DS Edgar opens the car door for me. I wonder if his mates call him “Poe.” There are worse nicknames. I’ve had some of them. At school I was called “Virus” because of the rhyme.
“You’re a psychologist,” Edgar says. Not a question. “You treated a mate of mine in the SWAT team. You said he had PTSD and recommended he be medically retired. Pissed him right off.”
“I can’t talk about my clinical cases.”
“Right. Sure. You were probably right.”
“Probably” means he thinks I got it wrong.
I often get this reaction from police officers when they discover the work I do. I’m the specialist they see after they’ve been attacked, or shot at, or have discharged a firearm, or witnessed a tragedy. I judge their mental state. I look for signs of trauma. I prevent suicides. I negotiate with hostage takers. The thin blue line can be a mentally fragile one.
Edgar has grown uncomfortable with the silence.
“How do you know the boss?” he asks.
“We go way back.”
“Did you meet her on the job?”
“When I was a child.”
He doesn’t react, but I recognize what he’s doing. He’s digging for details. He knows what happened to my family. I’m the boy who came home from football practice and found my father dead in the sitting room and my mother on the kitchen floor and my twin sisters hacked to death in the bedroom they shared upstairs. Did I really discover my older brother sitting on the sofa, watching TV, resting his feet on my father’s body?
I don’t give him the opportunity. “What do you know about the victim?”
“Jodie Sheehan. Aged fifteen. She was last seen at a fireworks display at the Clifton Playing Fields. Her parents reported her missing this morning. Her body was found just after midday in a wooded area next to Silverdale Walk.”
“Who found her?”
“A woman walking her dog.”
Why is it always someone walking a dog?
We partially circle two roundabouts and enter a small triangle of streets squeezed between Clifton Lane and Fairham Brook. The cottages and semidetached bungalows are postwar, with low-pitched roofs, flat-fronted facades, and postage-stamp-sized front gardens.
I know areas like this one, full of hardworking, respectable people who have pushed back against low-pay, insecure employment and government austerity by working multiple jobs, driving secondhand cars, and setting achievable goals rather than aspirational ones.
Turning a corner, I see a crowd spilling onto the road. Dozens of people jostle and press forward, hoping for a glimpse of the fallen girl or to see a real-life tragedy unfold that isn’t on their TV screens. Two police cars are parked across the entrance to the community center. Forensic technicians clad in light blue overalls are unloading silver cases from the sliding doors of a van.
A handful of uniformed officers are keeping the crowd behind bollards and crime-scene tape. DS Edgar flashes his badge and raises the tape above my head. A big man steps from the crowd, yelling, “Is it her? Is it our Jodie?”
He’s wearing a fawn-colored raincoat tight across his chest and his head seems to perch like a stone ball on top of his shoulders.
“Please go home, Mr. Sheehan,” says Edgar. “We’ll tell you as soon as we know something.”
The man tries to force his way past the police but is pushed back. A second, younger man grabs his arm. “Come on, Dad,” he says. “Let it go.” He’s a deflated version of his father, with short hair and long sideburns that reach down his cheeks.
“Poor bastards,” mutters Edgar as we walk in single file along an asphalt path, entering a large copse of trees surrounded by wild meadow. It’s four thirty and already growing dark. Ahead of us three lampposts cast pools of light that lengthen and shorten our shadows. Entering the trees, we reach a footbridge with welded metal handrails and the sound of running water underneath. I glance over the side and see where Fairham Brook widens into a pond fringed by reeds.
Eighty yards away, in a small clearing, tree trunks have been turned to silver by bright lights and portable generators are throbbing like a drum track playing on a loop. A white canvas tent has been erected at the base of a steep embankment. Lit from within, it glows like a Chinese paper lantern with moths trapped inside.
Two four-wheel Land Rovers are parked at the western side of the footbridge. Lenny Parvel is seated in one of them, talking on a two-way radio. I wait until she’s finished.
She shakes my hand, wanting to pull me closer into a hug, but this is work. Her hazel eyes soften. “I wouldn’t normally.”
“Yes, you would.”
Dressed in a Barbour jacket and Wellingtons that reach as high as her knees, she has pale, fine features and bottle black hair cut short enough to brush against her shoulders. Lenny isn’t her real name. She was christened Lenore Eustace Mary Parvel by parents who thought a long name would give their daughter added status, although Lenny would dispute this. She once told me she’d have earned higher grades at school if she hadn’t spent so much time filling out her name.
Lenny was the first police officer on the scene when my parents and sisters were murdered. She found me hiding in the garden shed, where I’d armed myself with a pickax, convinced I was the next to die. It was Lenny who coaxed me out and wrapped me in her coat and sat with me until the cavalry arrived. I remember her crouching beside the open door of the patrol car, asking me my name. She offered me Tic Tacs, holding my trembling hand as she shook them onto my palm. That moment, her touch, made me realize that there was still warmth in the world.
In the days that followed, Lenny sat with me during the police interviews and watched over me when I slept in a foldout bed at the station. During the committal hearings and the trial, she shielded me from the media and chaperoned me to court, keeping me company as I waited to give evidence. She was sitting at the back of the courtroom when I swore to tell the truth and tried not to look at my brother in the dock.
Back then she was a constable, barely a year into the job. Now she’s head of the serious operations unit in Nottinghamshire Police; married, divorced, remarried, with two grown-up stepchildren. I’m like a third.
“How much did Edgar tell you?” she asks.
“Jodie Sheehan, aged fifteen, went missing last night.”
Lenny shows me a photograph of two girls, pointing to Jodie, a sloe-eyed teen with thick brown hair and a gap in her front teeth that braces didn’t fix.
“She was last seen by her cousin Tasmin Whitaker at five past eight at a fireworks display less than a mile from here.” Lenny points to the second girl in the picture, who is taller and heavier, with a round face and a lopsided smile.
“Jodie told Tasmin she was going to a fish-and-chip shop on Southchurch Drive. They planned to meet up later at Tasmin’s house. Jodie didn’t arrive.”
Lenny leads me down the muddy path that switches back and forth and grows steeper in places. As we near the tent, duckboards are set out like stepping-stones and arc lights create pools of bright light that turn dew-beaded cobwebs into jeweled threads.
A canvas flap is pulled back and I catch a glimpse of the body. Jodie Sheehan is lying on her right side with her knees pulled up towards her chest. Leaves and grass cling to her hair. Her jeans and knickers are bunched at her ankles above her suede boots, and her sweater has been pulled up beneath her chin. Her bra is unclasped and twisted to the side, exposing small, pale breasts that are stained with mud or blood. Her eyes are open, popping slightly, with a dull white sheen as though cataracts have grown across her pupils.
I feel embarrassed by her nakedness. I want to pull up her jeans and tug down her sweater and say how sorry I am that we’re meeting like this. I want to apologize that people are taking photographs and scraping beneath her fingernails and swabbing her orifices. I’m sorry that she can’t tell me who did this to her or point him out from a lineup or scrawl his name on a piece of paper.
I crouch and notice the leaves and grass clingin
g to her hair. There are scratches on her hands and forearms, and bruising to her right eye, and a bump on her forehead. She’s wearing a single earring—a delicate silver stud that catches the light. Where is the other one? Was it lost in a struggle, or taken as a souvenir?
A ghost-like figure steps into the tent. Clad from head to toe in shapeless hooded coveralls, Robert Ness is barely recognizable, but he makes the tent feel smaller because of his bulk.
The senior Home Office pathologist, sometimes called Nessie, is in his late forties with skin so dark it makes the whites of his eyes seem brighter. He’s wearing rimless glasses that momentarily catch the light when he tilts his head.
“Do you two know each other?” asks Lenny.
We nod but don’t shake hands.
“Let’s make this quick,” says Ness. “I don’t want to leave her out here.”
“When did she die?” asks Lenny.
“Early hours. It was cold last night, which lowered her body temperature and kept the insects away.”
“Cause of death?”
“Unclear. She suffered a blow to the back of her head that didn’t fracture her skull but might have rendered her unconscious. I’ll know more after the post mortem.”
“Was she sexually assaulted?” I ask.
“There are traces of semen in her hair.”
A bubble of air gets trapped in my throat.
The pathologist drops to his haunches, pointing to Jodie’s boots. “They’re full of water and I found pondweed in her hair. Fairham Brook is beyond those trees.” He indicates the bruising on her forehead. “That’s an impact injury, likely caused by a fall.”
“What about the scratches on her arms and face?” I ask.
“From branches and brambles.”
She tried to run.
Lenny turns away and summons DS Edgar. “I want police divers here at first light. We’re looking for her mobile phone and a polka-dot-print tote bag.”
Leaving the SOCO tent, I keep to the duckboards until I reach the perimeter of the crime scene. A carpet of papery leaves squelches beneath my boots, hiding roots that bump up from the ground ready to catch my ankles. In daylight the clearing would be visible from the footpath or the top of the embankment. At night it disappears and becomes darker than the meadow because overhanging branches block out the ambient light.
Lenny has joined me. We scramble up the embankment using the trees as handholds.
“Where does the footpath lead?” I ask.
“Once it crosses the footbridge it hits a T junction. To the right is Farnborough Road. Turn left and it crosses the tram lines and eventually reaches Forsyth Academy, Jodie’s school. Her family lives beyond, in Clifton. This would have been a shortcut home.”
“From where?”
“Her cousin’s house. Tasmin Whitaker lives five minutes from here.”
Ness calls out. “You done?”
“For now,” answers Lenny.
Below us, a group of forensic technicians have lifted Jodie’s body onto a white plastic sheet that is folded over her and sealed. A second layer of plastic is zipped up, cocooning her in a bag with handles that is carried by four men to a waiting ambulance.
Lenny watches in silence, her dark hair boxed on her neck.
“The tabloids will have wet dreams over this one,” she mutters. “A pretty churchgoing schoolgirl; a champion figure skater.”
“Figure skater?”
“British Junior Champion. The Times profiled her during the summer. They called her the golden girl of British skating.”
Crossing the footbridge, we follow the asphalt path to the community center. Most of the locals have gone home, escaping the cold, but TV crews and reporters have taken their places. Cameras are shouldered. Spotlights blaze.
“Is it Jodie?” someone yells.
“How did she die?”
“Was she raped?”
“Any suspects?”
The questions seem brutal in the circumstances, but Lenny keeps her head down, hands in her pockets.
We pause at the police car. “What do you need?” she asks.
“Can I talk to her family?”
“They haven’t been formally notified.”
“I think they know.”
5
* * *
CYRUS
* * *
The semidetached house has a single bay window on the lower floor and a small square of soggy front garden surrounded on three sides by a heavily pruned knee-high hedge. Two vehicles are parked nose to tail in the driveway—one a black cab and the other a new-model Lexus with a darker-than-legal tint on the front windows.
A police constable is waiting outside, stamping her feet against the cold. Lenny presses a doorbell. Dougal Sheehan answers and looks past us, as though hoping we might have brought his daughter home.
“I’m Detective Chief Inspector Lenore Parvel,” says Lenny. “I wanted to speak to you and your wife.”
Wordlessly, he turns and leads us into an overfurnished sitting room with a lumpy sofa and two worn armchairs. A TV is showing football with the sound turned down.
Maggie Sheehan is standing in the arched doorway to the kitchen. Everything about her is crumpled and diminished. The forward cant of her shoulders. The dark rings beneath her eyes. A string of polished wooden rosary beads are clenched in her fist.
Beyond her I see a couple sitting at the kitchen. The man looks like family. He’s dressed in dark trousers and a white shirt, buttoned to his neck. The woman is physically the same size and clearly the most resolute of the four, ready to prop up the others.
“Mrs. Sheehan,” begins Lenny.
“Please call me Maggie,” she replies mechanically, before introducing her brother, Bryan, and his wife, Felicity, who are sitting at the kitchen table. The Whitakers are Tasmin’s parents, come to offer support.
Lenny is standing in the center of the room with her legs braced apart and hands clasped like she’s on a parade ground. Some people own every space they inhabit, but Lenny seems to conquer the room quietly, taking it inch by inch with the force of her personality, until everyone is concentrating on her.
Maggie takes a seat on the sofa. The skin above her collarbone is mottled and there are cracks in the makeup around her eyes. Dougal is next to her. She reaches for his hand. He takes it reluctantly, as though unwilling to show any frailty.
The Whitakers are side by side in the arched doorway, their faces filled with dreadful knowing.
Lenny begins. “It is my sad duty to inform you that the body of a teenage girl has been found beside Silverdale Walk. She matches the description of your daughter, Jodie.”
Maggie blinks and glances at Dougal, as though waiting for a translation. His eyes are closed, but a tear squeezes from one corner and he wipes it away with the back of his hand.
“How did she die?” he whispers.
“We believe her death to be suspicious.”
Dougal gets to his feet and sways unsteadily, gripping the back of the sofa for support. He’s a big man who looks like a builder or a butcher. Big arms. Big hands.
“We will need one of you to formally identify Jodie,” says Lenny. “It doesn’t have to be today. I can send a car in the morning.”
“Where is she now?” asks Maggie.
“She’s been taken to the Queen’s Medical Centre. There will need to be a postmortem.”
“You’re going to cut our baby up,” says Dougal.
“We’re investigating a homicide.”
Maggie Sheehan’s fingers have found her rosary beads. She clutches the tiny crucifix in her fist, squeezing it so tightly it leaves an imprint when she opens her palm. She must have prayed all day, daring to hope, but nobody has answered her.
Bryan and Felicity hug each other in the doorway. She seems to be holding him up.
“We need to establish Jodie’s movements,” says Lenny. “When did you last see her?”
“At the fireworks,” whispers Maggie.
&n
bsp; “We go to Bonfire Night every year,” echoes Felicity. “We used to call it Guy Fawkes Night, but people don’t do that anymore. Maybe it’s not politically correct. Didn’t Guy Fawkes try to blow up the Houses of Parliament? The Gunpowder Plot and all that.”
She’s a tall, striking woman, with a plume of silver flowing through her thick dark hair from the left side of her temple to the collar of her blouse.
“Who was Jodie with at the fireworks?” interrupts Lenny.
“Tasmin. Our daughter.”
“Anyone else?”
Maggie looks lost for words. “Schoolmates. Friends. Neighbors.”
“Everyone was there,” explains Felicity. “It was like a big street party. I took a bottle of champagne and glasses.”
Maggie takes a cotton handkerchief from the sleeve of her cardigan and blows her nose.
“I shouldn’t have let her stay out. I should have made her come home. She would have been safe.”
“Nonsense. This is not your fault,” scolds Felicity in a tender voice.
Dougal doesn’t react, but I can already sense the tension between husband and wife. The recriminations are just beginning. Guilt has to fall somewhere when logic fails.
“What time did you last see her?” I ask.
“She found me at eight o’clock,” says Maggie. “She asked if she could sleep over at Tasmin’s house. I told her she had to be up early for training.”
“Training?”
“The nationals are coming up,” explains Bryan Whitaker, sounding apologetic. “We’re on the ice by six thirty, six mornings a week.”
“You’re Jodie’s coach,” I say.
“I taught her to skate.”
“Almost before she could walk,” echoes Maggie.
Brother and sister have similar eyes and the same-shaped noses. Maggie is rounder and softer while Bryan has slim hips and slender hands. He looks like a dancer in the way he stands with a straight back, square shoulders, and raised chin.
Good Girl, Bad Girl Page 3
