First One Missing

by Cohen, Tammy

  ‘Actually – though this info is strictly classified – this body also was partially unclothed and there was a semen sample recovered from the scene of this latest murder. Not on the body itself, but on plant matter nearby.’

  Leanne was almost too intrigued by this fresh information to mind him saying ‘plant matter’ instead of ‘grass’.

  ‘So that links in to Megan’s case. And then, of course,’ continued the detective chief inspector, ‘there’s the killer’s usual USP.’

  Only Desmond ever used marketing jargon to describe a detail of a murder investigation. Unique Selling Point. That’s what he called it. The killer’s calling card. That tiny ‘SORRY’ written in blue biro on the right leg, just under the sock, which handwriting experts had concluded was done left-handed by someone who usually wrote with the other hand.

  ‘And you’re still working on the theory that he films the girls in some way?’

  Leanne asked the question more out of an awareness that she hadn’t contributed yet to the discussion than any real curiosity. She knew that Desmond would have said something by now if there were any new theories being bandied around. He loved to be the first with the news.

  ‘Going by what our profilers have told us, that still remains our number-one avenue of enquiry, yes. No footage has shown up as yet but we do have several sources on the case.’

  ‘Sir?’ Pete again. ‘Have you had a call from Helen Purvis yet? I bet Megan’s Angels will be waiting to welcome the Glovers with open arms.’

  ‘That’s a bit uncalled for,’ Jo remonstrated in her squeaky little voice. ‘That group has provided strong support for the families. I don’t know how any of them would have coped without it.’

  ‘I agree with Jo,’ Leanne said. ‘No one else can understand what those poor sods are going through. Just them.’

  ‘Yeah, well, not sure whether Fiona and Mark Botsford are getting much out of it,’ Pete said.

  ‘They still go though, don’t they? Presumably no one is making them.’

  Ten minutes in each other’s company and they were already winding each other up.

  ‘Much as I’d love to listen to you two squabbling, I really do have important things to do.’ Desmond was making his Sucking on a Lemon Face, and leafing through some papers on the desk, and Leanne knew they were being dismissed.

  Outside the building, the three of them blinked myopically in the white sun. Until a week ago it had felt like the disappointing spring would never end, but maybe now summer had finally arrived.

  ‘Wish we could all stop meeting like this,’ said Leanne, trying to lighten the atmosphere.

  Jo smiled sadly. ‘I know what you mean. Nothing personal, but I’d love it if we three never had to meet again.’

  After Jo had gone to find her car, Leanne and Pete stood together in awkward silence. Leanne had forgotten Pete’s habit of kicking the toe of one foot repeatedly against the ground when agitated. Bugger if that wasn’t annoying.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I suppose I should get going. Dreading the rest of the day, to be honest with you.’

  Pete nodded. He knew how tricky that initial time with the Reids had been in Leanne’s life. He bloody well ought to. He’d been the one making a difficult situation unbearable.

  ‘Never mind. I’m sure your boyfriend will be on hand to run you a hot bath when you get home,’ Pete said.

  It was nearly a year since she and Will had got together and the bitterness Pete felt was still there, bubbling away under the surface.

  ‘Yeah, well. I’m off then.’

  She’d gone about five paces before he shouted after her.

  ‘Sorry!’ he said. Or at least that’s what she thought he said. But by the time she turned, he was heading in the opposite direction, shoulders back, same cocky walk as ever.

  Standing up on the tube, clutching on to the railing during the long trip up to Highbury and Islington, where she’d get on the overground to Hampstead Heath, the nearest station to the Reids, Leanne replayed their conversation, and that word Pete had yelled out. The more she thought about it, the less convinced she was she’d heard right. When had Peter Delagio ever said sorry to anyone? Sorry wasn’t in his DNA. She tried to think of other words that sounded like sorry. Lorry? Now that would be too random, even for Pete. Eventually she gave up. The thing was, Will probably would run her a bath when she got home. He knew how hard today was going to be for her. It didn’t make him any less of a man, just because he wanted to make her life easier. Pete was an idiot. A Neanderthal. That’s why their marriage hadn’t worked. That and the small fact he’d cheated on her with a woman nearly ten years younger.

  Still, she wished she knew what it was he’d said.

  7

  Having a murdered sister was like wearing a badge you couldn’t take off. A loud, attention-grabbing badge. With flashing lights. And bells.

  People didn’t look at him and say, ‘There’s Rory Purvis, he’s doing ten GCSEs,’ or ‘He’s fit,’ or ‘He’s five foot eleven and a Scorpio and has seven metal pins in his leg from breaking it snowboarding.’ No, they said, ‘There’s Rory Purvis, his sister was murdered.’

  Sometimes it made him fucking sick.

  And now they’d found another body, things were going to get worse. All the same stupid people coming round insisting he must want to talk about it. Counsellors sitting expectantly on the edges of their chairs with their boxes of tissues. You must be feeling this, Rory. You must be feeling that. Blah blah blah. What he must be feeling is fed up with having to sit with people who just wanted to put a tick in the box saying, ‘Victim’s family has been offered support.’ TICK.

  Even worse, they would use that horrible photo again. Just thinking about it made Rory cringe – the school photo of him and Megan taken the year before she died when he was in the last year of primary. He looked like a geek. His hair was doing this thing where it sprang up, bouffant, like some kind of mushroom-head. And he was smiling a horrible fake smile so you could see where his adult teeth had come through insanely big. At least he didn’t have braces back then. Metal-mouth as well as mushroom-head – now that would have been a seriously bad look.

  He hated that photo.

  Walking home from school with his mates, they passed the newsagent’s with a board outside with a headline about the new murder.

  ‘Kenwood Killer? Isn’t that your sister’s one?’

  Jack W. was a twat sometimes. Your sister’s one – like he was talking about her fucking phone provider. Dickhead.

  Jake H. shot him a sideways look like you do when you want to see the expression on someone’s face but don’t want to freak them out by staring straight at them.

  ‘Sorry, mate.’ Jake H. mumbled at the best of times, but now his voice was all but inaudible. ‘You OK?’

  ‘Yeah, sound.’

  ‘Hey, does that mean you get to see your girlfriend again?’

  Jack W. again, of course.

  Rory gave him a thumbs-up, but inside he was raging because Jack W. was right. Another murder meant Mum would insist on organizing another of her get-togethers, which meant another afternoon being stared at by Jemima Reid. Enough was enough.

  Trudging up the road towards home, his steps became slower than normal. Last summer he’d been stopped and searched by police who accused him of ‘walking slowly next to cars’. They’d thought he was casing them out or something. Those were exactly the words they’d used – ‘walking slowly next to cars’. Like that was a crime. He smiled remembering how his mum had rung while they were searching him, and had insisted on being put through to the policemen and giving them a hard time. ‘But that’s how he always walks,’ she’d snapped at them.

  Now he was walking so slowly he wasn’t sure it even counted as walking. The thing was, he really didn’t want to reach the corner because he knew he’d see them, the usual little knot of photographers standing outside the gate leading to his house, smoking their fags and talking their usual bollocks.

/>   As they saw him approaching, the photographers and reporters went quiet. Rory always thought it was rather funny how they didn’t know quite how to treat him. He knew they were desperate to ask him all sorts of questions, but it was a bit dodgy as he’d only just turned sixteen, so they kind of hopped from foot to foot murmuring, ‘All right, Rory?’ as he pushed past.

  All right, Rory? That was a joke in itself. It really fucking was.

  He got out his key, praying it wouldn’t be one of those days when it inexplicably decided not to work. His mum said it was because he’d lost his key so many times they were always having to make copies from copies. She’d tried to make him wear his key around his neck once. Like that was going to happen. As the door opened there was a chorus of frenzied snapping from the photographers behind trying to get a shot into the hallway. Of what, he wondered? The grief-stricken coat-stand? The sorrow-struck shoe-rack? Stepping inside, he heard Mum’s worried voice calling from the kitchen.

  ‘Rory? Is that you?’

  Rory had read books where people said ‘my heart sank’ and he recognized the symptoms all too well. One minute his heart was sitting happily in its proper place behind his ribcage, and the next it was squelching around somewhere in his stomach along with the remains of the chicken tikka sandwich he had for lunch. His mum always did that.

  He did his ‘walking but not really moving’ motion down the black-and-white-tiled hall. By the time he reached the five stairs at the back that led down to the kitchen-diner, he was practically going backwards.

  ‘Oh darling, has it been awful for you?’

  She flung her arms around his waist and pressed her head into his shoulder. Looking down, he was pleased to note her head stopped lower down his body than the last time they’d stood in this awkward position. He was still growing then.

  Holding him at arm’s length, she peered up into his eyes. He noticed she looked paler than usual but she had those red spots on her cheeks and on her neck that she got whenever she was agitated or excited (or drunk).

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said, crossing to the back of the room to toss his bag down on the kitchen table.

  ‘It is all right, you know, to say how you’re really feeling.’

  Rory turned his back to her and pretended to be looking through the French windows into the garden, but really he was wondering how to get up to his room without having to go through another hug.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t feel sorry for his mum. Obviously it was crap, having your daughter murdered and then having to relive it every time the freak did it again. But the thing was, life went on.

  ‘That poor, poor woman,’ Mum was saying.

  Rory didn’t need to ask who she was talking about. She said that about them all. All the mothers. All of them poor, poor women.

  ‘I saw her on the news earlier,’ she said. ‘Just a glimpse. Just to think of what that poor woman is going through. No doubt the police will ask me to talk to her soon enough.’

  ‘You can always say no,’ he pointed out.

  Mum looked over at him, frowning.

  ‘It’s not something you choose, Rory,’ she said, and he noticed with panic that her eyes were starting to well up. ‘No one chooses to be a bereaved parent. Choice doesn’t come into it. You can’t just say, “No, not today, thank you.” Like it was a pint of milk.’

  He stared down at the floor so as not to see her cry. The laces of her brown brogue-type shoes were undone and he almost pointed it out, but stopped himself at the last minute.

  ‘People will start bringing it all up again, Rory. I want you to promise me not to let it get to you. Your exams are coming up soon and you must focus on those. What happened to Megan wasn’t your fault. You mustn’t let anyone upset you.’

  Rather than having to meet her eyes, Rory followed the course of the tear snaking down her left cheek. Now he was feeling really awkward because he wanted to go to his room, but knew he shouldn’t leave his mother crying on her own in the kitchen. He knew she wanted him to say something. It was what she was waiting for.

  ‘It’s all right, Mum,’ he said finally, his voice coming out all croaky, like it did when he was really embarrassed. ‘I know it wasn’t my fault.’

  For a moment her hand stayed resting on his arm, just where it emerged from the sleeve of his white school shirt. Her blue eyes, blurred by the tears, continued looking right at him and a strange expression passed over her face. Then her hand dropped and he was free to go. Briefly he considered stopping on the way out to grab a packet of biscuits from the cupboard because he was starving, but he didn’t want to risk getting drawn into another conversation, so he went straight past.

  Sometimes he really hated having to climb up the three sets of stairs to his room at the top of the house, past all those photos (though not the school photo used over and over again by the media, thank God), past Simon’s stupid certificates in their stupid frames, but today he practically jogged up there without noticing. When he finally pushed the door open and flopped down on his bed, his whole body sagged with relief.

  Much later on, Rory had a gatecrasher in his sanctuary at the top of the stairs. As soon as he heard the tell-tale slap-slap on the staircase, he knew it was his stepfather on his way to talk him into going to the next Megan’s Angels meeting. As far as Rory was concerned, it was bang out of order for Simon to start telling him what to do. None of his business, Rory reckoned. Rory wouldn’t dream of telling his stepfather how to live his life. If Simon wanted to sit around all weekend on his fat arse stuffing himself with junk food and playing online poker, that was up to him.

  But this thing of meeting up with the fucking Botsfords and the fucking Reids, well, Rory just didn’t see the point. If it would help find the killer, he’d do it, but just sitting around with a load of miserable people so they could all be miserable together, what was that all about?

  So now Simon was standing in the doorway of Rory’s room (out of breath from going up those few stairs – he really needed to get fit) and giving him that reproachful look.

  ‘You know what this means to your mother,’ he said in that voice that made every single one of Rory’s muscles tighten up.

  Rory fixed his eyes on his electric guitar propped against the wardrobe, and imagined playing the opening chords of ‘Get Lucky’, seeing where all his fingers would go on the fretboard.

  But still Simon droned on and on. ‘We’ve all got to pull together now and stop being so bloody petty. Your mother needs you. I know it’s difficult when it all gets dredged up again, but you know what? Them’s the breaks.’

  Them’s the breaks? Why did his stepfather have to be such a dick?

  As Simon talked, he picked up Rory’s phone from his desk where he was leaning, and started playing around with it, passing it from hand to hand. Rory’s phone was a piece of shit, but still it was annoying. Rory would like to see what would happen if he went into Simon’s office and started tossing his stuff around. He noticed, with distaste, how the skin around Simon’s wedding ring was all puffy. Simon wasn’t obese or anything but he needed to lose a few pounds. No joke.

  ‘I think you need to think very seriously about your priorities.’

  He fixed Rory intensely with his pale eyes and it was that same look he gave Rory’s mum when he was telling her to do something but trying to disguise it as a request. Rory looked down to avoid his gaze and found himself staring at Simon’s blue-white toes, emerging from the straps of his sandals. The toes had thick black hairs sprouting all over them.

  Previous experience had taught Rory that Simon wouldn’t leave without ‘the bonding bit’. Maybe that’s something you got taught at stepfather school: ‘the bonding manoeuvre’ to follow up the tough-love bit. Sure enough, the older man leaned in and put a hand on Rory’s biceps which he instinctively tightened up.

  ‘We’re family, yeah?’ Simon asked in his best fake young-person’s voice. ‘And families stick together.’

  Listening to his stepfather lumberi
ng back down the stairs, his sandals slapping on the carpet on each tread, Rory wondered whether there might actually be, right in the back of Simon’s mind, a tiny millionth of a chance that he actually believed the stuff that came out of his mouth. He’d have to be pretty thick though, wouldn’t he?

  8

  Emma could make out Leanne’s shadow through the opaque-glass panels in the front door. When they’d bought the house, she’d wanted to replace the panes with stained glass that she’d specially commission from a local expert craftsman, to bring the entrance back into keeping with the period of the house, but Guy had baulked at the thousand-plus cost. Ten years on, she still felt a pang every time she went into the hallway. Now, seeing the dark shape through the glass, she hesitated with her hand on the brass latch. It wasn’t that she disliked Leanne. You couldn’t dislike Leanne. She was warm and straight-talking and she knew when to step back and give you space, reappearing discreetly some time later with a freshly made cup of tea, and a squeeze of the elbow or shoulder so fleeting you almost thought you might have imagined it.

  It was just the baggage Leanne brought with her – trailing it through the house like mud – that Emma couldn’t stomach: the memory of the first time they met, when Emma was still The Woman She’d Been Before, still believing Guy when he said that Tilly would turn up somewhere, and this would become one of those family legends that gets repeated at weddings and Christmas dinners. ‘Remember the time …’ And then those other memories that Emma tried to block out – Leanne’s face when she came in from the back garden where she’d been talking on her phone in a low murmur, and how even before she’d sat them down and leaned forward to put a hand on Emma’s knee, she’d known what she was going to say and buried her head in Guy’s shoulder, closing her eyes as if that could shut out the truth. Leanne sitting two rows behind at the funeral, wearing a pink cardigan in compliance with the family’s no-black request, mascara snaking down her cheek, while Emma’s own dry eyes burned with unshed tears. Then a gap of more than a year before Leila Botsford’s death brought Leanne once again to her door, just as she was now, causing all Emma’s muscles to tighten and her head to ache with the effort of keeping the memories at bay.