The Body in the Mist by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788632232
Publisher: Canelo Digital Publishing Ltd
Published: 2019-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 25

On his return to Surrey, Gillard wasted no time in registering Emily Speakman on the police Missing Persons Unit website. Beyond the photograph, he had little information to offer. Hair colour: dark; eye colour: unknown; ethnicity: white British. The year of her disappearance he bracketed as 1972–74, with a date of birth guesstimate of 1950–58. Sam, having tried on the clothes, was able to estimate the woman’s height as five foot five, and her weight around eight stone. Pretty much every part of the description was drawn from the photograph, so if nobody recognized it, that was the beginning and end of it. Gillard had also sent the picture and description to every constabulary in the country, but doubted that anyone in Britain’s busiest and most populous police areas would even look at it, and with good reason. This wasn’t a high-priority case, it didn’t have the backing of police officialdom, and the person in question probably died in the mid-1970s. If the police couldn’t raise the manpower to investigate a burglary that happened yesterday, and often they couldn’t, they certainly wouldn’t have the time to look into a non-case from almost 50 years ago.

Gillard had known right from the start that it would be down to him. Still, he had been in that position before, and it wouldn’t put him off. Once again he googled Emily Speakman, and got 300,000 results. He cut this to just over 10,000 results when he restricted the search to show only those pages registering both words together. Many of them were for just a few prominent people including a talented Welsh teenage artist and an American businesswoman. He switched to the image search, which stretched to a dozen pages and showed no one with any resemblance to the photograph he had.

There were other ways to seek information. Gillard used a Russian email service to set up an account for Emily Speakman, as it asked no ID or verification questions. With the email he then created a Facebook profile for her, fixing her picture at the top and including a request for information. He then shared the post worldwide. There was really no more he could do until someone, somewhere, searched for her name or recognized the picture.

It was only half an hour before he got the first of several dozen friend requests, mostly coming from dubious-sounding individuals who had few online friends of their own. A couple of them showed pictures of attractive, and in some cases, partially clad women. Gillard recognized the hallmarks of fraudsters, phishing for confidential information like date of birth, address and mother’s maiden name.

Having heard that Philip Antrobus had been married, Gillard searched the General Register Office for a marriage certificate in his name, but came up short. He was no more successful in researching the Central Family Court for evidence of a decree absolute to nail down the date of a divorce. Graham Walsh, the Thames TV cameraman he had met at the funeral, must have been mistaken.

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