He stood for a moment, assessing the space from the centre of the room. Each corner sported a single bed with a shared desk between the two pairs. Each bed had a bedside cabinet and a small wardrobe. Three areas had been personalised with posters on the wall and colourful bedding but one area in particular drew his attention. The spot at the top left, nearest the window, stood out as it was totally devoid of personality.
Dawson sensed he was looking at the space of Sadie Winters.
He took a step forward.
‘Hey, who are you?’ said a voice from behind.
He turned to find a ginger-haired freckled girl glaring at him.
‘Detective Sergeant Dawson,’ he answered. ‘And you?’
‘Err… I’d quite like to see your identification, please?’ she said, without answering his question.
He took it from his pocket and held it forward.
She looked at it, closely. And nodded
‘I’m Tilly,’ she said, stepping past him and throwing her satchel on the bed. ‘And I live over here.’
‘You were friends with Sadie?’ he asked, moving towards the bed opposite hers. He noted her posters were of world maps and horses.
‘Umm… well…’
‘You didn’t get on?’ he asked, in the face of her hesitation.
She scrunched up her face. ‘Well, neither of the above, really,’ she admitted, taking a textbook from her bedside cabinet.
‘Sadie wasn’t the easiest person to be friends with,’ she said, and then frowned as though she’d said something wrong.
Dawson got it. ‘It’s okay to tell the truth,’ he advised.
‘Well, not really cos she’s dead,’ Tilly answered, tucking her red curls behind her ear.
Dawson wondered how the two girls could live in such close quarters and not be friends.
‘Did you try to make friends with her?’ he asked. Maybe Sadie had rebuffed her attempts.
She rolled her eyes dramatically. ‘Jeez, look at me. I’m the ginger-haired kid with freckles. I look like a reject from the cast of Annie. I need all the friends I can get. Even the weirdos.’
‘And was she one of those?’ Dawson asked. ‘A weirdo?’
‘Not really, just closed off all the time. Serious, never hung with the rest of us. Mainly studied and sat there scribbling.’
‘Did Sadie have a boyfriend?’ he asked. He knew kids started young these days.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so, but she wouldn’t have told us if she had.’
Dawson had a sudden thought.
‘Was Sadie being bullied?’
Tilly actually laughed out loud. ‘You’re kidding. There’s no one that would have bullied Sadie.’
‘Why not?’ he asked.
Tilly simply shrugged and headed for the door.
‘They just wouldn’t, and now I really gotta go.’
‘Okay, thanks for the chat, Tilly,’ he said as she bolted out of the door.
It had been a short conversation but one in which he felt he’d learned quite a lot about the young girl.
She had been withdrawn, unsociable and unhappy. He had been the first to question his boss’s gut on this one. But now he felt his own instinct begin to react to something that Tilly had said.
She’d been so definite, resolute that Sadie Winters was not being bullied and now he wanted to know why.
Fourteen
‘Well, that was helpful,’ Kim said, as Jaqueline Harris left the room.
‘Give the woman a break,’ Bryant said. ‘She’s only been Sadie’s housemistress for just over a month.’
‘Oh yeah, she was very quick to tell us she’s only been in the position for a short period of time and that she has ninety-six girls in her care. I think the word “troubled” is going to come up a lot,’ she said, recalling the woman’s brief understanding of Sadie Winters.
‘That word seems to follow this kid around,’ Bryant observed as the heavy oak door opened.
Nancy’s permed head popped into view. ‘May I offer you coffee or tea or—’
‘Nancy, is there really no other room we can use?’ Kim asked, looking around at the wood covered walls, stained and re-stained over the years to resemble the colour of melted chocolate. The heavy thick beams that ran the eight-foot length of the ceiling that seemed to be only inches from her head when she stood.
While Jacqueline Harris had been speaking Kim had realised why the room bothered her so much. Fairview, the children’s home where she’d spent much of her childhood, had had a room just like it.
It had been called the quiet room. Allegedly, it had been a place of reflection for minor discretions, usually backchat, coming in late for curfew or another minor breach of the rules. And the quiet room had been quiet, indeed, and locked from the outside. Usually for eight to ten hours at a time.
She remembered she’d just turned seven years old and at the home for three months when she was first introduced to the quiet room for deliberately spilling another girl’s drink at the dinner table. And she had.
Her open hand had knocked the plastic beaker from the new Jamaican girl’s grip, and she had watched the cheap, thin orange cordial spread across the table as girls had squealed and backed away from the travelling puddle, raising their plates of limp cheese sandwiches out of the way.
Kim had refused to apologise and had been grabbed by Mrs Hunt and dragged to the quiet room.
She had been removed six hours later and ordered to apologise. Again she had refused, and her own stubbornness had prevented her explaining that she had knocked the drink away after seeing one of the older, meaner girls spit into it.
During her time at Fairview Kim had been no stranger to the quiet room. One carer had once joked about putting a nameplate on the door.
‘Sorry, officer, but Principal Thorpe said this was the only room available,’ Nancy said, bringing her back to the present.
Oh, he did, did he? Kim thought. If he thought trying to confine her to an office barely bigger than a jewellery box was going to speed up their investigation, he could think again.
‘And I’m afraid Graham Steele, the school counsellor, won’t be coming to see you next,’ Nancy continued. ‘He’s had to leave site unexpectedly.’
‘Okay, thank you,’ Bryant offered, quickly, obviously seeing the scowl that was settling on her face.
She frowned as the door closed behind Thorpe’s assistant.
Kim stood and opened it again before looking back into the room.
‘Okay, Bryant, come on, give me a hand,’ she said, lifting her side of the desk.
‘You’re kidding?’ he said.
She shook her head and began dragging the desk along the floor.
‘Jesus, hang on, you’re gonna bloody hurt yourself,’ he said, grabbing the other end.
‘Yeah, well, I’m going to hurt someone else if I stay in here much longer,’ she admitted. ‘And the likelihood is that it’s gonna be you.’
‘Turn it sideways,’ he said, as she reached the door.
Kim had quickly realised that the desk was a replica and nowhere near as heavy as the real thing would be.
‘Where are we taking it?’ he asked, once they were in the corridor.
‘Just follow me,’ she said, walking backwards.
Once she was back in the grand entrance hall she set her end down.
‘This will do nicely,’ she said, heading back for the chairs. She wheeled two out at the same time, one with each hand. Interviewees would have to pass them to get to the cupboard in which they’d originally been placed.
‘Not sure Thorpe is going to be all tickety boo with this arrangement,’ he said, as they sat down facing the entrance door.
‘His problem, not mine,’ she said, already feeling the cloying darkness evaporate from around her. She took a deep breath and began to relax.
‘Okay, so seeing as our counsellor is MIA, who are we interviewing next?’
Bryant took the list from his pocket and app
eared to do a double take before a slow smile spread across his face.
‘The next one is a person I feel will need no introduction at all.’
Fifteen
Dawson sat on the bed and took a moment. How many times had Sadie Winters sat in this exact same spot and contemplated life, and even possibly death?
There was an alien feeling inside him at the thought of going through her possessions despite the fact he knew she wasn’t going to barge in and accuse him of snooping. A teenage girl’s bedroom was her safe place; somewhere she could express herself and evolve into someone that felt at ease with the world. A place she used while she found somewhere to fit and the person she was meant to be. And as this corner of the room was the place Sadie had spent most of her time, this was as good as it got.
He wondered why she had been so unhappy here and if she’d asked her parents if she could leave. He remembered pleading with his mother to take him out of school after Johnny Croke and his gang had forced him to eat ten cream crackers straight. The moisture in his mouth had been swallowed up by the second, leaving him coughing and choking as the dry flakes of each cracker tumbled down his throat. His discomfort had only made them laugh more. Only once the last bite had gone did Johnny Croke give him back his school bag.
He had been ten years old.
His mother had always offered him a goal. Kept him moving forward to the weekend, to a day out, a special event, a holiday. And it got him to the age of fifteen when he took things into his own hands and began to lose weight.
He hadn’t left school with many friends and had failed to pick up many more along the way. His earlier experiences at school had left him suspicious of people’s motives. Many times, kids had attempted to befriend him and always with the intention of ridiculing him.
He was aware that all those hours spent in the gym and running in the early morning when no one could see his rolls of fat jiggling along the pavement had instilled in him a selfishness and self-obsessed nature. But as the years since his school days increased he was able to take a breath and accept that he would never be forced into such a place of powerlessness again.
Time had also taught him to value the few friends he now had.
He wondered if he would find any evidence of the friendships in Sadie’s life as he gingerly opened the top drawer of her bedside cabinet.
It contained a hairbrush, an array of dark nail varnishes, a few pieces of costume jewellery, marker pens and elastic bands. Dawson surmised this was her junk drawer. Everyone had one. It was the drawer that held everything you didn’t know where to place.
The second drawer was full of textbooks, and the third held a few notebooks, two chocolate bars and a packet of crisps.
He looked around, ready to move on to the next space, wondering why there were no family photos: her parents, sister, even a dog.
He stood and opened the wardrobe door. The left-hand side was devoted to school wear and the right to casual wear, with a few smarter pieces shoved in at the end. The bottom of the wardrobe was filled with different coloured trainers and the top shelf with warm jumpers and a couple of jackets.
He felt along the shelves to see if anything had been placed there, but it was all clothes.
He stood at the foot of the bed and frowned. His search was complete.
He sat back on the bed and opened the top drawer of the bedside cabinet again. This was the space that bothered him. In addition to being the junk drawer, the bedside cabinet was also normally used for quick access. The place you kept the most important stuff.
There was nothing of any importance in this drawer, which could only mean one thing.
Someone had been here first.
Sixteen
Kim’s expression gave nothing away as the familiar figure sauntered across the great hall towards her.
‘Cheers, mate,’ she said, under her breath to her colleague who really could have warned her.
The expression of Joanna Wade was amused as she took a seat on the other side of the reproduction desk.
‘We meet again, Miz Wade,’ Kim said, meeting her gaze and recalling her insistence on the title the last time they’d met.
‘As I knew we would, Inspector,’ the woman offered, sitting back and crossing her long legs.
‘Death unites us once more,’ Kim observed. ‘But what brings you here?’
Kim had first met Joanna Wade a couple of years earlier while investigating the murder of school principal Teresa Wyatt, a woman linked to the discovery of bones at the site of a derelict children’s home. After interviewing most of the woman’s colleagues and receiving the exact same ‘saintly’ description, this woman had been the only one to tell them the truth, while flirting outrageously with Kim.
She had changed very little, Kim noted. Her long blonde hair was tied back in a ponytail revealing a strong, square jaw and piercing blue eyes. Her plain black trousers were well cut, emphasising her long legs, and a plain white silk shirt showed a St Christopher around her neck.
‘Buy me a drink and I’ll tell you,’ she said, smiling.
Kim ignored the response and continued. ‘You taught Sadie Winters?’ she asked.
All amusement disappeared from Joanna’s eyes and was replaced by sadness.
‘I did, indeed, Inspector,’ she said.
‘For how long?’
‘Since I joined the team last September.’
‘So, just over six months?’
‘Six months is a long time here,’ she replied.
The response took Kim by surprise. Not so much the words as the tone. It was covered with a quick smile, the type one uses to convince the other person it was a joke, but Kim had not missed the regret. She really found herself wondering why Joanna Wade had made the move but guessed that she was not going to find out.
‘Different to your last school?’ Kim asked. If she recalled correctly Joanna’s teaching methods had sometimes been unconventional and derided by her boss despite getting and keeping the attention of her students.
Joanna simply nodded, and Kim understood she was getting no more.
‘So, what was she like, Sadie?’ Kim asked. ‘And please don’t say troubled,’ she added.
Joanna shook her head. ‘I wasn’t going to. I’d describe her as introspective, reflective and far more talented than she gave herself credit for.’
‘In what way?’
‘Poetry,’ Joanna answered. ‘She saw her writings as pointless ramblings. They were expressive and occasionally a little self-indulgent, but she was thirteen. I think we were all captivated by our own emotions at that age. Her poems reflected much of what was going on in her mind.’
Kim saw Bryant make a note. She guessed it was to ask Dawson about such writings amongst her personal possessions.
‘Like what?’ Kim asked, wanting to understand the girl better.
‘Her place in the world, fear, often loneliness, just stuff,’ Joanna said, glancing away.
Kim waited for her gaze to return. ‘“Stuff”?’
There was something that Joanna was keeping to herself.
‘As I said, Inspector, she was thirteen years of age.’
The set expression was back, and Kim felt the woman’s resolve to say nothing more on the subject. She had a feeling that Joanna’s stubbornness mirrored her own.
‘Did you ever have any trouble with her in lessons?’ Kim asked.
Joanna shook her head. ‘I didn’t.’
‘Indicating that someone else did?’ she pushed.
Joanna opened her hands expressively. ‘Sadie loved English, so she was never any bother to me.’
Kim opened her mouth to speak as Principal Thorpe entered the grand hall and stopped dead. The young couple chatting excitedly behind almost walked into him.
The woman’s right hand instinctively covered her extended stomach.
These folks were getting in early.
The principal’s face turned thunderous before he remembered prospective customers were rig
ht behind him.
‘May I ask…’
‘My apologies for relocating,’ Kim said, pleasantly. ‘But the office allocated for questioning and taking statements was not particularly suitable.’
She wanted to ensure that the young couple were under no illusion as to who they were.
They both frowned towards the principal whose face was colouring with rage. The woman’s hand had remained against her stomach.
‘Alternative facilities will be found, Inspector,’ he said, with a slight flare of the nostrils.
He offered her a look as he guided the young couple past, leaving Kim in no doubt they’d be rehoused at the earliest opportunity.
Joanna Wade smiled at her ruefully. ‘Does Inspector Kim Stone normally get everything she wants?’
‘Most times,’ Bryant answered for her.
‘So, Miz Wade, what more can you tell us about Sadie’s accident?’ Kim asked.
‘Not much,’ she admitted. ‘I wasn’t there.’
‘How did you come to know about it?’
‘I was in my classroom preparing for a lesson when I heard a commotion in the hallway. I heard her name and the word roof. I can add two and two like any other person.’
‘And where is your classroom?’ Kim asked, wondering how far away from the action she’d been.
‘I’m at the front of the house facing the second row of elm trees.’
‘To the left of the metal grate in front of the daffodils?’ Kim asked.
Joanna thought for a moment and then nodded. ‘Pretty much,’ she answered.
Kim realised that if Sadie had jumped she would have sailed right past the teacher’s window.
‘Okay, thank you, Miz Wade.’
‘Finished with me so soon?’ Joanna asked, allowing her voice to drip with disappointment.
Kim hid her smile. Different case, different location but Joanna Wade had not changed one bit.
Dying Truth: A completely gripping crime thriller Page 5