by Danuta Reah
Tina realized she hadn’t thought about her impending interview with Farnham for the past hour. She looked at her watch. He must know she was in the building now. She was aware of the tension building up as she turned the pages. She was in flagrant breach of instructions. Suppose they’d never discovered the identity of the dead woman? Suppose they had, and it was nothing to do with the case? She could feel her shoulders start to tighten and the first throb of a headache in her temples. She was beginning to realize she’d made a mistake – it would have been better to have taken her hunch about the dead addict to Farnham, let him know what she was doing. Unless she could bring something useful back, he’d see this as another excuse.
She was skimming the pages now, turning them fast, missing things. She either had to do this properly or not at all, but it was too late to go upstairs with nothing. She was past the date of Fraser’s trial and conviction now – a parallel case brought to a satisfactory conclusion and closed. They didn’t seem to have searched too hard to find the identity of the dead addict and she was near the end of the file.
Then she found it. It was there, a grainy photograph of a girl with fair hair and shadowed eyes. She looked at the caption, and a sense of vindication flooded through her. She had a name for the dead woman – the dead girl, she amended. And she had her connection as well. The dead girl had been just fifteen, a runaway from local-authority care who had, somehow, slipped though the net of the original searches – not that it would have made much difference at the time. A girl who had drifted through the inadequacies of the care system until something had made her abscond, drift on to the streets, into prostitution, into drugs and into early death, a death that had been overshadowed by the high-profile tragedy of Ellie Chapman.
But Tina had heard her name before, heard it when she talked to Cara Hobson’s ex-care worker, Denise Greene. The girl who had become friendly with Cara Hobson because they had shared the experience of coming into care, had shared the casual drift into prostitution, a drift that had taken this girl into the coils of addiction as well. The name of the dead addict was Sheryl Hewitt.
And as she looked at the photograph, she realized something else. She felt the jump of excitement as an important connection slipped into place, but she also felt a lurch of apprehension. If she had been in trouble before, she was in worse trouble now. The face that looked at her from the newspaper cutting was the same face that had looked back at her from the photo-montage in Daniel’s exhibition. He’d said it: She was a prostitute. Found dead. No one cared much.
She did.
It wasn’t sunny any more. The sky was heavy with clouds, and the light was starting to fade. Kerry didn’t want to go home. She lingered in the school entrance. The police might be waiting for her at home. That was why they hadn’t come to get her at school – they were going to get her at home, and Mum too, probably. She needed to see Lyn, she needed to get the stuff about Dad, whatever it was. But even if she did get it, maybe no one would listen. Who’d care? She was Kerry Fraser, Kerry Fraser whose dad was a pervert, Kerry Fraser who told lies, Kerry Fraser who bunked off school, Kerry Fraser whose mum so much couldn’t cope with her that she was pissed out of her face all the time.
She got out her phone again. She’d have to be careful – she’d kept it switched off most of the day, but it would run out eventually. She switched it on. She felt a jump in her stomach as the message icon flashed at her. She pressed the buttons, but nothing appeared on the screen. She looked again – it was voice-mail. She called the answering service.
It was Lyn. Lyn hardly ever sent voice-mail. Kerry could hardly hear what she was saying – she was whispering, and the crackle of interference obscured the words. Hi, Kizz. Sorry I’ve not called. Too busy. I’m like ‘Get me out of here!’ I’ll call soon. But nothing about Dad. Kerry wanted to throw the phone down in frustration, beat it against the wall to make it say what she wanted to hear. It wasn’t fair, Lyn wasn’t being fair.
Then there was a flurry of talk and laughing and Marie and her group came down the steps with their arms linked, their bags on their backs or hooked over their shoulders. Marie saw her and stopped. ‘You coming, Kerry?’ she said.
Kerry looked at her and shrugged. ‘Might do,’ she said. ‘Where you going?’
‘We’re going to Meadowhall, we’re going to the movies.’
Kerry’s heart jumped, then she felt the letdown. She couldn’t go anywhere. She didn’t have any money. She shook her head.
‘Come on, Marie.’ The others were tugging at Marie’s arm, wanting to get going.
‘Oh, go on,’ Marie said. ‘If you do my T-shirt for the weekend, I’ll treat you.’ She said it like it was no big deal.
‘OK,’ Kerry said. She could feel her face brighten. ‘All right. I’ll do it tomorrow.’
‘Come on.’ And Kerry was incorporated into the group as they linked arms and headed for the bus stop into town. Kerry was part of the group and she wasn’t part of the group. A bit of her was talking and laughing and listening, and another bit of her was thinking about Lyn, and about Dad, and about how she didn’t know what she was going to do next because she couldn’t go home.
Snow was starting to fall as they got into town. No one was in any hurry. It was nice wandering round the shops, looking in the windows. It was cold and wet, but somehow, in a crowd, it didn’t seem to matter. They bought burgers and Coke. Kerry didn’t have money for a burger, so she pretended she wasn’t hungry, but she had a Coke.
‘I so don’t need this,’ Marie said, patting her stomach. ‘Look at me.’ She offered Kerry some chips. Kerry helped her out. It was after six by the time they walked up the hill to the tram stop at the cathedral, just as a tram was gliding up to the stop and they all piled on. It pulled away smoothly, and Kerry let her mind wander. The tram swooped over the flyover, swayed round a corner and pulled in to the next stop. More people piled on to the tram and Kerry got separated from the others. She peered through the crowd and saw Marie looking for her. She waved and smiled. It was OK, she was going to the movies. The windows of the tram were black. It was night outside, now, but she knew the canal basin was down there, behind some buildings…Her eyes snapped open. She didn’t want to think about it.
The tram picked up speed. It was racing along now. Kerry, standing, was squashed against the side. Then she heard the beep of her phone. She eased her hand into her bag and slipped it out to check. The icon was flashing. New message. Soon. Lyn had said she’d call soon. She almost dropped it as she pressed the buttons, and had a sudden vision of it crushed under the feet of all the people with Lyn’s message unread and lost. She pressed ‘read’, and the words scrolled across the screen: WHR R U?
She looked down the tram quickly. Marie and the others were talking. The tram was just pulling away from the stadium. She keyed the words in quickly. Don vlly stdm. Trm. Don Valley Stadium. On the tram.
She waited, tense. The phone beeped almost at once. MT U ON TOPATH RLY BR 7.30 RGNT DNT B L8. Meet you on the towpath, railway bridge. Urgent. Don’t be late.
The railway bridge. The railway crossed the canal just a bit back into town. She had to get off the tram and go back down the towpath. The next stop was the Centertainment. She could go over the footbridge and walk back along the towpath. She keyed the message in, quick, keeping herself close to the door. Cu @ 7.30 rly br.
Then the tram was slowing. She was by the door and out as soon as the doors opened. She stepped back into the shadows as the tram waited, watching through the bright yellow of the windows. Marie and the others were still there, still talking. They hadn’t noticed. She backed away. She didn’t want anyone seeing her going towards the canal.
The tram didn’t move away from the stop at once, and she backed away from the lights, round the cinema complex, into the car park. She looked round. It was all burger places and bowling and…She read the flashing neon. Eating, dancing, cavorting! The high, bright lights flooded the car park, and the signs on the cafés and the bars f
lashed in greens and reds and blues, but there was nobody there. There were cars in the car parks, there were people in the cinema and in the restaurants, but the car park was a deserted stretch of concrete. From a distance – Kerry had seen it often enough from the tram or the bus – it looked lively and fun, but now she was here, it was lonely and dead.
She was cold, and it was still snowing. She could see into the cinema foyer. There were people there, queuing for tickets, buying ice cream and sweets in the shop. The smell of popcorn drifted out through the doors and it made her want to cry. Mum used to make popcorn, years ago, when Kerry was small. Kerry and Lyn used to like watching. Lyn would tell Mum to make it in the pan with the glass lid, and Mum would drop the golden bits of corn into the hot oil and put the lid on, and soon the corn would start to jump and explode into white clouds, and Mum would put some butter on and some salt, and Kerry and Lyn would sit in front of the telly eating it. ‘It’s like at the movies,’ Lyn used to say.
‘You know what giants do,’ Lyn said once, holding up a piece of the corn. ‘They drop little kids like you in hot oil and all your insides explode and they eat you while you’re still alive.’
‘Do not,’ Kerry had said, uneasily.
‘It’s true,’ Lyn said. ‘Your dad’s a giant. He’ll do it to you one day, when you’re asleep.’
‘He’ll do it to your dad,’ Kerry had said. ‘Your dad’s a…’ She tried to remember what Dad said. ‘Your dad’s a shit.’ She giggled. ‘That’s why you smell!’
Lyn had smacked her face and Kerry had started crying, then Mum had come in and shouted, and Lyn had shouted back and then Dad had come and it had been everybody shouting, and Mum said, ‘Oh, I can’t cope with all of this. Why can’t you all get on? I’m going to have a drink,’ and she’d poured out drinks for her and for Dad, and Dad looked worried and puzzled. And Lyn had smiled.
She needed to get to the bridge. The tram would have gone by now. She ran back to the stop, then over the footbridge. There was a pathway leading to the canal side, overgrown with bushes, dark, shadowed. She stopped. It was quiet. There was no one there. She ran lightly along the path, then she was by the canal, a wide, flat pool gleaming in the lamp light, boats moored on the far side, quiet, still.
The boats were painted: red, green, blue. They reminded her of the water-bus on the sunny day, the last day. They had names that were homely and happy: Carol, Spider, Trent Lady, Mary May, but they looked ramshackle and abandoned, the cabin windows dark and empty, the decks deserted.
She didn’t want to be on the towpath, but she didn’t want to go back through that narrow, overgrown footpath. She hesitated, but the towpath lights were working, and it wasn’t so very late. If she started walking now, she’d be at the bridge in plenty of time. She tucked her hair inside her coat as the rain began to fall more heavily, and started walking back towards town.
The problem of Tina Barraclough nagged at Farnham, distracted his mind from the important details of the investigation. He was tired and he’d been wrong-footed by Flynn. Was that influencing him? He tested his anger and it felt solid. Barraclough had got herself involved with a witness – OK, it happened. He didn’t approve, but it wasn’t a hanging…his mind edited the thought. It wasn’t a capital offence. She’d got herself involved with a suspect – that was worse, but in fairness to Barraclough, Flynn hadn’t been a suspect at the time of the opening. She’d kept the information concealed. That was the stopper. That was the killer. And he was going to take her apart for that.
He picked up the phone and called through to the incident room. ‘She did come back,’ a voice said in response to his query, ‘but I don’t know where she is now.’
‘Page her.’ Farnham had had enough of Barraclough for the moment. He had a killer out there, and two people who were disturbingly close to both the killings and the gallery – and to Eliza Eliot, who was, thank Christ, safely out of the picture, staying with her friend.
He remembered the photographs from the Ellie Chapman case. He might as well have a look at them before Barraclough gave him the material she’d collected from the archives. He spread the photos across his desk, along with the two he’d taken from Eliza’s flat. He was curious as to why they’d been separated from the rest.
That was interesting. They weren’t there. Either the photos Eliza had given him were not part of the same batch, or the set in the Chapman file was incomplete. Had there been a second film? Unlikely. Fraser had not used up one film on these. He looked at the pictures, trying to sequence them.
There were three taken on the boat, one of the two girls sitting on benches smiling especially for the camera, one of Ellie pretending to fish over the side of the boat. There was one of a man with Ellie – Mark Fraser, he recognized the face from the newspaper reports. They were typical holiday snaps, with feet cut off, posts sprouting out of the tops of heads – family, fun…The word innocent drifted through his mind.
It must have been chilly on the river as both girls were wearing jumpers. Ellie’s was yellow, Kerry’s was red. And Mark Fraser’s was beige, the beige wool jumper that had been wound around Ellie’s body when she was seen again, six months after these pictures had been taken. There was nothing innocent here.
Then there were a couple of pictures taken on the bank. The two girls posing with their arms round each other, the two of them climbing up the grassy slope that surrounded the castle. They were wearing T-shirts this time. And shortly after that picture was taken…
But the pictures Eliza had given him had been taken from the middle of the sequence. The girls were on the boat. They were wearing the red and yellow jumpers. Farnham looked again. These pictures were different. The ones he’d been looking at had been taken on the deck. These were taken from inside the boat, through a window. And the camera that took these pictures had been set in date mode. There was no date across the bottom of the other prints.
Christ. The implications of what he was seeing hit him. There had been someone else on the boat that day who was interested in Ellie. Someone inside the boat, someone who’d taken pictures. Someone who’d…
His phone rang, breaking his train of thought. It was his secretary. ‘DC Barraclough is here to see you,’ she said.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘No calls, please.’ This wasn’t something he was particularly looking forward to, and he had other things he needed to deal with now. There was a knock on his door. ‘Come in,’ he called, and Tina Barraclough came in. He’d expected nervousness or sullen defensiveness, but this was a Barraclough he hadn’t seen before, quick, keen, who started speaking before he had a chance to say anything.
‘I’m sorry, sir, I know you want to talk to me about Daniel Flynn, but I’ve found something important, look –’
Farnham listened as she took him through the story of the dead addict and the unrecognized link between Cara Hobson and the Ellie Chapman killing. Sheryl Hewitt, the dead junkie. Sheryl Hewitt, Cara Hobson’s friend.
Those photographs. Eliza had assumed they’d come from Maggie’s, that she’d brought them across with all the other stuff she’d collected. But Cara Hobson had been in Eliza’s flat that night. He remembered Eliza’s description of her, laden with baby paraphernalia and bags, struggling out of her chair. How easily could a couple of photographs slip out of a bag or a pocket, unnoticed by either woman?
Barraclough was putting a cutting in front of him. ‘That photograph’s in the exhibition,’ she said, showing him the grainy picture of a young girl. ‘Sheryl. I remember seeing it.’ Flynn! Shit! And he’d let the man walk out of there. ‘Wait,’ he said as he got on the phone. He wanted Flynn bringing in now. And he wanted all the files on the Chapman case. ‘OK,’ he said as he put the phone down. ‘That was good work, Barraclough.’ She flushed and looked pleased.
But it made no difference. ‘You know what this means?’ he said, pushing the cutting across the desk at her. ‘This puts Flynn in the frame. And anything you do in relation to Flynn is contaminated now. Why the�
�why didn’t you tell me at the time?’ He could feel a headache starting behind his eyes. Not enough sleep and too much to do. And it had to be Daniel Flynn she’d got herself involved with. Fucking maniac with his sick paintings and his sick mind. At the same time, he was aware of the glaring anomaly of his position, the fact that his own attitude towards Flynn could hardly be impartial now. Well, that was his business, his decision. ‘You know I should take you off this investigation, don’t you?’ he said.
She bit her lip, and nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’
She kept her eyes down. Her face looked pink. He hoped to Christ she wasn’t going to start crying. He couldn’t cope with a crying woman just now. ‘Why didn’t you tell me at the time?’ he repeated.
‘I don’t know,’ she said after a moment.
‘Well, you’d better find out, Barraclough. Now.’ If she’d told him, then the damage would have been minimal. There was no reason to have kept it quiet, unless…There had to have been something else, and he wasn’t going to let himself be blindsided again.
She shook her head. ‘It was…I was embarrassed, I suppose.’
He wasn’t buying that. Barraclough was no shrinking violet. You didn’t work in this job for any time and stay thin-skinned. Or you didn’t survive in it. ‘Come off it, Barraclough. You’ll have to do better than that. What was it? You told him something you shouldn’t?’
She flushed again. ‘No, sir,’ she said.
She could still resent a slur on her professionalism. What the fuck had gone wrong with her? At least she hadn’t been shooting her mouth off about the investigation to a suspect.
So what had been the big secret? Orgies? He found himself confronting the rather disturbing mental image of a naked Tina Barraclough entwined in a heap of bodies. ‘Threesomes?’ She looked at him indignantly. ‘Pills?’
He saw the expression on her face and realized he’d got it. Shit! An officer – and someone on his team – using drugs with a civilian. He was going to have to hang her out to dry. ‘All right…’ His phone rang. He swore under his breath and picked it up. ‘I said, no calls,’ he snapped at his long-suffering secretary.
