“So, if her sessions make her seem self-involved and unpleasant, that’s not really her, not in a complete sense. She shared with me a part of herself that she, wisely, shares with no one else. That kind of self-control speaks to wisdom, doesn’t it? And self-understanding? So I mustn’t judge her, or dislike her, because I haven’t met ‘her.’ Not the full her.”
I retrieved my handbag from near the front door. “Listen to this,” I said, and turned on the tape of Annalise Williams’ first session. I’d brought it home with me.
I played the session on the mini-recorder, the volume pushed up as high as it would go through its tiny, tinny speaker. I commented as it went along, pointing out her wondering if I’d ever known anyone else from Lilling, and her mention of Annalise Wood having had a baby. “That’s strange to me,” I told Tom. “I don’t remember anyone ever saying that Annalise Wood had had a baby. I would have remembered that. And then there’s this… .” I swapped tapes, and put in Hannah-Claire Finney’s tape, from her single session several months ago. Hannah had claimed to actually be that child. These two accounts were literally the only times I’d heard of this baby even as a theory, never mind as accepted truth.
Listening to Hannah’s voice lulled me into grief. She’d never come back to see me. She’d been so hopeful for her future, possibly with Henry.
“She’s dead now,” I explained to Tom. The tape continued to spin after the recording had finished. I clicked it off.
“Maybe the baby thing is a new theory of the case. Maybe there’s been a new book. It’s not as if I follow it in the news.” But my sister does, and she never mentioned it. “Anyway, I’m going to transcribe these. Just to try to make some sense of them. This last one … Well, you tell me. I felt very uncomfortable, but maybe I’m overreacting.”
I played the tape of Annalise Williams’ aborted session from that day. The tone of voice indeed conveyed the sense of menace I’d felt so sharply. “See?” I said, as if proving my case. “And she admits here that she knows where I’m from. Why would she know that? And if she did know it, why hide it in the first session? It’s as if she’d been testing me.”
It had all taken longer than I realised. Simon fumbled with his keys in announcement of his return. I clicked off the tape, and jumped up to open the door for him.
“Good talk?” he asked, hands full of takeaway bags.
I felt guilty, as if talking to Tom instead of just myself were taking unfair advantage of the solitude Simon had given me. I took his bags and smiled gratefully.
I set the table with proper plates and wineglasses. We’d chosen Simon’s dishes over my chipped ones when we’d sorted through our aggregate belongings. I wondered briefly if it was him or his ex who’d chosen the pattern. I wondered if he had memories attached to these plates, of meals they had habitually cooked together, or of special dinners observing their milestones. Does he talk to imaginary her when I’m not home? After all, I don’t really think I’m talking to Tom’s ghost. She wouldn’t have to be dead for him to pretend she’s here …
He distracted me with gossip from the pub: our neighbours’ daughter is getting married; our plumber is getting divorced. Our. Mine and Simon’s. I felt present. The duck was pungent and the sauce was tangy. I’m happy, I thought, and I reminded myself that I’m not a hypocrite. I love Simon. Also still loving Tom didn’t change that.
I’m happy, I thought, and I ached for Hannah-Claire Finney. I wished for her that she could be alive, about to spend Christmas with Henry’s family. I wished for her that whatever drove her into the river was very recent, and that she’d had at least some months of peace before.
“I want to attend her funeral,” I told Simon. “My client’s.” I didn’t tell him that it was because I needed to see who else would be there. I needed to see for myself that she had a family, even if it’s just unlikeable cousin Sandy, who had for some reason told Hannah, after her adopted parents died, that her “real mother” was a famous murder victim. How would cousin Sandy even have known that? What had Sandy expected Hannah to do with that information?
Simon’s face froze.
“What?” I asked, fork hovering over the last of my noodles.
“The funeral might be delayed. The police are questioning the husband.”
My fork didn’t move. My arm started to ache.
“Laurie? I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. It was on the television at the pub.”
I could only choke out, “What’s his name?”
“Who?”
“The husband. Is it Henry?”
Simon’s mouth opened and closed with no sound. “It could be,” he said at last. “I didn’t register the name. Ware, I think? His last name is Ware.”
I tasted salt and realised I must be crying. I felt only anger. If Henry had hurt her …
“Laurie.” Simon rose, and pulled me up to meet him. He wrapped his arms around my shoulders. He rested his cheek on the top of my head.
“I didn’t know they’d got married.” I leaned into him. Our breathing synced.
My thoughts were full of Hannah, poor Hannah, having got her Henry and look how it went. But Annalise Williams intruded. She elbowed into my thoughts, jealous of this moment of loving closeness brought on by grief. This is what she seeks, over and over, with her false tale of victimhood.
It’s not worth it, I wanted to explain to her. Real grief is never worth it. Comfort is a lovely, needed thing, but it’s never bigger than the grief it seeks to mitigate. The grief always wins, even when the comfort is strong, even when the comfort is profound. I screwed up my eyes to squeeze out the last of the tears.
“Laurie,” Simon said, and he sounded like Tom. They both had kind voices, and they both loved me.
Chapter 8
Morris Keene
TRINITY IS MASSIVE.
It’s not just the wealthiest college; it’s double the scale of even its nearest competitor. Its first courtyard is a ridiculous two acres. That said, its chapel is smaller than some. Grand, obviously, but, of the grand college chapels, not the grandest.
We ended up in there because we needed privacy for the conversation.
“See? No students!” Jimmy announced with pleasure, as our footsteps tapped on the stone floor of the lobby-like ante-chapel. Well, lobby-like if lobbies were where life-sized marble statues waited for chapel entry. I recognised only Newton and Tennyson; the rest were beyond my knowledge of the college’s history. They looked alert, some even judgemental. It was under their eyes that we sat, on a long wooden bench, feeling small.
“I’d heard you left,” Jimmy said, holding his hand out in front of us, meaning that my hand was the reason.
“I did leave. I came back.” I held my hand out too. It was still here. Didn’t work properly any more, but still here. “I need to know more about Annalise Wood.”
He leaned back, his bowler hat tapping a brass memorial plaque on the wall behind us, one of dozens. Trinity porters are among the smartest dressed; certainly better than me in my basic black suit and cheap grey tie. “So you said. That was a sad case, Morris. A sad case. Before your time.”
It’s not often that I feel young. “I know, Jimmy. So tell me. What was it like?”
“It’s the parents that I remember. Howlingly upset. At first trying to prove that the worst might have happened, just to get the police to do something; then desperately trying to come up with ways that maybe the worst hadn’t happened, as years went on.”
I nodded. “You were part of both investigations, 1976 and 1992?”
“I was the only one on both, officially. Unofficially, everyone who’d been on the case in ’76 took an interest when the body was found.”
“Tell me as if I’m stupid. How do you even know that the body was hers? It had to have been far gone …”
“It was,” Jimmy began. He pulled off his hat, rubbed his head, stalling. “Fresh bodies are bad. I know you know. They’re close to life but just, stopped. It’s wrong. It’s uncanny. But long-go
ne ones …” He shook his head. “It wasn’t human any more. It wasn’t a she, it wasn’t a person. It was evidence that a person had once been there, like a footprint is, but it’s not itself the person any more, not any person.”
Jimmy had retired after that investigation.
He shook himself and went on. “We knew it was once her because of the clothes: black uniform skirt, school blouse with the crest on it, and the name-tape inside of the collar.”
“But the body …” I prompted.
He waved a hand vaguely. “Right height, right hair. It was her. You sound like …”
I sat up straighter. “There were people who didn’t believe it was her?”
“It wasn’t a matter of belief, Morris. It was hope. Some people get blinded by it. We’re not supposed to.”
I nodded, agreeing with the sentiment, but still pressing the point. “DNA?”
“This was the early days of the science. The parents were dead. There had been no samples set aside. We pulled out all the stops we had, but this was a long time ago.” The musical metaphor of pulling out stops was punctuated by the actual organ above us stirring to life with an arpeggio. From this point, the practising organist scored our conversation with pounding chords and a driving melody. I hadn’t even realised anyone was up there.
“We had Annalise’s fingerprints taken from objects in her bedroom. But the left hand of the corpse was too deteriorated, and the right hand had been carried off by scavengers. Before you wonder, the separation at the wrist appeared to be post-deterioration, so, no, there isn’t a killer out there with a right-hand souvenir. There were most of her teeth, but there was nothing distinctive, just healthy teeth. But I felt pretty good about ID-ing a dead girl in a missing girl’s clothes as the missing girl!”
He was clearly annoyed by what seemed to him to be criticism of his judgement. I tried to placate him over the volume of what I now recognised as a hymn. I didn’t know the words but the tune was something I’d learned at Christmas or Easter as a child. My chest vibrated with it. “Jimmy, I trust you. That’s why I’m here. You know better than anyone. I’m not asking because I don’t believe you; I’m asking because I wasn’t there.”
“You read the notes.”
“I read the notes. I make notes like that. I know that they don’t tell the whole story.”
“Did you read the books?”
“Yes. But I want to hear it from you.” I hate “true crime” as a genre. I don’t trust it.
“I’m in the Martin book,” he said, nodding proudly. “He quotes me.”
I nodded admiringly, which was what he seemed to be after.
“I’ll tell you what I told him. Just because we don’t know something doesn’t make it a mystery, not in the way most people mean the word. People say ‘mystery’ as if there’s no possible answer, as if only the supernatural, or aliens, or some massive conspiracy were left. Something you don’t know isn’t as grand as a mystery. It’s an ordinary thing that you just don’t know.”
“You think Annalise’s death was straightforward.”
“Of course it was. I hate to say this but you know it’s true: Sometimes people kill. Sometimes people rape. By ‘people,’ I mean ‘men,’ don’t I. I say it as a man myself. And if you’re going to kill someone, or rape someone, you’d want someone youngish, not too strong. But, unless you’re a paedophile, you’d want someone pubescent, right? So it’s not a shock that someone—some man—who wanted to rape someone and then killed them (which may have been part of the thrill or maybe just a necessary evil or even an accident) chose a teenage girl. A pretty one. Well, most teenage girls are pretty. Maybe I didn’t know that when I was a boy but it’s obvious now. Young, riding a bike, long hair. It’s a crime, but it’s not a mystery.”
I anchored his musings in the practical: “What do you think happened to her bike? It was purple, right?”
“Purple, with a stubborn souvenir sticker from a trip to Spain partly scraped off. If we’d found it, we would have known for sure.”
“And the rape? You’re sure about that? Because in the notes—”
He slumped. “The press treated it as a sex crime from the start. They shouldn’t have. It was salacious. Unnecessary. But you know how it is. Ted Bundy in America was making headlines at the time she disappeared. Remember the Will Teague case, in Peterborough in the nineties? All those prostitutes? I swear my kids learned the birds and bees from the coverage of those murders. It was everywhere, and it sold papers, just like this case. No doubt the coverage made it worse for Annalise’s parents. But there was semen, Morris. I can’t prove if it was a rape or a rendezvous, but, considering that he then smothered her, I’m going to stick with rape!”
I cleared my throat. “Was any of the semen in her body, or just on her clothes?”
“‘Just’?” He raised an eyebrow. “Do you know how difficult it was to isolate it at all? This was a sixteen-years-dead former body, Morris. The pants were a total loss. The skirt had ridden up and bunched in the grave, so part of it had been spared the fluids of decomposition. That we got anything useful at all was a bloody miracle.”
“So the semen you tested was exclusively from the skirt, not from anywhere else?”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that we know that someone came on her skirt, not that someone had sex with her.”
“The most obvious way to get semen on the inside of a skirt is to fuck the girl in it, wouldn’t you say?”
The organist stopped abruptly, as if offended by a swear word in chapel. But, no, he must have been working through a difficult passage. He stopped and started several times, repeating a challenging flourish.
I tried to placate Jimmy. “I just need clarity. You did the angels’ work. I mean that. We’re building on what you did then to now put this to bed.”
That worked; he perked up. “You found him?” he asked, not angry any more. He looked hopeful.
“We’re figuring things out. There might be more than one ‘him.’ We don’t think the person who left the semen”—I deliberately phrased it that way—“did the killing. What can you tell me about that? She was smothered? By a hand, or was there some kind of object involved?”
He shook his head and lifted empty hands. “Blood vessels break in the eyes when someone dies like that, but we didn’t have the eyes. All we had was a broken nose, and broken front teeth, as if from pressure. We had evidence in what was left of the flesh of her face that those wounds happened when she was alive, at least briefly. You get your face pressed in like that …” Here he made a gesture, pushing with the heel of his hand. “Over the nose and the mouth, well, you stop breathing. I don’t know what was pressed there, if anything. There was nothing in the grave with her. A hand alone could have done it. A man’s hand,” he clarified, meaning a large hand. “There were only the clothes she went missing in, still on her. We sifted the earth around her body for days. There was nothing else. Nothing.” He squinted defiantly, daring me to criticise his meticulous work. “Morris, if we’d found the grave closer to the time she went in, before her body … Well, if we’re going to wish, we might as well wish that it had never happened!” He sounded angry enough to compete with the minor chords bouncing around the chapel walls.
This was going to be my professional life from now on, questioning my colleagues. Besides cold cases, our team’s other work involved advising on stalled current cases and looking into domestic abuse investigations that had been handled badly. All, in a way, policing other police. I’d thought I’d been lucky to be handed Annalise as my first go, such a huge case; I’d thought it was a gift. Maybe it was a test. Maybe it was an albatross.
“What made the grave stand out?” I asked carefully, not engaging his indignation. Just keep it flowing, just keep him talking, like I do with suspects. It didn’t feel right, treating my own people that way.
“It wasn’t us that found her. It was a man walking his dog, one of those massive dogs, those kind that rescue pe
ople in mountains.” He didn’t look at me and his voice was normal again. He knew this wasn’t personal. I hoped he understood that in his bones.
“What about the tracks? Why there? Did anyone ask the locals about that spot, whether it had a reputation, why anyone would choose it?”
“She’d been laid near a copse of poplars planted in memory of a historic derailment. That’s how she was found; a storm knocked down a tree and the roots brought her up.” He shrugged. “Maybe it felt more respectful to choose a marked place, or maybe the trees gave some cover to the act of burial.”
“Did she look … ?” I hesitated. I’ve never seen a corpse that old. “Did she look sixteen?” Hard to say if sixteen looks that much different from the years on either side, but Jimmy had seen her and I hadn’t.
He reared back. “She looked dead, Morris. Just dead.”
He stood up. I joined him. This was the job now: looking over the shoulders of earlier investigators, questioning their work and pissing them off.
He added, “Someone else came to me about Annalise last month. She’d got my name from that true crime book.”
So not police. “Family?” But Annalise had no family left.
“Well, that’s the interesting thing. She looked a lot like those photos. Well, what those photos would have grown into. But I suppose quite a few people look like that. You get the hair right, and white skin and general Englishness, resemblance isn’t that hard to achieve. She had it in her head that she was Annalise’s daughter. You know what it’s like.”
Oh, I do. Some people try to insert themselves into investigations, even to the point that they’ll confess to things that can get them into trouble. To some people, attention, even in the form of trouble, is as necessary as oxygen.
“Except she wasn’t trying to prove it. She was trying to disprove it. She brought me the book and said that there was nothing about Annalise having had a baby. She wanted to know if the autopsy had shown anything, you know, if her pelvis had shown she’d given birth. She wanted to know if we had any DNA sample left and if she could have a test done. I told her absolutely not. She suggested we’d covered it up for the parents’ sake, and I asked her to leave. I’ll be honest with you, Morris, if we had found evidence that Annalise had been pregnant, I’d’ve seen no reason to give that to the press. But there wasn’t. I went and looked at the autopsy report again. There was nothing in the bones to suggest she’d had a child. Could have had a C-section, of course. Could have been pregnant and miscarried or aborted, but if she’d pushed a baby out, well, the pelvis would show it. No baby. That woman was a bloody lunatic.”
Look for Her Page 9