by Cara Hunter
I take a deep breath. Alex has gone back to the sitting room. I can hear the sounds of the TV, the rain on the glass lantern above my head. I know what I have to do; I’m just not looking forward to doing it.
‘OK, Somer. Leave it with me. I’ll call Harrison and tell him we want to escalate this. To a possible hate crime.’
* * *
* * *
It’s late, but there’s no way Somer is getting to sleep any time soon. She picks up her phone and hesitates, wondering if she’ll wake him. But she knows he doesn’t go to bed early and, right now, she’d really like to hear his voice.
He picks up at the second ring: he wasn’t asleep.
‘Hey, I was hoping you’d call. How’s it going?’
‘The case? Better, I think. We may have made a breakthrough.’
‘You have – or you have?’
She smiles; he’s good at that: making her own up to her own achievements. It never comes naturally to her, not even now.
‘You’re not too shabby at this detective lark, are you?’
He laughs; he has a good laugh. ‘Well, I think I may have inside info on this particular suspect.’
She sits back in her chair and draws her feet up under her; she can hear the faint murmur of voices in the background.
‘You watching TV?’ She isn’t really interested – she just wants to talk. About anything, nothing.
‘Uh-huh.’
No need to ask what. For a DI with over ten years’ experience Giles has an endearing addiction to true crime. TV, books, podcasts, you name it, he does it, as the recordings now racking up in Somer’s Sky box testify. And she gets it – up to a point. She watched The Staircase with him and it was completely riveting, but Giles runs through the whole range, all the way from serious documentary to things like Wives with Knives and Southern Fried Homicide, which she’d initially assumed had to be spoofs. But as far as Giles is concerned, it’s all equally fascinating. ‘Helps me understand why,’ he’d said, when she quizzed him. ‘Why, after ten thousand years of human evolution, we’re still doing such appallingly shitty things to each other.’
‘How was your day?’
She can hear him stretch now. ‘OK. Not exactly exciting.’
‘Have you heard from the girls about the summer?’
Saumarez has two daughters who live with their mother in Vancouver. Somer hasn’t met them, but they’re due over for the long school holidays. She’s been trying not to let the prospect completely freak her out.
‘Still waiting for confirmation on the flights.’
She tries to think of something to say, but the long day is taking its toll.
‘It’ll be OK,’ he says, reading into her silence. ‘Really. They’re nice kids. They just want me to be happy.’
And you make me so.
He doesn’t say it, but perhaps he doesn’t need to.
‘Can’t wait to meet them,’ she says, realizing, suddenly, and with a jolt of happy amazement, that she actually means it.
* * *
Adam Fawley
2 April 2018
09.15
There are different types of silence, in this job. There’s the silence of anger and impotence, when we have absolute knowledge but absolutely no evidence and can’t do a damn thing about it. There’s the silence of pity, at the terrible things people go through, even – or especially – at the hands of those who are supposed to love them. And there’s the silence of failure and regret, when we’ve done everything we can but it just isn’t enough. But when Somer pins up the copy of Faith’s birth certificate it’s a different sort of silence entirely. You can almost smell the dread. At where this might go, what it might turn out to be.
‘So you think it could be a hate crime?’ says Gislingham, turning to me.
I nod. ‘I hope not, but yes. It has to be a possibility.’
Everett is looking uneasy. ‘But she’s still insisting she wasn’t attacked. How can we even start investigating it properly if she won’t tell us what actually happened?’
‘We’ll just have to hope she changes her mind,’ observes Baxter, who appears to be taking over Gis’s old role as Principal Stater of the Bleeding Obvious.
There’s another silence. A silence of evaluation. Of deliberation.
‘So how do you want us to play it?’ Quinn now.
I take a deep breath. ‘We start by re-interviewing Faith. Formally, this time, and as a matter of urgency. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that this needs to be handled extremely carefully, but there’s no getting away from it: we need to know who else besides her family knows about her status.’
‘I can check her social media again,’ says Baxter. ‘See if there’s anything online – if she’s logging on to any discussion boards for trans kids. Nothing popped the first time but I wasn’t exactly looking for it.’
‘That’s an excellent idea, Baxter,’ says Gis, who’s clearly putting his recent ‘Giving Feedback’ session to good use (‘be positive, use their name’; I should know, I was sent on that damn course myself).
‘Yes, I agree,’ I say. ‘And let’s see if we can track down the father as well.’
Gis nods and makes a note.
I glance round again. There’s only one person who hasn’t said anything.
‘Any thoughts, DC Asante?’
He considers, and he takes his time doing it. Evidently he, at least, isn’t afraid of silence.
‘No,’ he says eventually. ‘I think we’ve covered everything.’
* * *
Everett and Somer are in the car, across the road from 36 Rydal Way. There’s no sign of life inside. The postman knocked five minutes ago but no one answered. They can still see him, a few doors along, talking to an elderly woman with a chihuahua barking tetchily in the crook of her arm. Somer makes a face; her grandmother had one of those when she was a child. She’s hated crabby little dogs ever since.
She looks at her watch. ‘The college said Faith had called in sick, so she should be here. And surely the mother must have left for work by now.’
‘And taken the delightful Nadine with her,’ says Ev heavily. She pushes open the car door. ‘So let’s just cross our fingers we have more luck than the postie.’
The two women walk up the path to the front door. The street is now completely deserted, apart from a couple of jackdaws scrapping over some raw and unidentifiable roadkill. It’s not the happiest of omens.
Ev rings and waits. Then rings again, longer this time.
‘I can’t hear anything.’
‘Give it a minute,’ says Somer. ‘She’s probably trying to see who it is. I would be, if I was her.’
And sure enough, they eventually hear the sound of footsteps inside, and the door opens. But slowly and not very far.
‘What do you want?’ Her face is scrubbed clean now, but there are still red rims round her eyes. She has the same ragged old jumper wound about her like a straitjacket. ‘Mum’s not here.’
‘It’s you we wanted to talk to, Faith,’ says Somer. ‘On your own, if that’s OK. It’s quite important.’
‘Doesn’t Mum have to be with me?’
Ev shakes her head. ‘You don’t need anyone with you unless you want them to be. You’re a victim. Not a criminal. You haven’t done anything wrong.’
She leans on those last words, trying to get the girl to meet her gaze. We’re on your side – we want to help.
‘We can do this whichever way makes you feel more comfortable,’ says Somer. ‘At the station with your mum or someone else you trust, or here, with just us. We thought that might be easier, but seriously, it’s entirely your call. We’ll do whatever you prefer.’
Faith hesitates. ‘I told you – it was just a bad joke.’ But her eyes are wary all the same. Because she can see something in their faces; something that wasn’t there before.
Somer steps forward. ‘We know, Faith,’ she says softly. ‘We know about you – about Daniel.’
The girl bites her lip and her eyes fill with tears. ‘It’s so unfair,’ she whispers. ‘I never did anyone any harm –’
‘I’m sorry,’ says Somer, reaching out and touching her lightly on the arm. ‘I wouldn’t have brought it up if I didn’t have to. But you can see why we’re worried. What you do with your own life is no one else’s business and we’re absolutely with you on that. But we don’t want this to happen to another girl. Someone else in your position. Something like this – it’s not OK. Even if it was “just a joke”. And if it wasn’t –’
She leaves the sentence unfinished. She knows the power of silence. Silence in a good cause.
The girl takes a deep breath and blinks the tears away. ‘OK,’ she says at last. ‘OK.’
* * *
Tony Asante is in a café on Little Clarendon Street. One of those achingly trendy places with displays of muffins and shiny cakes and sourdough bread. The place is packed, and a couple of students taking up space with laptops are getting side-eyes from people in the queue. As is Asante, though he’s too absorbed to notice: the cup of coffee in front of him is long since empty, but he’s still sitting there, staring at his phone, switching every minute or so between different web pages. Baxter may have been the one assigned to social media, but he won’t be doing what Asante is doing. Or going where Asante has gone.
* * *
Faith takes the two women through to the kitchen at the back of the house. Ev had been steeling herself for yet more mauve but it proves to be just anonymous cream cupboards and worktops that look like granite but probably aren’t. The fridge is barnacled with Post-its and to-do lists and jolly little magnets. A woolly sheep, an enamel cat, three ducks in formation; a large pink heart saying Daughters start as your babies but grow up to be your friends, and another, square and yellow with a sprig of daffodils, Just be yourself. That’s plenty wonderful enough.
Somer feels her throat tightening. Diane Appleford might be prickly and defensive with the police but when it comes to her kids her heart is definitely in the right place. She’s going to support her children, whoever they turn out to be. And Somer wonders suddenly if her husband wasn’t, in the end, able to do the same – and whether that’s the reason he’s no longer around.
‘You want tea?’ she asks, moving towards the kettle. ‘Coffee?’
Faith shakes her head but Everett indicates yes. She’d have done the same even if she’d had four cups already and was wired with caffeine: it’s not about the drink, it’s about the domesticity. The reassurance of routine. There’s only instant in the cupboard but the aroma fills the small room. Not for the first time, Somer wonders why it always manages to smell better than it tastes.
She pulls out one of the stools at the breakfast bar and slides Ev’s mug across to her. They’re waiting to see if Faith speaks first – they want her to feel she’s in control.
‘So,’ begins Everett, having strung out the process of sugar and milk (neither of which she takes) as long as humanly feasible.
‘I’ll talk to you,’ says Faith at last. ‘But I don’t want any of it coming out. In public, I mean. About me. Who I am.’
The two women exchange a glance. They know the perils of a promise like that. Especially if this is a hate crime. Somer takes a deep breath and makes a decision.
‘Until we know who did this we won’t know why. If he did it because of your status, then we’ll have to charge him with that offence and it’ll be almost impossible to keep your name out of it entirely.’
Faith starts to shake her head but Somer plunges on. ‘But if he attacked you because you’re a beautiful girl – and you are – then that’s different. Either way, I promise you I will do everything I possibly can to protect your privacy.’
She reaches out for Faith’s hand, forces her to look up, to believe her. Their eyes meet and slowly the girl sits up a bit straighter and lifts her chin.
‘OK. What do you want to know?’ she says.
‘Why don’t you start at the beginning?’ says Somer. ‘You had breakfast with your mum and sister then left for college? Let’s start from there.’
Faith takes a deep breath. ‘I left the house at 9.00 and walked down towards the bus stop on Cherwell Drive. That’s where it happened.’
‘Someone took you – abducted you? Is that what you’re saying?’
Her head drops and she nods.
‘It’s usually quite busy along there at that time of the day, isn’t it?’ says Ev. She makes it a question, hoping it sounds less confrontational like that, but there’s no getting away from the fact that Rydal Way is a rat run and no one reported any sort of incident along there that morning. The idea that a young girl could have been snatched off a busy cut-through in the middle of the rush hour and no one saw anything –
Faith looks up briefly. ‘It had just started raining. Really hard.’
Which could – just about – explain it. The road is suddenly awash, windows get steamed up, drivers concentrate more on where they’re going and less on what’s around them.
‘I’d stopped to get out my umbrella,’ says Faith. ‘I’d propped my bag up on a wall to look for it. That’s when it happened. Someone put a plastic bag over my head and started dragging me backwards. I tried to fight them off but they jabbed something in my back. Something sharp. I thought it was a knife.’
‘You didn’t see his face?’ asks Somer, keeping her voice steady. It’s her own personal wake-at-dawn terror. Not being able to breathe, not being able to see. ‘No one went past just before? No one was hanging around?’
‘I had my earphones in, so I wasn’t really concentrating.’
‘And then what happened?’
‘He started dragging me round the back towards the garages. I couldn’t see but I could tell – it’s all gravelly in there – it’s different to the pavement.’
‘The garages?’ asks Ev.
‘Yeah, you know, at the bottom of the road.’
And Ev does know, now she thinks about it. You hardly ever see that sort of thing any more, but Rydal Way has a separate area for garages just before the junction with Cherwell Drive. And now Faith’s story is starting to make more sense: if the attacker was lying in wait round there he wouldn’t have been visible from the street and it would have taken only a few seconds to bundle Faith out of sight.
‘And then he shoved me against the van and I heard him open the door.’
‘He had a van?’
Faith nods. ‘Oh yeah, he had a van.’
‘What happened next?’
‘He pushed me forward and I fell into the back. That’s when he tied up my hands.’
‘In front or behind your back?’ ‘In front.’
‘And you’re sure it was a van? It couldn’t have been an SUV? Some other sort of car that opens at the back?’
Faith shakes her head. ‘I never saw it but it was too low for an SUV. And it wasn’t that big. When we went round the corners I got thrown against the side. There was some sort of plastic on the floor – I could feel it sticking to me.’
Somer nods and makes a note. However traumatic it was to get to this point, now Faith has made up her mind she’s proving to be a surprisingly good witness. Accurate, observant, attentive to detail.
She’s playing with her necklace now; the one that bears her name.
‘Just now you said “they”,’ says Somer. ‘And then you said “he”. Is it possible there was more than one person?’
Faith shrugs. ‘I don’t think so. I’m not sure.’
‘But no one spoke to you – you never heard any voices?’
She shakes her head. ‘The whole time, he never spoke. He never said a single word.’
* * *
Adam Fawley
2 April 2018
11.24
I’m halfway home when I get the call. I curse under my breath when I see who it is. I promised Alex I’d be there to meet the health visitor, but I was rather hoping to get back to the office before any of the team rea
lized I was AWOL. Some hope, clearly.
The line is breaking up but I can still just about hear.
‘Sir? It’s Tony Asante.’
I could have guessed it’d be him. He’s been with us a few months now and thus far I can’t fault him. Diligent, intelligent, technically excellent. He does what he’s asked and he takes the initiative when he should. And yet there’s something about him I just can’t get a handle on, and I don’t think the rest of the team can either. Every time I think I have him worked out, he manages to wrong-foot me. It’s almost as if he’s playing a role; going through the motions. As if his real agenda is elsewhere. Alex says he’s probably just extremely ambitious and not very good at hiding it, and I suspect she has a point. It would certainly explain why Quinn has taken such an obvious dislike, and let’s face it, he’s not that good at hiding it either. But unlike Quinn, Asante seems to get on better with the women on the team than the men, which still isn’t that common in this job. Perhaps it’s just that, like them, he knows what it’s like being in the minority.
‘What is it, Asante?’
‘Sorry to bother you, sir. I think I’ve found something.’
I frown slightly. ‘What – Douglas Appleford, you mean? You’ve tracked him down?’
A slight pause. Embarrassment or calculation?
‘No. It’s not that. Look – it’d be easier to explain face to face. I could come to you if you’re off-site.’
Of course I’m bloody well ‘off-site’. He wouldn’t be calling me otherwise.
I can hear the sound of traffic in the background; he must be on the street somewhere.
‘I’m not in the office. I had to go home. Briefly.’
‘That’s Risinghurst, right? I can come there.’
I don’t know why him knowing that annoys me, but it does. It’s not as if people from the office haven’t been to the house before. But not that often. And not since Alex has been pregnant.
‘I’ll only be an hour or so. Can’t it wait till I get back?’