by John Harvey
He pulled round a chair and sat down.
'According to Anita, you think it might have been your ex-husband who took those photographs of Beatrice and emailed them to your computer?'
'Yes. It's possible.'
'I wonder why you didn't say anything about that before.'
'I suppose—I don't know—I didn't want to get Simon dragged into all this. There didn't seem to be any point. I mean, he's got troubles of his own—and I didn't want to think in any way he was involved.' Looking down, she brushed something non-existent from her skirt. 'They were only photographs, after all.'
'And a message,' Will said. 'Wasn't there some kind of message?'
Ruth looked at him before speaking.' "Isn't she lovely?" That's all it said. "Isn't she lovely?"' She waited for Will to respond. 'That doesn't mean ... It doesn't mean anything.'
But Will was thinking of the expression on Mitchell Roberts' face the time he had watched him in the park, returning a hat to a little girl in a purple anorak: the appreciation, the anticipation of pleasure that had animated his face. Isn't she lovely? Will could imagine the words forming, unspoken, inside Roberts' head, caressing the roof of his mouth and falling soft against his tongue.
'The images,' he said, 'you'll have to remind me—they weren't all taken at the same time? Nor at the same place?'
'No. A couple were outside her school and the others, yes, in different places. Different times, too.'
'And they were all taken without Beatrice's knowledge?'
'As far as I know, yes.'
'Or your own?'
'Of course not. Until we bumped into him that day in Cambridge I had no idea Simon was anywhere around. As far as I knew he was still living in London.'
'You hadn't been in touch?'
'No. Not for years.'
'Then meeting him as you did ...'
'It was a surprise, I told you. A total surprise.'
'Accidental, d'you think? Coincidence?Yourself and Beatrice running into him like that?'
'Yes.'
'How long was it after that meeting the photographs arrived?'
'Not long. A matter of days.'
'In which case, they would have been taken, most of them anyway, before you met.'
Ruth hesitated. 'I suppose so, yes.'
'Then he had to have been following her for quite some time.'
'I don't know.'
'Stalking her.'
'No. That sounds so ...' She shook her head vigorously. 'Not like that, no.'
Will reached out and closed the book, set it carefully on the floor and moved to sit facing Ruth on the settee. 'As far as you're aware, did Simon have any contact with Beatrice at all? Before that meeting?'
'Good heavens, no.'
'You're sure?'
'Of course.'
'If she'd known he was photographing her, following her—that anyone was—she'd have told you? You or Andrew?'
'Yes, yes, of course she would. But what you're suggesting, about Simon. That he might have been stalking her, it just doesn't make any sense. He's not ... well, he's not like that, not like that at all.'
'Nevertheless, there has to be an explanation for the photographs. If he didn't take them somebody else did, someone he knows. Has contact with.'
Ruth clasped herself and, for a moment, closed her eyes once more, as if doing so could shut off the thoughts beginning to race around her mind.
'We need to talk to him,' Will said. 'It could be there's a perfectly innocent explanation.'
'I'm sure there is. There has to be.' She was beginning to be aware of the perspiration on her skin.
'You don't have an address? Anything recent?'
'No. Nothing. His old address in London, of course, I could give you that. But otherwise..."Living close," that's what he said. "Now that we're living close." I don't know anything beyond that.'
'And Pierce, that's his surname? Simon Pierce?'
'Yes.'
'And is he likely to be working somewhere up this way then, do you think?'
'I imagine so. He was working in local government before, but now ... He'd always talked about going back to being an accountant. Freelance, you know? Part time. I never thought he'd do it. I thought it was one of those things people say. A kind of safety valve, I suppose.'
Will nodded to show he understood. 'When you were talking about him before, you said something about troubles. Troubles of his own.'
Ruth was slow to answer, composing her thoughts. 'It was after the accident. To Heather. We ... I suppose we dealt with it in different ways. Simon was very closed off at first, holding it all inside. Trying to talk to him about it, about what had happened, it was almost impossible. As though he wanted somehow to push it all away as if it hadn't happened. He didn't even want to talk about Heather. And I ... I was in a state, the least little thing would set me off crying, and then he'd get angry. Tell me not to make a fuss, make a scene, why didn't I get a hold of myself ?
'I went to stay with my parents for a while, I thought that would be easier. But they—my father especially—every time I broached the subject they'd smile and pat my hand and start talking about something else.'
She swallowed as if her mouth were going dry.
'It got so that I'd start talking to people on buses, complete strangers. I thought ... I really thought I was going mad. And then Simon told me he'd found this group through the Internet, for families who'd lost their children. Accidents or illnesses, mostly. He'd found it easier, not having to speak directly, just emails. Back and forth, all the time. He wanted me to get involved and I did and it helped, for a while anyway. Helped to know there were lots of others going through the same thing. It was somebody there who suggested therapy, put me in touch with someone they'd been seeing, and that's what I did. And it was really useful. It helped no end. I was starting to feel like, well, like a normal person. I mean, the grief over what had happened was still there, I was still grieving, of course I was, every day, but that seemed almost normal now. As if I could go back to getting on with my life. I tried to get Simon to do the same as I'd done, see the same person, but by this time there were a couple more groups he was involved with—he'd be at the computer all the time, every minute he wasn't working—and he said he didn't need to see any kind of therapist, he was getting all the help he needed as it was. But it had become a kind of obsession. I never saw him. We never had meals together any more. Not even conversations. Half the night he'd sit up and not come to bed until three or even four and then he started sleeping in the spare room next to his wretched computer. And it was affecting him, you could see it was, not getting enough proper sleep and hardly eating. It was having an effect on his work, too. I think he'd had at least one official warning. When finally I left him, I don't think he really noticed. This whole business had taken him over. And then, when I saw him again, this last time, he looked truly awful, truly ill ...'
The door opened suddenly and Ruth's father took two steps into the room, mumbled an abrupt apology, and withdrew.
'We'll talk to him,' Will said. 'Simon. If he's in the area, he shouldn't be too difficult to find.'
'You don't think...?'
He smiled gently. 'I don't know.'
'Our friend Lyle,' Ruth said, 'Anita told me you were speaking to him. Was he able to help at all?'
'No, not really.'
'I'm sure he would have if he could.'
'Please don't get up,' Will said. 'I'll find my own way out.'
When he'd gone, she stayed exactly where she was, unable to move. The music had long since finished and slowly now the ordinary sounds of the house were starting to build around her: the quiet opening and closing of doors imprisoning her inside her own thoughts. Isn't she lovely? No matter how distressed, how sick he had become, Simon could have had no part in Beatrice's disappearance, surely?
Sitting there, alone, Ruth began to gouge her fingers into the soft skin around her eyes, as if to blind herself from what she feared but feared to see
.
57
Helen woke without knowing immediately where she was. A quick glimpse of the floral-patterned curtains, the kettle on top of the chest of drawers with its attendant tea bags and sachets of instant coffee, and, from outside, the raucous call of seagulls, provided the answer.
How had Cordon described it? Clean and quiet. Well, it was certainly that. The landlady had greeted her with a cup of tea and two Garibaldi biscuits and a warning about not smoking in her room. As if.
Helen had spent the remainder of the previous day reading through the notes summarising the investigation into Heather Pierce's death, Cordon trying none too successfully not to editorialise over her shoulder. Eventually she had asked him if there weren't something else he could more usefully be doing, whereupon he'd informed her he would pick her up at her hotel at nine the following morning and left her alone.
As far as Helen could tell, the investigation seemed to have been carried out pretty much by the book, the only serious blip being the failure to discover the girl's body during the initial search.
Apparent failure.
It was this, the possibility that the body had not been present when the search originally took place, which had given rise to Cordon's doubts. For Heather to have fallen down the shaft of the engine house on the evening she disappeared would have meant her body being overlooked; for the body to have been introduced later raised the questions of how and by whom? And where she had been in the meantime.
As far as Cordon and, to a lesser extent, the coroner were concerned these were questions to which there were, as yet, no satisfactory answers. For the senior officers at the time the answer had been simple: the first search had been inefficiently carried out and the body had simply been missed.
Carelessness. Inexperience. No crime.
Helen read the statements made by Francis Gibbens, the man who had found—and saved—the second girl, Kelly, and by Kelly's father, Alan. Alan Efford. Both, she thought, were witnesses she wouldn't mind talking to further herself. But by then she could feel her eyes starting, involuntarily, to close and knew she was on the path of diminishing returns.
No mini-bar in her room, she had bought a half-bottle of common-or-garden Scotch on the way back to her hotel and, after a quick nightcap, surprised herself by falling asleep within minutes.
For the journey down she had worn a denim skirt over thick black tights, a short leather jacket over a pale blue top, soft comfortable shoes. This morning she wore blue jeans, not her best, and a pair of sturdy boots, a grey marl sweater beneath an oversize green anorak which had been left behind by a previous short-lived boyfriend.
'Well,' as she liked to say to her friends, 'when a man turns up wearing walking boots for a first date you know he's not going to hang around for long.'
Cordon was waiting outside, the engine of the four-by-four quietly running.
'Dressed for it, I see,' he said.
'What did you expect? High heels? Four-inch stilettos?'
'It's been known.'
The interior smelt of dog and something damp she couldn't identify. In a matter of minutes they were shed of the town and heading out across the peninsula on a road that lifted them up on to flat fields and moorland, past places with names like Bosvenning and Deveral Common and Jericho Farm.
'So what did you reckon?' Cordon asked.
'I can see why you were concerned.'
'Concerned? A stubborn bastard with his head located somewhere up his arse was how my boss put it. Words to that effect.'
'Some might take that as a compliment.'
Cordon grinned.
Just short of the small town of St Just, he swung left on to a narrower road that wound abruptly through a series of tight bends before petering out into a muddied track. A few hundred metres along, Cordon brought the vehicle to a halt just shy of a five-barred gate.
'We'll walk from here.'
Two fields across and they were standing on a ledge of flat rock high above the coast path, heather spreading out below, a blaze of purple and rusted orange broken here and there by jagged outcrops of granite. Above, the sky was so bright and clear a blue it hurt Helen's eyes to look: ahead, as far as the eye could see, was the ocean.
'It's beautiful,' she said. 'I never realised it was so beautiful.'
Cordon grunted with something like satisfaction and clambered down, striding out without bothering to look back or offer a hand. Helen scrambled and slid, then jumped and set off in his wake. At least she wasn't being patronised.
The engine house stood out in silhouette, its tall chimney suggesting the ruins of a church perched high near the cliff edge.
Almost there, Helen thought, but, deceptive, the path rose and fell several more times, dropping down sharply towards a stream bed where the land briefly levelled out, each ascent steeper than the last and causing her to stop and catch her breath, the muscles at the backs of her calves beginning to tighten and ache.
'How you faring?' Cordon asked, as she reached a crest and bent low, arms on hips, breathing heavily. 'Maybe time for a cigarette?'
Straightening, Helen gave him a scathing look and pushed past, Cordon laughing as he followed behind.
By the time they had reached the engine house, swathes of white cloud had begun to wind themselves across the sky. Despite the autumn sun, the stonework was cold and rough to the touch. Helen moved to the open doorway and peered cautiously inside. Gradually, as her eyes became accustomed to the change in light, she was able to make out the edges of a platform, twenty feet or so down, and beyond that only the interior of the shaft and the falling dark.
'This is where she was found?'
'Down there, aye. Pure bloody chance. One of the search party lost his footing—round about where you are now.' Helen inched a step or two back. 'Lucky for him, that ledge down there broke his fall. The girl, Heather, she was right there in front of his eyes. To all appearances, she'd fallen, same as him. Cracked her head against some old machinery, part of the original winding wheel.'
'Was that what killed her?'
'A serious blow or blows to the head, that's what the coroner said. Most likely sustained when she fell.'
'Most likely?'
Cordon nodded. 'The official version, you'll have read it yourself.'
'The two girls became lost when this sudden fog came in off the sea, disorientated, frightened. Maybe they get separated by accident, possibly they split up on purpose, searching for the path. Kelly takes a tumble down the cliff and ends up near this man Gibbens' shack, Heather gets as far as this and what? Takes shelter? Inside it'd be pitch black. She'd fall easily.'
'Agreed.'
'And the estimated time of death suggests she died on that first evening, that first day, two days before the body was found.'
'Yes.'
'So, according to your theory, where was the body all that time?'
'I don't know.'
'Someone killed her, though, that's what you're saying? Killed her and hid the body, then came back for it later and disposed of it inside here.'
'More or less, yes.'
'It's easy to hide a body, out here in the open? Keep it hidden even though the whole area, this whole stretch of coastline's being searched?'
'I could take you to ten tunnels within five hundred metres, opening, some of them, right out on to the cliff. Some are hidden by bracken, a few, the larger ones, fenced off. You likely saw a warning sign or two on the way along.'
Helen moved towards the open doorway. 'I do need a cigarette.'
'Be careful where you toss it away.'
A container ship was making its way north-east along the horizon, a couple of small fishing boats close in.
'If the body was that well hidden,' Helen said after some minutes, 'why come back and move it? Why take that risk? Do you think, whoever it was, they wanted it to be found?'
'Maybe. Either that or lost for ever. If it hadn't been for that piece of ledge, I doubt there's much to break your fall till the bo
ttom of the shaft.'
Helen held the smoke down in her lungs before releasing it slowly.
'Suppose you're right for a moment, just suppose. Do you think the murderer was someone already known, someone you've already interviewed, had in for questioning? Or do you think it was someone as yet unknown?'
'It could be the latter,' Cordon said. 'In which case, at this remove, unless we were to come up with some new evidence, it's unlikely we'll ever know who they are.'
'And if it's not? Who's your money on then?'
Cordon stepped away. 'Gambling's for fools. Let's go and talk to Francis Gibbens.'
Gibbens was on the slip of beach below his makeshift shack, trousers rolled up above his knees, paddling in the tide. When Cordon called out, he turned and raised a hand to shield his eyes, recognising him straight off and slowly making his way back on to the sand.
'Who's she?' he said, indicating Helen with a nod of the head.
'A colleague.'
Helen introduced herself and held out a hand.
Gibbens sat on a rock and began to dry his feet with a scrap of towel that had been wrapped around his neck like a scarf.
'Salt water,' Gibbens said, 'good for my rheumatism. Bunions, too. Bastard things.' He looked up. 'I doubt you're here to pass the time of day.'
'The occasion you rescued the girl,' Cordon said. 'My colleague'd like to hear how it was.'
Gibbens looked at him sharply, snapping the towel tight. 'No. That's not what you want. It's the other girl, isn't it? The other girl you're interested in, Heather, what happened to her.'
'Why do you say that?' Helen asked.
"Cause it's never been rightly settled, has it? Stumbling into that old engine house in the dark, layin' there for days. More to it'n that.'
'Is that what you believe?'
'He does. Ask him.'
'And you? How about you?'
