Mr. Graham is in his late fifties with a long, thin face that falls like a landslip towards his chins. He whispers his greetings.
“Dreadful business. Such a shock. We’re all feeling it—the staff, the students . . .” The office door closes. “Some girls have been crying for days. I’ve called a school assembly for midday. What do I say to them?”
He seems to be addressing me. Instinctively, I understand why. He knows who I am—about my family—and thinks this somehow gives me some special insight or monopoly on words that might help children cope with loss. The question transports me back to my first day at school following the funerals of my parents and sisters. My grandparents wanted to keep my life as normal as possible, so I went back to the same school. Miss Payne escorted me to my first class. Biology. As I walked into the room, I was greeted with absolute silence. A pin dropping would have sounded like a crashing cymbal. My eyes didn’t leave the floor. I don’t blame my classmates for staring at me. I blame Elias. It was always my brother’s fault.
“Should I tell them Jodie was murdered?” asks Mr. Graham.
“I think that ship has sailed,” I reply, immediately regretting my sarcasm. I start again. “They will have heard the news. Be honest. Don’t manufacture emotions. Don’t say, ‘I know what you’re going through,’ or tell them you’ve lost someone too. Don’t offer your thoughts and prayers. Don’t look for a bright side. There isn’t any.”
“What do I say?”
“Nothing. Listen.”
“I can’t listen to them all.”
You can’t even listen to me.
I start again. “Children are especially vulnerable to grief. Some will struggle with how to communicate their sadness or confusion. Accept their feelings. Not all of them will have known Jodie, so don’t say that everyone will miss her. Say that you’re sad for her friends and her family.”
I want to warn him about inviting bereavement counselors into the school, because they can reinforce the idea that people should be traumatized. I know this because I’ve been there, passed between psychiatrists, therapists, and counselors, who squawked at me like seagulls fighting over spilled chips, spending hours telling me how I should be feeling or asking me to vent, when I simply wanted to be left alone.
Lenny interrupts: “We’re here to look inside Jodie Sheehan’s locker.”
“Yes, of course,” says Mr. Graham, picking up his phone and asking his secretary to get “Mr. Hendricks.”
“Ian is Jodie’s form tutor,” he explains. “Every child at Forsyth Academy is assigned a tutor who becomes their main adult contact at the school; someone they see every day, who calls the roll and checks their uniforms. Students are encouraged to talk to their tutor about any problems at home or at school. Issues around bullying or homework or participation.”
“Did Jodie have any problems?” I ask.
“Ian will certainly know.”
“How long was Jodie a student here?”
“Since year seven. She was quite special because of her skating. Her parents approached me and asked if we could offer her extra tutoring and waive some of the normal rules regarding attendance. We accommodated Jodie’s absences as best we could.”
Someone knocks. The door opens. Ian Hendricks is wearing casual trousers and an open-necked shirt. He’s in his midthirties, slim and athletic, with flecks of grey in a ponytail that he has twirled into a samurai knot at the back of his head. Straightaway, I clock him as the “cool teacher,” a John Keating figure who wins over his students by reading poetry or standing on his desk or quoting lyrics from the latest pop songs. I bet he has an Instagram account and uses Snapchat.
“DCI Parvel and Dr. Haven wish to look inside Jodie Sheehan’s locker,” explains Mr. Graham. “They also have some questions about Jodie. I thought you were the best person to ask.”
Hendricks looks less than keen. “I don’t have a key to her locker.”
“Well, call maintenance and get bolt cutters.”
Moments later we’re escorted along a covered walkway to a two-story brick building with stairs at either end. Children call out to Hendricks, who waves back, using their first names.
“Do you know them all?” I ask.
“Eight hundred students—I don’t think so.” He forces a laugh.
“What about Jodie?”
“I’ve been her form tutor since last year. She missed a lot of school with her skating. I helped her catch up.”
“How did you do that?”
“I collected the relevant notes from her teachers and emailed her homework and assignments.”
“Was she popular?” I ask.
“I think so. Everybody knew her.”
“Outgoing?”
“Yes.”
“Academic?”
“Not really.” He gazes past me at a window, high up on the stairwell. “Some students are naturally gifted, but Jodie had to work hard to keep up. Some of her teachers complained that she fell asleep in class, but most understood the hours she trained.”
“Did you ever see her compete?” I ask.
“No, but I used to wonder if it was cruel.”
“In what way?”
“Making a child work that hard—up every morning at six, a special diet, gym sessions, weight work, dance classes, acrobatics. She didn’t have time for a childhood.”
“You make it sound like child abuse.”
“More like white slavery.” He smiles wryly. “Some parents expect too much of their children and others expect too little. Both can be equally damaging.”
The metal lockers are lined along the walls around the base of the stairwells. A maintenance man in a grey uniform arrives with a set of bolt cutters that slice easily through the soft metal of a cheap padlock.
Lenny tosses me a pair of latex gloves and puts on a similar pair, smoothing them over her fingers. The locker door squeaks on stiff hinges. The inner surface is plastered with photographs cut from magazines. There are no skaters this time. Instead Jodie has chosen boy bands, pop singers, and film stars. I recognize Justin Bieber and Ed Sheeran.
Lenny takes photographs of the undisturbed locker, which is divided by two metal shelves. School textbooks are stacked upright at the bottom, along with several ring-bound folders, which Jodie has decorated with stickers. The middle shelf has brightly colored storage containers full of pens, highlighters, flash cards, hand cream, hair bands, cough drops, ChapSticks, chewing gum, a small zippered makeup bag, a bundle of greeting cards . . .
Lenny is flicking through the ring-bound folders. I look at the cards. Some of them celebrate Jodie’s birthday, while others are valentines from secret and not-so-secret admirers. I look for names. Clues. One has a flower pressed between the pages, a blue forget-me-not. The inscription reads:
I am not too young. You are not too old. I am your Ruth and you are my Tommy. Never Let Me Go.
“What is it?” asks Lenny, looking over my shoulder.
“A valentine.”
“Is that Jodie’s handwriting?”
I compare it to the notes in her subject folders. “She must have written it and run out of courage.” I look at the quote again. “It’s from a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go.”
“What’s it about?”
“A doomed love affair.”
Ian Hendricks is sitting on the stairs, looking at his mobile. I ask him what texts Jodie was studying for her English classes.
“We were reading dystopian stories.”
“You’re her English teacher?”
“Yes.”
Lenny continues searching. She unzips the makeup bag and quietly nudges me. I glance down and see a box of condoms. Open. She pulls back the flip top and counts. Four of the twelve are missing.
“Parents are the last to know,” she whispers.
The condoms are put into a sealed evidence bag that she marks with a time, date, and location.
A black rubberized flashlight is standing upright at the back of the lock
er, looking out of place. Weighing it in my hands, I unscrew the battery cap and shake out a single D-sized battery into my palm. There should be more. Holding up the flashlight, I peer inside and see a roll of paper. Not paper. Banknotes: hundreds, fifties, and twenties.
Lenny takes the bundle from me. “It has to be five, maybe six thousand.”
“Where would Jodie get that sort of money?”
The question echoes in the stairwell, unanswered, and we both realize that Jodie is not the girl we imagined.
15
* * *
CYRUS
* * *
I’ve been standing outside the house in Hotham Road for twenty minutes, studying the way the sun throws shadows beneath the eaves and highlights the colored glass in the leadlight panels above the windows. A wind vane of Father Time on the pitched slate roof is pointed fixedly towards the west, regardless of the breeze.
No. 79 is an ordinary house in an ordinary street in north London, lined with plane trees and dotted with estate agents’ signs and posters for the local primary school’s autumn fete.
This is where Evie Cormac emerged from hiding six years ago. Back then, the house was being renovated. The garden was overgrown with weeds and the downpipes were streaked with rust and the window frames needed painting. Wisteria had grown wild during the summer, twisting and coiling up the exterior wall, creating a floral curtain that half covered the front door. The house has been renovated since then, but the wisteria remains, littering the steps like mauve confetti left behind by a weekend wedding.
A woman emerges from the house. She has red hair and a pinched face and she’s holding a mobile phone to her ear.
“Can I help you?” she shouts, not leaving the front steps.
“No. Thank you.”
“Well, piss off!”
“Pardon?”
“We don’t like your sort around here.”
“What sort is that?”
“Whatever you are—a ghost hunter, psychic, true-crime writer, or general sicko.”
“I work with the police,” I say, taking out my business card.
She edges closer, squinting as she reads.
“A psychologist! You’re not the first.” She’s still holding her mobile to her ear. She speaks to someone: “Yeah, he’s one of them . . . I will . . . Bye, love.”
She lowers the phone and rattles off a list of answers to questions I haven’t asked. “You can’t come inside. The secret room doesn’t exist anymore. There are no ghosts, no hauntings, no strange sounds, no dog kennels in the garden. And we don’t know what happened to Angel Face.” Defiantly, without prompting, she says, “We bought this place after the murder, okay. I know we got a bargain, but we didn’t expect to be in the bloody guidebooks.”
“I didn’t mean to trouble you,” I say.
“Well, don’t.” She turns in her slippers and disappears inside the house, slamming the heavy door so violently it rattles the windows.
“Don’t mind Francine,” says a voice from across the fence. “She’s never been very friendly.” The jug-eared old man has a Scottish accent and is leaning on a rake in his garden. His baggy trousers make him look bowlegged. “I don’t know what she’s complaining about—she didn’t live here when it happened. That was a real circus.”
“Circus?”
“The police and the reporters and the TV vans. We could barely get into the place. And the smell.”
“You were living here?”
He holds out his hand and introduces himself as Murray Reid.
“It was me who called the landlord because the dogs were howling at night and the lawn hadn’t been mown for weeks. I figured the tenant had done a runner—skipping on the rent, you know—so I knocked on the door. When nobody answered, I pushed open the mail flap. That’s when I got a whiff. That smell could have routed an army.”
“How well did you know Terry Boland?”
“I didn’t know anyone by that name. Called himself Bill. We said hello a few times. Waved over the fence. I’d see him outside, working on his car or carrying stuff back and forth.”
“Did you ever see him with the girl?”
“Never. I mean, people came and went—the killers obviously, although nobody took much notice—but I never saw that wee girl. Still makes me shudder—the thought of her alone in that house with a dead body. Then again, maybe she was better off.”
“What do you mean?”
“He couldn’t hurt her anymore.”
The temperature seems to drop, as though a cloud has suddenly passed across the sun.
“Why do you think they tortured him?” I ask.
Murray shrugs. “At first I figured he must have been a gangster or a drug dealer, you know. He pissed off the wrong people. But when they found Angel Face that all changed. Pedophile like that—kidnapping a wee girl—he deserved everything he got.”
A group of school-age children are pushing bikes along the footpath. As they get nearer, their chatter ceases.
Murray yells out to one of them. “Hey, George.”
A teenage boy looks up, embarrassed to be singled out. Leaving the group, he wheels his bike towards us.
“This is Dr. Haven—he works with the police,” explains Murray. “George lives over the road. He saw Angel Face.”
“Only one time,” says George, who is tall and gangly, with a foppish fringe that falls over his eyes, while the rest of his hair is cut short in a wide band.
“When did you see her?” I ask.
“My dad says I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
“Why not?”
“Property prices.”
Murray finds this funny. George doesn’t like being laughed at. “Dad says we get too many rubberneckers driving up and down the street, looking for the house. He says the police are useless. No offense.”
“None taken. Did you ever talk to the man who was murdered?”
“No.”
“But you saw him.”
“Sure.”
“You must have been young when it happened.”
“Ten.”
“And you saw the girl.”
George shrugs. “I didn’t know she was a girl. I thought she was a boy because she had short hair.”
“Where did you see her?”
“In the window, upstairs.” He points towards the house. “I waved to her, but she didn’t wave back.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“Only the police woman.”
“Sacha Hopewell.”
He nods.
“She came to talk to us about the robberies,” says Murray.
“What robberies?”
“A lot of us had stuff going missing. Little things, you know. I lost a cashmere blanket and a bag of liquorice allsorts. Mrs. Vermeer had dog food stolen.”
“Someone took my Harry Potter books,” adds George, “and my snow dome of the Eiffel Tower.”
“We thought it was local kids until Constable Hopewell found Angel Face,” says Murray. “It’s amazing how that wee lass survived all those weeks. I often wonder what happened to her; if she made it back to her family. I hope she’s OK.”
* * *
A different house in a different street. A shadow passes behind the frosted glass.
“Who is it?” asks a woman from behind the door.
“Dr. Cyrus Haven. I’m looking for Sacha Hopewell.”
“She’s not here.”
“I work with the police. Can you tell me where she is?”
“No.”
“I’m going to slide my business card under the door.”
I push the card halfway and it disappears onto the far side. After two beats of silence, the deadlock releases. A woman with burnt-orange hair and thick spectacles peers at me over the security chain.
“Why do you want Sacha?”
“I’m looking for information about a cold case.”
“Angel Face?”
“Yes.”
“Go away!”
She shuts the door. I put my finger on the bell, letting it ring constantly. This time a man answers, her husband, telling me to leave or he’ll call the police.
“I am the police,” I say.
“They all say that.”
“Who do?”
“Leave us alone.”
“It’s Rodney, isn’t it? I talked to you on the phone. Give me five minutes. Please. It’s important.”
The door closes and I can hear them arguing, whispering urgently.
“Sacha told us not to . . .”
“He doesn’t look dangerous.”
“What if it’s a trick?”
“But he’s a psychologist.”
“The card could be fake.”
After a few more moments, the chain is unlatched and the door opens. They’re standing side by side in the hallway like parents ready to scold a child for coming home late.
“We’re not going to tell you where she is,” says Mr. Hopewell.
“I understand. Can I come in?”
They look at each other as though trapped by their natural politeness. Mrs. Hopewell is a heavyset woman in a floral dress and cardigan. Her husband is tall and lean and hunched over, as if bent by some invisible weight.
He whispers to me as I pass him in the hallway. “Please, don’t upset Dominique. She’s not well.”
Their kitchen is cold. Used teabags have solidified in the sink and a dripping tap rings the same note over and over.
Mrs. Hopewell offers to turn on the heating. She’s in her midsixties with a fine head of chemically colored hair, swept back and held in place by a hairband. They sit close together. Shoulders touching. Arms crossed.
“I’ve been asked to look into a police cold case. I was hoping your daughter, Sacha, might be able to help me.”
“She can’t,” says Mr. Hopewell.
“She won’t,” echoes his wife. “Haven’t you done enough to hurt her?”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
“I wish Sacha had never found that Angel Face.”
“Why?”
“Because we lost a daughter,” says Mrs. Hopewell, her chest expanding and collapsing in a sigh.
I don’t know what these people are talking about, but their pain is real.
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