by Liz Evans
‘Well, it wasn’t Heidi he stowed in the Smugglers’ Caves,’ I admitted. ‘But that’s not to say he didn’t put her somewhere else.’
‘You think he could still be the one?’ Graham asked.
‘No,’ O’Hara said bluntly. ‘And forgive my asking, but didn’t it hurt when your fist made contact with my nose?’
‘I panicked. Thought you were going to tell Ellie the truth. Will you?’
‘No. I’ll leave that choice to you.’
All three of us turned at the sound of someone fumbling with the latch on the back gate. Imogen calmly walked inside.
‘Immy!’ Graham threw himself off the swing and ran towards her. ‘Are you all right? Where have you been?’
Imogen faced him calmly. A seven-year-old bundle of determination in blue jeans, yellow sweatshirt and yellow wellingtons. ‘I went to the beach to see if I could see a mermaid. I’m not a baby anymore you know. I can go places by myself.’
Once we’d extracted ourselves from the orgy of shouting, screaming, crying and questioning and were back in O’Hara’s car, I said, ‘You feel the same way as Ellie about Graham’s phobia, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I get scared of being hurt.’
‘You’re a woman. It’s allowed.’
‘And you’re a male chauvinist pig.’
He flashed me a grin. ‘Glad we got that sorted. Now let’s go hunting for Heidi.’
‘Haven’t we run out of places to look?’
‘Well, I’m hoping that by the time we get back to your office, I’ll have had a delivery that will help us with that one.’
Chapter Thirty-One
‘That came by courier.’ Jan pointed to a parcel sitting on her desk. ‘It’s for him. Is he working here now?’
‘No, he’s not,’ O’Hara said. ‘We have much in common, Jan.’
‘She does sarcasm,’ I said.
‘That was irony.’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘Irony is classier.’ He hefted the parcel. ‘Let’s go up to your office.’
I’d left the office window open. A pigeon was hunkered down on the inside windowsill. I flapped at it. It gave me an indifferent look, fluttered over to the filing cabinet and settled down again. ‘Do you think it’s hurt?’
‘Why? Did you give him the brush-off as well?’
‘I didn’t give you the brush-off. I just … didn’t move things along any further,’ I finished lamely. The truth was that when he’d produced the chocolate paint last night, I’d hesitated for a fraction too long. He’d got the message and we’d had coffee for afters instead of sex.
He’d finished stripping off the packaging. The contents seemed to be a small fluorescent tube, two DVDs and two books. ‘I need a computer. Does Annie have one in her office?’
‘She has a laptop. She’s very possessive with it.’
Annie agreed to load the software on condition that she got to keep it afterwards.
‘It would be cheaper to go buy our own computer,’ O’Hara said.
‘Probably,’ Annie agreed. ‘Tell me, have you worked with any forensic software packages?’
‘This is my first time. I’m guessing it’s not yours?’
‘I did some work on them when I was in the police. Different version, but the principles will be the same. I’m sure you’ll manage to pick them up. In a week or so. However, if you want to pay for my time …?’
‘You drive a hard bargain, Anchoret,’ O’Hara said. He passed the disks over and Annie inserted the first one in the DVD drawer. She and the screen started some kind of two-way dialogue, prompted occasionally by O’Hara.
Once the computer seemed to have digested the software satisfactorily, O’Hara put on his glasses, uncoiled a lead from the tube, plugged it into the back of the laptop, and then moved it slowly across the surface of the picture Maria had given me. ‘Are we in business?’
‘Yep.’ Annie turned her screen slightly so we could both see the picture sitting on it. Fourteen-year-old Maria and Heidi grinned out, frozen in their short tight outfits and layered make-up. ‘What are we looking for?’
‘I need to magnify and enhance anyone in the background. Then any partial images, we use the re-building program to construct a 3D model.’
‘Okay. Pass me the instruction manual.’ Annie’s fingers started flashing over the keyboard with O’Hara issuing suggestions and reading sections from the manual. Blurry abstract patterns started appearing on the screen, which then deepened and sharpened in contrast until it was obvious they were sections of heads. In the end they’d extracted fourteen separate people. ‘I think that’s all we can reasonably get,’ Annie murmured.
She was hunched forward, peering intently at the screen which was reflected back in her spectacle lenses. Today it was the gold-rimmed ones; efficient but less scary than don’t-mess-with-me-red. It occurred to me that she and O’Hara looked like a pair with their matching specs and heads close together over the laptop, and I looked like the outsider. The sharp pang of jealousy surprised me. To reclaim their attention, I reached over and picked up the original snapshot. ‘Do you need this any more? I should get it back to Maria.’
O’Hara looked up, his mind obviously somewhere else. ‘No, that’s fine. Take it. Let’s start with the guy at the candy floss kiosk. We’ve got a clear profile so it shouldn’t take too long.’
The left side of a teenage boy appeared on the screen: blonde punk haircut, acne, nose ring. Annie did something and a featureless three dimensional head appeared. She tapped and dragged the mouse and the boy’s profile was superimposed like a birth mark on a small section of the head. I watched as she coaxed it larger and larger until it fitted the skull size. ‘Best match?’
‘Uh-huh,’ O’Hara said.
Skin like raspberry porridge and spiky hair flowed over the head. Within seconds we were looking at the kid full face. In fact, we could look at him from all angles. The head spun in cyber-space, giving us views of his neck, bird’s-eye perspective, even up his nose when it tilted backwards. From any angle, however, he was a total stranger. ‘There’s a facility to age on this,’ Annie said reading from the manual. ‘It goes in five-year increments. I’ll try fifteen years on him.’
It gave him deeper face lines and receding hair, but it did nothing to make him any more familiar to us.
‘Neat software,’ Annie said. ‘It’s not available commercially, is it?’
‘It’s not been released yet,’ O’Hara agreed. ‘It’s aimed at forensic labs. We’ll need to check all these people out with the Walkinshaws. See if they recognise anyone. Let’s save both images and move on.’
Some of the bits of bodies were no more than an ear and eyebrow. The less there was, the more variations the computer offered us. We could have a selection of face shapes, hair styles, eye colours, assorted chins. It was fun at first, but it rapidly became mind-numbingly boring. I guess I could have left them to it and sorted out some work in my own office, but I felt obliged to offer moral support.
‘Woah! Ho!’ O’Hara whistled loudly.
‘What?’ I sat forward and refocused on the screen. My stomach tightened. ‘Can you make the hair grey and shorter? And add a moustache?’ Annie did as I asked. A chunky-faced head rotated in cyberspace. It was minus the smug expression, but it was undeniably the Walkinshaws’ supportive neighbour. ‘Major Roger Eh-Eh Nesbitt!’
‘Where was he on the photo?’ O’Hara asked.
‘Section G7.’ Annie replaced the bodyless major with Maria’s original photo, overlaid with grid lines. The galloping major was behind a fruit machine; with just the top right third of his head visible.
‘Way to go, software,’ I said admiringly. ‘Did the major strike you as the kind of guy who’d spend his evenings playing the machines in the arcades?’
‘On the whole, no,’ O’Hara agreed.
‘Ellie Walkinshaw said he was shy of making any kind of romantic connection with grown women. Maybe he do
esn’t have the same hang-up about young girls? They’d be less threatening. And he works at the DIY store. He’d have used the road out to River End to get to it. It all makes sense if you think about it. Heidi was too smart to get into a stranger’s car, but this is a guy she’s known forever. It’s raining. He stops and offers a lift. Why wouldn’t she get in?’
‘And leave her bike behind?’
‘Maybe the fussy little general didn’t want a muddy bike in his nice clean car. Perhaps he offered to run her home for some dry clothes and he’d come back for the bike when he’d put some protection down over the car seats. That could be why she left it in Schoolhouse Lane. Less traffic, less chance of anyone pinching it before he got back. So he takes her back, finds some reason to take her into his house, and then … well, I don’t know … he pushed for more than she was prepared to put out. No wonder he didn’t want us to start stirring up the search for Heidi again. And why the creep tried to run me down with his motorbike. Did anyone search Nesbitt’s house at the time?’
‘I don’t know,’ O’Hara admitted. ‘I’ll have to check.’ He pushed back his chair and stretched cramped shoulders.
‘Am I to take it we’re finished here?’ Annie said.
‘For now. Thanks,’ O’Hara replied.
‘My pleasure.’ She swept up the software disks and manuals and locked them in her desk drawer, making it clear it wasn’t our company that had given her the pleasure.
‘What now?’ I asked. ‘Roger’s probably at work up the DIY store. You want to tackle him first, or take a look round his house?’
‘Neither. I want to do a bit of research first. Roger’s kept for fourteen years, he’s not going anywhere. I’ll get back to you.’
I decided to put returning Maria’s photo at the top of the to-do list. I felt bad about hanging on to it. It was plainly important to her.
When I reached the reception area Jan was doing something unusual: she was working. Her fingers pecked at the keyboard while she transcribed some sheets in Vetch’s handwriting. ‘I’ll be really glad when I’m famous. All this bleeding typing is ruining me nail art. See?’ She displayed a set of talons. Some of the spiderweb designs had lost their little ruby spiders. ‘I’m gonna have to have them re-touched up.’
‘My heart bleeds. I’m going round to Maria Pierpoint’s house if anyone wants me.’
‘Okay. You had a couple of phone calls.’
She returned to her screen. I picked up the wastepaper bin and retrieved two post-it notes. One said ‘Ms Terris, Tourist place, wants to talk re T-shirts’. The other said ‘Chainsaws cut off’.
‘Is this a message from an anonymous slasher?’
Jan glanced over. Her make-up today reflected the arachnid theme. The over-mascara’d lashes looked like thick furry spider’s legs. ‘Some tool hire place says you only paid for a chainsaw up to yesterday. They want it back.’
And I’d left the damn thing at Clemency’s house yet again. I’d planned to walk up to Maria’s house, but now I’d have to take the car or walk through Seatoun lugging a chainsaw. I did Maria’s first.
‘Thanks,’ she said on receipt of the photo. ‘I wasn’t sure if you’d kept it or I’d dropped it at West Bay when we ran from the rain.’ She showed me into the sitting room. ‘Horrid isn’t it?’ she said. ‘We’re decorating upstairs first. Would you like something to drink?’
‘No. I’m fine thanks.’ I’d caught her in the middle of the ironing. There was a large pile tottering on the sofa. ‘How are the kids?’
‘Nathan’s upstairs having his nap. Daisy’s round her friend’s house. Thank heavens. It gives me a chance to catch up on …’ she indicated the ironing mountain. Something was plainly on her mind. Her round face was creased with thoughts that were a long way from whether to spray or use the cool setting. ‘I’ve been thinking about her a lot,’ she said without any preamble. ‘Not how she was back then. I keep thinking how she’d probably be married by now and have kids. How if she’s dead she won’t ever get to see them take their first steps; or feel how amazing it is to cuddle them after a bath and smell that baby smell.’ She sat herself down on the sofa beside her ironing. The stack was higher than her. ‘I went up there, to the caves, when they said on the radio it was Heid’s body they’d found. I put some flowers down for her. Now they’re saying it’s not.’
‘Unofficially, it’s probably Leslie Higgins’s sister.’
She bit her bottom lip. ‘So he was a killer?’
‘Probably.’
Maria shivered, rubbing her hands up goose-pimpled arms. ‘And Heidi?’
‘We don’t know.’
She stared hard at her friend’s picture for a few more seconds. And then thrust the photo into a drawer rather than her bag. I sensed a decision had been reached. Maria had finally decided to say goodbye. ‘We might not even like each other if we met now. People change, don’t they?’
‘Mostly. I never asked — did Heidi ever think of something that would really wind her mum up that last evening?’
Amusement flitted over Maria’s features. For a brief moment the fourteen-year-old peeped out from behind the wife-and-mum. ‘We had our tongues pierced. I only had one stud, but Heid had three. It hurt like hell. We went to this bloke who had a room in his basement and I don’t think he really knew what he was doing. Mine went septic, I had to have antibiotics.’
I thought of Heidi, flouncing up to her bedroom that last evening. Mumbling and miserable when she collected the papers next morning. What had been interpreted as teenage moodiness had really been agony from throbbing, festering tongue piercings.
‘Well, I’d better get on with this ironing before the mini-monsters are around.’ Maria took the T-shirt she’d been ironing off the board and turned it back inside the right way with a few practised flicks. The berserk Easter Bunny snarled out at us.
‘Can you tell me where you bought that?’
‘There was a man selling them on the front yesterday.’ She folded it neatly against her chest. ‘He might still be there if you want one.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind. I just have to go collect a chainsaw first.’ It would come in handy. He’d flogged his last T-shirt when I caught up with him.
*
Bianca answered the door at the house. Tears were pouring down her big cheeks, flooding from red-rimmed eyes and dripping off her nose. Her breath was coming in great noisy gasps as it fought the howls of misery.
‘What the hell’s happened?’ I asked.
‘Jo … Jo …’ She strove for breath to finish the words. ‘Jon … he … he …’
My stomach turned over. The stupid, selfish, berk had managed to kill himself.
Chapter Thirty-Two
‘Where is he?’ I shook Bianca, trying to get through the hysteria. I might still be able to start CPR if he hadn’t been down for too long. ‘WHERE’S JONATHON?’
‘He’s in his study, writing,’ Clemency ran lightly down the staircase. ‘Why?’
‘Bianca seemed so upset, I thought something must be wrong.’
‘Something is.’ She reached the foot of the stairs and directed a look at Bianca that could have frozen a blast furnace. Bianca’s wails became even more pitiful. ‘For heaven’s sake, B. I’m sorry Jon hit you, he shouldn’t have done that, but you must see why he did it. We trusted you.’ She thrust her way past the sobbing blob and stalked towards the kitchen.
‘You can, Clemency,’ Bianca’s voice rose in squeak. ‘I’d never let you down.’ She lumbered after the blonde iciness.
Clemency was sweeping items together on the table, replacing something in a small cardboard box and collecting up the brown paper and torn sticky tape that I assume it had been wrapped in. The address label on the parcel was briefly visible before she crushed it: triple-spaced lines in capital letters. The anonymous correspondent had moved from letters to packages. ‘I’d say it’s pretty shitting obvious you already have, B.’
Bianca wrung her big hands. The tears were stil
l cascading. She resembled a big, blubbering fifteen-stone baby in a blue denim romper suit. ‘Please no, Clemency. Don’t be angry with me.’
‘What do you want?’ Clemency snarled.
It took me a moment to become aware I was the one being snarled at. ‘Chainsaw.’
‘Why the hell don’t you keep the frigging thing with you instead of storing it in my house?’
‘Exactly what I’m planning to do.’
‘Good. And as for you …’ Clemency’s eyes flashed. ‘You’ve blown it, B. All those promises and I can’t trust you to do the simplest little thing. Where the hell does that leave our plans now? It’s hardly the right time to start a family is it, when we don’t know what the sod is going to happen next?’ Bianca reached out. Clemency struck her hand away. ‘No! Just don’t touch me. Don’t talk to me.’ Tears spilt over her own eyes. Not great blubbering sobs like Bianca’s, but gentle silent drops that fell to her tight sweater and glittered for a moment like diamonds before dissolving into the black wool. Whirling away, she fled upstairs, the remnants of the parcel clutched to her chest. A door slammed loudly overhead in synchronisation with the rabbit flap crashing open down here. By the time I’d separated them, two feet plus of bunny was sitting on his fluffy rump in front of me with a familiar gleam in his little black eyes.
‘He l-likes you,’ Bianca hiccupped. Now that Clemency had gone she seemed to be getting the grief under control.
‘I’ve always loved rabbits.’ Preferably stewed with onions. ‘What the heck was all the excitement about? What are you supposed to have done?’