The Names on the Wall

The Writing The caretaker was unhappy about the door. She had told the first officers three times that it had been locked when she arrived, and now it was standing open, with a strip of blue tape stretched across the frame and a man in white overalls moving about on the other side of it. Every time somebody passed her in the corridor, she started again. ‘I had to fetch the spare. That's the thing. You keep asking me about who went in, and I'm telling you I couldn't get in myself.’ Detective Inspector Caleb Winters let the uniformed constable finish taking down her details before he approached. The woman had a ring of keys attached to her belt by a length of cord, the sort sold for people who worked in schools. She was still holding the plastic carrier bag she'd brought for her lunch. In it he could see a banana, two rolls wrapped separately in foil and a yellow packet of crisps. ‘I'm Caleb Winters,’ he said. ‘Would you show me which key?’ She turned the ring round twice, looking for the red tape. Caleb had been told the same thing by three separate officers, but the key was hers and she was plainly determined to show him. She unfastened it from the bunch and held it by the narrow end. ‘This one. For the meeting room. Colin wasn't supposed to leave it locked if he was in there. Unless he was counting the money, and even then—’ She stopped. ‘It sounds terrible, talking about the keys.’ ‘You were trying to get on with your morning.’ She gave him a quick, disapproving look, as though he'd misunderstood her on purpose. ‘I was trying to find him. He'd left the lamps on downstairs. The hall's on a meter. I'm forever going on about it.’ Caleb checked the time she had first tried the door, who else possessed a key and whether anyone had been through the rear access. She answered with increasing precision. Ten twenty-four, then ten thirty-one after she had checked the fire-exit corridor. The rear door had been bolted from the inside when she opened up at eight. Colin generally arrived before nine to deal with the community centre's accounts and room bookings; some days he stayed a full morning, some days he left before the exercise class came in. She had found him at approximately ten forty-five. The officers had reached the building minutes later. ‘Could he have been here before you opened up?’ Caleb asked. ‘Of course. He had the front keys, same as me. Every other Thursday he came in at half six because he had the bank to deal with later. He'd lock himself in to stop people walking straight through while he was sorting papers.’ ‘Did you see his car when you arrived?’ ‘Round the side. I remember because he keeps parking across the line, and the milk delivery complains he can't turn. I didn't see him. That wouldn't be unusual.’ She looked vexed that what she remembered was a parking complaint. ‘When I said he wasn't supposed to lock the room, I meant while other people were in the building. If he was here at seven, that's different.’ Caleb put the times in his notebook, leaving space beside each for confirmation. Colin could have let himself in hours before the caretaker arrived; now they needed somebody who had actually seen him do it. The chairman, perhaps, or the driver who kept complaining about the car. ‘His daughter's coming,’ she said. ‘I rang her before I rang the police. I thought he'd had one of his turns.’ ‘Has he had turns before?’ ‘Dizzy spells. Blood pressure, I think. She ought to have been told.’ ‘You weren't wrong to be worried about him. We'll make sure she has somebody with her when she arrives.’ ‘She'll say I oughtn't have rung.’ The woman looked towards the room. ‘They had an argument on Sunday. About the car. Now she'll have to live with it.’ Caleb had heard people apologise for the last ordinary argument they had had with somebody who died. He let her finish. ‘Is she coming on her own?’ At the far end of the corridor, a children's movement class was being sent home. A parent was trying to put a coat on a boy who kept folding his arms inside it. The instructor had switched off the music, leaving an odd, busy quiet: shoes dragging on vinyl, somebody demanding a lost bottle, the thump of equipment being moved away in the hall below. Caleb asked for that part of the building to be kept clear, then stepped to the threshold of the meeting room. Three mismatched tables occupied most of the meeting room. Somebody had kept a broken fan, an old flip chart and a plastic box of extension leads long after they had stopped being useful; the craft-sale notice was from the previous month. Beside a ledger stood a mug and half a biscuit. Caleb could imagine Colin sitting here that morning, irritated by a column of figures or someone coming through the door to ask about the heating. The body lay close to the table. The first responding officer had checked for signs of life, and a paramedic had confirmed the death; now the scene examiner was working around the places they had needed to stand. Colin had one arm beneath him. A dark stain showed near the back of his head, although Caleb couldn't establish from his position what had caused it. His shoes were polished to a deep brown, one lace fastened in a loop that had almost come undone. ‘We haven't moved him,’ the scene supervisor said. ‘Other than the initial check. Photographing as found. Doctor's being arranged.’ ‘Anyone see someone leave?’ ‘Not yet. We're separating out who was here for the class, who was here for the building and who was passing through. Two people heard a raised voice, but neither can agree on when.’ ‘Keep those accounts apart until they're recorded.’ ‘Already done.’ The supervisor angled herself so Caleb could see past a standing whiteboard propped against the inner wall. ‘There's something else. First officer spotted it before the examiner came in.’ In the narrow space between the whiteboard and a bank of stacked chairs, a name had been painted across the plaster. The letters were black, approximately the height of a man's hand, unornamented and sufficiently uneven that whoever had made them hadn't used a stencil. FIONA CREASE Caleb took the name down exactly as it appeared, including the space and the absence of punctuation. He had expected a complaint about Colin, perhaps somebody else's version of an argument, and now there was a woman whose name might mean almost anything. He resisted asking the examiner whether the paint was fresh. She would tell him when she could establish it. ‘Has anyone here identified her?’ ‘Caretaker doesn't recognise it. We'll ask the rest.’ ‘Was the board in front of it when the first officer arrived?’ ‘Yes. We have that in the initial photographs. Could've been moved before then, of course.’ Someone might have painted the letters weeks earlier. The plaster was marked in other places, with old fixing holes and a yellowed square where a notice had once hung. Caleb leaned just far enough to see the bottom of the writing without crossing the examiner's marked area. Whatever its age, nobody had yet supplied a reason for Fiona Crease to be on that wall. ‘Photograph it in the context of the room, not just close up,’ Caleb said. ‘And establish who last saw this room without it. Colin, the caretaker, whoever used it yesterday. Don't have anyone touching the paint until the examiner's finished.’ The supervisor made a note. ‘Do you want it treated as a threat?’ ‘I want someone finding out whether Fiona Crease is a person who might need us.’ ‘Could be the offender.’ ‘Could be. Could be a former employee's name. We don't know.’ He glanced again at the writing. ‘We don't need to know what it means to check whether there's someone at risk.’ The supervisor repeated the instruction into her radio. A constable in the corridor asked for a spelling; she gave it twice and told him to preserve the version he had first written down. Caleb stayed by the room while the examiner finished photographing the board in place. He needed the room to tell him what had happened to Colin, however much attention the name was about to attract. His phone vibrated in his jacket. Tomasz Lewin was calling from the office. ‘I assume you don't want congratulations on a quiet morning,’ Tomasz said. ‘There are people waiting to give you those in person. We've got one deceased, Colin Ransome, and a possible name on the wall.’ ‘A possible name?’ ‘It's a name. I don't know what the possible thing is yet. Fiona Crease. Spelled C-R-E-A-S-E. Can you get the team to start on it? Properly log the candidates and the sources. Ask the duty sergeant to send any urgent welfare concerns straight through.’ ‘I've just had a call from uniform about the deceased. Is the writing part of the scene?’ ‘Yes. Hidden behind a board when the room was opened. Work as though it might be a warning until somebody proves it isn't. Don't assume she knows Ransome.’ ‘I'll find out how many Fiona Creases there are first.’ ‘Probably more than we want.’ ‘That's my optimistic estimate.’ Caleb asked Tomasz to check the first-discovery time against the incident log. While they spoke, a woman downstairs was insisting that her child had left a water bottle in the movement-class cupboard, and the constable on the stairwell was trying to find somebody free to fetch it. Caleb put that with the other unavoidable disruptions of an occupied building and went back over the caretaker's timings. On the way downstairs, Caleb was stopped by a man in a green fleece who had been waiting outside the hall. He had a receipt book tucked under his arm and explained, apologetically, that he was the centre's volunteer chairman. Could someone tell him if the children's groups could return next week? He wasn't being callous, he insisted, but the building depended on its bookings. He was also worried about an envelope of takings from the weekend market, because Colin had been handling them. ‘We'll tell you which rooms remain unavailable as soon as we can,’ Caleb said. ‘You'll need to leave the accounts alone until we've spoken to you about them.’ The man grimaced. ‘It's eleven hundred and forty pounds. Well, it ought to be. I suppose that sounds bad as well.’ He then remembered that part of the money had been taken by card. The envelope might have contained no more than a float, depending on whether Colin had reconciled the receipts. Caleb asked him to bring the bank and booking records together with whoever actually knew how the centre's accounts worked. He had no interest in building a theft motive on a chairman's anxious estimate. ‘That's usually Colin,’ the chairman said. ‘We'll find another way of checking.’ The chairman went off to find the name of the person who prepared the annual accounts. He was certain he had written it on a Christmas card, because the treasurer's address book was too complicated to search; he could even remember which shop the card had come from. Caleb left him to it and asked the nearby constable to take his contact details before he forgot why he had gone. ‘It sounds like a matter we should check. Who else has access to the office?’ The chairman began counting on his fingers, then stopped at the cleaners because he couldn't remember whether their key had been returned. He offered to telephone the cleaning company. Caleb asked him to let an officer make the call: they needed a list of access holders before everybody began checking with everybody else and confusing the answers. The chairman said Colin had been useful, although difficult. Always available to sort out a broken lock or the accounts at Christmas, and always ready to complain if anyone moved his filing system. He had brought in a new kettle himself after the last one failed and charged the centre for it at cost. He had also refused to allow the Saturday dance group to store their decorations in the meeting room, a dispute that seemed to have lasted several months. ‘Did he argue with anyone this morning?’ Caleb asked. ‘He argued with people every morning. Mostly on principle.’ ‘Someone he was expecting?’ ‘He told me there was a booking enquiry to sort out. A woman, I think. I didn't ask. He kept that diary in his head half the time, drove the caretaker mad.’ The chairman couldn't say whether the woman had arrived. He did remember Colin leaving a space in the bookings diary, although he wasn't certain on which page. Caleb gave him the number of the officer gathering statements and asked him to speak to her before chasing further recollections round the building. Colin's daughter arrived while Caleb was still in the entrance hall. He knew who she was before anyone introduced her because she stood directly inside the doorway, looking up the stairs, while the caretaker hurried towards her. She was holding a set of car keys in one hand and a child's school sweatshirt in the other. She said she had driven straight from the school gates; the sweatshirt belonged to a pupil who had left it in her car that morning. ‘Can I see him?’ she asked the uniformed officer. The officer glanced towards Caleb. He stepped closer and introduced himself, giving her his name once more when she asked him to repeat it. She made no attempt to shake his hand. ‘They said he'd collapsed,’ she told him. ‘That's what I was told. Is that what happened?’ ‘I'm sorry. Your father's died. We can't yet give you a reliable account of how.’ The caretaker made a sound that might have been the start of an apology. Colin's daughter raised her free hand without looking at her. ‘He had a heart thing four years ago. The tablets make him dizzy. He told you, didn't he?’ ‘We have that information. There are circumstances at the room we need to investigate, and we'll keep you informed as soon as we can give you something accurate.’ She looked at his face for a long moment. ‘So you're saying somebody did something.’ ‘I'm saying we're investigating his death. I don't want to guess at things you might have to hear again later.’ ‘Was he alone?’ He told her he didn't know. For several seconds she kept her car keys raised as though there were somewhere to put them. The caretaker went to find a chair and came back with one covered in leaflets for a Christmas appeal. Colin's daughter shifted the leaflets to the floor, sat down and laid the school sweatshirt across her knees. Her thumb found a patch of dried glue on the cuff and worked at the edge of it while Caleb explained who would contact her next. ‘He was meant to drive me to the garage tomorrow,’ she said. ‘That was what we were arguing about. I'm thirty-nine and he still thinks mechanics try to cheat me.’ She shook her head. ‘I told him I didn't want him there. It was stupid.’ Caleb asked whom she would like contacted. She said her husband was at work, changed her mind, and took out her phone. The caretaker went with a constable into the next room, where they could speak without being overheard. Caleb moved to the end of the corridor and added the daughter's question about whether Colin had been alone to his notes. It was something the witnesses and examination might eventually answer. Outside the centre, parents were returning for children who had been sent home halfway through their class. A little girl was refusing to give back a fluorescent hoop; her father held the car boot open while she tried to fit the hoop around his waist. At the far end, a driver reversed laboriously between a delivery van and a bollard, ignoring instructions from someone in a waterproof jacket. Caleb stood by the entrance to finish his notes while an officer explained yet again that the building was closed. His phone rang before he could return upstairs. It was Tomasz. ‘I've got three possible identity records already,’ he said. ‘Two reasonably current. One old address that might be useful, might be nothing. We're making calls. No link to Ransome yet.’ ‘Who owns the checks?’ Tomasz named the sergeant coordinating the checks and read back the incident number. Officers had been assigned to separate addresses, while an analyst was comparing Colin's known contacts against the possible identities. Caleb repeated the number into his notebook. Someone had to be able to reconstruct the attempts afterwards, including the unsuccessful ones. ‘Good,’ Caleb said. ‘Keep each Fiona separate. I'd rather we find three women who are fed up with us than miss one who needs us.’ ‘One of them may be fifty miles away.’ ‘Then speak to the people who can reach her. Don't wait for me to come back.’ After the call, Caleb checked what had been recorded from the first witnesses and went back inside. The caretaker was in the corridor arguing mildly with a constable about the heating timer. Nobody could get into the locked control cupboard without her other key, which she had put somewhere safe. Once she had found it, he asked who had been with Colin when she last saw him the previous afternoon.