Woman in the Water. Katerina Diamond

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       Chapter Seventeen

      Adrian clicked through all the images Gary had compiled. As they had barely any information on John Doe, he could have been reported missing at any point from anywhere. The things they knew were that he had naturally brown hair and brown eyes, and was no younger than twenty and no older than forty. He was five foot eleven and Caucasian. Anyone who didn’t fit those criteria was immediately removed from the list.

      ‘Dr Forrester said he would have something for us in less than half an hour,’ Gary said as he returned to the room with two hot coffees from the secret coffee machine in his office.

      ‘I’m down to under three hundred now, much better than what we started with,’ Adrian said. ‘I feel like we should be investigating all of these, anyway.’

      ‘It’s definitely depressing.’

      ‘I don’t know what we’ll do if he’s not one of these men. Back to CCTV from the quayside, I guess, see if there is anything. There must be something we are missing.’

      Adrian looked through the faces one more time, thinking about the faces he had already discarded. Who was going to look for them? The idea that every single one of those people had someone who cared about them enough to notice they were gone, to report them missing, was distressing. Growing up with an addict for a father meant Adrian was no stranger to living with someone who was in and out of your life. Charlie Miles came and went as he pleased, and they never reported him missing. Maybe it was the same for some of these people.

      He couldn’t get bogged down in what their stories might be, though. They might not all be sad stories. The truth was, he didn’t know and it was no use speculating; he couldn’t think about them right now. They weren’t all dead – some were probably homeless, some may have just felt suffocated in their lives and needed a new start elsewhere. It was common for people to disappear after a bad break-up. Sometimes the police would track them down and the missing person wouldn’t want to be found; it was their right to leave in the first place. Occasionally, they were fleeing abusive situations.

      Adrian couldn’t imagine that, just dropping everything and moving away, but then he had his son, Tom, to think about, so he was tethered. Even when things had got really rough with his ex – Tom’s mum, Andrea – Adrian wouldn’t have thought about leaving; it didn’t even occur to him.

      A notification sounded on Gary’s personal laptop and he rushed back over to the seat next to Adrian with it under his arm. Within seconds, Gary had the image on the screen of the reconstructed face.

      The man looked quite young. He had the slender, angular face of a man under thirty. His cheekbones were prominent and he had a fairly square jaw. He didn’t quite have superhero looks, but there was something so everyday and inoffensive about him. Even Adrian could see that he was a decent-looking guy, the right side of average, symmetrical in all the right places.

      Adrian started at the beginning of the MisPers list again. It was easy to see which faces didn’t belong to the man in the clay reconstruction. As he looked through, he tried to commit each face to memory so that if he ever saw them in the street, he would be able to remove them from the list. He knew he wouldn’t remember, though. Each face was replaced immediately with a new one before he really had a chance to study it. They went through the faces over and over again, whittling them down further and further each time until they had just seventeen faces left.

      Some of the photos supplied by the people who had filed the report had been less than clear, but Adrian found himself drawn to one particular image. The man was smiling in the photograph, standing on a jetty overlooking one of the major lakes in the Lake District. He had his arms outstretched and was wearing an orange beanie. Simon Glover.

      Simon Glover was reported missing from Charmouth in Dorset just a week earlier by his sister, Fiona Merton. The more Adrian compared the image of Simon to the clay model, the more he was convinced they were the same person.

      ‘It’s this guy. Simon Glover. Can we get any better images of him?’

      ‘He’s probably got some form of social media profile; most people have. I’ll look him up,’ Gary said as he opened various tabs and typed into each one at a speed that seemed inhuman to Adrian.

      ‘Well?’

      ‘This is him, I think.’ Gary said, spinning the screen towards Adrian.

      A Facebook profile, current job listed as working in Weymouth. It was him, though; a more serious picture of his face, but it was uncanny how much he looked like the clay sculpture. It’s not as if Adrian didn’t believe in the science of it, but this confirmed it in a way that couldn’t have been done any other way. He could see it with his own eyes. Simon Glover was John Doe.

      ‘Gary, I could kiss you.’

      ‘I’m sorry, mate, I’m taken.’

      ‘Talking of which, is he married? Is our Jane Doe his wife?’ Adrian said, remembering the wedding ring Jane Doe was wearing.

      ‘His relationship status on this is listed as single.’

      ‘So, whoever Jane Doe was, she wasn’t Simon Glover’s wife. What was her connection to him, then? How did they end up in the river together? Are there any pictures of Jane Doe on his profile?’

      ‘In all of his public photos he’s alone. We can put in a request to gain access to his account, but Facebook are notoriously slow for granting these requests, so I wouldn’t hold your breath.’

      ‘Do you have an address for his sister? I’m going to grab Imogen then we can head on over there.’

      ‘I’ll send all the details to your phone.’

      Adrian rushed out of the room. Finally, a break in the case. It was horrible to think of unclaimed victims, that somewhere out there their unsuspecting family members were just carrying on with their lives. Simon Glover was the first real name they had. Even though Adrian wasn’t relishing telling his sister the news of her brother’s passing, it was worse when you couldn’t find the family to notify them. Now that they had somewhere to start, it was only a matter of time before they got the whole picture, a matter of time before they found the woman again and made sure she was safe.