Look for Her

by Emily Winslow

  Dan pointed out, “That would only be if he expected the body to be found, which doesn’t seem to be the case. And if it had been found any earlier, the face could have been recognisable as not-Annalise. If he was waiting for a storm to blow over a tree and a man to walk a dog, well, he was playing a long con… .”

  “What if he wasn’t just waiting? What if … ?” I grabbed the paperback shoved between the couch cushions. I’d been reading and highlighting while nursing. “The dog walker, Clemmy Osborne. Clemmy? Well, thank you, Dan, for not calling our daughter that… .”

  “Named after his mother, Clementine, perhaps?” He sat too and read over my shoulder. Mr. Osborne had lived in the area all his life. He’d been rather thoroughly interrogated by the police in 1992. The afternoon that Annalise went missing, on her way home from school, he had a perfect alibi with many witnesses at a gathering of model railway enthusiasts.

  “So not him,” I conceded, meaning all the usual caveats: not him that day, not him alone. An alibi for one part doesn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t involved at all. “But what if that was the reason? What if someone wanted to create the illusion that Annalise’s body had been found, even if they knew they had to wait years for the decomposition to make it believable?”

  “To comfort her family?” Dan suggested. “For a certain definition of comfort, I suppose… .”

  “They were dead by 1992. In fact, it was their deaths that got the clothes and Annalise’s other belongings out of the house, so someone with access to the clothes would have already known they were dead. Unless they took the clothes directly from the house before then… .”

  “You have to chase those clothes. Find out where they ended up.”

  “I do.” I felt a tug and springy lift. She—Stephanie, I reminded myself—had fallen asleep and let me go. And I’d forgot to switch her halfway through. My left breast, still full, ached.

  “Damn.” I tried jiggling her a little as I turned her around to my other side. I mashed her mouth up against my nipple, but she was utterly asleep. I leaned my head on Dan’s shoulder beside me and closed my eyes too, but I wasn’t dreaming. I was thinking. “Morris is revisiting homes around Lilling, following the trail of interviews from years before. If Annalise had been kept before she was killed, there could be some evidence of … a secret room? A converted shed? The original investigators weren’t looking for anything like that.”

  “And you?”

  “There’s one house that piques my interest. It was a private home when Annalise went missing, and it’s a law office now. But in between it was a boarding house. I don’t think that makes it a candidate for hiding the girl. After all, a boarding house is by definition shared by too many people for secret-keeping to be easy. But I’d wondered why the killer had chosen that burial spot by the tracks. It seems a risky and exposed place. But could it have been worth it if he’d been able to look at his work every day? The boarding house had a tower room that frames that view exactly. Morris even found that noted in an old interview, but the assumption then was that the body had been buried shortly after disappearance. In 1976, it had been a little girls’ room. That line of enquiry had been dropped.”

  “Can you find out who rented that room?”

  “Trying to. I’m hoping the law office receptionist will come through. Or her estate-agent cousin.”

  “Gossip at its most useful.”

  Just then, wriggles in my arms. Stephanie was rooting in her sleep. I rolled her towards me and she latched on.

  “So how does this involve Spencer?” Dan asked, again. Somehow with all of my words I hadn’t answered that.

  “There was a woman who thought she was Annalise Wood’s secret daughter. Or, was worried that she was. She wanted to check. Morris heard about this from both of the old investigators he spoke to. She’d been hoping to do some kind of DNA comparison. But the body was cremated.”

  Stephanie fell off again, still sleeping. I shimmied myself into a more comfortable position. It felt ridiculous to have such a businesslike conversation with my shirt hiked up to my neck. Dan pulled it down and tucked a throw blanket around my shoulders. “The only chance Annalise could have had a baby was the year before, when she was in France. Well, supposedly in France, if you think she instead went somewhere to have a baby… . I interviewed someone who went to France with her, who said that Annalise was there. She could be lying, I suppose, but there was a whole theory about Annalise getting together with a French boyfriend in 1975 and running off with him in 1976. Not a police theory, but gossip. The point is, people talked about it. Surely if she hadn’t really gone to France it would have come up. Surely her parents would have told the police. The father of her child would have been a suspect. So why this woman thought she could have been Annalise’s daughter …”

  “You’re speaking of her in the past tense,” he observed.

  I sighed. “She died. She fell into the river in Cambridge.”

  “‘Fell’?”

  “That’s Spencer’s job to figure out.”

  Dan recapped: “So, the clothes, the boarding house, and the woman who fell in the river.”

  I agreed, adding: “And Morris is reinterviewing Lilling locals, with the new idea in mind that Annalise might have been kept somewhere for a while. Without letting on that that’s what he’s after, of course.”

  “So today?”

  I cuddled in the blanket around my shoulders and Stephanie sighed in my lap. Her having a name felt different. It felt weird. It marked her as a specific person, already narrowing the infinite possibilities of her life into finite actuals. It felt vulnerable, and limiting, and necessary, grounding, and real.

  My work is also real. “I’m going to prod my sources regarding the boarding house, see if I can get a lead on how Annalise’s belongings were disposed of—those are phone calls and emails—and ask Spencer what he thinks happened to Hannah-Claire Finney. That’ll be in person.”

  “Where?”

  “He’s taking a part-time course in ‘Applied Criminology and Police Management’ at a manor house near Cambridge, ambitious boy. This weekend it includes taking tea between lectures. I may even get a scone.”

  “You really think there’s a connection?”

  “Not likely. We just have to be sure. Just wondering where her delusion came from at the same time that we’re looking into the case. And what if someone who believed in her story took action?”

  Dan nodded, thinking. “What if someone who mistakenly thought she had Annalise’s DNA in her didn’t want it to be compared to the body from the train tracks? Someone who didn’t know it had been cremated, or who worried that the police had samples?”

  “Someone who wanted us to keep believing that body is Annalise. Holy shit.”

  “I should’ve been a cop.”

  “I should have designed buildings. Can you take her now?” I said, rolling Stephanie towards the best man in the world. “I have to put on a new shirt, one that doesn’t have easy access.”

  At the doorway, I turned and looked at how easily he held her, and how happy she was to sprawl across his chest. “Can you imagine feeling so unconnected that you fantasise your mother was a famous murder victim? As if that’s some kind of improvement on your life?”

  “It’s the Disney thing. Your mum’s a dead royal. Makes you both a princess and completely free. Makes you a heroine.”

  He had a point. “Like how people are proud to have been beheaded aristocrats in a past life.”

  “Don’t laugh. I was Julius Caesar,” Dan joked.

  “No wonder you look so good when you wear nothing but a sheet.” I leaned over to kiss him goodbye.

  I almost asked him then. I almost felt that, having given the baby a name, I had gained standing to request something that I knew would be hard for him, for us. But he spoke before I spoke, and my daring was lost.

  “Maybe later you could wear something with easy access again.”

  We tried to kiss again but ended up gi
ggling into each other’s faces.

  MADINGLEY HALL DOMINATES the village to the west of Cambridge from which it gets its name. The University reaches even here, running its continuing education school from the grand house and manicured gardens.

  The inside is a combination of tatty-yet-impressive country house glamour, and conference facility practicality. I was taken to a great room on the upper floor and left to gaze out at the lawns from a dignified stuffed chair. Spencer’s group would be released here between lectures. Two young women were setting up industrial amounts of coffee, tea, and biscuits.

  I’d texted him that I was coming, so he wasn’t surprised. He was curious, though. I hadn’t told him what I was there for.

  “I’d thought you might have brought the baby,” he said, peeling off from the crowd when he caught sight of me. He hasn’t met her yet.

  “Soon. She has a name now!”

  “Do I get to know it?”

  I realised that I hadn’t even told it to my mother yet. More to add to the endless mental list. “Stephanie,” I said out loud, for the first time.

  “That’s a pretty name. Tea?”

  “Coffee.”

  He fetched some for both of us, and two little packets of shortbread.

  “Good lecture?” I asked him.

  “That’s not why you’re here.”

  “But I’m polite.”

  “Since fucking when?”

  I laughed. I liked him. We had got along on the one case we’d worked together, up until things went to shit with Morris, and I ended up on emergency bed rest.

  “I need to ask you about a case.”

  He squinted at me with suspicion. “That’s a surprise. Did you cut your leave short?” He sat next to me, in a matching stuffed chair, so we each had to turn to face the other.

  “No. Still on maternity leave. In fact, I’m at home right now. You can’t even see me.”

  “Can’t I?”

  “Look. Morris Keene is back on the job. You know that, right?”

  “I’d heard.”

  “It’s cold cases. Nothing to do with us. But, well, maybe to do with us just this one time.”

  “He asked you to come to me? That’s bullshit. That’s cowardly bullshit.”

  “No! No. He hasn’t asked me to do anything. It came up; he and I are friends; I wondered if you could help. I wondered if I could see if there’s a connection.”

  He clattered his cup and saucer onto the little table between us. “What case?” he asked, but he was frowning.

  “Hannah-Claire Finney.”

  “Fell in the Cam.”

  That’s all: just four words and a stone face.

  “An accident isn’t a case,” I observed.

  “Maybe an accident. Maybe a suicide. Maybe pushed,” he acknowledged. “But there’s nothing we can do about it. I don’t like her brand-new husband; it’s been claimed by his sister that he was at the least verbally abusive, possibly physically. But there are no witnesses from the night in question, and no injuries related to her death that can’t be otherwise explained. It doesn’t smell right, but it’s a prosecutorial dead end.”

  I sipped at my coffee, too milky and now cool.

  “Well?” he asked. “Are you going to tell why you’re interested?”

  I wanted to. But the buzz of the crowd around us … The name Annalise would whip round the department before I got home.

  I shook my head. “It’s probably nothing. Just …” I breathed in, considering my words. “If it wasn’t the husband. If it was a stranger to her. Does that ring any bells for you?”

  “Is this an old serial killer thing? Because I don’t recall any cases of serial river pushers.”

  “Not a serial killer, no …” I put down my drink, right next to his. Still a team, I was trying to communicate. “We have reason to believe that Hannah-Claire was herself pursuing an old case. It may have got her into trouble.”

  He opened his hands wide. “Are you serious? We’re going to play a game where I give you information, and you withhold it?”

  “No, no. Just … not here.”

  “We could have had this meeting tonight. We could have had this meeting in my car. You chose here.”

  I didn’t have an answer for that.

  “If Morris Keene has questions for me, he can ask them himself, after he tells me exactly why he wants to know, naming names.”

  “And here I thought you were going to say that he could go fuck himself. You’re more civil than I expected.”

  He smiled, but it didn’t turn into even a chortle.

  “I’m sure he’ll come to you,” I said, in as appeasing a voice as I could manage. “I’m sure he will, if it turns out that there’s a good reason to. I was only trying to see if that reason exists.”

  Spencer’s crossed leg bounced in annoyance. “There was broken glass near where she went in. But, there’s broken glass in various places around Cambridge every night, as I’m sure you know.”

  “Bottle glass,” I suggested. Sloppy drunks.

  “Usually. We got the analysis back yesterday. This was from a picture frame. There was even some adhesive on the corner where there had been a price sticker.”

  “Just the glass?” I asked.

  “Just bits of the glass. No frame. No picture. Probably nothing to do with Hannah-Claire.”

  “And her injuries?”

  “A healing bruise on her upper thigh and bottom. Her husband said she’s an avid cyclist. Could have got it falling off. Also old marks on her upper arms, the kind you might get if someone squeezes; not as easily explained. As for her death, it was cold that night, and the water colder; when she hit it she had a heart attack. Then she drowned.”

  I leaned back. There wasn’t a lot to do with that. Without a witness, someone could get away with this. I asked, “Do you have reason to believe she was depressed, that she might do this to herself?”

  “She’d lost both her parents not that long ago. A coworker told us she was having panic attacks.”

  I thought, Maybe that explains her pursuit of an alternate parent, though why she’d want a dead one is one for the psychologists.

  People had started to drift towards the door. It must have been time for another talk. One of the young women in staff uniform took our cups and eyed our unopened biscuit packets disapprovingly.

  Spencer said, “I have to go back in. I’ll tell you whatever you need but bloody hell, do the same for me.”

  “I will,” I said. “Morris will. It’s a touchy case.”

  Just then Spencer’s mobile rang. He answered it, turned his back the way people do, as if that creates privacy. “I’m on my way … I will … Okay. Text me the number.”

  He rang off and muttered, “I’ll probably have to write an extra paper to make up for missing this lecture.”

  “What happened?”

  He looked me right in the eye, considering before he went on. “Hannah-Claire’s cousin was attacked after the funeral today.”

  “Attacked?” I asked, stunned.

  “Beaten, apparently. She’s being taken to Addenbrooke’s. I’m on my way to the scene.”

  I stepped in front of him.

  “Can I come?”

  He shook his head, but it wasn’t a no. I think he was marvelling at my nerve.

  “Fine,” he said. “Follow me there.”

  He walked ahead, down the staircase and out through reception. As he walked he phoned someone else. “Hello, this is Detective Sergeant Spencer from the Cambridgeshire Police. Is Cathy Rigg there?”

  I stopped in surprise, then scrambled to catch up with him and keep listening.

  “I’m sorry, but this is an emergency. She would want to be interrupted.”

  I could hear unintelligible jabbering from the other end, presumably Rosalie explaining why Cathy was unavailable. His mouth hung open. “I’m sorry, who?” he asked. “You’ve been dealing with DI Chloe Frohmann?”

  Spencer and I locked eyes. I lifted
my shoulders. I had not expected any of this.

  “I’m afraid I really can only speak to Mrs. Rigg. Could you give me her mobile number, please? It’s about her daughter.”

  I frowned. Daughter?

  Spencer got the number and called it, while glaring at me suspiciously. He wasn’t happy to learn I’d spoken with Rosalie.

  “Mrs. Rigg, this is Detective Sergeant Angus Spencer of the Cambridgeshire Police,” he said smoothly. “I’m very sorry to tell you that your daughter Sandra has been taken to Addenbrooke’s Hospital. I’ve been asked to tell you. I’m on my way to the scene and I hope to meet you at the hospital later.”

  The panicked, high-pitched voice at the other end pelted Spencer with questions, but left him no room to answer. When the call finally ended, I clarified: “The beaten woman is Hannah-Claire’s cousin and Cathy Rigg’s daughter. Cathy Rigg, ex-wife of Charlie Bennet now married to Nigel Rigg, is Hannah-Claire’s aunt. Is that so?”

  “Sounds like you have a lot to tell me,” he said. He was right.

  Chapter 11

  Laurie Ambrose

  SIMON,” I SAID into the phone, even though he hadn’t picked up. He must have still been driving. The ringer at the other end pulsed. Brrrt. Brrrt. Brrrt …

  The policeman had asked me to wait. Someone was going to come and ask me questions, like why the near-dead woman they’d just taken to hospital was between my car’s front bumper and a brick wall.

  The uniformed officer kept looking over at me. I dialled another number, but didn’t hit the green button. Instead I talked to the empty space of the incomplete connection. “Tom?” I said, holding the phone to my head so no one would think I was crazy.

  “Tom, it’s Laurie. I’ve found a bit of trouble. I don’t know what to do. Simon is coming, but he’s not here yet, not even headed here yet because I asked him to pick me up at Silver Street. I didn’t tell him what was happening because I didn’t want to say it. I don’t want it to be true. I’m worried about Blake. What has he tangled himself up in? I’m sad over Hannah-Claire. I’m horrified about Anna. I’m scared for me. I don’t want to be involved. I’m already involved. I don’t know what I’ll say when I’m asked. I can’t tell them everything because even dead clients have privacy rights. And Prisha’s not here to advise me because of her sister’s baby. Everyone’s life is just moving forward at such a pace and I can’t ask for help from anyone, not even from Simon, because he’s driving responsibly and not answering his phone.” I wiped my forehead and realised that I was sweating ridiculously. It was so bad I’d thought I was crying, but I wasn’t. Not yet.