But now Ivo had completely lost sight of Roxanne. He circled around the lake, stopping once or twice to exchange pleasantries with fellow hacks, taking a gloating delight in hinting at what a great photo op they’d just missed. One of them mentioned that he’d seen the local reporter not so long ago, mingling with a group of students and no doubt collecting tributes to Polly and Rachel. Ivo had no problem crashing that party so made his way towards where the hack had pointed.
The trees grew more closely here, and he thought it would be safe to nip behind one and take a leak. Enough silvery light from a waning moon filtered down between the branches for him to make out where he was going. As he finished cursing his prostate, and his eyes grew accustomed to the shadow under the summer canopy, he thought he could make out the figure of someone lying further off in the grass. At first he thought perhaps it was a young couple making out, but then realised it was a woman alone. She was lying sedately, presumably looking up at the stars or whatever soppy stuff it was girls liked to do. Then he recognised the thick dark curls. What was she doing? Surely this wasn’t some bizarre attempt to hide from him?
‘Hey, Roxanne!’ he called. She didn’t move, so he zipped himself up and moved closer. ‘Roxanne!’
He thought perhaps she was asleep and moved gently to her side, not wanting to startle her. Her arms were by her sides and her short skirt lay in a neat fan shape over her bare, straight legs. Her eyes were open and her head seemed turned at a funny angle. Shit! Ivo jumped back, his heart pounding. He looked around wildly but could see no one anywhere near. He was about to shout out, but some ancient war-horse instinct strangled the cry in his throat so that all that came out was a stifled grunt of fear and shock.
He bent down, trying to leave as little imprint in the grass as possible, and looked into her eyes. ‘Roxanne!’ He gave her shoulder a little shake but her face remained impassive. The girl was dead. Fuck! Oh fuck, no!
He made himself look again at her face. Her cheeks appeared swollen and puffy, but then he realised that something, some kind of fabric, had been stuffed into her mouth. His instinct was to yank it out, but he restrained himself: a reporter never lets himself become part of the story. All the same, he knew what he had to do, even though his hands shook so much that he had trouble holding his phone still enough to take the photos. He doubted the lawyers would ever let the paper print them, but he didn’t want a bollocking from his editor for passing up such a golden opportunity. He moved to get a different angle; perhaps if he took the picture here, from her feet, her eyes would be facing away and it would work better. The phone’s flash went off, throwing her slim wrists and delicate hands into sharp relief against the grass. Something between her thighs glinted underneath her skirt.
Ivo looked over his shoulder, seeing himself in his mind’s eye for what he was – a foul scavenger picking at carrion, then lifted the fabric with two fingers and, with his other hand, pressed the light on his phone. Her hips were bare, her pubes waxed into a neat black line, and the neck of an empty wine bottle had been inserted into the soft embrace of her labia. Swallowing hard, he took the photo, then dropped the skirt, stifling the urge to straighten it again as demurely as he could. There was only so much explaining he was prepared to do later to some nerdy forensics expert.
So this was why Keith had got in such a strop over his piece about the bottle! Even the Young Ferret hadn’t been able to unearth this half of the story, merely that a vodka bottle had been recovered from the scene and processed for prints and DNA. Now he knew the darker secret and could quite see why Keith would guard it so fiercely. Why the fuck would anybody do a thing like that? Who the fuck would?
In the gloom under the trees Ivo could hear his own laboured breathing. The sound unnerved him. He hoped he wasn’t about to have a coronary. But fuck it, he’d taken this kid under his wing, and now she’d been murdered and this vile thing done to her: that made it personal. He was going to have to expose this twisted little bastard before he died! He straightened up and took a deep breath. His pulse was racing and he hadn’t felt this invigorated in years.
Ivo checked the time on his phone. If he called it in now, they’d likely be the only paper to get this into the early editions. Which meant that to stay ahead of the game he had to get the story safely tucked up before he called the police. Once the plods got here, he’d be stuck at the station all night making a statement while every other cowboy in town was free to ride around collecting background before they filed their copy. He couldn’t have that.
The police would check his phone, of course; they’d know what he’d done. But so what? What could they do to him? It wasn’t a crime in this country for an honest man to do his job. Not yet, anyway. Ivo looked down at Roxanne and shuddered. The sight of her made him want to weep. No question, it was a crying shame; she was a sweet kid, a good girl, but it wasn’t going to make the slightest difference to her now whichever call he made first. Besides, he owed it to her to tell it right. This was her big story, and now it was his crusade. He must do it before his adrenaline crashed and he lost his nerve. If he let that happen, he knew for sure that there’d only be one outcome: he’d have to find a drink. A double. Just to get him started.
He made the call.
THIRTY-ONE
Lance received the urgent summons to make their way down to the trees between the two lakes. The explanation was brief and to the point: a body had been found.
Keith was already there, talking to a shorter, paunchy man whom Grace was now able to recognise as Ivo Sweatman. Keith glanced at her over Ivo’s shoulder and told her curtly to stay back. She looked at Lance, wondering if he meant both of them or just her, but Lance remained with her anyway, making room for uniformed officers who came scurrying out of the darkness with crime scene tape that they proceeded to wind around the ring of trees.
‘Any idea who it is?’ she asked one of them.
‘Local journalist, according to the guy who found her.’ The young female PC nodded towards Ivo. ‘He knows her. He’s one of the London press corps, apparently.’
‘Roxanne?’ Grace started forward, but Lance caught her arm and held her firmly.
‘Wait! You’ll have to wait.’
‘It can’t be her! Why would anyone hurt Roxanne?’
‘We don’t know it is her yet.’
‘We can’t have been more than a couple of hundred yards away!’
‘I know.’
Grace looked into his eyes, willing him to say it wasn’t true. ‘Oh Jesus. We saw Pawel Zawodny! He was right over there. Why didn’t we keep him in custody when we had the chance? We should never have let him go!’
‘Look, we don’t know anything. Could even be some kind of accident.’
Keith summoned a uniformed officer to escort Ivo away, then came over to where they stood. He gave Grace a hard look. ‘Where have you been all evening?’ he asked.
‘Skirting around the lake, like you told us. Why? I don’t understand.’
‘Grace has been with me the whole time,’ said Lance firmly, and then Grace understood: she was a potential suspect!
‘So it is Roxanne?’ she said.
‘Yes. I’m sorry.’
‘Are you sure she’s dead?’ Grace started to move forward again, propelled by her sheer disbelief, but Keith blocked her way.
‘We’re waiting for official confirmation. Samit’s on his way. But I spoke to the officers who were first on the scene. They’re experienced guys.’
‘But what’s happened?’ Grace’s brain, still able only to reject this alien reality, looked for some other way out, some escape clause, some other answer to this riddle.
‘Looks like the same MO as Rachel Moston,’ said Keith.
Lance lowered his voice. ‘Is there a bottle?’
Keith nodded. ‘So Ivo says. I don’t want to contaminate the scene more than necessary, but Wendy’s on her way, should be here soon.’
Grace had stood around many times waiting for the crime scene inves
tigators to arrive, but on those occasions the interval had been simply a tedious matter of minutes to be filled with gossip and banter, the anonymous victim largely ignored, merely the opening of a new case file. Now the idea of turning their backs on a lifeless human being filled her with intolerable distress. ‘Is there nothing we can do?’ she asked.
‘Duncan’s organising teams to get names and addresses as people leave, so I want you two here,’ Keith spoke softly, his businesslike tone deliberately calming. ‘Someone’s bringing lights over, so if you want to nip back to your car to get jackets or whatever, now’s your chance.’
The night breeze coming off the dark water was indeed growing chilly and the ground beneath the trees was damp, but Grace shook her head: she couldn’t leave Roxanne friendless.
‘I’ll go,’ said Lance. ‘I’ve got a torch in the boot, too.’ He squeezed Grace’s arm before slipping away between the tree trunks.
She and Keith stood awkwardly together. ‘You don’t happen to know the next of kin?’ he asked.
Grace felt a rush of sorrow for Roxanne’s parents. They were nice people, lived in Haywards Heath, not far from Brighton, and she’d visited them several times when she and Roxanne were students. Roxanne’s father had a little garage and, back then, her mother worked in the Italian cafe-restaurant her grandparents owned. But that was ten years ago, and Roxanne had mentioned that first evening at the Blue Bar that the cafe had closed when her grandfather died. She told Keith all this, and he asked her to relay the essentials to the Sussex police.
Grace was grateful for the distraction, and pleased to end up speaking to someone in the local district force who was calm and sympathetic. Ending the call, she tried not to think too much about Roxanne’s parents hearing the doorbell at this time of night and opening up to find uniformed officers on the doorstep.
A generator van lumbered down the slope and across the grass towards them. Technicians jumped out and swiftly began to set up powerful arc lights. Grace stayed well back, reluctant to face the inevitable sight of the corpse. Keith came up behind her. ‘You don’t have to be here for this. It might be better if you weren’t.’
‘Thanks, boss. But I’d like to stay, if that’s possible.’
She saw him hesitate before he spoke. ‘Ivo said the tip about the bottle of Fire’n’Ice came from her. We have to know who told her about it.’
‘Not me, boss!’ she promised, praying again as she had when facing the chief con that it was the truth. ‘I swear I never told her anything about the investigation.’
‘Well, we’ll never know now, will we?’
Grace’s heart sank: it was a selfish thought, but the only other person who could confirm what she had or hadn’t said that night in the Blue Bar was now dead. She stepped closer to the SIO, raising her chin. ‘You can trust me, sir.’ She glanced into the darkness under the trees. ‘We were friends. I owe her the truth.’
Keith hesitated before he nodded, though Grace could see some doubt linger in his eyes. ‘OK.’ He sighed. ‘Ivo said people at his paper gave Roxanne’s information a further spin. Someone in a lab may have been bribed, they may have hacked a phone or a computer, who knows.’
‘Surely he has to tell you now?’
Keith laughed. ‘Don’t kid yourself! No, I doubt he’ll give me any more than he already has.’
There was a loud click and suddenly they were bathed in bright white light. It made Grace blink and threw every leaf and blade of grass into sharp, colourless relief. Without meaning to, she turned her head and immediately saw, beyond the taut blue-and-white tape, Roxanne lying on the grass. Her face was turned away, her legs straight, her pose so restful she could very well have been asleep. It was Roxanne, but not Roxanne. Not any more.
Grace was determined not to break down in front of the SIO: if she showed too much emotion, he might take her off the case. But she yearned to breathe life back into her friend, not to allow her memory of someone once so sweetly and zestfully alive to be overlaid by the image of this scene. She recognised that part of her grief was self-interested, that her remembrance of Roxanne also preserved the hopeful energy of her own youth; this crime stole something precious from every person with whom the victim had ever shared her life.
‘Pawel Zawodny was here tonight,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘Do we pick him up?’
‘Be patient, DS Fisher. Wait and see what we can recover from the scene first. Let’s hope matey’s slipped up this time and left something we can nail him with.’
Grace made a silent vow to thank Roxanne for her friendship in the only way now left to her: she would hunt down her killer.
THIRTY-TWO
Murky clouds muted the moonlight as Grace and Lance made their way back to the car park by the dwindling beam of his torch. The area was deserted now and the familiar glow of the interior light as Grace opened the car door promised a welcome security. Lance drove, allowing Grace time to stare silently out into the blackness.
Once Samit had arrived and they’d suited up, she’d tried her best to examine the body through the pathologist’s professional eyes, and for a while she had succeeded. It had helped, too, that she’d been prepared for the intimate sight of the violating wine bottle, though the little cloud of midges that swarmed over Roxanne’s bare skin, magnified by the bright white light, was a mental picture she’d probably never manage to obliterate. Apart from what looked like some kind of fabric placed in her mouth, which Samit would wait to extract under sterile mortuary conditions, Roxanne’s body had been positioned in a manner strikingly similar to the way Rachel Moston’s had been arranged.
Once Keith had decided to remove the body, and Wendy had secured the scene, there’d been the usual chat around the forensic van as people wound down and agreed deadlines to deliver test results and reports. Just at the moment when it hit Grace hard that she was the only one here who had truly lost someone, Lance had moved unobtrusively to her side and remained there until the undertakers’ van had lumbered off across the grass.
Now they were reaching the deserted lamp-lit roundabouts on the outskirts of Colchester, and Lance casually mentioned that, if she’d rather not be alone for the few hours that remained of the night, she was welcome to come back to his place and get some kip on his couch until it was time to report for work. Grace accepted gratefully.
Lance’s flat took her by surprise. It was on the ground floor of a large Victorian house near Lexden Park, and had shuttered windows, high ceilings and bare floorboards. The living room contained only a big leather sofa, a frayed Oriental rug, a low wooden table and an upright piano with tarnished candle sconces that looked like it had once belonged in a pub or a music hall. The lid was up and a book of classical music lay open on the stand. She could read pencil notations in the margins written in what she imagined was the firm hand of a music teacher.
‘So you’re a pianist?’ she said.
‘Yeah. Another thing my family reckoned was me being jumped-up,’ he replied. ‘A bit too girly for them. Little did they know.’
Exhaustion made her indiscreet. ‘You’re gay?’
He gave her a jaded look.
‘I simply never clocked it,’ she said. ‘Sorry. Too preoccupied this past week, I guess.’
‘Well, I don’t exactly advertise it at work. What can I get you?’
‘You know what I’d really like? Some toast.’
‘Coming up.’
He disappeared through to the kitchen. Grace considered following him, but she was too tired. She flopped down onto the leather couch and closed her eyes. Immediately she saw a swarm of grainy black insects and raised her lids again, blinking to relieve the dryness that went with being awake for nearly twenty hours. She lay back and focused instead on the scrolling plasterwork around the ceiling, so different to the mean, plain surfaces of her own flat. How blind she’d been not to perceive Lance’s sexuality, not to realise how tough it might sometimes be for him in a workplace that was a long
way from banishing homophobia. What else had she been blind to? If she’d listened to Roxanne in the pub, really listened and asked questions instead of banging on about her own problems, might she have learned something that could have prevented her friend’s death tonight?
Why Roxanne? Why had she been killed? Keith said it was Roxanne who’d told Ivo about the vodka bottle, and now Grace was terrified in case that knowledge had somehow led to her death. Had she, Grace, put Roxanne in danger by telling her? If only she had some way to know for sure whether or not she’d said anything on that tequila-fuelled night!
The sheer physical finality of the undertakers carrying the black body bag to the private ambulance hit her, and she tried to control her breathing to overcome her panic. She’d been too young to remember her mother’s death, and her dad had died in hospital, rigged up to tubes and monitors. A guy she’d been at school with had written himself off on his motorbike, but this was the first time someone she knew and had been close to had died such a sudden and cruel death.
And all the time she’d been only yards away! That’s what she couldn’t get over, couldn’t get past. She knew her thoughts were illogical, but she felt like she’d just stood by and let it happen. And what if was her fault? What if Roxanne had been killed and violated because of dangerous knowledge Grace had given her?
Lance came back in balancing mugs of tea and plates of toast spread with raspberry jam. He looked at her as she sat up. ‘I think you’re in shock,’ he said. He put everything down on the low table, sat down next to her and handed her a mug. ‘Drink this. Supposed to be what got everyone through the Blitz.’
‘It’s my fault.’
‘That a confession?’
‘No, but –’ Grace longed to unburden herself about what she had and hadn’t said to Roxanne, but not even the late hour made her forget the chief con’s warning: if she had any other unauthorised contact with the media, it would be treated as a very serious disciplinary offence. And she had: she’d deliberately gone against that order and met Roxanne in the out-of-the-way pub the very same day. Withholding information from an investigation went against every principle Grace had, but she must not get herself sacked! Nor could she risk telling Lance; it wouldn’t be fair to expect him to keep her secret.
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