Shatter

by Michael Robotham

  He points to the screen. “There are three base stations nearby. The closest is on Sion Hill, at the bottom of Queen Victoria Avenue. The tower is on the roof of the Princes’ Building. The next closest is two hundred yards away on the roof of Clifton Library.”

  He types Christine Wheeler’s number into the search engine. The screen refreshes.

  “There!” He points to a triangle on the screen. “She was in the area at 3:20 p.m.”

  “Talking to the same caller?”

  “It appears so. The call ends at 3:26.”

  Ruiz and I look at each other. “How did she get another mobile?” he asks.

  “Either someone gave it to her or she had it with her. Darcy didn’t mention a second phone.”

  Oliver is listening in. He’s slowly being drawn into the search. “Why are you so interested in this woman?”

  “She jumped off the Clifton Suspension Bridge.”

  He exhales slowly, making his face look even more skull-like.

  “There must be some way of tracing the conversation on the bridge,” says Ruiz.

  “Not without a number,” replies Oliver. “There were eight thousand calls going through the nearest base stations every fifteen minutes. Unless we can narrow the search down…”

  “What about duration? Christine Wheeler was perched on the edge of the bridge for an hour. She was on the phone the whole time.”

  “Calls aren’t logged by length,” he explains. “It could take me days to separate them.”

  I have another idea. “How many of the calls ended precisely at 5:07 p.m.?”

  “Why?”

  “That’s when she jumped.”

  Oliver turns back to the keyboard, typing in parameters for a new search. The screen becomes a stream of numbers that flash by so quickly they blur into a waterfall of black and white.

  “That’s amazing,” he says, pointing to the screen. “There’s a call that ended at precisely 5:07 p.m. It lasted more than ninety minutes.”

  His fingers are tracing the details when they suddenly stop.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  “That’s strange,” he replies. “Mrs. Wheeler was talking to another mobile which was routed through the same base station.”

  “Which means what?”

  “It means whoever was talking to her was either on the bridge or looking at it.”

  13

  There are girls playing hockey on the field. Blue-pleated skirts swirl and dip against muddy knees, pigtails bounce and sticks clack together. The word budding comes to mind. I have always liked how it sounds. It reminds me of my childhood and the girls I wanted to fuck.

  The sports mistress is refereeing, her voice as shrill as a whistle. She yells at them not to bunch up and to pass and to run.

  “Do keep up, Alice. Get involved.”

  I know of some of the girls’ names. Louise has the long brown hair, Shelly the sunshine smile and poor Alice hasn’t hit the ball once since the game began.

  A group of adolescent boys are watching from beneath a yew tree. They are sizing up the girls and poking fun at them.

  Every time I look at the girls I imagine my Chloe. She’s younger. Six, no seven, now. I missed her last birthday. She’s good at ball games. She could catch by the time she was four.

  I built her a basketball hoop. It was lower than regulation height so she could reach. We used to go one-on-one and I always let her win. In the beginning she could hardly sink a basket but as she grew stronger and her aim improved, she landed maybe two shots in every three.

  The hockey game is over. The girls are running indoors to change. Shelly with the sunshine smile runs across to flirt with the boys and is shepherded away by the sports mistress.

  I squeeze my fingers around a chalky stone and begin scratching letters on the stone capping on the wall. The powder sinks deep into the cracks. I trace the letters again.

  CHLOE

  I draw a heart around the name, punctured by a cupid’s arrow with a triangular point and a splayed tail. Then I close my eyes and make a wish, willing it to be so.

  My eyelids flutter open. I blink twice. The sports mistress is there, holding a hockey stick over her shoulder with the colorful toweling grip squeezed in her fist.

  Her lips part: “Get lost, creep—or I’ll call the police!”

  14

  There are moments, I know them well, when Mr. Parkinson refuses to lie down and take his medicine like a man. He plays cruel tricks on me and embarrasses me in public.

  There are thousands of involuntary processes in the body that we cannot control. We cannot stop our hearts from beating or our skin from sweating or our pupils dilating. Other movements are voluntary and these are abandoning me. My limbs, my jaw, my face, will sometimes tremble or twitch or become fixed. Without warning, my face will lock into a mask, leaving me unable to smile in welcome or to show sadness or concern. What good will I be as a clinical psychologist if I lose my ability to express emotion?

  “You’re giving me the stare again,” says Ruiz.

  “Sorry.” I look away.

  “We should go home,” he says gently.

  “Not yet.”

  We’re sitting outside a Starbucks, braving the chill because Ruiz refuses to be seen inside such a place and thinks we should have gone to a pub instead.

  “I want an espresso, not a pint,” I told him.

  To which he countered, “Do you try to sound like a hairdresser?”

  “Drink your coffee.”

  His hands are buried in the pockets of his overcoat. It’s the same rumpled coat he was wearing when I first met him—five years ago. He interrupted a talk that I was giving to prostitutes in London. I was trying to help them stay safe on the streets. Ruiz was trying to solve a murder.

  I liked him. Men who take too much care of themselves and their clothes can appear vain and overambitious but Ruiz had long ago stopped caring about what other people thought of him. He was like a big dark vague piece of furniture, smelling of tobacco and wet tweed.

  Another thing that struck me was how he could stare into the distance even when sitting in a room. It was as though he could see beyond walls to a place where things were clearer or better or easier on the eye.

  “You know what I can’t understand about this case?” he says.

  “What’s that?”

  “Why didn’t someone stop her? A naked woman walks out of her house, gets in a car, drives fifteen miles and climbs over a safety rail on a bridge and nobody stops her. Can you explain that?”

  “It’s called the bystander effect.”

  “It’s called apathy,” he grunts.

  “No.”

  I tell him the story of Kitty Genovese, a New York waitress who was attacked outside her apartment building in the mid-sixties. Forty neighbors heard her cries for help or watched her being stabbed but none of them called the police or tried to help her. The attack lasted thirty-two minutes. She escaped twice but each time her assailant caught her and stabbed her again.

  The caller who eventually raised the alarm phoned a friend first to ask what he should do. Then he went next door and asked a neighbor to make the call because “he didn’t want to get involved.” Kitty Genovese died only two minutes after the police arrived.

  The crime caused a massive outpouring of anger and disbelief in America and abroad. People blamed overcrowding, urbanization and poverty for creating a generation of city dwellers with the morals and behavior of rats in cages.

  Once the hysteria died down and proper studies were done, psychologists identified the bystander effect. If a group of people witness an emergency they look to each other to react, expecting someone else to take the lead. They are lulled into inaction by a pluralistic ignorance.

  Dozens of people must have seen Christine Wheeler on Friday afternoon—motorists, passengers, pedestrians, toll collectors, people walking their dogs in Leigh Woods—and they each expected someone else to get involved and help her.

 
Ruiz grunts skeptically. “Don’t you just love people?”

  He closes his eyes and exhales slowly as if trying to warm the world. “Where to now?” he asks.

  “I want to see Leigh Woods.”

  “Why?”

  “It might help me understand.”

  We emerge out of Junction 19 and take back roads towards Clifton, winding between playing fields, farms and streams that are brackish and sullen as the floodwaters recede. Small sections of the tarmac are dry for the first time in weeks.

  Pill Road becomes Abbots Leigh Road and the gorge drops dramatically away on our left behind the trees. According to local legend it was created by two giant brothers, Vincent and Goram, who carved it with a single pickax. The giants died and their bodies floated down the Avon River to form islands in the Bristol Channel.

  Ruiz likes the legend (and the names). Maybe it appeals to his sense of the absurd.

  A sandstone arch marks the entrance to Leigh Woods. The narrow access road, flanked by trees, leads to a small car park, a dead end. This is where they found Christine Wheeler’s car, parked amongst the fallen leaves. It is not a place that she would necessarily know about unless she were given directions or had been here before.

  Thirty yards from the car park is a signpost pointing out several walking trails. The red trail takes an hour and covers two miles to the edge of Paradise Bottom with views over the gorge. The purple trail is shorter but takes in Stokeleigh Camp, an iron-age hill fort.

  Ruiz walks ahead of me, pausing occasionally for me to catch up. I’m not wearing the right shoes for this. Neither was Christine Wheeler. How naked and exposed she must have felt. How cold and frightened. She walked this path in high heels. She stumbled and fell. She tore her skin on brambles. Someone was issuing instructions to her, leading her away from the car park.

  Fallen leaves are piled like snowdrifts along the ditches and the breeze shakes droplets from the branches. This is ancient woodland and I can smell it in the damp earth, rotting boles and mold: a cavalcade of reeks. Occasionally, between the trees I glimpse a railing fence that marks the boundary. Above and beyond it there are roofs of houses.

  During the Troubles in Ireland, the IRA would often bury arms caches in open countryside, using line of sight between three landmarks to hide the weapons in the middle of fields with nothing on the surface to mark the spot. British patrols searching for these caches learned how to study the landscape, picking out features that caught the eye. It might be a different colored tree, or a mound of stones or a leaning fence post.

  In a sense I’m doing the same thing—looking for reference points or psychological markers that could indicate Christine Wheeler’s last walk. I take out my mobile and check the signal strength. Three bars. Strong enough.

  “She took this path.”

  “What makes you so sure?” asks Ruiz.

  “It has less cover. He wanted to be able to see her. And he wanted her to be seen.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  Most crimes are a coincidence—a juxtaposition of circumstances. A few minutes or a few yards one way or the other and the crime may not have happened. This one was different. Whoever did this knew Christine Wheeler’s phone numbers and where she lived. He told her to come here. He chose what shoes she wore.

  “How? How did you know her?” I ask myself silently.

  You must have seen her somewhere before. Perhaps she was wearing the red shoes.

  Why bring her here?

  You wanted her to be seen, but this is too open, too public. Someone could have stopped her or called the police. Even on a miserable day like Friday there were people on the walking trails. If you truly wanted to isolate her you could have chosen almost anywhere. Somewhere private, where you had more time.

  And rather than kill her privately, you made it very public. You told her to walk onto the bridge and climb over the railing. That sort of control is mind-boggling. Unbelievable.

  Christine didn’t fight back. There were no skin cells under her fingernails or defense bruises. You didn’t need ligatures to subdue her, or physical force. Nobody saw you with Christine Wheeler in her car. None of the witnesses mention someone with her. You must have been waiting for her; somewhere you felt safe—a hiding place.

  Ruiz has paused to wait for me. I walk past him and leave the footpath, climbing up a small slope. At the top of the ridge there is a knoll formed by three trees. The view of Avon Gorge is uninterrupted. I kneel on the grass, feeling the wetness of the earth soak through to my trousers and the elbows of my coat. The path is visible for a hundred yards in either direction. It’s a good hiding place, a place for innocent courting or illicit stalking.

  A sudden burst of sunshine breaks through the scurrying clouds. Ruiz has followed me up the slope.

  “Someone uses this place to watch people,” I explain. “See how the grass is crushed. Somebody lay on their stomach with their elbows here.”

  Even as I utter the words my gaze is snagged by a piece of yellow plastic caught in a mesh of brambles a dozen yards away. Rising to my feet, I close the gap, leaning between thorny branches until my fingers close around the plastic raincoat.

  Ruiz lets out a long whistling breath. “You’re a freak. You know that.”

  The engine is running. The heater at full blast. I’m trying to dry my trousers.

  “We should call the police,” I say.

  “And say what?” counters Ruiz.

  “Tell them about the raincoat.”

  “It changes nothing. They already know she was in the woods. People saw her. They saw her jump.”

  “But they could search the woods, seal it off.”

  I can picture dozens of uniformed officers doing a fingertip search and police dogs following a scent.

  “You know how much rain we’ve had since Friday. There won’t be anything left to find.”

  He takes a tin of boiled sweets from his jacket pocket and offers me one. The rocklike sweet rattles against his teeth as he sucks.

  “What about her mobile phone?”

  “It’s in the river.”

  “The first one—the one she took from home.”

  “It wouldn’t tell us anything we don’t know already.”

  I know Ruiz thinks I’m reading too much into this or that I’m looking for some sort of closure. It’s not true. There is only one natural convincing closure—the one none of us can avoid. The one Christine Wheeler collided with at seventy-five miles per hour. I just want the truth for Darcy’s sake.

  “You said she had money problems. I’ve known loan sharks to get pretty heavy.”

  “This is a step up from breaking legs.”

  “Maybe they pushed her so hard that she cracked.”

  I stare at my left hand where my thumb and forefinger are “pill rolling.” This is how the tremors start, a rhythmic back and forth of two digits at three beats per second. If I concentrate hard on my thumb, willing it to stop moving, I can halt the tremor momentarily.

  Clumsily, I try to hide my hand in my pocket. I know what Ruiz is going to say.

  “One more stop-off,” I argue. “Then we’ll go home.”

  15

  The police vehicle lockup in Bristol is near Bedminster Railway Station, hidden behind soot-stained walls and barbed-wire fences. The ground shakes each time a train rattles past or brakes hard at a platform.

  The place smells of grease, transmission fluid and sump oil. A mechanic peers through the dirt-stained glass of an office and lowers a teacup to a saucer. Dressed in orange overalls and a checked shirt he meets us at the door, bracing one arm on the frame as if waiting to hear a password.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” says Ruiz.

  “Is that what you’re gonna do?”

  The mechanic makes a show of wiping his hands on a rag.

  “A car was towed here from Clifton a few days ago. A blue Renault Laguna. It belonged to a woman who jumped from the suspension bridge.”

&n
bsp; “You here to pick it up?”

  “We’re here to look at it.”

  This answer doesn’t seem very palatable. He swirls it around his mouth for a moment and spits it into the rag. Glancing sideways at me, he contemplates whether I could possibly be a policeman.

  “You waiting to see a badge, son?” says Ruiz.

  He nods absently, no longer so sure of himself.

  “I’m retired,” continues Ruiz. “I was a detective inspector with the London Metropolitan Police. You’re going to humor me today and you know why? Because all I want to do is look inside a car that isn’t the subject of a criminal investigation and is only here until a member of the deceased’s family comes and picks it up.”

  “I suppose that’s OK.”

  “Say it like you mean it, son.”

  “Yeah, sure, it’s over there.”

  The blue Renault is parked along the north wall of the workshop beside a crumpled wreck that must have taken at least one life. I open the driver’s door of the Renault and let my eyes adjust to the darkness inside. The interior light isn’t strong enough to chase away the shadows. I don’t know what I’m looking for.

  There is nothing in the glove compartment or beneath the seats. I search the pockets in the doors. There are tissues, moisturizer, makeup and loose change. Bunched beneath the seat is a rag for wiping the windscreen and a deicing tool.

  Ruiz has popped the boot. It’s empty except for the spare tire, a tool kit and a fire extinguisher.

  Going back to the driver’s door, I sit in the seat and close my eyes, trying to imagine a wet Friday afternoon with rain streaking the windscreen. Christine Wheeler drove fifteen miles from her home, naked beneath a raincoat. The demister worked overtime, the heater as well. Did she open the window to call for help?

  My eyes are drawn to the right where the glass has been smudged by fingerprints and something else. I need more light.

  I yell to Ruiz. “I need a torch!”

  “What you got?”

  I point to the markings.