The Split

by Sharon Bolton

  ‘Sorry,’ she says to her son, when she has announced herself at reception and she and Joe are on their way to the place where the dead are stored. ‘There wasn’t anyone else.’

  ‘How was she found?’ There is no doubt in Joe’s mind that he is about to identify Dora.

  ‘Unusual flooding down at the Mill Pool off Silver Street,’ his mother says, ‘even allowing for how much snow we’ve had. The Environment Agency suspected a blocked storm drain and sent some equipment in to clear it. They pulled out Dora.’

  ‘Do they know how long she’d been down there?’

  His mother’s face is grim. ‘A while.’

  In a brightly lit examination room they are met by a lab technician. Expecting to see a human form beneath a white sheet, Joe is puzzled by what lies on the central steel table.

  ‘Clothes?’

  ‘You don’t need to see the body,’ Delilah replies. ‘There’s very little of her left, and nothing recognizable. If you can identify the clothes, that will be enough.’

  Ashamed of how relieved he feels, Joe steps closer. The green woollen duffle coat has not had chance to dry out but he knows it is Dora’s. The toggle buttons are exactly as he remembers. The blue beret is Dora’s, as are the Wellington boots. He is less sure about the dress but the blue sweatshirt carries a worn picture of Elsa, the heroine from Frozen.

  ‘These are Dora’s clothes,’ he says.

  ‘How sure are you?’ his mother asks.

  Joe looks sadly at the thick silver plait, the wry smile, the form-hugging blue dress of the Disney princess. ‘One hundred per cent.’

  ‘There was a wrapper from a packet of chocolate buttons in one pocket,’ the lab technician tells him.

  ‘Dora,’ says Joe.

  ‘There’s also this.’ The technician holds up a plastic evidence bag with a small slip of card inside. Joe takes the bag and sees one of his own visiting cards. On the reverse, he’d written, 8.20pm, Tuesday.

  ‘She liked to have appointment cards,’ he says. ‘I gave her one every time I saw her.’

  ‘We found them in another pocket,’ the lab assistant says. ‘Wet through and stuck together. Looks like she kept them all.’

  ‘This one gives us a good idea of when she died,’ Delilah says. ‘She obviously intended to keep that appointment with you.’

  ‘She never missed,’ Joe says.

  His mum reaches out, as though to pat his shoulder, and thinks better of it. Her hand falls back to her side. ‘So, if you can confirm when you last saw her, and what Tuesday that card refers to, we’ve got a window.’

  Joe finds the calendar on his phone. ‘Twenty-third of July,’ he says. ‘That’s when I last saw her. That appointment is for the thirtieth, seven days later. Do you know how she died?

  ‘We’re waiting for the results of the post-mortem,’ Delilah says. ‘But given the state of the body we might never know.’

  ‘Could it have been an accident?’ Joe asks. All the rough sleepers were running scared last summer. It isn’t impossible that Dora saw the storm drain as a safe refuge for the night.

  His mother and the lab technician exchange a glance.

  ‘Not impossible,’ Delilah says. ‘The master of Peterhouse – a woman, go figure – tells us the drain leads into the old foundations. Peterhouse goes back to the iron age. There are cellars, dungeons for all I know. Someone desperate could have holed up down there.’

  ‘What about her shopping trolley?’ Joe asks. ‘I never saw her without it.’

  Dora might have taken refuge in a storm drain. She would never have left her trolley behind.

  ‘We haven’t found it yet,’ Delilah says. ‘But the foundations near the river have collapsed at some stage. We need to go slowly because the structure’s so old. And archeologically significant.’

  Joe wonders if his mother is keeping something from him. ‘She could have got stuck,’ he says.

  Delilah pats his arm. ‘You know what, lad. I kind of hope so.’

  * * *

  Snow is falling again as Joe leaves the hospital and the fog-yellow sky suggests there’s more to come. He heads back into town and it takes longer than usual, because everyone slows down for the snow.

  When he’s finished for the day, he goes out for a walk, crossing the river at the same time as a crocodile of school boys clad in top hats, cloaks and purple and white scarves. The choristers are making their daily journey from the choir school to the chapel for evensong, and the snow is irresistible. They dart about, hurling snowballs at each other, at the master, into the river. One of them hits Joe on the neck and the boys flee, squealing.

  As Joe heads for home, cold trickling under his collar, he thinks, as he so often does, of a land where the snow is almost constant. He has heard nothing from Felicity since she left for South Georgia. He’d hoped for, expected even, an email or two, letting him know she’d arrived safely, but nothing. He thinks perhaps he might rent Frozen this evening, open a bottle of red wine, and let himself cry.

  * * *

  Delilah phones him at six o’clock. ‘This isn’t public knowledge, so keep your mouth shut, but the poor old love didn’t die of natural causes and it wasn’t an accidental death.’

  Joe really doesn’t want to know. ‘Go on,’ he says, because he knows he must.

  ‘Three wounds on her lower-left rib cage, compatible with knife marks. She was stabbed in the stomach, at least three times, by someone aiming upwards towards her heart.’

  ‘Christ,’ he says. Poor Dora. What a way to end a life gone wrong.

  ‘And there was a rope round her neck.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I didn’t mention it before because we weren’t sure whether it had killed her or not. Turns out it didn’t, no damage to the neck bones consistent with hanging or extreme strangulation. We think whoever killed her tied the rope round her neck to drag her into the drain.’

  Joe can sense his mother is in a hurry.

  ‘I’ve got to run, love,’ she goes on. ‘I’ve got a press statement five minutes ago. I didn’t want you hearing it on the news.’

  Joe asks, ‘Do you think whoever killed Dora killed Bella Barnes?’

  ‘Two murders of rough sleepers within two months,’ Delilah says. ‘Both abdomen stab wounds. What are the chances of that being coincidence?’

  As Delilah hangs up, Joe thinks of Ezzy Sheeran, a potential third murder victim. The brief flurry of possible sightings over the previous summer ended as quickly as it began, and the police have long since reverted to their missing-presumed-dead conclusion. He wonders if Ezzy, too, is under the city somewhere, waiting to be found.

  Joe turns on the TV to catch his mother’s press conference. There are no photographs of Dora, but Delilah has had an artist produce a drawing of a grey-haired old lady, small and thin, wearing a green coat, blue beret and wellingtons. She pulls along a battered old shopping trolley in a blue-and-red plaid pattern. He feels a moment of pride in his mother. She has got every detail right.

  ‘Dora Hardwick was one of the most vulnerable members of our society,’ Delilah tells the waiting journalists. ‘We should have taken better care of her.’

  Dora would have been tickled pink to see herself on the news.

  * * *

  Delilah turns up at his flat two hours later, her arms laden with Chinese takeaway.

  ‘I’ve eaten,’ he says.

  ‘Good,’ she snaps. ‘I didn’t get you anything. Pass me a plate.’

  In spite of her grumpiness, and her usual appetite, she has brought far too much food for one, so they sit together at Joe’s kitchen table and eat chicken chow mein, Singapore noodles, and sweet and sour pork.

  ‘You need a hobby,’ he tells her. ‘Get you out of the house a bit, give you an interest. It’s not too late to find a boyfriend.’

  ‘Cheeky git.’ She forks up noodles. ‘And look who’s talking.’

  They eat in silence; Joe can’t decide whether it is sad, or sweet, how much the two
of them depend upon each other.

  ‘Did you see me on telly?’ she asks him.

  ‘You looked great,’ he lies. ‘Any leads?’ he adds, without much hope.

  ‘We did the usual appeal for witnesses and information but after seven months?’ Delilah shakes her head.

  ‘Still no news on Shane?’ Joe asks. The prime suspect in the murder of Bella Barnes has proven most adept at avoiding discovery. The darker nights of autumn and winter have only aided his powers of concealment.

  ‘Gone,’ Delilah confirms. ‘If he was ever real in the first place. I tell you, love, my legacy is going to be the unsolved murder of two homeless women and a hunt for a phantom.’

  When she’s eaten, Delilah gets up. ‘Got to get back in,’ she tells him. ‘See if anything’s turned up.’

  Joe walks his mother to her car and she is unusually silent. ‘What’s up?’ he says, as he opens the driver door and wipes a dusting of snow from her windscreen.

  She hovers, half in half out, of the car. ‘Probably nothing,’ she tells him. ‘Probably coincidence.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The two women who were killed, Bella and Dora? What did they have in common?’

  Joe thinks he might laugh if he weren’t so sad. ‘Where do I start? Both rough sleepers. Both suffered physical and mental health problems. Both ridiculously unlucky, in life and death.’

  ‘Yeah.’ His mother gets into the car. ‘And both very keen on you.’

  * * *

  Joe doesn’t sleep much that night. He spends the hours after his mother has left combing the news channels on TV and the internet, looking for information on both murders. He checks his diary for last year to see what he was doing the night Bella was found dead and is worried, but not surprised, to find it was a Friday. He nearly always spends late Friday evenings out in the city, doing the rounds of all the rough sleepers. On that particular night, the seventh of June, he was still officially on sick leave but he’s pretty certain he did go out that night.

  All the time he searches and reads, he is conscious of his unease growing. He does not want to form the word alibi, even in his own mind.

  He remembers the Friday night shortly after he last saw Dora, when he walked the streets checking on the homeless. He’d been afraid, as though sensing something very wrong was happening in the city, and he knows he won’t be at all surprised if that turns out to be the night she died. He goes to bed at midnight and falls into a light doze, only to wake less than an hour later, convinced he has heard someone moving around in his flat. Sweating in spite of the chill he checks each room. Finding nothing doesn’t reassure him.

  The night seems to last forever. Finally, when the emerging sun casts a blood-red cloak over the pale and shivering city, he gives up trying to sleep. He makes coffee, sits at his window and waits. The call arrives shortly before nine in the morning. His mother is sending a car for him and he is wanted at the police station, immediately.

  61

  Joe

  For once, Delilah isn’t waiting in reception. Joe gives his name at the desk and a detective he doesn’t know leads him to an interview room where a young woman is waiting. She introduces herself as a detective sergeant and he immediately forgets her name. She has dull brown hair tied back in a ponytail and wears a dark-blue suit with a white shirt. There is not a single feature, on her face, body or clothes, that strikes him as memorable.

  Recording equipment is switched on and both detectives give their names for the tape. Both names strike Joe as being entirely bland and he makes no further attempt to remember them.

  Over the sergeant’s shoulder there is a large mirror. Joe looks into it and feels sure his mother is on the other side. He tries to remember what she has told him about how people behave in police interviews, what the right things to do are, and what will suggest his guilt. He wonders when, exactly, he started to apply the word guilt to himself.

  The questions begin. He is asked about his relationship with Dora Hardwick, how long he knew her, how often he saw her, what they talked about, whether they’d had any falling out. He answers fully and frankly and knows that this is only the beginning. The two detectives take turns, and when he is certain they cannot possibly ask him anything more about Dora, they switch to Bella.

  ‘And you’re paid nothing for all this time you spend counselling homeless people?’ the sergeant asks, when they’ve exhausted the Bella-related questions.

  ‘You can’t take money from people who don’t have it,’ Joe tells them.

  At a nod from his sergeant, the constable switches on a wall-mounted screen.

  ‘We were lucky in our TV appeal,’ the sergeant says. ‘A hardware shop on Fitzroy Street archives all its CCTV footage and they went back to the period shortly after the last known sighting of Dora Hardwick.’

  The footage starts to play. Joe can read the date in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, but the constable confirms it for him all the same.

  ‘This is Friday the twenty-sixth of July, eight thirty in the evening,’ he says. ‘Three days after your last appointment with her in the church hall.’

  The scene is a Cambridge city street, not far from where Felicity lives. Joe watches three students walk along the pavement closest to the shop and a West Indian woman push a baby stroller in the opposite direction before Dora appears.

  ‘That’s Dora,’ he confirms, and then finally they ask him the question that counts.

  The sergeant says, ‘Can you tell me where you were on the night of Friday the twenty-sixth of July?’

  ‘I was out walking the streets,’ Joe replies. ‘Looking for the homeless.’

  * * *

  He is left alone. He realises, after several seconds, that he is sitting with his head in his hands.

  He feels as though his whole life has been building up to this – the moment when everything falls apart – and yet he has no idea what he could have done differently. Ezzy? He’d just wanted to help her. Bella too. It is not entirely impossible, he realises, that he will be charged with murder. It will break his mum. And his kids. Sarah will have to take them out of the city.

  The door opens. Expecting the forgettable sergeant and her unmemorable sidekick he is surprised to see Delilah clutching two steaming mugs. Another detective follows with a plate of custard creams and both take their seats. Delilah gives a heavy sigh and can’t meet her son’s eyes. Joe looks at the biscuits and thinks, as last meals go, this one sucks.

  He waits to see if they have actually sent his mother to charge him. It seems beyond cruel, although he wouldn’t put it past her to volunteer for the job, to prove she was entirely incorruptible.

  ‘What happens now?’ He wonders if this might be the moment when he accepts, once and for all, that his mum can’t make everything right.

  ‘We have a cup of tea,’ she says. ‘I put sugar in. I know you don’t take it, but you look like you need it. Biscuit?’

  She can’t seem to look at him, but he does what he is told. The biscuit is stale and he takes a childish pleasure in putting it down on the table with only a bite missing.

  ‘We tracked down Dora’s shopping trolley,’ Delilah says. ‘We got a call first thing from a student who worked at the punt hire place on Silver Street last summer. He remembers finding one exactly like it in a punt early one morning. It was put in lost property and disposed of at the end of the season.’

  ‘He checked the lost property log for us,’ the other detective adds. ‘It was found on the morning of Saturday the twenty-seventh of July, meaning it was left there sometime the previous night.’

  ‘Probably thrown from Silver Street Bridge, intending to go into the water,’ Delilah adds. ‘Bad luck for the killer that it landed on a punt.’

  ‘When you add it to the last sighting of Dora on Friday the twenty-sixth, it does suggest that was the night she was killed,’ the other detective says.

  Joe can’t argue with any of that. And he is tired of pussyfooting around.

>   ‘Come on then.’ He leans back in his chair, affecting a nonchalance he certainly doesn’t feel. ‘Let’s get it over with.’

  Delilah and her colleague share a puzzled look. ‘Get what over with?’ she says.

  ‘Arrest me. Charge me. Whatever it is you want to do.’

  ‘Why would we charge you?’ his mother asks.

  A split second later, the other detective asks, ‘Do you want to confess to something?’

  ‘No,’ Joe insists. ‘I thought you were going to charge me with Dora’s murder.’

  ‘God no.’ His mother looks shocked. ‘You were being interviewed as a witness, not a suspect, and obviously I couldn’t be involved in that. Jesus save us, do you think I’d let you be interviewed under caution without a solicitor?’

  The relief has hardly begun to wash over Joe when he realises there is more to come. He is not a suspect. That should be good news. Yet somehow—

  ‘You haven’t realised the significance of the date, have you?’ his mother says, in an unusually gentle voice.

  What date? Today’s date?

  ‘Friday twenty-sixth of July – the night Dora Hardwick was almost certainly murdered – is also the night Felicity Lloyd was seen running through the streets of Cambridge covered in blood,’ the detective says.

  ‘Bella Barnes was found dead close to midnight on Friday the seventh of June,’ the other detective adds. ‘That same evening, Dr Lloyd was admitted to hospital with numerous minor injuries and unable to account for her movements.’

  ‘You’re not a suspect, love,’ his mother says. ‘But she is.’

  There is a knock on the door. ‘Got the results back, Delilah.’ A young uniformed copper pokes his head into the room. Delilah opens the file and takes several minutes to read what she finds inside.