I nodded and thanked him. He left me alone again.
If Charlie had deliberately killed Annalise, I’d expect his violence to have seeped out through other aspects of his life. But this wasn’t a man who lashed out when cornered; he made himself sick with fear. He was more the type to piss himself than to attack.
Or if Annalise’s death had been a covered-up accident, I’d expect more dramatic remorse and control from her killer. Religion, maybe, or obsessive-compulsive mannerisms, not this casual, emotional Charlie.
Chloe opened the door without knocking. “Never breastfeed,” was all she said, darkly, as she took her same place in the chair just behind me.
“I’ll bear that in mind,” I agreed.
Then the solicitor and Charlie came in, and we were all as we had been. I wonder if that’s what it’s like to feel guilty about something. You keep trying to leave the room, but every next room is exactly the same.
“Where did it happen, Charlie?” I asked.
“Where did what happen?”
“Your DNA has been matched. We know you had sex with Annalise Wood. Was she your girlfriend?”
He looked around the room, as if to share his wonderment with an agreeing crowd. “Girlfriend? No. We were friends. Why do you think that we … ?”
Chloe backed me up. “We know you did, Charlie. You don’t need to hide it. You were a lucky man. Well, boy. It was a long time ago.”
He shook his head. “No. I never had sex with her. I would have, but I never did because she didn’t think about me that way.”
“Maybe not to start,” I offered, “but women can be persuaded. Sometimes they don’t know what they want until you show them.”
“No. That’s not true. You’re saying that to make me agree with it, but I know that’s not right.”
The solicitor interrupted. “He has denied having sex with her. Are we really talking about a forty-year-old crime?”
“His semen,” Chloe explained, pulling out a lab report to back her up, “was on the inside of a dead teenager’s skirt. You know, the wet spot.” She handed it over to the solicitor.
“That’s impossible,” Charlie said.
The solicitor shook his head and gestured for Charlie to stop speaking while he looked over the report.
Chloe prodded, “Are you saying that’s not your DNA? Our lab thinks it is.”
“I know it is,” he said, going pale.
“Do you need to get to a toilet?” I asked quickly. But he looked shocked, not sick.
“So it’s your semen,” Chloe summarised. “But you didn’t have sex with her. Is that right? Is this a semantic thing? Maybe you didn’t get it all the way in so you think it doesn’t count?”
“I never touched Annalise. Never. Not with my hands, not with my body. We never kissed, we never fucked, and we never did anything in between.”
“You’re saying you fucked her skirt, then?” Chloe laughed at the end, a short, direct “ha!”
Charlie closed his eyes. He whispered something to his solicitor. The solicitor whispered back. This is precisely where our caution is superior to the American “Miranda warning.” In America, the right to silence is absolute. In this country, silence can be judged as evidence of guilt. That difference is motivating.
“I was in her bedroom. I jerked off into one of her skirts.”
I laughed like Chloe. Well, that was quick thinking, if nothing else. Now to ask for details and get him to trip over himself. “What was the point of that, Charlie? Were you hoping she’d not notice and then wear it? Was that exciting?”
“Are you fucking crazy? She was dead. She was never going to wear anything again.”
We all froze for a moment, even the solicitor, who was the first to regain enough composure to ask, “When was this, Charlie?”
“1979. Annalise’s parents kept her room like a shrine. Everything was still there: her schoolbooks, her makeup, her clothes. Everything dusted and kept nice. Mrs. Wood kept in touch with all of us, all of Annalise’s friends. She’d do these teas and things. I was there one time with Cathy and Andrew and Liam and Pru. I went upstairs to the loo and I peeked in her room. It was … See, we’d all got older. And her room hadn’t. In that room, she was still studying for O-levels, while Pru and Liam and I had jobs, and Cathy and Andrew were home from university. We’d grown up and Annalise was still sixteen. Her clothes were all school uniforms that none of us wore any more. It was … it was really fucking heartbreaking, if you must know. I was really fucking sad and I really fucking missed her. And I just … So I did it and then I went back downstairs.” He rapped the table with a closed fist. The solicitor tapped his shoulder and he drew his hands back into his lap.
“Are you saying,” I recited for clarity, “that three years after her disappearance, or more, a hidden Annalise Wood, or her corpse, was dressed in a skirt taken from her wardrobe and buried in it? Is that what you’re saying? You may wish to consult with your solicitor about whether that’s the lie you want to stick with.”
“It’s not a lie!” he shouted, which was the angriest we’d seen him get. Even in that anger, though, he didn’t seem on the offensive. Instead, he was bent forward, pleading.
“Charlie,” I said, leaning forward myself. “I have to put this together. Do you see my trouble? I have to put this together for a courtroom and a jury to understand. They’ll understand, Charlie,” I lied, “if you had sex before she disappeared, or if you snuck into her room and messed on her skirt while she slept nearby. That will make sense, Charlie. This, though? This isn’t good enough.”
He didn’t look like a liar. His posture was, for the first time today, open and unburdened. He held out his hands, then let them drop. “I don’t know how that skirt got on her, her, her body … I … It was in her wardrobe in January 1979.” He flung up his hands again. He seemed as frustrated as I felt.
Chloe took over. “Let’s say we take that, Charlie, we accept it. We still have a story. You took that skirt back with you, to where you kept her, dead or alive. You pulled it up over her legs, fastened the little snaps and zipper. You’re still in the story, Charlie. Let’s say we accept that you buried her three years later, fine; you can still be the one who took her too.”
Charlie covered his face, and his shoulders shuddered.
“No crying, Charlie boy,” Chloe admonished him. “It’s too late for that.”
He uncovered his face, which was wet, yes, but also smiling with a big, open mouth. “You don’t even fucking know. Can you believe this?” he asked the solicitor.
“I find it’s all too believable,” I said. “I think a jury is likely to think so too.”
“You don’t even know!” he shouted, and stood up, but the solicitor tugged his sleeve and brought him back to his seat before I could hit the panic button.
“What don’t I know, Charlie? Tell me. I want to know everything.”
“Comment ça va?” he asked in an execrable accent. “Comment allez-vous?”
“Interview suspended,” I said into the microphone, but before I hit the stop button Charlie grabbed my hand. Chloe stood. The solicitor put his hand on Charlie’s elbow.
“That’s all I remember from my six months in France,” Charlie said. “January to July 1976. It was an exchange programme through our school. You can ask anyone. I was in the Alps when Annalise went missing. My parents told me on our weekly call home. Those calls were the only time I was ever allowed to speak English. I had to find a way to tell my host family what had happened in French. That’s not exactly the vocabulary we’d been given, you know? I told them that my amie was perdue. I told them that she was absente. They thought that she was my girlfriend and that we’d broken up. I finally had to say that she was morte, just to make them understand. We didn’t know yet that she was dead, but it felt like she was. It felt like she was going to be. It was one of the worst times of my life. I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to her, not when she disappeared, not when she died, not when sh
e was buried, not when she was found.”
“Interview concluded,” I repeated. He didn’t object this time. I pressed the button.
“DO YOU THINK he really was in France?” Chloe asked from the passenger seat. We were on our way home in my car, which still smelled of soap and sick.
“We’ll have to check but, yes, I think he was really in France.”
“He could have done it before he left. The skirt thing.”
“He could have, but that would have been almost six months before. Surely Annalise or her parents would have washed it between when he left for France and when she disappeared.”
“France is close. Being there doesn’t mean he couldn’t have come back. Schools do day trips all the time.”
“We’ll check. His host parents may still be alive, and will have had same-age children as Charlie. Someone will be able to tell us if he buggered off at any point.”
“But you don’t think he did.”
“Do you?”
“No.” Chloe looked out the window, dragging her gaze along a wide flint wall, jagged and sharp, like magnified sandpaper. “If he’s telling the truth about the skirt …”
“… Then she was buried by someone who wanted her to look like she’d been killed the day she disappeared. In her school uniform.”
“Which in turn means that she probably hadn’t been killed that day, and that she was wearing something different by the time she died, or maybe the same thing still, just … tattered, perhaps.”
“And maybe she wasn’t raped. Maybe there was no sex at all.” Jesus, was the skirt all there was to that? I didn’t even know if there was flesh left when they dug her up… .
“We can hope,” said Chloe, meaning we can hope that there was no rape. That would be good for Annalise, who would have suffered less on her way to death, but bad for finding her killer. Without semen, there were not a lot of options for DNA after all these years.
“Are you free tomorrow?” I asked.
“Why, are you sending me to France?” she joked, smirking.
“How about the local charity shop? We need to know what happened to the clothes from Annalise’s wardrobe. The parents are dead, but some of those friends Charlie mentioned …”
“Pru, Liam, Cathy, and Andrew,” Chloe recited. Cathy was the most important; Charlie had told us he’d been married to her for a few years a couple of decades ago. “You want to meet here?” she suggested.
I shook my head. “I’m going to talk to someone in Cambridge.” We needed to know more about the body.
She was already typing into her phone, presumably tracking down the old friends.
“Don’t you go and get car-sick now. I can’t take it again.”
She laughed, and kept pressing buttons. “Who’s in Cambridge?”
I just smiled.
“Someone I know?”
Someone we both knew. He retired from forensics and got work as a porter—those combination receptionist/security/administrative gatekeepers at the colleges. A fair few ex-police end up in those jobs as a quieter retirement. “Jimmy,” I said.
Chloe laughed. “I’ll trade you Lilling for Trinity.”
That’s right; he’s at Trinity, the largest, wealthiest college. “I once dated a girl at Trinity.” I smiled.
“Good memories?”
I shrugged. “She was fine. The dates were fine. Being young, though …” That had been superb. I’d had no idea at the time how special it was. Being twenty was a good memory.
“I was an idiot when I was an undergraduate. Not sure I like remembering that.”
“But you didn’t know that you were an idiot. You thought you were brilliant, didn’t you?” That’s the sum of age twenty: cockiness.
“You still think you’re brilliant, even when you’re not,” she averred, lightly, but we both knew that wasn’t true. The past year had rattled me badly.
But I played along: “I’m not cocky, just always right.”
“Me too,” Chloe agreed. “What are the odds that it’s two perfect cops who end up working together?”
It was better this way, better than apologising, or arguing, or explaining. We’d been at odds a lot over this past year, Chloe and I, but maybe our differences are why I trust her: if I can get her to agree with me, or she can get me to agree with her, well, then we must be on the right track.
We’d left Charlie in for the night, based on his driving violation, to give us a chance to look into his French alibi. If he had indeed been away on a foreign exchange when he said he was, we’d have to let him go, even while we double-checked the details.
I didn’t think that Charlie would advertise that we’d questioned him about Annalise. The details would only embarrass him. All that sergeant knew was that we were interested in a potential pattern involving white girls with long, dark hair. The solicitor knew, but he wouldn’t breach confidentiality.
Thank God we hadn’t done this more publicly. Thank God there had been no press conference, no fanfare. The fact was, we didn’t have Annalise’s killer.
I tamped down the familiar feeling of a panic attack stirring. Breathe, Morris.
We had a skirt that proved that her burial and possibly her death had taken place years after her disappearance. We had leads to follow. It was less than I’d thought we’d had this morning, but more than we’d had yesterday.
“I’ve got one,” Chloe announced. “Prudence Greene. Ah, and Liam Taylor or Liam Henley.” She scrolled, and pressed the screen, and squinted at tiny text.
We drove around a bend to an abrupt view of open fields and it felt very seaside all of a sudden, very rented-convertible-with-the-top-down. I felt excited. We didn’t have the answers yet, but we had work to do. That was more than I’d had a month before. It was a salt-in-the-air, sand-in-the-car feeling, here on this road deep in landlocked Hertfordshire at the chilly start of autumn.
“You mind if I put music on?” I asked Chloe, who was still bent over her phone.
“It’s your car.”
I pushed the volume up. I rolled my window down. I drove.
“Did Gwen work when Dora was born?” Chloe asked, when we were almost back to her home.
That was not a question I expected. “No, she didn’t. This job …” I shouldn’t have had to explain it to Chloe. “She made up for my schedule being unpredictable. And overbooked.”
“Was that hard for her?”
“Probably sometimes …”
“But she wanted to? It wasn’t just because she thought she should?”
“She did want to. She always had. What are you—”
But Chloe changed the subject back to the investigation. “Andrew, Cathy, Liam, Pru …”
That recitation put me in mind of her nameless child. “You need to name that baby,” I prodded her as her fairy-tale cottage loomed into view. “Aster, Daisy, Rose?” I suggested, plucking random names from her lavish garden.
She waved her hand vaguely in the flowers’ direction. “They’re not going to last. Dan and I are shit gardeners. But he fell in love with it, with the idea of it, that somehow we’d become the kind of people who can keep up a house like this. Or the kind of people who can afford a gardener. Christ, my tits hurt. Where’s that baby?” She got out of the car.
Before I pulled away from the kerb, I wondered if that’s what I was doing, if that’s what I’d always done: liked the look of something, followed my gut, and just crossed my fingers that I’d live up to it. Isn’t that exactly what I was doing now, back at work?
That’s bloody everybody, I reminded myself. That’s the difference between forty-plus and twenty: we see through ourselves at forty, sure, and we see through everyone else too. Somewhere, the person who killed Annalise Wood had got older too, more aware of his weaknesses, maybe more vulnerable. I was going to find him.
Chapter 4
Laurie Ambrose
DAD HAD EVENTUALLY figured out which Annalise I’d meant, and phoned me back, worried and disapproving tha
t I was asking about a dead girl. He hadn’t appreciated it when she had come up in conversation last Christmas either.
It was Helen, my sister, who’d brought her up, specifically the semen sample that back in the nineties had failed to yield a DNA match with any known criminals or match any other open cases. DNA testing had been impressive and almost science fiction back then, but it hadn’t been able to do anything without a suspect to match it up to. Dad had walked out then, taking his cup of milky coffee elsewhere. In Mum’s younger days, she would have chided Helen for mentioning semen at breakfast. Mum, though, had already started to loosen her social standards. (Helen apparently never had any to begin with.)
I must have been frowning because Helen had chided, “Oh, don’t be so serious, Laurie.”
Mum had then changed the subject to laundry—possibly making the leap from semen stains to stains in general; it doesn’t bear thinking about. But the fact is that Annalise is talked about. That’s normal, or at least not abnormal, especially from our little corner of the country.
I had my mini-recorder and headphones in bed. Simon was already asleep. I never thought I would be with a man who smokes. I suppose he never thought he’d choose a woman who snores. Our younger selves would be amazed at how forgiving we’d become in middle age.
Hannah-Claire Finney is the other client who had talked about Annalise months ago, an education officer from the Fitzwilliam Museum. The museum is part of the University, which is why she’d come to me. She looked in her thirties, with a Canadian accent, and her crossed leg had bobbed up and down, up and down, throughout almost the entire session.
I clicked the little triangle representing “play”:
Hannah-Claire Finney (Fitzwilliam Museum), University Counselling Service, recorded and transcribed by Dr. Laurie Ambrose
Both of my mothers are dead.
I don’t mean two mothers as a lesbian thing. They weren’t together. They were each my mother, separately. Depends who you would ask, and when.
Look for Her Page 4