When You're Smiling

by GS Rhodes

  “Just got a message off Diane at the front desk,” Kidd said as he approached the computer. “The press is hounding Colin Hansen.”

  Zoe rolled her eyes. “Fucking vultures.”

  “Yeah,” Kidd said. “I don’t know what he wants us to do. We can get them to go away, but they’re only going to come right back. Does that make them vultures or cockroaches?”

  “Vicious hybrid,” Zoe said. “We have to do something. We can’t just leave him.” She sighed. “I mean, if it wasn’t enough that this was being brought back into the light, he’s having to deal with all of that. He can’t even go to work.”

  “Okay,” Kidd said. “I’ll send a couple of DC’s later on to do a drive-by, disperse anyone still there, make sure he’s alright. How does that sound?”

  “It sounds like you’re doing the bare minimum,” Zoe said. “But we’ve got a murderer to find.”

  Kidd shrugged. “My thoughts exactly. So, Joe wasn’t there this morning? What were you saying about his dad?”

  Zoe groaned. “A total dickhead.” Serious hatred for the police. Thinks we’re the scum of the Earth and didn’t want to help.”

  “Really?”

  “Monosyllabic answers from start to finish.”

  “But mum seemed…”

  “She seemed like she had something to say but didn’t dare say it in front of Mr Warrington,” Zoe said with a sigh. “I just felt sorry for her. He was one of those people who somehow managed to manspread across an entire room. The worst.”

  “Can we get her to come in, do you think?”

  Zoe shrugged. “I can make a call,” she said. “No guarantees though. Mr Warrington is retired, so he’s home a lot.”

  Kidd took a breath and headed back towards the board. DC Ravel appeared at his side.

  “I’ve got printouts for the board, sir,” she said, handing him a stack of photos. She’d printed more photos she’d found on Joe’s Instagram of him and Lydia together. It made Ben feel nervous all over again. If his inkling was right, Lydia could be next on his list and that meant trouble. There was too much pointing to him.

  “Thank you, Janya,” he said. “Anything from Belmarsh yet?”

  “Nothing, sir,” she said. “Happy to chase though.”

  “That would be great, thank you.”

  “One last thing,” she said. “I’ve been in touch with the Anders family. Everyone’s present and accounted for.”

  “So Jennifer Berry is a horrible coincidence?” Kidd said, looking over at DS Sanchez for confirmation. She shrugged.

  “Sorry, sir,” DC Ravel said. “But at least it’s just one body…” she trailed off and headed back to her desk, that familiar clacking returning to underscore the tension in the room.

  Kidd sighed. It’s just one body, for now, he thought.

  “DS Sanchez,” Kidd called out as he stuck the pictures on the big board.

  “Yes?”

  “Can you go and check on Lydia for me?” he asked, still looking at the board, at her smiling face next to Joe’s. Was that the face of a killer? Kidd didn’t know, but what other leads did they have at this point? “I’m worried. If she knew Jennifer and is also friends with Joe, she could be—”

  “No problem,” she said. “Leave it with me.”

  “Thank you.”

  The door to the Incident Room opened, DC Campbell appearing in the frame looking incredibly pleased with himself. Zoe looked him up and down and walked away. She wasn’t having any of it, leaving it to Kidd to figure out what had him preening like a bloody peacock.

  “Evan Petersen is here,” Campbell announced. “And he’s ready for the interview.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Kidd gathered himself and took DC Campbell with him to the interview room. He’d done interviews with DC Campbell in the past and he tended to be a little bit jumpy, thinking he was a detective on a TV drama rather than in real life, but that had been well over six months ago, maybe he had grown up a little. Though, recent experience told him that was wishful thinking on his part.

  Kidd walked into the interview room to find Evan Petersen already sat with his lawyer at his side. He’d expected the old man to bring a lawyer, even though he wasn’t technically under arrest. It made him seem more guilty of something, sure, but Kidd wasn’t about to tell anybody that.

  “Good afternoon, Mr Petersen, lovely to see you again,” Kidd said. “How are you?”

  “I’d be much better if I wasn’t here,” he said.

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Campbell said. Kidd shot him a look and he seemed to wince under the pressure of it.

  “I don’t believe we’ve met,” Kidd said to the lawyer, a middle-aged man with grey, flyaway hairs dancing at his temples. He reached out a hand. “DI Kidd.”

  “Matthew Michaels,” the man replied, taking Kidd’s hand and shaking it. “My client is quite distressed by all this.”

  “Me too,” Kidd said. “Quite a gruesome murder, wasn’t it? A good reason to be distressed, I’d say.”

  Campbell cleared his throat and took a seat, Kidd followed suit, offering Mr Petersen a smile that he didn’treturn. This man was grumpy through and through. Now that they were all sat at the table, the room seemed even cosier than it had done a few moments ago. He was almost touching knees with Evan and the walls seemed to be pulling in closer. Kidd hated the interview rooms. They were claustrophobic and always ended up getting too hot, especially in the summer months. But usually, it was enough to unnerve whoever was being questioned.

  He focused his gaze on Evan Petersen, trying to get a read on him. For being “distressed,” he looked remarkably calm. Although, Kidd suspected he was more like a duck on water, calm and collected on the face of it, legs swimming at an alarming rate underneath.

  “Mr Petersen, I take it DC Campbell told you why you’re here?”

  “He mentioned something about asking me a few questions,” Evan said, his voice as gravelly as it had been last time Kidd had spoken to him. Kidd was fairly sure that Campbell would have said something a little more detailed than that, but if Mr Petersen was going to act like a fool, Kidd was going to treat him like one.

  “Well, Mr Petersen, here is the situation,” Kidd said, “we’ve had a brutal murder occur on this borough, a woman was attacked, and then, once dead, her corpse was mutilated to replicate a set of murders that originally occurred fifteen years ago. I asked you a few questions just yesterday, in fact, about your whereabouts over the past couple of days, and it turns out, there was a rather huge detail that you left out, wasn’t there?”

  “I don’t know what—”

  “Okay, let me rephrase that, there was a rather huge detail that you left out. There’s no denying it, Mr Petersen, and leaving it out only leads me to believe that you might be hiding something else. Are you hiding something else, Mr Petersen?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then why keep it from us?”

  Mr Petersen clamped his mouth shut and looked to his lawyer for support. Kidd waited for whatever wisdom he was going to come out with. When nothing was forthcoming, he decided to carry on.

  “Let me take you back to Monday night, shall I, Mr Petersen?” Kidd said. “You left work as you usually do, locking the gate behind you at 10:30 pm, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then you proceeded to, I don’t know, go home to a loved one, maybe carrying a guilty conscience—”

  “DI Kidd, I hardly think that’s appropriate,” the lawyer finally chimed in.

  “Fine,” Kidd said. “But you went home and then, some thirty minutes later, you decided to go back out again. And you unlocked the gates to the park and went inside, not coming out again for a solid hour.” Kidd looked over at Mr Petersen who was shifting uncomfortably in his seat. “I think you know what my next question is going to be, Mr Petersen.”

  He didn’t say a word. He stared at DI Kidd from across the table, his grey eyes not giving away a single thing. Kidd shook his hea
d.

  “What were you doing going into Bushy Park in the middle of the night, Mr Petersen?” Kidd asked. “It’s a very simple question, and if you have nothing to hide—”

  “Don’t push it, DI Kidd,” Mr Michaels said.

  “I’ll push it as far as I want to.”

  “Am I under arrest?” Mr Petersen asked, the slightest shake in his voice.

  Kidd sighed. “No, Mr Petersen, you’re not under arrest, but if you can’t give me a straight answer to these questions—”

  “I’d left something behind.”

  “What?”

  “My anniversary gift for my wife!” he barked. Kidd backed off, leaning back in his chair, waiting for him to elaborate. “Monday was our anniversary, fiftieth if you must know, and my wife was already furious I’d been working and then even more furious because I told her I’d left the gift at work. Things haven’t been good for us recently. We’ve been having troubles. I don’t want to lose her after all these years, DI Kidd, so I went back to pick it up because I didn’t want her to be upset with me.”

  Kidd took a breath, exhaled. “Can your wife confirm this?”

  “Absolutely,” Mr Petersen said. “I can give you her phone number, you could call her right now, she’ll happily tell you what a forgetful klutz I am.”

  Kidd allowed a smile to tug at the corners of his mouth. “Well, a belated Happy Anniversary to you both,” Kidd said.

  “Am I free to go?” Mr Petersen asked, looking at the door like he was about to burst through it and leave a Mr Petersen shaped hole in it if Kidd said yes.

  “Just a few more questions, while I have you,” DI Kidd said. “I want to know the kind of people that have been hanging around Bushy Park the past week or so.”

  Evan sat back in his chair, his tension in his bony shoulders seeming to slough off. He was no longer under suspicion for murder, it was hardly surprising that he’d relaxed.

  “Parents and their children,” Mr Petersen said, not looking at Kidd, trying to think. “Old couples, a lot of old people.”

  “Anything out of the ordinary,” Kidd said. “You mentioned briefly about how frustrated you get at some of the people who spend their time in Bushy Park, what kinds of people are they?”

  Mr Petersen let out a heavy breath, practically a groan. “University students mostly, like I said,” he said. “They dress so scruffily, make a whole lot of noise, and leave a mess everywhere.”

  “Is that out of the ordinary?”

  “Not really, unfortunately,” Mr Petersen said. “We’ve had a few complaints coming in over the last week or so about some of them.”

  “Really?” Kidd said. “What about?”

  Mr Petersen rolled his eyes. “It was nothing really. Young people being entitled. They were filming something, a short film or something. They got antsy and started trying to get the parents to quieten their kids down. The parents got upset, told us, but by the time we got to them they were long gone.”

  “How many of them?”

  “Just two,” Mr Petersen said.

  “Description?”

  “A girl with long brown hair,” Mr Petersen said. “And a boy with dark curls, that’s about all we got.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  DS Zoe Sanchez left the office around the same time as Kidd, grabbing her coat and heading out to her car. The picture of Lydia with Joe Warrington that was now stuck to the board was burned into her memory. Knowing that Lydia knew Jennifer Berry too, made it even the worse. Too many times in her career she’d seen vulnerable young women be left at the mercy of asshole men, and she wanted to do everything in her power to protect her. So maybe on the drive there, she broke the speed limit a few times. So long as no one saw, it was okay.

  She pulled up outside the dilapidated old house, taking a deep breath before heading down the ramshackle garden path to the front door. It really was a hole. She would have hated to live here as a student. In fairness, her digs when she’d been studying hadn’t been much better, but as an adult the thought of living here made her skin crawl.

  She knocked on the door, ignoring the flaking of the paint as she did so.

  No answer.

  She knocked a little harder, the glass shaking in the windowpane and making a hollow sound that echoed right down to Zoe’s bones. She stepped back and looked up at the house. There were a couple of lights on the upper floor. Either they were burning electricity or they just hadn’t heard her.

  She went back to the car, switched it on, and pressed down on the horn, long and hard.

  A face appeared at a high window. She gestured emphatically to the door and the face disappeared at breakneck speed.

  “At least that got their attention,” she grumbled, heading back down the path.

  The door opened before she reached it, TJ Bell stood bathed in the yellow light of the hallway, wearing a pair of jeans and a different baggy hoodie. His gormless face stared out at her, clearly confused as to why she was there. It made her want to yell.

  “Can I come in?” she asked, though it wasn’t so much a question as it was a demand. It was fucking freezing.

  “Yeah, yeah, sure,” he grumbled, opening the door to the porch and letting her in. Zoe had half hoped for heat to rush out and greet her, like it did whenever she went back to her parents’ house, but instead, she was met with that same cold damp that had enveloped her when she’d come here yesterday. How they could live like this was beyond her.

  “I was going to come and change my statement,” he babbled. “I just haven’t had a chance to do it yet. I had a class late yesterday afternoon so couldn’t do it then and today… I just haven’t done it yet.”

  “You’re alright,” Zoe said, holding out her hands in a calming gesture. “I’m not here about that. I’m here to see Lydia.”

  “She’s not here,” TJ said with that same drawl that seemed to accompany everything he said, like even talking was too much effort. Their entire conversation could have been finished a heck of a lot faster if he talked at a semi-regular speed.

  Zoe waited for him to elaborate, but nothing came. “Can I ask where she is?”

  “Erm,” TJ looked off towards the wall and thought about it. Zoe was so close to punching him. “Not sure.”

  “When did you last see her?”

  “Erm—”

  “No, TJ, no ‘erm’, tell me when you last saw Lydia Coles, please.”

  “Yesterday,” he said. “I said my goodbyes after you guys left, went to my class, and she was out when I got back.”

  “Did she come home last night?”

  “Erm-“

  “TJ!”

  “I don’t know, I was tired,” he babbled. “It had been a long day, I didn’t know if—”

  “Did you think to check on her at all?”

  “She has other friends, and I think I heard her go out this morn—”

  “You think?” Zoe was getting frustrated. She needed a straight answer and TJ wasn’t giving her anything close to that. Every sentence started with an ‘erm’ and he didn’t seem to realise quite how severe the situation was. He’d seen the body, hadn’t he? Was he just not affected by any of this?

  “We live with three other people,” TJ said. “It could have been any of them.”

  “Would she have gone out with Joe Warrington?”

  “Who?”

  “Christ, never mind,” Zoe grumbled.

  Kidd was going to flip out. Zoe could already see that he was on edge. Everything that was happening was already hitting a little too close to home with how the case went down the first time and the last thing he wanted to do is end up with another body. If it ended up being Lydia he’d never forgive himself.

  “Can you call her?”

  “Erm—”

  “TJ,” Zoe said firmly. “I need you to call her, call her now.”

  Zoe waited as TJ fumbled in his pocket and took out his phone. A few taps later and he held the phone to his ear. Zoe could hear it ringing from where
she stood, the steady beeps that were making her heart run a little faster the longer they went on.

  The line went dead.

  “Can you try again?” Zoe asked.

  “Do I need to be worried?” TJ asked, his face shifting from one of gormless indifference to one that actually looked scared for his friend. “Like, do I need to be worried about Lydia?”

  “The honest answer to that is, I don’t know,” Zoe said. “We hope not. We’re just trying to figure out where she is. She might be in trouble.”

  “Oh shit,” TJ said, tapping his phone again and putting it to his ear.

  The line rang for a few moments, moments that seemed to draw on for hours in Zoe’s mind before the line went dead once again. Her blood ran cold.

  “Do you mind if I take the number?” Zoe asked. TJ waited while Zoe tapped it out into her phone. “I’m going to give you my number and you need to call me if you manage to reach her. Oh, and if you could ask your housemates if they’ve seen her since yesterday afternoon, that would be great.”

  Zoe gave him her number and turned to leave.

  “DS Sanchez,” he called after her. Zoe was already halfway out the door, but turned to look at him bathed in the light of the lone, naked bulb in the hallway. “Is Lydia going to be alright?”

  And it was in that moment she felt sorry for TJ. He was living in this house, probably miles away from his family and one of his friends had gone missing. Sure, he was a little slow to help her but it’s probably a lot for anyone to deal with.

  “We’re going to do our best to bring her back in one piece,” Zoe said, forcing a smile onto her face. “She could be on her way home from class right now, for all we know. Just keep me posted, yeah?”

  TJ nodded and Zoe walked away, already dialling Kidd’s number.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  It wasn’t confirmation that Joe Warrington was there, it was barely a confirmation of ID, but the description was enough. Kidd knew it was a long shot to get the parents to come in and confirm anything, the people that had complained. No doubt they would have made the complaint and then promptly forgotten all about it, not knowing that in just a few days a girl they now knew to be Jennifer Berry was going to show up dead.