by Jane Casey
The operator was talking. ‘OK, Sarah, the police will be with you shortly. Just stay put and keep your mobile phone switched on. They may ring you to get further directions.’
‘I can go nearer to the road,’ I offered, suddenly oppressed by the stillness, horribly aware of what was hidden behind the tree down in the gully.
‘Just stay where you are,’ the operator said firmly. ‘They’ll find you.’
When she had hung up, I sagged to the ground, still clutching my phone, my lifeline. The breeze had picked up and I was cold in spite of my jacket, chilled to the bone, and utterly exhausted. But it was all right. They were coming. They would be there soon. All I had to do was wait.
1992
Three hours missing
I run into the kitchen as soon as I hear Mum calling. Being indoors feels weird at first – dark and cool, like being underwater. The tiles are cold under my bare feet. I slide into a chair at the kitchen table where two places are laid: one for me, one for Charlie. Mum has poured two glasses of milk and I take a big gulp from the one in front of me. The sweet coldness slides down my throat and into my stomach, spreading a chill through my body that makes me wriggle. I put the glass down carefully, without making a sound.
‘Did you wash your hands?’
She hasn’t even turned around from the cooker. I look at my palms. Too dirty to lie. With a sigh, I get off my chair and go to the kitchen sink. I let the water run over my fingers for a minute, making a cup of my hands and filling it to overflowing. Because I feel lazy and Mum isn’t watching, I don’t use soap, even though my hands are tacky with grime and sweat. The water drums on the sink, drowning out my mother’s voice. It’s only when I turn off the tap that I hear her.
‘I said, where’s your brother?’
Telling the truth feels like a betrayal. ‘I haven’t seen him.’
‘Since when?’ She doesn’t wait for an answer, walking to the back door to look out. ‘Honestly, he should know better than to turn up late for his tea. Don’t you turn into a teenage rebel when you’re Charlie’s age.’
‘He’s not a teenager.’
‘Not yet, but he acts like one sometimes. Wait until your father hears about this.’
I kick the chair leg. Mum says a word I know I’m not supposed to hear, something I store away, even though I know I definitely shouldn’t repeat it – at least, not in front of her. She goes back to the cooker, scooping up oven chips with fast, angry movements. Some of them skid off the tray and fall on the floor and she throws the spoon down with a clatter. When it comes, my plate is overloaded with food. Two eggs glistening with oil stare up at me, a pile of chips beside them, balanced like a game of spillikins. Carefully, I draw out one chip from the bottom of the pile and press the sharp end of it into a round, quivering egg. Yellow oozes out onto the plate, mingling with the ketchup I squiggle over everything. I expect to be told off for playing with my food, but Mum leaves me to eat alone and I hear her at the front of the house, calling Charlie. I plough through the stack of chips, the sound of chewing too loud in the quiet kitchen. I eat until my stomach aches, until my jaw is tired. When Mum comes back, I think she’ll be annoyed with me for leaving food on my plate, but she tips the leftovers into the bin and doesn’t say anything.
I am still sitting at the table, dazed with food, when Mum goes into the hall to phone my father. Anxiety gives an edge to her voice, an edge that makes me nervous, even though I’m not the one in trouble.
The hands of the kitchen clock slide around the face and there’s still no sign of Charlie and I’m scared. And almost in spite of myself, without really knowing why, I start to cry.
Chapter 2
IT TOOK SURREY’S finest quite a while to reach me, in the end.
I sat with my back to the tree and watched the sky fade in colour as the sun slid down towards the horizon. The shadows lengthened and joined up around me. It was getting dark under the trees and cold. I wrapped my arms around my knees, holding them close, trying to hug myself warm. I checked my watch every minute or so, for no real reason. The operator hadn’t been very specific about how long it would take the police to get there. It didn’t matter, really. It wasn’t as if I had somewhere better to go.
I didn’t really believe that Jenny’s killer would come back to that quiet spot in the woods, but my heart still pounded at every sudden noise and half-seen movement. Tiny sounds all around me suggested invisible animals going about their business, unmoved by my presence, but every rustle in the dry leaves had me twitching with nerves. I could only see a few yards in any direction as the trees grew so close together in that part of the woods, and it was hard to shake the tingle at the back of my neck that said you’re being watched …
All in all, it was a great relief to hear voices in the distance, along with the rattle and cough of police radios. I stood up, wincing as I straightened stiffening limbs, and shouted, ‘Over here!’ I waved my arms over my head, lighting up the screen on my mobile phone to try to attract their attention. I could see them now, two of them, moving through the trees with purpose, high-visibility jackets gleaming in the fading light. Both were male, one stocky and middle-aged, the other younger, leaner. The stocky one was in the lead and, it quickly became apparent, in charge.
‘Are you Sarah Finch?’ he asked, stumbling a little as he approached me. I nodded. He stopped, bracing his hands on his knees, and coughed alarmingly. ‘Long way in from the road,’ he explained at last in a strangulated voice, then hawked up something unspeakable and spat it to his left. ‘Not used to all this exercise.’
He had taken out a handkerchief and was wiping sweat from his quivering cheeks, which were latticed with broken veins. ‘I’m PC Anson and this is PC McAvoy,’ he said, indicating his colleague. PC McAvoy smiled at me tentatively. He was really very young, on closer inspection. They were oddly mismatched, and I wondered, irrelevantly, what they found to talk about.
Anson had got his breath back. ‘Right, so where’s this body you’ve found, then? We’ve got to check before the rest of the crew turns up. Not that we think you’re a nutter with nothing better to do than call 999 for kicks.’ He paused for a moment. ‘You’d be surprised how many of them there are, though.’
I stared at him, unimpressed, then pointed down into the hollow. ‘She’s down there.’
‘Down that slope? Bugger it. Hop down and check it out, Mattie, would you?’
Clearly Anson resented having to do anything that involved physical exertion. McAvoy hurried to the edge of the gully and peered over.
‘What am I looking for?’ His voice was taut with suppressed excitement.
I stepped forward to join him. ‘The body is behind the tree. The easiest way to get down is probably to your left.’ I pointed to the rudimentary path I had made in my flight up the hill.
But he had already gone over the edge. Branches cracked under his feet as he ran down the slope, gathering speed as he went. I winced, anticipating a crash at the bottom. Anson rolled his eyes in a long-suffering manner. ‘Enthusiasm of youth,’ he said. ‘He’ll learn. Faster isn’t always better, is it?’
The crudeness in his tone made my skin crawl.
McAvoy had made it down the hill and was peering nervously over the fallen tree. ‘There’s something here all right,’ he shouted, his voice cracking a little on the ‘something’.
‘Get a closer look, Mattie, and then get back up here,’ Anson boomed. He had one hand on his radio, ready to report back. I watched McAvoy sidestep the tree’s tangled roots, and bend to look at what lay behind it. Even at that distance I could see the blood draining from his face. He turned away sharply, his shoulders heaving.
‘For God’s sake,’ Anson said in disgust. ‘That’s a crime scene, Mattie. I don’t want to have to explain a dirty great puddle of vomit in the middle of it, thanks.’
McAvoy walked away a couple of paces, not answering. After a moment or two he turned to start back up the slope, carefully not looking in the direction o
f Jenny’s body. ‘It’s a young girl. You can call it in,’ he said, scrambling over the top, eyes trained on the ground. Shamefaced was not the word for how he looked. I could understand why; I doubted that Anson would be quick to forget his display of weakness. But to my surprise, the older policeman didn’t comment beyond sending McAvoy to wait by their car, to guide the other police to the scene.
‘I’m not walking back all that way. Hop to it, son.’
The expression on Anson’s face was kindly as he watched McAvoy hurry off. ‘Give him time, he’ll get used to that sort of thing,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘He’s a good lad.’
‘I don’t blame him for being upset.’
Anson looked at me without warmth. ‘You’ll have to wait, I’m afraid. CID will want to talk to you. They’d have my guts for garters if I let you swan off.’
I shrugged, then went back to sit down where I had waited before, settling against the familiar tree trunk in as comfortable position as I could, which was pretty far from being comfortable. I didn’t feel like making conversation with Anson and after a moment or two he moved away, turning his back to me, hands jammed in his pockets. He was whistling quietly under his breath, the same tune over and over. It took me a second to think of the words that fitted it.
‘If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise …’
It was a nice touch.
PC McAvoy did his job well. Within the hour they were there, lots of them: police in uniform, men and women in disposable white paper suits with hoods, officers in blue overalls, one or two in casual clothes or suits. Most of them arrived carrying equipment: bags, boxes, canvas screens, arc lights, a stretcher complete with body bag, a generator that coughed into life and pumped a brackish mechanical smell into the air. Some paused beside me to ask questions: how had I spotted the body? What had I touched? Had I seen anyone else while I was out running? Had I noticed anything out of the ordinary? I answered almost without thinking; I told them where I had walked and stood and what I had touched, and my shivers turned to shudders of fatigue. Anson and McAvoy had disappeared, sent back to their regular duties, replaced by people whose job it was to investigate murder, who were now combing the woodland area. What a strange job they did, I couldn’t help thinking. They were calmly professional, as organised and methodical as if they were in an office, shuffling paper. No one looked hurried or upset or anything but focused on the job they had to do. McAvoy was the only one who had reacted to the horror of what lay in the little clearing and I was grateful for it. I would almost have doubted the strength of my own feeling otherwise. Then again, they didn’t know Jenny. I had seen her alive, vital, laughing at a joke in the back row of my class, earnestly holding her arm in the air when she had a question. I would see the gap in the ranks of her classmates, the absent face in the school photograph. They would see a file, a sheaf of photographs, evidence in bags. To them, she was a job – nothing more.
Someone had found a rough blanket and wrapped it around my shoulders. I gripped the edges of it now, holding it so tightly that my knuckles shone white. It had a strangely musty smell but I didn’t care; it was warm. I watched the police moving around, their faces ghostly in the harsh grey-white light cast by the arc lights, which were now mounted on stands all around the clearing. It felt odd to be looking down on the people below, all knowing the part they had to play, moving to a rhythm I couldn’t quite hear. I was very tired and I wanted more than anything to go home.
A female police officer in plain clothes detached herself from a group of people that had gathered near to the spot where Jenny’s body still lay. She climbed up the slope, heading straight for me.
‘DC Valerie Wade,’ she said, holding out a hand. ‘Call me Valerie.’
‘I’m Sarah.’ I worked an arm free from the heavy blanket to shake hands.
She smiled at me, blue eyes shining in the cold glare from the lights. She was round faced and slightly plump, with light brown hair. I thought she was older than me, but not much.
‘I suppose it all looks very confusing.’
‘Everyone looks so busy,’ I said lamely.
‘I can tell you what they’re doing, if you like. You see those people in the white suits – they’re the SOCOs. Scene of crime officers, that means. They find the clues – like on TV, you know, CSI.’ She was speaking in a slightly singsong voice, as if explaining their role to a child. ‘And that man over there, crouching down near –’
She stopped short, and I turned, surprised at the look on her face until I realised that she was trying to avoid any reference to Jenny’s body. As if I could forget it was there.
‘That man, crouching down, he’s the pathologist. And those two behind him are detectives, like me.’
She was pointing at two men who weren’t in uniform either, one in his fifties, the other thirty-ish. The older man had hair that shaded from iron-grey to white. He stooped as he watched the pathologist at work, his shoulders rounded, his hands buried in the pockets of his wrinkled suit trousers. He seemed hollowed out by exhaustion and the look on his face was grim. He was the single still point in the flurry of activity around the crime scene. The younger detective was tall, broad-shouldered, on the thin side, with light brown hair. Energy ran through him like an electric current.
‘The one with grey hair is Chief Inspector Vickers,’ callme-Valerie said reverently. ‘And the other is Detective Sergeant Blake.’ The change in tone between the first part of the sentence and the second was comic; she’d dropped the reverence in favour of slightly clipped disapproval, and when I glanced at her I noticed that colour had risen in her cheeks. That old story, I diagnosed: she liked him, he didn’t know she existed, and even saying his name ruffled her feathers. Poor Valerie.
The pathologist looked up and gestured to a couple of the policemen who were standing nearby. They picked up the canvas screens that had been left to one side and lifted them carefully into position, hiding the next part from my view. I turned away, trying not to think about what might be happening down in the hollow. Jenny, I reminded myself, was long gone. What was left behind couldn’t feel what was happening to her, couldn’t care about any indignity. But I cared on her behalf.
I would have given anything at all to turn back the previous hours, to choose a different route through the woods. And yet … I knew very well that it could be worse to live in hope. Finding Jenny’s body meant that her parents would at least know something of what had happened to their daughter. At least they would be certain that she was beyond pain, beyond fear.
I cleared my throat. ‘Valerie, do you think I could head off soon? It’s just that I’ve been here for quite a while and I’d like to get home.’
Valerie looked alarmed. ‘Oh no, we’d like you to wait until the chief inspector gets a chance to speak to you. We like to talk to whoever finds a body as soon as we possibly can. And even more so this time, because you know the victim.’ She leaned forward. ‘Actually, I wouldn’t mind finding out a bit about her, and about the parents. I’m going to be the family liaison officer. It’s always good to know what I’m going to be dealing with beforehand, if at all possible.’
She would be good at that, I thought vaguely. She had shoulders that were made for crying on, plump and cushioned. I realised she was looking at me expectantly, and I hadn’t replied. All of a sudden, I didn’t feel inclined to talk to her any more – I was too cold, underdressed, dirty and upset. I busied myself by taking the elastic off my ponytail and shaking my hair free. ‘Do you mind if I don’t talk about it now?’
‘Not at all,’ she said warmly, after a beat. That was probably her training kicking in: never show your frustration with a witness. Bond with them. She laid a hand on my arm. ‘You really want to get home, don’t you? But it shouldn’t be much longer.’ Her eyes slid over my shoulder and she brightened. ‘Here they are now.’
DCI Vickers came straight over to us, his chest heaving from the climb up the bank. ‘Sorry for keeping you hanging a
round, Miss …’
‘Finch,’ Valerie supplied.
Up close, the bags under the chief inspector’s eyes spoke of too many late nights, as did the vertical trenches carved in his cheeks. His eyes were red-rimmed and threaded with veins, but the irises were a clear blue and I felt they missed nothing. He had a slightly hangdog air, the opposite of charisma, and I liked him immediately.
‘Miss Finch,’ he said, and shook my hand. ‘I think DS Blake and I should have a chat with you before we do anything else.’ His eyes swept over the blanket I was clutching around me, up to my face where I was trying to hide the fact that my teeth were chattering. ‘Let’s go somewhere warmer, though. I think we’d be better off at the station, if you don’t mind coming back there with us.’
‘Not at all,’ I said, mesmerised by the chief inspector’s gentle manner.
‘Do you want me to drive, guv?’ DS Blake asked and I turned my attention to him, noting that he was very good-looking, with a lean face and a sensitive mouth. I could tell that his offer was all about getting a head start on finding out more about Jenny. Valerie Wade crashed in desperately with: ‘No point in you wasting your time doing taxi duty, Andy. I can drive her.’
‘Good idea,’ Vickers said, slightly absent-mindedly. ‘I’m going to have a team conference at the station, so stick with me, Andy. I’d like to talk things over with you on the way.’ He turned back to Valerie. ‘Get Miss Finch settled in my office, and get her a cup of tea, won’t you.’
Valerie herded me through the woods and into the front seat of her car in short order. I found it slightly surreal to be in a strange car – a police car, no less – driving through the familiar streets of my home town. The radio burped incomprehensibly every few seconds, and although Valerie didn’t miss a beat in her attempts at small talk, I knew that she was really focused on the static-filled chatter that I couldn’t interpret. The streetlights had come on and I watched the play of light and dark over the car’s bonnet as Valerie drove, adhering to the rules of the road as rigorously as if I had been a driving examiner. I was in a bit of a daze by the time she pulled up outside the police station. She led me through the public area with the reception desk and, with a flourish, punched a code into a keypad to unlock a heavy door. It was painted a dull shade of green and had three or four really handsome dents in it, as if someone very frustrated had tried to kick it in.