Girl Number One: A Gripping Psychological Thriller

by Jane Holland

  ‘I get the picture,’ I say.

  ‘So here’s my thought. If you could take another quick peek at the woman you found in the woods, in more controlled surroundings, perhaps you’ll be better placed to remember if she’s anything like the first body you saw.’

  ‘She isn’t,’ I say wearily, ‘and I’m certain about that. There’s the number, for a start. The number on her forehead.’

  ‘That could have been changed, between when you first saw her and when you uncovered her grave.’

  I remember Tris saying more or less the same thing. I shake my head. ‘I don’t need to see her again to tell you she looked nothing like the first woman.’

  His smile looks like it’s stuck in place. ‘Humour me, Eleanor. We just want to jog your memory. And if you need counselling afterwards, we can arrange that too.’

  I fumble for my house key in the pocket of my shorts. ‘I don’t want to go. But perhaps I should if it will help you find the other woman. Have you identified the body yet?’

  DI Powell hesitates, watching me unlock the front door to the cottage. ‘Yes,’ he admits.

  ‘So who is she?’

  ‘I can’t tell you her name. We haven’t managed to notify her next of kin yet. But I can tell you what our victim did for a living. She was a surf instructor, working out of Newquay.’

  ‘A local, then?’

  Powell nods. ‘Reported missing a few weeks back. The hotel staff said she spent her days on the surfing beaches along the north coast – Widemouth and Polzeath, mostly, judging by the parking tickets we found in her hire car – and her nights in the clubs. She liked to dance as well as surf, went to all the beach barbecues.’

  He pauses, looking at me closely. ‘A bit of a party animal by all accounts. Maybe you knew her.’

  I open the cottage door but do not go inside. I don’t like the idea of inviting the police in the cottage again. It’s our private space and it’s been invaded too much lately.

  ‘Yes, I still go clubbing sometimes, though less than when I was in uni. There are clubs all the way along the coast. Hard to avoid them when you’re out in a group. But that doesn’t mean she was a party animal, or that I knew her.’

  He smiles. ‘You wouldn’t make a bad detective.’

  I raise my eyebrows, waiting.

  ‘Right now, we need to focus on who she knew locally. Presumably someone from the village, since her body was left here. She might have met her killer on the coast, maybe gone surfing or clubbing with them. He could be someone who knows you too, given the way you seem to have been targeted.’ Powell looks straight at me, his gaze suddenly piercing. ‘Know any keen surfers, Eleanor?’

  She liked to dance as well as surf, went to all the beach barbecues. A bit of a party animal by all accounts.

  There are thousands of surfers like that hanging around Newquay and the surrounding area in the summer. I’ve met dozens myself that would answer her description. And he was right. I might even have met the victim at some point in the past, and not recalled her face when I saw it. Maybe at one of those night-time beach barbecues where people are just faces looming up out of the darkness, the fire reflected in their eyes. Without a name, I’m not sure where all this gets us.

  The inspector is looking at me expectantly. I think of Denzil Tremain. But there’s no way I’m dumping one of my friends in this. Not without one hell of a good reason.

  ‘Hundreds,’ I tell him, then turn away into the cool of the cottage. ‘Give me a few minutes to change, Detective Inspector Powell. I’ll come and look at the body.’

  In the mortuary, the body is lying under a white sheet on a stainless steel table. Exactly like a corpse in one of those television shows where the dead come back to life, slowly sitting up on the table while the white sheet slides to the floor. Not a very comforting thought. I slow my breathing, wait for the light to stop flickering above the metal table. I can do this. I just need to get a grip on my emotions.

  I think of the stuffed animals I saw in the farmhouse. The sleek weasel with glass eyes and bared teeth. That’s all a dead body is, I tell myself. The physical form of a person without their essence. The husk without the spirit.

  DI Powell is talking in a low voice to one of the mortuary technicians, a blond young man in a white lab coat, who looks incongruously cheerful considering the macabre nature of his job.

  I’m sweating, my palms clammy. I try not to stare at the body shape under the sheet while I wait, wondering what the delay is. Something about the next of kin and a telephone call, from what I catch in their muttered conversation.

  ‘Ready, Eleanor?’

  PC Helen Flynn puts her arm around my shoulder. Her tone is professional but sympathetic. I expect she has to deal with this situation quite frequently: grieving relatives, shocked witnesses, people who can’t deal with the reality of death.

  I’m not a relative though. I did not even know the dead woman. I look down at her hand clasping my upper arm and the police officer releases me, moving back slightly.

  DI Powell is behind me. His footsteps echo on the hard floor. ‘We can wait a few minutes if you’re not.’

  ‘I’m ready.’

  ‘Good.’

  DI Powell comes to stand at the top of the table, looking straight at me, then pulls back the white sheet.

  I was wrong. I am not ready.

  I draw in a sharp breath and take an instinctive step backwards, staring. Then check myself, aware of the inspector still watching my face.

  She looks very different from the woman I remember from the woods. They’ve removed all the soil, you would never think she’d been left in that shallow grave. Someone’s even combed out her blonde hair so that it lies smooth and clean on her shoulders.

  The number two is still there on her forehead, but fainter under the overhead lights than it looked in the woods.

  She has a thin build and looks fit, so she was probably like me, physically active most days, constantly burning off calories. DI Powell said she was a surfer. And I can see that she was used to the outdoor life, her cheeks hollow and freckled, her face more tanned than the shoulder and upper arm exposed by the raised sheet. But no doubt she habitually wore a wetsuit.

  She looks unreal, like a waxwork. Or a mannequin.

  I take a step closer, peering at something that’s caught my eye. Her throat shows the same signs of dark bruising with a thin central line that I saw on the other woman.

  ‘So she was strangled too?’

  Powell’s eyes narrow on my face. ‘Too?’

  ‘The other woman, the first body I found,’ I say. ‘She had been strangled as well. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘I didn’t see her body,’ he reminds me drily.

  ‘But I gave you a statement.’

  He glances at PC Flynn, and she nods, disappearing. The heavy door bangs behind her, shockingly loud in this quiet place.

  DI Powell lets the sheet settle on the woman’s chest. He looks at me. ‘You’re absolutely sure this isn’t the same woman you saw before?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘You definitely couldn’t have made a mistake? No one would blame you if you had. Finding a dead body can be very upsetting in the best of circumstances, and given your personal history … ’

  ‘I’m sure,’ I say again.

  ‘Take your time, Eleanor. Have a good look at her.’ He waits. ‘You say her throat shows the same bruising as the other woman. But isn’t it more likely that she is the first victim?’

  ‘Not a chance.’

  ‘And you’re basing that assumption on … what, exactly?’

  Slowly, I count to ten in my head. He waits in silence, hands in his trouser pockets, head on one side, watching me.

  ‘It’s not a hunch. It’s a fact based on simple observation. For starters, this woman is blonde, not a brunette.’

  ‘But you could have been mistaken first time round.’ He looks at me solemnly. ‘You were panicked. You were on your own. It was the anniversa
ry of your mother’s murder. I doubt you were thinking that clearly at the time. Let alone taking note of the victim’s hair colour.’

  ‘Let’s say that’s true, but she’s also Number Two, not Number Three,’ I point out, then look away from the body. ‘Can we have this conversation somewhere else?’

  ‘Does it upset you to look at her?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  His gaze does not leave my face. ‘Yet you seemed perfectly cool when I saw you down in the woods, immediately after you found her. How do you explain that?’

  ‘I was in shock.’

  ‘You had dirt under your fingernails.’

  ‘I’d been digging.’

  ‘That is what surprises me most,’ DI Powell says, and then pauses a beat, as if the idea has only just occurred to him. Which I don’t believe. He strikes me as a man who thinks things through very carefully before acting, who likes to plan out most conversations before he has them. ‘I mean, why dig there in the first place? In that exact spot, when you had the whole woods to choose from. It’s almost as though you knew she was there.’

  ‘I knew there was probably a dead body still somewhere in the woods,’ I agree, ‘because you lot had stopped looking for her.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that. We had our reasons.’

  ‘You mean the police decided I’d hallucinated the whole thing so you didn’t bother looking any further.’

  ‘We looked,’ he assures me. ‘We even looked in the same area where this woman was buried. There was nothing there that day, according to my officers. No loose soil.’

  I frown, taking that in. ‘You’re saying this woman wasn’t buried there when you searched the woods the first time?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  Respectfully, with careful precision, DI Powell lifts a corner of the white sheet and drapes it over the dead woman’s face again. Her body discreetly disappears, just as it did under the soil. But I’m still aware of it lying there between us. Like a silent accusation.

  ‘Preliminary results indicate that she died about a week ago,’ he adds slowly, as though reluctant to share too much information with a member of the public.

  I feel queasy. The unpleasant smell is beginning to get to me.

  ‘Can we get out of here?’

  DI Powell indicates the door behind me and we go outside. In the corridor he waits in silence, hands back in his trouser pockets, while I lean my forehead against the cool wall, breathing slowly in and out, trying not to throw up.

  Me and dead bodies. We can’t seem to stop meeting. But we don’t get on.

  ‘Better?’ he asks.

  ‘I want to go home.’ I look up and down the corridor. Everywhere looks the same in this place. I can’t remember now which way leads to the exit. ‘Where’s the way out?’

  ‘I’ll arrange for someone to drive you home.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  He walks ahead of me down the corridor. ‘So you simply went back into the woods to look for her on your own?’

  ‘With Tris.’

  ‘With Tristan, sorry.’

  ‘Not to look for her. I had a hunch, that’s all.’

  ‘I thought you said it wasn’t a hunch.’

  ‘I said knowing she’s a different woman isn’t a hunch. But going back into the woods … It was something I needed to do. For my own peace of mind.’

  ‘And Tristan was there as back-up? Was it his idea to go into the woods?’

  ‘I already told you, no. It was my idea.’

  ‘And your idea to go digging in that particular spot.’

  ‘The soil was loose there. It looked freshly dug. That made me suspicious.’

  ‘So why not call the police?’

  I stop and look at him directly. ‘Why do you think, Inspector? Calling the police didn’t work out so well for me last time.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘I suppose I wanted to be sure you hadn’t missed anything. That’s about as far as our premeditation went though. We didn’t take any spades, there was nothing planned about it. Even when we started digging, we didn’t really expect … ’

  ‘To find a body?’

  I nod, and duck through the door he is holding open for me.

  ‘Especially not a different body?’ he murmurs.

  ‘Dead right.’

  He looks at me, brows raised, but says nothing.

  We head out into the station waiting area, which is surprisingly quiet this evening, only one middle-aged woman sitting in a corner with a faux snakeskin handbag on her lap. I wait by the glass doors while Powell speaks to one of the officers behind the front desk. It’s getting dark outside. The sky even looks a little threatening to the north of the town. I wonder if the weather is going to break at last and bring us rain.

  I think about the next few days at work, and the various track and field activities we have planned in the run-up to Sports’ Day. It will not be much fun if we get a downpour.

  I try not to think about Tris, and the stolen photograph I found in his bedroom. I’m not going to mention it to Powell. Two things there: first, I would have to admit I got it by entering his house illegally, and second, I want a chance to confront Tris about the photo on his own. Whatever he’s done, he’s still my friend and I want to believe in him. However bloody stupid that may turn out to be.

  ‘Right,’ Powell says, coming to join me at the door, ‘my sergeant will drive you back to Eastlyn. He’s just getting his coat.’

  ‘I appreciate it.’

  ‘One last thing before you go, Eleanor,’ DI Powell says, pulling a see-through plastic evidence bag out of his jacket pocket. There’s something in the bag. Something small and golden and shiny. He holds it out to me. ‘Have you ever seen this before?’

  I take the bag and stare at it. My heart jerks in shock. ‘Where … where did you get this?’

  His gaze changes, becomes intent. ‘So you do recognise it?’

  I nod, my voice coming from a great distance. ‘It’s mine. Or it could be mine. My gold anklet. I thought I’d lost it.’

  ‘Where? When?’

  I turn the bag over in my hand, examining the chain more closely. Of course, there must be hundreds of plain gold anklets in the world. Though this one looks identical to mine, I have to admit. Right now to the bent clasp, which is probably how it fell off my ankle in the first place.

  The bag has been tagged with a label. Numbers and letters, some kind of identity code. I struggle against a sense of unreality.

  ‘Newquay. Last Saturday night. I went clubbing there with … ’

  ‘With whom?’ the inspector prompts me when I hesitate, his tone urgent. ‘A man? Sorry, I really need a name from you. Just so we can exclude him from our enquiries.’

  ‘Denzil,’ I say reluctantly. ‘I was with Denzil Tremain.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  DI Powell slips the evidence bag back into his inside jacket pocket, looking grimly satisfied.

  ‘Wait,’ I say as he turns away, ‘aren’t you going to tell me where you found that?’

  Powell glances round cautiously, but the middle-aged woman has got up and is talking to the desk sergeant through the glass. There is no one to overhear us.

  ‘This information has to remain completely confidential,’ he says.

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘It was found on the victim,’ he admits. ‘The woman in the grave. She was wearing it round her ankle. No fingerprints, no DNA on it except hers. So we can assume it was wiped clean beforehand. Given that this anklet was all she was wearing, it must be significant, it must hold some kind of symbolic importance for the killer.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I think it’s a message. A message for you, Eleanor.’

  I stare at him. A message?

  I feel cold inside. No fingerprints, no DNA. I see again Denzil setting fire to the handwritten note on the windscreen, and dropping it to the ground. You’re my Number One. Thanks for the anklet.

 
; ‘Inspector,’ I say, ‘there’s something I haven’t told you. Something important.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I grab my leather jacket and helmet from the school staff room, then fish my phone out of my rucksack. Nothing from Tris. Nothing from Hannah. Nothing from Denzil.

  Though the latter is hardly a surprise. DI Powell rang this morning to tell me Denzil had been arrested.

  I have been feeling guilty all day. I cannot believe Denzil has anything to do with this, anymore than I can believe Tris is involved. But of course the police are desperately looking for a scapegoat to reassure local voters, and Denzil Tremain, with his long history of social problems and minor arrests, must fit their criteria very nicely.

  They let Tris go. They will let Denzil go soon too. They will ask him about the note on the windscreen, and the anklet, and his relationship with me, and then they will let him go. There will be no evidence against him, I’m sure of it.

  I study the clock on the staff room wall. Just over an hour until my next hypnotherapy session. I could do some shopping for tonight’s dinner, or go for a coffee somewhere comfortable. There’s a sharp wind blowing today, and the sky is cloudy. Not good weather for a walk through the park as I had originally planned.

  I tell myself not to do it, but ignore that warning and tap the letters into the empty text box with deliberate recklessness.

  Need to speak to you asap.

  As soon as I send the message, I wish I could unsend it. I have not spoken to Tris since the police took him in for questioning. And I’m still smarting from Connor’s damning portrayal of my character. I know he wants to protect Tris from getting in trouble with the police again, which probably does entail staying away from me, but does he have to suggest to his brother that I’m not right in the head?

  A few minutes later though, I feel a buzz in my jacket pocket. Too late to back out now, I think, glancing down at the text on the screen.

  Where are you? Call me.

  I hesitate, listening again to that nagging internal critic, then ring his mobile anyway. He answers almost immediately. ‘Eleanor? What’s up? I thought you were at work today.’

  ‘The head gave me the afternoon off. For another hynotherapy session.’