After lemonade with the renovators, I genuinely needed the toilet at the fourth occupied house. There was a woman in the front garden who looked about seventy, pushing a mower. I took a chance based on the file. “Ms. Russell?”
She stopped the mower’s engine and pulled a pair of pink earmuffs off her head. “Yes?” she shouted far louder than necessary, and shook out her bobbed white hair. Whatever noise-dampening had been attempted with the earmuffs, it didn’t seem effective.
“Ms. Russell, I was just with your neighbours. I’m sorry to have to ask this, but could I please use your toilet?” I raised my voice so there would be no repetition required; I was in a hurry.
She squinted. I smiled. At last she wafted her hand not in the direction of the house, but towards a cluster of outbuildings. The door to the shed was open; presumably that’s where the mower had come from. Next to that was an outhouse.
I hesitated for only a moment.
When I was finished, I glanced into the shed. Storage. Well, storage now. In any case, much smaller than the barn that was becoming an art studio. Not really room for even a bed. But there was a garage-like building on the other side of the house. And, of course, in each of these cases there was the house itself.
If you’re willing to hide someone completely, you don’t actually need much room.
“Thank you, Ms. Russell,” I said as I rejoined her. She was looking in my car. She jumped when I came up from behind.
“You’re not a carpenter?” she asked anxiously. I realised that in my haste I hadn’t identified myself and she’d assumed I was a contractor working on the barn conversion. I showed her my ID.
“Police?” she said, so aghast that I wondered if she might have shoplifted something on a recent outing.
“I’m with the police, yes. I’m investigating something that happened at the old boarding house at the edge of Lilling back in the eighties.”
She breathed in deep and then laughed it all out as she gestured towards my car. “When you first drove up, I thought I’d forgotten which day it was. My friend Pamela takes me shopping on Thursdays.”
“And what an enormous disappointment to see me emerge instead.”
She blushed. Ah, flattery would work this time.
“Ms. Russell. Ginny. May I call you Ginny? I’m Morris.”
We shook hands. Hers were tougher from yard work. She didn’t seem to notice the faintness of my grasp, which I covered as best I could with a strong thumb. “Of course,” she said.
“Ginny, I know from the property records that you’ve lived here since before the eighties”—I avoided even using the word “seventies”—“with your father, John Russell, is that correct?”
She nodded, and her eyes slid towards the house.
I followed her gaze. “Is he still alive?” I asked, sounding more shocked than was polite. It was actually impressive that she would have a living parent at her age, but it would be rude to show the degree of incredulity I felt, implying as it would that she was herself terrifically old (she was) and/or that her father had, well, fathered her when he was very young (possibly, and not my business). Then I noticed a ramp coming down the side of the steps, presumably for a wheelchair, and a garden table with two empty, used teacups.
“You look after him,” I said, my tone acknowledging what a workload that must be. Peter Gage’s old interview notes had indicated that they had been living like that even in 1992, just the two of them, the mother long gone. “That’s very admirable,” I added, inwardly shuddering at what might be ahead as my own parents and in-laws got older. “Did either you or he know anyone who lived at the boarding house?”
She lifted her chin sceptically. “Are you really asking? Don’t you know?”
“I know extremely little, Ginny. Why they let me keep my job I’ve no idea.” Smiling, smiling, meaning both I’m-harmless and I-need-your-help… .
She liked that. She relaxed her shoulders. “I used to work there. I cleaned once a week.”
“Really? Can you remember any names?”
“All of them! I’m very good at that. Can I send you a list?” Her eyes slid towards the house again.
“You can, but I’m happy to wait right here, or to come back later… .”
“Please, I’d rather post it. Do you have a card?”
“I do.” As I fished one out of my inner jacket pocket, a tinny jingle came from inside the house. Her father was ringing a bell for her.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry …” she said, gathering up the loose hem of her denim shirt in an anxious fist as she took my card with her other hand. “You have to go.”
I pulled my car out of sight of the property, in case her anxiety about her father’s potential reaction to my presence was correct. I didn’t want to make trouble for her.
I parked in what was probably the start of someone’s driveway or a farmer’s tractor path, and added notes on my tablet. I put John Russell on the list. Why not? If he was, say, ninety now, then in 1976 he would have been in his fifties. No reason he couldn’t have taken Annalise.
He and any of the other hundreds of men within spitting distance of Lilling. And it didn’t even have to be someone around here. People have cars. She was taken from a road. Shit. This was hopeless in 1976, never mind now.
All of the new leads depended on one thing: Annalise being the girl in that grave by the tracks, her burial now time-shifted by at least three years. But I was feeling it deep in my body that she wasn’t Annalise, and I finally figured out why.
If that body was Annalise, there would have been no need to redress her in something identical to what she was already wearing the day she disappeared. Even if the original uniform was old or torn by then, it was just going into the ground. I couldn’t come up with a scenario that made sense.
It was at first equally baffling to wonder: Why would someone dress another young woman in clothes from Annalise’s wardrobe? But did they even know? The initials on the name-tape wouldn’t have stuck out to someone not specifically looking for them. It was just a school uniform, in a donation box. We know that this young woman didn’t go to Annalise’s school, because Annalise is the school’s only question mark over several decades; so it wasn’t someone needing a uniform for actual school.
It was a sex thing, I said in my mind. Then I typed it into my notes on my tablet: schoolgirl sex thing. Maybe she was a prostitute. Maybe she was a runaway. Someone—likely someone at that boarding house—had given it to her to wear while she was still alive.
Usually when a theory comes together, it feels like slipping into your own car after driving someone else’s: suddenly everything fits, there’s room for your legs, everything necessary’s within perfect reach, and the radio is set to the good stuff. This didn’t feel like that.
This felt clammy, because I was sweating. This felt stifling, even though I was panting.
I rested my head on the steering wheel.
I wasn’t going to solve Annalise, I realised. At best, we were going to identify some poor girl who wasn’t as famous, maybe not as wanted and missed, as Annalise. At best, we would comfort a grieving parent or two, if they were still alive. That should be enough, I reminded myself. Truth should be enough.
But the truth is that I was going to become the detective who un-solved Annalise Wood, and made us know less of what happened than we thought we did before.
All of this “kept in a shed” business would come to nothing. We’d only thought of it to make sense of Charlie’s DNA getting on her three years later. But if the girl in the grave by the tracks had nothing to do with Annalise except the clothes, then what happened to Annalise herself wasn’t time-shifted by Charlie’s DNA. It was probably the same as we always assumed; she was just in a different and unfindable shallow grave.
That’s when I stopped knocking on doors, and drove back to the road between Bishop’s Stortford and Lilling. There was nothing to see on it, and hadn’t been for years; only for a brief moment in 1976, when no one w
as looking.
Chapter 14
Laurie Ambrose
THANK GOD FOR work.
I rescheduled the next day’s clients. I didn’t stay at home, though. I went into the office. Habit was going to keep me upright.
I played at working: fully dressed, sitting straight, doing desk things. My office is an odd combination of cosy and impersonal. I want clients to feel “at home” here, so there’s a soft, bright-blue pillow on one of the chairs, a craftsman-style desk lamp, and a beautifully carved wooden clock on the wall; but I need the focus off me, so there are no family photos or evidence of my hobbies. Today, that personal neutrality was comforting. Dealing with the details of my actual life would have been overwhelming. Instead, my office felt like a kind of waiting room. It was a place to gather my strength before re-entering the specifics of my life.
I thought about Hannah-Claire. I thought about the clients I had just cancelled. How would I feel if one of them died before I could see them next? Would it be in part my fault? Was Hannah in part my fault?
I didn’t know if anything I knew mattered. The professional guidelines regarding client privacy leave it to me to decide what’s important enough to share with police. Hannah-Claire and Anna being related was a shock for me, but would it be meaningful to anyone else? That Anna made Hannah-Claire believe that she was Annalise’s daughter, playing with Hannah-Claire’s grief and linking her to something vividly terrible, adding to Hannah-Claire’s roster of dead parents … It was cruel, but not criminal. Did it have anything to do with her death? If her death was a suicide, possibly, but not prosecutably. It was a vicious lie, but lying isn’t criminal.
Assuming it was a lie.
It must be, surely. If Annalise Wood had had a child, that would have come out by now.
And if it was true, how would Anna—Sandra—know it? And why would she have kept it to herself except for this one slip? I don’t believe that for a moment. If she knew something this explosive, she would have exploited it just to insert herself into the case. It had to have been something Anna created to hold some kind of power over Hannah-Claire.
But even if it was true, I reminded myself, this had nothing to do with Hannah-Claire dying and Anna being attacked.
Unless someone else believed it was true. Unless someone believed that Hannah-Claire and Anna “knowing” this thing—whether Anna actually believed it or if it was true at all—was a threat to them.
And me knowing it too could be a threat to me.
That thought felt like a voice outside myself, a voice I didn’t recognise. Since when had I become a coward?
I fished for my phone in my bag, wondering where I had tucked the business card from that detective sergeant I’d had to interact with yesterday. Had I thrown it away? Part of me hoped that I had, so the decision would be out of my hands. But something knocked against my window: three raps. I flinched and dropped the bag, spilling my wallet and phone onto the carpet.
My window has blinds over it, which I’d tilted but not pulled up. I saw a striped version of outside, distorted by the missing parts. In strips: the street, cars coming off the roundabout, and a hand, and a head. I jumped back, and my chair rolled against my rubbish basket.
She stepped back. I stood and pushed apart two slats of blinds with my fingers, and saw her in full. Anna Williams was outside my office. She had on sunglasses. She had a cane in one hand. She mimed hugging herself, as if she were cold and pointed to the front door.
She smiled, and nodded, as if we were friends.
I walked back from the window, until she couldn’t see me. She would think I was going through the door of this room, to open for her the door to this building. Should I do that? I wondered. I didn’t want to. But if she left I wouldn’t know what she’d come for. I didn’t want that either.
I opened my office door. There was no one in the entry lobby, nor anyone on the worn wooden stairs. This had once been a house. It felt like Anna Williams was outside the door to my home.
The buzzer went off, a razzing, vicious sound. She’d rung the main bell.
I was too slow. My colleague Justine appeared at the top of the stairs. I waved her off and forced myself to the front door, and opened it.
Anna stood there, leaning on her cane, looking cross. I could see bruising around where her sunglasses covered. “It’s really hard to walk up stairs,” she said accusingly.
I had the nasty thought of inviting her to one of the offices on the next floor. But I stepped aside so she could limp towards my room, and followed her in.
She chose the chair with the pillow, just as she had last time.
I pulled a mini-recorder out of my desk and set it down where she could see it. I’d recorded her previous sessions, with her permission, but I did it this time as a challenge, not just as a matter of course.
“You may not want this recorded,” she said. She tried to look confident, but she couldn’t cross her legs or get comfortable.
“Who did this to you?” I asked.
“Your son.”
I froze. The wooden clock made an audible tick as it hit the hour. I was tempted to turn the recorder off. I turned my head away. I wanted to run.
“Let it record,” she said. “You can always erase it at the end.”
My bag was still on the floor, its contents spread around. I nudged them to the side with my feet rather than perform the indignity of bending over in front of her. The recorder faintly whirred.
“You lie about a lot of things, Sandra,” I said.
She took off her sunglasses and held them in her lap. A dark bruise covered over a third of her face.
“Everyone calls me Anna. Except for my family. That’s not a lie. It’s been my nickname since I went away to university.” She shifted to lean her weight to one side. Apparently the chair wasn’t a good fit for her injuries, and I leaned back in mine, ostentatiously stretching.
“You’re not at Wolfson,” I said, boldly, considering that I hadn’t checked the name Sandra. But I felt confident at this point that she simply wasn’t a student.
“No, but I had to say that I was with the University in order to be able to talk to you. If you didn’t have rules like that, I wouldn’t have had to lie.”
I didn’t argue; there wasn’t any point with someone like her.
She continued: “And once I did it, I liked it. I was allowed to say anything I wanted, to describe things however I felt like saying they were. There’s something about being a student that makes your whole life feel like a fresh start. That’s what it was like with Blake. And Clara too. She’s so friendly! You must have been a very good mother.”
I went onto autopilot. I pretended these weren’t my children she was naming. “How did you meet Blake?” Inside I was screaming.
“Here! Well, just outside of here. It was after my first session with you. He and I literally bumped into each other. Literally.” She laughed.
Blake and I were supposed to meet for dinner that evening. When he’d phoned to apologise later, I’d heard a woman’s voice in the background.
Blake is a sweet boy. Blake lacks confidence. Blake has good friends, but doesn’t always trust that he does. Maybe he should have gone to Oxford instead, or Edinburgh, or Durham. Has he stayed too close, and has it made him more vulnerable, less resilient? If his father were alive would he be more confident? I wanted to imagine a Blake who would have walked away from Anna, not one who would be flattered.
“He was a perfect gentleman,” Anna said. “You know how he is.”
“Why did you want to talk to me?” I asked. I meant both then, and now.
She answered about then, with a shrug. “Because you’d helped Hannah-Claire. She acted like she was better than me. She said that I needed ‘help.’ I think she meant it flippantly, but I figured she had a point.”
I didn’t say anything. This is the point where a client often reveals their assumptions of what I “must” be thinking.
“Look at this!” She pointe
d to her face, then swivelled and pulled up her sweater. “These are real. This really happened to me. I didn’t make this up.” She started to cry, in big, vocal sobs.
“Do you need a doctor?” I asked, as if she were a normal client. She sounded as if she were in physical pain.
“It’s another hour before I can take more meds.” She wiped her nose and took a deep, shuddering breath.
“Does it feel good?” I asked.
She widened her eyes. “Does what feel good?”
“You wanted to be a victim. You wanted to be like Annalise. Does it feel good to have a real story to tell?”
She flung her arms out wide. “Fuck off.”
I waited.
“No, seriously. I mean it. Fuck off.”
I said nothing.
“Let me explain something to you,” she said, and her voice cracked. She seemed exhausted. “My cousin died. Do you get that? It’s really fucking terrible… .”
She cried for a little while. I watched the smallest hand on the clock lurch from one second to the next.
“If this is what you came here for …” I began, tired of her manipulations.
“I know what Hannah-Claire told you, and it’s not any of your business. And it’s not the police’s business. I think we can help each other.”
I stood. “You should leave.”
“No. No! You want to know how this happened?” She gestured to her whole body. “The police wanted to arrest Henry for Hannah-Claire’s death, but they couldn’t. There wasn’t enough evidence. But I knew he has a temper. I knew what he’s capable of. So I gave the police a reason to get him. They’ve already put him in jail.”
“This has nothing to do with me.”
“It does. Because I needed Blake’s help. I knew I could get Henry’s DNA under my fingernails, and I knew I could make him angry, but there wasn’t a guarantee I could get him to hurt me badly, enough to get him punished for what he’d done to Hannah-Claire. I needed Blake to finish the job.”
Look for Her Page 17