray was getting to his feet, which Ryan thought was pretty uncool, a very un-­Ray-­like thing to do in the middle of a speech; and it was a moment before he took in the general applause, noticed people at nearby tables congratulating him. As Ryan watched, Ray leaned over and kissed Diane, buttoned his shimmering tuxedo and began to make his way towards the stage.

Fuck me, Ryan thought in shock. He’s fucking well won something. Perhaps he actually said it out loud, because Carol turned to him with that look of hers that he didn’t yet understand, hard-­eyed and startled, as if she too was transfixed by the action on the stage, by Chester Lynch greeting Ray with a fist bump. And the next moment he was on his feet, fingers in his mouth, whistling and stomping his boots on the floor, while Barko sat immobile, staring at him in scorn.

 

They drove back to Kennington in her Range Rover. His Peugeot was still in the garage. For a while she didn’t say anything, and he watched her as they went quietly through the hush of Oxford at one o’clock in the morning, past the cathedral, down the long stretch of road where the college playing fields are laid out like artworks on the carefully curated green of the water meadows.

‘Just taken by surprise is all,’ he said at last.

She gave a brief smiling pout of disbelief, looking at the road ahead.

‘Alright. Jealous, then. A bit.’

The smile played at the edges of her mouth.

The urge came on him, very strong, to kiss her, touch her, put out his hand and feel the thin silk of her dress slide over her leg; he almost groaned with the force of it. But it also seemed a truth-­telling urge, and he said, ‘A bit, I don’t know, pissed off. I mean, I did actually do quite a lot of the legwork.’

She drove on.

‘This was after your discharge,’ she said, after a while. ‘So you weren’t actually a policeman.’

‘Just suspended,’ he said defensively. ‘Working my way back, fast track.’

They drove past the Tesco.

‘Fast-­ish,’ he said.

They went over the railway tracks and turned towards Kennington.

‘What’s your problem with the lady giving out the prizes?’ she asked, in a different tone.

‘Lynch? She’s alright. Just, like, everything’s exaggerated with her. Toughest cop ever. Smartest cop ever. Coolest cop. It’s like this whole Chester Lynch legend.’

He looked at her sideways, her profile.

‘People got a crush on her. Ray’s got a crush. Maybe it’s a black thing.’

‘Not allowed to say that, Ryan.’

They drove on.

‘What did she get her CBE for?’

‘Street vagrancy policy, I think. Sort of a clean-­up. Move them on, basically.’

‘And she got results?’

‘If you look at the stats, yeah. Crime down, antisocial down, drug trade down. But police complaints went up big time, and, if you talk to any of the homeless – fuck, they hate her. Call her the Mover.’

They drove under the bypass, quiet now.

‘Got moved on herself from Violent Crime, she said.’

‘Yeah, all the way up to DCC.’

‘But moved on, why?’

‘Well, that’s something else. Scandal, controversy, whatever. Shot some local gangster in a lock-­up. Rumour was she just took him down, personal thing. Don’t believe it. Maybe even put it about herself, for the, you know – what’s the word?’

‘Notoriety?’

‘That’s the one. Worse thing, I think’s, stuff with the homeless. I mean, they might be losers, but still.’

He shifted uncomfortably in his seat; it wasn’t clear if it was the thought of Chester Lynch or his scratchy dress trousers that chafed him.

‘Know any homeless, Ryan?’

Briefly, he thought of his old schoolmate, Mick Dick. Homeless, then dead. He sighed. ‘Not anymore.’

They went slowly up the long road with its street bumps until they came to Kenville Road, where Ryan lived with his sister, Jade. Little Ryan would be there, asleep in his bed in the room he shared with his father, and Ryan thought of his son with the total abandonment of love. He looked at his watch: going on one thirty.

Carol slowed, came to a stop, looked at him. There was a moment’s silence between them. ‘Do you want to come back to mine?’ Her dress had fallen off her thigh again and he stared at it, mesmerised, and swallowed. She knew he didn’t like missing breakfast with his son, especially not after missing bedtime reading the night before.

‘He had a tummy upset,’ Ryan said.

She nodded. ‘I’ll get you up early, drive you back in time for breakfast. Or maybe,’ she said softly, ‘I’ll just keep you up all night.’

He looked at her. They drove on.

 

So Oxford settled into sleep. A small city, damp, unconscious under February cloud, its clustered monuments making their familiar iconic gestures against the dim sky – here, the Radcliffe Camera’s fat dome; there, the sharp tack of St Mary’s spire – their outlines crisp as cardboard cut-­outs. And, in the shadows of these buildings, on pavements slick with condensation, the homeless lay, silently outlasting the cold in their bags and tents. In Blue Boar Street, in Cornmarket, at Blackfriars, St Aldate’s, St Ebbe’s, outside the Odeon in Gloucester Green and in other haunts, they crouched, hunched under fire escapes or in doorways. In the shadows of the great colleges, wrapped in layers, wearing scavenged boots that didn’t fit, they lay prone on cardboard beds rimmed with the day’s detritus, invisible under piles of clothing. They persisted, getting through the night, alone, or in twos or threes, or in larger groups, not sleeping but sometimes no longer conscious, left out in the open like so much litter, lost things. But, at the makeshift camp in the graveyard of St Thomas the Martyr, at three o’clock in the morning, there was no one. It was deserted. They’d vanished in haste, leaving everything behind them – their tents and boxes, rags and empties – abandoning the graveyard with its tilting tombstones and dripping yew, putting distance between themselves and silent, dirty Becket Street, darkest and dirtiest street in town, where a Rolls-­Royce Phantom lay buckled and wedged in the entrance to the rail station car park.

Three

Somewhere a phone was ringing. It nagged, thinning out his dreams, bringing the room back to him. He woke with a grunt, found the bed stuck in his face and rolled on to his back, groping around, eyes shut.

‘What?’

A voice told him what.

‘Yeah, but. Why not Traffic?’

The voice told him why not.

‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘It’s four o’clock. What about the other Wilkins?’

But the voice had rung off.

He lay there a moment, preparing himself. Next to him, Carol lay, smelling faintly of sweat and perfume, and he longed to roll towards her, feel her warm body against his, but he turned the other way and hauled himself out of bed, and stood there in his underpants, skinny runt of the trailer park, with his bowed legs and bony shoulders. He remembered then that he had no clothes with him but his rented tuxedo.

‘Fuck’s sake.’

Carol, completely unmoving in the bed, said, ‘Take my car. Just stop talking.’

Silently, he smelled his armpits, winced, began to get dressed.

 

He’d never seen such a thing before, not close up. It was enormous – so big and luxurious it didn’t seem like a car somehow, more like a piece of real estate, a deluxe apartment crash-­landed in grimy Becket Street, taking up almost the entire width of the road, its elegant frontage a little crumpled now, crudely stuck in the entrance to the rail station car park. The colour of it was weird. Dazzling, shimmering. He thought of peacocks – a slaughtered peacock dumped in someone’s dirty backyard. He’d never seen a peacock, in fact. He knew a bit about dirty backyards.

Forensics were on their way. Bobbleheads were stringing tape across the road; they threw him glances, smirked.

‘The fuck you looking at?’

They were serious again, bending to their task.

He straightened his tuxedo, felt out of place in his evening dress; a passer-­by, not too observant, might even assume the car was his, that he’d crashed it. He looked around, sniffed the air, yawned. He went up close, felt the bonnet, made a call. ‘Here, now. . . . Yeah, abandoned. No driver, no passengers. . . . I dunno, half an hour ago. Listen, why isn’t this Traffic? . . . Yeah, it’s a fucking big car, but it’s still a car.’

An explanation was given. Emergency had received a call, at 03.10. A woman had said politely, ‘This is Zara Fanshawe.’ And then, ‘Always lost and never found.’ She had been going to say something else, but was abruptly cut off. The message got passed along, where it puzzled the duty staff at St Aldates. As they were puzzling, a night officer called in an apparent traffic accident in Becket Street: a Rolls-­Royce Phantom, damaged and abandoned. They checked the reg. It was Zara Fanshawe’s car.

But there was no sign of Zara Fanshawe.

Ryan calmed down, got interested, started noticing details. Not much damage to the car. It had come down the street from the south, turned as it reached the car-­park entrance and collided with the little booth just inside. He took a closer look: gashes in the gorgeously lacquered passenger-­side flank, a headlight shattered, bits and pieces scattered around, the grille buckled – though the little statue of the Spirit of Ecstasy on the great blunt nose still fluttered jauntily above the damage. That’s the thing about ecstasy, he thought – once you’re in it, you’re in it, even after you’ve crashed. He peered through the driver’s window at the luxuriously appointed interior. More weirdness. It looked like a cross between a space-­flight control desk and an antique drinks cabinet, impossibly high-­tech and absurdly old-­fashioned at the same time. The door opened when he tried it and he poked his nose inside, looking around. It was spotlessly clean, the model of a perfectly valeted Rolls-­Royce – the walnut dash, the cream-­coloured soft leather steering wheel, the sexy virgin thigh of the door’s upholstery.

There was a cheap, well-­thumbed paperback in the side pocket. He squinted at the title. The Catholic Confessional and the Sacrament of Penance. Nothing else: everything photo-­perfect.

Withdrawing, he looked around. The narrow, gloomy road was sunk between the screen of spindly trees fronting the car park and a row of tall Victorian tenements used as guest houses and lodgings, the dirty brickwork of one still painted with the ancient words Flory’s Commercial Hotel, a leftover sign for a leftover place. To the north was the great green ziggurat of the university’s Saïd Business School, the snout of money lifted heavenwards. Opposite the car-­park entrance was the little humped church of St Thomas the Martyr, its modest tower hidden among the darkness of trees.

He made a second call. ‘Collision, yeah. . . . Just a wall. No signs of injury; don’t think she was going very fast. Like she was trying to get into the car park and missed. Check out the hospitals, will you? No one else involved, far as I can tell. . . . Yeah, taking a look round now.’

Hitching up his loose dress trousers, he went into the car park, empty apart from half a dozen vehicles left overnight, and scanned around. No sign of anyone. Going back out, he went across the road and through the wooden gate into the churchyard. It was dark under the trees, dank, tombstones here and there blotted with wet. On the ground along the inside of the wooden fence was a mess of belongings: a two-­man tent, some sleeping bags, cardboard sheets, blankets, newspaper – all the makeshift sleeping materials of the homeless. Scattered about were empties, litter, carrier bags. To one side. . .