“I do understand it. I would hate you for it too. You’re allowed to hate me, Morris. No one’s stopping you. I won’t try.”
The baby must not have been hungry, just tired and in need of comfort. After that brief suckle, she was suddenly finished and asleep, her head lolling over Chloe’s arm. Dora used to sleep like that, utterly loose, utterly at rest. She has insomnia now.
Life is long. That phrase had been bubbling up over and over again in recent weeks. Life is long and there’s a lot in it. I do hate Chloe for having let that investigation go so far in the direction that it did. I hate her more than Spencer, the detective sergeant who did the arresting, because Chloe knows me. She knows Dora. She should have stopped it at any cost, for me.
And all of the reasons that I thought she should have done that for me, all of the reasons that I hated her, are the same reasons that I didn’t only hate her. We’d worked together for years, and she was the best of my partners. I hated her, but I also trusted her. The past few months, I’d missed her. Her baby could have died. She could have died.
“I’m glad you’re all right,” I said, again. I meant it.
Dan brought in a tray. I cleared the coffee table of board books, a box of wet wipes, and a plate of flaky croissant crumbs. I took a cup in my good left hand.
“When do you start?” Chloe asked me.
“This week. I’m reviving a case.”
“Anyone I know?”
“Before your time.” I’m ten years older. “Before mine too. Annalise Wood.”
Chloe laughed too close to her teacup, making it slosh. “That old chestnut? Who are you going after next, Jack the Ripper?”
“Old Jack didn’t kill in Cambs, Beds, or Herts. And his case hasn’t had new evidence pop up.”
Chloe sat up straighter, jostling the baby, who curled in the other direction but didn’t wake. “New evidence? From … when was it? ’78?”
“She went missing in 1976. Body found in 1992.”
“What’s come up?”
I hesitated. I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone; the press would be ready to run with anything about Annalise if the new information leaked. But this was Chloe.
“Well?” she pressed.
I think I’d come knowing I would tell her. In my self-indulgent imagination, I did it to impress. Getting to close a famous case was a pretty good start to my return to work. But what I wanted when actually sitting in front of her, baby snores and her ridiculous ruffles and my fucked-up hand between us, was different. You can’t impress someone who knows you, really knows you. You can only share.
I smiled conspiratorially, and lowered my voice. “DNA match.”
Her gasp was gratifying.
“Wait … didn’t they try DNA testing years ago?”
I nodded. “They did. It worked; they got a result. But there was no match to it in the national database. Not then.”
A different voice, sceptical instead of excited: “I thought the body was too far gone for that.”
I’d forgotten that Dan was there. He was absently stacking plastic rings on a tall cone, one of those toddler fine-motor-skills games that could, at a pinch, double as an executive stress toy.
“The sample didn’t come from inside her. It came from the inside of her skirt.”
Dan’s hands were hypnotic. The purple went on top of the blue; the red went on top of the purple.
“Look, Chloe, the baby’s asleep. Do you want to come along?” I said, without having planned to.
Her face twitched in surprise. “Come along where?”
“To interview the bastard. You wouldn’t be official. It wouldn’t be paid,” I added hastily.
She and Dan caught eyes. “I haven’t pumped,” she said.
“There’s some formula in that box your sister sent,” Dan suggested.
“I haven’t showered in three days,” she noticed, in a tone of wonderment, as if this were the first she’d realised the fact.
“You showered last night,” Dan reminded her. “It was two in the morning.”
“Did I?”
I remember those days. Everything a blur. “You don’t have to …” I said, to take the pressure off.
Chloe got up and flounced out, trailing a wake of incongruous lace.
“She hasn’t been out except to go to the pharmacy and Sainsbury’s,” Dan explained.
I nodded, plopping a yellow ring onto an orange one. We were almost at the top. “Working on anything new?” I asked him.
“I’m joining a firm. It’ll be more consistent. I’m set to start when the baby’s six months old. Chloe will go back to Major Investigations then, and the baby—she’d better have a name by then—has a place with a child minder at the end of the road. We had to register her as ‘Baby Matthews,’ can you believe that? I’m not even insisting that she be called Robin. I’d like it, but I’ll take anything. Chloe won’t budge.”
I wasn’t sure what was going on with that, but I remember having a hard time choosing a name. I didn’t want to accidentally call my daughter after someone I’d arrested, or someone who’d been a victim in any case of mine, or a traumatised relative or witness. You work this job long enough, that’s harder than you’d think. I’d vetoed my wife’s first choice of William when we didn’t yet know if we were having a boy or a girl, because of Will Teague, a Peterborough murderer of prostitutes. It hadn’t been my case personally, but it was in Cambridgeshire while I was a young cop and it had been huge. Some names just get ruined.
Chloe reappeared, transformed. Her hair was brushed; she was dressed in a suit. She was no longer wearing pink, but the colour was in her cheeks.
“I hope it is him. Wouldn’t that be something? We’d solve Annalise Wood,” she said once we were in my car, with doors closed, belts clicked. She was giddy enough that she looked like a kid herself. It didn’t feel like preparing to interview a suspect; we might as well have been going to Legoland. I started the car.
“DNA makes it almost too easy,” she joked, as if her earlier years as a detective had involved samples of mastodon wool and analysing cave paintings.
“You’ve always had DNA,” I pointed out. It makes me either experienced or old that I remember, just barely, when tests for blood type were high-tech. “It hasn’t put us out of a job yet. I’m sure there’ll be something left for us to do.”
I joined the motorway towards St. Albans, heading to Lilling.
THE MAN’S NAME was Charlie, which is a name that’s easy to say dismissively. It’s a nickname that’s easy to use to push someone around.
His parents answered the door. They were both upright and healthy-seeming, which meant Charlie was living at home at age fifty-two because of his own lack of resources, not for their sake. He’d grown up here, at the edge of Lilling, and had been in the school year below Annalise.
“Charlie home?” I asked.
His mother looked worried. “No …” she said cautiously. Her husband stood behind her, hands pressing down on her shoulders.
“Are you police?” he asked.
I smiled that they’d recognised it in me. I waved my Review Team ID, which is technically not a warrant card, but looks near enough and gives me most of the same powers. “Are you expecting police?”
Chloe looked pointedly at the empty place where a car would park in front of their terraced house. “Is Charlie out?”
“He’s at work,” the father allowed, seemingly ignoring the inference but clearing his throat awkwardly. The reason Charlie’s DNA was in the system was for persistent kerb-crawling, that is, soliciting street prostitutes. He’d been cautioned, then fined. The last incident, combined with a stupid traffic violation, had seen his driving privileges banned for six months. Less than six months ago.
Just as his mother started to stammer excuses, a modest blue sedan, about ten years old, pulled into the parking space next to their small, scraggly lawn. The vaguely muffled narration of a rugby match emanated from the radio within. It must have been a te
nse moment. The driver leaned over the steering wheel, and left the car idling. As a crowd cheered in the background and commentators crowed, Chloe rapped on the driver’s-side window and pressed her warrant card up against the glass.
Charlie flinched, wagged his head from side to side looking for escape, and could have shot the car into reverse if he’d wanted a chase.
His quick surrender instead, and his so-fast-as-to-be-reflexive explanation of “only to work and back,” didn’t strike me as coming from someone with a guilty conscience over rape and murder, even from a long time ago. Nevertheless, we had his DNA from the corpse.
“C’mon, Charlie,” I said. “We’re going to have a chat.”
As giddy as we were over getting to bring in the murderer of Annalise Wood—well, a significant suspect in the murder of Annalise Wood—there were sobering obligations attached. Our every move would be subject to legal scrutiny. The media would jump as soon as they were signalled. Catching him driving was a gift; we let him think that was why we’d come.
I told him, “We just need to have a conversation. We can talk here if you like …” while sliding my eyes towards his parents. I couldn’t, in my new role, personally arrest him, but I could make him want to come away with us to talk.
He got into my car sheepishly and, I think, even blushing.
The nearby police station was expecting us with a duty solicitor waiting in an interview room. I let them wait a little longer and took the long way, through Lilling proper and past Annalise’s old house. I drove slowly.
Estate agents cite Lilling centre’s “charm” and “history” to justify its house prices. Back in the 1970s, it would have been just another village full of Tudor leftovers, inconvenient to any major city. Now, with longer commutes normalised, house prices have leapt. Those who can afford it get to live a few centuries in the past and pay for it with income from jobs in London and Cambridge.
Annalise’s former home, now managed by a rental company, was likely to have been upgraded inside, but the historic outside—all plaster and beams, as though a corner of Stratford-upon-Avon had been chipped off and dropped here—must look much as it did then. Chloe swivelled round to watch Charlie seeing the house.
He didn’t oblige. The rear-view mirror showed him head down.
In minutes we were through and out. Away from the centre, simpler homes, still with a tinge of the sixties and seventies about them, lined the road, giving way to fields and a railway track roughly parallel to this section of road. Annalise’s body had been found buried along that stretch of railroad. Not here, not this close, and not visible from the car, but along this route.
Charlie was looking out the other side.
Outside it was autumn, but in 1976 Annalise had gone missing from a legendarily hot summer. It was June when she disappeared, still term-time, with classrooms in her Bishop’s Stortford secondary school (which Lilling’s teens still attend) boxing the temperature in. That heat wave is one of my earliest memories. The air had been still and heavy and damp. Opening windows had done nothing; there had been no breeze to catch.
Annalise had left school on her bicycle. She would have been sweating. If she’d made it home she likely would have showered and changed, but she was eventually found still wearing her school uniform.
“I feel sick,” Charlie blurted from the backseat.
“You’ll be fine,” Chloe dismissed him, without turning around, deliberately declining the invitation to be motherly.
“I think I’m going to …” And he did, all over the seat beside him.
I focussed on the driving, breathing through my mouth to avoid the sour smell. Chloe swore and turned around. “Keep your eyes on the road,” she admonished him, presumably to keep his travel sickness from repeating itself, but sounding as though she were telling him off for staring impertinently.
Shit. This was going to delay his processing. He’d have to be seen to by a doctor before we got to question him.
At the station, while Charlie was examined and hydrated and asked to choose standard, halal, or kosher fare should he be in long enough for a meal, Chloe and I cleaned the car. A young Sergeant McMartin showed us where to park within reach of a spigot and brought us a bucket and sponge.
“Shame to see Charlie in here again,” he commented, leaning over us, his hand on the car roof.
Although there was no room for him to help, and certainly no obligation, I didn’t appreciate him towering over me while I was on my knees scooping sick. Chloe was inside the car, in the clean spot where Charlie had been, wiping after me. “You see him often?” she asked.
“Not here. Out there. Kerb-crawling, yeah? We cautioned him. We even fined him. We thought a night in would do the trick, but I s’pose not. Where’d you catch him?”
“He was driving,” I said. “Unlicensed.”
Chloe backed out of the vehicle and asked Sergeant McMartin face-to-face over the roof, “You’ve been the one to pick him up? When he’s been soliciting?”
“Every time. Poor sod.”
“What’s his type?”
“Type? The women? Not you, if you’re interested.”
Chloe waited out his trickle of a laugh.
“Just a joke. Never mind. He likes long hair, is all.” Chloe’s hair is short. “Dark hair, but always white women, I think. Never Asian. That’s not really narrow enough to count as a ‘type,’ is it?”
I stood and brushed off my knees. “Any of those women ever come to harm?”
McMartin lifted his chin as his glance slid back and forth between us. “Not that’s been noticed …”
“Would you check for me, please?” I emptied the bucket out over a narrow bed of gravel and weeds alongside the wall.
“Not Charlie. He’s pathetic, not … not bad.”
“We’ll be in the interview room,” Chloe said, rolling down her sleeves and pulling her jacket back on.
McMartin shrugged, and accepted the bucket of soiled towels that I handed over. “Shit, Charlie,” he said, swinging the bucket, back and forth, back and forth, as he led us in through the back door of the station.
CHARLIE, WHO INSPIRED protectiveness in the sergeant who regularly arrested him; who had blushed and stammered and seemed sure he’d been brought in for unlicensed driving; who had seemed unaffected by Annalise’s house: this Charlie, who, on the other hand, had also vomited out of nowhere, as if perhaps he knew deep-down that this was bigger than he was letting himself consciously think it was, waited for us meekly.
The interview room had a built-in recording system and a panic button in case of violence, but not nearly enough room for two detectives, a suspect, and a solicitor. At least we didn’t need to squeeze in a translator.
Charlie and I eyed one another across the table, which was, of necessity, hardly big enough for the paperwork. Chloe, in a chair just off the table corner, held most of it on her lap. The solicitor sat just behind Charlie’s shoulder.
I pressed record and recited all of our names and the date. As soon as I finished a repeat of the caution, Charlie said, “I had to get to work. I had to. If I didn’t work and didn’t pay my bills, you’d be arresting me for that.” He folded his arms and leaned back.
Chloe spoke as if idly, while flipping through a file: “You do like paying for things, don’t you, Charlie. You pay for things that most men can get for free.” She looked up, and smiled.
The solicitor intervened: “Paying for sex is not a recordable offence.” Trawling for it by car is, but never mind, I thought. “As for driving while banned, my client will accept the fine, and appeal through the proper channels to have his driving privileges restored.”
Charlie nodded along, sweating.
I nodded too, as if our rivers were all flowing in the same direction. “Tell me about them, Charlie. The ones you choose. Emma the last time, wasn’t it? And Tracy?” This had been in the file, the regulars he’d been caught chatting up from his car window.
“I don’t know their names,”
he answered, at the same time that his solicitor told him not to say anything.
“But you’d know their pictures, wouldn’t you?” Chloe asked brightly. “I have one here, I’m sure of it.” She made a show of shuffling papers, then slid a photograph across the table.
Long dark hair, dark eyes, pale skin, a smile. Surrounded by friends, but she was the only one looking at the camera. That orangey tone of seventies film made the mood of it feel dreamy and faraway.
Charlie sucked in a breath. The solicitor asked what exactly was going on. I pushed back in my chair; maybe I sensed what was coming.
Charlie turned his head and was sick in his solicitor’s lap. The solicitor jumped up and back, skidding his chair up against the wall. Chloe put her head out the door to call for the doctor and a cleaner.
I leaned forward over the table, over the photo of Annalise, towards Charlie’s sour, panting breath. “She’s who you like, isn’t she, Charlie?”
He shook his head. He wiped his mouth.
“Charlie?” I said again, but the doctor put his hand on my shoulder.
I LEFT THE solicitor in the men’s room, wiping his trousers with wet paper towels. Chloe had gone into the ladies’ room with a complicated-looking breast pump and a determined expression. I was in an interview room identical to the first, waiting, eating a chocolate granola bar from the jail kitchen.
We were all attending to our bodies. That’s at least half of life. There are psychological needs too, and swaying emotions, but bodies are the relentless foundation of most actions.
It had been assumed from her disappearance that Annalise’s murder was a sex crime. Maybe he hadn’t even meant to kill her, or had only had to in order to keep her quiet about the rape, if there was a rape. There’s more than one way to get semen inside a girl’s skirt; maybe that part was consensual, or after death. At any rate, Charlie had been there, and he knew something, something he’d never told police, even when Annalise was just a missing person and there was supposedly a chance of getting her back. That’s something to answer for all on its own.
I said “come in” to the knock on the door. It was Sergeant McMartin. “The women that we know Charlie’s been with, they’re fine. They’re drug addicts, but they’re accounted for.”
Look for Her Page 3