Of course I’ve heard. Everyone’s heard. “Annalise Wood Alive.” The headline font was like three inches high.
I don’t know. It’s weird.
Even Annalise wasn’t Annalise. I mean, she was Annalise Wood before she disappeared, but that Annalise was just a teenager who was pretty and popular in a general way but not perfect. Not famous. She only became the important “Annalise” in the eyes of others, once she was gone. She became a kind of symbol, a kind of idol, to strangers, and to me, but she didn’t get to experience being that herself. I don’t think anyone ever gets to experience being that, even if they’re alive and aware that it’s happening in other people’s minds. That’s something you can think about others, but you can’t ever be inside of it. When you’re inside yourself, you know better.
No, I don’t think she did know. From the way it’s been described in the news, Ginny Russell kept Annalise isolated from all that was going on. Ginny was terrified that if the accident was discovered, her father would go to prison for driving after his licence had been taken away due to poor eyesight. She felt badly about what had happened and dedicated her life to making Annalise physically comfortable. The injuries apparently made her … compliant. It’s horrible. Horrible. I can’t …
Nothing. I just mean that I’m not. [Breathes heavily.] I’m not … There was even my picture online; did you see? The reporter asked me for one so I got to pick. I chose one from a couple of years ago. I didn’t go back to the photos I used to fantasise about using; those would have been far too young; but it was from my second year at university. I was at a party, so there are other people in it too. They blurred out the other people’s faces but you can see that I was in a group, and I’m smiling, and my hair looks great, and I look pretty. I look pretty. That’s “me” now, if you google my name. Maybe someone is fantasising about being perfect like me.
Annalise is in a care home now. She’s the same age as my Mum. In a way she looks younger than Mum, actually, in that one picture the media have been allowed to use. Her face is childlike while her body is middle-aged.
I … No. That’s not what the fantasy ever was. That’s not what the fantasy …
Look, it’s not even my fantasy any more.
Because it’s not. Because I have my own story now. My stepfather beat me until I almost died. [Crying.] He killed my cousin. Who was my sister. He killed her and he almost killed me. And talking about that doesn’t feel special, the way that it did when I was making something up. It feels ugly, and out of control.
Thank you, Dr. Dean. I appreciate the tissues.
Chapter 20
Laurie Ambrose
THIS TIME I went ahead and wore black, because no one would be looking at me. I wanted to pay my respects, and we were all strangers, so no one would sort and rank who was close enough to justify the colour.
A charity group had organised a candlelight vigil to honour the memory of the young woman who for years was thought to be Annalise Wood. Her name was Mara Webster. She’d run away from her home near Hunstanton, that town in north Norfolk with the beach and that tiny aquarium, and ended up addicted and dipping her toe into prostitution in St. Albans.
Simon didn’t want to wear a suit, but knotted a tie, at my request, so we wouldn’t look out-of-sync. “How did they figure it out, after all these years? Was it DNA?” he asked me.
It’s not that Simon doesn’t bother to read the news; it’s that the police had kindly told me details that haven’t been reported. “It was the man who’d found the body, back in 1992. He was walking his dog.” I tucked my hair into a hairslide.
“… and?”
“You know dogs. It brought him a piece of the body.”
Simon wrinkled his nose.
I felt the need to defend the animal. “The body had been buried for sixteen years! Wait, no, thirteen years. Maybe twelve. Sixteen is if it had been Annalise. But any body in the ground that long isn’t … whole. Not completely.”
“Why is this significant?”
I slipped on black shoes. We were ready. I sat next to him on the edge of the bed. “It was her right hand. He saw a tattoo on it. Three little fish, in red, blue, and green. Maybe she liked the aquarium when she was younger.”
“And the dog walker didn’t tell anyone?”
“The dog had chewed on it. He thought he might get into trouble. That’s what he said. But really I think he knew that meant it wasn’t Annalise. That’s what she’d looked like at first, of course, to everyone: missing teenage girl, long dark hair, school uniform, near Lilling. He wanted her to be Annalise. He wanted to be part of Annalise’s story. So he let the dog keep at the hand until it was gone.”
Simon leaned away from me. “That’s terrible.”
“I know! He knew it too. When he got home, he drew a picture of the tattoo, to remember it. He knew it was important. Not enough to actually do something, but important enough to make sure he had it right. When he finally told police, he had a decades-old sketch to show them. Coloured pencils. I’ve seen the picture. He’s not a bad artist. Mara Webster had been registered as a missing person by a friend of hers, another prostitute, not her family. That very specific tattoo was part of the description. The police hadn’t put much work into looking for her.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. It was an odd thing for him to say to me, but it was also perfect. He was sorry that some people were treated as forgettable while others were remembered too much. He was sorry that I had become part of a story with such sadness in it. He put his hand on my hand. Against my will, I imagined little fish swimming up from the base of my thumb.
“When Hannah-Claire went to the dog walker,” I continued, “she asked him if he remembered anything distinctive about the body. She was hoping he’d mention a scar. He, of course, thought she was on to him about the tattoo. He panicked. He lied to her. It was only when he found out that Hannah-Claire was dead and a new Annalise investigation hit the news that he felt he needed to confess. He phoned that woman detective, Chloe.” I know her better now. She’s not terrible.
“Is he in trouble?”
I shook my head. “Not even Anna Williams is in trouble.”
“You and Blake have restraining orders against her. She can’t contact you.”
“What if she’ll be there tonight?” The thought just occurred to me. I felt sick.
“We don’t have to go. But,” he added, when I vehemently shook my head, “there will be hundreds of people. Hundreds. That’s a good thing.”
“It’s a shame that hundreds of people didn’t care about her when she was alive.”
We went downstairs for coats, scarves, my handbag. My scarf was red. We were near Christmas, and the memorial candles were going to look oddly festive in this context, as if we were gathering to turn on the lights on the city tree.
“They know who killed her!” I deliberately added an exclamation mark with my tone. Trying to hold on to whatever is good.
“That Peterborough man, right? The one who killed those prostitutes in the nineties.”
“Will Teague. He’d apparently lived in Lilling when he was much younger, under a different name. The police found his fingerprints all these years later, can you imagine?”
“How could they possibly …”
“He’d partly paid his rent by helping out where he lived. He took down a bunch of old paintings when there was building work, and he rehung them when it was done. No one had taken them down since. His fingerprints were all over the backs and frames.”
“Well, he’s paid for his crimes.”
He’d died in prison years ago. But, “Being dead isn’t a punishment.”
“Isn’t it?” Simon asked me. He said it like it was a real question.
Is it? I didn’t know. Was it worse to be Tom, or to be me missing Tom? Sometimes I couldn’t tell.
It had been proposed to hold the event where Mara’s body had been found, but it was too dangerous to bring that many people so close to the tracks, or to
light hundreds of candles in a field. Lilling’s nearby town centre had also been considered, but it seemed unfair to mourn her in the place known primarily as the home of the girl she’d been too long mistaken for.
In the end, they held it in St. Albans Cathedral. About two hundred and fifty people gathered to acknowledge the brief life and terrible death of Mara Webster, Will Teague’s first known victim. Candles were handed out upon arrival, and the flame itself was passed from wick to wick. It was a moving service.
I didn’t see Anna. I hadn’t asked Blake or Clara to come. I recognised the police, but they didn’t seem to be on-duty. They seemed genuinely respectful. The one with the dead hand—I’d only noticed it when everything was all over and I’d tried to shake it—had been in the news a lot. A paramedic had heard him call the woman in the wheelchair “Annalise” and that was it, the story got its own legs in that moment. The press needed a hero to focus on in all of the sadness and he was chosen.
We were supposed to be thinking of Mara, and I tried, but other figures overshadowed her. Others were thinking of Annalise, no doubt. It was a subject of gossip to wonder if she would have been better off dead, if her last forty years as a brain-damaged secret prisoner had been worse than the ghastly but quick murder we’d all assumed. Other people argued that she had years ahead and would be able to appreciate them, even in the limited way available to her, and might have appreciated all manner of things in her constrained life with Ginny Russell. Perhaps her limited mental capacity would have made her captivity more tolerable. If her doctors knew how much Annalise truly understood what happened to her, it wasn’t being shared with the public. And thank God for that.
I was thinking of Tom. Simon’s question about death being the ultimate punishment rattled around, distracting me. I realised that for years I felt like the worse off of the two of us, me and Tom. The one left behind to go on. The one who had to feel the agony of grief.
Simon squeezed my hand. The building had been decorated for Christmas, and silvery things reflected the candlelight.
But there’s so much else, I reminded myself. I’d had to feel the grief, which lingered far longer than I let on, but I also got to feel new warmth and love and anticipation. I was alive. I had time for new things to happen.
Near the end of the service, the priest asked us to remember Mara. We were to say her name, and then blow out our candles together, in what I suppose was a gesture of letting her go. This was for us, after all, not for her. She wasn’t here any more.
The congregation took in a breath together, and we let it out together. Around me, hundreds of mouths shaped “Mara” as they exhaled. But mine shaped “Tom.”
I blew out the candle.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Superintendent Jon Hutchinson for orienting me to the new organizational structure of the Cambridgeshire Police and Major Crimes; to former forensic investigator Steve Morgan, now a porter at St John’s College, for insight into both his past and present roles; and to Rosemary Parkinson, for sharing her experience working for the University Counselling Service and with privacy issues. Their generosity and experience were real gifts. Any errors or literary license in the above areas are on me, not them.
Thanks to Rebecca Fitzgerald for getting me into Trinity College when it was closed, and to Jake Dyble for showing me around Robinson.
Thanks to Amanda Goodman for writing with me so many Thursday mornings, and to Jason Scott-Warren for being my writing challenge buddy as we both neared our finish lines.
Thanks to Katy Salmon and Neil Robinson for their thoughtful nitpicking; to Amy Weatherup for astute first impressions; and especially to Sophie Hannah for her invaluable insights.
Thanks to Chloe Moffett in New York for a brilliant edit; to Susie Dunlop in London for continuing support; and to Cameron McClure, agent and friend.
Thanks to Matt Wise, for helping me clarify Morris’s emotional arc.
Lastly and always, thanks to Gavin and the boys, for their patience and support.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More …*
About the Author
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Meet Emily Winslow
Neighbours in Crime: A Conversation with Sophie Hannah
About the Book
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Questions for Discussion
Read On …
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Have You Read? More from Emily Winslow
About the Author
Meet Emily Winslow
EMILY WINSLOW is an American author living in Cambridge, England. Her Cambridge-set novels of psychological suspense star investigators Morris Keene and Chloe Frohmann, and are told through multiple first-person narrators. They are a series (in order: The Whole World, The Start of Everything, The Red House, Look for Her) but can be enjoyed as standalones. Her fiction has been called “brilliant” (Washington Post), “vivid” (Parade magazine), and “dazzling” (Shelf Awareness).
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Neighbours in Crime
Psychological suspense authors Sophie Hannah, who is the internationally bestselling author of Closed Casket, and Emily Winslow collaborate in Cambridge
Q: You’re both transplants to Cambridge. What brought you there?
Emily: Cambridge is my husband’s home town. We met when he and I both lived in the States, but moved here in 2006 to raise our kids. It’s an inspiring place, full of people who are passionate about their interests, and with over 800 years of history. I know most people get excited about nature, about beaches, about mountain views. I’m crazy about architecture. I love the stories that buildings tell, and the human choices they represent. Cambridge is a great place for that.
Sophie: I lived in Cambridge for two years between 1997 and 1999, when I was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College—that basically means Writer in Residence. I fell in love with the city the first time I set foot in it, in exactly the way one falls in love with a person—I just knew straight away it was the perfect place for me. I adored living there for those two years, but then we had to move away when my husband got a job in Yorkshire. After eleven years in Yorkshire, however, my husband decided to give up his job, and suddenly we had a completely free choice about where to live—we both screamed “Cambridge!” at the same time. So we moved back to Cambridge in 2010, and it feels more like home than anywhere else I’ve ever lived.
Q: How did you meet?
Emily: Sophie was organising workshop teachers for a local literary festival, and so contacting Cambridge writers. While researching me, she noticed a link to an article about my house, which we’d had custom built. She’s a great fan of interesting architecture, so once she’d booked me to teach, she asked if she could come over and see the house! At the time, she was renovating parts of her own lovely house, and writing her book Lasting Damage, the plot of which involves property listings, so with all of that we had a lot of “house things” to talk about.
Sophie: I was doing an event at Waterstone’s in Cambridge City Centre and Emily came and introduced herself to me. I knew about her already, because I’d recently bought her book The Whole World, the US edition, from Heffers.
Emily: Now I remember that! I think that was between our phone call and the subsequent tea in my living room. I only had my first book out at that time, and I remember feeling a bit nervous and deferential about introducing myself in person.
Q: What do you like most about each other’s houses?
Emily: Sophie’s top-floor study is stunning. The room itself is spacious, every wall covered in either art or bookshelves, with a big, neat desk ready for work. (I’m a “piler.” The flat surfaces in my house are never neat, so this makes me jealous.) The best part is the study’s attached patio, with a view of iterating rooftops.
Sophie: Emily’s house is the kind of house that might turn up on Grand Designs—architect-designed, very contemporary, totally unique, incredibly stylish. It was built to perfection, from scratch. Mine’s
the opposite—I bought a very shabby Victorian house and am slowly perfecting it room by room. Yes, Emily’s house is a bit messy, but as long as she can find teabags to make me a cup of tea when I turn up, I’m not planning to complain!
Q: What else did you find you have in common?
Emily: Our admiration for complicated characters and for Ruth Rendell! Sophie and I both feel strongly that the most interesting characters aren’t “all good” or “all bad.” Ruth Rendell’s characters, especially in her Barbara Vine books and her standalones, have that complexity, even ambiguity. Heartstones, Live Flesh, and A Fatal Inversion are my favourites, as well as her short story collections. Pretty much as soon as I answered Sophie’s “Who’s your favourite crime writer?” question with “Ruth Rendell,” she asked if I’d like to form a writer’s group, reading each other’s work in progress.
Sophie: Yes, we found that we liked a lot of the same books, especially Ruth Rendell. And we’re both interested in layers of psychological complexity in fiction, rather than simple linear narratives. And, in terms of being writing group friends, we have in common that we are properly critical of each other’s work in progress. We don’t just say, “Yes, it’s great, it’s lovely.” We pick everything apart and examine all the separate components, and provide real hands-on editorial advice. That is what a writing group should do, I think. My last writing group, in Yorkshire, was way too flattering and not nearly critical enough.
Q: How do you work together?
Emily: We send each other parts of whatever we’re working on, sometimes the whole thing, sometimes just chapters. With crime and psychological suspense especially, it’s extremely helpful to have comments about the logical progression of clues and assumptions. For her, I usually make a table of comments with columns for “Lines I love,” “Moments of confusion,” “Mystery raised,” “Mystery solved,” and “Comments.” The “mysteries raised” then “solved” are probably the most important. They give a skeleton of the most important aspects of the structure, and can reveal things that need more emphasis or clarity.
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