by Jo Bannister
What he’d seen on Roy’s table was a skeleton with scraps of skin adhering and a cap of short fair hair about the skull. He studied the photograph for a trace of kinship. But this time the magic failed him. It was a passport-type photo of a teenage girl who looked like a million others, whose experiences were probably pretty much like theirs until the day that she didn’t go home. It might have been the girl they’d found, it might not.
‘Sasha Wade,’ he read aloud. ‘What’s Sasha short for?’
‘I don’t think it is,’ said Voss. ‘I think it’s Russian.’
‘You think she’s a Russian?’
Detective Superintendent Deacon was clearly an astute man, but not all the time. Voss said patiently, ‘It’s one of those names that was trendy thirty years ago. The sort of name hippies gave their children.’
Deacon was looking blank. ‘You think her parents are Russian hippies?’
Voss straightened from the screen and regarded at him levelly. ‘You’re winding me up, sir, aren’t you?’
Deacon chuckled. ‘Just a little bit. Well, I’d better go and talk to them. Print me the address, will you? I’ll take Jill Meadows. In case I find Mrs Wade on her own.’
‘After eight years she may be quite relieved.’
‘To know that her daughter’s been murdered? I don’t think so, sergeant!’
Voss was unapologetic. ‘Yes. To know. Not to be worrying any more. Not to be wondering if she’s safe, or in trouble, or wanting to call home but too embarrassed. Not to be constantly listening for the phone. When we get a positive ID she won’t be afraid of the phone any more.’
Deacon considered. ‘When I was at Hendon, basic training was about getting a shine on your boots and Always finish what you start so don’t start anything you don’t want to finish. Amateur psychology must have come in later.’
Voss hadn’t come from the Met so was never at Hendon. ‘Don’t know, sir,’ he said stoically. ‘I got mine from Chinese fortune cookies, mostly.’
It was a nice day for a drive but Deacon took no pleasure in it. Whatever Voss thought, the reality was he was about to tell two people there was a good chance their daughter had been lying in a muddy hole on the Downs for the last eight years. Then he was going to ask them to help identify her.
Thank God, there was nothing they could tell him from looking at the remains. Nor were there any personal effects – no clothes, no jewellery, no watch. If there’d been anything they might have recognised he would have asked them to look, but he was glad there was not. It was always a deeply upsetting moment.
Deacon himself had seen much worse than a gently decomposing skeleton. He’d witnessed the results of unspeakable cruelty – people in terrible suffering, dying people for whom nothing could be done, and those so newly dead their agony was etched both on their ravaged faces and on the backs of his eyes. Pain was the real horror. Death was an end. He investigated murder with all the energy, ingenuity and resources at his command not because someone was dead but because someone else was a killer.
Beside him, Detective Constable Jill Meadows was anticipating the coming interview with quiet dread. It was a routine part of the job, much commoner than being shot at or taking part in high-speed chases, but still hard to deal with. Crises come from nowhere and you react with a blend of instinct and training, and usually there’s only time to be afraid afterwards. Breaking bad news is difficult because you know you’re going to have to do it.
‘What if they ask if we could be wrong?’
Deacon shrugged. ‘Tell them the truth. It could be someone else, but the odds are it’s Sasha.’
Meadows nodded sadly. ‘Eight years? She’d have been my age.’
A few miles passed. Deacon enjoyed driving normally, found it therapeutic. His mind split itself neatly in half when he drove, one half managing the road, the car and whatever arose while the other quietly kicked a football around. Sometimes the football was work, sometimes his private life. Usually it was work.
Today he wasn’t sure what it was. Something someone had said. Someone had said something, and he couldn’t think who or what or when, but the little Deacon in the back of his mind who had time to kick a football around thought it was significant. Thought he ought to give it some consideration. Was jumping up and down trying to attract his attention. Deacon could see him, but he couldn’t think what he was on about.
And then he could.
The first Meadows knew was the car slowing down. When she looked at him enquiringly his face was closed for stock-taking, please call again later, and his eyes were turned inward. ‘Sir?’
He found somewhere to stop. Actually, he just stopped and let the traffic behind shift for itself. ‘She’d have been twenty-seven?’
Meadows nodded. ‘If she was nineteen eight years ago.’
‘But she could have been twenty-five eight years ago,’ mused Deacon. ‘That’s what Roy said – she was eighteen to twenty-five. By now she could have been thirty-three.’
‘Sir?’
Deacon went on thinking. ‘We still need to see the Wades. But if they ask about the odds, tell them their daughter is one of two young women it could be.’
‘Who’s the other?’
He was already on the phone to Voss. ‘Charlie, have you spoken to Corin Hurley yet?’
‘Not yet. I was going to do that next. Why?’
‘Ask him about Michelle Rollins.’
Corin Hurley bought his flat at The Diligence, his parents guaranteeing the loan, when he was eighteen and starting a photography course at Dimmock Polytechnic. He owned it for the three years of his studies, letting the second bedroom to two fellow-students in order to pay the mortgage. After graduation he sold it and put down a deposit on a London flat.
All this Voss learned in the course of a phone conversation with the elder Mr Hurley who still lived in Bognor Regis.
Mrs Hurley answered the phone. Voss had learned not to begin conversations with, ‘Good morning, I am a police officer,’ because it took ten minutes to calm the other party down enough to answer questions. Instead he said, ‘There’s nothing whatever to worry about, Mrs Hurley, but I’m a police officer and I need a quick word with your son Corin. Can you give me his current address and phone-number?’
Mrs Hurley did not yield to hysterics but she did put her husband on the line. She stayed at his elbow, listening. Voss could hear her prompting him.
‘Has something happened to Corin?’
‘No,’ said Voss, ‘nothing. Something’s come up’ – he could have worded that better – ‘at The Diligence where he used to live and I want to ask him about his neighbours.’
‘Tell him he hasn’t lived there for five years,’ urged the whisper in the background. ‘He hasn’t lived there for five years,’ said Hurley dutifully.
‘I know that, sir. If you could give me his address?’
‘Tell him he’s married,’ came the whisper. ‘Got a good job. And two little girls.’
‘He’s married now,’ said Hurley. ‘He’s …’
‘ … Got a good job and two little girls,’ said Voss patiently. ‘Yes, I know, sir. I still need to talk to him.’
If Corin Hurley had still lived in London Voss might have paid him a visit. Phoning would take ten minutes, travelling up to town half a day. On the other hand, there are risks with interviewing people over the phone. You can’t see their eyes. Plus, there’s always the chance that as soon as they put the phone down they’re going to head for the nearest airport. He wasn’t expecting Hurley to confess to murder, but if he did Voss would be in a difficult position. You can’t arrest someone over the phone, and while he could tell Hurley to stay put while he despatched the local CID it was asking a lot.
The matter became academic when Hurley turned out to be in Aberdeen, working for the public relations department of an oil company. So the phone would have to do. After all, Voss had no reason to suspect him. It was only information he was after.
The marvels of moder
n technology allowed him to speak to Hurley as the North Sea hammered the boat carrying the photographer back from an oil-rig.
‘I thought you used helicopters,’ said Voss.
‘From a helicopter the sea always looks flat and the rigs look like toys. For a decent photograph you need to get up close and personal.’ Also, the manic cheerfulness in his voice suggested that Corin Hurley liked being tossed about in boats.
‘There’s been an incident at The Diligence,’ Voss said. ‘A body’s been discovered. It seems likely she was buried around the time you moved into your flat.’
‘She? A girl?’
‘Late teens, early twenties. Does that mean something to you?’
‘No. There was an elderly lady living there – Miss Venables – and a couple, the Rollinses. Other people arrived later, but I don’t think I ever saw a girl.’
Voss cleared his throat. ‘Mr Hurley, you and two other male students were living there. You’re telling me you never took a girl home?’
‘Of course not. But we never mislaid one. We counted them all in and we counted them all out again.’
‘Was Sasha Wade one of them?’
Hurley had to think. Voss listened to the waves boom along the steel hull. ‘Not one of mine. I don’t remember either of the other guys going out with a Sasha. To be sure you’d need to ask them. But like I told you …’
‘ … You counted them all out again. Still, I’ll speak to your flatmates. Do you know where they are now?’
‘Can I call you back from home? I’ve got them both in the address book. Or call my wife and ask her. Jonathan Scott and Mark Parsons. Mark’s doing glamour photography in Amsterdam. Jonathan, oddly enough, went into the church.’
‘Did you ever see anything strange or suspicious at The Diligence? Perhaps something that didn’t seem significant at the time but does now you know we’ve found a body.’
Hurley didn’t remember anything. ‘We were pretty strange but I don’t think anyone thought we were suspicious. I was a late-flowering hippy, Jonathan was seeing cosmic meaning in everything, and Mark had a down on clothes. He could get some girl to pose naked anywhere, any time. As part of the course we had to photograph a multi-storey carpark. Mark shot it from a roof three miles away with a telephoto lens, between the legs of a girl called Mindy. It was the most erotic image from the whole damn course.’
‘I don’t suppose Mindy suddenly disappeared?’
‘No, sergeant. She’s Mindy Parsons now, she runs his studio in Amsterdam’s red-light district.’
Even without being able to see his eyes, Voss was content that Corin Hurley knew nothing about a murder. Which didn’t mean he couldn’t still be helpful. ‘Did you see much of the Rollinses?’
‘Not a lot. Eddie was older than us – just enough to disapprove of our beards and clothes and late-night parties. We tried to keep the noise bearable but he still complained regularly. I’ve every sympathy for him now. Then I thought he was my dad in disguise.’
‘What about Michelle?’
‘Never really got the chance to know her,’ said Hurley. ‘We moved in in July, about a month after they did. We introduced ourselves, asked them to our house-warming, borrowed the odd cup of sugar, then she ran off with an Italian truck-driver.’
‘They weren’t happy together?’
‘I’m not sure Eddie does Happy. I thought they were OK. We didn’ t hear them argue and he seemed to be fond of her. He bought her a nice new suite. Of course, that could have worked out better.’
‘What was she like?’
‘Bubbly. She was fun, I liked her.’
‘Tall – short?’
‘Not tall. She had short blonde hair, huge mascara eyes, and a silly giggle. She was a hairdresser. She was a bit younger than Eddie – early twenties, maybe. Oh, she was the original dumb blonde, and I guess she was what my mother would call common, but from the little I saw of her she was a nice girl – kind, you know? I don’t know what she saw in Eddie. Security, probably – he was always going to be in work. But I don’t think married life was all she’d expected. Hence the Italian.’
‘Did you see him?’
‘Alas, no. Eddie told us a few days later. To avoid speculation, he said. So we wouldn’t think …’ Hurley’s voice died as the implications caught up with him.
‘Think what?’
There was a shell-shocked note in the voice on the phone. ‘It’s just what he said. That Michelle had left him and wouldn’t be coming back. That she’d gone off with an Italian truck-driver called Luigi. That he didn’t want us thinking something had happened to her.’
‘It’s a reasonable thing to say,’ said Voss mildly.
‘That’s what we thought. At the time. When we didn’t know there was a girl buried in the garden!’
As soon as he’d finished with Hurley, Voss called Deacon back. ‘Have you seen the Wades yet?’
‘Not yet.’ Deacon’s voice dropped a note. ‘Are you telling me I shouldn’t bother?’
‘No. But if they want some hope to cling to, Michelle Rollins is as good a match for the girl in the ground as Sasha.’
Which was a policeman’s lot all over, thought Deacon grimly. Too many suspects or none at all; a victim with no name or one with a choice of two. ‘I’ll take DNA samples from the Wades, that should tell us if it’s Sasha. If it isn’t we’ll need to check that Luigi the truck-driver isn’t a figment of Eddie Rollins’s imagination. Get onto the Italians again. The last they heard we were looking for a potential witness: they need to know Michelle Rollins could be the victim.’
It was now after six and Deacon hoped to find both of the Wades at home, if only to save one the agony of telling the other after he’d left. He wasn’t by nature a thoughtful man but every so often he surprised people.
It was a comfortable semi in a post-war housing development and everything about it celebrated the basic decency of the owner-occupying lower middle class, the salmon paste in the Great British sandwich. The outside was painted every five years, and every weekend the lawn was mown and the mid-range hatchback on the drive was washed and waxed. It was living at its most respectable, and people who wash their net curtains twice a year and polish their doorstep shouldn’t have to learn that their daughter has been dug up by a builder.
When a policeman calls, most people do an urgent head-count. Is everyone here, has someone had an accident? Deacon thought that Alice Wade knew why he was there before he introduced himself. ‘We’re from Dimmock CID. We’d like to talk to you and your husband.’
She was older than Deacon had expected, with long greying hair tied back in a loose plait and bones like a bird. Her voice was soft. ‘You’ve found her, haven’t you?’
‘We don’t know yet, Mrs Wade,’ said Jill Meadows gently. ‘It’ll be a couple of days before we’re sure.’
‘Where was she?’
By then her husband had shown them through to the sitting room. Deacon took the proferred seat and summarised events at The Diligence. ‘We don’t yet know who it is we’ve found, and we don’t know how she died. We’re here because there’s nothing in what we know of Sasha that says it couldn’t be her. We’ll know for sure if mouth-swabs from you two match her DNA.’
The Wades exchanged a quick, significant glance. ‘That could be a problem,’ said Philip Wade.
‘Why?’
‘Sasha was adopted,’ said Alice. ‘As a baby. She was ours almost all her life but she won’t have our DNA.’
‘Ah.’ Deacon sat back, momentarily nonplussed. It was salutory how quickly even a detective like him, a man who swore by old-fashioned, sweat on the brow, blisters on the feet police work, could be seduced by a scientific advance. Deacon learnt his job when genetic profiling was laughed off as science fiction by policemen who thought solving crimes would always depend on asking suspects questions and preferably thumping them till they answered. Of course, a hundred years earlier the same doubts had attended the new science of finger-printing.
&
nbsp; In just ten years, though, the primacy of DNA as arbiter of identity had seeped so deeply into the collective consciousness that, for a moment, he couldn’t think what to do next. He gave himself a mental shake and thought back to when he was Voss’s age. ‘What about old injuries? Did she ever break a bone?’
Mrs Wade shook her head.
‘Who was her dentist? Dental X-rays are pretty foolproof.’
The woman went to a bureau drawer, came back with an address book. ‘Try him by all means, but I don’t think Sasha ever had an X-ray taken. She had a couple of minor fillings. She was only nineteen, superintendent.’
DNA, bones, teeth … Thumping someone was almost all that was left. ‘A good photograph might help. Taken not too long before she disappeared.’
‘That would still be useful?’ murmured Mrs Wade. ‘After eight years in the ground?’
Tragedy takes people different ways. Some are overwhelmed by it. Others get through by attending to the minutiae almost like part of the professional team. Neither was right or wrong, more or less appropriate. Deacon had seen enough of violent death to know that anything which helped those left behind was valid.
‘The lab will measure the distances between fixed points on the face and compare them with those on the body. It’s pretty reliable. The proportions vary between one individual and another.’
Sasha Wade’s mother nodded. ‘I have a picture. Only, I would like it back.’
‘Of course,’ said Jill Meadows, standing up. ‘Shall I come with you?’ She wanted to see Sasha’s room. In all probability it would be as it was the last night the girl slept there.
Left alone, Deacon turned to Philip. ‘There’s a note on the file to the effect that Sasha was missing once before. Went off with a boyfriend, came back later. Is that what you thought had happened this time?’
Wade shook his head. ‘Not after the first couple of days.’
‘Why not?’
