Their Fatal Secrets

by JANICE FROST

  A small crowd had assembled on the bridge to watch the proceedings on the path below. A couple of uniformed officers were ensuring that they didn’t encroach on the scene. A representative from the local news station was there too. Ava recognised the reporter, standing with her back to the bridge, one of those big fluffy microphones hovering in front of her like a giant, hairy caterpillar.

  A CSI crew had been working through the night, processing the immediate area. A diver sat in a yellow dinghy, and four other members of the underwater search team stood on the riverside, holding cables connecting them to the divers beneath the surface.

  Much as she loved swimming and the occasional scuba-diving experience, the idea of groping her way around in the silt and filth of a murky riverbed in zero visibility brought out the claustrophobic in Ava. She looked at the spot where the yellow cables entered the water, picturing the divers beneath the surface searching in wide arcs, combing every inch of the riverbed with their fingertips, raking up all the detritus that ended up discarded there. She shuddered. The river was essentially a dumping ground. Its sun-dappled surface concealed just about anything you could imagine in terms of rubbish — used syringes, rusting tins and broken bottles . . . Was it possible to find a murder weapon among all that?

  “Anything?” Neal asked one of the team, who had introduced himself as Paul Wells.

  “Nothing so far, sir. All the usual crap, of course. We’ve been told we’re looking for a blunt instrument of some kind? The girl had her skull crushed in as well as being beaten.” Ashley Hunt, the pathologist, had been surprised that Leanne was conscious at all when she entered the water, given that she had extensive injuries as well as that crushing final blow to the head.

  Neal nodded. “Aye, that’s right.”

  Paul pointed. “We’ll extend the search to the start of the marina. There’s a shoreline search already underway, isn’t there?” Neal nodded again. It was true that the murder weapon was often found near the scene of the crime, usually because killers panicked and wanted to get rid of it immediately. Unless it was a crime that had been meticulously planned. In a case such as this, it was anyone’s guess whether they’d find a weapon.

  Paul shook his head. “If you ask me, this is a stupid place to dump a body, right in the middle of town where it’s going to be spotted so quickly. Not the cleverest move, but let’s face it, killers haven’t always got a lot upstairs.”

  “Maybe they had an argument, he killed her and then panicked,” said Ava. “We know people’s minds often go blank when that happens. They literally act without thinking. I’m amazed no one saw it happen. I know it was late, but the killer must have caught an incredibly lucky break to escape being seen, given all the bars along the marina.”

  “Maybe the killer didn’t throw her in the river,” Neal said. “Maybe he thought she was dead and was planning to dispose of her body elsewhere.”

  Ava looked at him. “You think she was on a boat?”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  Paul held up his hand. “Hang about. Lee’s tugging on the line.”

  A couple of moments later the head and shoulders of a man wearing goggles and breathing apparatus broke the surface. With his back to the onlookers, he handed something to one of his colleagues in the dinghy, then turned and gave Paul a thumbs up.

  Ava glanced at Neal. “Looks like we might have a murder weapon.”

  “Aye, maybe.” Neal scowled at the bystanders on the bridge, and then turned away.

  Dan Cardew of the forensics team held up the recovered object, encased in an evidence bag.

  “It’s an old-style flat iron. Traditional roses canal art design. My mum’s got one. She uses it as a doorstop, but it’s the sort of thing you might find on a narrowboat. A lot of people go for vintage stuff on those things. Like to create an olde world feel. Not that I’m an expert. Not been in there long, by the look of it.”

  “Can we get prints off it?” asked Ava.

  “Possibly,” he answered, surprising them all. “DNA too, if we’re lucky.”

  “If it is our weapon, it makes it more likely that Leanne was on a boat and tried to swim to safety,” Ava pointed out. “A flat iron’s not the sort of thing you’d carry around in your pocket or pick up at the side of the road.”

  Dan took another look at the iron. “The design on this one is quite nice. It might be possible to trace the artist.”

  Neal nodded and gave a tired sigh. He turned to Ava. “Right, no point in us hanging around here any longer. I said we’d see Ashley when we’re finished here.”

  With a brief wave at Dan, Ava ran after Neal.

  * * *

  Ashley looked as weary as Neal. Ava showed him a picture of the flat iron that Dan had forwarded to her.

  He nodded. “Could be what caused the crack in her skull. A slantwise blow on the head from the flat side of an object like that could certainly have caused the kind of indent we see here.” He showed them a picture of the woman’s head and pointed to one side, just below her hairline. “Besides her other injuries, she also has a broken ulna, and substantial bruising to the other forearm.”

  These were classic defensive wounds. Leanne Jackson had been fending off blows to her head.

  “So she drowned?” Neal asked.

  Ashley nodded. “There was water in her lungs. She was alive when she entered the water. I’m thinking she might have lost consciousness for a while, regaining it before or as she hit the water. With her injuries, it would have been practically impossible for her to swim.”

  “We are thinking she might have jumped from a boat,” said Neal.

  Ashley nodded slowly. “That would work.”

  Ava brightened. “There can’t have been too many boats passing along that stretch of the river at that time of night. Someone’s bound to have seen something. And if not, it should be easy to spot a fifty-foot barge on the CCTV footage.”

  Neal frowned. “Yes, well let’s not think this is going to be as straightforward as all that. It wouldn’t take long to disguise the boat. It would only require a coat of paint.”

  He turned to Ashley. “Thanks, Ash.”

  Chapter Two

  Jess Stokes stood among the throng of people on the bridge watching the police divers begin their trawl of the riverbed. She had been listening to the local radio station, Strom FM, when the news came through that a couple of students had pulled the body of a young woman from the river in the early hours of the morning. A later update had given the young woman’s name as Leanne Jackson, causing a shiver to run down Jess’s spine.

  She hadn’t thought about Leanne for a long time. They had never really been friends, but once Leanne had been there for her, and that wasn’t something you forgot in a hurry.

  Jess felt impelled to see the spot where Leanne had died. She hadn’t meant to stay, but like the others around her, she’d been swept up by the buzz of activity on the riverfront and lingered to see what the divers might find. She was still there when DS Ava Merry arrived at the scene, accompanied by a man who was clearly in charge of proceedings. Jess knew Ava slightly from the local leisure centre, where they both went to swim. They had a sort of passing acquaintance. Sometimes this extended almost to a conversation, but they had always stopped short of getting to know each other better.

  A few people on the bridge clapped or cheered when the frogman surfaced and gave his colleagues the thumbs up. Someone next to Jess speculated that this might be ‘the murder weapon.’ Until that moment, Jess had assumed Leanne had drowned. Her mind reeled at the thought that it might have been murder.

  The woman next to her peered into her face. “You alright, duck?”

  “I’m fine.” Jess managed a small smile.

  “Bad business, i’nt it?”

  “It is.” Jess slipped back into the crowd. She didn’t feel fine. Not really. It wasn’t that she felt unwell, just slightly detached from reality. It was the way she might feel after drinking in some dimly lit bar at lunchtime a
nd then emerging slightly drunk into the sunshine.

  Her mind conjured up an image of two very different teenage girls, one street smart and strong, the other with a disfiguring condition that attracted the derision and cruelty of the school bullies. Leanne and Jess. As an adolescent, Jess had suffered from idiopathic scoliosis, a severe curvature of the spine that twisted her back out of shape, destroying her confidence and isolating her socially at a vulnerable time of her young life.

  Leanne had lived on what was, back in the noughties, the most notorious housing estate in Stromford. In many ways she was typical of a kid from such a background. Her conduct in class had been challenging, her attitude to authority figures disrespectful and defiant, and her behaviour with boys precocious. She was like an unstable element, seemingly unable to bind the various atoms of her personality together into a coherent identity. Possibly only Jess knew that Leanne was kind.

  Jess had discovered this one lunchtime at school. She had left her pencil case in the art room and gone back to look for it. The art room was located at the end of a long corridor with an alcove for lockers about half way down. Walking past the alcove, Jess had heard a girl call out, “Hey look. It’s the spastic. Want to come and play with us, Spaz?”

  Jess walked past without turning her head, tears pricking her eyes. She should have been immune to the taunts by then, but it was hard to face them down when you were only thirteen. She retrieved her pencil case and walked past the alcove a second time. The same calls rang out.

  Then Leanne was there. “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size, Chelsea? Oh, I know why. No one else with an arse big enough.” Leanne closed her locker and stared Chelsea Hope down. It was no contest. Chelsea mumbled something about not having anything against Leanne, and she and her two cronies suddenly found they had somewhere else to be.

  “Th . . . thanks,” Jess stammered, staring down at her shoes.

  “No problem. Can’t stand bullies. You let me know if they bother you again.”

  “You . . . your name’s Leanne, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. We were in the same class for English last year.”

  “I remember. You . . . you were good at writing stories.”

  “Was I? Don’t remember that.”

  “You wrote one about dolphins. It was lovely.”

  Leanne stared at Jess. “Fancy you remembering that.” She seemed on the point of walking away, then hesitated. She asked rather awkwardly, “So what’s wrong with you, really? Were you born like that?”

  Jess coloured. She was used to people staring but they seldom asked so bluntly.

  “I have something called idiopathic scoliosis. No one knows what causes it. It makes my spine grow twisty.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Sometimes, but mostly it doesn’t.”

  “Is it curable?”

  “I wear a back brace at night to help stop the curve from getting worse. I can have an operation when I’m older to help straighten it out.”

  “That’s good, isn’t it?” Leanne said. Jess nodded, uncertainly.

  “You shouldn’t take any notice of what people say. If anyone calls you names, let me know and I’ll take care of them.”

  And she had. From that day on, Leanne seemed to appear whenever anyone hurled unkind words Jess’s way. She heard them all. An endless stream of hurtful, hateful comments that sucked away her confidence and self-esteem throughout her adolescence. Bullying is insidious and enduring. Jess never truly recovered the confidence of her pre-teen years. She recalled her embarrassment in the changing rooms, her efforts to get undressed with her back to the wall so that no one could see her misshapen spine and call her by the worst name of all. Hunchback.

  And now Leanne was dead, at twenty-three. Jess felt stricken. Leanne hadn’t simply drowned, she had been attacked first. There was a murder weapon. She would have fought back, Jess was sure. Leanne had never been the passive type. She would have fought with every ounce of strength available to her. Imagining what Leanne’s final moments must have been like, sinking, bleeding into the dark water, made Jess feel sick to her stomach.

  But it wasn’t just Leanne’s tragic fate that bothered Jess. It was her own shame too. She had not looked out for Leanne the way Leanne had looked out for her. Always difficult, Leanne had gone completely off the rails a couple of years after Jess’s encounter with her in the corridor, and had been expelled from school. Jess had only seen her a couple of times after that. The first occasion was in the Riverside shopping centre in Stromford. Leanne was being led out of a clothes store by a security guard, caught shoplifting. Leanne grinned at Jess as she was ushered past, but Jess was with her mother and looked away, embarrassed.

  The second time was a couple of years later. Jess, her once misshapen spine newly transformed by surgery, was shopping on the High Street with a friend when a brawl broke out in the street between two young women, arguing over drugs. One of them was a scarcely-recognisable Leanne. A couple of security guards from the nearby shopping centre were struggling to prise the two women apart, when Leanne suddenly looked up and caught Jess’s eye. She gave Jess a flicker of a smile but again, Jess had turned away.

  Three times Jess betrayed Leanne. The last time was quite recent. A couple of weeks ago she received an email from Leanne on her college email account. Leanne was a student at the college now, and wondered if Jess could spare some time to meet her. Jess had intended to reply, but she’d been busy and somehow she never got around to it.

  Jess liked to think of herself as a compassionate person. Her experience of bullying could have made her bitter, but she liked to believe that it had made her more sensitive. But she had turned away from Leanne when she was in trouble. Some caring person she was. Now Leanne was gone and Jess would never have an opportunity to put things right.

  Jess crossed the road. She leaned over the other side of the bridge and saw more police activity — officers searching the paths on either side of the river, and the marina.

  “Oh, Leanne. How did you end up in that river?” Jess asked aloud.

  “What’s that, duck? Who was you talking to?” It was a homeless man with a curious little dog at his side wearing a dirty check scarf.

  Jess turned towards them. “Just thinking aloud.”

  “You wasn’t thinking of jumping in, was you?” the beggar asked. His dog gave a yap and licked its master’s hand.

  “Definitely not.”

  “Good then. They pulled a poor young lass out of there last night. Police asked me if I’d seen anything.”

  “Oh.” Jess’s heart quickened. “Did you?”

  “Not a thing. Hardly surprising, seeing as I was tucked up in the Centre that time of night. Bright Night Centre down Rampton Lane. Know it?” Jess nodded. “Nice place,” the man said, stroking his dog. “They don’t mind me bringing Victor here in. Long as he don’t sleep on the bed.”

  Jess waited for him to say something else, but he seemed to have lost interest in the conversation and was rolling a cigarette. The dog limped over to Jess and she bent to pet him. Poor thing, he only had three legs. She stood for a moment longer, gazing at the river, feeling the bridge vibrate with the passing vehicles. Below, the river was teeming with colourless fish — perch and carp and speckled trout — all writhing in the brownish water. Jess walked away.

  She had been surprised to see Ava Merry at the scene, though Jess knew she was some sort of police officer. A detective, it appeared, for she wasn’t in uniform. Maybe she could speak with her at the pool. Even in swimming hat and goggles Ava managed to look good.

  Jess sighed, thinking of the long scar on her back that even her high-backed swimsuit couldn’t hide. All through her teenage years she had been so self-conscious about her twisted spine that she had assumed she was ugly. The hunchback. She’d never gone out with boys. Even the seemingly nice ones who told her they didn’t care about her back weren’t to be trusted. She’d once been persuaded to go out with a boy in the year
above her, only to discover that he’d asked her out as a dare. After that it seemed easier not to bother.

  Just recently she had started seeing a man called Mitch. Jess couldn’t quite believe that he really wanted to be with her. She had shown Mitch a picture of her twisted spine the night they made love for the first time, a medical photograph taken before her operation. He gasped. She sat up, ready to move away, but Mitch pulled her towards him, saying she’d misunderstood him. He ran his fingers the length of her scar, brought his lips to her spine and kissed it.

  “Jess!” Jess spun around and came face to face with a man she thought she recognised from somewhere.

  “Jonty Cole. I’m Barney’s big brother.” He held out his hand. He was the brother of one of the students she supported at work. She’d seen him at the college with Barney but she didn’t think they’d ever spoken.

  “I saw you on the bridge just now,” Jonty said. “Terrible, isn’t it? You look shaken. Did you know her?”

  Was it so obvious? “I . . . Yes, I did.”

  “I’m so sorry. Were you close?”

  “No. We were at school together, but I hadn’t seen her for a while.”

  “Would you like to talk about it? I mean, I know I don’t know you very well, but, well, you’re Barney’s teacher and he absolutely adores you. Anyone Barney likes, I like too.”

  Jess smiled and shook her head. “I’m fine, honestly. I have a day off work today and I’m going to go home and have a coffee with my neighbour, Pam. She’s a kind of second mum to me.”

  “That’s nice,” Jonty said. “I’m glad you’ve got someone. I hate to think of you going home alone and upset.”

  She thought he’d go then, but he lingered, falling into step beside her until they reached the junction.

  “I’m going this way,” Jess told him, stopping at the traffic lights. She pointed along the street. “I live just down here. It was nice talking to you, Jonty.”