The Suspects

by Katharine Johnson

  Copyright © 2019 by Katharine Johnson

  Cover Image: Adobe Stock © Restyler

  Design: soqoqo

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or Crooked Cat Books except for brief quotations used for promotion or in reviews. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are used fictitiously.

  First Black Line Edition, Crooked Cat Books. 2019

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  For Lucy

  About the Author

  Katharine Johnson grew up in Bristol and now lives in Berkshire. She’s the author of three previous novels, all featuring good people who make bad choices. As a journalist she’s written for a variety of magazines, and a history book about Windsor. When not writing, you’ll find her with a book in one hand and a coffee in the other, patching up a house in Italy, playing netball or out walking her spaniel while plotting her next novel.

  Acknowledgements

  I have so many people to thank for their kindness and support in helping me knock this novel into shape and make it as accurate and believable as I could.

  Firstly, as always to Laurence, Stephanie and the wonderful team at Crooked Cat Books.

  Also to members of Book Connectors and The Book Club (TBC) who were so generous with their time and advice when the story was at a very early stage: Mark Hayden, Suzanna Salter, Stephen Hall, Lin White, Priya Prakash, Rachel McCollin, and Claire-Louise Lulabelle Armstrong Brealey; Val Penny for her legal advice and Rebeca Bradley for checking the police procedural details. To Rachel Gilbey and all the wonderful bloggers who gave up their time to support the launch. Also to Eleanor, Christine, Jodie, Jo, Bev, Cristina, Kate, Amanda, Gill, Roger, Shirley, Rosie, Helen, Stephanie, Heidi and Jenny.

  Big thanks to my family and friends who put up with me while writing.

  And finally but especially to you, the reader - I hope you enjoy it.

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  ALSO BY KATHARINE JOHNSON:

  The Secret mybook.to/thesecretjohnson

  The Silence mybook.to/thesilence

  Lies, Mistakes and Misunderstandings mybook.to/LiesMM

  The Suspects

  Chapter One

  The body of a young woman has been found in woods near Ashton Court in Bristol. Police are investigating a possible link with the murder of the young bride Lily Ambrose who was abducted from the same area.

  November 1989

  There was nothing remotely funny about Xanthe’s funeral except she fulfilled so many predictions by being late for it. The ice had left potholes all over the place, so I suppose it was inevitable that the hearse would get stuck in one.

  I could just see her, pale green eyes wide and alight with indignation, saying “I mean there I was…” just as she’d started most of her anecdotes.

  Because with Xanthe nothing went according to plan. She’d come breezing into the office, her witchy hair blown about as though she’d been running on the moors instead of driving her 2CV, seemingly oblivious to the editor’s sarcastic “Nice of you to turn up” and say “You will not believe what just happened…”

  Ignoring the editor’s pained “I don’t want to know” she’d swizzle round in her chair as she recounted her latest misadventure. Covering her face with her hands like a child playing hide and seek, her laughter coming in great, gurgling gasps. The cuffs of her black jumper were stained, stiff and jagged, her black painted nails nibbled and cracked, those long, raised scars on the underside of her thin wrist just visible. A smudged phone number invariably decorated the back of one hand.

  The editor usually cut her off before she reached the climax of the tale and stuck her on Product News for the rest of the day as punishment for her lateness. The magazines in our company had the sort of titles most people had never heard of and wouldn’t care about if they had. Ice Cream Retailer, Radiator Supplies Monthly, Furniture Maker. There’s a magazine for everything somewhere – even one called The Embalmer. Xanthe used to love that one. It seemed funny at the time.

  In the church the organ played, people whispered, a woman in front of us rootled in her handbag for tissues and blew her nose with an explosive hoot. Someone crackled a sweet wrapper. Stuart looked round in disgust. It was a large church, most of the pews still empty. There were flowers at the pew ends. Nice ones – left over from a wedding, I supposed.

  Zak raked his hand through his dark mop and rubbed the stubble on either side of his face. You could hear his skin rasping. He’d been last up that morning, sitting sockless and dishevelled in the kitchen, staring into space, drinking one coffee after another. I knew he’d been awake half the night. I’d heard his floorboards creaking and the window opening and closing, and strains of Xanthe’s Everything But the Girl album – the one he’d threatened to throw out of the window if she played it one more time.

  He caught me looking at him in the pew and did a half-smile. “All right, Em?”

  I managed a quick smile back – the first time we’d communicated in days. As I leaned forward to put my bag under the pew I felt him studying me.

  “Is that dirt or bruises?” he asked at last.

  I clapped one hand to the back of my neck, turning up the back of my jacket collar with the other. I’d hennaed my hair that morning when I was half asleep and done my usual trick of forgetting to check I’d washed all the dye off my skin. Zak looked away in an unsuccessful attempt to hide his smile.

  The four of us were crammed into the pew. I don’t know what people thought of us, sitting there. I’m sure they wondered how we knew each other, let alone how we’d known Xanthe. Imogen with her punky platinum cropped hair, wearing a black baggy jumper and leggings; Stuart with his sports jacket and roll-neck, Zak in his jeans and vegan leather jacket, and me in the stalwart black Lycra dress I’d worn to the office, press launches, shopping and parties but would never, I realised at that moment, wear again.

  Imogen’s hand on my knee alerted me to the way it had been jiggling up and down. It was years since I’d been inside a church. Just talking about religion made me cringe. Zak said to me once, “How come you’ll answer any question about sex, but you go all panicky when someone asks if you believe in God?”

  “It’s just too big a question,” I said, squirming.

  “It’s Yes or No,” he replied. “Or I don’t know.”

  “Just don’t go there, okay? Can of worms.”

  The smell of dust, polish, lilies and old coats, the silky pages of well-thumbed hymn books dragged me back years. Those oppressive quiet moments I always longed to break by streaking down the aisle, shouting obscenities. It had left me with a fear of silence and a need to fill gaps in any conversation, however inappropriately.

  But I didn’t want to misbehave on this occasion. I’d have given anything not to. It just happened. I saw the name Charlotte Lucy Clarke on the funeral pamphlet. Jumping out of my seat, I blurted, “We’re at the wrong do.”

  I don’t even know why I used the word ‘do.’ It�
��s something my Granny would say about a sherry party.

  “It’s Xanthe,” Imogen said, tugging me back down.

  Of course, the police and the press had been calling her Charlotte for several weeks, but I’d imagined Xanthe must at least be her middle name.

  “See that couple?” Imogen whispered. “Her parents.”

  “Foster parents,” I reminded her, looking over at the middle-aged couple in the front pew. “The real ones died in the plane crash, didn’t they?”

  The blonde brows twitched. “It seems not.”

  “And that’s her sister?”

  “Yep.”

  “The nun? The one who…?”

  Imogen barely blinked and yet her cool blue eyes signalled she’d tell me later.

  It made me wonder if we’d ever really known Xanthe.

  Then that thing about the hearse getting stuck. I’d seen so many comedy shows about funerals – undertakers slipping in the mud, mourners sneezing out their false teeth into the grave – and I got a picture in my head of a speeded-up film, of the driver taking out the coffin and leaving it on the pavement while they jacked up the car and maybe someone else coming along and making off with the coffin and I could hear Xanthe’s indignant tone “I mean, there I was…”

  The vicar was apologising for Xanthe’s late arrival.

  “What’s new?” mumbled Zak. I saw his shoulders shaking and he let out one of his Muttley laughs.

  It wasn’t funny. Not at all. Until Stuart leaned across the pew, his face all red and stiff and snapped out of the side of his mouth, “Sort yourselves out,” like he was forty-two instead of twenty years younger.

  Zak stopped just long enough to say, “Yeh, all right, Dad,” and we sank to the floor, stuffing our hands in our mouths but every now and then a squeak or a snort would escape, and I could see tears of mirth running down Zak’s neck.

  “Please, Emily,” said Imogen in that dreadful, cold, pleading tone. “Just go outside.”

  Looking back now, I don’t know why we laughed. I realise how disrespectful and hard-hearted we must have seemed. I shouldn’t even try to justify it. I could say I’d already done my crying and Zak had done his anger, kicking Xanthe’s stuff around until you couldn’t recognise it any more. But the simple truth is, neither of us could face up to where we were and what was happening.

  Knowing she’d been so close to home for two whole weeks, lying under the frozen leaves when we thought she’d buggered off to Sweden with her boyfriend, dumping us in even more debt.

  There all the time and none of us knew. All the time we were drunkenly playing Twister, falling over each other in a heap, squealing and shouting, Zak farting, Imogen’s earring getting caught in my belt buckle and nearly pulling her ear off, Xanthe had been lying less than a mile away.

  While we watched The Crying Game, danced around the house to Talking Heads, argued over whose turn it was to make the coffee. While Zak and Stuart brawled over a game of Scruples, Stuart screaming at Zak he had “no understanding of the personal space bubble.”

  And when the phone bill came in and Imogen went ballistic, seeing all those calls to Sweden. The way we’d slagged Xanthe off for buying shoes when she said she couldn’t afford to pay her share of the electricity bill…

  “Here she is,” whispered Stuart. A knife twisted inside me. I’d so hoped they wouldn’t be able to fix the hearse. As long as she wasn’t there in the church I didn’t have to accept it as real. Now it crashed in on me.

  I couldn’t look, couldn’t think about her being in that box or what she must look like. It wasn’t her, not as she had been. I curled my hands. How could they parade her like this? I couldn’t help thinking back to a history lesson when one of those Norman kings had burst out of his coffin during his funeral.

  One of the pallbearers stumbled and I thought, Don’t drop her, don’t you dare drop her.

  To my surprise Imogen reached out and took my hand and I squeezed back so tightly she winced and withdrew hers. Seeing the red marks, I mumbled an apology. Stuart cleared his throat. The vicar burbled on about someone I didn’t know, calling her Charlotte, who’d loved horses and gymnastics and had shown promise as a dancer. She was nothing like Xanthe.

  He kept talking about her as though she was still alive in there, saying she was “about to make her final journey.” For God’s sake, she’d already done that.

  I know Xanthe would have tried to contact us. She’d have been calling for help, transmitting messages for as long as she was able. She was always trying stuff like that.

  “Close your eyes and tell me what animal I’m thinking of.”

  Usually it ended up in a big row about coincidence – someone always saying elephant or number seven or Africa and someone else saying well of course you’d guess that. So we started coming up with answers she could never have heard of and she stomped off saying we weren’t suitable subjects for the experiment.

  Yet not for a moment did I doubt she’d left of her own accord to escape the bills, the soaring mortgage rates, those letters about being in arrears - and the heart-stopping guilt about what we’d done after the New Year’s Eve party.

  Thinking back a few weeks to when she was still there in the house, I’d do anything to be able to stop time. It was a Saturday morning, the house smelled of coffee and we were all nursing hangovers from hell and Xanthe looked up from the cards she’d spread out in front of her on the floor and said,

  “Oh my God, something terrible’s going to happen to me.”

  And we all just laughed. Later, I wished we’d paid more attention.

  Even when the Swedish boyfriend rang and said she hadn’t turned up we weren’t that bothered. She’d have met someone on the flight over, taken a detour, perhaps changed her mind about him altogether. If she said Tuesday she meant a Tuesday. Or perhaps Wednesday. But as the days went on, we started to wonder. We went through every personal contact in her Filofax and they started to creep in, those icy fingers of doubt.

  The thing is, she’d probably have laughed, too, hearing Stuart tell us off like that in the church. She was always trying to rile him. It was Xanthe who’d first noticed how he talked out of the side of his mouth when he got angry. She could mimic him perfectly. No one else would have dared but even Stuart seemed to find it funny.

  Even now, all these years later, I can’t, won’t, think of her without her nose all scrunched up and her face stained by mascara tracks, making her look like a Pierrot, trying and failing to get through a story without dissolving into gulping, gasping giggles. She’d be sitting up on the window seat, knees drawn up under the tent of her skirt. Sometimes she’d laugh so much she’d fall off and lie in a heap on the floor, helpless.

  She loved Stuart’s pomposity, prodded away at him constantly to get a reaction. If Stuart had been in the Famous Five, he’d have been Julian, the bossy one who always took the decisions. He even looked a bit like those pictures in the early editions – tall with a firm jawline and very short fair hair. Hitler Youth was how Zak described his look during one of their rows, which as a result turned nuclear.

  He always dressed in a button-up shirt and smart chinos. Xanthe and Imogen persuaded him to buy a pair of jeans once, but he wore them with polished brogues and complained he couldn’t bend his knees properly, so they gave up.

  But none of us laughed at his middle-aged manner that day the police called. We were all watching Casualty, predicting ways in which people would end up in hospital.

  “The vegetable knife’s going to slip.”

  “Nah, the cat’s going to bite her. It’s got rabies.”

  “No, she’s going to trip over the cat and fall face-first onto the hob.”

  When Stuart walked back in, something in his face made Zak grab the controller and switch off. He didn’t have to say they’d found her.

  “They need someone to um – identify…”

  Because at that stage of course we thought we were all the family Xanthe had. We had no idea she had one
of her own, let alone a different name. We all looked down into our laps, hating ourselves for the worthless cowards we were.

  “No, it’s fine,” he said after a moment. “I’ll do it.”

  His face was grey when he came back but when I asked him what Xanthe had looked like, he kissed the top of my head and said. “Fine. Lovely. Asleep.”

  I knew he was lying but I loved him for it.

  I wished I hadn’t let Zak go on about the foxes digging her up and the different stages of decomposition. All those thrillers he read. Up until that moment I thought I could forgive Zak anything. But I never forgave him that.

  ***

  When the service was over, Stuart ordered us to hang back while the family walked over to the burial plot, which was a relief because I’m pretty sure I’d have done something awful like throw up and people would think I was just doing it to get attention. It was years since I’d done that.

  Xanthe’s mother’s eyes never left the ground but her father, stiff, dignified, stared straight ahead, over everybody as though we weren’t there – or he wasn’t. His coat was rucked up at the back and I wanted to tell him, but I couldn’t move my legs and it didn’t seem appropriate to call out.

  I only noticed the two policemen as we got to the gate. Had they been there the whole time? Nice of them, I thought, to pay their respects, show their support. After all, they were dealing with deaths all the time but perhaps Xanthe, being so young, had specially touched them, reminded them of their own daughters. After all, it could just as easily have happened to them. Packing to stay with your boyfriend one moment – in a box the next. Fine line.

  So I couldn’t work out what was happening at first when Stuart started walking off with them. He was supposed to be giving us all a lift, after all. But I saw the back door of the police car being held open, a hand placed on his head as he climbed in. He looked back once, a strange look – helpless? Confused? Accusing? All of those things. I looked away but met Imogen’s crushed-ice stare.