The Drowning Ground: A Novel

by James Marrison

  ‘Yes,’ Graves said. ‘And?’

  ‘And how old was she when she left?’

  ‘Seventeen or eighteen.’

  ‘So more than three years ago,’ I said. ‘And around four years after the girls went missing.’

  ‘About that, yes,’ Graves said.

  ‘And no one has seen her since. Absolutely no one. In all that time. No sign of her. Nothing. Think about what was in the rucksack, Graves. You saw what was in it. Makeup. A young woman’s clothes. Cigarettes. Chewing gum. A pamphlet in there, if I remember. Too old to see what it was after all these years, of course. A timetable? A train timetable? What if,’ I said, ‘what if she never left at all? What if she never got the chance?’

  Inside the room there was another short silence. Graves looked like he was about to say something, then hesitated. He surveyed the room beyond the glass.

  I sat back in the chair, and my left hand hovered above my chest for a moment before resting on the plastic arm of the chair. ‘This is how I think it went,’ I said. ‘Hurst comes back from work one day and Rebecca’s gone. Probably he goes tearing off in that Land Rover of his to try to stop her. Maybe gets to the train station. But of course it’s too late. She’s gone. If she was planning on leaving, she would have given herself a good head start. And it would have been a day when the housekeeper wasn’t there either. So he comes back. And of course her room’s empty. She’s packed up her things, and she’s done exactly what she had been threatening to do. Maybe she left him a note.

  ‘Now there’s nothing particularly out of the ordinary about that. Rebecca was old enough to leave and to take care of herself, and it happens all the time. Especially in villages like Quinton. Kids get bored out of their minds. You know how it is. Now he was worried about her of course,’ I said. ‘What parent wouldn’t be? But then he gets something in the post. A postcard. From London. It’s from Rebecca. And she says she’ll be in touch as soon as she’s settled. And every now and again he’d get another one. Not very often, but it’s enough to put his mind at ease. To begin with anyway. And not a letter. A postcard. She wasn’t really the type to take the time to write a whole letter. The girl was too selfish, by the sound of it, so it fits in with her personality as well.’

  ‘And a postcard is easier to fake,’ Graves said, staring at me, ‘isn’t it?’

  I nodded. ‘Now Nancy told me that after a while Hurst wouldn’t even read them any more. And Nancy told me that one day he went up to London to see Rebecca and she never showed up. And when he gets home her room and some parts of the house have been turned upside down.

  ‘He might have told himself that Rebecca had got him to come to London so she could come back to find something in her room. Something that she had forgotten or needed. Or maybe she was after some cash in the house. But I think deep down he must have known. Known that something was very wrong and had been wrong for a very long time.’

  Both Graves and Collinson were watching me almost warily. I took a deep breath and ran my hand along the back of my neck.

  ‘So what does he do?’ I continued after a short pause. ‘He hires Bray to go looking for her. Now, Bray told me that if she’d been in London he would have found her. But there’s no sign of her. No sign of her ever having arrived in London at all. So now her old man really must know that something isn’t right.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, sir,’ Graves said in a more careful tone of voice than before. ‘It seems like a bit of a leap. Really, there’s no way of knowing for sure that Rebecca’s still not alive somewhere. She could have changed her name. Might have got married since then. I mean Bray might have only done a half-assed job of it. She could easily have moved abroad. And if Hurst really did have something to do with those two girls, the same kind of thing might have been happening at home. So why would she come back? There’s literally nothing here for her to come back to now.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘But let’s assume Bray was right. Right or wrong, Hurst seems to have believed him. So what does Hurst really know about what happened to his daughter? All he knows for sure is that she’s disappeared,’ I said and looked across the desk at Collinson. ‘And she’s not the first girl to disappear from Quinton.’

  Graves shifted forward in his seat. ‘So he begins looking at the original cases,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Yes. Maybe he does some digging on his own and discovers that there were three men. Three men that we’d looked at really closely. And he gets them looked into too. Maybe he can find something … something that we missed. Of course, he doesn’t come to me after what I put him through.’ I shrugged. ‘But he has them looked into all the same.’ I fell silent and tapped my fingers twice on the chair.

  ‘Well, even if you’re right,’ Graves said, ‘and it is her down there, Hurst could still be guilty. Maybe Hurst caught her. Walked in as she was on the way out the door and went ballistic. Killed her and buried her with all her stuff.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Why hire a detective agency to try to find her if he knew she was already dead? And you saw her room, Graves. Looked like a shrine. He was waiting. He was waiting for her to come back.’

  ‘Covering his tracks?’ Graves suggested.

  ‘No,’ I said more firmly this time. ‘He was obviously worried about her, though, and wanted her back. But I think after a while … he must have realized that she was never coming home.’

  Graves looked as if he were about to object when Collinson intervened. ‘Because she was there the whole time. The whole time he was looking for her she was under his feet, and he didn’t even know it. That’s what you think now?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  Collinson swivelled on her chair so that she was peering through the walls of her office. ‘If it’s true, that means whoever killed her did it just at the point when Rebecca was leaving,’ Collinson said thoughtfully. ‘Killed her when she was packing up and getting ready to go. She couldn’t be allowed to leave the village. She might have seen something when she was younger. Maybe she saw something but hadn’t realized its importance. Too young perhaps.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘And I think that’s why her old man was killed too. Whoever killed Hurst must have known that he was getting close. Close to the truth of what happened to those two little girls and his daughter.’

  She gave me a long, hard look. ‘So it means we’re still looking for a local,’ she said finally. ‘Only a local would have known Hurst was up there on that hill.’

  I nodded.

  ‘And Nancy?’

  I looked at Graves.

  ‘Nothing much,’ he said. ‘We might have had a sighting of her in a café. A greasy spoon on the edge of town. But we’re not sure yet. That came through this morning. It was closed by the time we started asking around last night. If it was her, she seemed to be waiting for someone. But whoever it was didn’t show up. So she paid and left. There’re lots of trains to London. Around one an hour to Paddington. None direct to Brighton. But she could have changed easily enough once she was in London. She just decided to take the shortcut to the station.’

  Collinson nodded. ‘So she knew something,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s why she returned home. She must have seen something when she was working in that house. Something she never told anyone about, and it’s something to do with Hurst’s daughter, because she mentioned Rebecca on the phone to the man she was meeting. And when she found out Hurst was dead, she must have realized that what she had seen was important. And she came back here and contacted this man.’

  ‘And her phone, Graves?’

  ‘We’re checking that now.’

  ‘So I suppose you want to change direction on this thing,’ Collinson said, studying my face keenly. ‘You think that if we can find out what happened to Rebecca, we’ll find out what happened to those girls. And it all ties in with Hurst.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But there’s nothing certain. There’s still no word from forensics in Oxford abo
ut the age of the victim, and so we can’t completely rule out that it’s not Gail or Elise. Not yet anyway. I mean I could be wrong. There still could be another body down there for all we know. But I don’t think we’re going to have to wait long. Brewin should have his DNA results later on today. So we’ll know for sure one way or another if the body we found down there was Elise’s or Gail’s.’

  In the small glass office there was a sudden air of expectancy. The idea that it could be Rebecca seemed to hover uncertainly in the air. There was another silence while I, knowing that I needed Collinson’s approval, waited anxiously for her to make up her mind.

  She stared across the desk at me. ‘Downes, I sincerely wish you’d come to this conclusion before the bloody papers got wind of it,’ she said coldly. ‘Because we’re going to have to tell the poor girls’ parents.’ She sighed and rubbed her forehead, glaring at me with a hard look in her eye. ‘Now I’m going to have to…’ It took her a few moments to put her anger to one side. ‘All right,’ she said and picked up a pencil. ‘Well, we hardly know a thing about this girl … Rebecca,’ she said. ‘Let’s assume you’re right, Downes. And if you are, of course it changes the whole direction of everything. So the first thing we’ll need is another DNA sample to make sure. Not Frank Hurst’s. His funeral was days ago, wasn’t it?’

  ‘His brother,’ Graves suggested. ‘We can get a sample from his brother and see if that matches.’

  I nodded. ‘The lab in Oxford might come up with something in the meantime. But I think we’ll probably have to wait for the results we get from Hurst’s brother to see if they match the body. And if they match, it’s Rebecca.’

  ‘So what do you propose we do?’ Collinson said.

  ‘We need to find out as much as we can about her as quickly as possible,’ I said. ‘All I know is that Hurst sent her off to some boarding school somewhere. His brother will probably know which one. You can get the address for me when you get that sample, Graves. But get on the phone to the forensics lab in Oxford first or get Brewin to do it. Find out if they’ve got anything on the age of the body. After you’ve talked to them, I need you to go into the village and ask questions about Rebecca. Take Irwin and Douglas with you. And canvas the whole place. Ask about close friends. Boyfriends. Any talk at all. We need to try to get a good picture of the type of person she was.’

  ‘So the postcards,’ Graves said. ‘Who was sending the postcards?’

  ‘Her killer,’ I said and stood up.

  PART THREE

  32

  Graves paid a quick visit to Simon Hurst and then delivered the DNA sample to Brewin. Next he took Douglas and Irwin with him to knock on doors in Quinton.

  By 11.00 he found himself walking along the green. Although they had no constables at their disposal, they were interested only in villagers who had been around when Rebecca was still living there, so there were relatively few people to interview. Douglas took the small lanes and the cul-de-sacs on the north of the village; Irwin took those on the south; both moved inwards while Graves worked outwards from the centre.

  Graves asked his questions and noted down the answers when there were any. When he finished with the houses, he tried the shops. At 2.00 they met in the centre and went for lunch in the pub near the green. They talked about Rebecca. There wasn’t much.

  When the food came, they put their notes away and started eating. Hoping to get Irwin off guard, Graves put his sandwich down on to his plate and said as lightly as he could manage, ‘You said he was famous. Shotgun, I mean. You remember, the other day. Back in the canteen. You said he was famous up in London. I was wondering what you meant.’

  Irwin shrugged. ‘I might have been exaggerating a little bit.’

  Graves said, ‘Well, is it true? Drayton said he nearly killed someone. Did you guys ever hear anything like that?’

  Douglas nodded. ‘I heard something. While back, that was. But that’s all.’

  ‘Only that it happened in London?’

  ‘Yes. Think so.’

  ‘You really want to know, don’t you?’ Douglas laughed. ‘Driving you mad. Not knowing.’

  Graves shrugged. ‘Wouldn’t you want to know if you were working with him every day? I just can’t figure him out at all. I tried him on Google. There’s plenty of stuff about his work around here, but there’s nothing about him in London.’

  ‘Ed knows,’ Douglas said. ‘Don’t you, Ed?’

  ‘Thanks,’ Irwin said. ‘Really. Thanks a lot. If Shotgun finds out I’ve been talking about him behind his back, I’ll be in the shit.’

  ‘So there is something,’ Graves said. ‘I knew it.’ Graves took a bite out of his sandwich and sat back so that the chair rocked on its back legs.

  Irwin looked worried. ‘What did Drayton tell you?’

  ‘That he nearly killed someone and that he won’t ever get in the back seat of a car. Hence the nickname. Is that true?’

  ‘That’s what they say,’ Douglas said.

  ‘Come on,’ Graves said. ‘I won’t tell him.’

  ‘Yes, come on, Ed.’ Douglas seemed to be enjoying himself.

  ‘Well, I heard something a while back.’

  ‘Who was it anyway?’ said Graves. ‘One of the old boys at the station?’

  Irwin eyed him warily over his plate. ‘No. Someone else. He’s retired now, I imagine. Maybe you should know. So you know what you might be up against.’

  ‘Up against?’ Graves said, surprised.

  ‘All right, throw in a curry in town tonight and I’ll think about it. But if I do tell you – you didn’t hear it from me, all right?’

  ‘All right,’ Graves said. ‘Done.’

  They finished their lunch and left the pub.

  ‘We don’t have nearly enough,’ Graves said, and slipped his notebook back into his pocket.

  ‘We could try some of those old cottages,’ Douglas said. ‘The ones we saw coming in. And there’re old farmhouses near Hurst’s house. And the secondary school. Could try the shops again maybe.’

  Graves nodded. ‘All right,’ he said.

  They stood there a little longer before heading back to the car. The church stood against the grey sky on the top of the rise overlooking the pond. The village was very quiet. Graves waited while the other two automatically reached for cigarettes. Far above the yellowish roofs of the houses, a ragged blackbird flew and was buffeted by the wind and then faded finally out of sight.

  33

  Rebecca Hurst’s old boarding school was over in Banbury. It didn’t take me long to find it. Her old housemistress, Ms Walker, told me what little she knew, while the headmaster, a toadyish-looking man, hovered and huffed around impatiently, then ushered me without a word straight outside and off the premises. There wasn’t much. A strikingly pretty girl who kept to herself before they had to exclude her. No boyfriends as far as they were aware and just one friend. A girl called Alice Hunt.

  There was one other thing. A psychologist called Victor Lang used to come to see her at school on Frank’s orders. They didn’t know much about it, but they gave me his phone number and they had an address for Alice Hunt’s parents on file as well. I would need a court order to talk to Lang about Rebecca, so I asked Collinson if we could get one rushed through; she thought it would be possible if we outlined our suspicions that Rebecca could well be dead and linked her death to the disappearance of Gail and Elise. Then, having got Hunt’s new address from her parents, I called her. She said that I could come over and see her.

  She was in her third year at Oxford studying chemistry, and was living in Cowley in a modern-looking building that was attached to the far end of the dorm rooms for the other students. Her study window looked out on to some frozen and sullen-looking hockey fields.

  She was plump, and pretty. Her hair was tied back severely in a ponytail held in place with a blue ribbon. As I took off my coat, I glanced quickly around her study. But the study was, like its owner, cold and detached and gave no sign of a personal life at a
ll.

  ‘So you think that Rebecca might have run away? After she left school?’

  ‘We don’t really know,’ I said. ‘We’re just trying to find out where she is. She hasn’t shown up yet and we need to speak to her. You know what’s happened? To her father?’

  She nodded. ‘It was in the papers.’

  ‘And you’ve not heard anything from her?’

  ‘No. Not for years now. Not since school.’

  ‘You were friends, right?’

  ‘Well, yes, kind of. But we weren’t friends for long. She wasn’t at the school for that long and when she left I never heard from her again.’

  ‘So how close were you?’

  ‘Well, we were friends for a while. But not really close friends.’

  ‘What about anyone else from school? Was there someone else she might have confided in? Or maybe been in touch with?’

  ‘I can’t think of anyone at all. She was a very quiet girl, and she didn’t really have friends apart from me.’

  ‘But why you?’

  ‘I suppose I felt sorry for her.’

  ‘Sorry for her?’

  ‘It’s a bit hard to explain. The thing is, she came to the school relatively late. When she was fifteen or sixteen, I think it must have been. The other girls kind of ganged up on her. Well, some of the more popular girls did, and the others just ignored her.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Most of the girls were already pally by the time Rebecca arrived. We’d all formed our little groups and cliques, and we’d been living there a good while together. Since we were twelve or thirteen, most of us. Rebecca came halfway through term.’

  ‘But is it usually such a big deal – starting late at the school?’ I asked, quite shocked.