Probably. “But Annalise could have had a baby by Caesarean section. Yes?”
“You’ve read the interview with her family and friends. She’d never been pregnant.”
“She was in France for several months the year before …”
“There comes a point when you just have to trust your colleagues, yeah?”
Touché. “Did you get the woman’s name?”
“She didn’t say.”
“How old was she?”
Jimmy squinted. “Just a kid; about your age,” he joked.
He was right. If Annalise had had a child, that child would now be around forty.
“Thanks, Jimmy, for the information and the compliment.” Nothing like spending time with someone decades older to feel young again.
“I promise you that there’s nothing in her story. She’s just an attention-seeker. But if you truly want to chase your own tail, I sent her on to Peter Gage.”
I leaned back, as if the name were a glass marble and I needed to get it to fall into just the right hole in my brain. “I remember the name …”
“He worked the case in ’92. He’s a porter at Robinson now.”
“Thanks, Jimmy.” I tried to smooth things over. “The case was lucky to have you.”
He thought about that for a moment, then tipped his hat. I felt forgiven for my necessary scepticism. He left the chapel.
I held still for a moment, trying to fit in with the statues. They represented men more important than I’ll ever be. But they were dead, and I wasn’t, which seemed to be more to the point than being special. I thought about the woman who’d sought Jimmy about supposedly being Annalise Wood’s child. Probably, as Jimmy had divined, just an attention-seeker. But perhaps, just perhaps, something more interesting.
Robinson College wasn’t far. I phoned ahead, asked if Peter Gage was working. He was. I walked.
The distance between Robinson and Trinity is ten minutes, but it jumps you forward four centuries. Robinson had been founded in the 1970s, tastefully choosing red brick over the bland concrete that curses most of the University’s other late twentieth-century additions.
Peter met me at the top of the long upwards path leading to the porters’ lodge. At that point, the red brick gave way to a paved courtyard and, after that, lawns and gardens. Unlike in the more formal courtyards of the older colleges, it’s permissible to walk on Robinson’s grass. Peter Gage had offered me a walk in the gardens.
Peter was young compared to Jimmy, and a little older than me. So, not young to the students around us, but young in the new normal I was making for myself. He was cheerful, too, and seemed excited, rather than defensive, to have an excuse to talk about the case again.
He extended his hand to shake while introducing himself, so I knew he didn’t know the details of my injury. I put my hand in his, gripping with my thumb but with the rest of my fingers slack. I could see in the quick flicker of his eyes that he noted the strangeness, but he didn’t comment. Most people won’t say anything so long as I handle it with confidence myself.
“Peter, I understand that you worked on the Annalise Wood case when her body was found. It’s my case now. Is there anything you think was ignored at the time that should have been given attention?”
We were walking towards a pretty brook, which was crossed by a pretty bridge, and where a practical bright orange life-ring hanging from a post reminded that bad things can happen anywhere.
“I’m not sure what I can do for you. Jimmy knows more about the case than I ever will.”
He was a few years older than me, within view of fifty while I was still recovering from hitting the forties, but had an earnest, youthful modesty. I assured him of his importance to the case. “He’s given me the forensic overview. You talked to witnesses, didn’t you? I would really like to know what it was like.”
“It was like stepping into a legend. I’d grown up hearing about the case. I think it was the first case I was aware of as a child. It might have been what made me join the force in the first place. And then, when the body was found, somehow I was in the middle of it all. It had come out of nowhere. For something new to surface after so many years …” We paused at the centre of a long bridge, leaned on the railing. “Is there something new now?” he asked me, sliding his eyes my way without turning his head.
“Maybe.” I smiled. “We thought we had something big that turned out to be something small, but might, just might, be something big enough.”
We were facing the sun, which felt good but made us both squint. He closed his eyes and considered out loud: “After all these years … I’m betting either a deathbed witness confession, or DNA.” He opened his eyes and faced me. “DNA, am I right? That’s why you went to see Jimmy.”
“When you’re right, you’re right,” I admitted. “But it’s not conclusive. You can’t say a word.”
“There wasn’t much,” he recalled, thinking back. “There was nothing to compare the body to. Her parents were dead. The original investigation had saved fingerprints but no DNA samples. Even a toothbrush, properly preserved, could have done it, but they didn’t know that back then …”
“I can’t say what it is.”
He carried on musing: “So it can’t be the girl; has to be the man. The stuff on her skirt. That’s all they’d had. Right? I haven’t lost my touch, have I?”
He said it as a joke, but at his age, and even at my age, the question has a manic tinge as well: I’m not old yet, am I? Surely not yet …
I had to be firm. “Now do you see what the media will do with this if they catch it? Same as you. And I promise you it won’t help. I have to keep what we have quiet.”
He acquiesced, apparently because the enemy of his enemy is his friend. “The newspapers were appalling. The photographs they published! Actually published! And people came to the site. We had to have police at the body round the clock until it was fully removed. Some people brought their own cameras, which at least took effort then. Could you imagine it today?”
“What were the people like? You followed up on the original interviews, with whoever was still near Lilling. Any in particular that stood out to you?”
“It wasn’t like interrogating a suspect, where an emotional reaction lets you know you’ve hit a tender place. This case was tender for literally everyone there, so a reaction didn’t mean anything. Most of the people I spoke with had already heard the news, but there were some for whom I was breaking it. It took my breath away sometimes, I mean that. You’d think I was telling them about their own child. Well, they’d known her, some of them. Or at least known her parents. Or just remembered that she’d been one of them. None of my interviews did anything for the case, in the end. Just like this one won’t do anything for you,” he added wryly.
We’d started wandering again, and I nudged away from clutches of students and from open bedroom windows. “Is there somewhere more private?” I asked.
Sensing that this would be worth his while, he led me round a hedge to a grassy space he introduced as the college’s outdoor theatre. We sat at the edge of the low stage, facing an empty audience. He offered me a cigarette; I declined.
I said, “What if I told you that her body wasn’t buried the day she disappeared? What if I told you it was buried three years later, or more?” Charlie hadn’t messed with the skirt until 1979.
“Three years’ difference, out of sixteen … and now out of almost forty … You can’t tell that with forensics.”
“What if I could? Would that make you look at any of your interviewees in a different way?”
His eyes followed fast-moving clouds as he savoured the chance to smoke. “That would mean … she’d been kept before she was killed?”
I shrugged. “Kept dead or alive. Went into the ground later than we thought.”
He demanded precision: “Or was in the ground elsewhere first …”
“Possibly,” I allowed. “But probably not.” It would be difficult to change the clo
thes of an unearthed corpse.
He shook his head; he let out a low whistle; those stereotypical signifiers of awe, as if he were playing them for someone in the back row.
He said, “Lilling’s full of big houses, especially at the edges of the town. Houses, fields, sheds … You think it was like that case in Germany?”
I shrugged. There have been too many cases of imprisoned women. Austria, Ohio, take your pick …
He continued, “I don’t know. There weren’t any homes where I wasn’t allowed in. People wanted to talk.”
I pounced: “Anyone who wanted to talk about it more than you’d expect?”
He wagged his head slowly for no. “No one that made bells ring. Oh, there were the usual lonely people, who would have been happy to talk about anything. One cup of tea after another. But no one who seemed … voyeuristic. Well, at least not more than the whole thing naturally was.”
“And these were people who had been interviewed back in 1976 as well?”
“A lot of them. I’d been given the original interview list to use as a checklist. Sometimes it was the next generation on. Sixteen years, after all …”
And now almost forty. “If you were going to do these interviews again,” I began, because that’s exactly what I had ahead of me, “where would you start? Who would you prioritise?”
We went over the obvious details that would pique interest: property, outbuildings, privacy, whatever would make it possible to hide a living teenager or her body for, say, three to ten years. Keep her any longer than that, and there wouldn’t have been enough time in the ground for that level of decomposition.
He wouldn’t let go of that time frame, and how I’d got to that first “three years.”
“You can’t get that level of precision from the body itself. It’s insects, isn’t it? Something that would have implanted itself at death and then hatched … exactly thirty-something years later?” He trailed off. Insects help in the scale of days and weeks, not years. Besides, the remains had been cremated.
He slapped his knee. “It’s the clothes, isn’t it. Has to be. But she wore them the day she disappeared. I saw them myself, standard school uniform …”
I kept my face blank.
“We’re back to his DNA. But you can’t date DNA like dinosaur bones.”
“And if we could, it would tell us something within plus or minus a thousand years.”
“Fabric content? Was it a new style? But it had her name-tape in the collar. I’m telling you. They were her clothes.”
I agreed with a bland nod. Then I wondered, “What did the name-tape say, exactly?” Because we hadn’t yet touched on the route of the clothes.
“‘AKW’ for Annalise Katherine Wood.”
He remembered her middle name. I was strangely touched. “Just the initials?” I clarified.
“Are you thinking we’ve mixed her up with someone else, some missing teenager from the county called something like Alice Kitty Walsh, and we were just too stupid to make a connection? The original detectives had been told that’s how her mum had done her labels. We were looking for those initials.”
I believed him. My stress on the name-tape wasn’t mistrust of their work. If that label had been explicit, saying “Annalise Wood” in full, then the clothes would have to have been used deliberately. But if there were only initials, someone could have got at the clothes, not knowing whose they were …
I shook my head. That was opening up more directions than would be easy to follow. All we knew about this body for sure was that she’d never had work on her teeth, and had long, dark hair. Actually, the hair …
“Peter, do you remember how long the hair was? On the corpse?”
“You think someone cut it?”
“Had they?”
He said no and stubbed out his cigarette on the bottom of his shoe, and put the butt into a little tin he carried in his pocket. “You’re wondering if her hair had grown.” He grinned, wanting approval.
“Had it?”
“It was long,” he said, holding his hands roughly two feet apart. “Long, like in the pictures of her.”
“Which was the fashion in the seventies,” I noted.
“Exactly.” He took out the box of cigarettes again, offering again. He didn’t expect me to take it; I think he wanted to know if we were going to keep talking long enough to get him through another. I nodded that he should go ahead. “How fast does hair grow in three years?” he wondered out loud.
I looked it up on my phone. About half an inch a month, so about eighteen inches in three years. But I know from my daughter that hair sometimes reaches a terminal length. If it was long already, it might not have grown much more. Or someone might have been cutting it.
“Was it ragged on the edges?” I asked. “Or clean across?” They would have expected clean across if they’d thought she’d died soon after going missing. They would have noticed a ragged cut or unexpected length, surely …
Peter thought so too, and chided me. “The hair looked just like the day she disappeared. Where did you get this three-year business, anyway?”
From a prostitute’s john who was driving when he shouldn’t have been. From a boy who was in France when Annalise disappeared, and had an embarrassing story of masturbation at the ready. Was Charlie really enough to upend the assumptions of this case? When it’s his DNA, I suppose he is.
“Thanks, Peter,” I said. His cigarette wasn’t even half-done and he looked forlorn at my finishing. Good thing I had one more question. “There’s a woman who thinks she’s Annalise Wood’s daughter. Did she get in touch with you?”
He nodded, laughing and inhaling at the same time, which ended in a sputtering cough. He finally spoke, while knocking his chest with his fist. “Her! Yes. She came here. We went for a walk, same as today. Except she didn’t like that I smoked. Didn’t say a word, but I could tell.”
“Well?” I prompted.
“‘Well,’ what? She’s a nutter. Annalise didn’t have a baby.”
“But did she say why she thought that?”
“Wouldn’t tell me. Wanted me to do all the talking. I didn’t have much to say.”
“Did she give her name?”
“No. I have her number, though. She’d phoned the office to see if I was working. I wrote it down.”
I blinked. “You’re still a cop,” I marvelled.
“At heart,” he agreed.
I copied the number from a note in his phone into mine.
“Do you think the body’s not her?” Peter asked as we stood and stretched our legs. We were at the middle of the front of the stage, and his voice seemed to carry.
“I can’t say that,” I told him, meaning it deeply. If that’s not Annalise, we’re worse off than when I took the case.
“Oh,” he said, coming up with one more thing to use up the last centimetre of his cigarette. He inhaled then said, “I think I know what you’ve got!” His eyes sparkled. He really wanted to prove he’d figured me out.
I looked away. “Bet you don’t.” It was a phrase that would inevitably egg him on, but I was confident that “Charlie Bennet masturbated into Annalise’s old clothes during a tea party in 1979” wasn’t about to pop out of his mouth.
“The dog walker.” He lifted his eyebrows, waiting for me to admit he’d got me.
“Sorry?” I said, tilting my head in genuine lack of understanding.
“The one who found the body. We were all interested in him. A real character, as we would say if we were feeling polite. He was a strange one, and very interested in the case. We all wondered if he might have taken a souvenir before he called us. But …” He shrugged. “He said he hadn’t …” He stubbed out this cigarette, so I was pretty sure the conversation was about to end. “It was worth a guess. A deathbed confession of some object buried with her, something not around before 1979?” Still a question mark at the end of his sentence, in case I might yet surrender to his cleverness.
“Peter, it would be a p
leasure to discuss it with you, but you know I can’t.” He’s not police any more.
Technically, neither am I. But I’m with the police. He’s with the University. It’s different.
I wondered, as we walked back through the gardens, over the bridge, past the helpful but ominous life-ring, if I would ever go this route. College courtyards have something over our overcrowded offices, but I could never do it. Not after having been a student at Cambridge. I couldn’t imagine the way the undergraduates would look at me if they knew. You were one of us, and now you’re staff? Never, I could never. What does that say about me, caring what eighteen-year-olds think of me?
I thanked Peter at the porters’ lodge and took the ramp leading out. The slant of it, and the brick college walls behind me, made me feel like I was exiting the hold of a ship.
I headed into Burrell’s Walk, a cycle path between Trinity’s gardens and the University Library, and crossed another little bridge. I walked quickly, hands in pockets. The state of the case had me on edge. If that body’s not Annalise, I’ve got to solve it, or bury what we got from Charlie. If all I contribute to the case is undoing what little they had, and the press gets hold of it … That’s not what I came back to the job for.
Cyclists and students brushed past me as I stepped to the side of the path to phone the number of the obsessed young woman. Very likely a dead end, but not certainly, and so it was worth it to bother.
It rang six times, then went to voice mail. “You’ve reached Hannah-Claire Finney. I no longer work at the Fitzwilliam. If you need to reach someone there, please call the main number. If you want to talk to me, leave a message!”
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