Look for Her

by Emily Winslow

  I suddenly hated her sitting on my couch. I suddenly hated her fingers on my keyboard. And I realized that I really need to get it all out, all of my stuff, or give it to her officially, and just live my life moving forward. I think you would approve of that, Dr. Ambrose. It sounds like something a professional would call a breakthrough.

  It’s made me realize that I don’t need to “make nice” just because they’re all the family I have left. I have Henry now, and his family, and his doting mother and judgemental grandmother and his sister who sells candles. That has given me courage.

  I’m going to take back that baby book, Tall or Small, to throw it away. I just don’t want Anna to have access to that part of me. And there are some things about her and our family that her belongings have given me access to as well. There are some things that need dealing with.

  We’re going to talk some things through tonight, me and my family.

  I’ll write again if I fuck everything up.

  Must go! I need to tidy before Henry gets back. He still isn’t used to this being “our” home. I think I’ll ask again about us getting a new place together. Maybe that can be his Christmas present to me.

  “The last one is from the day Hannah-Claire died,” Laurie said.

  “You’re her doctor. What do you think it means?”

  “I was only her therapist for one hour! One hour! That doesn’t make me ‘her doctor.’”

  I backed off. “All right. I’ll have a go. Sounds like she was rather up-and-down. Emotional. Someone in a state like that might take risks, or make a statement.”

  “She said she was going to talk things through with her family. She was with someone from her family. The way she used that word makes it clear that she meant her old family, not the new one.”

  “Yes, and after that conversation she could have been even more upset, and done something dramatic. I’m not saying that I think she did, but if you’re trying to prove that she was murdered rather than suicidal or drunk-and-clumsy, we’re going to need more. As for Henry, look, she loves him, but it comes off as a bit desperate, in my opinion. He seems … tightly wound, at least from the way she reacts to his imminent arrivals.”

  “So you agree with the sergeant, Henry did it?”

  “She was in the middle of Cambridge near her old flat, her old job, her old life. Maybe Henry didn’t like that.”

  “Maybe,” Laurie hesitantly acknowledged. “But, Inspector, Anna was scared by me having these emails. I’m sure of it. Hannah-Claire says in them that she had left lots of things in her flat, including her ‘keyboard.’ If she’d left her desktop computer, and Anna had been using it, she could have found these in the sent folder. If she deleted them from there, the only copies left would be the ones in my spam folder. Anna had to have assumed I’d received and read them. There’s something in here that she doesn’t want us to know.”

  I nodded, pacing. This was what it had come to: our attempt to solve what happened to Annalise was going nowhere, and now the press knew it—but we were going to figure out what had happened to Hannah-Claire. “The obvious thing would be that Anna was hiding her own meeting with Hannah-Claire. But you say that Blake gives her an alibi?” For the duration of this conversation, I’d decided to take Blake’s claims at his word.

  “Yes. Hannah-Claire was there, Blake said, but she left alive. Anna must be protecting someone, someone in their family.”

  The dates clicked into place. That was the afternoon I’d been at the office of Rigg and Loft, and Rosalie had answered a phone call from Cathy’s niece. It had been a confirmation of the niece meeting Cathy later that day.

  That had been Hannah-Claire, and Anna must be protecting her mother.

  Chapter 16

  Morris Keene

  I PRESSED THE NIPPLE-BELL at Chloe’s door. A ringing; a baby wail. Familiar now. But instead of Dan answering, it was Chloe. She was already dressed, even though it was ridiculously early. The baby must have been with Dan, because it wasn’t on her. She said, “I’ve seen the news.”

  That pulled me up. I hadn’t seen the news.

  “What’s in the news?” I asked, already wincing. We’d been waiting for it. The word “Annalise” coming out of a policeman’s mouth made it inevitable. Someone had talked.

  “Is that not why you’re here?”

  “Coffee, please. Please,” I said, making it clear with the second “please” that this wasn’t an “ordering her around” request but a desperate one.

  She led me to her kitchen table, which was overfull with mail and catalogues. “Did you know that they just send those?” Chloe asked, as she fitted a cafetière together and boiled water.

  I nudged the thick booklets with the back of my hand. Babies in very expensive clothes and beside very expensive toys smiled manically at me. When Chloe handed me a mug, I used a baby’s grin as a coaster.

  “TV or paper news?” I asked.

  “Online.”

  Right. Shows I am getting old, that that wasn’t my first guess. “What was the headline?” I asked.

  “New DNA Evidence in the Case of Murdered Teen Annalise Wood.”

  I sipped. “That’s actually restrained.”

  “I know! I was expecting ‘raped teen beauty’ or something like that.”

  No doubt that would come. “Named sources?”

  She shook her head. “But—” She hesitated.

  “What?” My coffee cup had made a ring around the catalogue-baby’s head, halo-like.

  “Your name.”

  I nodded. The press would soon come looking to me for quotes. The press would come looking to me for a solution.

  “And Hannah-Claire Finney.”

  I sat up from my fatalistic slouch. “Really?” I tapped the table. “That narrows it down,” I said, meaning that only a few of the people I’d spoken to knew also that Hannah-Claire Finney had been thinking that she could be Annalise’s child.

  “It does more than that,” Chloe said. She told me about Hannah-Claire’s cousin, and the cousin’s threats to their shared therapist, while popping toast emphasised random points.

  “So, this woman, Sandra—” I began.

  “She calls herself Anna. She’s a little into Annalise.”

  “All right, Anna. She believes that Henry Ware killed Hannah-Claire, and set out to provoke more violence from him, of which she was certain he was capable, in order that he would go to prison for something, if not the murder itself. Is that right?”

  She nodded, while buttering. She had four slices piled up in front of her.

  I continued, “But to stop the therapist from revealing … something … Anna threatened that she would lie and claim that her boyfriend—do I have this right, the therapist’s son?—was actually the one to do it, at her request, in order to frame Henry, who in this version hadn’t done it. That’s what’s happening.”

  “And that doesn’t make any sense, because it would undermine the whole point of her injuries, which are, truly, awful. This was no light thing. She put herself at significant risk. If her point was to sacrifice herself to put Henry in jail, well … But that couldn’t have been her point if she’s so willing to change her story to keep the therapist’s mouth shut.”

  “You’re grinning. You know something.” I know that look. She likes to get one over on other cops.

  “I think her point wasn’t blaming Henry so much as it was protecting someone.”

  “Herself?” But Chloe wouldn’t have phrased it the way she had if that’s what she was leading up to.

  “No. Alibi with the boyfriend. So who would she care about?”

  “You trust the boyfriend?” It’s not like Chloe to trust anyone in a case.

  “They’d broken up. I think he’s telling the truth, and so does his therapist mother. Which leaves us …”

  “Family.”

  “And who is her family?” in that voice in which parents ask children what colour grass is.

  Chloe had told me yesterday. “Charli
e. And Cathy.”

  “And her sister, Sadie, and her stepfather, Nigel Rigg. But, yes, mostly Charlie and Cathy. I think Cathy.”

  “You think what about Cathy, exactly?”

  “I think she killed Hannah-Claire Finney.”

  Chloe explained about Hannah-Claire’s lost emails to Laurie Ambrose, and the plan they revealed for Hannah to meet “family” the night of her death, which was what Anna had most likely been trying to keep quiet. What Anna didn’t know was that Chloe had witnessed a phone call from Hannah-Claire to the Rigg law office confirming her plans with Cathy that day. And a mother is an obvious person for someone to want to protect.

  I took the role of damp to her enthusiasm. “We don’t even know that Hannah-Claire was killed. We can’t know. It could have been an accident. We can’t prove otherwise.”

  “But I think we do a good job of proving—well, implying strongly—that Anna believes that Cathy killed Hannah-Claire. Or at least fears it. Otherwise why should she go to all the trouble? All of this specific, horrific trouble?”

  “Which means that Anna presumably knows something we don’t yet know, something that maybe could prove that Hannah-Claire was killed, if we can get it out of her …” By now the catalogue’s perfect cover-baby was marred by Chloe’s crumbs, a smear of butter, and a splash of my coffee.

  Chloe laughed. “Who would pay a hundred and ten pounds for a cardigan for a baby? A white one, no less!”

  “Speaking of which, where’s the real baby?” I hadn’t heard a sound since that initial waking burst.

  She leaned over the table to confide: “Bottles. Amazing.” Presumably, Dan was also involved, not just bottles on their own.

  “I should take a turn,” she said, I assumed meaning with feeding. “Then go back to bed. Laurie Ambrose and her revelations kept me up last night.” She stood, then remembered back to the start of our conversation. “Wait. You said you didn’t know the Annalise investigation had hit the press. Why are you here?”

  I shook my head. I brought the now-empty mug to my lips to stall.

  Chloe sat down again. “Morris?”

  I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but Chloe and I call each other by first names, instead of the more professional use of surnames. We’re friends. I can trust her. That’s why I’m here.

  “The Review Team does more than cold cases,” I reminded her. “We also review current cases under very specific circumstances.” I locked eyes with another cover-baby, this one disconcertingly riding a cartoon tiger.

  “Meaning what?” she asked, leaning over her plate.

  “Bob Cameron told me to leave off with the Annalise investigation yesterday. He looked at what we have, which to be honest isn’t likely to add up to much, and decided that it would be better not to ‘upset the apple cart’ by pursuing the theory that the body by the tracks is someone else. He’s one for clichés, our Superintendent Cameron. He thinks it’s unlikely we’ll be able to identify who the body—which, to be fair, we don’t actually have any more, thanks to cremation—actually was. He thinks it would ‘undermine public confidence’ to try to do so. He is also one for arse-covering. I wonder if he’s got a Google alert about the news story.”

  “It’ll be in the Daily Mail by tomorrow, with full-colour photos from 1976.”

  “It probably will.”

  “But that could be good for us, good for the case. Cameron might have to let you go on with it, if the cat’s already out of the bag.”

  No doubt using that exact phrase.

  Chloe tried to comfort me. “I know you didn’t want it out, I know you don’t like your name attached to such a well-known case without a proper resolution, but this could work for good. It already has with Laurie Ambrose. She wouldn’t have told us anything if the news mention hadn’t pushed her.”

  “It may be pushing Anna Williams, if she thinks Dr. Ambrose told the police what Anna didn’t want her to. Spencer should keep an eye on both of them.”

  “I already tipped him off to that.”

  I raised my eyebrows. She’d called him last night, or this morning, but not called me.

  She saw my face. “It wasn’t urgent for you. He needed to do something about Laurie Ambrose’s information.”

  “So do I.” I sucked in a breath and pushed it out slowly. “Hannah-Claire’s death was an incident of potential domestic violence that was under police investigation. Anna’s attack is an escalation of that incident and has been deemed in need of Review Team oversight.”

  Chloe pushed her chair back. “You? They gave it to you?”

  “My two colleagues are deep in another case. I’ve been asked to use my suddenly free time to ‘assist’ Detective Sergeant Spencer. That’s why I came to see you.”

  She nodded, but then tilted her head. “For what? What do you want me to do?”

  “I just wanted you to know. I—I think I came here to put it off, to be honest.” I held my hands in my lap, the left one squeezing my right, hard. For some reason that helps me to stop unreasonable panic from escalating.

  The noise was unsettling. At first I thought it was the baby, because I couldn’t imagine Chloe would make that sound at me. She was laughing. I pushed back from the table.

  She covered her mouth. “No! Morris! Don’t you get it? Don’t you?”

  “Apparently not.” Apparently I was stupid as well as everything else.

  “Please.” She put her hand on my arm. “You idiot. Do you not understand that Spencer feels embarrassed by what he did? He feels foolish for having been so tough with Dora. He has to take it from your old mates who tease him. He’s the one going to be humiliated by you coming to look over his shoulder, not the other way round.”

  “I know he won’t like it. I know that. But that’s exactly what’ll make him want to humiliate me first. And if he tries, what do I have to fling back at him? What do we have?”

  She smiled. “You said ‘we.’”

  “You’ve been a help.”

  “I can still be a help.”

  I squinted at her. “What do you mean?”

  “You and Spencer go after Cathy and Anna. Cathy wouldn’t appreciate seeing me again anyway. I’ll keep following what we’ve got about Annalise.”

  “We don’t have anything much about Annalise. What we have are clues about the body by the tracks, which I’m increasingly persuaded isn’t Annalise at all.”

  “Tell me.”

  So I did. I told her my theory that the school uniform, which had come with the other donated clothes into the boarding house, may have been voluntarily worn, possibly as sexual role-playing, and possibly without anyone knowing it was Annalise’s specifically; just random discarded clothes costuming a schoolgirl fantasy. The vantage point from the tower possibly indicated that the person who did the killing—or, at least, the burying—was the one who lived in the boarding house, rather than the girl being the one who lived there (though, of course, they could have both lived there). I hoped that Ginny Russell, the dutiful daughter who had looked after her father literally all of her life, would get back to me with her memories of the boarding house’s residents. Perhaps she’s dutiful in all things. I could only hope.

  “That’s settled, then,” Chloe announced, all efficiency. “I’ll go and see Ms. Russell. See if I can get that list of names of people who lived in the boarding house. You go and see Spencer.”

  “That’s the plan,” I agreed.

  I was grateful. I knew it would be easier facing Spencer if I had the possibility of an eventual solution to hold on to. Any solution. Maybe if we can’t name the girl, we can still name the man.

  “Chloe,” I said. “I hate today. I hate it. I don’t want to walk into Spencer’s case. I don’t want to make him feel small. I don’t want to fight. But he has to respect me. Whatever happens or doesn’t happen with Annalise and this thing we started with Charlie’s DNA, he needs to respect me.”

  She leaned on her arm, clearly exhausted. I knew I should go but I stayed beca
use I needed something. “You can’t control what other people do, Morris. You can only control whether you deserve respect, not whether he gives it to you.”

  “You sound like you’re speaking from experience.” She has not always had it easy in Major Crimes.

  “Look, I watched a lot of telly when I was on bed rest. I mean enormous amounts of it. Huge. And there was a multi-part dramatisation about the discovery of King Tut’s tomb that was somehow framed as a doomed romance. You can look it up if you must. Anyway, I found myself getting angry as I watched it, and it took me almost the whole way through to figure out why.” She carried her plate and my mug to the counter. “The whole premise was that Howard Carter—he’s the man who discovered the tomb, in case you didn’t study history properly when you were at school—found it because he was tenacious. Because he was determined. Those were presented as his unique virtues. Only he deserved the tomb because only he persevered.”

  “Isn’t that fair?” I asked. “If everyone else gave up …” I wanted to help with the dishes, but the counter was covered in many more than I could make a start on without making more of a mess first.

  “It was only virtuous of him to continue after everyone else moved on to other things because we know now that the tomb was there, full of treasure. What if it hadn’t been? Then he would have been stubborn and stupid instead of determined and brilliant. My point is that whether he was stupid or brilliant wasn’t defined by his actions. It was defined by the tomb. If the tomb was there, he’s a hero. If it wasn’t, if the valley had been emptied by all the previous expeditions, he’s a fool. And I was frustrated with the TV programme because that’s our job. That’s our job! We don’t know if there are findable answers. We don’t know. There might not be any. We just have to do the work, and whether we’re ultimately heroes or time wasters isn’t on us. Even if we do everything right, there might not be something to find.”