Johnny kicked the door shut and they propped the tree up across the hallway. It filled the space. Kelly went to take off the mesh.
‘Wait a minute.’ Johnny held up his hand, panting. ‘If you do that, we won’t get it into the living room.’
Kelly’s hat had slipped over her eyes, she was sweating under her padded walking jacket, and the woollen scarf at her neck tickled. She was quickly losing her sense of humour and wanted a glass of warm red wine. She left the tree and went to open the double doors that led to the living room, then snatched off her hat and quickly undid her jacket.
‘Any time tonight,’ Johnny said. It had taken them two hours to choose and transport the tree, and Kelly knew that he’d be off to do it all again tomorrow with his daughter, Josie, for his own house.
She smiled at him and deliberately took her time walking back to her end of the tree. She picked it up, and they manoeuvred it to where they’d agreed it should go, propping it up against the sofa next to the stand. It was one of the growing list of things they had in common: neither of them was precious about stuff; things were just things, and they were both more interested in the outdoors.
‘Should we have a glass of wine before we get it up and decorate it?’ Kelly asked.
Johnny nodded, and they left the tree and unpeeled themselves from their heavy coats. The fire was ready to be lit, and Johnny set about doing that while Kelly fetched two glasses from the kitchen to the side of the hall. The two rooms were all that comprised the entire downstairs, and it made the little house comforting and cosy. They both took off their shoes, and once the fire was lit and roaring, Johnny placed the guard in front of it and they sat on the sofa. Kelly put her feet up.
‘Good job,’ he said.
‘Thanks for helping me. I feel as though I just want to leave it there now. No wonder Mum and Dad never bothered with a real one.’ Kelly checked herself. Dad was such a natural and common expression that not to use it would have been weird. But she hadn’t yet decided how she felt about finding out that John Porter was not in fact her biological father, and the phrase slipped out as it always had. She fiddled with her ponytail and Johnny put his hand on her knee.
‘He’s still your dad, like he always was,’ he said. Johnny had never met John Porter, but Kelly had described him many times.
She laid her head on his shoulder and mused on how it might feel if they lived together like this. They rarely disagreed, they didn’t get in each other’s way, and they liked the same kind of things, whether it be what snack to eat on a hike, or which song to play on a Friday after a long, exhausting week.
The fire began to throw out its heat and the first sips of wine made her insides warm. Johnny wasn’t on call for the mountain rescue tonight. There was no doubt that he could still navigate Striding Edge after a glass or two, but that wasn’t the point. It was a rare night off. They’d been busy lately, with accidents on Broad Stand, on Scafell Pike, at a record. The series of steps and slabs of sheer rock linking Scafell to Mickledore on Scafell Pike is described as a scramble, but anyone who has negotiated it knows that it is anything but, and falls are usually fatal. For her part, Kelly had been dealing with the awful case of Jenna Fraser. Due to the horrific nature of the girl’s injuries, they’d assumed murder – any violent death in such circumstances was suspicious – but they’d found nothing to support the theory.
‘Shall we?’ Johnny said. ‘Come on, it’ll distract you.’
She looked at the boxes of decorations. She’d dragged Johnny around countless shops, antique and otherwise, searching for baubles and hanging bits to adorn her dream tree, and now the moment was here. The task would take all night, but Johnny was committed; he couldn’t back out now. It was his turn to cook, and they had enough wine to keep them going for hours. He would stay here tonight, knowing Josie was all right on her own until their trip back to the forest tomorrow for their own tree. Josie was fifteen years old and perfectly capable of looking after herself. She enjoyed a great deal of freedom for her age, but Johnny trusted her. She’d turned up earlier in the year, fed up of living with her mother. It had been a shock for Kelly, but they’d both had to get used to it. A few years ago, she might have run a mile rather than even think of becoming a stepmother figure, but Josie wasn’t needy.
‘Let’s crack on. You can unpack all your shiny things and I’ll get the curry on,’ he said.
‘Is that your final standard operating procedure?’ She poked fun at his army jargon, but he didn’t mind. Johnny had been out of the army for six years now, but he still used its peculiar terminology. His ex-wife had hated it, as she had hated anything to do with the army, but it brought about the opposite response in Kelly. Language in the police force was similarly old school, and they understood one another.
She waited and watched him, smiling. She’d softened him. He was no longer hard, the fighting man he’d described to her after his return from Afghanistan. She couldn’t imagine anything other than the peaceful strength she’d grown used to, but he’d told her that for a while, he’d carried his anger round with him like a great weight. She saw the odd flash of it –when he heard that a former colleague had committed suicide due to PTSD, for instance – but Lakeland life had generally calmed him and absorbed his brutality. The demons had all but gone.
She touched his hand and he put down his glass of wine, pulling her towards him, kissing her. The fire crackled and kept them warm as he peeled layers off her. They threw their clothes onto the floor and Kelly lay down underneath him. The sofa was large enough to double as a bed, and only the sound of the cushions moving and their bodies pushing against one another punctuated the sizzle of logs and the puffs of hot air. Johnny buried his head in Kelly’s neck as they both tensed, and she wrapped her legs around his back, holding onto the moment. Stepdaughters and dead teenagers were all forgotten in the time it took for their motion to quietly subside.
They were suddenly cool from the night air and aware of the fact that they had a job to do. They both looked at the tree and reluctantly got up from the sofa to search for hastily discarded garments. Kelly hopped into her jeans and took a swig of wine before crawling under the tree. Johnny took the top and began to heave it into the stand, with Kelly calling directions from underneath. At last it was straight, and they stood back to admire their work. Kelly nodded, and Johnny cut away the mesh. The tree sprang into life and spread out, sending bits of the forest everywhere. Kelly knew exactly where she wanted it, and they pushed it into place together before she went to get a jug of water to pour into the base.
‘Sorted?’ he asked.
‘In the bag,’ she replied.
He nodded and went to the kitchen to start his culinary masterpiece, leaving Kelly to unwrap the delicate pieces of glass, metal and jewels and place them gently on the sofa. Her plan was to lay them out and design the look of the whole tree, rather than fling them on randomly. She might be some time.
She flicked Sonos on via her phone and chose Jamiroquai.
By the time Johnny came back through to ask her if she wanted naan, she’d unpacked all the precious items and was kneeling by the tree trying to wrap the lights around the back. He poked life into the fire and left her to it, filling his glass as he went.
Chapter 4
The grim task of performing the post mortem operation on Jenna Fraser was left to the senior coroner for the north-west, Ted Wallis. He was in the process of training a new recruit, who would hopefully take over from him in the coming months, but for now, this job was one that had to be carried out by someone of Ted’s calibre. A fell runner had discovered the poor girl hanging in the gargantuan regal pine, and Ted shook his head at what on earth the poor fellow might have dreamt about since.
Ted had seen fall victims before. Without a trained eye, it would appear impossible to accept that the jumble of limbs and organs in front of him once had a human form. He’d performed the autopsies on two students who’d committed suicide by jumping off the top off Bowland Tower,
in the middle of Lancaster University, within three years of one another. The damage inflicted on their bodies was classically consistent with vertical deceleration injuries. These differed extensively from, say, car crashes, where the deceleration forces were horizontal. In other words, when the body crashed into something ahead of it, it suffered different injuries from those that occurred if it slammed into something from above.
Jenna had vertical deceleration injuries, and Ted could tell from a preliminary once-over – though it was tricky to identify parts of the body that had ended up where they shouldn’t – that she’d fallen feet first. In his mind, this meant that she’d jumped rather than being pushed. Somebody fighting for their life at the edge of a cliff wouldn’t remain upright in a fall; they’d be thrashing and twisting until the final impact, and would have massive lacerations from where they’d tried to grasp for safety in the canopy. Jenna had none. He knew Kelly Porter wouldn’t be happy.
The students who’d jumped off Bowland Tower had both sustained major foot, leg, hip and vertebral trauma. The bones in the feet and legs had literally shot up through the body and ripped the soft tissue apart from below. Jenna was different in that she’d landed in trees, but Ted could still tell that she’d come down feet first.
It would be a long operation because he’d have to locate every skeletal structure first and compare where it should be with where it actually was, removing countless foreign bodies thrust into her as she passed through the trees, like a chef trimming thyme to sprinkle on a slab of lamb. Only then would he be able to eviscerate, and this posed its own set of problems, because most of her major organs south of her sternum had been impaled and torn apart by branches. He guessed that the only thing he’d find intact was the girl’s heart. Protected by the chest cavity and the sternum, the organ most associated with vitality had probably survived the forces of collision, though he wouldn’t know for another few hours.
He’d studied the photographs from the scene very carefully before turning to the body, because he wanted to know what her path of downward descent had been: it would determine his calculations when he worked out her initial velocity as she left the cliff. This would prove critical to the final report, because standing jumps were very different to run-up jumps, and this girl had landed quite a way from the face of the cliff, indicating that she’d left the edge at considerable speed. So she was either chased, or possessed with an immense desire to die.
The case had brought him into contact with Kelly again, and it had been awkward. After numerous investigations together, their relationship had cooled, and Ted couldn’t help but conclude that Kelly wasn’t happy that he was seeing her mother. He’d known Wendy for forty years, and meeting her again had brought all the memories back: the painful ones as well as the wonderful ones. Years ago they’d had an illicit fling that had started at a grand party thrown by the Earl of Lowesdale. Those were the days, he reflected. He wished now that he’d had the courage to pursue her, to ask that she leave her husband for him, but propriety had won the day and they’d both stayed in pedestrian marriages.
It was only when John had died that Ted had thought about getting back in touch, but even then, it had taken him a few years to pluck up the courage. Working with Kelly had given him the push he’d needed, and he’d finally visited her. She’d been as pleased to see him again as he was her, and he’d felt like a teenager again. There was only one problem: Wendy was seriously poorly. He kicked himself daily for leaving it too late, but they were making the most of their time together, and his thoughts turned to the surprise he’d booked for her for Christmas Eve. It was only two weeks away.
He turned away from the body and looked at the photographs. Forensic officers had reconstructed the scene and drawn black pen lines on possible trajectory and impact sites, based on the damage to surrounding foliage and Jenna’s final resting place. There were photos of blood pooling and spatter, and Ted formed a picture in his mind of her final few moments. To him, or anyone sane, they would have been moments of horror, but to someone bent so irrefutably on destruction, they could have been welcome.
That was what had led to his argument with Kelly only this morning.
‘Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups, Ted,’ Kelly had said when they’d first discussed the death. Ted wasn’t offended by her coarse language, though he’d prefer her not to use it. But she had spoken to him like a child, and not the senior coroner that he was, and he couldn’t help deduce that she was tetchy. At some point he’d have to have a serious conversation with her about his relationship with her mother. He was adamant that he wasn’t going to lose Wendy again, so Kelly would just have to accept it. They could still work together. They had to work together.
‘I’m not assuming, Kelly, I’m using science to give you my informed opinion.’
‘You haven’t even seen her body yet,’ she said.
‘But I will this afternoon, and I will report straight back to you.’
‘But your mind is already made up,’ she challenged him.
He’d sighed. It was a blatant insult to accuse a pathologist of circumnavigating science to reach a conclusion. It was the very opposite of what he stood for, but it was Kelly, and so he let it go. For now.
‘I’ll call you when I’m done,’ he’d said.
Ted didn’t want the girl to have committed suicide either; no one did, least of all her family. But the facts were conclusive. By the time he’d finished sorting out the jigsaw puzzle that was Jenna Fraser’s body, he had worked out her initial velocity as over five metres per second. Yes, she could have been running away from something, but if that was the case then she would have sustained massive hand and arm injuries as she clutched at branches to break her fall, and those simply weren’t present.
More telling were the track marks up her arms and in her groin. The toxicology result confirmed it: the girl was a heroin addict. It was well known that a bad trip could encourage hallucinations, and although heroin was a painkiller rather than a hallucinogen, a rogue batch could lead to unexpected results. He was seeing more and more drug deaths – they all were, pathologists up and down the country – and it was a worrying trend.
Jenna’s addiction made some sense when they learned from her parents that she had been prescribed opioids after a bad injury and had become hooked on cheaper street drugs after the prescriptions stopped. Ted remembered reading articles about the athletic achievements of the girl now on his slab, and her death suddenly seemed even more tragic.
Chapter 5
Kelly slammed the front door, threw her coat over the banister, and sat heavily on the couch. She stared at the Christmas tree. It was a symbol of pure joy and celebration, but in Jenna Fraser’s house, it would forever become the hallmark of despair. An overwhelming sensation of defeat assaulted her, and she wiped away tears. Jenna had been sixteen years old. It wasn’t often that Kelly Porter faced the awful realisation that nothing more could be done; she was used to seeing a case through to the end, whether it be a triumph or a disaster. The result of this enquiry was neither, and she felt simply flat. Deflated, dejected, and despondent.
People committed suicide all the time; it wasn’t a crime, but Kelly wanted this to be a crime. A sixteen-year-old with so much to look forward to driven to despair and madness was quite incomprehensible. Kelly needed the final jigsaw puzzle piece to slot in to finish the composition. She demanded a cause, a perpetrator, a guilty party; anything to take away the damning conclusion that a child could be driven to this. She was desperate to understand, in a way she couldn’t remember for a very long time. If only they’d been able to find out who’d sold Jenna the drugs, they might get a conviction. She’d even looked into indirect murder of a minor with oblique intent, but their inquiries led to one conclusion alone: Jenna had thrown herself off the cliff. In fact, she’d run off it.
Acceptance was the last thing Kelly thought she’d signed up for. Policing often required a strong stomach and time spent in the company of scum, but subm
ission wasn’t in the job description: at no point had anyone asked her if she was willing to approach death as a docile, passive spectator. She’d never sat in an interview and agreed to surrender, or shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘Ah, well.’
But that was how she felt now.
A search of Jenna’s bedroom had yielded various empty packets containing traces of the drug that had altered her mind to the state where jumping off a cliff edge wouldn’t have seemed so bad. But that wasn’t all; they’d also found Adderall, a stimulant popular among students, and in large enough quantities to conclude that the girl was a regular user. In a shoebox they’d discovered spoons, sterile syringes – presumably stolen – and elastic straps. The puzzle pieces that Kelly so desperately wanted to find were the wrong ones. Nothing about the girl’s original profile had prepared them for the final conclusions.
Jenna’s bank account had been emptied of prize money, her school performance had dwindled to virtually remedial, her remedial training had dropped off and her behaviour had become erratic: all signs of a drug-addled brain. The girl had so much to live for, but she had nothing to keep her alive. Her developing addiction had fried her future and ended up with her impaled on a tree. Kelly wanted to kick something. What had started out as the hunt for a bewildering cause of a tragic suicide had become a predictable demise. It made her sick to her stomach. There was no call for a lengthy investigation.
The case was closed; the true cause of the girl’s obliteration was kept out of the press, at the behest of her parents, who didn’t want the shame to stain their daughter’s memory, but gossip fluttered around the Lakes with impunity.
Bitter Edge Page 2
