The Doll's House: DI Helen Grace 3

by M. J. Arlidge

  ‘DS Fortune specifically left me in charge,’ Lucas was saying. ‘If anything significant came up while he was at the beach, I was to handle it.’

  Sanderson was about to come back at her, but DC Lucas was not finished yet.

  ‘And every minute you spend arguing with me reduces the chances of us bagging this guy and bringing Ruby home safe and well. Do you understand, DC Sanderson?’

  Lucas had enunciated the syllables of Sanderson’s name deliberately slowly – to underline her point. The eyes of the rest of the team were on her now and there was no way she could continue the fight, without looking irresponsible. With bad grace, she backed down and returned to her desk.

  Ever since the investigation had widened to include Roisin Murphy and Isobel Lansley, Sanderson had been busy compiling dossiers on both women, climbing inside their lives to test Helen’s theory about their abduction. She had made good progress but she flicked through the pages listlessly now, still fizzing with anger over her confrontation with Lucas. She had never liked the humourless fast-tracker whose ambition was so ill-concealed, but now she was growing to loathe her. This sort of conflict was unnecessary and counter-productive. It risked turning the team against each other, which could only hamper the investigation. It was outrageous of Lucas to accuse her of risking lives, when she was the one whose ego could prove costly.

  Sanderson returned to the task in hand, wrenching her mind away from crucifying Lucas to the important police work in front of her. She mustn’t compromise her own work through anger or bitterness – that wouldn’t be fair to Ruby or Pippa. So she continued to leaf through the files, diligently comparing the life of Roisin – a single mother of Anglo-Irish extraction who lived off benefits in a small flat in Brokenford – with that of Isobel Lansley, a student at Southampton University about whom they knew almost nothing. She had few friends, little money, no jobs or hobbies. All they did know about her was that she lived in a one-bed flat in –

  Sanderson stopped in her tracks, her heart suddenly racing. Checking the details again, she skimmed back fast through Roisin’s growing file, searching for the relevant entry. And there it was. The discovery took Sanderson’s breath away.

  Finally, they had the break they needed.

  69

  The three figures stood alone, whipped by the wind that roared in off the Solent. Helen was on one side of the trio, Harwood on the other, with an uncomfortable DS Fortune in between. The two women had hardly spoken to each other since arriving and the atmosphere was tense. Helen got the feeling that Lloyd would rather be anywhere else but here, but that was too bad. This was too important not to have her right-hand man by her side.

  The beach had been deserted when they arrived, so securing it wasn’t hard. Given the brief window she’d been allowed, Helen had pulled out all the stops, dragging a dozen uniformed coppers off the beat, so that that the beach could be taped off swiftly and the necessary public notices erected. Nobody was swimming off this beach today.

  A POLSA team had been scrambled from Kent Police, making it to Carsholt in under two hours – Helen had impressed upon them the urgency of the situation. They were now at work, the metal detectors, cadaver dogs and ground-penetrating radar scouring the broad expanse of sand for any signs of burial, deposition or human remains. The occasional bleep from the metal detectors was all Helen could hear above the wind.

  The beach presented in a very different light from the last time Helen had been here. When they had found Pippa, the weather had been incongruously glorious, the sun beating down on the SOC officers as they’d completed their painstaking forensic work. Today the sun had disappeared behind looming grey clouds, hiding its warmth and cheer from the scene. Even the sea seemed to be getting in on the act, raging and crashing on the surf nearby.

  DS Fortune sneaked a look at his watch.

  ‘How many hours of daylight do we have left?’ Helen asked him.

  ‘About seven,’ he replied quickly. His voice was clipped, infused with the anxiety of a man serving two masters.

  ‘Seven hours before we can bring this charade to an end,’ Harwood added. ‘Are you planning on staying down here all day, DI Grace? Or do you have some police work to do?’

  ‘I’ll stay as long as is necessary,’ Helen replied evenly. She wasn’t going to embarrass herself by squabbling with Harwood in front of a junior officer. ‘After all, we only have limited time.’

  Harwood didn’t respond, so Helen took this as her cue, heading down to the water’s edge. Once there she turned, taking in the full panorama of Carsholt beach. Harwood and Fortune were chatting easily – more relaxed now Helen had left them – in sharp contrast to the men and women from Kent, who had worked out a grid and were now combing every inch of it.

  Helen felt the tension within her rise as she watched their patient, diligent work.

  Had she been too hasty in ordering the search? She had little credit with Chief Constable Fisher and even less with Harwood, so it would be hard now to ask for extra resources later in the investigation, if today’s search proved fruitless. For a moment, Helen berated herself for her characteristic impatience. It was like an obsession for her, the desire to chase down leads, to complete the story, to find out what had happened. Once you climbed inside an investigation of this magnitude and urgency, it was hard to wrench your mind from it, as you constantly checked and double-checked your assumptions to see if there was something you could be doing better or faster. Sleep was hard to come by and it was almost impossible to relax, but that was as it should be. You didn’t come into this line of work for an easy life – you did it because you wanted to make a difference.

  Helen snapped out of her daydreaming, because one unit of the POLSA team had suddenly stopped. They weren’t combing any more, they were digging. Helen raced across the sand, making it to the quartet of officers, just before DS Fortune. The look on their faces said it all.

  ‘We’ve found something.’

  70

  Southampton Common looked bleak and sinister under the grey clouds. A suitable place for a killer to roam, DC Lucas thought to herself. She was new to Southampton and still didn’t know it well, so she’d brought as many uniformed officers as she could muster. Good, honest guys who knew every inch of this terrain and could be her guides.

  Fanning out, they set about their task, stopping joggers, mums, businessmen, even council workers cutting the grass, asking them what they were up to and who they’d seen on the Common that morning. The vast majority were baffled by the questions, others were taciturn and suspicious, afraid of getting dragged into something that was nothing to do with them. It was an exhausting and potentially fruitless endeavour – so many people used the Common during the course of the working day. But he was here somewhere.

  The mobile signals had sprung to life just under forty-five minutes ago. If Lucas hadn’t had to face down DC Sanderson, she would have been here even sooner, but she was still pleased by the speed of their response. She now had six CID officers in addition to herself and fifteen uniformed officers combing every inch of the Common. They might get lucky, they might not. But something in her waters told Lucas that they would be lucky today.

  She had ventured off the beaten track now, walking away from the body of the search party into the denser undergrowth near the Wildlife Centre. It was oddly beautiful here, despite the grey sky that framed the woods. The trees were old with characterful hanging branches and thick foliage. And they were full of birds, who called to each other as Lucas picked a careful path deeper into the woods.

  Crunch.

  Lucas froze, her senses suddenly alert. She cast around her, but couldn’t see anything.

  ‘Police. Who’s there?’

  Still nothing. A silence that seemed to go on for ever, then:

  Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. Where was the sound coming from? She strained hard to hear, but, finding it impossible to locate the cause, made a snap decision and plunged through the foliage to her right.

 
Suddenly it happened. A figure bolted. The crunch, crunch had obviously been him creeping away, but now he was in full flight. Lucas was after him in a flash, sprinting over the forest floor and hurdling fallen logs in pursuit. Lucas had always been a good sprinter and she needed every ounce of her ability now, as the fugitive darted gracefully under branches and round bushes, intent on escape. He knew the forest far better than her, so while he seemed to glide unimpeded through the woods, Lucas was whipped by thorns and branches, scratching the skin from her face and arms. The trees were thinning now, however, and Lucas spotted her chance.

  Cutting off the corner of the wood, she raised her speed a notch further. She was taking a calculated gamble that the man she was chasing would bear left on leaving the sanctuary of the wood, heading for the busy city centre rather than exposing himself to capture on the open ground of the Common.

  Sprinting free of the woods, the man turned sharply left and sprinted for the park exit. Wham! Lucas took him down, wrapping her arms round his legs, bringing him down hard on the concrete pathway. She was swiftly up on her feet and pressing him hard up against the park noticeboard. He was already cuffed and compliant by the time the other officers arrived to assist.

  Lucas’s pulse was racing, but her triumph was short-lived. The ‘man’ she was chasing turned out to be sixteen years old. A teenager with a taste for soft drugs and two decent-sized baggies of cannabis in his pocket. What he didn’t have, it soon became clear, was any mobile phones.

  Cursing, Lucas turned him over to uniform and returned to the hunt. Another twenty minutes had passed and it was clear to her now that unless their killer had a pathological desire to be caught, he would be long gone.

  71

  Helen stood on the lip of the trench, as the team continued their excavations. Their ground-penetrating radar had picked up two bulky forms buried deep below the beach at locations that were only a stone’s throw from each other. Helen’s whole body was rigid, hoping she was wrong, but fearing that they had found what they came for.

  ‘It’s a young female.’

  The words were simply said, but affected everyone who heard them. Some things you never get used to and the loss of young life was always particularly upsetting. Helen lowered herself into the trench, taking care not to impede the team’s efforts or trample on potential evidence. As with Pippa, the cold sand had done a good job of preserving its charge. There was only slight decomposition and the young woman looked as if she had simply gone to sleep four feet below the beach. Strange that people who have met their ends in such awful circumstances could look so peaceful.

  Using fine tools and brushes, the team had now revealed the woman’s face and the damp black hair that framed it. Helen examined it closely. There were two small holes in her right nostril, but, as with Pippa, the jewellery had been removed. Any make-up there might have been had also vanished, the moisture and movement of the sand effectively scrubbing the young girl clean. There was a stark simplicity to her face, the features proud and undisguised. It was beautiful, but also crushing. Helen had seen the photos, read the files, and looking down at the face below, she had no doubt in her mind that she was now looking at the remains of Roisin Murphy.

  Helen was tempted to leave Roisin now. The rest of the team were at the other dig site, twenty odd yards away, disinterring another form, and it was important to establish as swiftly as possible whether she was their other missing girl – Isobel Lansley. Yet something made Helen pause. It’s strange the connection you can make with someone you’ve never met before, someone whose life has been snuffed out months, possibly years, ago. But Helen wasn’t alone in wanting to cleave close to the poor girl, now that she had been discovered. Her family had been searching for so long, hoping against hope that she was ok, wondering if Roisin would ever return to her baby boy. The uncertainty was over now – they would never see their bubbly, troublesome daughter, mum and friend again. She had been let down by those around her and cruelly let down by life and – though there was nothing that could be done for her – it seemed wrong to abandon her now.

  It didn’t make much sense, but no one would leave the trench until they had delivered the young woman from her tomb. There was something tender about the way the team eased her shoulders and arms from the sand. It was obviously done to preserve both the evidence and the scene, but it was oddly moving, a final act of kindness in a brief, brutalized life. Helen made a mental note to thank the team later for their professionalism and care.

  Already Helen’s mind was scrolling forward, drafting the words she would use to tell Roisin’s family the terrible news, but what she saw suddenly banished all such thoughts. Roisin’s left shoulder and arm had now been fully exposed and the sight of it made Helen’s blood run cold.

  There, standing proud on her bare, pale shoulder was a small bluebird tattoo.

  72

  Ruby looked at her reflection, but saw a stranger staring back. On the back of the improvement in their relationship, Ruby had persuaded her captor to leave the main lights on during the day and had pushed her luck still further by asking for a mirror. He had refused of course – there was no way he was going to give her glass, or anything else that might be fashioned into a weapon.

  But, in deference to her wishes, he had found a couple of sheets of Mylar and made a mirror of sorts. It had only taken him a few minutes to find the reflective sheets upstairs and it set Ruby wondering what kind of job he did. Mylar was used to make those shiny silver helium balloons – was he some kind of children’s entertainer? Did he work in a gift shop?

  Pushing those thoughts from her mind, Ruby stared at herself in her ‘mirror’. She was already much thinner, anxiety and the denial of food shedding the pounds quickly. She could see her ribs now – all of them – and her arms looked bony too. Ruby wondered how long she could survive down here and once more visions of escape filled her thoughts. Her scrawny body and the sunken features in her face demanded action. She was beginning to look like one of those poor kids you see on charity appeals.

  Her plan was in play and tonight she would see if he had gone for it. The anticipation was horrible. Had he got what she needed? And more importantly, if he had, would she have the courage to see it through?

  73

  She slipped her key in the lock and teased the door open. She should really have gone back to the station after the discoveries on the beach – to brief Stephen and talk to Media Liaison – but she couldn’t face it. Her mouth was dry, her head was pounding and she just wanted to shut the world out for a while.

  Yet again, Helen Grace had made her look a fool. She had argued vigorously not to waste time and resources digging up the beach and though neither she, Helen nor Stephen would ever mention it again, it would be remembered by both. For Helen it would confirm her impression that her boss was a politician and desk jockey rather than a real copper, but more worryingly it would set back her relations with Stephen. He knew her well and had always liked her but lately she had come to question where his loyalties lay. Was he attracted to Helen? Many men were, despite the fact that she was totally unobtainable. Or was he just seduced by her status as the heroic face of Southampton policing? Once more, Helen had proved that she had a nose for the big, career-defining cases. And if she managed to bring in another serial killer it would burnish Stephen’s reputation still further. Leaving her as the bad guy who nearly messed the whole thing up.

  Opening the fridge, Ceri Harwood took a large swig of Chardonnay straight from the bottle, then held the chilled glass against her raging head. It felt nice and suddenly all she wanted to do was to find Tim, snuggle up on the sofa and finish the rest of it. This cheering thought roused her to action and she climbed the stairs two at a time. Tim often worked at home and was constantly badgering her to get home early, so they could spend more time together. She seldom obliged – how could she in her position? – but having bunked off work she felt exhilarated by the thought of surprising him with her sudden appearance.

 
; She was halfway up the last flight of stairs to the attic office, when she paused. The office was quiet, but there were noises coming from elsewhere. From their bedroom. She could hear Tim, but also female tones too. Laughing, talking and more besides.

  Ceri willed herself to move, but her feet stayed firmly planted to the stairs. What does one do in these situations? Slink away or confront? She wanted to do the former – God she wanted to do that – but some vestige of personal pride now forced her to choose the latter course. Summoning her courage, she marched forward, turned the handle and stepped inside.

  The confusion started as soon as she entered. Surprise, then shock, then panicked apologies, as the naked lovers scrambled to make themselves decent. Tim was already halfway across the room, trying to steer her from the bedroom, but she didn’t see him. She had eyes only for his lover. The woman she had been tasked with buttering up on numerous occasions, when she dined at their house. Lucy White.

  Shrugging off her husband, Ceri Harwood stumbled downstairs to the kitchen. Her first thought was for the girls – she didn’t want them walking into this – so she found herself texting another school mum to see if she could pick them up. She invented a lame excuse for the sudden emergency, which brought her up short. Is this how it would be now – lying to cover up her hurt and Tim’s transgression? What are you supposed to tell your children in these situations?

  Ceri sat down on the hard kitchen chair. None of this felt remotely real, but as she heard the front door shut quietly and Lucy’s gentle footsteps clip-clopping down the steps to freedom, she knew that it was. This day had started badly, got steadily worse and ended in utter horror.