by Jane Casey
‘I don’t wish to be unhelpful, but I’m surprised by your interest in Minnie’s life.’ Dr Chang looked from me to Maeve to Derwent. ‘I was under the impression that she was attacked by a stranger. I don’t see how that could have anything to do with the school, except for the obvious fact that she was in uniform.’
‘We don’t know who attacked her yet,’ Maeve said.
‘But I was given to understand – I thought there would be CCTV from the bus.’
‘It’s inconclusive.’ Maeve’s voice was calm but Derwent scowled and shook his head, unable to hide his frustration.
Inconclusive. Maddening was another word for it. We had come back to the office after finishing the search of Minnie’s room to find DS Colin Vale and Derwent glowering at the TV in the viewing suite. Colin was our resident tech expert, able to conjure magic from the least promising CCTV, but not on this occasion. The footage was clear enough. On screen, people took their place beside a sleeping Minnie Charleston, and travelled for a few stops, then got off to allow someone else to take their place. There was no dramatic moment where someone plunged a weapon into our victim; whatever had happened had been quick and subtle. Throughout the journey passengers had got on and lingered in the aisle, blocking Minnie from view for several long seconds at a time. Plenty of footage to watch: no answers so far.
‘We’ve found that it’s a good idea to start with the victim in a murder investigation anyway,’ Maeve explained to Dr Chang. ‘We need to get to know them, to understand what led them to be where they were at that particular moment in time. We don’t want to assume that the person who killed Minnie was a stranger to her. If there’s anything else you can tell us about Minnie – anything at all – we would appreciate it.’
Dr Chang frowned. ‘I do take a pastoral interest in the girls, but the best person to talk to is probably Pauline Kennedy. She was her class teacher. She would have seen Minnie every day. You should talk to Pauline. She can help you.’
‘I don’t think I can help you.’ Pauline Kennedy, slim and fair and younger than I had expected, was busy tidying her classroom – far too busy to stop and talk to the police. She had her back turned to us, organising books on some shelves, but the narrow crescent of her face that I could see was flushed.
‘Why would you say that?’ Derwent was deceptively polite. ‘We were told you saw Minnie every day.’
‘Yes, but she wasn’t the sort to confide in me.’ A glance at Derwent that only made her blush deepen. ‘She was … robust. She didn’t need me. Some of them like to spend a lot of time with me. I hear all about their difficulties. Minnie was … closed off, from me at least. She had a lot of friends. She had plenty of people to turn to if she needed them.’
‘That’s interesting, though – that she had a lot of friends.’
‘Is it?’ She gave a little laugh. ‘She was quite a leader. Quite forceful. She was a strong personality. Not everyone got on with her, but a lot of the class wanted to be friends with her.’
‘See, I knew you could be helpful. That’s not information we had before.’ He perched on a desk and folded his arms, making it clear, pleasantly, that he was going nowhere until she cooperated. I was always interested to see how other officers handled a difficult witness. He would be hard to imitate, I thought – he took up so much space and he had such presence it was impossible to ignore his scrutiny. Besides, with his long legs and the way he was sitting, he had basically trapped her in her corner.
As for Maeve, she was wandering around the classroom looking at the posters on the walls, lost in thought. I took advantage of her being distracted to stand next to Derwent, lining up on his team. It looked as if he and I were there together, and Maeve was just tagging along. I liked giving that impression.
‘Did she get on with everyone?’
‘No. Not at all. She had a serious falling-out with another student a few months ago. It was … unpleasant. You know how teenagers are – they take everything to heart. And Minnie could be very sharp. She looked down on the other girl.’
‘Why was that?’ Maeve had turned, her attention caught by the teacher’s words.
‘Oh – Rosa was pretty and very clever. She was all of the things Minnie would have liked to be, I think. She had a full scholarship, and those are hard to come by. Minnie made fun of her for being poor.’ Pauline shrugged, uneasy. ‘I think there was more to it, but Rosa wouldn’t talk about it with us. Dr Chang was in a difficult position because Minnie was at fault but her father was a major donor to the building project, and – well, Rosa wouldn’t tell us what was going on—’
‘So it was easier to get rid of the scholarship girl.’ There was a hint of anger in Maeve’s voice but her face didn’t give her away.
‘That’s basically what happened, yes. It’s not the decision I would have made, but then I’m not in Dr Chang’s position. And Rosa wasn’t asked to leave – not exactly. Dr Chang felt she would be happier elsewhere and her parents agreed. She went to a school that was better for her at the moment.’
‘Did Minnie confide in any adults other than you, do you know? Any other teachers?’ Derwent asked.
Pauline jumped as if she had touched an electric wire. ‘Um … not recently.’
‘But she did at one stage.’ He leaned forward, softening his tone to coax her into trusting him. ‘Come on. We’ll find out anyway.’
She sighed and turned to face him. She was barely more than a schoolgirl herself, I thought.
‘I don’t think it’s relevant. It was just … it was unfortunate.’
‘What happened?’
‘Minnie developed an interest in one of the male teachers here – Zach Roth. She had a bit of a crush on him, I think. He was a music teacher and she was quite musical, so she would find reasons to go to the studio when she knew he was there. She played the guitar and sang. She had a good voice – deep, not a soprano. She sounded like a rock star. You couldn’t put her in a choir or get her to sing classical music, but she had such a distinctive sound and she was determined to make something of it. She wrote her own lyrics – she’d even designed album covers and logos.’ Pauline shook her head. ‘It was a genuine interest of hers, but it also meant she could spend time with Zach, so she became kind of obsessive about it. And he was very much aware it was risky. A twenty-seven-year-old male teacher in a girls’ school might as well have a massive target painted on his chest. He was so careful to keep their relationship on a professional basis. He told her he didn’t have time to read her lyrics or listen to the music she recorded by herself. He did give her advice, but it was just the advice he would have given anyone. He never saw her outside of school, he tried not to be alone with her, he maintained proper professional boundaries.’ She paused, almost short of breath. Her face was still flushed and her eyes glittered with distress.
‘I’m guessing things didn’t stay within those professional boundaries,’ Derwent said.
‘No, they did! But she didn’t like that.’
‘What did she do?’ I asked.
‘She threatened him. She said she would tell Dr Chang he’d behaved inappropriately with her.’
‘But would anyone have believed her?’ Derwent asked.
‘Even the suggestion might have caused trouble. Dr Chang doesn’t take any risks with that sort of thing. And … and she had a couple of text messages from him that were completely innocent but without context you could think they weren’t. Song lyrics. He was quoting things. But if you didn’t know that, you might think it was … inappropriate.’
‘What did she want him to do though?’ Maeve crossed the room, taking an interest again. ‘If he began a relationship with her, he would be in the wrong then too. He’d have got the sack either way.’
‘He pointed that out to her, but she didn’t care. She said she loved him, but I think she’d decided to destroy him if she couldn’t have him. Anyway, there was no question of him starting a relationship with her.’ Pauline pressed her lips together. ‘He would never
have done that.’
‘So what happened?’ Derwent asked. ‘Dr Chang didn’t mention this to us.’
‘Dr Chang never knew about it. He left – not just the school, but teaching.’ She cleared her throat, blinking hard. ‘He was my friend. We started working here at the same time. I liked him. A lot.’
‘Do you know where he is now?’ I flipped open my notebook. ‘Can you give us his full name and contact details, please?’
‘He took a job with a band – The Inviolates. They needed some extra musicians for their Asian tour.’
I’d heard of them – I’d actually seen them perform at a festival once. They wrote folksy, quirky songs and had a passionate following of teenagers.
‘He could play anything, really, but he hated performing. He was shy. He just loved making music and because he wasn’t part of the regular line-up he could play on stage with them without attracting too much attention. They were in Thailand in November and – and there was an accident … A moped crash. He didn’t survive.’ The tears spilled over. ‘He should never have been there. He loved teaching and making his own music so much.’
‘Do you have a picture of him?’ Maeve asked gently.
The teacher got her phone and scrolled through it, sniffling. ‘There. That’s him. That’s us together.’
They were smiling, leaning against one another. Zach was thin and handsome in an impeccably nerdy way – little round glasses, floppy hair, an actual cardigan. Unthreatening was the word that came to mind. Ideal for a teenager who was simultaneously drawn to men and frightened of them, who wasn’t pretty and didn’t know how to get what she wanted with charm. He must have been terrified of Minnie, and maybe that was enough for her. If he was scared, at least he was thinking about her. That was all she’d wanted, I thought – to matter to someone, even if it was because of fear, not love.
‘Were you in a relationship with him?’ Maeve asked.
‘No. I’d thought – but no. We were friends. Just friends.’ She touched the screen with a fingertip, then closed the image. ‘I miss him so much.’
Chapter 4
‘So our victim is Minnie Charleston.’ Derwent stood at the top of the conference room, a board behind him. He stuck a picture up: one I hadn’t seen before. In it, Minnie was smiling in a pink T-shirt. She was tanned and looked happy – innocent was the word, I thought. Young.
‘This picture is from last summer when she was on holidays with a school friend. Her parents couldn’t find a recent picture of her.’ Derwent looked around the room meaningfully to make sure no one had missed the significance of that fact – and yet, as Mrs Charleston had said, teenagers could be hard to photograph. ‘This is the one we’re going to share with the media when we make an appeal for further information and witnesses.’
He slid a second picture into place beside the first. ‘This is also Minnie Charleston.’
‘Quite a difference,’ DS Chris Pettifer commented, the loudest of the remarks that hummed around the conference room. The image was a selfie. Minnie had tilted her head to one side and was staring up at the camera through narrowed eyes. She was sucking her cheeks in and pouting. Blue-black eyeliner and purple lipstick smothered her features, blurring the shape of her eyes and mouth. Her bra strap had slid off one shoulder, framing a hand-drawn rendering of the logo she’d put on her bag and bedside table. It was positioned where she would probably have had a tattoo if she’d been older. I drew it in my notebook to remind myself to find out more about it.
‘How old was she?’ DCI Una Burt asked. We were presenting the case for her benefit, largely; she was fielding queries from her bosses and the media and not enjoying any of it.
‘Fifteen.’ Derwent shook his head. ‘We got this from the same friend, by the way. The lab are still working on downloading her computer and phone data. The friend didn’t want to share it with us, but her mother made her.’
‘She wanted us to see it to explain why she’d stopped her daughter from hanging around with Minnie,’ Maeve said from the back of the room where she was leaning against the wall. ‘She felt Minnie was a bad influence on her daughter, and she might have been right.’
‘The school were quite guarded about what they told us, but the friend’s mum was more forthcoming.’ Derwent looked smug, as well he might; he had charmed her into whispered indiscretion while Maeve and I spoke to the daughter. ‘Minnie was a strong character and not to everyone’s taste. She fell out with a few of her classmates, played favourites with others and generally caused trouble. Her parents weren’t involved with her or bothered about what she was getting up to as long as she went to school and got out from under their feet.’
‘Minnie’s mum told us she had lots of sleepovers with friends,’ Maeve said, taking over the narrative again. ‘Actually she was out overnight staying who knows where. She went to gigs in London and further afield. She was into rock music, heavy metal, that kind of thing. She even managed to go to Belgium for an illegal festival with some older friends by telling her parents it was a school trip.’
‘So she was out getting up to all sorts,’ Pettifer said heavily. ‘What does that have to do with how she died?’
‘Don’t know yet. CCTV wasn’t a lot of help, so we’re still trying to work out when she was stabbed and where, let alone who did it.’ Derwent shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘But it’s worth knowing that she wasn’t a typical fifteen-year-old, isn’t it?’
‘Probably that is a typical fifteen-year-old these days.’ Pettifer shook his head sorrowfully. ‘They weren’t like that when I was a lad.’
‘Have we had the post-mortem yet?’ Burt asked.
‘This morning.’ I shuddered. ‘It was grim.’
Burt raised her eyebrows at that. ‘Anything interesting?’
‘No drugs in her system. No alcohol.’ I tried to remember anything else the pathologist had said and got stuck on the memory of Minnie’s hands. The nails had been bitten down so the skin puffed up around them. I’d tried to look anywhere but at the table where the pallid, bloodless body lay, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her hands. ‘She was a bit overweight. No tattoos, no piercings.’
‘I don’t think we’re interested in her general appearance,’ Derwent said evenly.
I felt myself go red. ‘I was just getting on to the main part. She had a stab wound to the left side of her torso. The blade entered here.’ I pointed at my ribs, just above my bra strap. ‘It was sharp and narrow, like a skewer, and it didn’t have to be very long to reach her heart. She would have died quickly. Most of the bleeding was internal, which is why no one on the bus noticed for so long. Her whole chest cavity was full of blood. It was a clean injury.’
‘So we’re looking at the people who sat next to her,’ Una Burt said with the air of someone who has solved the case.
‘First and foremost,’ Maeve said. ‘There’s a small chance that she was stabbed before she got on the bus and managed to stagger on before she died, but we’re starting off with the bus passengers, given that we have good images of them. In any case, we need to find them because they’re witnesses. BTP have given me access to the records so we can match up the CCTV with the people who tapped in with a bank card or Oyster card, or a Zip card if they were kids. I’m still working on a couple of the IDs, but I’ve got pictures.’
‘Show us,’ Burt commanded her. ‘Thanks, Josh.’
Maeve started towards the front of the room, shuffling through her photographs as she went and not looking where she was going. Derwent was moving in the opposite direction, on a collision course. As he reached her, he put his hands on her shoulders and steered her to one side to get her out of his way.
‘You could have stepped to one side,’ she protested.
‘Could have. Didn’t.’
She rolled her eyes and carried on, unmoved by his display of physical dominance.
I drew a heart on my notebook and coloured it in, then scribbled it out. Derwent wasn’t a hearts-and-flowers kind of man. I f
orced myself not to think about what he might be like instead. I really didn’t need the distraction of trying to decide if Josh Derwent would hold you down, in the right circumstances, or if he was one of those men who pretended to be tough but turned out to be gentle, and generous, and thorough …
‘Minnie got on at the start of the route and sat on her own for the first three minutes or so. The first passenger who sat next to Minnie was this guy.’ Maeve put the picture on the board behind her. It was a still from the bus’s CCTV camera and sharply focused because Transport for London had invested heavily in their cameras: a young black teenager, his face obscured by the baseball cap he wore. His navy jacket had a distinctive white flash on the shoulder. ‘They’re still trying to identify him for us. A lot of school kids got on at the same stop.’
‘He’s not a child,’ Pettifer protested. ‘Look at the size of him.’
‘I think he’s a teenager.’ Maeve put a second picture beside the first, giving us a different angle on him. ‘He’s got massive feet and hands, but he’s skinny under that tracksuit, look. And one of the kids in uniform was talking to him before they got on the bus. He only sat beside Minnie for a few stops – he got off here, near Queenstown Road.’ There was a map of the bus route beside the photographs and Maeve wrote ‘1’ on it in marker.
‘And how was the victim after this lad got off the bus?’ Una Burt asked.
‘Hard to say. She had her eyes closed.’ Maeve shrugged. ‘I’ve looked at every frame of CCTV from every camera on the bus and we just don’t have a great angle on that seat, unfortunately. She gets on and seems to go to sleep straightaway, and no one notices anything strange about her until the bus gets to Clapham Common.’
