by Gwyn GB
Miss Mayhew looks at her and gives a perfunctory smile.
‘Hello Rachel, of course.’
There are still a few children sauntering past, too many ears to risk saying it aloud here.
‘Somewhere private?’ Rachel adds.
Miss Mayhew looks at her watch.
‘I’ve got English now so it will need to be quick, or do you want to catch me at lunch?’
‘Now please,’ Rachel meekly replies.
Miss Mayhew doesn’t look overly pleased, looking at her watch and pursing her lips, but she leads her into the empty Arts classroom.
‘What is it Rachel I don’t have long?’
‘I think I’m having my period,’ Rachel almost whispers the last word, her cheeks burning hot.
‘Oh OK, that’s perfectly natural you know, nothing to be worried or embarrassed about,’ Miss Mayhew’s voice has softened and when Rachel looks up her face has a veil of sympathy and a warm smile.
‘But, I don’t have a pad or anything,’ Rachel blurts out.
‘Oh you poor thing. That’s not a problem, come with me and I’ll get you one.’
Miss Mayhew leads her to the teachers’ staffroom, ‘Are you feeling OK?’ she chats along the way, ‘How is your dad? Is everything alright at home?’
‘He’s fine thank you. I’m fine,’ Rachel replies. She is grateful for Miss Mayhew’s help on this occasion but there’s no way she’s giving her an opportunity to interfere at home.
The teacher goes straight to a cupboard in the staffroom and pulls out a medical box from which she plucks a packet of sanitary towels. She takes one out, hesitates and then takes another three, before handing them to Rachel.
‘Here you go, we’re only supposed to hand out one but you’ll need to change it every few hours depending on how heavy the flow is.’
Rachel quickly stuffs them away into her bag like an illicit contraband, fearful that someone will walk in and catch her.
‘Thank you Miss,’ she replies.
‘No problem. You know you can always come to me if you’ve got any issues, don’t you?’ Miss Mayhew says to her.
There goes that sympathy again, Rachel looks away.
‘Yes. Thank you,’ she replies, before walking off quickly to the toilets.
It’s a horrible day. Rachel cowers back into the shadows even more than she usually does, suffering from pain and embarrassment. By the time the school bell goes for home, she’s already soaked through two pads and has to use the third for the journey home. She finds that walking heightens both the pain and the bleeding, but she knows that as soon as she’s got in - and got some money from her dad, she’s going to have to go back out again to the shop.
As Rachel walks into the yard she sees a van from the electricity company and two men at the front door talking to her father. His voice is raised, theirs calm and professional. The look on her dad’s face is not a welcoming one.
Rachel doesn’t want them to see her so she diverts round the back of the farmhouse to the kitchen door and then runs straight up to her bedroom. She changes out of her school clothes and goes to the bathroom where she uses the last pad. Walking somewhere is the last thing she feels like doing right now, but she has to get to the shop to get some more sanitary towels.
The front door slams shut, rattling the sash windows in their frames. Rachel runs down to find her father.
He’s standing in the kitchen, leaning on the table, head bent. His back is to her. The jumper he wears is hanging off him now, making him look scruffy with his beard and hair that hasn’t seen the barber since before her mother died. She hesitates, but needs must.
‘Dad?’
She startles him.
‘Rachel, you’re back. I didn’t see you come home.’
‘Are you OK?’
‘Yeah yeah fine.’
Rachel crosses to the fridge to see what they have in. It’s empty apart from some milk, brought in by Reg or George, a scraping of butter and a half empty can of baked beans.
‘I’m hungry can I go to the shop, get something for our tea?’
‘I’m sorry love, I’ve literally got about two pounds. Here you can have it, but that’s it until tomorrow.’
She thinks he might be about to cry, but he doesn’t.
‘What about the bank? They have money.’
Her dad gives a wry half smile.
‘Yes, but it’s not mine.’
‘They could lend you some.’
‘No, I don’t think they will. You walk to the shops and get something. Don’t worry about me, I’m not hungry. I need to think.’
Rachel takes the £2.22 that she’s handed in coins and traipses to the door. The pain in her stomach is draining her but she has to get to the shop and get some sanitary pads, and she’s hungry, really hungry. She’d barely had anything for lunch.
The only way she can keep going is to imagine she’s on an expedition and their lives depend on her succeeding. She has to battle through the pain and exhaustion to keep walking. Along the way she’s encouraged on by her mother who walks by her side, smiling reassuringly when the pain gets worse. In her head she runs a commentary, a narrator recounting the highs and the lows of her trek.
‘Rachel Hill bravely battles the elements, walking through desert dust storms to save her father.’
Her throat feels dry and her eyes are irritated by the dust she kicks up on the track. She’s relieved when she reaches the main road and can walk along the narrow pavement to the outskirts of the nearby village.
‘Struggling on without food and water Rachel’s determination is the only thing keeping her going. This young heroine is battling against all the odds, climbing mountains and trekking across barren wastelands to get to her destination.’
When Rachel gets to the shop the enormity of her reality hits her.
£2.22 is only going to buy one or the other. A loaf of bread and can of baked beans will wipe it out, or she can choose the sanitary towels. There is no way she is going to be able to afford both and yet she has to have them. She wanders around looking at every item of food she can, checking prices. She needs to get something her dad can eat too, and what about their lunches tomorrow?
The smells from the bakery and delicatessen sections make her tummy clamour with hunger. A bowl of pasta salad is just inches from her, cheeses and hams sit protected by the glass counter mocking her.
She moves away from them, standing in front of the magazines and newspapers, pretending to scan their front pages, while she thinks. ‘Hospitals get warnings on killer bug’, ‘Who will be the new James Bond?’, ‘An interview with Take That’s Robbie Williams.’ All of it meaningless, all of it irrelevant to the battle going on inside her head. Throughout it all, her stomach and back are in pain as she progresses to womanhood.
Rachel knows she has to make a decision. Once again she does a sweep of all the food and as she’s walking round she spots one of the shop assistants starting to reduce the boxes of eggs. 75p. Rachel jumps on them. Back to the breads and she sees a loaf for £1, they can do without butter. 47 pence left. The cheapest sanitary towels are £1.50.
It’s as the song, ‘Everything Changes but you’ is playing through the shop speakers, that Rachel commits her first crime. She doesn’t want to, she doesn’t want to steal, but the alternative for her is even worse. She picks up the packet of sanitary towels and discreetly slips them into the pocket of her jacket before walking up to the till to pay for the food.
‘Brave explorer Rachel Hill is left with a life and death decision. Foraging for food she is forced to take desperate action to protect herself and her father. It is survival of the fittest out there.’
Rachel walks home with 47 pence in coins jangling in one pocket and the stolen pads like lead weights in the other.
43
Claire, 18th October 2016
The team are having a quick catch-up to go over the latest developments in the case. Claire’s glad she’s not involved in trying to track do
wn Mike in Vietnam because Bob is getting mighty annoyed about the fact they can’t find him. The young DS who had volunteered to take on the search will now have wished, more than a million times, that he hadn’t opened his mouth. The search has become the bane of the poor guy’s life. Claire’s sure he’s developed a nervous tick in the last few days.
Sandra/Carly has been downgraded as a suspect with Rosa McKenna now under scrutiny. They’re discussing next moves for the investigation when an email pops in from Mark Rodgers. Claire’s heart gives a little skip - for more than one reason. She tells herself it’s because she’s desperate to see if he’s found anything unusual with Todd Fuller. The email is brief, ‘Got something you are going to find very interesting. Your place or mine?’
She loves the flirtatious tone of the email, but she loves the promise of an interesting result even more.
‘Is it worth showing to DCI Walsh?’ she replies.
‘Definitely,’ is his response.
‘I’ll book us one of the conference rooms here and get some coffees in, let me know when you can come over.’
Claire’s adrenaline is pumping now. It must be something fairly conclusive for Mark to be so sure, she knows he wouldn’t waste Bob’s time otherwise.
Bob is reluctant to take time away from the Neil Parsons investigation, but she’s insistent and within an hour they’re all sitting round a table looking at a screen. Mark has a smug air about him and is enjoying the audience. Claire finds the smugness attractive - it’s more professional confidence than conceit.
‘OK, so original autopsy report,’ says Mark, ‘standard stuff, it wasn’t negligent. All the routine tests were done and nothing unusual showed up. There was also nothing at the scene to suggest anything criminal had taken place. I’ve gone through the first responder reports and I spoke to the officer who dealt with this. Quite simply, Todd was found sitting in his armchair, dead. It happens.’
Bob and Claire are sitting up all ears.
‘With Claire’s suspicions that he might have been murdered, I ran some further tests, only this time I specifically looked for things which I know are hard to detect and which wouldn’t be picked up in standard autopsies. And bingo.’
Mark flicks to the next slide which is a shot of a suicide victim. The man is also sitting in a chair, only he has a gas bottle next to him and a pipe running from that to a bag over his head, held tightly sealed by large elastic bands.
‘It’s a method that is suggested on many suicide sites and of course with suicides it’s easy to detect because the victim will be found with the equipment used still on them. It’s apparently one of the nicer ways to go, non-violent, and if you do it right it’s quick. In Todd’s case the gas cylinder and bag must have been removed after death and thus there was no trace of a murder weapon. It would have looked like he’d just died.’
‘What is it?’ Claire asks.
‘Helium. Asphyxiation is quick. For someone who was intoxicated, it would have been fairly easy for anyone to have put something over his head or face and pumped pure Helium in. Helium contains no oxygen so the brain is very quickly starved of it, making the victim unconscious fast. Death follows subsequently, within minutes.’
‘Blimey!’ is all Claire can say.
‘So you found evidence of this in Todd’s body?’ Bob asks.
‘Yes, we were lucky. Helium is an inert gas, there’s no signs of it in usual toxicology testing. The body simply shows the results of sudden death, cerebral edema etc, but thankfully we still had an intact lung. It wasn’t easy, Helium is obviously invisible and odourless, but I definitely found helium present. Now, you could argue Todd might have been playing silly games with balloons prior to his death, but to be detected it has to have been a significant amount. I would be 99 if not 100% certain in saying that Todd Fuller died through helium asphyxiation. The question now is whether this is an assisted suicide or murder.’
‘No suicide note was ever found,’ Claire confirms.
‘So, we could be looking at a series of silent murders with bloody balloon gas!’ Bob says, ‘Shit.’
Mark holds his hands up.
‘Sorry.’
‘No, it’s not aimed at you, I wasn’t trying to shoot the messenger. That’s good work Mark, good work both of you. So why weren’t these deaths ever linked?’
‘Because there was no link obvious. They happened in the victim’s homes, unexplained natural causes. There would simply not have been anything to link them to the dating agency and so they were all completely separate cases. It’s only when you look at them with the agency link that you realise what a massively high death rate there was.’ Mark explains.
Bob shakes his head.
‘There’s something else,’ Mark adds, ‘From what I can tell from reading the Coroners’ reports, most of them didn’t have family around either. There was no one to make a fuss over them. All except one, Robert Jones. A sister came out the woodwork after the inquest, started saying he’d been murdered. Nobody took her seriously though, she had a history of alcohol abuse and no evidence. Maybe she was right after all.’
‘Well the pair of you have just massively scaled up this enquiry. I’m going to have to go and tell the DCS. Can you put this all in writing for me Mark?’
‘Sure. There’s a couple of other things you should know though,’ Mark says, more gravely, ‘Firstly, it is going to be highly unlikely, if not impossible to tell if the other people were asphyxiated by Helium. Several were cremated and the other one would be so badly decomposed by now we’d have no chance. You are going to have to focus on this one death I’m afraid, when it comes to prosecution. Secondly, I ran the test on Neil Parsons. No helium. I had wondered if his could have been a botched asphyxiation, but it wasn’t.’
‘Then we could still be looking at two completely different murderers,’ Bob thinks out loud, ‘but there’s one definite link: the SoulMates dating agency.’
44
Claire, 18th October 2016
Back in the incident room, photographs of Rachel’s dug up rabbit have been added to the board. There have been a few jokes about bunny boilers and zombie rabbits, but mostly they’ve all been grown up professionals and realised how upsetting it was for her.
Claire stands staring at the board.
‘So far the stalker hasn’t shown himself to Rachel. There doesn’t appear to have been any physical contact,’ she says out loud.
‘Yup which could mean he’s known to her,’ Bob chips in. ‘That’s the likeliest explanation. He doesn’t want her knowing his identity because she’ll be able to name him and tell us. Go and see her, you’ve got the best relationship with her, find out who else she has regular contact with, apart from those at SoulMates. Has she spurned someone’s advances? While you’re there ask if any of those who died ever tried it on with her or did she ever see them outside of work? In the meantime I’ve got Lew working on the other agency deaths. He’s tracking down family and friends to see if we can get any inkling as to what may have been going on before they died.’
When Claire gets to Rachel’s house a red VW Golf is just pulling out of the drive. She takes down the registration, just in case.
She finds Rachel quiet and thoughtful, not surprising given the circumstances.
‘It’s an estate agent,’ Rachel tells her rather ashamedly. ‘I can’t take this, all this abuse, the house doesn’t feel like my home anymore.’
‘You can’t let them win,’ Claire replies.
‘It’s easy for you to say that,’ Rachel answers, not nastily, just matter of factly. ‘I don’t like coming home anymore. I don’t want to invite people round in case something happens to them. I have never thought of myself as the victim type but he’s making my life miserable, so what’s the point?’
‘We’ll catch him. We will.’
‘Look, I know your focus is on finding Neil’s killer, and it should be. I’ve just got to look out for myself and with the agency in a mess, it’s looking like a good time
to be making a move. I can’t help keep thinking about what’s happened to other women, Lily Allen and do you remember that Jackie Stiller case last year. He killed her, that was awful.’
Claire does remember the Jackie Stiller case only too well, but she’s not about to admit that to Rachel and she can’t disagree with her. It makes her angry though. She promised herself never to let that happen again - she’s determined Rachel’s stalker won’t go unpunished.
‘Look, we’ve got to catch him. Find out who it is and bring them to justice.’
Rachel grimaces.
‘Is there anyone else you might have had contact with, someone who perhaps asked you out and you said no, or who you went out with and then didn’t want to see again?’
Rachel is thinking hard.
‘In the last year or so? No, I really can’t think of anyone. Work is where I focus my time and apart from inviting Neil around, and occasionally Gary, there’s been nobody else.’
Claire nods.
‘How about clients? Did you ever see any clients outside of the office?’
‘Well, when you say outside of the office, yes I guess. I used to take some of them out for coffee, the ones who seemed to be struggling to find a partner. We’d go out to a cafe or something and I’d coach them on date etiquette. You’d be amazed how many of them just have no idea how to talk to someone of the opposite sex.’
Claire consults her notebook now.
‘OK, would that have included, Todd Fuller, Robert Jones, Mark Baxter and Steven Marshall?’
Rachel pauses and thinks again.
‘Certainly Todd and Robert, oh yes Mark we went for lunch, and Steven? That was some time ago, but I think so. There were others too. Why?’
Claire’s heart is skipping beats. It is all falling into place now.
‘Who would have known about these coffees?’
‘Just the guys at the agency: Eddie, Gary, Felicity and Sandra, they’d have known. Anyone else? I don’t think so, not unless… Not unless someone was watching me.’
