Good Girls Don't Die

by Isabelle Grey

  Grace shook herself. Wrong to identify with the victim: that way you missed things, jumped to inaccurate conclusions. Wrong to think about the past: she was here to move on. She picked up the menu and turned back to Roxanne, willing herself to recapture that earlier lovely moment when she’d remembered being naive, wide-eyed and careless.

  The air was still warm when they finally left the bar. They made for the High Street as Roxanne phoned for a taxi. People from other clubs and bars had spilled out onto the noisy streets, making the most of the balmy June night, and there was much drunken laughter and banter outside a popular kebab shop. One girl, misguidedly attempting a somersault on a bike rail, slipped and lay giggling on the ground while her girlfriends shouted their glee and tried to haul her up. A group of buff young men – Grace had the impression they might be paratroopers from the local barracks – gathered round, all clutching beer cans and cheering and jeering in equal measure. Fired up by the attention, the girl tried to repeat her clumsy performance with equally dismal results. When Grace had shadowed uniformed beat officers as part of her graduate-entry training, she had accompanied her share of revellers to A & E after they’d got into brawls, fallen over or vomited themselves into unconsciousness. It was both distasteful and a shocking waste of police time. Her colleagues – many of them legendary boozers themselves – were probably right to despise members of the great British public who couldn’t hold their drink. Yet Grace had remained aware of how vulnerable inebriated youngsters of both sexes could be to robbery, violence or sexual aggression.

  Roxanne must have seen the serious expression on her face, for she gave her a playful push, nearly overbalancing herself in the process. Laughing, Roxanne grabbed on to her friend in just the same way that Grace had watched Polly’s grainy avatar cling on to her mates to keep herself upright.

  ‘Polly was as caned as we are now when she disappeared,’ she told Roxanne. ‘It’s on the CCTV footage.’

  ‘What d’you think has happened to her?’

  Grace shrugged, aware of the shadowy doorways and silent alleyways around them. ‘No idea. But look at us – she’d have been pretty easy prey for someone who was sober and determined, wouldn’t she?’

  The cab Roxanne had ordered drew up, and as they identified themselves and clambered in, Grace looked back at all the young women innocently enjoying a boisterous summer night in this old market town, and wished them well.

  FIVE

  She lay awkwardly on top of the jagged debris that covered the half-cleared site where a Sixties office block in the centre of Colchester had been torn down. The body had been arranged with feet apart, legs straight and covered demurely by the smoothed-down, patterned skirt. The arms rested to the sides, and the head was pillowed on some red fabric that looked, from where Grace stood, like a neatly folded item of clothing. Trying to peer past the crime scene investigators, who were carefully laying plastic stepping boards over the rubble, Grace saw but did not immediately account for the dead woman’s short dark hair, startling herself with the realisation that this was not Polly Sinclair.

  Despite the surrounding activity, and the undeniable thrill of privileged access to the epicentre of this event, Grace’s brain was sluggish this early in the morning. It had been such fun to gossip all night with Roxanne, but now she was regretting the amount she’d had to drink and her short, fitful sleep. She tried some deep breathing to boost her oxygen level.

  ‘Not seen a corpse before?’ Lance’s quiet enquiry was sympathetic, but Grace, caught off-guard, replied more snappily than she intended.

  ‘Of course I have. I’m fine.’

  Lance stepped back, and Grace saw his face go blank.

  ‘Do we know who she is?’ she asked, trying to retrieve his goodwill.

  ‘Not yet. The super’s talking to Wendy now. The crime scene manager,’ explained Lance, nodding in the direction of the forensic van where Keith Stalgood stood engrossed in serious discussion with a woman about Grace’s age. With her shapely figure and white-blonde hair, Wendy looked like she’d be more at home on a country and western stage than amid the gruesome buzz of a crime scene.

  Distracted by the purr of a powerful engine, Lance turned to watch a gold Porsche Panamera slide in behind the forensic van. He smiled. ‘Good, here’s Samit. Now we can get started.’

  ‘Samit?’

  ‘The pathologist, Dr Tripathi.’

  The driver’s door opened and a middle-aged man got out. He wore chinos and a check shirt, and had a pleasant, unassuming face with watchful eyes behind rimless glasses. Seeing them stare in his direction, he nodded politely, then went over to greet Keith.

  ‘Nice car,’ Grace observed.

  ‘Last case we were on, he had an E-type Jag.’

  Grace was relieved to see the friendliness had returned to Lance’s eyes. The CSIs finished laying the walkway and, after instruction from Wendy, disappeared into the van. They soon returned with the kit for a portable tent, which they expertly slotted together to hide the body from prying eyes and protect it from contamination.

  ‘Don’t know if we’ll get to suit up nor not,’ said Lance glumly. ‘Keith won’t want any more of this rubble dislodged than necessary.’

  ‘Sure. Do you reckon this is linked to –?’

  ‘Don’t say it!’ Lance cut her off. ‘Because if our guy has gone and left us a second victim, then this is one serious “oh shit” moment.’

  She nodded, understanding perfectly what he meant: they hadn’t a single lead on Polly’s disappearance, and here another woman was dead.

  Looking around, Grace realised that the street on which Samit’s Porsche and the forensic van were parked led up towards the Blue Bar. Over the past couple of days every nearby alleyway, garden, yard and unoccupied or neglected building had been searched for any clue to Polly’s fate, but nothing had been found. Now this.

  Keith beckoned them over, and they went eagerly. Wendy and Samit had already ducked under the inner cordon of tape and were pulling pristine forensic suits up over their clothes.

  ‘I want you as exhibits officers,’ Keith informed them brusquely.

  Grace and Lance grinned at each other and dived for the forensic van. Moments later they joined the others inside the tent. In the filtered light, with only their eyes visible, their white-suited figures seemed unearthly. Samit concluded his initial description of the young woman; while he concentrated on posture, body weight and identifying marks, Grace saw a slim young woman with expensively cut short dark hair and good-quality clothes. Last night’s eye make-up now appeared clown-like against the dead pallor of her face.

  Squatting down, Dr Tripathi began the process of taking surface swabs and tapings, each of which he handed to them to be bagged and marked. ‘I’m now going to lift the skirt,’ he informed Keith, who gave a nod of agreement. Delicately, he folded the patterned skirt back up to the dead woman’s waist. ‘Well,’ he exclaimed softly. ‘That’s a new one even on me.’

  Grace looked over his shoulder: the victim had no underwear, and a clear glass bottle glistened between her pale thighs. Grace instinctively turned away, but then made herself drag her eyes back, to look with her mind, not her emotions. The neck of the bottle had been neatly inserted in the dead woman’s vagina.

  Samit continued his narrative. ‘There is a bottle between the subject’s upper thighs that appears to be intact and contains a clear liquid.’

  Grace could see that the bottle had been aligned so the label faced neatly upwards. The gaudy design of red and silver illustrated the name, Fire’n’Ice, and some of the letters had been written backwards in an attempt to suggest Cyrillic script. She glanced at Lance, who mouthed ‘vodka’ at her.

  Samit stood up to make room for the photographer and turned to Keith. ‘What’s your strategy?’

  ‘I’d like to remove the bottle now so we can get started on any fingerprints or DNA it might provide,’ Keith told him.

  Samit nodded. ‘Be better to remove the clothes in the mortua
ry, too, rather than on this rough ground.’ He crouched back down, examining the position of the bottle more closely. ‘I’m unable to see any blood or obvious wounds around the vagina. There are no visible marks to suggest a violent struggle, nor that she was dragged here.’

  ‘There’s no clear route in or out,’ said Wendy. ‘There’s no way of knowing whether this is the murder scene or whether she was dumped here.’

  ‘Nor how many people might have been involved,’ added Keith.

  Grace stared out at the jagged, uneven surface of broken bricks, tiles, glass, concrete and rubbish, heard in the near distance the build-up of morning rush-hour traffic, thought of the young woman she’d seen last night, attempting her drunken somersaults. She’d witnessed how easy it would have been to lead such a lamb to slaughter.

  ‘Sooner we get a starter for ten, the better,’ said Keith.

  Taking out a torch, Samit shone it into the eyes of the corpse, raising his chin to focus through the bottom of his varifocals. ‘Possible petechial haemorrhage suggests strangulation. Though it’s anyone’s guess what we’ll find beneath her.’ He straightened up. ‘She could have a bloody great knife stuck in her back for all I know,’ he commented drolly.

  As Samit stepped back, Grace was able to look straight down into the dead woman’s face. Her features were rounded, soft, childlike, jarring against the dark hair of her brutally exposed genitals. Grace could see now that the red garment placed carefully under her head was a folded-up woman’s jacket. Beneath her right ear something bulged under the fabric. Grace pointed to it. ‘That looks like a pocketbook.’

  Keith nodded approvingly. ‘Might give us an ID. As soon as you’re ready, Samit, I think we should move her.’

  ‘Right. Then I can do the PM immediately,’ said Samit.

  ‘Good.’ Keith turned to face them as best he could in the confined space of the tent. ‘The bottle goes to forensics, but what you’ve all seen here stays under wraps until I say otherwise, understand? Not a word of this leaks out to the media. No one outside the investigation is to know anything about it. No one. Right?’

  ‘Right, boss.’

  He waved Lance and Grace out of the tent, and they made their way to the edge of the inner cordon, where a CSI came to take their evidence bags from them.

  ‘This place is a going to be total nightmare,’ grumbled the CSI, surveying the rubble. ‘God knows how much material we’re going to have to take and preserve.’

  Grace and Lance stared at one another as they snapped off their disposable gloves and peeled the protective covers from their shoes. Despite the shock of what they had seen, the excitement of being handed a secret to keep had turned the investigation into an adventure.

  As Grace hopped about on one foot, pulling off her suit, she noticed Roxanne watching from the far side of the road. The reporter beckoned urgently, in defiance of the uniformed officers tasked with encouraging the few pedestrians out so early in the morning not to rubberneck. Handing her suit to the waiting CSI, Grace walked reluctantly as far as the blue-and-white tape where, certain it was not a good idea to be seen speaking to a journalist, she remained safely inside the cordon where the uniformed officers could hear every word.

  ‘Hey, Roxanne.’

  ‘Is it Polly?’ Roxanne’s eyes shone, her pen already poised over her open notebook ready to take down a quote.

  ‘You have to go through Hilary.’

  ‘Oh, come on! The whole national media pack’s going to be here by lunchtime. Give me a head start, at least!’

  Grace shook her head. ‘Ask Hilary.’ She turned away and, aware of Roxanne’s hungry eyes boring into her back, walked the few yards back to where Lance waited. He looked at her with raised eyebrows. ‘Did she know you were going to be here?’ he asked.

  ‘No!’

  Over his shoulder she saw Keith, exiting the tent with Samit, notice Roxanne and then direct a sharp, questioning look at her.

  ‘Shit!’

  ‘Come on,’ said Lance. ‘Work to do.’

  Grace saw that he was rescuing her, and was relieved to let him shield her from their boss’s displeasure. Suddenly she was desperate to know just how much Keith had been told about why she’d really left Kent. She’d given the breakdown of her marriage as the reason for quitting her job, and very much doubted that Colin, her old DCI, would have had the balls to deviate from that version of events in his reference. Grace imagined that her stepmother had probably told her old friend Hilary most of what she knew, which thankfully wasn’t everything, and Hilary had asked no direct questions. But news travelled fast: had Hilary gossiped with anyone here about the obvious gaps in Grace’s story? Grace hadn’t picked up any signals that she had, and now told herself firmly there was no point speculating on what Lance and the others did or didn’t know. Best just to keep her head down and get on with the job.

  Once they had finished signing over the evidence bags, they began the short walk back to the police station, weaving their way through quiet, narrow lanes where the shops were only just opening for the day. Although they did not immediately speak, Grace could sense Lance’s bubbling excitement.

  ‘Do you think the bottle was an afterthought,’ he said eventually. ‘A last-minute impulse? Or was it the whole point of the exercise?’

  ‘It must have been arranged like that postmortem. Which means he didn’t use it as a weapon.’

  ‘If I’m allowed to reference the FBI’ – he shot her a teasing look – ‘there’s a difference between “staging” and “posing”.’

  Grace nodded encouragingly. She was already familiar with the distinction but, pleased that they were evidently on good terms, didn’t want to steal his thunder.

  ‘Posing is what he likes to do for himself, his signature,’ he explained. ‘Staging is for our benefit, a message.’

  ‘So which is this?’ she prompted him.

  ‘I reckon she’s been staged.’ Lance checked over his shoulder to make sure they were not overheard; Grace was thankful that there was no sign of Roxanne trailing them. ‘Laid out all neat and tidy to taunt us because we haven’t found Polly yet.’

  ‘And the bottle?’

  ‘Has to be a sick joke, surely? No one in their right mind would –’ He shook his head in disbelief.

  ‘Who says he is in his right mind?’

  ‘True. But there was no other obvious violence; it wasn’t a sadistic attack.’

  Grace considered the grammar of the crime scene. Her immediate reaction had been that the almost gentle pose and delicately inserted bottle contained an eloquence she couldn’t yet decipher. ‘Her head was cushioned. He made her comfortable before he left her.’

  Lance shook his head stubbornly. ‘It’s a message for us. Some game he’s playing.’

  ‘He’s trying to communicate something,’ agreed Grace. ‘But I don’t think it’s a game.’ She wanted to say that the message, whatever it was, had seemed to her to be sincere, but now clearly wasn’t the time to change Lance’s mind about what they’d seen. Besides, she was more interested in hearing his thoughts than in putting forward her own. She could bide her time.

  ‘Maybe he’s pissed off because we haven’t found Polly,’ he said, ‘and this is his way of letting us know.’

  ‘That there’ll be a price to pay if we don’t play his game, you mean?’

  ‘Yeah. It’ll all be about him keeping control, won’t it?’

  ‘If you’re right,’ she said, ‘then you’re saying this poor girl’s death is supposed to steer us to something we’ve missed.’

  ‘Exactly!’

  ‘So what is it?’ she asked. ‘Why haven’t we found Polly? Where is she? What point are we missing?’

  SIX

  Photo ID recovered from the pocketbook in the jacket folded beneath the victim’s head suggested that the dead woman was a twenty-one-year-old final-year law student named Rachel Moston. Her parents were on their way to the mortuary to make a formal identification. Keith meanwhile had sent Gr
ace and Lance over to the law faculty to build up as full a picture of her as possible.

  They walked once more from the car park across the green sward to the raised concrete structures of the campus. The morning sun reflected harshly from the windowed expanse of walls, exacerbating Grace’s dull headache and tempting her to suggest they grab a cold drink before locating the faculty office.

  Heading for the mini-market, Grace spotted Roxanne coming out of the campus bookshop. The reporter, slipping her pen and notebook back into her bag as she ducked into the cafe next door, did not notice them.

  ‘What’s she doing here?’ asked Lance, annoyed.

  In answer, Grace pointed to the bookshop door, where a page of newsprint from the local paper had been taped to the glass: Roxanne’s interview with Polly Sinclair’s parents, headlined with their appeal for help in finding their daughter.

  ‘If people are talking to the Mercury, we need to hear what they’re saying,’ said Lance, changing course and pushing open the bookshop door.

  They entered the hush of a near-empty shop. At the far end, a man with a lank ponytail and a plaid shirt with rolled-up sleeves appeared to be doing a stock check. Nearer the door, the neatly dressed young man Grace had observed on Monday was straightening piles of books on a display table. He had short, fine hair and wore the kind of grey trousers and white shirt that supermarkets sell as generic school uniform. Once they had shown their warrant cards and given their names, he introduced himself politely as Danny Tooley, the assistant manager, and asked how he could help. Lance pointed back towards the entrance. ‘You’ve displayed that piece about Polly Sinclair.’

  ‘Yes. I put it there.’

  ‘Is Polly Sinclair a customer?’

  ‘Yes. Have you found her?’ he asked eagerly.

  ‘Not yet.’