by Danuta Reah
Tomorrow was the day for a letter from Dad. He used to write every week, but lately…Maybe she could tell him what Lyn said, maybe Dad would know what she meant, and he could tell Kerry what to do. As she drifted back to sleep, things began to look a bit better. Its abut yor dad meet u at the cafy 7 dont b 18…
It was shortly after eight the following morning when DCI Farnham called his full team together. The canal death was now officially a murder. Tina Barraclough shook her head to clear away the fuzziness left from the sleeping pills she’d taken the night before. At least the pills meant she didn’t dream. Dave West had saved her a place, and she picked her way through the group to sit next to him. ‘Who were you up to last night?’ he said.
So she still looked like shit. Oh well. ‘No one you know,’ she said.
Farnham’s manner was quick, efficient, dispassionate as he gave an account of the post-mortem report which confirmed what they had already worked out – the woman they had fished out of the canal had been murdered.
‘We’ve got an initial identification,’ Farnham said. ‘She lived in one of the flats above the gallery – called herself Cara Hobson. We need to confirm that, find the next of kin, OK? She was murdered. There may have been an attempt to make it look like suicide, but it was pretty half-hearted.’
‘Maybe whoever it was didn’t mean to kill her,’ one of the officers suggested. ‘Panicked and dumped her in the canal afterwards.’
‘She drowned in the canal,’ Farnham said. ‘That’s the cause of death. But the initial post-mortem findings suggest we’re looking at something that was planned.’
Though Cara’s arms and legs had been free when her body was pulled out of the water, there were marks around her wrists and ankles that suggested she must have been tied at some time before her death. A cut cord that matched the marking on the wrists had been found in the water. ‘There’s no flow in the canal,’ Farnham said, ‘so anything that fell off her would still be close by. We haven’t found her bag, or a purse. Her money, her cards, her keys – they’re all missing.’
The damage to Cara’s hands had been noted when the body had been lifted out of the water. ‘They aren’t defence wounds,’ Farnham said. ‘And she didn’t break her fingers trying to pull the cord off her neck. They were broken before she died – someone twisted them until they snapped.’
There was a murmur around the room. Farnham held up a cloth sack with a drawstring. ‘This was round her neck, weighted with a stone. It’s the way you drown a dog, throw it in the canal with a brick round its neck. But the post-mortem suggests – this isn’t definite, but it’s probable – that she had already drowned before the weighted sack was put round her neck.’ He explained about the marks from the drawstring that had been twisted round Cara’s neck. ‘There’s very little bleeding into the soft tissue – it might have been an afterthought, make sure that her head stayed under the water just in case. There was no attempt to hide the body – she was caught in the mud. If she’d been pushed away from that, she’d have sunk and we probably wouldn’t have found her for a while.’
And the immersion had destroyed any physical evidence of Cara’s killer that might have been on her body. ‘What it does mean,’ Farnham had said, ‘is that whatever happened took time, and it wasn’t quiet. It’s unlikely she was attacked in the flat. The woman next door didn’t hear anything. No one heard anything on the canal bank. There’s somewhere else. He spent some time with her.’
The pathologist had not been able to come up with a close time of death. The cold of the water had made this even less certain than it usually was. Cara could have died any time between midevening and shortly after midnight the night before. She’d been dead for at least six hours when she was lifted from the canal at six-thirty that morning.
Tina’s mind went back to the flat, the dim room, the light switches that hadn’t worked, the heavy blankets over the windows, the flickering light of the candle. She missed the next bit. West nudged her and she hastily reconstructed what Farnham had asked – what time had Eliza Eliot heard Cara in the flat. ‘Around midnight,’ she said. ‘She’s coming in today to go through her statement.’
Farnham considered her for a moment then moved on. Tina breathed again. She could remember talking to the Eliot woman the evening before, struggling against a headache and a fatigue that threatened to overwhelm her. Eliot had been emphatic about hearing Cara, but had been uncertain about the time. ‘It was – I think I woke up,’ she’d said. ‘I think I’d been to sleep. So it must have been – I’m trying to think of something to give me a fix.’
‘Well, was it before midnight or after midnight?’ Tina had been desperate to get home, lie down, get over the speed hangover that was getting worse and worse.
Eliot had looked at her. ‘I’m not…’
‘We just need to get a general idea.’ If she didn’t get out of here soon, she was going to be sick.
‘…before. I think.’
‘If I say midnight?’ Tina said.
Remembering this, she felt her face flush and she concentrated on her notes to hide it. But it sounded like midnight was about right.
Farnham was winding up. ‘There was some disarrangement in the flat,’ he said. ‘Pillows displaced, stuff hanging out of drawers and cupboards. It doesn’t look like a struggle – but we can’t rule it out, not until we’ve got the forensics anyway.’ The candle had been burning for about eighteen hours – but that gave no indication of the time she had left the flat.
There was one more thing. Cara Hobson had been picked up on Broad Street and charged with soliciting three weeks earlier. Tina had been aware of a change of atmosphere in the room, a murmur that ran round the team. She thought she detected a certain relaxation in some of the men. A puzzling case had suddenly become a simple one. A prostitute. It was unfortunate, but these things happened. Occupational hazard.
Tina was assigned the job of going through the stuff that had been taken from Cara Hobson’s flat. It was something one of the uniformed officers could have done, and Tina wondered if Farnham had noticed her late arrivals, the signs of hangovers, the lapses in concentration. She had to get her act together. She sorted listlessly through the pile of papers, and tried to stop herself from looking at the clock. Eliza Eliot was coming in later that morning to go over her statement. That would give her a break.
If only her head didn’t feel so woolly from the sleeping pills. She could try and wake herself up with some…She dismissed the thought. Using the last of her coke might liven her up for the moment, but she’d come crashing down later. She started on the task of going through the stuff the search team had brought from the flat.
She remembered her first impressions of the flat – a strange, dim nursery lit by the flickering light of the candle. The nursery effect – more of a child’s bedroom effect, Tina thought, came from the toys scattered round the room – toys that were far too old for an infant: a rocking horse, a doll, a teddy bear, all larger than the baby herself; a counterpane printed with nursery-rhyme motifs. Presumably Cara was trying to create some kind of idealized child world for Briony Rose. One that she hadn’t had herself? Hold that thought.
She sorted through the clothes. Cara had favoured shapeless, baggy clothes, jeans with floppy, flared legs, loose-fitting sweatshirts, but there were one or two unexpected things – a basque, lacy stockings, what looked like an old-fashioned school tunic – odd things for a woman of Cara’s age and tastes to be wearing.
‘There’s not much here,’ Dave West observed. He had been taking witness statements, and had come along to offer a hand to Tina more as a gesture of support than because she really needed it. He started sorting through a box of papers.
According to Eliza Eliot and Jonathan Massey, Cara had lived in the flat for about three months. There should have been bills: utilities, council tax. There should have been some kind of evidence of Cara’s income: bank statements, Building Society books, benefit books. But there was nothing. There should have
been personal stuff: addresses, phone numbers, some kind of reference to friends, to appointments. But again there was nothing. No one at the gallery reported seeing anyone visiting her – in fact, Eliza Eliot had specifically mentioned the solitary life that Cara Hobson had lived.
There was no phone installed. ‘Is there a mobile?’ West said.
Tina checked. It seemed logical, but there was no sign of one, and no record of any account. ‘That’ll need looking into.’ Tina made a note. A mobile could contain a lot of useful information. Cara’s killer could well have taken it, thrown it away. ‘Do you think someone cleared the flat out before we got there?’
West shrugged. It was possible. ‘Anything from forensics?’ he said.
‘The identifiable prints in the flat were Cara’s. There’s a thumb print that can’t be matched to anyone yet. They’re still looking at that one. Apart from that, there’s no evidence of a break-in.’ But stuff had been pulled out of the drawers, scattered around. A search, or the general mess that nineteen-year-olds tended to live in? The flat itself was bleak and comfortless – the walls new plaster, the bathroom untiled, no cooker, bare boards on the floors.
Having finished with the clothes, Tina began to go through the piles of papers that Dave had been sorting out. It was like he had said. There wasn’t much. ‘I’m going to talk to the people who rent the flats,’ Tina said. ‘This Trust or whatever it is.’ She began going through her notes, looking for the number.
‘Here,’ Dave had found it.
She negotiated her way through the electronic answering system, pressing buttons as an automated voice issued instructions, until she made contact with a human being. The woman at the other end of the phone admitted that she did know something about the Second Site flat, took Tina’s number and said she would phone her back.
‘She said “flat”.’ Tina remembered that they’d gone to the gallery expecting to find just one residence.
‘Doesn’t give you a lot of confidence.’ West was packing stuff back into the boxes. ‘If the boss can get anything out of this lot, he’s a better…’
The phone rang. ‘We have one tenant,’ the woman from the Trust informed Tina. ‘Ms Eliza Eliot. She took the tenancy of the flat in August last year, as soon as it became available.’
‘And the other tenant – the other flat, I mean,’ Tina said. ‘Cara Hobson and her daughter.’
‘There is no other flat,’ the woman said.
Surprise silenced Tina for a moment. ‘Of course there is,’ she said. ‘That was where Cara Hobson was living.’
‘Well, I’m sorry…’ There was the sound of papers being moved around. ‘Let me go and check.’ Tina put her hand over the phone, and looked at Dave. She raised her eyes and pointed to her head. Brainless. Then the woman was back. ‘There are plans for a second flat,’ she said. ‘But the conversion isn’t complete. There are no plans to finish it before next summer. There’s only the one flat at present.’
Tina thanked the woman and hung up. ‘Hobson must have been squatting,’ Dave said, when she told him.
Tina thought about it. It explained the comfortless, unfinished appearance of the flat. But it seemed like an odd place for a squat. It would have been the simplest thing in the world to exclude her from the building – secure either of the access doors, and Cara would have been unable to get back in. On the other hand, if this was purely a temporary residence, it would explain why Cara had so few possessions and the lack of any paper evidence of her existence.
She expressed these doubts to Dave, who shrugged. ‘Who knows why they do anything?’
Who can understand the mind of a prostitute? Tina translated. Who cares?
‘What about this?’ Dave had a couple of sheets of paper in his hand and was unfolding them. She looked over his shoulder. They appeared to be press cuttings, photocopies of newspaper reviews. ‘Arty stuff,’ Dave said, dismissively.
Tina read through the first one, aware of a flicker of interest outside the routine of basic detective work that was – OK – important, but dull, dull, dull.
Gonna roll the bones!
Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, until 9 September
‘Entropy’ is an intriguing exhibition of film and computer images that is worth a visit. Ivan Bakst’s time-lapse animation, and the reworkings of stills into abstract designs turns the process of death and decay into something that has a strange if macabre beauty…
There was a photograph – a dead fox with its teeth pulled into a rictus snarl, the eyes fallen in. She checked the date: 1999. The second cutting was another review of the same exhibition. Tina read it. This review was dismissive. An obsession with death…cliché…gratuitous detail…
She looked at West, who shook his head. They didn’t mean anything to him. She turned them over. On the back, someone had scribbled: J – thought you might be interested. J? Jonathan Massey? She made a note to follow it up, and another to chase up the details of Cara’s arrival in the flat, then went back to her search through the paperwork. There was nothing else.
FIVE
When Kerry woke up, she felt better. She got up early and ironed the grey skirt and maroon jumper that was what they made you wear for school. She’d taken the skirt in, and turned up the hem. She’d asked Mum for some money to buy a top, one of those with eagles and flowers like she’d seen Samantha Mumba wearing, but Mum had said, ‘I haven’t got money for T-shirts, Kerry. Don’t go on.’ So Kerry had got out her tiger one that came from the World Wildlife Fund, and she’d jazzed it up with sequins and things, but she couldn’t do much with the jumper.
She put on the top, pulling the sleeves down to cover the fine tracery of cuts that ran up the inside of her arm. It was chilly, but she draped the jumper carefully round her shoulders, tying the sleeves loosely at the front. That looked better. The skirt felt loose. She was going to have to take it in again. She brushed her hair and looked in the mirror. If she’d washed it yesterday, she could have worn it loose like Buffy. She tied it up with a band. She looked in the mirror and smiled at her reflection. Buffy smiled back. That was all right.
She went downstairs. There was post on the mat. She picked it up. A letter in a brown window envelope. A bill. It was in red with Final Demand written above the address. A letter addressed to Mum – it was from the school, Kerry recognized the postmark. She slipped it into her pocket. No letter from Dad.
Mum was in the kitchen, and she looked up as Kerry came through the door, picking up the green mug that was beside her. She was still in her dressing gown. ‘Are you off now?’ she said. She smiled, but she sounded anxious and there was a flat, strained look to her smile. She wanted Kerry to go. That smell, sweet and penetrating like nail polish, hung round her. Kerry knew what that meant.
She got down the cornflakes. ‘You want some, Mum?’ she said.
‘I’ll get something later.’ Mum lit a cigarette and watched Kerry pour milk on to her cereal.
‘Aren’t you going to work?’ Kerry could hear her voice sounding small and angry. She put the brown envelope on the kitchen table. ‘You’d better go, because there’s another bill you haven’t paid.’
Mum stared at the window. ‘Oh, Kerry, don’t nag,’ she said. ‘Hurry up. You’ll be late.’ She shifted restlessly from foot to foot. Kerry wanted to say something, but Mum looked at her so blankly that she couldn’t think of anything. She picked up her bag and looked in the mirror again. This time it was just Kerry who looked back, but somehow she couldn’t care about it any more.
She left the house, heading towards the bus stop, her feet moving slower and slower. She opened the letter from school as she walked. It was the usual stuff. Dear Mrs Fraser…Mum didn’t call herself Mrs Fraser any more, but the school kept making that mistake, because Kerry went on being Kerry Fraser. Dear Mrs Fraser…Kerry pulled a face. Blah, blah, blah…unexcused absences…blah, blah…She was about to screw it up and throw it away, when a phrase caught her eye:…excluded for a period…She read the letter closely, but
it was all right. She wasn’t excluded, but she had to stay after school on Friday. She would be excluded if she missed that…without good reason…At least they couldn’t phone Mum now. She remembered the last time the school had phoned. Mum’s eyes had looked tired. ‘I can’t cope with this,’ she’d said. And Kerry had felt cold inside. What if Mum sent her away? What if she put Kerry in care? That’s what she’d done to Lyn. Then what could she do to help Dad?
But the phone had been cut off. That was another bill Mum hadn’t paid. Kerry had told Lyn, and Lyn had pulled one of those faces, but she’d given Kerry the phone. ‘Don’t let her get it,’ Lyn said. ‘I worked hard to buy that.’
She kept it deep down in her bag, where Mum wouldn’t see it, and she kept it switched off so it wouldn’t beep and give her away. She switched it on now. She wanted to call Lyn, but if Lyn was mad at her she might not talk. She thought for a moment, then keyed in sori I woz l8. She pressed ‘send’, holding her breath. Was Lyn so mad she wouldn’t get in touch? She sat on the low wall by the bus stop, the phone in her hand, watching up the road for the bus. It didn’t mean anything if there wasn’t a reply. Lyn’s phone might be switched off, she might be busy, anything.
She could see the bus in the distance now, pulling in to the stop further along the road. She was about to stow the phone safely in her bag when it beeped. She nearly dropped it. The message signal was flashing. She felt breathless as she pressed the read button. It was all right. Lyn wasn’t mad at her – Lyn was worried. The letters ran across the screen.
RUOK?
Eliza got up early and watched the sun rise over the canal. She hadn’t slept much the night before. Every time she began to drop into sleep, she thought she heard those soft footsteps again on the other side of the wall.
By eight, she was dressed and breakfasted, and glad to go downstairs and start work, to get back to the world of the normal, the commonplace, the everyday.
