The Gathering Man (A DI Erica Swift Thriller Book 7)

by M K Farrar

  Chapter Ten

  Bethany hovered outside the door of the school counsellor’s office and prayed no one would see her. It was bad enough having to come to school without having this on top of everything as well. She’d given her bullies plenty of fuel to use against her without them deciding she was crazy and needed a therapist, too. She shuffled from foot to foot, glancing around anxiously. No one else was near, so she lifted her hand and quickly knocked on the door.

  She’d been expecting for the counsellor to call her in, but instead the door swung open. The man on the other side was in his forties, she guessed, with light-brown hair and a well-trimmed beard. He was slightly overweight and reminded her of a younger Father Christmas.

  He beamed at her. “You must be Bethany. I’m Mr Henniger, but you can call me Alfie.”

  She gave an awkward smile. “Alfie?”

  “Well, that is my name.” He gestured into the office. “Come in, take some weight off.”

  Bethany already had a bad feeling about this. He was trying too hard to act cool, and it was doing the opposite to what he probably wanted. Instead of making her feel relaxed, it was winding her up further. The air was infused with the scent of coffee, though there was no sign of a coffee machine in here, or even a kettle. The teachers had a staffroom to make their hot drinks and eat their lunch, but did this man even count as one of the staff? She had no idea.

  She peered around his office, trying to get a better idea about who he was. A spider plant hung from the ceiling in a crocheted net. A box of tissues and a digital clock sat on his desk next to a computer and a pen pot. She hoped to see framed photographs of his family on his desk, but there were none. Did that mean he didn’t have one, or did he just like to keep his family and work separate? She wasn’t sure why she would have felt better knowing he had a family, but she would have.

  “Sit, sit,” he said, nodding at the seating arrangement.

  His office had a sofa instead of the hard plastic chairs that made up most of the offices and classrooms in the school. She perched on the edge of it, hoping he wasn’t going to ask her to lie back like they did in the films.

  He sat opposite. “So, Bethany, why don’t you tell me a bit about the reason you think you’re here.”

  She stared at him as though he was stupid. “I would have thought that was obvious.”

  He steepled his fingers at his lips. “I assume you mean the hair loss. Is this something you do to yourself rather than it being from a medical issue?”

  “Trichotillomania is a medical issue,” she muttered, her cheeks burning.

  “Yes, but I mean, you have at least some control over it, unlike say, hair loss from chemotherapy.”

  “No, I don’t have control over it. That’s the whole point.”

  Anger rose inside her. She wished she did have hair loss from chemotherapy, at least people understood that and would feel sorry for her instead of treating her like she was a freak.

  “You can, Bethany, you just need to learn some coping mechanisms so you turn to those instead of pulling your hair out.”

  She couldn’t help her sarcasm. “Really? I never would have thought of that before.”

  “I assume from your tone that you’ve already tried that.”

  “I’ve tried everything.”

  “Maybe there’s something you haven’t tried, and if we can find out what that thing is, and then combine it with these sessions where you can talk to me, maybe it’ll even help.”

  She sighed again. “Nothing ever helps.”

  He crossed and uncrossed his legs. “Have you ever heard of a self-fulfilling prophecy?”

  “You’re saying that believing nothing will help means that I’m making it so nothing will help.”

  “Exactly. Don’t you think that if we tell the universe we should be treated in a certain way, then the universe will oblige?”

  “The universe?” She curled her lip in disdain. This was a waste of time. She’d known this wasn’t going to help.

  He flapped a hand. “Call it whatever you like—a positive mental attitude has been proven to help people in healing. Ever find that some people just seem to be luckier than others? It’s not that they’re inherently luckier, they just have a mindset that means they open themselves up to possibilities that people with a different mindset don’t.”

  “You’re saying this is my fault.”

  “I’m saying that you have more power inside you to make a change than you’re giving yourself credit for.”

  She stayed silent for a moment, letting it sink in. Could that really be true? If she just changed the way she thought about things, would it make a difference? But it wasn’t as easy as simply changing her mindset. How could she when all she was surrounded by was unhappiness?

  “Maybe,” she muttered.

  He clasped his hands between his knees. “Tell me about the last time you felt the urge to pull your hair out?”

  Her mind whirred. When had it been? When she’d been sitting in English class and they’d all had to read out loud from the Shakespeare book they were studying for GCSEs, and as the teacher had moved around class and got closer and closer, the urge to pull at her hair had become all-consuming until she was barely even thinking about following the text and had been fully focused on keeping her hands in her lap. Or had it been when she’d been using the girls’ toilets and she’d been in one of the stalls only to hear the voices of a couple of her bullies outside? She’d frozen on the loo, her breath caught, praying they wouldn’t think to look under the door or over the top of the divide and discover her there. Or had it been this morning when the tension over the breakfast table had been so bad she’d felt herself vibrate internally with it?

  “I’m not sure,” she said instead. “There are lots of times. I get stressed out at school a lot and then I want to pull my hair.”

  “You find school stressful?”

  “Yes.”

  “What parts?”

  “All of it. Pressure to do well with my work, pressure to be popular, pressure to look good.” She gave a small laugh. “Which I’m clearly not achieving.”

  “What about at home? How are things there?”

  She shrugged. “Okay, I guess. I mean, my parents fight, but don’t all parents?”

  “How bad are the fights?”

  The last thing she wanted was for any of this to get back to her parents. She imagined how that would go; she’d get home and they’d tell her that someone from the school had phoned, and they’d demand to know why she was telling complete strangers that it was her parents’ fighting that in some way caused her to pull her own hair out. Even though her mother had encouraged her to come to this thing, she wouldn’t be pleased knowing that Bethany had talked about them, and her father would be furious. Mr Henniger—Alfie—might say that everything was confidential, but she didn’t believe it. Adults always found a way around things so they could twist whatever it was they promised and make it seem as though the kid was the one in the wrong.

  “No worse than anyone else’s, I’m sure.”

  “Do the arguments ever get physical?”

  “No, of course not!” Her parents had never hit each other—at least that she was aware of—but they had thrown things and punched walls, and slammed doors. Her dad had thrown his entire dinner across the room one time when her mother had been talking about how one of her friends was going to Mallorca on holiday. Her father had taken it as her complaining that they never got to go to Mallorca, and it had blown up into a fight about money and how nothing was ever good enough. Bethany had scooped Florence up and taken her upstairs, where they’d sat in her room with the door closed and tried not to listen to what was going on.

  He softened his voice. “What I’m trying to do, Bethany, is get you to identify the times when you know you start to pull your hair, so you can do something else instead.”

  She raised her chin. “Like what?”

  “Have you ever heard of EFT?”

  “No
.”

  “It stands for Emotional Freedom Tapping and it’s linked to acupuncture, only you don’t need the needles, so it’s far more accessible. You just use your fingers instead and tap on the pressure points.” He showed her the places where she was supposed to tap—between her eyebrows, the top of her head, the side of her hand, among others. “Any time you feel the need to pull your hair, just tap instead.”

  She stared at him in disbelief. “You want me to sit in a classroom, tapping on my head? Like the kids in class don’t have enough to use to make fun of me, you’re going to make me look like an idiot as well.”

  “It doesn’t need to be your head. You can tap on the side of your hand—”

  “This was supposed to help me,” she interrupted, “not make things worse.”

  “I just like you to try—”

  She was already on her feet. “I knew this was going to be a waste of time.”

  “Bethany, wait.”

  She grabbed her bag off the floor, put her head down, and headed for the door. She burst out into the corridor, her heart racing and her palms sweaty. Her fingers itched to reach for her hair, her eyebrows, her eyelashes, and she clenched them at her sides and gritted her teeth. He didn’t know what he was talking about, doing stupid tapping. How was that ever going to help her?

  She could do this on her own.

  Chapter Eleven

  Erica and Shawn went back to the office via the drive-through so they could grab a half decent coffee.

  “I can’t do another cup of that vending machine crap,” she commented.

  “You know that’s bull. We’re all in an abusive relationship with that machine. No matter how badly it treats us, we always go back for more.”

  She laughed and dumped two sugars into her black coffee and stirred.

  Mentally, she put together the pieces of what they’d learnt.

  “Let’s investigate places that sell sushi in the evening near the park, the coffee places as well. If somewhere sells both at the same time, even better. Find out if they’ve got CCTV from that evening. If we can catch our Jane Doe on camera, it’ll give us a better idea about her final steps that night, and if she was with anyone. If she used a card to pay for the meal, we might even get a name.”

  Shawn took a sip of his drink. “Good idea.”

  “It’s bothering me that the scalpel used to make those cuts hasn’t been found yet. The killer either took it with them or dumped it somewhere around the park.”

  “Maybe they kept it as a souvenir?” he suggested.

  “I just hope they’re not planning on using it on another girl.”

  When they’d finished their drinks, Erica drove back into the office. She found her usual parking spot empty, pulled into it, and switched off the engine.

  “I’m going to update Gibbs,” she said as they entered the building.

  Shawn nodded. “I’ll take a look at the local places that sell coffee and sushi, and see if any of them are open late.”

  “Great. Let me know how you get on.”

  Erica went to DCI Gibbs’ office and knocked on the door. He called for her to enter and so she did.

  It had been some time now since he’d suffered a stroke that had put him in hospital and on leave for a while, but unless a person knew for sure what had happened, they most likely wouldn’t know. Erica could still see the weakness in one side of his face, the slight tilt to the corner of his mouth if he smiled, and the way his hand trembled when he picked something up, but otherwise he was good as new.

  He glanced up from his computer. “Swift, please tell me you have an ID on the Jane Doe.”

  “Still working on it, but I’m sure it won’t be much longer. Someone has to be missing her. I don’t think she’s a runaway or illegal immigrant. She was too well cared for when she’d been alive. The postmortem shows she was killed by an injection of fentanyl into one of the cuts on her body, that’s why it was hard to tell her cause of death right away. Someone might have been trying to make it appear as though she killed herself.”

  Gibbs frowned. “They must have known we’d find the fentanyl the moment we did a tox screen.”

  Erica understood what he was getting at. “They made it appear to be a suicide, but perhaps not for our benefit?”

  “If not us, then whose?”

  She considered that for a moment. “Whoever killed her might have been trying to convince themselves it was suicide rather than murder. I mean, if they’re screwed up enough to carve those symbols all over her body with a scalpel then we’re hardly looking at a stable individual.”

  He tented his fingers at his lips. “Hmm, possibly. It’s certainly something to think about. Getting this girl’s identity is of vital importance, though. At least then we can start to understand if she might have been caught up with someone or something that led to her death.”

  “You think the killer knew her rather than it being a stranger?”

  “From statistics, we know that’s normally the case, but also, after reading the report that was uploaded, we can see she didn’t have any kind of defensive wounds, no signs of a struggle or abrasions from being bound.”

  Erica nodded. “That’s what Lucy Kim said, but remember there was fentanyl in her system, so it’s possible it was injected in a lower dose to sedate her first, before the overdose was given. If he caught her by surprise, there wouldn’t have been time for defensive wounds.”

  “I’m not an expert on drugs by any means, but wouldn’t it take a professional to get that kind of dosage correct?”

  “Yes, that’s right. That’s another line of enquiry we’ll be following, too. That, together with the use of a scalpel to make the cuts, might point towards a medical professional.”

  “Okay, good.”

  She filled him in on everything else they’d covered as well, including the girl’s final meal.

  “Let me know when you make progress,” he said.

  “Will do.”

  Erica stepped out. The office was a buzz of voices, phones ringing, and the clicking of computer keys. She always enjoyed the atmosphere of the place. Yes, she preferred to be out talking to people than sitting behind a desk, but there was still something about the energy and camaraderie that lifted her soul. People would probably think she was crazy if she ever voiced that out loud.

  She stopped by Rudd’s desk. “How are you getting on with finding an expert for the symbols?”

  “I’ve contacted a couple of people now, but no one recognises them. Sorry.”

  “Not your fault. Keep trying.”

  Across the room, DC Jon Howard hung up the phone and then rose from his desk.

  He called across to get her attention. “Boss, we’ve got a hit on a misper case. Mother reported her seventeen-year-old daughter as missing this morning. Apparently, she hasn’t been home for two days.”

  “And she’s only just reporting it now?”

  Jon shrugged. “Maybe she made a habit of staying out for a couple of nights on the trot?”

  “Okay, I want to speak to her.”

  “I’ve got her address. I’m sending the misper report over to you now. It contains a photograph the mother gave to the officers she reported the girl missing to.”

  Erica sat at her desk, fired up her computer, and clicked on the report. She viewed the picture on-screen with mixed emotions. While she wanted to ID their Jane Doe, knowing who she was would also mean breaking the hearts of the girl’s mother, father, and everyone else who loved her. Her heart sank. Though the body they’d found had been disfigured by the cuts to her face, arms, and legs, it was clearly the same girl.

  ERICA AND SHAWN DROVE to the address on the report, the mood in the car sombre. The photograph that had been uploaded—a vibrant, smiling young woman—was a stark contrast to the body they had in the mortuary. Once Erica had asked a few questions to be as certain as she could be that this was the same girl, she’d have to get one of the parents to come down to the mortuary to do an official ID o
n the body.

  The road was a set of terraced, yellow-brick houses with bay windows and steps leading up to the front doors. A line of cars were parked on both sides of the road, and several bikes were chained to railings in front of the houses. One of the walls separating the small front yards from the street had graffiti sprayed across it.

  Erica located a parking spot, and they had to walk back down the road to the right house. She trotted up the four steps to the front door and rang the bell.

  A woman in her early fifties answered the door.

  “Mrs Ford?” Erica held her ID up in one hand.

  A combination of hope and concern washed like a wave across the woman’s features. Her dark hair was grey at the roots, and she had a too-thin, undernourished look about her.

  “Is this about my Stacey? Did you find her yet? Is she okay?”

  She hadn’t even given Erica a chance to introduce herself. “Do you mind if we come in and have a chat?”

  Erica could see the woman holding herself back from launching at Erica, grabbing her by the shoulders, and shaking the news out of her. Instead, she nodded meekly and stepped back, letting them both through.

  They followed her across the hallway and into a lounge at the front of the property.

  Mrs Ford gestured for them to sit on the sofa and then perched on the edge of an occasional chair. Her hand went straight to her mouth, and she anxiously tore at her nails.

  “I’m DI Swift, and this is DS Turner. You reported your daughter, Stacey, missing this morning?”

  She nodded. “That’s right. I was sure she’d show up some time last night, but when she still wasn’t back this morning, I knew something was wrong.”

  “Does she often stay out?”

  “Yeah, she’s seventeen. She comes and goes as she pleases. I try to keep track of what she’s doing, but she won’t always tell me. I think she must have a fella on the go.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I’m not sure, just a mother’s instinct. She was always going out and not telling me where she was going, and if I asked, she told me to mind my own business. She’s been secretive lately, looking at her phone but not letting me see the screen.”