Nine Lives

by Anita Waller

  ‘Call-out?’ Frannie muttered, nowhere near the state that could be loosely called wakefulness.

  ‘Yep. Go back to sleep, I’ll ring you later and let you know what’s happening.’

  Frannie didn’t respond, so Erica leaned over, brushed back her wife’s short dark hair and gave her a quick kiss on what was showing of her forehead. Frannie’s deep brown eyes opened momentarily, closed again, and Erica shook her own head to force some degree of awareness.

  She swung both legs out and allowed her feet to rest on the fluffy bedside rug before letting them take her towards the bathroom. She didn’t have time to shower, so splashed her face with water, gave her teeth a perfunctory twenty-second scrub, and returned to the bedroom to twist her long blonde hair into a ponytail. Her blue eyes stared back at her and she peered closer into the mirror searching for wrinkles. She counted every day as a bonus when she didn’t see one. She quickly dressed in jeans and a top before grabbing a breakfast bar and a travel mug of coffee and leaving the house.

  It was still raining, and she pulled the hood of her thick winter coat up and over her head, while she unlocked her car. She reversed down the drive and on to the road after a cursory glance to see if anything was travelling towards the rear end of her car, but it was a token nod to the possibility – who the hell was likely to be out at four o’clock on a dismal late October morning, other than her.

  The rain was heavy and she switched her wipers to fast. It had been constant rain for the best part of a week, and parts of Sheffield had flooded. It always baffled her that a city built, like Rome, on seven hills could flood. It was an impossible city to cycle in because of the steepness of the hills leading out from the city centre, and yet it flooded. ‘Doesn’t water naturally go downhill?’ she said aloud, but there was nobody to answer her.

  The phone call at three fifty-two had told her of a dead body in the River Porter, at Midland Station.

  She frowned as she realised she didn’t even know the River Porter was at the station, and she wished there had been time to check the internet – her DS, Beth Machin, would know, and Erica would have to be careful how she hid her ignorance until she could get to a computer.

  She pulled into the station car park and put a POLICE ON CALL sign in her car, then ran across to where she could see crime scene tape.

  ‘DI Cheetham,’ the young PC Sam King said with a smile, and held up the tape for her to duck under. It occurred to Erica every time she saw Sam just how good-looking he was, and yet he never spoke of girlfriends. His deep brown eyes and dark hair were enough to win the hearts of many a fair maiden, but, like her, he always seemed to be at work.

  ‘Thanks, Sam. DS Machin here?’

  ‘She is. She’s having a coffee while she’s waiting for you.’

  Erica nodded without responding. She saw a railway employee waving at her so she headed towards him, guessing he would know what was going on, and would probably have information for her.

  ‘I’ll take you to the river when you’re all here, ma’am. You might want to get a hot drink first, it’s going to be wet and cold down there.’ He pointed towards an open office door, and she saw Beth Machin waving from the window to the left of the door.

  She headed towards her sergeant. Down there? So where’s this bloody river?

  Beth Machin, looking immaculate as always despite the early hour, nodded as Erica entered the small office, Beth handed her a mug of coffee. Her red hair was in a ponytail and she’d even managed to put on a little lipstick. Just for a moment Erica wanted to punch her in the mouth.

  ‘Morning, boss. This is Graham Carver, the station manager.’

  Erica looked at the tall, dark-haired man with the serious expression, and she smiled at him. ‘Mr Carver. Have you been called in as well?’

  ‘I have,’ he said. ‘If I can help…’

  ‘Is there some way we can have refreshments set up for our officers?’ Erica asked. ‘It’s a cold ’un, and they work better when fed and watered.’

  ‘I’ve already asked our coffee shop lady to come in. We’ll get that open for you. I do want to emphasise that you’re going to be really wet, but hopefully you won’t have to go beyond the Megatron, because you’ll need a boat if you do. The water’s running high and it’s running fast, so you need to take care. We’ve had hell of a lot of rain.’

  ‘Is the body still in the water?’

  ‘It’s wedged apparently. We had night workers on last night, checking everything was okay because of the amount of rain. The body is in the Porter. It meets up with the Sheaf lower down. Under platform five actually.’

  The internet was sounding more and more like a good idea to Erica. She had no idea what the Megatron was, and wasn’t there walkways she could walk on? Her bed was sounding more inviting by the minute. She could have ignored the phone call… And rivers met under platform five? This was starting to sound a bit Harry Potterish, and she smiled.

  ‘Ian and Mike are here, boss,’ Beth said, so Erica handed her half-drunk coffee to Graham Carver, thanked him, and both women left the warmth of his office for the coldness of the station concourse.

  Erica led the way to the man who was going to take them to the body, and he looked at the footwear of the two women.

  ‘They expensive trainers?’ Callum McNicol, the night manager who had been the first to stumble across the body, shook his head as he spoke.

  Beth and Erica looked at each other.

  ‘We need wellingtons, I assume,’ Erica said.

  ‘No, DI Cheetham, you need waders.’

  Erica took out her phone and spoke to the Forensics team, telling them they were going to see the body in situ, and to bring waders; the river was deep.

  DCs Ian Thomas and Mike Nestor groaned. In looks, both men were an almost perfect match for each other. Over six feet in height, both had dark brown hair showing no signs of thinning, and grey-blue eyes almost identical between the two men. Their personalities matched their kindly faces, and Erica knew she was blessed to have snagged these two men as part of her team.

  Ian and Mike had decided to change into wellingtons as they’d exited their cars, but it seemed they would be as useless as the women’s trainers. Everyone hung around until Erica and Beth returned from their cars wearing wellingtons even though guessing they wouldn’t be adequate, and Callum led them outside to the car park. The rain was still relentless, and the roar of the water was deafening.

  Erica tried to squash the feelings of claustrophobia as they descended through the culvert where the river flowed underground, the river that would eventually meet up with the mighty Don, and end up flowing into the North Sea. The noise was awesome, scary, as they heard the roar of the waters pulsing through. Within seconds they felt soaked, and water had ridden over the tops of their ineffective wellingtons.

  They could walk part of the way on a ledge, their torch beams waving around as they struggled to maintain some sort of balance, but then had to drop into the water and feel the intensity of the powerful force of the River Porter as it battled its way through to the Megatron, the cathedral-like structure deep under the streets of Sheffield that was home to the River Sheaf, after it had swallowed up the smaller Porter.

  They could see a man in the distance, and Callum turned to speak to them. He had to shout over the roar of the water, but they got the gist of what he was saying, that the body was where the man was. He had been left to make sure it didn’t dislodge and carry on down to the Sheaf, and ultimately the Don. The speed of the water would have it quickly heading for the coast, and expulsion into the North Sea.

  The body was unclothed, her long blonde hair floating on the water. She was young; Erica estimated around nineteen or twenty, and didn’t think she had been dead long. She used her torch to look at the woman, and the way she was being held in situ, trapped by two huge stones that jutted out from the walls of this massive underground tunnel. She wanted to shield her. Her nakedness was on show and she somehow felt that this young girl would
be mortified if she knew that four men could all see every part of her. There was nothing obvious to indicate cause of death, and Erica sighed as she switched off her torch.

  Beth Machin seemed to sense what her boss was thinking. ‘We can’t,’ she said gently, placing her mouth close to Erica’s ear. ‘We can’t cover her. We have nothing to do it with, and it would be swept away within a minute in this torrent.’

  They could see five people approaching in the distance, and Erica breathed a sigh of relief. ‘It looks as if Ivor is here.’

  Ivor Simmonite, his white hair almost acting like a beacon, raised a hand in greeting when he spotted the small group of people, and two minutes later he was surveying the scene. He tried to wipe the water spray from his glasses, but knew it was a losing battle. He waited for the photographer to finish taking photographs, and then instructed his team to prepare the body for removal. There was no point attempting to do anything under the present conditions, any clues to what had happened would have been washed away by the force of the water; he wanted this young girl back in his autopsy suite where he could investigate how and when she had died.

  Erica’s team were the first to leave; they could do no more. They had given up speaking, the noise from the rushing water was deafening, but slowly their hearing returned as they reached the normality of the station concourse. Crime scene tape had been extended from the concourse to the opening of the culvert, steering passengers away from the area the police needed to use, and the four of them looked a sorry sight as they emerged.

  ‘Tea?’ Ian Thomas offered, and they all nodded in gratitude.

  The station was quiet; it was still only half past five, and the commuter rush hadn’t started.

  ‘I’m frozen,’ Beth said. ‘Think we can all fit in that little office?’

  ‘We can try,’ Erica said, sipping at her drink.

  She led them across and Graham Carver looked up in surprise as they all entered. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I wanted to get some extra seats in for when you came back, but it’s not taken you as long as I expected.’

  ‘We couldn’t do much down there,’ Erica explained. ‘They’re bringing the body up shortly, so thank you for getting the area screened off. We will have to go back down, but we will be better equipped, I promise you. I don’t think any of us realised what the conditions were like. In fact I’ll lay odds on none of us knew about this world underneath the station. We couldn’t really speak to the man who was looking after the body for us until we could get there, but I imagine there must have been someone else who raised the alarm and Jim stayed with her. I need Jim’s details, by the way, in case we need to ask him anything.’

  ‘No problem. Callum McNicol, the chap who led you down, is the man who was with Jim. Callum saw the body first. He called the police immediately, then me. He works nights, he’s sort of the night manager, but he sees to any maintenance that needs doing, stuff like that. As day manager, I deal more with passenger-related things, and trains. He’s still here somewhere. He came back up after he’d taken your Forensic team down. You want to speak to him now? Jim is called James Hardcastle, by the way,’ he added as Beth was taking notes.

  Erica shook her head. ‘No, we need to get home and changed into dry clothes and shoes, I think. I’ll ring you later to say what we want, and see where we go from here. I need to requisition waders for us as a priority, because we’re going to have to go back to the place she was found, but it’s possible we’ll have to go in this damn river at some other point when we find out who she is and where she lived.’ Erica leaned across his desk and shook his hand. ‘Thank you for your co-operation, and for opening up the café. Police officers will be here for a couple of days, and will be grateful for that facility.’

  Graham watched as they walked back across the concourse and headed out into the wind and rain of the car park. Nice smile, he thought, nice lady; he looked forward to seeing her again.

  3

  Frannie was eating breakfast when she heard Erica’s car pull onto the drive, and she quickly clicked on the kettle. The front door opened, and Erica called out, ‘Coffee, I need coffee.’

  Frannie walked through to the hallway, then stopped. ‘You’re wet.’

  ‘I’m fucking soaked,’ Erica grumbled. ‘Look at me. And frozen. I’ve been in a river.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A bloody river! I tell you, Fran, I’ve seen things this morning I didn’t even know were there. You know the River Porter?’

  ‘That’s the littlest one of the five, isn’t it?’

  ‘I have no idea, but it’s not little at the moment. Look at me!’ Erica paused dramatically with her arms outstretched. ‘Look at me! It covered my boobs!’

  ‘And nice boobs they are too,’ Frannie said, trying not to laugh at the amateur dramatics going on in the hall. ‘Go and have a shower, and I’ll do you a bacon buttie and a coffee.’

  Erica moved towards the stairs. ‘You’re a star. Did the meeting go okay last night? I didn’t hear you come in, I was out for the count by about nine.’

  ‘Boring book, was it?’ Frannie asked. ‘Yes, the meeting went well, but we all went to the pub afterwards. It was gone eleven when I arrived home, so I tried not to wake you. I moved your Kindle off the bed, and even that didn’t disturb you.’

  Erica waved a hand in acknowledgement, and Frannie returned to the kitchen, wondering if she should have a bacon sandwich also, despite having finished her toast. She’d lost two pounds the previous week, and she had been trying really hard to not eat rubbish… Her brain took no persuasion and she placed six rashers on the grill.

  Erica, in dry clothes, stood and watched as Ivor Simmonite began the post-mortem. The girl’s head was resting on a block, her long blonde hair hanging over the edge of the table.

  Ivor seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time inspecting her upper arms and instructing his colleague to take photographs, particularly of the tiny butterfly at the top of the right arm, and of the palm of her right hand. He was clearly not going to be rushed into anything, despite there being nothing that could help with identification. Her fingerprints hadn’t been on their database, so it would mean much more detailed research to find out who she was.

  Erica felt her phone vibrate in her jeans pocket, and she quickly read the message before leaning forward to use the intercom. ‘Ivor, I have to go. We may have identification for you. Can you let me have the full report of the autopsy as soon as you have it, please?’

  Ivor turned his grey eyes towards her, held up a thumb in acknowledgement, and Erica left the viewing platform.

  Becky Charlesworth and Katie Davids lifted their heads as the interview room door opened.

  ‘DI Erica Cheetham,’ Erica said, and held out her hand. They shook it, uncomfortably, clearly not used to shaking hands.

  ‘You’re here to report a missing person?’

  Becky stared at her. ‘We didn’t expect to be reporting to a DI. We thought it would be the officer on duty at the front desk.’

  Smart young lady, Erica thought.

  ‘Tell me about your friend. When did she go missing?’

  ‘Last night. She went to the university Drama Studio to watch Macbeth with our other friend, Clare Vincent. They’re both taking the same course. We’d all arranged to meet in the pub later, but only Clare showed up, worried because she couldn’t find Susie.’

  ‘Susie?’

  ‘Oh, sorry. Susie is Susanna Roebuck. All four of us share a house.’

  Erica was writing. ‘Spell Susie’s first name, will you?’

  Becky obliged.

  ‘Let me get this straight, so it’s clear in my mind. Student accommodation?’ Becky and Katie nodded. ‘And collectively you are Rebecca Charlesworth, Katie Davids, Clare Vincent and Susanna Roebuck?’ Again Becky and Katie nodded.

  Erica turned to the next page. ‘Can you give me a description of Susie, please? And where is Clare?’

  ‘Clare and Susie had a lecture this morning,’
Becky confirmed, ‘an important one, so Clare’s gone to that so they at least both have notes on it, even if Susie, for whatever reason, isn’t able to be there. Susie has long blonde hair, usually wears it down, ponytails give her a headache. Pretty, slim, she’s twenty. Blue eyes, but not bright blue, bluish-grey, I’d say. About five feet four. Certainly smaller than me.’

  Erica took a deep breath. ‘Any identifying features? Tattoos, piercings?’

  ‘She has pierced ears, wears gold studs during the week, but she might have changed them last night for going to the theatre. No other piercings that I know about.’ Becky turned to Katie as she finished speaking. ‘Which arm is her butterfly on?’

  Katie thought for a moment, then pushed forward her right shoulder. ‘It’s here, at the top of her arm.’

  Erica gave a slight nod. ‘And do you know her parents’ address?’

  Becky fished around inside her bag, producing a small diary. She looked in the back, then passed it across to the DI. Erica wrote down the address, noting that it was in Bridlington, on the east coast.

  ‘Are her parents elderly?’

  Becky looked puzzled, and turned to Katie. ‘No. Mid-forties, Katie?’

  Katie agreed. ‘If that, actually. Why?’

  ‘It’s me jumping to conclusions,’ Erica said. ‘I kind of assumed they’d retired to the coast.’

  Katie gave a half smile. ‘No, Susie’s lived there all her life. She was glad to get a place at Sheffield, but she loves the coast. All four of us camped in their back garden in the summer. They live in a massive house. We haven’t checked if she’s there…’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We didn’t want to worry them. Harry and Olivia are so lovely – we’re always getting food parcels and other stuff from them. And Susie can’t have decided in a few seconds that she wasn’t going to wait for Claire to go to the ladies, she was going home to Brid. She’s not like that. I have some pictures on my phone from that camp in the back garden, so I can show you what she looks like.’ Katie scrolled through her phone and handed it to Erica.