by Ryan Casey
“It means she never slept a night here. She checked in, paid for her room… and then she did it.”
The suicide angle still troubled Brian. There were too many coincidences. Sure, he could kind of see where Annie was coming from regarding Dan. He could’ve let the code slip, but he seemed pretty insistent he hadn’t. And then there was the talk of Elaine’s fragile mental state, too. She’d disappeared after a gig, and her friend had left her to vanish. It all seemed so off. But the frustrating thing was that it made a twisted kind of sense.
“Are there any clothes?” Brian asked. “Any suitcases or luggage?”
Finch shook his head. “Not a trace.”
“Done any DNA scans?”
“Will do, when you get your smelly arse out of here.”
Brian did need a shower. He’d give Finch that one. “So she checked in and she didn’t stay here. What’re you so desperate for me to look at?”
Finch tilted his head to the left. A smile covered his face.
“What?”
It was at that moment that Brian saw exactly where Finch was looking.
On top of the rickety wooden desk, there was a mobile phone.
“This place is full of CRT televisions and mould, and you’re telling me the guests here get free phones? Not a chance.”
“It’s what’s on it that matters,” Finch said.
Brian walked over to the phone. He put a glove on and unlocked the phone without needing to enter a password.
The phone’s background was Elaine standing in front of the Eiffel tower. She was smiling, but there was a darkness to her demeanour. Like there was something hiding behind her eyes, even though that photo must’ve been taken over a year ago.
“Any messages?” Brian asked.
“Nothing weird,” Finch said.
Brian scrolled down the messages. Sammi was right. She had sent a lot of texts to Elaine. Thirteen, in fact, all of them asking if she was okay, then eventually ending with: I hope wherever you are you’re fine. Get in touch when you’re ready x
“Any emails?”
“Why don’t you look yourself?”
Brian opened up Elaine’s emails. Again, nothing major. Amazon newsletters. Clothes vouchers. Receipts. Normal things that normal twenty-one-year-olds had in their inbox.
Frustrated, Brian moved on to the photos. Again, nothing else.
It was only when he went to put the phone down that he remembered the social media angle.
“Wait,” he said. “Sammi said something about Elaine updating her social media. Have you looked into that?”
Finch nodded and chuckled a little. “It’s an app called Buffer.”
“A what?”
“An app.”
“I know what a bloody app is. I mean a buffy.”
“Buffer. It schedules social media. Tweets. Facebook posts. All kinds of things like that. The schedule was due to run for another six months. Every single message on there was completely different. Some of them were… some of them were photos of Elaine in different parts of the world. It’s like she wanted her family to believe she was living a life when in fact she’d taken it all along. She was covering for herself.”
Brian tried to wrap his head around the news. “Or someone else was.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Is this all we’ve got?”
“Almost,” Finch said. “Take a look in the drawer.”
Brian was on the verge of giving up when he opened up the top drawer.
Inside, he found a little pill bottle.
“St John’s Wort. Some kind of alternative medicine. Seems like Elaine wasn’t too keen on getting a doctor’s help.”
Brian turned the bottle around in his hand. He studied the name, then the brand. He shook it. There was nothing inside. “So she ran out and went nutty?”
“Look inside.”
“There’s nothing in here.”
“Just look inside.”
Brian frowned. He turned the lid and peeked inside.
When he saw what was inside, he got that strange feeling creep up the back of his neck again.
“Elaine ran out of meds,” Finch said. “But that didn’t stop her replacing them with what’s in that tub.”
Brian dropped one of the little tabs with the smiley cartoon character onto his hand.
“So the question is, was Elaine Schumer really fighting an illness, or was she just tripping on LSD all along?”
Nine
Brian held his breath as the blue protective cover was pulled away from Elaine Schumer’s body.
Two days had passed since her discovery, and finally the results of the autopsy were complete. The new team of pathologists, Imran Khan and Samantha Page, weren’t as punctual as Jeeves used to be. But he’d retired a few months back, not long after the chief constable’s disappearance, in fact.
Brian often wondered if the prompt retirement of Jeeves was really such a coincidence after all. But he couldn’t let it bite at him or it’d give him nightmares.
“Lovely day to be cooped up in a place like this,” Imran said. He smiled at Brian with his sparkling white teeth. He always seemed to be cracking a joke about something or other. Brian guessed you needed that kind of humour about you if you spent your days cutting up bodies. At least he wasn’t as smarmy as Jeeves used to be.
“Yeah,” Brian said. Imran was right—it was bloody boiling outside. Humid beyond belief. The last place Brian wanted to be was in here. It wasn’t that it smelled of the dead, but it definitely had that medicinal fragrance to the air, covering up the rotting stench. If anything, that smelled worse than the dead.
Actually, no. Not a chance. Nothing smelled worse than the dead.
“Are you ready for us to walk you through it or are you going to stand there gawping all day?”
Samantha was a much more assertive character than Imran. She had a sarcastic sense of humour, and never looked all that happy. She was tall, slim, with fiery ginger hair and angular glasses sitting on the bridge of her nose. She didn’t look Brian in the eye when she spoke.
“Ready when you are.”
Samantha nodded. She walked around Elaine’s dead body. Brian couldn’t get over how bloated and green it looked. It barely looked completely human anymore.
“We’ve examined her and concluded her death to be an accidental drowning, with an undiagnosed bipolar disorder as a significant factor. Judging by the state of the body, it seems accurate to predict she died around the end of May, which matches your findings so far, I believe.”
“So you’re buying the bipolar angle?”
“Elaine made contact with several GPs about bipolar meds, but she never accepted medication.”
“That’ll explain the wacky stuff you found at the hotel,” Imran said.
“The alternative medicine,” Brian said, nodding. He’d found a little container of an alternative med for bipolar disorder and anxiety issues. Only it’d contained a much more alternative medicine: LSD.
“Her body was found naked in the water tank, which was about seven-eighths full at the time,” Samantha said.
“Yeah. I saw that much.”
“The clothes you saw in the water floating beside her, we believe to have been hers.”
“Figures.”
“Also in her possession was the purse containing the provisional driving licence you found, as well as a key for her room. Nothing else.”
“Nothing else in the purse?”
Imran lifted it up and opened it. It was soaked and dripped onto the floor. “Not a penny.”
“So she paid cash when she checked in?”
“We have to assume that was the case.”
“Hmm.”
“Anyway, onto the body itself.”
“The best part.”
Samantha didn’t look amused. She hovered over the bloated corpse of a girl who judging by her driving licence, used to be very pretty. “Moderate decomposition.”
“It took you all these day
s to reach that conclusion?”
Again, Samantha didn’t look impressed. Imran grinned away like he was enjoying the fireworks. “There’s not a lot to be concluded, McDone. I know you’re eager to believe this girl was murdered for whatever twisted justice of your own, but all signs point towards accidental death.”
“My question is how a girl climbs a ladder, jumps into a tank and pulls the lid over by accident.”
“Like I said,” Samantha said. “She suffered from bipolar disorder. She’d had issues with mental health in the past. It isn’t beyond the question that Elaine had some kind of breakdown prior to her death.
Brian bit his lip and tried to stave off his frustration. “Go on then. What else have you got?”
“We did rape and fingernail tests.”
“And?”
“No evidence of physical trauma.”
Brian knew what was coming next.
“And no evidence of sexual assault.”
He felt bad for feeling disappointed to learn there’d been no evidence of any kind of struggle. Of course he didn’t want to believe this poor girl had suffered at the hands of a scumbag. But he couldn’t accept the verdict that this was accidental, either.
“Therefore, on the basis of all these investigations, myself and Imran have concluded that there is no evidence to suggest Elaine was murdered, or that she committed suicide.”
Brian rubbed the bridge of his nose. He was struggling to buy the suicide angle just days ago, now they were telling him there wasn’t even evidence of suicide? “How about toxicology?”
Imran smiled. “This is where it gets interesting.”
Samantha glared at him, then turned back to Brian. “We ran tests as well as we could, but it was difficult to get sufficient blood. From what we found, there were some basic metabolites. But no evidence of any prescription medicine.”
“Her bipolar meds weren’t prescription though, right?”
Samantha tilted her head. “Elaine’s bipolar meds weren’t prescription, but there are no traces of any bipolar meds at all. Prescription or otherwise.”
Brian narrowed his eyes. “What’s that mean then?”
“It’s possible that we didn’t look close enough, but we didn’t find any of the St John’s Wort. However, we did find evidence of other nonprescription drugs in her system. Ibuprofen. Sinutab. A little alcohol.”
“LSD?”
Imran shook his head. “None of it.”
Brian frowned. He couldn’t wrap his head around any of this. “So there’s no trace of any bipolar meds in Elaine’s system, but there’s also no trace of any LSD in her system?”
“There’s nothing to suggest Elaine had anything of the sort in her system. Which adds to our theory that her death was accidental. She stopped taking her nonprescription meds, as dubious as their effect may be. It tipped her over the edge.”
“But what’s the LSD all about?”
Samantha shrugged. “That’s for you to find out, Detective.”
Brian was trying to wrap his head around everything when his phone rang.
“Yeah?”
“Brian.” It was Annie. “We’ve got something. CCTV at the hotel. You’re gonna want to see this. Right now.”
Ten
“Are you ready?”
“Am I ready? Course I’m ready. I’m here aren’t I?”
“Brian, I have to warn you. This is… weird.”
“I’m used to weird.”
“But it doesn’t mean…”
“It doesn’t mean what?”
“Nothing.”
“No, go on. It doesn’t mean what?”
Annie hesitated. “Just because it’s weird doesn’t mean it’s murder.”
Brian swallowed a lump in his throat. “I’ll be the judge of that.”
He was back at the station in the CCTV room. By his side, Annie. There were other people in this room, but all of them were focused on CCTV footage of their own. The smell of coffee filled the air, which made Brian want to heave.
In front of them, a screen. Brian saw a still of a lift. The footage was one of the lift’s rear corners, looking down. It looked like the one he’d stood in inside Baker’s Inn.
“Right. Go on. Don’t keep me waiting any longer.”
Annie sighed. Then she hit play.
The grainy footage started. A still of the lift, the door closed.
“It’s from May 24th,” Annie said. “Top floor, which is where she was staying. Around midnight.”
“The night Elaine went missing,” Brian said.
Just as he spoke, the lift door opened.
Elaine Schumer stepped inside.
Seeing her in the lift, alive, made Brian’s chest knot. It was strange seeing a victim in the moments before their death. Brian always wondered whether they knew what was coming. Whether they were prepared for what was going to happen, and how different their life may be if they’d made another step somewhere along the way.
There was no doubt in Brian’s mind that Elaine looked terrified.
She was dressed in a blue hoodie with a white T-shirt underneath, just like the clothes they’d found beside her floating in the water. She was wearing long blue jeans and white flip-flops with no socks or anything on her feet. She walked towards the control panel and…
“Did she just—”
“Select a few floors?” Annie said. “Yeah. But wait. It gets weirder.”
Brian watched as the lights of the floors Elaine had selected lit up. The door started to close.
Then it stopped.
“Why’s it stopped?”
“Just watch.”
Brian saw Elaine’s confusion. He saw her waiting for the door to close, and he felt like he was in that lift with her.
Then she stepped towards the lift door. She leaned forward, peeking her head through it. She looked in both directions to see if anyone was there.
When she looked to the left, she quickly pulled back and cowered close to the wall beside the control panel.
Brian watched as Elaine stood there. He could see the fear on her face. He looked outside the lift, the footage grainy and pixelated. “She’s hiding from someone.”
“There’s no trace of anyone.”
“There… there has to be someone.”
“Brian, there’s no trace.”
Brian didn’t argue any longer. He focused on the video.
The lift door stayed open. A few seconds later, Elaine walked over to the door and stood right between it. She looked to the left, then to the right again.
Then she suddenly disappeared.
“Where’d she…”
Brian saw her appear again then. She walked back inside the lift and bashed the control panel. Brian could see and feel her frustration.
“She just disappeared then.”
“She went outside to look then stepped back in.”
“No. The footage. It just skipped.”
“It’s pixelated. Brian, just watch, for God’s sakes.”
After pushing the many buttons, the door still not budging, Elaine stepped back out of the lift and put both of her hands over her ears. Brian could see she was crying.
The door was still open.
Elaine looked to her right and rubbed her hands together. She scratched at her left elbow, which Brian could see was bleeding. She muttered things under her breath, but her words were pixelated as she to-d and fro-d around outside the open lift door.
Then she started jumping up and down on the spot. Squatting and kicking at the floor.
Brian felt his heart thumping hard.
She kicked at the floor a little longer, scratched at her elbow, messed up her hair.
Then she jumped and spun around.
She looked over her shoulder at something. Like something had snapped her out of her angry trance.
The lift door started to close.
Elaine opened her mouth to say something.
The lift door closed and the footage ended.
Brian sat silent after the footage ended. It’d given him a serious case of the creeps. But still it left him with more questions than answers.
“Well?”
“She… she saw something. She was snapped out of her trance right at the end.”
“She looked over at the door that leads to the roof,” Annie said.
“So someone came out of there. Someone opened that door.”
“Possibly. And she sneaked in there before it closed.”
Brian shook his head. “She sneaked in there and went through both doors? No chance. Besides, apparently nobody was up there two weeks ago. She saw something. Something coming through those doors.”
“Brian, she was having a psychotic episode.”
A bitter taste filled Brian’s mouth as the footage started to roll again. “The footage. It just doesn’t… Something seems off about it.”
“Everything seems off to you lately. What’s got into you?”
“She’s hiding from someone. Then she vanishes outside and appears back in the lift again in a flash.”
“It’s dodgy old fucking CCTV. There’s bound to be blackout moments.”
“The lift door. Why doesn’t it close?”
Annie puffed her lips out. “You’re saying you’ve never had a problem with a malfunctioning lift before?”
“Not minutes before my death, no.”
Annie leaned towards Brian. “Look, I know you think you’ve got something here, but you haven’t. I’d love to push forward with this too, but what do we have, seriously?”
“We’ve got footage.”
“We’ve got hunches. Hunches don’t beat evidence. Pathologists concluded Elaine’s death was accidental. Nothing at the scene or in Elaine’s life suggests anything otherwise.”
“Plenty suggests otherwise,” Brian said, but his tone was deflated and defeated.
“You need to let it go, Brian. Obviously we’ll continue to go about normal procedure, speak with people from the hotel to see if they can shed any light on Elaine’s final moments. But you’re barking up the wrong tree here. Seriously.”
Annie stood and walked out of the CCTV room.
Brian turned and looked at the footage playing on a loop.
He saw Elaine thrashing and kicking at the floor.
