First One Missing

by Cohen, Tammy

  He was proud of himself for the work he’d been putting in with Suzy over the last few days – two dates and endless calls and texts. And now it was paying off. He was going to meet Bethany at last. That story about his non-existent sister who’d paid for a bowling session she now couldn’t use had done the trick. Once again he called up the picture of the girl and tried to push those other memories to the back of his head. He wouldn’t think about blood matted in shiny hair, or clear blue eyes turning filmy like old milk. It was just a question of will-power. He could do that. He was the better man.

  18

  The pills are all that keep me going. I love the popping noise they make as they burst through their foil containers. I love the feel of them between my fingers, the promise of oblivion. Oliver has started hiding them from me. He doesn’t like the way I reach for them before I’m even fully awake, wanting only to be sent straight back to sleep again. He doesn’t like how Mia stands by the side of the bed, shaking my arm. ‘Wake up, Mummy. Wake up.’ She wants to know where her sister is. ‘In a fridge,’ I tell her, and Oliver snatches her away.

  This time last week I complained of being tired, but I had no idea of what tired meant. I thought tired was sleeping five hours instead of eight or being woken up at one by a seven-year-old’s nightmare and then again at five by a teething toddler. I had no idea about the kind of tiredness you feel in your very bones. The tiredness that makes words die unsaid in your mouth and everything impossible – standing, sitting. Breathing.

  This time last week I met a friend for coffee after school drop-off time. Mia was sitting at the table of the café with a plastic beaker full of crayons, the tip of her tongue protruding as she filled sheet after sheet with wild, single-colour drawings, and I was talking, whining, complaining. ‘It’s not enough, all this. The girls. I need to exercise my mind. I don’t feel fulfilled.’ As if fulfilment were a right. As if Poppy and Mia were holding me back.

  This time last week I got up in the morning and cared about my reflection in the mirror, got out the tweezers to pluck stray hairs from my eyebrows, put on mascara even just to take Poppy to school. When I pulled on my jeans, I minded that they had toothpaste drips on the leg and I got out a clean T-shirt because it mattered enough to make the trip from bed to chest of drawers and then to open a drawer and select.

  This time last week I thought pills were for people who gave up too easily, who looked for an external fix to internal problems. When I had a headache I held out against paracetamol until my whole brain was throbbing. When Poppy was ill antibiotics were a very last resort. I slid the foil sheet out with mistrust as if the box contained a dangerous wild animal not a mild pharmaceutical aid. Now I stack the pill packets high on the bedside table, so they’re the first thing I see when I claw my way groggily out of sleep. And if the stack is low, I feel a clanging anxiety building in my chest, my heart bouncing in my ribcage like a rubber ball in a box. Because if the stack gets too low, and the foil wraps are all empty, their contents popped, then there is nowhere to go but inside my own head, and that’s the place I cannot bear to be. The pills keep me outside of myself. They keep me in this bed. They keep me away from the door that leads to the hall that leads to the empty room with the ceramic ‘P’ on the door and the piece of paper where the words ‘Mia Keep Out!’ are scrawled in thick red capitals.

  I pop another one out from its blister pack, loving the purity of the white capsule, and then I pop one more for luck. Oliver will count them when he comes back and his mouth will tighten into a thin line as it does when he is annoyed.

  A week ago he woke me in the morning to have groggy, half-conscious sex and I was half resentful of the precious lost sleep and he kissed my stale-breathed mouth and said, ‘You shouldn’t be so damn gorgeous then.’

  I clutch the extra pill in the palm of my hand like a good-luck charm as I slip gratefully back into the void.

  19

  The woman had that particular hard-faced, red-raw look that comes from a combination of self-abuse and disappointment. Her bleached hair was pulled tightly back from her face, stretching the skin thin over her cheekbones and exposing a good half-inch of dark roots at the temples. When she’d first walked in, Leanne had put her at around forty, but now she could see she was much younger than that. Early thirties, maybe even less. Some people’s lives were ironed directly on to their skin, Leanne often thought. Growing up on a rough estate in Kent, she’d met a lot of women who looked like Donna Shields. Funny how when she told people where she was from they always said how lovely it must have been to grow up on the coast, whereas the truth was the nearest beach was four miles away and without a car it might as well have been four hundred. If you were lucky you got out, like Leanne. If you weren’t, you ended up looking like Donna Shields.

  ‘I still don’t understand, Mrs Shields, why you believe your ex-husband is linked to these murders.’

  Ever since the first murder, there’d been a steady stream of women just like this one presenting themselves at police-station receptions to accuse husbands, stepfathers, brothers, even sons. They fitted the bill. They’d never been ‘normal’. They were perverted, ill, dangerous, evil. They needed to be locked up. It was only a week since the discovery of Poppy Glover’s body, so Leanne fully expected there’d be another flurry of denunciations. Each time she dealt with one, Leanne felt another layer of skin grow over her existing one, until she worried she’d end up with a hide as thick as some of the older police guys who liked to boast that nothing could shock them. The day brutality came to seem like the norm was the day Leanne would hand in her badge and join a hippie commune somewhere to meditate for world peace.

  ‘He was obsessed with that first murder when we was still together. Spent hours every day on the computer going through all them newspapers. Even the ones he never read like the Guardian, which he said was a socialist rag.’

  ‘Didn’t you ask him why?’

  ‘Course I did. At least I did at the beginning, when we was still talking. He just used it as an excuse to have a go at me. Our daughter Keira was four then and he said he was just doing what any concerned parent would do and I was showing myself up as a bad mum because I didn’t care enough. That’s what Jason’s like. He twists everything. Except if there’s anyone who’s twisted around here, it’s him. Do you know what he did, he—’

  Leanne held up a hand to stop her and tried to stifle a sigh. It was always the female officers who got allocated these kinds of interviews, and it was always like this. Some of these women had spent months, years, lifetimes tiptoeing around violent, abusive men, and then the same amount of time gearing themselves up to reporting them, so when they finally got here, it was like a dam bursting. Every grievance – some heavy-duty, many petty – every misdemeanour, every harsh word, every beating, every mistress, every sexual perversion. Every single disappointment and heartbreak and put-down and slap, every bruise and black eye and ‘walked into a cupboard’. Every lie, every dashed dream, every time you locked yourself in the bathroom and ran the taps to disguise your sobs, watching the door frame shake with his kicks. All of those things came pouring out while Leanne or whoever else was on duty sat on the other side of the table and tried to corral the flood of words into some kind of structure, a neat box to tick.

  ‘Lots of people read the papers, Mrs Shields. And some people do take a ghoulish interest in the most horrendous crimes. But we can’t prosecute anyone for rubbernecking. You must understand that.’

  ‘He touched her. He would have done more if I hadn’t caught ’im at it. And after he left, I found there was stuff on our computer. Kids’ stuff. Absolutely disgusting. Filthy!’

  Leanne held up her hand again. ‘Hold on a minute, Mrs Shields. He touched who? Your daughter?’

  ‘No. Her friend. She was on a sleepover. He was in their room. If I hadn’t come in—’

  ‘Did the girl make a complaint?’

  The woman looked at her through narrowed eyes as if she wasn’t quite all there.
‘No, she was asleep, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Then how—’

  ‘I told you. I woke up and he wasn’t there, and I knew. I just knew. I went into Keira’s room and there he was with his hands under the covers.’

  ‘And what did you do?’

  ‘I put the light on, didn’t I? Bastard jumped up like someone had shot him. Insisted he’d heard her crying out in her sleep and had come in to check on her and she’d thrown her duvet off so he was putting it back. The girls was both crying their eyes out because we’d woken them up shouting.’

  ‘But you never reported it.’

  The woman pressed her thin lips together and shook her head.

  ‘And what about the porn. Child porn, did you say it was? I’m assuming you’ve kept that.’

  The woman widened her eyes as if Leanne had just made the most ludicrous suggestion.

  ‘You’re kidding, right? As if I’m going to leave that perverted stuff on the computer. My daughter uses that! Anyway, we don’t even have that computer no more. Had to sell it when we split up. I wasn’t exactly left well provided for. In fact, he said he’d stop paying altogether if I came to see you lot.’

  ‘So, just to get this straight, you’ve got no evidence against your ex-husband, Mrs Shields. Just that he showed a particular interest in the case when you were together.’

  Donna Shields leaned back in her chair rubbing together her thumbs and fingers with their glued-on nails as if rolling an invisible cigarette. She still looked scornful, but at the same time the slump of her shoulders indicated defeat.

  ‘I knew you lot wouldn’t take me seriously. Don’t know why I bothered.’

  ‘I’m sorry. We will run a check and make sure there are no other reports against him. And obviously if he breaches his restraining order, you call us immediately.’

  The woman looked infuriated now. ‘He’s always doing that, but by the time you lot turn up, he’s long gone.’

  ‘Well, like I say, contact us with any further breaches, but otherwise I’m afraid there’s really not a lot else we can do.’

  Leanne was already filing away the form she’d been filling in and putting her pen back in the holder on the desk. But still the woman opposite didn’t get up. When she finally looked at Leanne, all trace of the earlier bravado was gone.

  ‘I’m scared of him. I’m scared of what he’ll do to me and Keira. You don’t know what he’s like. There’s something missing inside him where other people have feelings. He never had no dad and his mum was a bitch, and nothing grew in him, d’you get what I’m saying? He never developed that thing most people have that makes you care how other people feel. I just wanted you to know that. So if another little girl is found with a rope around her neck or her pants around her ankles, or if I wash up with my throat cut, you’ll know who it is. Right?’

  Afterwards Leanne made her way back to her own desk only to find the normally buzzing open-plan office hushed and everyone facing the front where Desmond stood checking something on his phone.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Leanne whispered to Ruby Adjaye who occupied the seat to her right.

  The other woman rolled her eyes. ‘We’re awaiting another papal address – one-week review of the Glover investigation, I think. Rumour has it—’

  ‘OK, could I have everyone’s attention please.’ Desmond held up a hand for quiet. ‘Thank you. For the benefit of DC Scott O’Brian and the other two new members of the team, I just wanted to grab five minutes to go over where we are with the Poppy Glover case. Just to recap, the facts of the case are these: Poppy was seven, the same age as Megan Purvis. She and her parents, Susan and Oliver Glover, were picnicking with their younger daughter Mia by the pond on the Heath.’

  ‘’Scuse me, sir.’

  Leanne bit her lip. She’d worked with Scott O’Brian before and he was a lovely guy, but he had this terrible pedantic streak that meant he was constantly asking pointless questions.

  ‘There are quite a few ponds on Hampstead Heath, aren’t there? Which one are we talking about here?’

  Desmond consulted with his slight, perpetually nervous deputy, Andy Curtis, who stepped forward to explain.

  ‘Strictly speaking, it’s one of the Highgate ponds. The one nearest the Highgate entrance to the Heath. You come down Merton Lane and where it meets Millfield Lane there’s an entrance where there’s always an ice-cream van parked, and some toilets, and then the pond is just down to your left with a big grassy bank around it where people picnic.’

  Now Curtis withdrew, and Desmond resumed, the two changing places with a seamlessness born out of nearly a decade of working together. ‘Which is exactly what the Glover family was doing late afternoon last Wednesday. If you remember, it was the day the weather turned fine, the first proper warm day of the year. They’d been there an hour or so when Poppy asked if she could get an ice cream. She wanted to go by herself, to show she was a “big girl”, is how her mum put it.’

  Desmond made quote marks in the air when he said ‘big girl’, as if he were translating from a foreign language.

  ‘From the blanket where they were sitting on the slope, the Glovers could see the exit and the ice-cream van perfectly.’

  Here Desmond held up his hand.

  ‘It’s not our place to judge the rights and wrongs of letting a seven-year-old go off on her own. We’ll leave it to the great British public to do that.’ They were all aware how hard-lined people could be when it came to other people’s parenting. ‘Anyway. Mr Glover gave Poppy the money and she went up the slope to join the queue. They could see her the whole time. Mrs Glover swears she never took her eyes off her – until there was some sort of disturbance. A woman standing just ahead of Poppy in the queue found her purse had been snatched and she started yelling and then a crowd gathered around her, and when it parted, Poppy had vanished. That’s the last anyone saw of her until her body turned up the next morning.’

  ‘And just to clarify, sir, she’d been sexually assaulted?’

  Desmond closed his eyes briefly before responding to Scott O’Brian’s question.

  ‘As you all know, we were hoping to keep the details of how the body was found quiet, but somehow they seem to have got out. We all know the body was found on the Heath Extension. For those not familiar with the area, that’s a completely separate green area to the north of the main Heath. We’re still examining CCTV footage from the road that runs directly around the extension, but the body was found in woodland in the quietest section, which is between cameras. Nonetheless we’re hopeful some footage of the car used will turn up and we have people on that as we speak. The body was partially unclothed but according to the pathologist there is no evidence of sexual assault, although traces of semen were found on a dock leaf just a few feet away. And yes, Scott, before you helpfully point it out, it is a departure from the last two victims.’

  ‘But not from the first one.’ Leanne stifled a smile when she saw Scott lick his finger and start busily flicking through his notebook. ‘Megan Purvis was also found partially unclothed and in that case there was clear evidence of sexual motivation, and semen and other DNA were recovered – if I can just find the place where I wrote down all the details …’

  ‘No need, Scott. I think we’re all quite familiar with the facts. And I can tell you the lab has now finished comparing the samples of DNA from the Poppy Glover and the Megan Purvis crime scenes, and they are unequivocally not from the same person.’

  Leanne’s head shot up and something bitter and acidic coursed through her gut. So there was more than one of the bastards. It had always been a possibility, but hearing it spelled out made her feel sick in that part of her she tried not to show at work.

  As if he were reading her mind, Desmond carried on: ‘This means we’re looking for at least two men. Maybe a gang. As some of you might be aware, we’ve had some intelligence about the existence of an online paedophile forum that has taken a particularly strong interest in this case. That’s one of the leads w
e’re following up.

  ‘I don’t need to tell you all that it’s vital that none of this information goes further than this room. Now, Scott, since you’re the one with the answers, perhaps you might suggest what other lines of inquiry we might follow.’

  Put on the spot, Scott blushed and looked down at his notebook as if the answer might be written down there.

  ‘Leanne? How about you?’

  She might have known he’d pick on her next. One of Desmond’s fondest claims was that he liked to ‘keep his staff on their toes’. Sometimes, back in the good days, Pete used to pirouette around their flat like a ballerina, shouting, ‘Come on, Leanne. On your toes!’

  ‘Well, if the DNA samples don’t match, sir, couldn’t there be the possibility of a copycat murder?’

  ‘Exactamundo, Leanne. It’s pretty rare, thank God, and it would mean that the detail of the “SORRY” written on the leg had somehow got out, either from the families or from the killer himself, but it does happen and we have to cover all the bases.’

  After Desmond had gone, Ruby Adjaye leaned across Leanne’s desk and whispered, ‘Exactamundo, Leanne,’ in her ear, which made them both giggle.

  ‘Who was the woman you were interviewing before?’ Ruby wanted to know, and Leanne was startled at how completely Donna Shields had slipped from her mind.

  ‘Oh, just another woman wanting to nail her ex for the Kenwood Killings – and probably the Jack the Ripper murders as well while she’s at it. Though he does sound like a wrong ’un. I could see she was scared stiff of him, but she had no evidence at all. Only that he was particularly interested in the case, which would make half the bloody country suspects.’