A sharp collective intake of breath whistled across the room. No one spoke, though a question hung in the air, almost palpable. Jenny gave me a pointed look and then answered it.
“The comparison with Eli Diaz is inconclusive,” she said. “But the pattern of wounds across all three is very similar. One cut, clean across, right through to the bone, with something similar to this.” She shuffled her papers and raised a photo.
My spine convulsed. The silence was thick enough to bite. It was some kind of machete, or hacking knife, or I don’t know what, but it was all purpose and no style. A tan plastic handle with a hex bolt fixing, and a narrow, straight blade, perhaps a foot long and tapered upward to a point. Not a subtle weapon by any stretch of the imagination, nor easily concealed. The sight of it brought beads of sweat to my brow, but I couldn’t look away.
“Approximately a thirteen-inch blade, perhaps two to three inches wide, with a nonserrated cutting edge, drawn across the throat from behind, from left to right. So, in a right-handed manner.”
That last part pinged an alarm bell in my head. I scribbled a note—right-handed?
“I’ll email this to everyone, by the way. Thirdly, Kevin’s updated me this morning on the hunt for the Abbott family. So far we’ve come up with absolutely nothing whatsoever, which is shit, but we do now have a magistrate’s warrant to enter the house. Uniform are standing by and Sandra’s on her way back there as we speak. Ali, if you and DC Fisher could do the honors? I’m looking for any sign that Reed was in that house or is known to the family, and I want to know where Carol and David Abbott have disappeared to.”
I looked wearily past Kevin to where Annie was sitting wide-eyed, listening intently. She felt my eyes on her and blushed back at me with a slow nod. Her own eyes were glazed and heavy-lidded. She’d had a late night, I realized, interviewing Carla Cockburn alongside me—but then so had I, and with a rudely early wake-up call to boot. Her brow was also glistening, her cheeks a deep crimson. Tired, yes, but Annie was either highly flustered, or drunk, or both.
“Ali, as I understand it, Richard Cockburn’s wife has been released on bail, yes?”
My turn to blush again. I’d thrown everything I had at Carla, but she wasn’t going to give her daughter up for any of it. And rightly so, to my mind. I liked to hope I’d be that unwaveringly protective in her shoes. I nodded. “She definitely knows where Erica is, but we could waterboard her and she still wouldn’t tell us. Under the circumstances I can’t see any value in asking her the same questions over and over again, so I sent her home.”
Jenny looked crestfallen, and I guessed I knew how she felt, although not for the same reason. She wanted Erica found so that she could charge her with murder. I wanted her found so that she wouldn’t be murdered. As with all stories, the truth of her situation likely fell somewhere in between those two scenarios, but whatever the case, we at least agreed that finding her fast was critical.
We also, I’m sure, agreed that our current tactic wasn’t working. The incident room had received a hundred and thirty-eight calls since Jenny’s press conference had hit the six o’clock news. Every one of them had to be logged, reviewed, triaged and followed up. Not one of them bore a credible sighting. Erica, to all intents and purposes, was as much of a ghost as That Man, and as things stood, we had zero hope of finding either of them. We needed a miracle, and Jenny Riley wasn’t going to be the one to deliver it.
Chapter 20
The locksmith was busy chatting up Sandra when Annie and I pulled up in front of the Abbott house. The street was otherwise quiet and still, save for a twitching of net curtains in the upstairs window at number thirty-three.
We stood beside the car for a long moment, surveying the crime scene tape lying in the grass; the tire marks from the generator that had run the floodlights after the sun went down; the long rectangle of swept tarmac from which Richard Cockburn’s Volvo had finally been recovered in the early hours of the morning. Annie was silent, her eyes unfocused, hands trembling ever so slightly.
“You okay?” I asked her.
She jumped, and stood to attention, nodding a little too convincingly. “Yeah, fine,” she said, and smiled at me. It was a prettily shaped smile, but there was no sign of it in her eyes. All I could see there was pain.
“You sure?” I was trying for my soothing voice, but it cracked and I sounded like a thirteen-year-old boy instead. I was always the cool chick at school. “If there’s anything you want to talk about, you don’t have to bottle it up, you know.” I ducked into her dipping line of sight, and smiled reassuringly, gesturing to the car. “We can sit and talk right now if you want.”
She smiled again, though it was more of a wince. Shook her head. “No,” she assured me, “I’m okay. Just...you know. Fresh in my mind.” She pointed at the spot where Richard had met his grisly end. “I’ve never seen anything like that before,” she said.
I had, but I was, for once, grateful that I couldn’t actually remember it, because no one was asking me if I needed to talk about it.
“It’s why I packed this in and retrained as an analyst,” she said. “I don’t seem to handle trauma very well.”
“I know what you mean,” I laughed, walking her up the drive to where Sandra was shooing away the locksmith. “Same reason I got divorced and retrained as...” Yeah, no, now’s not the time. “Morning, Sandra.”
“Ah, is Morgan Freeman and Miss Daisy.” Sandra reached in through the open window of her van and hooked out a cardboard tray containing two McDonald’s coffees. “Is probably cold but get your own next time.” She went back in and came out with a brown paper bag. “You want McMuffin?”
* * *
It took longer to spread grease all over the paperwork than it did for the locksmith to get through the lock. I thanked him and saw him safely out of the drive, and then we cleaned ourselves up and let out our respective belches and got to work.
I eased the door open, bracing myself for the olfactory assault I was sure was coming. To my surprise, though, it wasn’t too bad—just the musty, dusty smell of old, moldy food. I stepped aside and let Annie and Sandra follow me inside, paper shoes swishing on the terra-cotta tile, loud in the overwhelming silence of the house.
“Makes me feel better about my kitchen,” Sandra said, barely above a whisper. Annie suppressed a smirk.
I skirted around the large, empty pine table in the center of the room, its four chairs tucked neatly in. Of all the surfaces in the kitchen, the table was the only one that was clean—incongruously so, in fact, albeit scattered with half-opened envelopes, corners torn away in hasty triage, contents still trapped inside. The wood had been scrubbed hard with bleach at some point, its lacquer rubbed away almost entirely in a circle radiating from the center, so that only the corners still reflected the light from the window, like an inverse vignette.
“That’s weird,” I said.
Sandra found a light switch by the door and flipped the overhead lights on. “Electric still is on,” she noted.
I took in the stack of fossil-encrusted dishes on the worktop, the pile of bulging bin bags beside the door to what I guessed was the downstairs toilet. “What’s in there?” I said to Annie.
She looked the door up and down, and reached out and opened it. I was right, there was a toilet and a sink inside, and the frosted window with the chipped frame, but we weren’t going to get in there to examine it just yet. The room was full to waist height with empty-looking boxes and bags full of bags and a car tire and a selection of winter coats and God knows what else.
Sandra bent over the table, her nose an inch from the dull wood, and gently breathed in its aroma. I wasn’t sure whether she was being scientific or just weird, so I nodded for Annie to follow me and moved on into the hallway that led to the front door and the stairs.
The doormat was buried in mail. I dug my hand into the pile and scooped some letters ou
t from the bottom. “These are from the beginning of April,” I said. More than three months ago. I dropped them as Annie squeezed past into the sitting room, and followed her into the gloom.
The mantelpiece was piled with unopened birthday cards. Sarah had vanished the day before she turned nineteen, or the day before she would have, depending on what happened thereafter. On an adjacent table, in the corner opposite the window, a small pile lay unopened beside three large silver picture frames: a straight-A exam certificate, an Oxford University acceptance letter and a studio portrait of Sarah, her fine blond hair draped artfully across her shoulders, blue eyes shining, her smile radiating confidence with a subtle note of mischief.
Annie and I stood in silence for a long moment, transfixed by a face filled with life and promise and beauty, until Annie broke it with a whispered, “Shit,” and I looked at her and saw that she was crying.
I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to put my arm around her and give her shoulders a squeeze, but I didn’t know how she’d feel about that, so I just gently touched her back, and felt her stiffen and stop breathing, and then left the room, embarrassed. “Sandra, I’m heading upstairs,” I called.
“Gloves, don’t touch anything,” was her terse reply. She knew I was wearing them; she’d seen me put them on, so either it was for Annie’s benefit, or she thought I was an idiot, or she’d just officially designated this a crime scene.
I didn’t hang around to find out. I climbed the stairs, feeling the familiar pain begin to creep into my hip, and paused at the top to consider the layout. One room to the left, the door closed. A bathroom and what looked like a box room, side by side in front of me. A fourth door to the right, slightly ajar.
I turned right, and then wished I hadn’t.
* * *
The master bedroom was dark and chilly, its heavy curtains drawn, but there was enough light from the window above the stairs for me to make out a shape in the bed. I froze, electrified by fright, eyes fixed on the recumbent form, willing it not to move as I waited for my heart to slow down and the goose bumps to settle over my body. They did, and I remembered to breathe, and felt the wall behind me for a light switch. My fingers found it, but it was already on; no amount of flicking it up and down shed any new light on the subject.
Momentarily, having reassured myself that whatever was in the bed was not going to spring up and cut my throat, I foot-swept my way to the window and took a curtain in each fist and jerked them apart along a sticky plastic rail.
Sunlight, to the immediate protraction of my regret, flooded the room.
* * *
On the high table beside the bed, there were two teddy bears. They sat side by side, leaning into one another for support with their feet dangling over the edge and their fur matted with dried blood as they watched over the body in the bed.
I could see that it was a woman. She was wearing a nightie, which had ridden up at the bottom and soaked itself flat at the top, such that the specifics of her anatomy were apparent in spite of her mummified state.
Above, however, the clues stopped. The remains of a pillow covered her face, crusted black. A fan of feathers spread like angel wings around her, matted to the headboard and the wall and the dried-out puddle of sickly mulch that had previously been her head.
I stood still for a moment, trying to control my breathing and to not focus on her tight gray skin or the horrifying way it stood out against the wide black stain on the sheet beneath her. I glanced around the room, but it was impossible to tell whether anything had been disturbed. Clothes spilled from drawers and baskets and the built-in wardrobes. The floor surrounding the bed was a minefield of mugs and pill packets and used tissues and tiny brown husks and a hundred and one other things that probably had some use in some other context. Every raised surface was covered in ashtrays and drink cans and stacks of pennies and dog-eared books and overturned nail varnishes, lipsticks, mascaras, the spaces between black with dusty-winged corpses.
My throat was too dry to shout, so I focused on the open doorway and returned to the landing. Everything in me screamed Don’t open any more doors! but of course, opening doors is my job.
The room opposite the master bedroom was, as I’d assumed, a box room, and had been used as one quite literally. It was comparatively orderly, too—cardboard filing boxes stacked neatly along the far wall, spanning the room to the height of the windowsill, and larger, irregularly sized retail boxes along the right side, slotted together like puzzle pieces, microwave beside printer below television above flat-pack display unit.
I closed the door and checked the adjacent bathroom. Dripping tap, smeared mirror, bathtub full of shampoo bottles. It may have been the scene of a struggle, but I guessed probably not.
Finally, soothed somewhat by the sound of voices drifting up from downstairs, I opened the fourth door.
This, evidently, had been Sarah’s. It had been kept tidy, in spite of all its bustle. The walls were painted lilac over old patterned wallpaper. The one to the right, above the single bed, was hung with a pair of Wolverine film posters. To the left, a dresser and a pair of floating shelves about as long as my wingspan displayed a startling collection of beautiful stuffed bears, each one posed—I hoped—to look at me as I walked in.
The view of limp trees in the woods behind the house added to the quiet sadness of the room, and I tried to imagine Sarah in here, laughing and texting and posting her wittily passive-aggressive Facebook statuses, but it was impossible. I kept my eyes on what I determined to be the head bear, a small but lustrous specimen that was a hundred years old if it was a day, as I backed slowly out of the room. It was either that, or look at the shotgun on the floor and the fountain of dried blood and brain and skull that coated the bed.
* * *
“Look at it from other way. You see?”
Annie was bent over the kitchen table when I walked in, holding her hair in a bunch at the side of her neck so as not to drape it over the surface. Sandra stood in the center of the room, her phone pressed to her ear. I could hear hold music over the rustle of her impatiently tapping foot.
“All okay?” I asked, the words husky from the abundance of saliva in my throat. I hadn’t been sick yet, but I was still tempted.
Sandra nodded. “Knife marks,” she said. “In table. They have blood in them.”
“You’re right. Bloody hell.” Annie straightened and let her hair down, and turned to look at me. “Shit, are you alright? You’re white as a...”
The hold music stopped. A tinny voice said, “Hello?”
Annie looked at Sandra, who looked at me, and then they both looked up at the ceiling.
“Are you still there?”
“Tell them to call the coroner,” I said. “I think I’ve found the Abbotts.”
Chapter 21
The ground-penetrating radar arrived in the marsh beside the train tracks just after noon on Wednesday, and ran under floodlights into the early hours of Thursday morning. By dawn, the data had been downloaded and roughly analyzed and a dozen points of interest mapped. By 8:00 a.m. the forensic archaeology team was assembled, fed, watered and grimly eager to excavate.
By three o’clock on Thursday afternoon, the search was complete, and five women had come out of the ground.
* * *
Like all of us, Jenny Riley was in a grim mood. What had seemed like an impossibly confused and confusing situation was now verging on a complete clusterfuck.
She was pacing the room with a pained expression when I arrived with Annie, and she was still pacing, on and off the phone, for some time after the team had assembled and sat down and stopped chattering. Finally, as the exchange of nervous glances threatened to reach fever pitch, she strode to the middle of the circle of dragged-up chairs, held aloft a plastic bag containing a bloodstained sheet of paper and said, “What the fucking absolute fuck is this?”
No one moved.
She flipped the bag around to display the contents of the note to the team. Six words, scrawled diagonally across the page in blue biro: I’m sorry Sarah. God forgive me.
“This note was found beside David Abbott’s body,” she said, “right after we found knife marks containing type B negative blood in a table in his house. It says, ‘I’m sorry, Sarah, God forgive me.’ It’s looking like Mr. Abbott probably wrote this sometime between blowing his wife’s head off with a shotgun, and lying down on his daughter’s bed and putting said gun under his chin. “‘I’m sorry, Sarah. God forgive me.’ What the fuck does that even mean?”
The silence was long and uncomfortable, Jenny just standing there in front of us, haunted eyes darting from face to face. It was Dan Hooper who eventually, tentatively, broke it.
“That he couldn’t take the guilt of not being able to protect his daughter?” he suggested, his piercing blue eyes already screwed into a wince.
Jenny’s shoulders sagged, the plastic envelope slapping against her skirt as she bowed her head and let out a weary sigh. “Yes,” she said. “Thank you. But no.” She tossed the note onto the desk beside her. Pulled out the chair. Sat heavily. “What it means is that we now have to consider the possibility that it means something else. Specifically, that David Abbott murdered his daughter, and if, as seems likely, one of the bodies at Two Mile Bottom is Sarah’s, that he therefore murdered Sam Halloran and four other women, too. And if we entertain that idea—which we fucking have to—then we also have to entertain the idea that Thomas Reed therefore didn’t kill them. Which then will beg the question of whether or not he has in fact killed anyone at all, and if so why, and if not, where the hell is he? Because for all we know, he could be dead, too.”
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