First One Missing

by Cohen, Tammy

  Leanne sat back against the pillows for a while, trying to take in the implications of what had just happened, but her brain seemed to be operating a half-hour delay behind the rest of her.

  After a while, Will got up, wrapping Leanne’s old towelling dressing gown around his skinny frame, and padded away to make the tea. Leanne still couldn’t really get her head around someone making her tea in the mornings. She couldn’t remember Pete ever bringing her up a drink to bed throughout their entire twelve-year marriage. And he’d rather have gone downstairs stark naked than wear something of hers. He’d have called it ‘emasculating’.

  Leanne lay back in the bed that used to belong to her and Pete but now belonged just to her (and Will sometimes), on top of the worn blue and white gingham duvet she and Pete had got as a wedding present, as Will clattered around the kitchen down the hall.

  She tried to focus her thoughts on the conversation she’d just had. Or, more to the point, the conversation she was going to have to have now that she’d had the conversation she’d just had.

  It was fair to say Leanne was not looking forward to calling Emma Reid.

  Desmond had assured her there had been no leaks to the media. Yet. Was ever a three-letter word so weighted with unspoken pressure? Leanne knew that dead children were gold dust to the media. When she’d first started doing the job, she’d been shocked by the lengths to which reporters would go to get a story, trotting out the same old lines: ‘People find it cathartic to talk about it.’ ‘Maybe your story will prompt someone who knows something to break their silence.’ And the odious last resort, ‘If you don’t talk to us we’ll still write the story anyway. Wouldn’t you prefer to have some control over what we say?’ That awful Chronicle journalist Sally Freeland being a case in point.

  Since getting together with Will, she’d become much more cynical. Not that Will was exactly the archetypal hard-bitten hack. As features editor on a small-circulation marketing magazine he was far more likely to be writing about the latest perfume campaign than a crime investigation, but still he knew how the business operated, and as a result Leanne liked to believe she was now less shockable. She knew it was only a matter of time before someone from the media called Emma Reid asking for her reaction to the news. It was imperative that she got in there first. Imperative. Already she was talking like Desmond.

  When Will came back into the room, carrying two mugs of steaming tea, Leanne was still exactly where he’d left her.

  ‘Yours, I believe.’ He extended the mug she always used, the one that had ‘Diva’ emblazoned across the side – a present from Pete in better times.

  As Leanne blew across the surface of the tea, Will studied her face, looking for clues as to what was going on.

  ‘All right,’ she conceded. Although he hadn’t said a word, Will’s endless, exaggerated patience was always guaranteed to push her towards indiscretion. ‘One of my old cases has, well, come to life again.’

  ‘Tilly Reid?’

  Leanne looked up sharply. Then she made a face. The kind of face that says, ‘You know I can’t possibly talk about this.’

  It was at times like this she felt like she might actually miss Pete. Not because Pete was so emotionally supportive or anything, but because he was on the force, so at least he had some idea of what she was going through.

  ‘Something’s happened that means the media are going to be raking everything up again,’ she told Will, as cryptically as she could. ‘So I’ve got to get back in touch with the family. Like, right this minute.’ Still she made no attempt to move.

  Will continued to gaze at her levelly. The towelling dressing gown, faded purple with stains that told a hundred stories, was gaping open at the front to reveal his pale, almost hairless chest and she averted her eyes as if it was indecent.

  ‘And, let me guess, you really, really don’t want to,’ he said softly, stroking her arm.

  Leanne almost allowed herself to relax, but then she stopped herself short. Even though it sometimes seemed like Will could read her mind, in this instance he couldn’t possibly know just how much she really didn’t want to make that call.

  ‘It’s the same every time,’ she blurted out. ‘I let myself believe it’s the last one. And then it happens all over again. And there I am again, ringing on that bloody doorbell …

  ‘She hates me, you know,’ she told Will, not even bothering to pretend he didn’t know exactly who ‘she’ might be. ‘I’m the Grim Reaper in a skirt as far as she’s concerned.’

  ‘Can you blame her?’

  ‘I suppose not.’ Leanne was grudging, but the truth was, obviously she couldn’t blame Emma Reid for the way she tensed up whenever Leanne came within a foot of her. When Leanne last appeared, it was because another little girl had died. Someone else’s daughter, someone else’s sister/niece/grandchild. Two more dead now since Emma’s Tilly, and of course before Tilly there’d been Megan Purvis, the original ‘angel’, as the tabloids had dubbed them all. And still Leanne kept popping up, the uninvited fairy at the christening – and never with the one thing Emma most wanted to hear. That Tilly’s murderer had been found.

  While Will went off for a shower, Leanne leaned back against the headboard, both hands clasped around her mug. If her eyes had been focused, she might have found herself staring at her own reflection in the mirror propped up against the wall opposite the bed, or at the overflowing laundry basket next to it. (‘Those clothes will get up and walk away of their own accord if you leave them much longer,’ is what Pete would have said if he’d seen it, like the washing was somehow her responsibility alone.) But that morning her surroundings failed to register.

  Instead she was picturing Emma Reid, as she’d first seen her – shiny caramel-coloured hair pulled back into one of those styles certain women can do where the hair is kind of tied up messily, with some strands artlessly coming loose. It was one of those styles that looks really casual, but Leanne had tried it herself often enough on her own wayward light-brown hair (‘beige’, Pete had teased her) to know that it was nowhere near as careless as it appeared.

  The loose strands of hair framed a small, pretty, flawlessly complexioned face. She was the kind of woman who knew how to do make-up so that it looked like she wasn’t wearing any. Leanne remembered she’d been wearing tight faded jeans tucked into knee-length leather boots and Leanne had thought about her own boots that barely fitted around her calves and wondered how many inches she’d have to lose off each leg to get them to slide on over thick denim jeans. And then she’d felt bad for thinking about something so trivial. She didn’t get that so much these days, the guilt. She understood now there were no rules for grief or grieving, no restrictions on how you should or shouldn’t think. One minute you could be facing something so terrible it made you question everything you knew about the world, and the next you’d be reminding yourself to pay the gas bill. It was just how it was.

  When she first met Emma Reid, Tilly was only missing. Guy, Emma’s tall, strong-jawed husband, had been in full motion, striding around the house. There’s lots you can do when a child is missing – people to ring, searches to organize – and Guy Reid was a doer. So he was in full flow, working out strategies, thinking of solutions, of ‘best-case scenarios’. He was some kind of troubleshooter in the City as far as Leanne could make out, one of those people who spend their lives bandying about phrases like ‘best-case scenario’. That was before there stopped being anything for him to do, when all that ‘doing’ energy inside him turned to something else and the best-case scenario turned out to be worse than anything he could have imagined.

  Emma had clearly been used to her husband achieving those best-case scenarios. She didn’t seem to have quite taken in the seriousness of the situation – hadn’t even made that link to the death of the Purvis girl two years before. She’d had that look of someone waiting for a misunderstanding to be cleared up, as if the shop assistant had given her change from a ten instead of a twenty.

  Leanne was
the one who’d had to break the news to them when they found the body two days later. It wasn’t something you’d wish on your worst enemy. The SIO had offered to be with her while she did it, but he’d done so in a way that left Leanne in no doubt that he’d rather pull his own toenails out without anaesthetic, as she’d told Pete later on.

  So she’d done it on her own, leaning forward on the Reids’ brown leather sofa to touch Emma’s knee across the coffee table. They were taught about body language and comforting gestures. They weren’t taught about how it looks when the life drains out of a person right in front of your very eyes, or how it feels to be looked at as though you yourself were responsible for the very thing you were describing. They weren’t taught how inadequate the word ‘sorry’ can seem.

  By 7.45, Leanne still hadn’t called her.

  At least she’d started to get dressed by then. Normally she’d just pull on the first things out of the ‘work’ side of her wardrobe but today she chose more carefully. Clearly this was not going to be an ordinary day and she wanted to be armoured up, by which she meant wearing clothes that didn’t look like they’d been scraped out of the bottom of the dirty-laundry basket. One thing about Emma Reid – even in the depths of her grief, she still matched her socks to her outfit. Leanne was lucky if she even matched her socks to each other.

  Leanne was just digging through her underwear drawer in search of a pair of tights without a hole when her phone rang again. Desmond.

  ‘I hope you’ve called her, because we’ve just found out the news is already out.’

  Shit.

  ‘I was just ringing her now.’

  Desmond was unimpressed.

  Hanging up, Leanne scrolled immediately through her contacts list. Reids was the landline number, she remembered that much. Scrolling down one further to Reid Emma, she pressed the green phone key.

  While waiting for Emma to pick up, Leanne tried to remember the stress-management techniques they’d been taught during training. Deep breath, concentrate on your breathing, not on what’s around you. Not on the crack in the ceiling above the bedroom window which, come to think of it, appeared to have got wider in the last month, not on the fact that the tights she’d chosen turned out to have a ladder near the top (she made a quick judgement call that the skirt would just about cover it), not on the image of Emma Reid going about her morning business serenely unaware, or of Jemima Reid’s face, blotchy with fear and frustration.

  ‘Emma? I’m so sorry …’

  3

  ‘Quite frankly, I don’t give a fuck about your profit margins, Mr Bellows. When one commissions a water feature, one expects it to feature water. Not just a few drops here and there, but a great big fucking cascade of water.’

  Sally Freeland noticed the man sitting across the table from her on the crowded train was nudging his wife but it didn’t bother her. What did bother her, however, was Mr Bellows trying to tell her it was her own water pressure that was to blame.

  ‘I’m a journalist, Mr Bellows. If I tell my editor I’m going to write fifteen hundred words on “MPs on the Make”, and then I turn in a thousand words instead, and say, “Oh, but my desk was a bit rickety so I couldn’t write as much,” he’s not going to be very fucking happy, is he?’

  Mr Bellows didn’t see the analogy, apparently. Frankly Sally doubted if Mr Bellows would recognize an analogy if one punched him in the face. Pressing ‘end call’, she yanked aside the mouthpiece of the hands-free headset.

  She was having a pig of a day already, and it was barely ten o’clock. She’d kill for a cigarette.

  ‘I am a person who doesn’t smoke,’ she reminded herself, trying to remember the exact wording Sebastian the hypnotherapist had used. ‘I can think about having a cigarette but I make the choice not to have one.’

  It wasn’t working.

  Sitting back in her seat, she looked out of the window at the green rolling East Sussex countryside, trying to let go of her anger, as her life coach, Mina, kept telling her to do. Shift focus, she told herself sternly.

  She picked up her Mulberry bag from the seat next to her and started to rifle through it, frowning as she spotted the Mulberry wallet which, being a totally different shade of brown to the bag, never failed to jar. Really, she’d been right to end things with Noel. What kind of person bought you a tan Mulberry bag for your birthday and then a chocolate-brown Mulberry wallet for Valentine’s Day? Not that that had been the main reason for the split. A symptom rather than the whole malaise, she’d told Mina.

  She wouldn’t listen to the little voice that pointed out it had been Noel who’d broken up with her, and she certainly wouldn’t dwell on that awful scene when she’d turned up on his doorstep drunk and sobbing and he hadn’t let her in, just called a cab and waited with her outside until it arrived.

  Pulling out a red crocodile-skin case, Sally extracted her reading glasses before opening up her laptop decisively.

  Focus, focus, focus.

  It was only six months since she’d last revisited the Kenwood Killer case – that awkward interview with Fiona Botsford, the mother of the third victim – but a full four years since the whole thing started with the death of Megan Purvis. Of course, it hadn’t been a serial killer then, just a seemingly random standalone murder of the type that happened sometimes. A body had been found in woods to the east of Hampstead Heath. Though Sally had lived in London at one time, she was a Fulham girl and hadn’t ever ventured to the vast expanse of grass and woodland to the north of the city, so had been taken aback to find that what was almost a wilderness existed so close to civilization. The scale of the Heath had unnerved her, with its hidden glades and miles of footpaths where you could walk without seeing another person and end up losing all sense of direction.

  That first time she’d driven up to North London, cursing her stupidity when she became completely gridlocked in traffic around Croydon. She’d spent nearly a week hanging around the Purvises’ house, talking to anyone who went in or out, offering money around like it was going out of fashion and clocking up thirteen parking tickets. Persistence had paid off though. It nearly always did as far as Sally was concerned. She’d hit the jackpot when she’d offered a massive donation to the charity of Helen Purvis’s choice, and convinced a close friend of hers that giving an interview was the only way to get the rest of the press pack to back off.

  She’d been proud of that interview, not to mention relieved. There was a time back in the 1990s when she’d been nicknamed the Queen of the Exclusives, dispatched here and there with what was basically a blank chequebook and a hefty expense account, but those days were long gone. Nowadays everyone was too afraid of losing their jobs to sign off on any payments over a hundred quid. Everything was done by committee so no one’s head would end up on the block. Thank God she wasn’t based in an office any more, all of them tiptoeing around eating salads at their desks that they brought from home in plastic containers. The last time she’d been into the Chronicle’s offices, it had been like walking into a library it was so quiet, and all those earnest interns being so self-important even though they weren’t being paid a bean. She’d felt like a den mother or something. So depressing. Of course there were still a few of the old crowd around, but mostly they’d either been promoted to some sort of executive position where they sat in an office making pie charts on their computer, or else they were dribbling in a corner in their shiny suits, stinking of last night’s Jameson’s. Well, apart from the odd one in prison.

  Nothing was as it used to be. Still, as Mina always said, nostalgia was for losers. Onward and upwards.

  Peering at her computer screen, she called up the folder marked ‘Purvis’. It had been a while since she’d read that interview, but now that there’d been another murder she wanted to refamiliarize herself with the facts. Sally took her ginkgo religiously every morning to boost her memory, but frankly she was fucked if she could remember her own name some days, let alone facts from a case she first wrote about four years ago.
/>
  When she double-clicked on the PDF file titled ‘Purvisinterview1’, a double-page newspaper spread opened up on the screen. The main photo showed a woman, with a mass of frizzy brown hair, tied back in an ill-judged ponytail, and watery blue eyes, gazing sadly out of a window. Sally instantly remembered the moment that was taken. Helen Purvis had seemed so self-controlled up to that point, yet when the photographer asked her to press a hand up to the glass, it was shaking so uncontrollably she’d ended up putting it in her lap instead.

  The headline of the feature was: NOT A DAY GOES BY THAT I DON’T THINK ABOUT MEGAN. Very original. Not. The sell was equally uninspiring: ‘Nine months after her daughter Megan, 7, was murdered, Helen Purvis talks to Sally Freeland about coming to terms with every mother’s worst nightmare.’ At least her name was in bold. That was something.

  She read on.

  Little Megan Purvis’s bedroom is like any other 7-year-old’s. Her duvet cover and pillow are covered in pink and orange flowers, to match the pink fluffy rug on the floor. Megan’s soft white fleecy dressing gown hangs on the back of the door, and her pink fluffy slippers are tucked neatly under the bed. Everything is just as she left it when she got up on 3 May 2010. Except Megan Purvis is never coming home again.

  Sally frowned as she read that intro. Almost immediately after that feature had come out, she’d been called up by the Chronicle’s deputy editor and told, ‘No more dead kids’ bedrooms.’ Apparently it was hackneyed. He’d clearly never heard the phrase ‘setting the scene’.

  Helen Purvis, a Special Educational Needs Adviser, is a petite, softly spoken 44-year-old. When I met her at the family’s £1m home in the desirable Crouch End area of North London, which she shares with her partner Simon Hewitt, an Account Executive, and her son Rory, now 13, she was still evidently grieving for the little girl she lost 9 months before.