“You’re right. And it’s also my round.” He points to my nearly empty coffee cup. “Same again?”
I nod and he stands, lumbering off between tables toward the side entrance of the pub. The black briefcase, I notice, he’s left behind next to our table. But the watch had disappeared back into the pocket of his voluminous suit jacket.
The pub garden has started to fill up a little now that it’s gone past midday, office workers from Castle Wharf bringing drinks out to occupy more of the tables in the warm spring sunshine, a handful of tourists comparing selfies taken with the Robin Hood statue just up the hill. After spending half an hour with Webber, I’m still not sure whether I trust him, whether he’s telling me the whole truth, and he’s still notreallyexplained why he’s taken the trouble of tracking me down after acquiring that Rolex.
He re-emerges into the garden with a fresh drink in each hand, sets the steaming black coffee down in front of me, and eases down into his own seat with a second pint of bitter.
As before, he takes the watch from his jacket pocket and puts it carefully on the table. But this time he lays it facedown, smoothing out the plastic so he can point to the finely tooled inscription on the back of the casing:EJS 11–29–75.
“This Rolex,” he says, “belonged to a man called Edward John Stiles. It was given to him on his eighteenth birthday, in November 1993, a gift from his maternal grandfather. Quite the favorite grandchild, Edward was, from what we couldglean later. And he wore this watch on special occasions. Never replaced it, always took good care of it, and had it serviced every year. Does the name Edward Stiles mean anything to you?”
“It’s not familiar.” I shake my head. “Should it be?”
“Perhaps not. It was a long time ago.”
“Was he a… suspect in a crime you were investigating?”
“No. Not a suspect.” He studies me for a long moment, taking a slow drink and wiping a film of beer froth from his mustache when he’s done. “Edward Stiles was murdered. And his killer was never caught.”
58
It’s a cold case.
Edward Stiles had gone missing in the spring of 2001. A single man, he had been a keen hiker, often spending long weekends wild-camping in the Lake District, Snowdonia, and the Yorkshire Dales. Sometimes he would walk on his own and it wasn’t uncommon for him to be out of contact for a day or two while he was “off on one of his adventures,” as his parents had told Webber all those years ago.
In the first few days, the ex-detective explains, his parents assumed Edward had simply taken an extended trip and not come across a payphone. After he failed to turn up for work the next week, they involved the police, who began to develop a theory that he had fallen while hiking alone. Subsequently there was speculation that he may have deliberately harmed himself, or even taken his own life.
There is an uncomfortable echo in his words, a reminder of Adrian Parish and the police theories that he too had come to harm by his own hand.
Webber unfolds a creased sheet of paper from his briefcase, four images photocopied onto the same page: a young-looking guy with a shy smile and wavy dark-blond hair. In two of the pictures he’s wearing a yellow waterproof jacket, a rucksack on his back.
“It was five months before his body was found,” Webber says, “in a shallow grave in woodland north of Derby. Decompositionmade the autopsy more difficult, but cause of death was eventually determined as a single stab wound in the back. Most likely with a serrated hunting knife. No defensive wounds that they could find. It was one of the first cases I was put on when I made the murder squad, one of the cases we never closed. The unit I work for now, we do what’s called ‘historical review’ of specific unsolved crimes.”
“Cold cases.”
“Exactly.”
I think back to my own life in 2001. I had been finding my feet in my first year at university in Aberdeen, when life revolved around new friends in my hall of residence, around sport and music and nights out at the students’ union, with a few lectures on the side. A fairly typical self-absorbed eighteen-year-old.
“I was a teenager when he died,” I say. “But I don’t remember ever hearing about it.”
“It was a strange one, right from the off,” Webber says. “There was no obvious motive; the victim didn’t appear to have any enemies, no criminal record, no prior contact with police that we could find. The body was fully clothed when they found him—his wallet was there, cash, credit cards, car key, all untouched. The only thing missing was the watch. Never recovered from the scene, from his house, his car, his work. We searched everywhere.”
“And you’ve been looking for it ever since?”
He nods. “I had a feeling it would turn up sooner or later; a piece like that is too fine to just throw away. And yet it hadn’t surfaced in more than twenty years,” he says. “Not until you strolled into that jeweler’s shop last week.”
I swallow, the coffee suddenly bitter in my mouth at the full, stark realization of what I had done, what I had set in motion.
“But this means something, doesn’t it? A lead—I mean, you can talk to your former colleagues in CID, right? Refer it on to them.”
He shifts uncomfortably in his seat. “When the time’s right. Not yet. I need to establish some of the wider context first.”
“Surely you can just give them a ring? Have an off-the-record chat?”
“It’s not as simple as that,” he says, eyebrows drawing together in frustration. “I need more to justify a full reopening of the investigation.”
“But surely—”
