I could feel myself getting cold. I had to make her stop going after this.
So I told her. I knew that Mum had her in 1975, during the time that she was supposed to have been in France for school. I knew that Annalise had gone to France then. There had been rumours that she had run away the next year with a French boyfriend. And every night on my school break I had to look out of that tower window, sleeping on a daybed surrounded by boxes of files, staring at those poplar trees, the only two left after that storm in 1992 had pushed the others down and their roots upended the body enough for a dog on a walk to notice.
This is what really killed me. She cried. She cried like it was a terrible thing, instead of an honour. I wish, I wish that someone would tell me something like that. Tell me I’m special. But it hurt her. I shrugged. There was nothing I could do about that.
I woke up again. This time someone was crying. I thought, for just a moment, that it was Hannah-Claire wishing that Annalise wasn’t her mother. But it was just the stranger in the next bed.
IN THE MORNING I was free to go. Sadie, my sister, was coming to take me back to my flat. Then I was going to ask her to leave, but I needed her with me for the hospital to let me out.
First, the detective was there again. Sergeant Spencer. I was alert enough to know his name now and really pay attention.
“We’ve arrested Henry Ware,” he told me.
I tried to lean forward. I was on enough painkillers that I could sit myself up now, but bending any farther than that wasn’t possible.
“He denies what you’ve described, but we have a witness who backs you up.”
I blinked twice, quickly. “Who?” I asked.
“An acquaintance of Hannah-Claire’s. Laurie Ambrose. Do you know her?”
My thoughts became jagged and jumbled. I didn’t know what he meant. How was it that Dr. Ambrose could have seen anything? Why had she been at the church? Had she and Hannah-Claire become secret friends? Did they meet over coffee and chat and compare notes? What did she know?
“Hannah introduced us,” I said, vaguely. It was true in its own way. I had found Dr. Ambrose’s information in Hannah-Claire’s email history. “I didn’t see Laurie Ambrose at the funeral.”
Sergeant Spencer tilted his head. “I see. Do you think she could be lying?”
He had his phone out to type into again. He was going to write down my answer.
“I don’t know. She could have been there. People were there. I was in the front because I’m family.” I didn’t want tears right now. I didn’t want my voice to shake. Actually being a victim of something is nothing like pretending to be one, but I knew that going in. I didn’t do what I did for sympathy. If Dr. Ambrose suggests that this is something I made happen because I like people to feel sorry for me, she’s a worse psychologist than I thought… .
“Are you all right? Would you like a nurse?” the sergeant asked kindly.
I left my cheeks wet, and smiled in between them. “I’m fine, really. It’s just a lot to take in.”
“Is it your version of events that no one saw you and Henry Ware together after the church service?”
I looked at the wall over his shoulder to give myself a break from his eyes. “When we were in the closet, the door opened for a second. I thought he’d pushed it open by accident, and shut it again. That’s what I assumed.” I’m glad I hadn’t known it was someone else. I would have worried that it had been my mother.
“That all fits together then. Thank you.” He put his phone away.
“Sergeant? Did Dr. Ambrose see Henry attack me?” I genuinely didn’t remember beyond the slaps. The doctor had told me that losing the memories immediately around a concussion of this severity was normal.
“No,” he said.
I thought ahead to a trial. Someone official would describe it, wouldn’t they? The doctor would have worked it backwards from my injuries, and they would have figured out exactly what he did to me. I wanted to know.
“Thank you,” I said, smiling bravely again.
I figured the sergeant would have a nice smile. He has a boyish face, so you’d assume they would go together. But he didn’t show me one. His phone must have vibrated in his pocket; I didn’t even hear it ring. He just nodded at me and pulled it out and started talking to someone else.
Chapter 13
Morris Keene
NO ONE KNOWS at exactly what point on Annalise’s half-hour route home things went wrong, but there aren’t that many options.
The road connecting her school in Bishop’s Stortford and her home in Lilling is well-travelled, and was back then too. Not jammed at commute time, but busy enough that there should have been a witness to something.
Some regular commuters thought they might have seen her; they had seen cyclists in general that afternoon, a couple of teenage girls with long hair billowing out behind them; no helmets back then. But no one had been certain. None of her school friends admitted to travelling even part of the way with her that day, but several had been confident of the time: at twenty minutes past four P.M., Annalise had left a French club meeting to go home.
The burial place along the railroad tracks was less than a mile from the road, at about the midpoint between the school and the village, but if what we’d learned from the skirt was true, that didn’t really matter. She had presumably been lured or forced off into one of the several side tracks, or got into someone’s car, and then been kept somewhere. Her purple bicycle was never found, despite a wide search for it. That made my job easier; every garage, shed, and barn that had been already looked into was not likely to have been her prison. That meant I needed to use the list to find the garages, sheds, and barns that hadn’t been voluntarily opened up to the police.
I printed out a map, so I could write on it. Well, “write” is a fancy word for it … I scrawled a blue highlighter over the railway line, awkwardly with my left hand, and then a yellow highlighter along the road. I usually wrote only by tapping on a touch screen, or, in this case, making some awkward left-handed marks. Still, the act of dragging the pen around the paper helped me to think.
“Dad? Do you need help?”
It had been almost a year since the injury. Even just six months earlier, an offer like that would have been a flick against my cheek, reminding me of my uselessness. Today it was a hug around the neck, like she used to give when she was a kid, jumping from the stairs onto my back. She’s fifteen now, well past that sort of gesture, but the kindness in her voice knocked the breath out of me today the same as her old jump-hugs used to. “Thanks, Dora. I’m just figuring out where I need to drive today.”
“Work?” She leaned against the table edge. I realised that her noticing my weakness didn’t hurt me today because her offer to help meant that she’s feeling stronger. All I want in this world is for her to get past the events of this recent fucked-up summer. If she surpasses me in conquering trauma, so much the better. That’s what a parent wants: better for their kids.
“I’m working on a case from before you were born,” I told her.
“How much before?”
“I was just born.”
She thought for a moment. “Okay. The seventies.” She leaned over the table to better see the map. “Oh, Lilling! That girl. Her name began with A?”
I nodded. “Yes, that girl. You’ve got to keep this utterly to yourself, understand? Nothing to any friends, even if they’ve never heard of the case before. I don’t want to trigger the press.”
“Won’t whatever you’re about to do in Lilling trigger the press?”
I rubbed my forehead. Yes, probably. Maybe already has. I just wanted to find something good to give them before they found out about it.
“Don’t you know who killed her?”
“No. It was never solved.”
“So he could still be alive?”
“I hope so. I’d like to lock him up.”
“Or he’s in jail already. That’s why it hasn’t happened again.”
Is that certain? Was it a one-off, or the start of a later pattern we’ve failed to recognise?
“What’s the blue line?” she asked.
“Railway line. Her body was found here.” I pointed. I didn’t elaborate on my questions about the certainty of the body’s identification.
“And the yellow?”
“Her route home from school. She rode a bike. Should have taken twenty-five minutes.”
“With friends?”
“Not that day.”
“Why not?”
Annalise was a popular girl. The photographs showed that. The breathless media had proclaimed it. But if it were true, why hadn’t she been in the centre of a group that afternoon, or even just one of a pair? It might be in the old notes somewhere, but I didn’t recall seeing it. Was it usual for Annalise to cycle home alone?
“Did she make it home?”
“No,” I said, though technically she could have gone home and then gone out again. The parents had insisted to the original investigators that there was nothing to indicate she’d made it into the house. No glass in the kitchen drunk out of, no fresh slice missing from the cake on the counter. No handbag or school bag dropped by the front door (it was later established that she left her books in her school locker and carried with her only her small personal bag). She hadn’t changed out of her uniform; her mother had claimed to know her wardrobe with an uncanny degree of precision.
Dora grabbed her bicycle helmet off the newel post at the bottom of the stair bannister. “Well, I’ll be back later.”
We’d chosen this house in Cambourne in part so Dora would be able to cycle to school. But, “I’ll drive you,” I said.
“Dad. I’m not going to get … whatever happened to her.”
“I’m not thinking that.” Of course, though, I was. I improvised: “A car is safer in case of an accident than a bicycle. I’ll drive you. I’m going now.” I gathered up my papers and phone and keys. My supposed safety concern wasn’t unfounded; death by road accident is twenty times more likely than death by murder. In the seventies, before seat belts and bike helmets, roads were infinitely more dangerous than back alleys. When you look at the statistics, it’s astonishing that anyone managed to unexpectedly die by anything else. Annalise had defied the odds.
Yet she’d been on a bicycle. On a road …
Dora broke into my thoughts. “I need my bike. I have to be able to get home again.”
“I’ll—” But I couldn’t know if I’d be back in time to pick her up. And it was futile, anyway. I knew that. It was bailing out the ocean with a bucket. I gave in.
My wandering thoughts also gave up on their tangent. If Annalise had been in an accident on Bishop’s Road, that would have been discovered quickly, if not witnessed. No, what had happened to her was not an accident; it was “a deliberate,” as Dora used to say when she was small.
“Dad, I’ll be fine.” She slipped her backpack easily over one shoulder. Her school had switched to ebooks for most of their texts. No more backbreaking lifting.
She could manage it if it were full of books, I said to myself, full of parental admiration. I kept these words in my head; she wouldn’t have wanted them said out loud. But I appreciated her strength. She’d never had to spend a night in jail but the arrest itself, and all that led up to it, had been traumatic enough. That she was back at school at all made me proud of her.
Dora stopped with her hand on the doorknob. “What did happen to her?” she asked.
“She disappeared,” I said, because every other more concrete answer, I was realising, wasn’t necessarily true.
Dora shrugged. The light backpack lifted up and dropped down jauntily. “Maybe she just left.”
She shut the door behind her. The door thudded within the frame; the latch clicked into place.
If Annalise Wood had “just left,” she’d have been either escaping something bad, or running away towards something good. The obvious people with enough power to make a child run away are abusive parents; but the original investigators couldn’t find anything that pointed to them, and besides, if Annalise had been afraid, she could have returned after they died. She could have been running to a boyfriend, but surely with all of the media attention she would have been shamed into returning home once she realised how much she was missed. Even if she’d wanted to stay away, she would have been a virtual prisoner because of all of the publicity. No, if Annalise had been alive beyond the afternoon she disappeared, I was confident that she’d been held prisoner against her will.
I examined Google Earth for outbuildings and isolated houses within a four-mile-diameter circle centred between her school and home, and dabbed an orange highlighter to mark the locations of the more significant-seeming ones that didn’t have a record of being searched for her bicycle. Start with the obvious, only widen the search if you have to.
Chloe was working this from the other end. Spencer was allowing her access to Hannah-Claire Finney’s phone, to see if any of the calls she’d made recently related to people involved in the Annalise case beyond the two ex-police porters we already knew about, and her Aunt Cathy and Uncle Charlie, who seem too much of a coincidence for this to be just a random case of obsession on Hannah-Claire’s part. Then again, if my aunt and uncle’s friend had been famously murdered, I might end up strangely obsessed, no further association with the actual case required.
My only request to Chloe was to keep me well out of that end of the case. I didn’t trust myself to be in the same room with DS Spencer. I didn’t have enough of an answer to Annalise yet; I didn’t want to face him ignorant.
And Chloe had handed over to me the trails she’d been following with regard to the disposal of Annalise’s clothes after her parents died, and the residents of the boarding-house-now-law-office in the eighties. Which, it turned out, had dovetailed. Her talkative contacts, Marnie and Rosalie, had decided to shut their mouths after Cathy’s daughter had been attacked at Hannah-Claire’s funeral. But Marnie had given Chloe one last piece of information: the name of the charity to which the clothes had been given. The local representative of that charity in the early eighties had been Amanda Collingwood, now deceased, then an older woman living at the same address as Cathy’s husband’s law office. She was one of the boarders, and the clothes had been brought into that house. Apparently, at least one set of them had not made it to their intended charitable destination.
The boarding house, and the possible year of burial arguably falling in the eighties rather than the seventies, gave me a good cover for my interviews today. I didn’t want to tell them yet that this was about Annalise. Besides, asking for a glass of water or a chance to sit can get one inside better than a request to search the property.
It worked for the most part. I knocked on the doors of seven houses, and, of them, four had people home. All of those invited me in. Three of them were older women alone.
My first try went like this: “Excuse me, Mrs. Brent.” (I had the names from the years-ago interviews and current real estate records. This woman had lived there since 1985 and had been interviewed by Peter Gage in 1992.) “I’m very sorry to disturb you. I’m with the police”—shows identification—“and I’m trying to get some help with an investigation. I need some guidance on local history and I’m hoping you might be able to help me.”
From her I got tea, stale but earnestly offered biscuits from a Marks & Spencer Christmas tin (not from this year’s holiday season), and lots of fascinated questions about drug dealing. I didn’t quite agree that drugs were what had brought me there, but didn’t deny it either. She was intrigued, and keen to speculate, but had no firsthand knowledge herself about anyone who had lived in the boarding house.
At the next house, I embraced the implication of drugs, which continued to spark speculation. There was always an assumption that the person we were looking for at the boarding house was a “young man,” which worked in my favour. I wanted to find out if these homes I was in had any men between the ages
of about seventeen and forty living in them at that time, and I got to that by asking if anyone living there then might have been friends with anyone staying at the boarding house. The woman in the second house had a brother in that range, but he, she said, hadn’t had many friends.
Ah, a loner … Well, that could be who I was looking for.
“I bet you were popular,” I said with a smile, to not seem too interested in the brother just yet.
Lucy—her name was Lucy Minton, née Burke, fifty-something years old with tightly pulled hair and a stern frown—did not appreciate it. “Don’t flirt. It isn’t work-appropriate.”
I apologised. I asked for a glass of water. (She’d allowed me in but had not offered tea.)
She took her time considering this request. “No, sorry. I feel that you were trying to take advantage of my age with false charm. I may not be married any more but that doesn’t mean I can be taken in by a little flattery. I’m well aware that I’m past being fawned over honestly.”
“I apologise, ma’am. I so much appreciate being flattered myself that it just pops out of me sometimes.” I got all of that out with an entirely straight face.
“If my brother were here, you’d be better behaved.”
“Is he coming back soon? I’d like to speak with him.”
“He lives with a woman in St. Albans.” She stood, so I did too.
“Well, thank you, very much. You wouldn’t have your brother’s phone number, would you?”
“It’s her phone number. He doesn’t pay for anything. Her last name is Smith. Good luck.”
Back in my car, I was able to find his name in the 1992 interview records: Joshua Burke. All right, living with a woman named Smith in St. Albans … Not impossible to find. Just a pain in the arse. But this property had a derelict-looking barn behind the house. He was on the list.
Actually, he was the entirety of the list so far.
The next house, occupied by a young couple in the middle of renovations, who I don’t think had even been alive in the eighties, I didn’t add to the list. Their barn, however … A couple of compliments was all it took to get into their soon-to-be art studio. The leftover rubbish they were attempting to conquer seemed to lean more towards storage room than prison, but a lot of years had passed. Given a couple of decades, normality can swallow up deviant history the way that jungle vines obscure ancient cities.
Look for Her Page 16