by Fiona Barton
“Quite. Has your son been in touch with you directly?”
“No. No,” I repeat when she gives me a long look. “I would tell you.”
“Like you did about the speeding ticket?”
“Okay. That was a mistake. I’m sorry.”
“It’s important, Kate,” Bob says, and I nod.
“Has the hire company given you any details to confirm it was Jake?” I ask.
“He used his driving license and a credit card to hire the car.”
“Has he still got the car?”
“No, that one was returned,” Salmond says.
“So he’s hired another one?”
Sparkes smiles. “So quick, Kate. Yes. Jake has hired another car. We’re looking for it—and him.”
“What will happen when you find him?”
“We’ll ask him some questions about what he heard and saw on the night of the fire.”
“If he was there.”
“Quite. Remember to pay the speeding fine.” Salmond snapped her notebook shut.
BANGKOK DAY 16
(MONDAY, AUGUST 11, 2014)
It was the Dutch boys who’d started it. Them and their stupid drinking games. They’d been necking beer all day by the look of them, those great big bottles of Chang, but they wanted some fun, they said, when they finally rolled up at the guesthouse with a bottle with no label.
“We’re leaving tonight. We want a going-away party!”
Alex had been worried. They’d been all red-faced and sweaty in that dangerous “it’s about to kick off” way. Eyes flitting over the girls and then at each other, as if they had a plan. She’d given Rosie a warning look, but she’d just laughed and Lars had thrown his arms round her and given her a big kiss on the cheek.
“My beautiful English girl,” he’d sung right into her face. He’d kept his arms round her, and Alex could see Rosie was beginning to struggle to get free.
“Come on, Lars,” Alex had said. The Head Girl. “What have you got in the bottle?”
“The man said tequila.” Diederik had belched and then put his hand over his mouth.
“Look out. He’s going to be sick,” Alex had said as she pushed him toward the toilets. Lars had let go of Rosie and helped Alex steady his friend.
“He’s okay. He’s okay.”
“He will be in a minute.” She’d steered Diederik into a stall and closed the door on him. Don’t need to hold his hair like a girl. He can get on with it himself, she’d told herself. The noises told their own story, and when he’d come out, he’d been grinning happily and wiping his mouth on his bare arm.
“Let’s start again,” he’d shouted and rushed back into the dorm to begin a new game.
* * *
• • •
Rosie was down to her underwear when Jake came in an hour later.
“Who the hell has puked in the bogs?” he asked in an icy sort of voice that shut everyone up.
“And what is going on here?” He was looking at Rosie. She tried to cover herself with her hands and Alex almost felt sorry for her.
She wanted to tell Jake that she’d tried to stop the game but her friend wouldn’t listen, just kept downing the stuff in the shot glasses and losing the dares, but she kept quiet. She’d had enough of making excuses for Rosie.
And though she wasn’t nearly as wasted as her friend, she was a bit tipsy. She’d started off matching her shot for shot, fed up with always being the sensible one, but after a while, when her head started spinning, she’d begun tipping her drinks into a bin behind her when the Dutch boys weren’t looking. Anyway, the boys were all about Rosie. Alex had watched as they circled her friend, her stomach clenching but secretly relieved it wasn’t her.
Jake was really angry but Lars had jumped up and started dancing round the room. He was a six-foot-four-inch schoolboy in a pair of Superman underpants and suddenly they’d all laughed. Alex couldn’t help it. He’d looked like a stick insect on crack. Rosie had put her T-shirt back on and Jake calmed down. He’d picked up a shot glass and sat on the floor with them.
“I know a game,” he’d said.
He wrote their names down on bits of paper napkin and they each had to pick one out and then pretend to be that person. The others had to guess who it was. If they got it wrong, they had to down a shot of tequila or whatever was in the bottle.
Alex got Jake, so she sat and waited. She didn’t need to scrutinize him for telling details—she’d memorized him already: the way he straightened his glasses when he was being serious, his crooked smile, his way of chewing the thumbnail of his left hand when he was listening. The others carried on, getting rowdier, clowning about and insulting one another. Diederik got Rosie’s name and started ripping off his clothes and flirting with Lars, kissing his cheek and ruffling his hair. They all knew who he was supposed to be, but it was so funny they let him carry on. Rosie laughed the loudest of all and Alex knew she would disappear with Lars as soon as possible.
When it was Jake’s turn, he put his head down and looked at each of them from under his lashes. Not in a sexy way. Secretly. Like a Peeping Tom. Alex realized instantly who he was impersonating and looked across at Jamie to see if he’d recognized himself. He looked like he had no idea. He mouthed, “Who is it?” and Alex pointed at him and mouthed back, “It’s you.” The word “Me?” formed on his lips but didn’t get any further. Jamie looked horrified. She could see him thinking, Is that what they see? Am I this weirdo?
The others were getting bored now, so Jake messed with his hair, making it stand on end like Jamie’s in the mornings, and Lars shouted, “JW!” and the ordeal was over.
But Alex knew Jake had been watching them. He knew who they were.
* * *
• • •
Hours later, when Jake went to finish the washing up and Rosie was walking Lars and Diederik to the bus station, she sat with Jamie on the floor of the dorm. He’d carried on drinking after the game.
She tried to get him onto his feet, but his legs wouldn’t cooperate and they ended up in a heap, laughing hysterically.
When they stopped, he looked at her with his unfocused eyes. “I love you, Alex,” he said. She tried to start laughing again but found she couldn’t. “I’ve loved you since I saw you on the plane.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You smiled at me on the plane over here. Don’t you remember?”
She didn’t, but she thought it must be the drink talking.
“I followed you onto the bus, but you didn’t notice me. Anyway, we ended up together, didn’t we?”
“Hush, Jamie,” she said. He took hold of her hand.
“I know you’re too lovely for me. Most girls are.” He took a deep breath, and it was as if something had been released in him, words spilling out: “Spud, one of the blokes on the last building site where I worked, called me ‘a bottom-feeder’—he told the others I only went after ugly girls because they were easy. I wanted to tell him they were nice girls. Kind. But I could hear the game starting. The ‘make Jamie angry’ game. So I breathed slowly, like they taught me, laughed with him, and then got on with mixing plaster. But I didn’t stop thinking about it. Flicking through the girls I’d gone out with. There weren’t many, really. And I chose them because they didn’t give me that ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ look. The one mean, pretty girls always give me, making me feel I’m nothing. So I stopped. I started looking for girls who smiled nervously when I walked up to them in a pub or a club. Who giggled, as scared of rejection as I was, when I spoke to them. They made me feel good, and that can’t be a bad thing, can it?”
Alex felt battered by this flood of confidences but shook her head. “No, that can’t be a bad thing.”
“Do you like me, Alex?”
She nodded, unable to do anything else. She wanted to say, “I like
you very much as a friend, Jamie,” but his sudden vulnerability frightened her. She couldn’t hurt him.
He smiled happily and slid slowly sideways on the floor. She picked a sheet off his bunk and put it over him.
FORTY
The Detective
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2014
A notification had pinged up on Sparkes’s screen twenty-four hours earlier: Alex O’Connor PM.
He didn’t remember putting it on his Outlook calendar—he’d scrawled it in his desk diary. He’s very analog, he could hear Zara Salmond saying somewhere. She must’ve put it online for him.
He was in the office early to prepare. He didn’t mind them. Postmortems. They were part of the job. But, to his quiet delight, Salmond always made sure she was standing in a corner of the forensic mortuary—“Away from the head end”—if she had to be there. Wonder Woman, as she was known in the department, had a chink in her body armor.
The police had been asked to attend by the West Hampshire coroner, an impatient, silver-haired solicitor who pushed proceedings along at a clip but still managed to charm the bereaved.
Sparkes didn’t know what the examinations would show. Evidence of a sexual assault could be very difficult to detect in an embalmed body. And of course, there might be nothing there. Nothing to find. Maybe there’d been a misunderstanding about the clothes. A mistranslation. And the absence of clothes was all they had at the moment. It was all completely circumstantial.
But that wasn’t what the families wanted to hear, and he wondered if they would be able to get on with mourning their children if the coroner agreed with the Thais that the girls had died accidentally in the fire. He doubted it. But at least they could hold their funerals.
* * *
• • •
Eileen had talked about her funeral the night before. She wanted her name in flowers, people singing “The Old Rugged Cross” and wringing their hands, she’d said and laughed at his horrified face. “Bob, I’m joking. If you sing ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ I’ll sit up in my coffin. How about ‘Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead’?”
He’d tried to play along, but inside he was dying.
“So,” she’d said finally, reading the list on her lap. “Lilies on the coffin. Donations to Cancer Research. The poem from Four Weddings and a Funeral, all the verses of ‘Amazing Grace,’ and David Bowie’s ‘Starman’ to finish.”
She tore the page out of her notebook and handed it to him. “All sorted.”
Apart from the dying part, he thought, and his stomach tightened into its default knot of fear. This is ridiculous, he told himself as he fought the nausea down. You’ve seen death so many times.
But usually after the event. And not people he loved. He’d seen lots of bodies, but this time he’d be there when death took place. And he was terrified. He couldn’t really say what of. The way the palliative nurse had described it, all would be serenity. Eileen would simply slip away. But she would be gone. And his future without her would begin.
DS Salmond tapped on his half-open door and roused him from his thoughts. He put his hands to his eyes in case he’d cried without knowing. It happened sometimes.
“Did you remember the O’Connor PM is today?” she asked.
“Come in, for goodness’ sake. I’m always talking to your disembodied head. Yes, of course I did. Remind me who’s doing it.”
“Aoife Mortimer. Hilary at the coroner’s office told me.”
“Oh good. We should go. She likes a prompt start.”
“Right. Well. Are you sure you need me to come, too?”
“Yes. You can drive.”
* * *
• • •
In the car, Salmond sucked a strong mint in a preemptive strike against the smells that always turned her stomach.
“Why do you think the Thais didn’t do a PM? Very sloppy,” she said, conversationally.
“Not a decision I’d be comfortable with. But let’s see what Aoife finds, shall we?”
They didn’t have to wait long.
The CSI photographer was taking her first pictures of the body of Alex O’Connor when Sparkes and Salmond entered the mortuary viewing gallery.
“Morning, Bob,” Dr. Mortimer called up to him. “Hello, Zara. How are you feeling today? I’ve put a stool in the corner for you. Just in case.”
Sparkes tried not to grin and moved forward to look down at the body on the slab.
“Christ, the embalmers have really gone to town with the formalin,” he said. The concentration of the embalming fluid was so strong that his eyes were burning.
Aoife Mortimer nodded. “I’ll come up. Shall we get on with the briefing, while we can still breathe?”
Sparkes ran through the story so far, carefully prefacing each fact with the words “according to the Thai police.” The pathologist made notes and then walked down to the mortuary floor to begin.
She put on an extraction airflow hood to protect herself from the formalin, put her notebook down on the sheeted table behind her, and looked up at Sparkes—her eyes level with his feet. “Right,” she said. “Shall we?”
There was silence in the room as she walked round the body to do the initial, visual scan of the mottled, waxy body on the table.
“Let’s get this postmortem makeup off,” she said quietly to the technician at her side.
“I suppose they were trying to cover the marks of the embalming needles in the neck, but they have put this on with a trowel,” Dr. Mortimer said.
The orange pancake foundation gave the dead girl the macabre air of an end-of-pier show dancer.
Sparkes tried not to breathe through his nose as the pathologist began washing the makeup off Alex O’Connor’s face and neck to expose the skin.
“That looks like bruising on the neck.” Aoife Mortimer reached forward to move the young woman’s hair back. “Can you see that, Bob? Where the foundation makeup was.”
He peered down from his perch. Decomposition had muddied the skin, but he could see a deeper-colored pattern of bruises and scratches.
“Christ, it looks like she’s been strangled.”
Salmond shot off her stool and came to look, her hand over her mouth.
Her eyes said, “Told you,” when she turned to her boss.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Dr. Mortimer said coolly, spotting the look. “I’ll need to complete the examination before I can come to any firm conclusions.”
She continued her meticulous external inventory of the body and Salmond returned to her place of safety to scribble notes on the back of a folder.
Dr. Mortimer worked her way down the girl’s body. She spent time examining the pubic area, moving backward and then in close, observing carefully from different angles. Sparkes knew she was looking for the glint or reflection of dried fluids.
Alex is telling us her story. Sparkes nodded to himself.
BANGKOK DAY 17
(TUESDAY, AUGUST 12, 2014)
It had been a difficult day and was about to get worse. That morning, she and Rosie had had the big showdown about moving on that had been brewing for days. But when Alex had walked into the bar that evening, she’d found Rosie busy flirting with Jake, batting her eyelashes slowly in time with his jokes. Her infatuation with Lars apparently forgotten.
Alex had felt as if she’d been slapped. Rosie must have known how she felt about Jake—she’d talked about him a couple of times, when they were alone in their room. Testing out how she felt, how others saw him. Rosie hadn’t sounded that interested then, but she was all over him now. Alex’s prior claim certainly wasn’t holding her back. And Jake had looked as if he was enjoying it.
“Rosie, I’m talking to you,” Alex had shouted.
“What now? I’m busy . . .”
“I can see that.” Alex had moved closer, screeching chairs out of the way. �
�I don’t know why I’m wasting my breath, but we need to get those tickets today. The cheap ones might sell out if we don’t.”
Rosie shrugged.
“We’re supposed to be leaving on Friday, after we get our exam results. We agreed.”
“You agreed, not me. I want to stay here. I’m having a good time. Jake wants to show me a new karaoke club. Don’t you, Jake?”
“Well, I was just telling you where it is. I’ve got no plans to go there,” Jake had said quickly and moved off to safety behind the bar.
“Jake!” Rosie had tried to call him back, then turned on her friend. “You drive everyone away, Alex. Everyone thinks you are such a miserable cow. Why can’t you just relax and enjoy yourself?”
“I am. I just want to see more of Thailand. I came to travel, not sit in a guesthouse for weeks on end, taking drugs and throwing myself at anything with a pulse.”
“Shut up! I’m having a good time and you can’t bear it. What’s your problem?”
“You! You’re my problem. And how long can you go on ‘having a good time’ if you carry on spending money on club booze and tattoos? Do you even know how much you’ve got left?”
Rosie had pulled a face, back to a sulky child. “Mind your own business, Alex. You’re not in charge of me.”
“Fine. But I’m leaving on Friday night whether you come or not. In fact, I’m going to buy my bus ticket tonight. You can do what you like.”
Jake was pretending to dry the glasses and Jamie was studying his phone in the corner, but of course they’d heard it all. Alex hated public rows. Her mum said they were common and Alex knew she got all red in the face and tearful. But it couldn’t be avoided this time. She’d been dancing around the subject in her head for days. According to the original itinerary, they’d been due to be toasting their A Level results in Ko Phi Phi, “gazing out at monolithic rocks in an azure blue sea,” Alex had read from her guidebook. But it looked as though they would be in Oxxi’s Place yet again, gazing out at a sea of drunks.
