One Under

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Which could happen.’

  ‘Right.’ They had both seen their share of traffic accidents. Things a layman wouldn’t believe could happen were common occurrence when speeding metal met human form. ‘But they’re not the sort of sandals you can just slip off, yet none of the straps were broken. And the heels, which are the weakest spot, weren’t broken either. And why did they end up in the ditch?’

  ‘Well, perhaps she had taken them off and was carrying them, like Mr Remington said,’ Atherton offered.

  ‘The soles of her feet weren’t dirty enough to have been walking barefoot. And,’ Slider continued before Atherton could discount that one, ‘her pants were on inside out.’

  Atherton looked at him steadily. ‘So what are you saying? It wasn’t a hit-and-run?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. Just that there’s something odd about it. Starting with someone from Birdwood House being in Harefield in the first place.’

  ‘So you did have an instinct about it,’ Atherton said triumphantly. ‘I thought there was something going on.’

  Slider didn’t want to sound fey. ‘Instinct is just the subconscious assimilation of evidence.’

  ‘Tell that to the marines,’ said Atherton. ‘Or rather, to Mr Porson.’

  Porson wasn’t pleased. ‘I don’t expect my senior officers to go off on pleasure jaunts. A hit-and-run? What were you thinking? If you haven’t got enough to do I can soon find you something.’

  Slider’s father had said the same thing to him when he was a boy, if he ever complained about being bored. ‘I’ve plenty to do, sir,’ he began.

  ‘I should hope so, if I’m going to get a replacement for Hollis. You go taking over cases from other boroughs and you’ve blown our argument for more personnel right out of the water park.’

  ‘I just said we’d inform the family, sir. Obviously the Harefield enquiries are better handled by the local team.’

  ‘I’m glad you think so.’ Porson stopped to cough rackingly and then had to blow his nose. He had a box of man-size tissues on his desk, and his wastepaper basket was already half full.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here, sir,’ Slider said.

  Porson gave him an inflamed and resentful look. ‘Had to come in for the funeral. Anyway, my boiler’s broken down. Cold as a witch’s cucumber at home. I’m better off here.’ He seemed to soften. ‘Do you think there’s something in this RTA, then?’

  ‘No, sir, not really. But I would like to know what she was doing there, and why nobody’s missed her. She was only fifteen.’

  ‘Ah. Bastard when they die that young. And I hate hit-and-runs.’ He had another blow. ‘But don’t waste time on it. We’ve got to watch our productivity these days.’

  Slider nodded. Their new Borough Commander, Mike Carpenter, was mustard on the spreadsheets. Rumour had already gone round that he was lettered ‘budget’ all through, like a stick of rock.

  ‘Here we are,’ said DC Kathleen ‘Norma’ Swilley, elegant in a beige trouser suit, her blonde hair held back with combs. ‘Kaylee Adams. Age fifteen – sixteen in December. Lives with her mother and younger sister on the estate. No father around. Mother’s on benefits. Kaylee goes to Richard Towneley school – when she goes. Poor attendance record.’

  Richard Towneley – the most misspelled school in the state sector – was the local secondary which had risen all the way from ‘sink’ to ‘special measures’ and was now officially described as ‘challenging’, meaning that the police had all too frequent contact with its inmates. Some might say that truant Kaylee Adams would have benefitted more from staying away.

  ‘Disruptive behaviour, fighting and so on when she is there,’ Swilley went on. ‘Arrested four times for shoplifting, starting age nine, but let off with a warning and a referral to social services. Social services—’ she turned a page – ‘had her marked up as at risk. Mother was on drugs, possibly paying for them with prostitution. But after the fourth bust, Mum seems to have cleaned up her act. She went to rehab classes, hasn’t come on the radar since. That was eighteen months ago, and apart from truanting, Kaylee hasn’t been in trouble either.’ She looked up. ‘That’s all that’s on her arrest record. I haven’t run her through Crimint yet.’

  ‘Right,’ said Slider. ‘Do that, just in case. And before the mother hears it from somewhere else, we’d better send someone round to the flat.’

  ‘Uniform, sir?’

  Slider thought a moment. He still didn’t quite feel easy about this hit-and-run. ‘No, I’d like one of us to go. Sniff around without being too obvious. What’s Connolly doing?’

  ‘I’ll get her,’ said Swilley, and departed.

  The rain had been swift in passing, and the wet pavements gleamed again in the sunlight from a sky like faded denim. The White City Estate was a vast area of five-storey former council flats, all named after heroes of the Empire. Birdwood House was one of the smaller, older blocks, so it had no lift and number twelve was on the top floor. It would be, Connolly thought, as she paused on the balcony outside the flat to catch her breath and look at the view. It wasn’t bad for an inner-city estate – a grassy lawn between the blocks and a big tree waving naked fingers over the top of the roofs. She’d grown up in grimmer surroundings in Dublin.

  She rang the bell, and hearing no sound from inside, knocked as well, in case the bell was broken. Eventually, a child’s voice said from inside, ‘Who is it?’

  ‘It’s the police, love,’ Connolly said. ‘Is your mum in? I’d like to talk to her.’

  A pause. ‘How do I know you’re the police?’

  ‘Just fetch your mum, willya.’

  ‘She’s asleep.’

  ‘It’s important. Open the door a little bit and I’ll show you my warrant card.’

  The door opened slowly to halfway, enough to reveal a skinny child of about ten, with thin, slightly sticky fair hair. Her face was so pale that her mouth looked unnaturally pink by contrast, as if she had been sucking a cheap lolly. She was dressed in pink cut-offs with sequins round the cuffs and a grubby T-shirt.

  She observed Connolly solemnly. ‘You got a funny voice,’ she said.

  ‘It’s me Irish accent,’ said Connolly. ‘Have you never met anyone from Ireland?’

  She thought about that. ‘My friend Abshiro’s from Somalia,’ she offered.

  ‘What’s your name, pet?’ Connolly asked.

  ‘Julienne,’ the child said proudly. ‘That’s with an e. There’s a Julie Anne in my class but that’s, like, two words. I like mine better.’

  ‘It’s a nice name,’ Connolly said. Name a God, who’d call their child after a method of chopping vegetables, she thought. But then she remembered the mother had been on drugs. ‘Can you go and wake your mum up for me? I have to talk to her. It’s very important.’

  The pink mouth turned down. ‘I don’t like waking her up. Sometimes she’s really ratty.’

  ‘I’ll come with you, if you like,’ said Connolly. The child backed off and let her in to the narrow passage. The flat smelled stale, of dirty clothes and the ghosts of many meals of fried food and takeaways. Through the door on the left was a small, cramped kitchen awash with pizza boxes, KFC tubs and cardboard coffee containers. The door at the end of the passage was closed. Julienne stopped in front of it and looked back at Connolly. ‘That’s mum’s room.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’ Connolly asked belatedly.

  ‘I stayed home,’ she said simply. ‘I don’t like leaving her when she’s like this.’

  ‘Has she taken something?’

  ‘Like, White Lightning an’ vodka. Her and Jaffa was partying last night. I think he brought coke and something as well. But he’s gone now.’

  ‘Is that her boyfriend?’ Connolly asked. The girl shrugged. ‘So she’s on her own now? Well, let’s wake her up, then.’

  The bedroom was in gloom from the drawn curtains, and was a frowsty-smelling pit of old clothes, full ashtrays, empty plastic bottles and other litter. The woman face down in
the tangle of bed sheets was visible only by her hair. Connolly stepped across the room cautiously to pull the curtains and open the window, letting in a draught of cold clean air. The body in the bed started to stir and mutter. Julienne stood at the door, apparently unwilling to take part, but a cough and a jerk of the head from Connolly induced her to step forward and shake a shoulder.

  ‘Mum, wake up. Mum! The police’re here. A lady policeman. She wants to talk to you. Mum!’

  The body moaned, thrashed a bit, muttered some profanities, and finally sat up, shoving hair out of its face and rubbing its eyes. ‘What you friggin’ wakin’ me for, you little pest?’ she growled at Julienne, who stood her ground expressionlessly, then glanced significantly towards Connolly.

  The woman was startled. ‘Oh my good Gawd! Who’re you? What you doin’ in my house?’

  ‘Detective Constable Connolly, Shepherd’s Bush police. I have to talk to you, Mrs Adams. Would you get up, please.’

  The woman rolled her eyes. ‘Now what?’ she complained. ‘What you always coming round here for, bothering me, frightening my kids? We haven’t done nothing. If it’s Jaf you’re after, he’s long gone. And I don’t know where he hangs out, so it’s no use asking.’

  But she was dragging herself out of bed. Connolly was deeply relieved to discover she was wearing an oversized T-shirt for a nightie. She slung her feet over the side, sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing one foot up the back of the other leg, and indulged in a long and phlegmy coughing session. Then she wiped her nose on her hand, rubbed her eyes again, and muttered, ‘Got a mouth like a hamster’s cage.’

  ‘What about a cup of tea,’ Connolly suggested to get things moving along.

  ‘There’s no tea,’ said the woman. ‘Only instant. Jule, make us one, ey?’ The child sidled away. ‘Here,’ Mrs Adams went on, her expression suddenly sharpening, ‘what you being nice for? What’s going on?’ Alarm followed suspicion. ‘Something’s happened, hasn’t it? Tell me.’

  ‘You’d better get up and get dressed first,’ said Connolly, not sure she was fully compos mentis yet.

  But the woman stared at Connolly, her face hardening. ‘If you got something to say, say it. Tell me what you come here for right now, or get the fuck out.’

  Connolly sighed inwardly. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you,’ she said. ‘It’s about your daughter.’

  ‘What, Julienne? I don’t believe you. She’s a good kid.’

  ‘No, your other daughter,’ said Connolly. ‘Kaylee.’

  ‘Kaylee? She’s not in trouble. She’s doing all right, now.’ Julienne had oozed back again from the kitchen. ‘Here, Jule, where’s Kaylee?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mum.’

  ‘What d’you mean, you don’t know? Didn’t she go to school this morning?’

  ‘I’ve not seen her, not since Sat’dy morning.’

  ‘Mrs Adams—’

  ‘Has something happened to her?’

  The child was looking at Connolly with eyes very like her mother’s, a little pink round the rims and infinitely old. There was no help for it. ‘I’m afraid there’s been an accident,’ she said.

  Mrs Adams, dressed in a smart Marks & Sparks dressing gown of chocolate brown with white polka dots, sat on the sofa cradling a mug of poisonous instant coffee that the child had made for her. Connolly knew it was poisonous because she’d been given one, too, made with tepid water (out of the hot tap, she guessed) from the cheapest powder and without milk or sugar.

  ‘I hate this stuff,’ Mrs Adams moaned. ‘I need my Starbucks. I’m no good till I’ve had my Frappuccino, am I, Jule?’ But she sipped at it anyway. Perhaps anything in the mouth was better than nothing.

  She had pulled back her tangled hair – curly, mid-brown with purplish highlights – with a scrunchie, revealing a face so ordinary it would be hard to remember it the moment you turned your back. It was pale and pouchy, and looked mid- to late-forties, which given the drug use probably meant she was mid- to late-thirties. Her eyes and nose were pink, and she sniffed constantly and dabbed hopelessly with a handkerchief, but that could have been the cocaine as much as anything. She had wept a bit when Connolly told her, but it looked more like a performance of what she thought, from an extensive consumption of TV, would be expected of her. Whatever genuine grief and shock she might feel was probably swimming upstream against the drugs and several litres of Russian cider.

  Julienne leaned against the arm of the sofa the furthest from her mother. She had made the coffee, fetched cigarettes when her mother demanded them. Otherwise she had taken no part, said nothing, only watched, her eyes moving from one speaker to the other, her face set and mute, with that look of simply enduring that you see on children’s faces all over the world when they have witnessed something incomprehensible happening in the adult world.

  The room was an oddity, compared with the kitchen and mother’s bedroom. The flat had been done out in standard developer’s off-white walls and cheap beige carpet, but in the middle of the sitting-room floor there was a square rug of purple swirls on a grey background, and the walls had been papered in a pattern of enormous purple flowers which, while vile, was certainly not cheap. There was a large sofa, nearly new, facing a huge wall-mounted TV, which must have cost a bit. Most different of all, it was tidy, moderately clean, and was suffused with a throat-choking peach air-freshener, an evident attempt at refined living.

  Connolly wondered where the money came from. The mother’s boyfriend? Meanwhile, she wasn’t getting anywhere with her questions. Kaylee went out Saturday lunchtime to visit a friend, saying she wouldn’t be back that night. She often stayed over with friends when they went out together. Where did they go? Up the West End. Clubbing. Just like anyone else. Worried about not seeing her on Sunday? Course not. She was a big girl, she could take care of herself. Likely she’d’ve still been with the friend. Which friend? Couldn’t say. Kaylee had so many. She was a very popular girl.

  ‘What might she have been doing in Harefield?’ Connolly asked.

  ‘Harefield?’ Mrs Adams said. ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Out Uxbridge way. Ruislip?’

  ‘Never heard of it. Never been to Uxbridge in me life.’

  ‘Do you have any relatives out that way? Friends. Someone Kaylee might have visited?’

  ‘No,’ she said indignantly. ‘I tell you, I’ve never heard of the place.’

  ‘Perhaps Kaylee’s got a boyfriend who lives there.’ Mrs Adams shrugged. ‘Does Kaylee have a boyfriend?’

  ‘Not that I know of. No one special.’

  ‘Really? I find that hard to believe. A lovely girl of fifteen?’

  ‘Lovely’ was pushing it a bit, but what mother doesn’t think her daughter a beauty? There was a school photograph of Kaylee Adams that the mother had produced on Connolly’s request from a drawer stuffed with papers. It had been taken the previous June, when Kaylee was fourteen, and showed a face as ordinary as the mother’s, with the round cheeks and full lips of youth and a look of cheeky self-confidence. She had supple skin and thick hair and a certain freshness, so she was attractive in the way all young creatures are, but that was all.

  ‘I’m sure she must have had lots of boyfriends,’ Connolly insisted.

  ‘She’s hung about with some of the boys at school, I s’pose,’ Mrs Adams said indifferently, ‘but not anyone like you might call a boyfriend. She’s not interested in ’em like that. She wants to better herself – got ambition, my Kaylee. She’s doing all right for herself now that bit of trouble’s behind her.’

  ‘Doing all right?’ Connolly queried, but the mother didn’t answer. ‘But she’s still truanting, isn’t she?’

  ‘She’s what?’

  ‘Bunking off school.’

  Mrs Adams looked indignant. ‘Why shouldn’t she? What use is school to a girl her age? They never learn her nothing anyway. Shouldn’t force fifteen-year-olds to go to school. Making jobs for teachers, that’s all it is,’ she grumbled. ‘My Kaylee can
make her own way, thank you very much. Doing all right, like I said. Why, she’s …’ She began to wave a hand, but stopped herself abruptly.

  Connolly had a flash of insight. It was Kaylee who had bought the TV, smartened up the room. The dressing gown, too, perhaps – being good to her mother. But where did she get the money from? However, that was not in the scope of her present visit.

  She tried a few more questions about boyfriends and Harefield, but couldn’t get anything out of Mrs Adams: she seemed genuinely never to have heard of the place, and was probably as genuinely ignorant of her daughter’s dating practices – even probably of her where-abouts day to day. Connolly had an idea that Julienne might know more about her sister’s comings and goings, but she couldn’t question a ten-year-old without good reason. And so far, the good reason did not exist.

  And now at last the fact that Kaylee was dead was finally beginning to register, and the mother in Mrs Adams was starting to ask questions of her own, many of them the same as Connolly’s, and to which of course Connolly didn’t have the answers.

  THREE

  Coupe and Contrecoup

  ‘You’d want to’ve seen her. Swear t’ God, there’s farm cats that are better mothers,’ Connolly concluded her report to Slider. ‘If we hadn’t gone round, I wonder when she would have started to miss her own kid.’ She gave Slider a bright, curious look. ‘So will you be having any follow-up, boss? I mean, we’re no closer to why she was in Harefield at all, but …’

  But there’s nothing here for us to investigate – those were the words Connolly didn’t need to articulate. Slider was about to speak when Swilley appeared in the doorway.

  ‘The Adams girl, sir. I put the name through Crimint.’

  ‘And?’ Slider encouraged.

  ‘She came up in connection with the Tyler Vance business.’

  ‘Ah! That must be where I heard her name before,’ said Slider.

  ‘Tyler Vance? Why does that sound familiar?’ Connolly asked.