“Louise,” Sean said. “It has to be. Louise Whittaker.”
MARK
Mark was zipping up his suitcase when the detective arrived. A different detective this time, another woman, a bit older and not so pretty.
“DS Erin Morgan,” she said, shaking his hand. “I was wondering if I could have a word.”
He didn’t invite her in. The house was a mess and he wasn’t in the mood to be accommodating.
“I’m packing to go on holiday,” he said. “I’m driving to Edinburgh this evening to pick up my fiancée. We’re going to Spain for a few days.”
“It won’t take long,” DS Morgan said, her gaze slipping over his shoulder and into the house.
He pulled the front door closed. They spoke on the front step.
He assumed it would be about Nel Abbott again. He was, after all, one of the last people to see her alive. He’d seen her outside the pub, they’d spoken briefly, he’d watched her head off towards the Mill House. He was prepared for that conversation. He wasn’t prepared for this one.
“I know you’ve already been over this, but there are a few things we need to clarify,” the woman said, “about events leading up to the death of Katie Whittaker.”
Mark felt his pulse quicken. “What, er . . . what about it?”
“I understand that you had cause to intervene in an argument between Lena Abbott and Katie, about a month before Katie died?”
Mark’s throat felt very dry. He struggled to swallow. “It wasn’t an argument,” he said. He held up his hand to shield his eyes from the sun. “Why . . . sorry, why is this coming up again? Katie’s death was ruled a suicide, I thought—”
“Yes,” the detective interrupted, “yes, it was, and that hasn’t changed. However, we’ve come to understand that there might have been, er, circumstances surrounding Katie’s death which we didn’t know about before and which may require further investigation.”
Mark turned abruptly, pushing the front door open so hard it rebounded on to him as he stepped into the hallway. The vise was tightening on his skull, his heart was pounding, he had to get out of the sun.
“Mr. Henderson? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” His eyes adjusting to the darkness of the hallway, he turned back once more to look at her. “Fine. A bit of a headache, that’s all. The glare, it’s just—”
“Why don’t we get you a glass of water?” DS Morgan suggested with a smile.
“No,” he replied, realizing even as he spoke how sullen he sounded. “No, I’m fine.”
There was a silence. “The argument, Mr. Henderson? Between Lena and Katie?”
Mark shook his head. “It wasn’t an argument . . . I told the police this at the time. I didn’t have to separate them. Not . . . at least, not in the way that was suggested. Katie and Lena were very close, they could be excitable and voluble, the way many girls of that age—children of that age—can be.”
The detective, still standing in the sunshine on the front step, was now a faceless outline, a shadow. He preferred her that way.
“Some of Katie’s teachers reported that she seemed distracted, perhaps a bit more reserved than usual, in the weeks running up to her death. Is that your recollection?”
“No,” Mark said. He blinked slowly. “No. I don’t believe so. I don’t believe that she had changed. I didn’t notice anything different. I didn’t see it coming. We—none of us—saw this coming.”
His voice was low and strained and the detective noticed. “I’m sorry to bring all this up again,” she said. “I understand how terrible—”
“I don’t imagine that you do, actually. I saw that girl every day. She was young and bright and . . . She was one of my best students. We were all very . . . fond of her.” He stumbled over fond.
“I’m very sorry, I really am. But the thing is that some new facts have come to light, and we have to look into them.”
Mark nodded, struggling to hear her over the pounding of blood in his ears; his entire body felt very cold, as though someone had poured petrol all over him.
“Mr. Henderson, we have been led to understand that Katie may have been taking a drug, something called Rimato. Have you heard of it?”
Mark peered at her. Now he did want to see her eyes, he wanted to read her expression. “No . . . I . . . I thought they said that she hadn’t taken anything? That was what the police said at the time. Rimato? What is that? Is that . . . recreational?”
Morgan shook her head. “It’s a diet pill,” she said.
“Katie wasn’t overweight,” he said, realizing how stupid that sounded even as he said it. “They talk about it all the time, though, don’t they? Teenage girls. About their weight. And not just teenagers, either. Grown women, too. My fiancée never shuts up about it.”
True, though not the whole truth. Because his fiancée was no longer his fiancée, she no longer moaned to him about her weight, nor was she waiting for him to pick her up to accompany him to Málaga. In her last email, sent some months ago now, she’d wished misery on him, told him she’d never forgive him for the way he’d treated her.
But what had he done that was so terrible? If he’d been a truly awful man, a cold, cruel, unfeeling man, he’d have strung her along for appearances’ sake. It would have been in his interests, after all. But he wasn’t a bad man. It was just that when he loved, he loved completely—and what on earth was wrong with that?
• • •
AFTER THE DETECTIVE LEFT, he walked around the house, opening drawers, thumbing through the pages of books, looking. Looking for something he knew very well he wouldn’t find. The night after Midsummer, angry and frightened, he’d built a fire in the back garden and had piled onto it cards and letters, a book. Other gifts. If he looked out of the back window now, he could still see it, a little patch of scorched earth where he had eradicated every trace of her.
As he pulled open the desk drawer in his living room, he knew exactly what he’d see, because this wasn’t the first time he’d done it. He’d searched and searched for something he’d missed, sometimes in fear and often in grief. But he’d been thorough that first night.
There were pictures, he knew, in the head’s office at school. A file. Closed now, but still kept. He had a key to the admin block and he knew exactly where to look. And he wanted something, he needed something to take with him. This wasn’t a triviality, it was essential, he felt, because the future was suddenly so uncertain. He had an inkling that when he turned the key in the back door, locking up the house, he might never do that again. Perhaps he wouldn’t come back. Perhaps it was time to disappear, to start over.
He drove to the school, parking in the empty car park. Sometimes Helen Townsend worked there during the school holidays, but there was no sign of her car today. He was alone. He let himself into the building and headed up past the staff room to Helen’s office. Her door was closed, but when he tried the handle, he found it unlocked.
He pushed the door open, breathing in the nasty chemical whiff of carpet cleaner. He crossed the room to the filing cabinet and pulled open the top drawer. It had been emptied, and the drawer below was locked. He realized with an acute sense of disappointment that someone had rearranged everything, that in fact he didn’t know exactly where to look, that perhaps this had been a wasted journey. He darted out to the hallway to check that he was still alone—he was, his red Vauxhall still the only vehicle in the car park—and went back to the head’s office. Taking care not to disturb anything, he opened Helen’s desk drawers one by one, looking for the keys to the filing cabinet. He didn’t find them, but he did find something else: a trinket he couldn’t imagine Helen wearing. Something that struck him as vaguely familiar. A silver bracelet with an onyx clasp, and an engraving reading SJA.
He sat and stared at it for a long time. He couldn’t for the life of him think what it meant, the fact that it
was here. It meant nothing. It couldn’t mean anything. Mark replaced the bracelet in the desk, abandoned his search and returned to his car. He had the key in the ignition when it struck him exactly when he’d seen that bracelet last. He’d seen it on Nel, outside the pub. They’d spoken briefly. He’d watched her head off towards the Mill House. But before that, before she had left him, she had been fidgeting with something on her wrist as they spoke, and there, it was there. He retraced his steps, went back to Helen’s office and opened the drawer, took the bracelet and put it into his pocket. He knew as he was doing it that if someone asked him why, he wouldn’t be able to explain himself.
It was, he thought, as though he were in deep water, as though he were reaching for something, anything, to save himself. It was as though he had reached for a life buoy and instead found weeds, and grabbed hold of them anyway.
ERIN
The boy—Josh—was standing outside the house when we arrived, like a little soldier on guard, pale and watchful. He greeted the DI politely, looking more suspiciously at me. He was holding a Swiss Army knife in his hands, his fingers working nervously around the blade as he opened and closed it.
“Is your mum in, Josh?” Sean asked him, and he nodded.
“Why do you want to talk to us again?” he asked, his voice rising with a sharp squeak. He cleared his throat.
“We just need to check a couple of things,” Sean said. “It’s nothing to worry about.”
“She was in bed,” Josh announced, his eyes flicking from Sean’s face to mine. “That night. Mum was asleep. We were all asleep.”
“What night?” I asked. “What night was that, Josh?”
He blushed and looked down at his hands and fiddled with his knife. A little boy who hadn’t learned yet how to lie.
His mother opened the door behind him. She looked from me to Sean and sighed, rubbing her fingers over her brows. Her face was the colour of weak tea, and when she turned to talk to her son I noticed that her back was hunched, like an old woman. She beckoned him to her, speaking quietly.
“But what if they want to talk to me, too?” I heard him asking.
She placed her hands firmly on his shoulders. “They won’t, darling,” she said. “Off you go.”
Josh closed his knife and slipped it into his jeans pocket, his eyes on mine as he did. I smiled and he turned away, walking quickly down the path, glancing back just once as his mother was pulling the door closed behind us.
I followed Louise and Sean into a big, bright living room leading out into one of those boxy modern conservatories that seem to make the house bleed seamlessly into the garden. Outside, I could see a wooden hutch on the lawn and bantams, pretty black-and-white and golden hens, scratching around for food. Louise indicated for us to sit on the sofa. She lowered herself into the armchair opposite, slowly and carefully, like someone recovering from an injury, afraid of inflicting more damage.
“So,” she said, raising her chin slightly as she looked at Sean. “What have you got to tell me?”
He explained that the new blood tests gave the same results as the original ones: there were no traces of drugs in Katie’s system.
Louise listened, shaking her head in clear disbelief. “But you don’t know, do you, how long that sort of drug stays in the system? Or how long it takes for the effects to manifest or to wear off? You can’t dismiss this, Sean—”
“We’re dismissing nothing, Louise,” he said evenly. “All I’m telling you is what we have found.”
“Surely . . . well, surely supplying illegal drugs to someone—to a child—is an offence, in any case? I know . . .” She grazed her teeth over her lower lip. “I know it’s too late to punish her, but it should be made known, don’t you think? What she did?”
Sean said nothing. I cleared my throat and Louise glared at me as I began to speak.
“From what we’ve discovered, Mrs. Whittaker, regarding the timing of the purchase of the pills, Nel could not have purchased them. Although her credit card was used, it—”
“What are you suggesting?” Her voice rose angrily. “Now you’re saying Katie stole her credit card?”
“No, no,” I said. “We’re not saying anything of the sort . . .”
Her face changed as realization dawned on her. “Lena,” she said, leaning back in her chair, her mouth fixed in grim resignation. “Lena did it.”
We didn’t know that for sure either, Sean explained, though we would certainly be questioning her about it. In fact, she was due to visit the station that afternoon. He asked Louise whether she’d found anything else of concern amongst Katie’s possessions. Louise dismissed the question bluntly. “This is it,” she said, leaning forward. “Can’t you see that? You combine the pills and this place and the fact that Katie spent so much time round at the Abbotts’, surrounded by all those pictures and those stories, and . . .” She tailed off. Even she didn’t seem entirely convinced by the story she was telling. Because even if she was right, and even if those pills had made her daughter depressed, none of it changed the fact that she hadn’t noticed.
I didn’t say that, of course, because what I had to ask was difficult enough. Louise was hauling herself to her feet, assuming our meeting to be over, expecting us to leave, and I had to stop her.
“There’s something else we need to ask you about,” I said.
“Yes?” She remained standing, her arms crossed over her chest.
“We wondered if you would be prepared to let us take your fingerprints.”
She interrupted before I could explain. “What for? Why?”
Sean shifted uneasily in his chair. “Louise, we have a matching print from the pill bottle you gave me and from one of Nel Abbott’s cameras, and we need to establish why. That’s all.”
Louise sat back down. “Well, they’re probably Nel’s,” she said. “Wouldn’t you imagine?”
“They’re not Nel’s,” I replied. “We’ve checked. They’re not your daughter’s either.”
She flinched at that. “Of course they’re not Katie’s. What would Katie be doing with the camera?” She pursed her lips, raising her hand to the chain around her neck, running the little blue bird back and forth. She sighed heavily. “Well, they’re mine, of course,” she said. “They’re mine.”
It happened three days after her daughter died, she told us. “I went to Nel Abbott’s house. I was . . . well, I doubt you can imagine the state I was in, but you can try. I beat on her front door, but she wouldn’t come out. I wouldn’t give up, I just stayed there, pounding on the door and calling out for her, and eventually,” she said, sweeping a strand of hair from her face, “Lena opened the door. She was crying, sobbing, practically hysterical. It was quite a scene.” She tried and failed to smile. “I said some things to her—cruel things, I suppose, in retrospect, but . . .”
“What sort of things?” I asked.
“I . . . I don’t really remember the details.” Her composure was starting to slip, her breath shortening, her hands gripping the sides of her armchair, the effort turning the olive skin over her knuckles to yellow. “Nel must have heard me. She came outside and told me to leave them alone. She said . . .”—Louise gave a yelping laugh—“she said that she was sorry for my loss. She was sorry for my loss, but it had nothing to do with her, nothing to do with her daughter. Lena was on the ground, I remember that, she was making a noise like . . . like an animal. A wounded animal.” She paused to catch her breath before continuing. “We argued, Nel and I. It was rather violent.” She half smiled at Sean. “You’re surprised? You’ve not heard this before? I thought Nel would have told you about it—or Lena, at least. Yes, I . . . well, I didn’t hit her, but I lunged at her, and she held me off. I demanded to see the footage from her camera. I wanted . . . I didn’t want to see it, but I wanted more than anything for her not to have . . . I couldn’t bear . . .”
Louise broke down.
Watching someone in the throes of raw grief is a terrible thing; the act of watching feels violent, intrusive, a violation. Yet we do it, we have to do it, all the time; you just have to learn to cope with it whatever way you can. Sean coped by bowing his head and remaining very still. I coped with distraction: I watched the chickens scratching around on the lawn outside the window. I looked at the bookshelves, my eyes passing over worthy contemporary novels and military history books; I took in the framed pictures above the fireplace. The wedding photo and the family shot and the photograph of a baby. Just one, a little boy in blue. Where was Katie’s picture? I tried to imagine what it would feel like to take the framed picture of your child down from its place of pride and put it in a drawer. When I looked over at Sean, I saw that his head was no longer bent; he was glowering at me. I realized that there was a tapping sound in the room and that it was coming from me, the sound of my pen knocking against my notepad. I wasn’t doing it deliberately. I was shaking all over.
After what seemed like a very long time, Louise spoke again. “I couldn’t bear for Nel to be the last one to see my child. She told me there was no footage, that the camera wasn’t working, that even if it had been, it was up on the cliff, so it wouldn’t have . . . wouldn’t have captured her.” She heaved a huge sigh, a shudder working itself through her entire body, from her shoulders to her knees. “I didn’t believe her. I couldn’t risk it. What if there was something on camera and she used it? What if she showed my girl to the world, alone and frightened and . . .” She stopped and took a deep breath. “I told her . . . Lena must have told you all this? I told her that I wouldn’t rest until I saw her pay for what she’d done. Then I left. I went to the cliff and tried to open the camera to get the SD card out of it, but I couldn’t. I tried to break it free from its mount, I ripped my fingernail out doing so.” She held up her left hand—the nail of her forefinger was stunted and buckled. “I kicked it a few times, I smashed at it with a stone. Then I went home.”