The tide of guilt rose and rose, and there was only one way to keep her head above it, to keep from drowning, and that was to find a reason, to point to it, to say, There. That was it. Her daughter made a senseless choice, but pockets filled with stones and hands grasping flowers: the choice had context. The context was provided by Nel Abbott.
Louise placed the black suitcase on the bed, opened the wardrobe and began to slip Katie’s clothes off their hangers: her bright T-shirts, her summer dresses, the shocking-pink hoodie she wore all last winter. Her vision blurred and she tried to think of something to stop the tears coming, she tried to find some image on which to fix her mind’s eye, and so she thought of Nel’s body, broken in the water, and she took what comfort she could from that.
SEAN
I was roused by the sound of a woman calling out, a desperate, faraway sound. I thought I must have dreamed it, but then I was jolted awake by banging, loud and close and intrusive and real. There was someone at the front door.
I dressed quickly and ran downstairs, glancing at the clock in the kitchen as I passed. It was only just after midnight—I couldn’t have been sleeping for more than half an hour. The hammering at the door persisted and I could hear a woman calling my name, a voice I knew but for a moment couldn’t place. I opened the door.
“Do you see this?” Louise Whittaker was shouting at me, red-faced and furious. “I told you, Sean! I told you there was something going on!” The this to which she referred was an orange plastic vial, the sort you get prescription drugs in, and on the side there was a label, with a name. Danielle Abbott. “I told you!” she said again, and then she burst into tears. I ushered her inside—too late. Before I closed the kitchen door I saw a light go on in the upstairs bedroom of my father’s house.
It took quite a while to understand what Louise was telling me. She was hysterical, her sentences running into one another and making no sense. I had to tease the information out of her gradually, one gulping, breathless, furious phrase at a time. They had decided at last to put the house on the market. Before viewings could start, she needed to clear out Katie’s bedroom. She wasn’t having strangers tramping through there, touching her things. She had made a start on it that afternoon. While she was packing away Katie’s clothes she had found the orange vial. She’d been removing a coat from a hanger, the green one, one of Katie’s favourites. She’d heard a rattling noise. She’d slipped her hand into the pocket and discovered the bottle of pills. She was shocked, even more so when she saw that the name on the bottle was Nel’s. She had never heard of the drug—Rimato—before, but she looked it up on the Internet and discovered that it was a kind of diet pill. The pills are not legally available in the UK. Studies in the United States have linked their use to depression and suicidal thoughts.
“You missed it!” she cried. “You told me she had nothing in her blood. You said Nel Abbott had nothing to do with it. But here”—she banged her fist on the table, making the vial jump into the air—“see! She was supplying my daughter with drugs, with dangerous drugs. And you let her get away with it.”
It was strange, but all the time she was saying this, attacking me, I felt relieved. Because now there was a reason. If Nel had supplied Katie with drugs, then we could point to that, and say, Look, there, that’s why it happened. That’s why a brilliant, happy young girl lost her life. That’s why two women lost their lives.
It was comforting, but it was also a lie. I knew it was a lie. “Her blood tests were negative, Louise,” I said. “I don’t know how long this . . . this Rimato? I’ve no idea how long it stays in the system. We’ve no idea if this even is Rimato, but . . .” I got to my feet, fetched a plastic sandwich bag from the kitchen drawer and held it out to Louise. She picked the vial up from the table and dropped it into the bag. I sealed it up. “We can find out.”
“And then we’ll know,” she said, gulping for air again.
The truth was, we wouldn’t know. Even if there were traces of a drug in her system, even if there was something that had been missed, it wouldn’t tell us anything definitive.
“I know it’s too late,” Louise was saying, “but I want this to be known. I want everyone to know what Nel Abbott did—Christ, she might have given pills to other girls . . . You need to speak to your wife about this—as head teacher, she should know someone’s selling this shit in her school. You need to search the lockers, you need—”
“Louise”—I sat down at her side—“slow down. Of course we’ll take this seriously—we will—but we have no way of knowing how this bottle came into Katie’s possession. It’s possible that Nel Abbott purchased the pills for her own use . . .”
“And what? What are you saying? That Katie stole them? How dare you even suggest that, Sean! You knew her—”
The kitchen door rattled—it sticks, especially after rain—and flew open. It was Helen, looking dishevelled in tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt, her hair uncombed. “What’s going on? Louise, what’s happened?”
Louise shook her head, but said nothing. She covered her face with her hands.
I got to my feet and spoke to Helen. “You should go on up to bed,” I said, keeping my voice low. “There’s nothing to worry about.”
“But—”
“I just need to chat to Louise for a bit. It’s all right. You go on upstairs.”
“All right,” she said warily, glancing down at the woman sobbing quietly at our kitchen table. “If you’re sure . . .”
“I am.”
Helen slipped quietly out of the kitchen, closing the door behind her as she left. Louise wiped her eyes. She was looking at me oddly, wondering, I suppose, where Helen had been. I could have explained: she doesn’t sleep well; my father’s an insomniac, too; sometimes they sit up together, do crosswords, listen to the radio. I could have explained, but the prospect felt tiring all of a sudden, so instead I said, “I don’t think Katie stole anything, Louise. Of course I don’t. But she might have . . . I don’t know, picked them up absentmindedly. She might have been curious. You say they were in a coat pocket? Perhaps she picked them up and then forgot about them.”
“My daughter didn’t take things from other people’s homes,” Louise replied sourly, and I nodded. No point arguing this one.
“I’ll look into it, first thing tomorrow. I’ll have these sent to the labs, and we’ll look at Katie’s blood tests again. If I missed something, Louise . . .”
She shook her head. “I know it doesn’t change anything. I know it won’t bring her back,” she said quietly. “It would just help me. To understand.”
“I see that. Of course I do. Would you like me to drive you home?” I asked her. “I can bring your car over in the morning.”
She shook her head again and gave me a shaky smile. “I’m OK,” she said. “Thank you.”
• • •
THE ECHO OF HER THANKS—unwarranted, undeserved—rang out in the silence after she’d gone. I felt wretched, and was grateful for the sound of Helen’s footsteps on the stairs, grateful that I wouldn’t have to be alone.
“What’s going on?” she asked me as she entered the kitchen. She looked pale and very tired, with circles like bruises under her eyes. She sat down at the table and reached for my hand. “What was Louise doing here?”
“She found something,” I said. “Something that she thinks might have some bearing on what happened to Katie.”
“Oh, God, Sean. What?”
I puffed out my cheeks. “I shouldn’t . . . probably shouldn’t discuss it in detail just yet.” She nodded and squeezed my hand. “Tell me, when was the last time you confiscated drugs at school?”
She frowned. “Well, that little toe rag, Watson—Iain—had some marijuana taken off him at the end of term, but before that . . . oh, not for a while. Not for a long while. Back in March, I think, that business with Liam Markham.”
“That was pills, wasn??
?t it?”
“Yes, Ecstasy—or something purporting to be Ecstasy, in any case, and Rohypnol. He was excluded.”
I vaguely remembered the incident, though it’s not the sort of thing I involve myself in. “There’s been nothing since? You haven’t come across any diet pills, have you?”
She raised an eyebrow. “No. Nothing illegal, in any case. Some of the girls take those blue ones—what do they call them? Alli, I think. It’s available over the counter, although I don’t think it’s supposed to be sold to minors.” She wrinkled her nose. “It makes them horribly flatulent, but apparently that’s an acceptable price to pay for a thigh gap.”
“To pay for a what?”
Helen rolled her eyes at me. “A thigh gap! They all want legs so skinny they don’t meet at the top. Honestly, Sean, sometimes I think you live on a different planet.” She squeezed my hand again. “Sometimes I wish I lived there with you.”
We went up to bed together for the first time in a long time, but I couldn’t touch her. Not after what I’d done.
Wednesday, 19 August
ERIN
It took Hairy the science guy about five minutes to find the email receipt for the diet pills in Nel Abbott’s spam folder. As far as he could tell, she bought the pills on only one occasion, unless of course she had another email account that was no longer in use.
“Odd, isn’t it?” commented one of the uniforms, one of the older guys whose name I haven’t bothered to learn. “She was such a thin woman. Wouldn’t have thought she needed them. The sister, she was the fat one.”
“Jules?” I said. “She isn’t fat.”
“Oh, aye, not now, but you should have seen her back in the day.” He started laughing. “She was a heifer.”
Fucking charming.
Since Sean told me about the pills, I’ve been swotting up on Katie Whittaker. The case was pretty clear-cut, although the question of why loomed large—as is so often the case. Her parents didn’t suspect anything was up. Her teachers said that perhaps she’d been a little distracted, maybe a bit more reserved than usual, but there were no red flags. Her blood work was clean. She’d no history of self-harm.
The only thing—and it wasn’t much of a thing—was an alleged falling-out with her best friend, Lena Abbott. A couple of Katie’s school friends claimed that Lena and Katie had had a disagreement about something. Louise, Katie’s mother, said they’d been seeing less of each other, but she didn’t think there had been an argument. If there had been, she said, Katie would have mentioned it. They’d had fights in the past—teenage girls will do that—and Katie had always been up front about it with her mum. And in the past, they’d always kissed and made up. After one fight, Lena had felt bad enough to give Katie a necklace.
These school friends though—Tanya Something and Ellie Something Else—said that something big was up, though they couldn’t say what. All they knew was that a month or so before Katie died, she and Lena had what they called a “vicious argument” that ended in them being physically separated by a teacher. Lena hotly denied it, claiming Tanya and Ellie had it in for her, that they were just trying to get her into trouble. Certainly Louise had never heard of this row, and the teacher involved—Mark Henderson—claimed it wasn’t really an argument at all. They were play-fighting, he said. Messing about. It got very noisy and he told them to quieten down. And that was it.
I skimmed over that when I was reading Katie’s file, but I kept coming back to it. Something felt off. Do teenage girls play-fight? It seems like something teenage boys would be more likely to do. Perhaps I’ve internalized more sexism than I care to admit. But I was just looking at pictures of those girls—pretty, poised, Katie in particular very well groomed—and they didn’t look much like play-fighters to me.
When I parked the car outside the Mill House, I heard a noise and glanced up. Lena was leaning out of one of the upstairs windows, a cigarette in her hand.
“Hello, Lena,” I called out. She didn’t say anything, but very deliberately took aim and flicked the cigarette butt in my direction. Then she withdrew, slamming the window shut. I don’t buy the play-fighting thing at all: I imagine that when Lena Abbott fights, she fights for real.
Jules let me in, glancing nervously over my shoulder as she did so.
“Everything all right?” I asked her. She looked awful: haggard, grey, eyes bleary, hair unwashed.
“I can’t sleep,” she said softly. “I just don’t seem to be able to get to sleep.”
She shuffled through to the kitchen, flicked the kettle on and slumped down at the table. She reminded me of my sister three weeks after she gave birth to her twins—barely enough strength to hold her head up.
“Perhaps you ought to get the doctor to prescribe you something,” I suggested, but she shook her head.
“I don’t want to sleep too deeply,” she said, her eyes widening, giving her a manic cast. “I need to be alert.”
I could have said that I’d seen greater alertness from coma patients, but I didn’t.
“This Robbie Cannon you were asking about,” I said. She twitched, and chewed on a nail. “We had a little look into him. You’re right about him being violent—he’s got a couple of domestic-violence convictions, amongst other things. But he wasn’t involved in your sister’s death. I went over to Gateshead—that’s where he lives—and had a little chat with him. He was in Manchester visiting his son the night Nel died. He says he hasn’t seen her in years, but when he read about her death in the local paper, he decided he would come up here to pay his respects. He seemed pretty gobsmacked that we were asking him about it at all.”
“Did he . . .” Her voice was little more than a whisper. “Did he mention me? Or Lena?”
“No. He didn’t. Why do you ask? Has he been here?” I thought of the tentative way in which she’d opened the front door, the way she’d looked over my shoulder as though watching out for someone.
“No. I mean, I don’t think so. I don’t know.”
I managed to get nothing more out of her on the subject. It was clear that she was frightened of him for some reason, but she wouldn’t say why. It was unsatisfactory, but I left it at that, as I had another awkward subject to raise.
“This is a bit difficult,” I said to her. “I’m afraid we need to search the house again.”
She stared at me, horrified. “Why? Have you found something? What’s happened?”
I explained about the pills.
“Oh, God.” She squeezed her eyes shut and hung her head. It might have been exhaustion dulling her reaction, but she didn’t seem shocked.
“She purchased them in November of last year, on the eighteenth, from an American website. We can’t find a record of any other purchases, but we need to make sure—”
“All right,” she said. “Of course.” She rubbed her eyes with the tips of her fingers.
“A couple of uniforms will come round this afternoon. Is that OK?”
She shrugged. “Well, if you have to, but I . . . what date did you say she bought them?”
“The eighteenth of November,” I said, checking my notes. “Why?”
“It’s just . . . that’s the anniversary. Of our mother’s death. It seems . . . oh, I don’t know.” She frowned. “It just seems odd, because Nel usually called me on the eighteenth, and last year was notable because she didn’t. It turned out she was in hospital, for an emergency appendectomy. I suppose I’m just surprised she would have been spending her time buying diet pills when she was in hospital for emergency surgery. You’re sure it was the eighteenth?”
• • •
BACK AT THE STATION, I checked with Hairy. I was right about the date.
“She could have bought them on her mobile,” Callie suggested. “It is really boring in hospital.”
But Hairy shook his head. “No, I’ve checked the IP address—whoever made the pur
chase did so at four-seventeen p.m. and they did so from a computer using the Mill House router. So it had to be someone in or near the house. Do you know what time she went into hospital?”
I didn’t, but it wasn’t difficult to find out. Nel Abbott was admitted in the small hours of 18 November for an emergency appendectomy, just like her sister said. She remained in hospital all that day, and they kept her in overnight, too.
Nel couldn’t have bought the pills. They were purchased by someone else, using her card, in her home.
“Lena,” I said to Sean. “It’s got to be Lena.”
He nodded, grim-faced. “We’re going to need to talk to her.”
“You want to do it now?” I asked him, and he nodded again.
“No time like the present,” he said. “No time like immediately after the child has lost her mother. Christ, this is a mess.”
• • •
AND IT WAS about to get messier. We were on our way out of the office when we were waylaid by an overexcited Callie.
“The prints!” she said breathlessly. “They’ve got a match. Well, not quite a match, because there’s no match to anyone who’s come forward, only—”
“Only what?” the DI snapped.
“Some bright spark decided to take a look at the print on the pill bottle and compare it to the print on the camera—you know, the damaged one?”
“Yes, we remember the damaged camera,” Sean replied.
“OK, well, they match. And before you say it, it’s not Nel Abbott’s print, and it’s not Katie Whittaker’s. Someone else handled both those objects.”