Look for Her

by Emily Winslow

  “So you were angry,” Mr. Keene prompted.

  “What?” Mum shivered, and the rhythm of her telling was broken. “I was heartbroken. Humiliated. I had thought we were friends.”

  “Mrs. Rigg—” the sergeant began, seeming impatient to get on with Nigel, but Mr. Keene interrupted him.

  “What happened next, Cathy?” It was the first time I’d heard either of them address her by her first name.

  She looked genuinely baffled. “Nothing. Nothing. I left first. I got on my bicycle to go home but I knew that Annalise was faster than me. I thought it would be awkward if she caught up, so I went around the back of the school library and waited a while. Let her get home first. But she never did get home. And if I’d been with her then, maybe …” She covered her mouth with her fist. I didn’t know if she was going to say that she might have been able to save Annalise from whatever had happened, or if she might have fallen victim to it too.

  Mr. Keene seemed frustrated, but he let the sergeant get on with what he had to do. They took Nigel away.

  When Rosalie turned back around, she reached almost immediately to clear away the coffee things. The sergeant’s untouched and childishly sweet coffee spilled halfway over as soon as she lifted it. She grabbed a cloth from the serving tray and moved it in circles to mop up the mess, but it mostly just smeared it around. She was making these frustrated, squeaky noises, which I think would have been crying if she’d let it out. She’d worked for Nigel a lot longer than Mum had been married to him.

  Rosalie dropped the cloth back onto the tray. The table was still a sticky swirl. She left.

  Mum and I sat, with an empty chair between us.

  I used to pretend that she had named me “Annalise.” I used to tell myself that “Sandra” was very near having done so, being reducible to the same nickname, if you squint.

  Mum said to me, “When we realised that something had happened to Annalise, of course we could talk of nothing else. And of course the police wanted us to talk, and the press wanted it too. I was free to tell all the made-up French stories I could have ever wanted, but I never told a single one ever again.”

  That was all she said. We sat quietly. I waited for them to come back and take me, but they didn’t.

  Chapter 18

  Morris Keene

  THE DINING ROOM double doors thudded shut behind us: me, and DS Spencer holding Nigel Rigg by the arm.

  Spencer calmly delivered the caution to Nigel Rigg and politely apologised for bringing out handcuffs, which he didn’t mean in the slightest.

  This was Spencer’s case and his arrest; actually, I couldn’t arrest anyone any more, as the Review Team’s status is civilian. I thought I would hate it. I thought I would flinch at being addressed as “Mr. Keene” instead of by my former rank of Detective Chief Inspector. But it wasn’t a demotion, not the way it came out in there. We had decided our roles beforehand: Spencer would be deferential to Anna; I would be sceptical. We got Cathy to agree to be there, “for Anna’s sake.” We planned the lie about Blake Ambrose confessing, which his mother had helped us concoct. We were doing what it took to get Anna to give up her mother, which she did … and then! I admit we were surprised by Nigel Rigg taking on the part of chief suspect. We assumed that the photograph would eventually give us Cathy’s fingerprints. From Nigel’s reaction to it, though, I was confident that it would yield his. We’d done it, even if the “it” we’d been aiming for had changed partway through. The throbbing in my rib cage was made equally of thrill and panic.

  Coming down from that now, with an arrest and a reasonable case ahead, made a buzzing, humming satisfaction in my chest. Spencer turned at the front door, looked over his shoulder, and mouthed “thanks” at me, which felt like we were high-fiving over Nigel Rigg’s head. For my part, I nodded, and smiled, and sat on the edge of the reception desk, arms folded.

  Rosalie the receptionist pushed through the doors, carrying a tray. She stared at Nigel Rigg’s hands behind his back as he exited.

  Her obvious agony penetrated my vindication. We solve things, but we don’t fix them. A lot of things can’t be fixed, only revealed.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, standing up straight.

  She sat at her desk. “He’s the one who should be sorry.”

  I didn’t have to follow Spencer, because we’d come in our own cars. I was tempted, though, to chase our moment of victory, in order to enjoy it a little bit longer. But I wasn’t needed; I could hear Spencer’s car already pulling away. It wasn’t my case we’d solved here. Annalise, and whoever the girl was who’d been buried by the tracks … Those cases, my cases, were still opaque.

  When Cathy had revealed that she and Annalise had argued the last afternoon Annalise had been seen alive, I had thought for a moment that … what? That young Cathy Rigg had killed Annalise? I admit that had leapt to my mind. It was absurd. A teenage girl killing another teenage girl wasn’t impossible, but to have hidden the body so completely was utterly unlikely. No, Cathy Rigg, emotional over her recent secret birth and feeling like her substitute fantasy of a summer in France was being taken away from her, might have lashed out, but I couldn’t picture anything beyond that, certainly not such a successful burial. If I was right, and the body by the tracks in the schoolgirl uniform was not Annalise, then Annalise was still buried elsewhere. It’s not as if we were beside the ocean in a yachting community; she had to be in the ground. I doubt Cathy Rigg on her own could have dug a grave deep enough. If she’d involved others, I doubt it would still be successfully secret now.

  Unless … Charlie? Were we back to him? Would his loyalty have lasted so long, even when we were interrogating him over the semen on the skirt?

  “Rosalie,” I asked gently, turning to her. “Do you know Charlie Bennet?”

  Rosalie wiped her cheeks and lifted her chin. “Mrs. Rigg’s first husband? A bit …” she answered cautiously. No doubt Mr. Rigg had rules about what she could and could not talk about. But Mr. Rigg had been dethroned. “I’ve worked for Mr. Rigg for eleven years. I only met Mrs. Rigg when they started dating. Mr. Bennet’s phoned a couple of times, and I met him at a Christmas gathering. He’s her daughters’ father, after all.”

  “Did he … did he strike you as the sort of person who could keep a secret?” The skirt hadn’t been a secret so much as an embarrassment. But could he have helped Cathy cover up an unintended death? Perhaps Cathy had impetuously grabbed some blunt object and swung harder than she’d intended? Or …

  Stop, I told myself. Charlie Bennet was in France. He couldn’t have assisted Cathy with covering up anything. If she did do it, and if she’d then had help, it was from someone we don’t yet conveniently know.

  Don’t be ridiculous, Morris, I reminded myself, which is good advice every single day. I wanted to solve Annalise, but wanting it didn’t turn the most convenient person into a viable suspect. The fact was, Cathy and Annalise had had an argument; Annalise headed home like we always knew, while Cathy waited behind the school library. That’s why Annalise had been alone that day. One mystery solved, at least, I acknowledged. I should write a book: “Annalise Wood: the untold story of why she was alone on the way home from school.” Something told me it wouldn’t sell.

  “Mr. Keene?” Rosalie squeaked.

  “Yes, Rosalie?” I said, sounding more impatient than I intended.

  “Your colleague. Ms. Frohmann? Detective Inspector Frohmann? She asked me for something. I didn’t get back to her because …” Her eyes shifted towards the front door and then down to the desk. Ah, Mr. Rigg had told her not to reply. “But I have it now. I have it. I don’t know if it’ll do anyone any good, but …” She shrugged. She pulled an envelope out of her middle desk drawer.

  I opened it.

  There was no doubt in my mind that, for all his faults, Nigel Rigg had impeccable taste in personal assistants. Rosalie was a wonder of organisation.

  “I knew a girl, Betty, who was engaged to a man who lived in this building, when it was
a boarding house. She used to visit him here on weekends. She ended up not married to him and I think he might be dead. I haven’t seen her in, oh, fifteen years but I found her on Facebook. She’s friends with my cousin’s best friend’s daughter. Small world.”

  “Small world,” I agreed, and turned to echo her leaning posture and tentative smile as well. There were names on this list.

  She pointed to the paper. “She tried her best to remember. It’s a little map, see?”

  So it was. It was the layout of the house. In one room, the surname “Haskell.” In another, a first name, “Gerald.” But mostly it consisted of descriptions: “Bald man, briefcase, northern accent.” In another, “Two women. Blonde and brunette. Sisters?” I turned it over to find the tower room.

  There it was: “Handyman. All hands.”

  “Sorry, Rosalie, what did she mean by this?”

  “Oh, him. She said he stared a little too hard, if you know what I mean. Betty didn’t like him. He got the tower room because in addition to paying rent, he helped around the house. He was the one you had to ask if something needed fixing. She said she hated it when he worked on things in the common rooms. When the conference room—well, the dining room—was being rewired it took months. It was dusty and the portraits were all stacked up in the corner. She told me that he once backed her into the corner when her fiancé was in the kitchen, and the backs of her legs rubbed up against the edges of the frames. Betty’s tights snagged and tore.” She suddenly sucked in a breath, and jumped from old murder to new. “Mr. Keene, what did Nigel Rigg do to that poor girl?”

  “DS Spencer will get to the bottom of what happened to Hannah-Claire.”

  “She was a nice woman. A nice woman. It’s one thing to think of an unnamed upstairs handyman doing something bad, but can you imagine Mr. Rigg, getting close enough to push her in?”

  “I’m sorry, Rosalie. I’m sorry you had to witness this today.”

  “I should look after Mrs. Rigg. I mean, I should look after Cathy.”

  A prophetic adjustment, no doubt. I couldn’t imagine Cathy remaining a Rigg for long.

  Rosalie pushed her chair back and walked towards the double doors of the conference room. “You’re not going to … ?”

  I think she was asking if I was going to haul anyone else off. I demurred with a wave of my hand. Anna Williams was due something, but it didn’t need to be taken care of today. If Spencer wanted her, he’d come back for her.

  I had my own work to tidy up. I was no longer supposed to be moving the Annalise case forward (which, I was coming to accept, might be impossible); but it seemed all right to put a bow on what we’d already done. Maybe this—I held up the paper, deciphering Betty’s handwriting—could identify the man who buried the body by the tracks, and lead us to identifying her. Instead of being disappointed by the possibility of putting a different name to that body, as I’d been dreading feeling, I was excited. I felt righteous. Whoever she was, she deserved to be named. That no one was looking for her, that no one had written books about her … That was something I was going to make right.

  I thanked Rosalie and stepped outside the front door. It was a chilly, sunny day, and I turned away from the sun to cast a shadow on my phone screen.

  I phoned Chloe. Maybe between this little map and the promised list of names from former cleaner Ginny Russell, we could identify the handsy handyman who’d lived in the tower.

  Chloe answered, but didn’t have much to report. “I visited this Ginny Russell, but she seems to have changed her mind about the list. I offered to sit down for a chat and write the names down myself, but she just mumbled an excuse.”

  “Some witnesses respond better to one gender or the other; apparently Ginny is the type to prefer male police.” I said this instead of assuming it was my personal charm that got something out of her; Chloe would have had something to say about that. “Or maybe she was worried about disturbing her father. She looks after him and she seemed worried about him seeing me there yesterday.”

  Chloe murmured a possible agreement. “Suspicious, I say,” she said in an exaggerated tone.

  I laughed. “You sound like me earlier. I had a brief, bright-shining fantasy that Cathy Rigg had killed Annalise Wood and was about to confess it in front of witnesses.”

  Chloe laughed too. “We’re getting silly.”

  “But not completely ridiculous. We’re not going to solve Annalise; I’ve accepted that. But we have a real chance with this handyman person. Look, I’ll go and see Ginny Russell myself, see what I can get out of her. Maybe her memory’s just going and she felt embarrassed when you asked.”

  “Enjoy!” she said cheerfully. “Ooh, I just got an email from the Dog Man. I’ll—”

  “‘Dog Man’?”

  “Our man Clemmy. The dog walker who found the body. Ugh, he’s a talker. He wants me to phone.”

  “All in the line of duty.”

  “Well, I’m off. Nothing more for me to do around here. Enjoy tea with Ginny. I’m picturing doilies, a lace-edged tablecloth, and possibly porcelain dolls as guests. Watch out for metre-long hairs in your cup.”

  That was just mean. “She was alert yesterday; you caught her at a bad time.” A buzz; I glanced at my screen, then put it back to my ear. “Oh, an email for me too. Peter Gage.”

  “Who?”

  “The ex-cop who did interviews in 1992. He’s a porter at Robinson now. I have a suspicion he may have been behind the leak to the press and I’m not happy about it. Well, we’ll see what he has to say.”

  “I hope you didn’t accuse him outright.”

  “No accusation; I simply asked.”

  She sighed disapprovingly, hung up, and we each turned to our emails. I read Peter’s while sliding into my driver’s seat. He wanted a call.

  I pressed the requisite buttons and we had a hands-free chat while I drove towards Ginny Russell’s.

  “DCI Keene …” he began, and I corrected him that I’m a Mister now, like him. “All right,” he said. “I was distressed to receive your message. I’m appalled that my taking an interest in a case was perceived by you as having an ulterior motive.”

  “It was no judgement on your character, Mr. Gage. There are simply very few people with the collective information to have made those specific leaks.”

  I drove through Lilling. In the middle bits, if you took away the cars and the people you could be in any one of several centuries, your choice.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Keene. We weren’t speaking in a soundproof room. Someone could have heard us here at Robinson, and Jimmy tells me there was an organist practising upstairs when you spoke with him.”

  “I doubt the organist could hear much …”

  “So do I, but that’s not the point. Maybe someone was praying in the chapel, did you ever think of that?”

  No, actually, I hadn’t. It’s not something I’d done as a student. “Fine. You’re right. I apologise.”

  “There! Now that you trust me again, why don’t you fill me in?”

  Sneaky bastard. Whether or not he shares the information, he surely does enjoy getting it for himself. I laughed. “Sorry, Gage. I’m—shit, wait a minute.” I was out of Lilling, on the road to Bishop’s Stortford, going the opposite direction of Annalise’s last journey. I had to keep my eye out for the dirt track leading into Ginny Russell’s neighbourhood. If I missed it, I’d have to go almost all the way to the school to find another turning.

  Ah, here it is. I turned. “All right, sorry, I’ve got it now. I’m driving.”

  “I picked up on that. I was a detective, you know.”

  I normally appreciate banter, but I really needed to concentrate. I wanted to find a place to park where the car wouldn’t be visible to the Russell house; that way Ginny wouldn’t have to worry about her father seeing it, if that made either of them uncomfortable. But having only been there the once, I needed to pay attention. “Why doesn’t Ginny Russell’s father like company?” I asked. With Gag
e on the line, I might as well make use of him.

  “Who?”

  “Never mind.” I pulled over onto what was either the edge of the Russell property or the edge of their neighbour’s, someone who wasn’t at home when I came knocking yesterday. A wide willow tree seemed to provide reasonable cover.

  “Wait, I’ve got it—Ginny and Jack Russell. No, seriously, his name was Jack Russell. Like the dog.”

  “I get it. Like the dog.”

  “They live off Lilling Road, don’t they?” British street-naming conventions are very practical. From Bishop’s Stortford going towards Lilling, it’s Lilling Road; at the halfway point, with cars from the other direction heading out of Lilling, it’s Bishop’s Road.

  “They do. You remember them?”

  “Not a future I’d want for myself. I don’t know what happened to her mum but she looked after her dad from the time she was a teenager. Maybe longer. Did she ever marry?”

  “She still answers to Ms. Russell.” Not that that’s a certain sign, but perhaps it’s a hint, in her generation. “I have to go.” I wanted to get on with the investigation, not explain it.

  “I did wonder, when I learned he’d died, if she’d sell the place. It’s sad to think of her minding that big house all on her own.”

  “Sorry, what?” I’d unbuckled my seat belt and it slithered through my hand with a buzzy thwip.

  “It’s a big place. She must be seventy-something. I wouldn’t want it.”

  “Her father’s dead?”