Lady in purple shirt: Sunita Sharman from the Mirror. Is it true that you are linking the murder to a similar attack six years ago?
DI Rutter: That is correct.
Sunita Sharman: What leads you to believe it is the same person?
DI Rutter: I’m afraid I can’t answer that right now. (Looks across to press officer.) I think that’s all we’ve got time for.
Sunita Sharman: Is it true, DI Rutter, that you have arrested David Alden, the same man who was convicted for the attempted murder of Melody Pieterson?
Press officer: The detective inspector won’t be taking any more questions now. We thank you for coming and will keep you updated on any developments.
Smartarse, Victoria Rutter says under her breath as she gets up to leave. There’s always one, trying to catch her out. She’s learning fast that you can’t let your guard down, not for a second. They hunt in packs, these reporters; one sniff of blood and they’re all on to you. At a guess there are forty people in the room, cameras and photographers included. Flashes in her face as she was talking. She finds it hard not to lose her train of thought, to play the professional, present the facts in the way she’s been instructed. There’s an art to this, one she has yet to master: the talking but not really saying anything, the answering questions in a way that doesn’t tell the journalists what they want to know. It’s a dance that requires nifty footwork. She tries to hold back; they try to coax her away from her script.
They’re looking for an angle. She is looking for the killer.
She’s never been a good dancer.
She is also the least photogenic person she knows, which is some achievement given the competition amongst her colleagues. ‘You’re beautiful but it’s fair to say the camera doesn’t love you,’ her husband Doug said once in attempting to be kind. Should she care? She can’t bring herself to worry about it. All the women (and men) she knows have bad hair days. They don’t always apply make-up perfectly. Their noses shine under the TV lights. So what? She won’t bow to the pressure of trussing herself up a bit just to go on the news. Or at any time for that matter. She has a job to do. Kids to look after, a mountain of paperwork to ignore, and if all that doesn’t leave a spare moment for a manicure and a bikini wax, she’s not going to cry over it. Only once, a few months ago, shortly after her promotion to DI, did she wish she took personal grooming more seriously, when she spotted a bogey hanging from her nose during a TV interview. They played it on the news all weekend. Nowadays she runs her finger under her nose before any press conference as a precautionary measure.
Walking out of the room she throws a final glance at Sunita Sharman, who is now engaged in chat with another reporter. Whatever he’s saying is obviously hilarious judging by the way she throws her head back laughing. If DI Rutter was allowed to act on her instincts she’d march over there and shout in her pretty, perfectly made-up face, ‘Have a bit of respect, would you? And while we’re at it, get your bloody facts right. David Alden was not convicted of attempted murder, it was GBH with intent.’
What she’s not prepared to concede, not right now anyway, is that Sunita could be excused the mistake. The reporter has been around for a while. She will be familiar with the facts of the previous case. Enticing a woman into your car then applying so much pressure around her neck that she falls into a coma is attempted murder in most people’s book, whatever label the courts might like to give it.
She surveyed him in his cell after they brought him in this morning. His pallor was not dissimilar to Eve’s. Seven days dead. He kept looking around the room, to the door. Being penned in didn’t suit him, she imagined. Not after five and a half years in prison. All it took was the sound of a key turning in the lock to transport him back to those long days in Pentonville, staring out of a window at a tiny scrap of sky.
Victoria had read as much of the case file as time allowed her. Enough to remind herself. David Alden had tried to kill his next-door neighbour because she rebuffed his advances, or as the prosecuting QC had put it, he was driven to mindless violence by unrequited love. That made it sound romantic, Shakespearean almost. She’d have put it in simpler terms: a violent thug who couldn’t take no for an answer. There were forensics too, Ms Pieterson’s hair as well as fibres from her coat were found on his blue cotton jacket. There was a CCTV image of a car near the spot where Melody was found in the hours after her disappearance. An expert witness had claimed it was David’s car though, as evidence goes, Victoria doesn’t like to dwell too much on this.
Victoria turned back to look at him in the cell. Let him stew for a bit, she thought, and went off to get herself a coffee from the machine.
When everyone was ready, DS Ravindra and DC Rollings started the interview. She watched it from another room on a live CCTV link. They would compare notes when they took a break.
She was fond of DS Ravindra. He wasn’t much younger than her and sharper than most of them in the station. She’d watched him plenty of times in interviews. His face was a picture of calm. If he was baited he didn’t rise to it. Not once. Just that smile: take as long as you want, I’ve got all the time in the world.
‘We are investigating the murder of Eve Elliot, whose body was found in Ham Common Woods yesterday, Sunday the fifteenth of September. We understand she was killed around seven days beforehand, on the previous weekend. What were you doing on Saturday the seventh of September?’
‘I was at home with my sister and a friend for lunch and then we went to the pub.’
‘What pub was that?’
‘The Brackenbury Arms in Hammersmith.’
‘And what time did you leave?’
‘Around ten thirty.’
‘Alone.’
‘Yes.’
‘So you went home alone?’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘And you have no alibi for the rest of the evening?’
He shook his head. His face appeared to have lost its shape, like his muscles had given up the job of supporting it. Pushing himself back in the chair he looked up towards the ceiling, clamping his eyes shut. He’s struggling to keep a lid on his emotions, Victoria thought. She took note of the muscle twitching in his clenched jaw. He’d lose his temper soon, she was certain. Calm until he snapped. Was that when he turned on Melody? And Eve?
‘I went home and went to bed. I played football the next morning. I scored a hat trick if you’re interested.’
‘Who were you with at the pub?’
‘My sister and a friend.’
‘They’ll be able to verify your whereabouts until ten thirty, will they?’
‘My sister will. But Eve won’t.’ He rubbed his temples with both hands, covered his eyes.
‘I’m sorry?’ It was DC Rollings this time, straightening himself in his chair before leaning in towards David Alden. ‘What did you say?’
‘I was with Eve most of the day until I left the pub.’
‘Eve Elliot?’
‘Yes. She was a friend of my sister’s.’
‘And you had lunch with her regularly.’
‘I wouldn’t say so.’
‘So why that particular Saturday?’
He gave a wry laugh. ‘Because she had some good news for me.’
Chapter Nine
Eve
THERE WERE THREE of us. Me, David and his sister Annie, gathered for lunch in the garden of his flat. This wasn’t, as David correctly pointed out, a regular occurrence but a meeting convened by me to impart ‘the big news’. It had been in my possession since the previous evening, burning a hole in my mind with its utter brilliance. It was the reason for my early morning trip to Ham Gate. I was checking my facts before I told David, because you don’t mess around with people like him. You have to be sure.
It took a moment after I told him for the relief to work its way through to his face. He looked like he was high. The semi-frown he always wore disappeared and his features softened to settle into a blissed-out smile. I’d got him wrong. I’d thought
he was aloof but I realised then that he’d been holding part of himself back. The part that allowed him to hope. Only now when he had something concrete to grasp did his emotions spring to the surface.
We laughed and hugged and worked out a plan for the future, because for the first time David sensed there might be one. And then a few hours later it all started to go into reverse. My death would put him right back at the beginning.
Lightning doesn’t strike twice, so the saying goes. But if you’d said that to David Alden as he sat in a cell, sweat blotting his T-shirt, blood roaring in his head, you might excuse him for laughing. Or crying. Or telling you to shut up and fuck off with your empty sayings. Because as far as he was concerned, when lightning found you it logged your coordinates and came back to strike you again and again and again.
It was déjà vu, the same nightmare unfolding. Maybe it was a different room, different faces accusing him. But it was the same, right down to the plastic chair that made his arse sweat. He asked himself why. Why me? Didn’t expect an answer. The first time he was arrested he thought it was a joke. This can’t be happening, they’ll realise their mistake soon. They’ll charge someone else. But they kept on questioning him, telling him he had attacked Melody, and then they charged him. One by one all those tenets of justice he had believed in had fallen away. Truth wasn’t enough. Not when there was sufficient evidence to support the lies.
He could talk and talk and tell them he didn’t touch me but they wouldn’t believe a word he said. Not him, a man who had already served a jail term.
The person who had believed him, who had found evidence to corroborate that belief, was gone. And now that I was dead, nothing else made sense.
In the same police station, in another interview room, my friend Nat was waiting for an officer to take his statement. He’d come almost as soon as he’d heard that morning. My mum had promised to call him when she had news of me and she kept her promises. Or at the very least she got someone else to keep them for her. The job of telling Nat fell to my stepdad Steve.
‘I’m sorry, Nat,’ Steve stuttered on the phone, ‘but Eve’s dead.’
Steve never did have a way with words, but in fairness there was no gentle way to break it. To string out the sentence, to give Nat some warning – Are you sitting down? Do you have anyone with you? – it wouldn’t have been any kinder. It all came down to the same thing. Eve was alive and now she is dead. Nothing could absorb the shock of those words.
Nat came almost as soon as he heard because he didn’t know what else to do. And because he didn’t believe it. Steve had sounded a bit moony on the phone, slurring his words, unable to provide any of the specifics Nat would require in order to verify that kind of information. He tried making himself a coffee, searched the internet for details. He came across a few paragraphs about a body being found near Richmond Park. He tried calling me again. Steve must have been pissed, he thought. He liked a drink. Nat remembered the disapproving looks my mum shot him at barbecues and parties at their house; Steve plying everyone with booze as a cover for his own excesses. He replayed his words: I’m sorry, Eve is dead. What the fuck had he been drinking to say that?
Now Nat peered down at the red record button winking at him. He had dead eyes, ones I remembered from all-night raves, taxi queues, long walks home from clubs in the cold and wind. Only this time there had been none of the preceding fun. He regretted coming. He regretted having to sit under the artificial light and inhale the body odour of the previous interviewee. He wished he had clung on to his disbelief for a few more hours. He wished Steve had been pissed.
‘When did you last see her?’ It was a young female detective taking his statement. DC Kate Chiverton. Her dark hair was cropped, with little shards of blond highlights poking out. As Nat spoke, she pulled a small silver locket back and forth on a chain around her neck.
Nat had already given her question some consideration. He had thought of little else since the phone call with Steve. ‘Wednesday the fourth, we met for a drink in town.’
‘And that was the last time you spoke to her?’
‘Uh huh.’ His voice wobbled. ‘I was in France that weekend.’
‘You didn’t try to contact her when you came back?’ I wished she wasn’t so hard on him. I wanted her to go easy, crack a sympathy smile or two. But that was the problem with murder. It dragged everyone under a cloud of suspicion.
‘I called her a few times, left a message.’
‘You didn’t think it was odd when there was no response?’
Her questions prodded at his guilt and were quickly drowned out by his own. Why? Why? he asked himself. He had been filming all day Monday, editing Tuesday and on Wednesday, a day off, he slept, pretty much all day on and off. Why didn’t you know something wasn’t right? How could you sleep and eat takeaway pizza for dinner when you hadn’t heard from your friend in days? Because, because, in my defence, it wasn’t unusual for her not to reply immediately. That’s a lame excuse. What you really mean is that you didn’t stop to think, isn’t that right?
Yes, that’s right.
‘Weren’t you the tiniest bit worried?’ he heard the DC ask.
‘How did she seem when you last saw her?’
He closed his eyes to reproduce the image of our meeting. It came to him immediately. There I was dancing around, throwing my head back, laughing. Why was I laughing? He couldn’t think. It must have been a joke he’d cracked or an anecdote. He needed to remember it, preserve it so he could tell it over and over again and keep me laughing. We were at my flat. I’d cooked a roast chicken, which we ate on our laps on the sofa. He spilt gravy on the velvet cushion. The broccoli was overcooked. ‘You never get your vegetables right, do you?’ he said, and I promised to hide them somewhere painful.
She didn’t seem like someone who was going to be murdered the following week.
Nat knew all about murders. We’d met at journalism college, mocked our peers who had drifted into PR over the years. Unlike them we stayed true to ourselves, conducting investigations, uncovering truths, exposing lies. He’d covered more than his fair share of murders, but the thing about them was they always happened to other people.
‘Had she ever mentioned the name David Alden to you?’
He sighed wearily. ‘Yes. I know all about David Alden. She was investigating his conviction.’ He glanced up to DC Chiverton and saw her nod her head for him to elaborate.
‘It’s what she used to do at work. She was a producer on APPEAL, you know the programme that looked into miscarriages of justice. Well, she was until they pulled it. What I’m trying to say is she knew what she was doing. Annie, David’s sister, was a friend of hers. She agreed to have a look at his case for her. She didn’t think it stacked up.’
The DC’s eyes widened, she tapped her pen on the table before quickly composing herself. ‘Was there anything to make you think she might be worried for her own safety?’ Tears bubbled up in his eyes; he wanted to explain but his words were tangled in his throat. ‘Nathaniel, was there something that Eve was concerned about?’
He wiped his eyes, inhaled to steady himself.
‘She started to think someone might have been in her house. She said things were going missing, clothes from the line, mugs rearranged in her cupboard, an Obi-Wan Kenobi doll …’ DC Chiverton raised her eyebrows. ‘Her dad had bought it for her before he died, it had special sentimental value.’
She nodded, ‘I see.’
‘But there was never any proof. I just thought …’
‘What?’
‘Well, she was so focused on the investigation … I thought she was tired, overtired.’
‘You didn’t believe her?’
He looked diminished. ‘No,’ he said.
He replayed the scene in his mind, the one that will haunt him for ever. We’re in my flat and I’m crying because I think I’ve taken on too much, promised David Alden and his sister more than I can deliver. Nat’s words are his usual mix of sarcasm, reassur
ance and wit, and he uses them to pick me up and give me a giant kick up the backside. ‘If anyone can do it, you can,’ he says as a final flourish. It was only a sentence, a bit of gentle encouragement from a friend who believed in me more than I believed in myself. It was exactly what I needed to hear at the time. But now he wished he could revisit the moment, erase it from our history and tell me to give up.
I’d liked to have told him it wasn’t his fault.
When DC Chiverton was finished with him, she showed him to the door that led to the reception. He walked slowly, uncertain that his legs could hold his weight. ‘We’ll be in touch,’ she said. ‘OK,’ was all he managed in response.
Beyond the station he could make out the street, people moving too quickly and with purpose. What purpose could there possibly be any more? He stopped for a moment to consider his situation. He felt like he had been sucked out of life, shown a truth that had irreversibly changed his perspective on the world, and now he was expected to go back out and walk to the same rhythm as before. He couldn’t do it. He watched DC Chiverton fade out down the corridor, leaving him dangling. Slowly he turned towards the door and his eyes caught a glimpse of blond hair. Relief exploded inside him. It was a nightmare after all and now he was coming round. Slowly he moved towards her. She was standing with a tall man he didn’t recognise and another woman, dressed in suit trousers and a shirt. Both of them blurred out at the edges of his vision. It was the woman his eyes drilled down on. He was trying to make sense of her features, which were so familiar but somehow not quite right, when he heard the suited woman’s voice say, ‘I really appreciate you coming, Melody.’
It took every ounce of effort to drag his eyes away and take the remaining few steps to the door.
Chapter Ten
Melody
WHY DO PEOPLE have to stare? Have they always stared like this or is it a recent development? And what is it about her that invites such forensic interest? She’d like to ask the man in front of her. Either Sam hasn’t noticed him staring at them (or her) or he’s pretending he hasn’t. But then he’s good at that, the pretending.
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