Watching from the Dark

by Gytha Lodge

  All of it had brought him here, and he felt as though he were poised on the edge of a chasm. The loss of one person he cared about was going to drag every other good thing with it, one by one.

  * * *

  —

  HANSON WAS NOT looking forward to the next few hours, however readily she’d volunteered to accompany the DCI. She’d yet to witness a postmortem and knew she had a high chance of being very ill at some point. But even that might be better than taking Siku and Martin Swardadine to identify the body of their daughter.

  While she and Jonah climbed into the Mondeo, the Swardadines left to find a hotel somewhere nearby, a waiting room where they would kill time until Zoe’s body was ready. Later, they would have to be fingerprinted. They would in all likelihood be questioned further, too. But for the time being, they were only grieving parents.

  Hanson watched the back of Martin’s sleek BMW leave the station car park and then said, “He seems like a pretty manipulative guy, this Aidan Poole. Do you think there’s any truth in what they think?”

  “He’s clearly a liar,” the DCI replied thoughtfully, starting the engine and pulling out onto the main road. “I’ll want to check that he really was Skyping her from home, and look at fingerprints. But I don’t think he’s lying about the murder. That phone call he made…He sounded genuinely terrified. And I can’t see why he’d lie. If he killed her and then went to the effort of making it look like a suicide, why would he then call us and tell us it was murder? It would have been a lot bloody safer to leave everything alone.”

  “I suppose so,” Hanson said, wondering if it was ridiculous to suggest that it was all some kind of a bluff. Did people really do that? And would Aidan Poole be the type? “What about the wife?”

  “We need to talk to him about that,” Sheens answered. “I’m going to ask him to attend voluntarily after we’re back from the mortuary.” He glanced over at Hanson. “It’s OK. You don’t need to be there.”

  “I’d quite like to be, actually,” she said a little awkwardly. “If you don’t mind.”

  “If you genuinely don’t mind wrecking your Friday evening, I’m always happy to have company,” he said.

  “Nothing to wreck,” Hanson replied with a crooked grin. “Friday pub’s off and I’m a sad case with no other plans.”

  “Snap,” Jonah said, and shook his head. “We both seriously need to get a life, Juliette.”

  * * *

  —

  THE MORTUARY WAS not what Hanson had been expecting at all. She wondered whether a diet of American cop shows had given her a slightly warped expectation that it would be all gloom, flickering strip lights, and metal sliding drawers.

  The reality was a softly lit, comforting entrance hall that let onto a room that looked like it belonged in a private hospital. There was little visible through the gap except a few seascapes on one wall, but it seemed neither gloomy nor full of horrors.

  There were two people waiting for them on arrival. The first was the pathologist, who it turned out was called Dr. Peter Shaw. Alongside him was a fortysomething woman, who introduced herself as Pauline and explained that she worked there. Hanson felt clueless. Was she a funeral director of some kind, or just staff there? What would you call that? A mortician? She needed to ask the chief about that.

  “I’m ready to start,” Shaw said. He had a soft voice with a hint of a Scots accent and a habit of ducking his head so that he had to look over his glasses at them. It made him look older than he really was, which Hanson guessed was in his early thirties. He wasn’t much older than she was. How had he become tough enough to cut people up on a regular basis?

  He led them into the rear of the mortuary, which gradually became a little more like what she’d been expecting. The carpeted areas gave onto marbled gray linoleum, and behind one of the doors was a clinical-looking room with a table in the center of it.

  Zoe’s partly covered form lay on it, and Hanson felt a flicker of fear that she wasn’t going to be able to do this. The victim was too real to her, even though she didn’t know her.

  But there was something calming in Shaw’s soft voice as he started to describe what he had done so far.

  “I took several swabs of a substance around the victim’s mouth,” he said. “Those are with your forensic scientist, but I’ve kept one and compared the odor to several other chemicals in similarly small quantities. I’m fairly confident that our traces are of desflurane, which would have rendered her unconscious within seconds if administered effectively.”

  “This would be by a cloth to the face?” the chief asked.

  “Yes,” Shaw agreed.

  “And its effects would have lasted awhile?”

  “Between five and ten minutes,” Shaw said. “It would have taken only around ten minutes for the victim to become unconscious from blood loss, so if she woke up at some point, she would have been disoriented and uncoordinated, and therefore unable to save herself.”

  Which Hanson tried very, very hard not to imagine.

  “On to first observations. Cuts to each forearm have, as first observed, severed the radial artery.” He lifted the right arm gently and rotated it slightly. “The right arm has two cuts, one of which looks like a false start.”

  “Is that common in attacks?”

  “It’s more common in suicides,” Shaw said. “But in a situation where an attacker has planned it and isn’t enraged, it also happens.” He paused over her hands and eventually lifted them to examine them more carefully. “There’s swelling and signs of scabbing on the left knuckle,” he said, and the DCI moved closer to look. “There’s bruising there, too, I think.”

  “Sign that she struggled with her attacker?” Sheens asked.

  Shaw paused, and then said slowly, “Possibly. But given that the cuts on her arms are so clean, it looks unlikely. And there’s grazing with some scabbing. I’d say it’s more likely to have happened earlier in the day.”

  Hanson met the DCI’s eye. “She fought someone earlier?” she asked.

  “Or she fell,” Shaw said, “and caught herself on a balled fist.” He nodded. “But I’ll take swabs anyway. If she did struggle with someone, there’s a chance some of the killer’s DNA made it onto her knuckles or under her nails.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Sheens said.

  * * *

  —

  HANSON WAS SHAKING by the time Shaw called for one of the mortuary assistants to close Zoe’s torso back up again, but she’d made it. She hadn’t been sick while he’d opened the body up to reveal that Zoe’s stomach was empty, and she hadn’t felt like passing out or crying.

  Shaw had finished up his observations by giving them a time of death with an unfortunately wide range. This was thanks to the immersion of the body in water and the lack of food in the stomach to judge amount of digestion from. Zoe had died at some point between late afternoon and the early hours of the morning—a range of hours that did, however, encompass the time that Aidan Poole claimed to have witnessed her attack and also allowed for Felix’s alleged sighting at 8:30 P.M.

  She found herself stuck on those bruises to Zoe’s hand, and on the emptiness of her stomach. She’d died late in the day, having most likely eaten nothing since the day before. Hanson had looked again at Zoe’s angular face and slender limbs and trunk, as dispassionately as she could. And then, outside the room with her gloves peeled off, she had pulled out her phone to look at the web page her DCI had found earlier that day.

  The Zoe pictured there had been round-faced. Curvy. Her smile dimpling. And Hanson wondered quite how she had died with an empty stomach at probably only a little more than half the weight she’d once been.

  * * *

  —

  SIKU AND MARTIN weren’t really taking much in, as far as Hanson could see. Pauline, the mortuary attendant, explained the process, and the DCI added reassuran
ces that they could take their time and back out at any point. But their eyes kept straying to the doorway into the other room, and their expressions were such a complex mixture of dread, longing, resolve, and sadness that it was hard to look at either of them.

  It was Pauline who took them through, and Hanson was glad she wasn’t going back in there with them. She and Sheens sat in the soft chairs of reception instead. Hanson listened while the DCI rang Aidan Poole and asked him, in a flat voice, to attend the station once again, and then sat picking at bits of fluff on her trousers in the silence.

  “You did well in there,” Sheens suddenly said. “I should have said. I had to go and puke during my first postmortem. And then I tried to avoid the next one until the pathologist basically dragged me in.”

  “I hope not puking is a good thing,” Hanson said, pulling a face.

  “Well, either you’re good at keeping it together under tough circumstances,” Sheens said, “or it means you’re a psychopath. But I’m sure there’s a place for you on the team either way.”

  Hanson snorted with laughter, and then suppressed it. It wasn’t appropriate when Zoe’s parents were seeing their daughter’s body. She tried to sit still after that and be somber, even while the adrenaline still running through her made her want to get up and pace.

  Siku emerged first, and although there were tears standing in her eyes, there was also fire in her expression.

  “What’s being done to find out who did this?” Siku asked.

  Sheens stood, and Hanson rose with him. “Everything that needs to be done,” he said with a small nod. “Looking for potential witnesses, searching for CCTV, questioning her acquaintances, and looking for any reason for anyone to do her harm. I’ll do a press conference tomorrow and ask for anyone who thinks they might know anything to come forward.”

  Hanson felt, not for the first time, that it was a relief to have the DCI around. She wasn’t sure how she would have handled that question. Defensively, probably.

  Siku gave a slow nod and then took her husband’s arm. Where she seemed to be all fire, Zoe’s father looked simply shattered. His wife drew him along, away from their only daughter’s body and out into the November evening.

  April—nineteen months before

  Zoe had spent an hour walking without aim or direction. There were furious, hurt conversations playing on repeat in her head. In every one she imagined screaming at Aidan, asking him how he could do this to her. In the better versions of these he would then admit that he was a horrible piece of work and she would walk out. In the worse, weaker ones, he explained that he had already left his wife, and that he’d done it for her. That she was all he’d ever wanted.

  She’d found herself, in that tumultuous hour, standing on a station platform. She knew that she needed to do something with this feeling. Needed to turn it into something. And so she climbed on the train to Winchester and paced the small square of carpet by the doors until it pulled in. She climbed off, and then she was suddenly at the School of Art without being aware of anything except the anger. God knew how she’d crossed any of the roads safely.

  It was quiet in the studio. This early in the summer term, most of the students were still treading water. Drinking. Relaxing. Procrastinating.

  Zoe dropped her bag down in her section, which showed the clutter of a great deal of work. She had filled so many empty hours between messages with painting, and she tried not to think about how she’d wanted to show her current piece to Aidan. She didn’t need him to validate her.

  She’d been so happy with this piece. Something about it put it above anything she’d ever painted. She thought it might be the way she had asked Angeline to pose, with her back arched and one arm over her head, her mouth slightly open. It looked so much like someone in the throes of passion. But it also looked like someone who was tortured by pain.

  She’d only chosen that pose in the exhilarated aftermath of meeting Aidan. Out of hundreds of photographs, it was the one that had spoken to her. And the painting had come together so quickly that she was now all but finished. She’d been adding a background of boiling clouds above and crashing waves against a shore below.

  But looking at it now, she could see that it wasn’t nearly finished. There were hugely important elements missing.

  Well, she could fix that. She would make it the painting it should be, a real piece instead of one based on fantasy. And even as the sight of Angeline’s form made her feel a throb of guilt about that missed call, she started to unpack her paints.

  She squeezed tans, browns, blacks, and vivid reds onto a palette and, with a feeling of strange abandon, began to paint two entirely new figures onto the canvas. The first was shadowy, and it twined itself around the figure of Angeline. It shadowed her where it wrapped around her, but it didn’t blot her out. It lacked form. Realness. But its fingers still twisted through Angeline’s where her arm was stretched out over her head. It was the cause of Angeline’s pose, the other half of a grotesque act of lovemaking.

  It was challenging to add the figure in, but with all the hurt rushing through her she felt no fear of going wrong. It was almost as if nothing mattered, and she might as well listen to the pull within her to do something.

  Once the shadowy figure was finished, she began immediately on a third figure, standing so close to the lovers that she could have reached down to touch them. Another woman as naked as Angeline and as angular, but standing upright, proudly. Smiling. She didn’t seem to notice that the two outstretched hands had opened up a wound in her stomach.

  With a sense of strange delight, Zoe made the cut bloody and horrific. She painted in a layer of fat in the torn flesh, and a glimpse of pale, tangled innards. She used crimson and scarlet with abandon after that, to trace the blood down onto the ground under the woman’s feet.

  It was hours after she had arrived that she stood back to look at it, her breath coming quickly and her heart thundering. Something in her felt immeasurably better now that it was done, even though what she had painted was an image of her own guilt. An image of her and Aidan and the harm they had done to his wife.

  She let her eyes drift over it all, wanting to feel what she had done. She was glad that there were a few other students in the studio with her now, and that they must be able to see this, too. There was a strange satisfaction in feeling the guilt of what she had done unknowingly. But a sense of creeping doubt came over her. It wasn’t quite right yet.

  She angled her head to look at the second woman. At the figure of an imaginary Mrs. Poole. And then she leaned in and smudged and scratched at the half-dry eyes. She had made them a piercing blue, but she realized that that was wrong. She shouldn’t have eyes at all.

  Once she was finished, there was nothing but a flesh-colored smear over the eyes, as if she had been deliberately blinded.

  * * *

  —

  ZOE PACKED UP her paints long after the lights had flickered on outside the building. It was a twilit seven o’clock on a beautiful April evening, and the grounds outside looked a strange, seductive deep blue from the window. She looked out at it and wondered why she didn’t seem to feel anything. She was someone who always noticed beauty.

  Perhaps, she thought, she had wrung herself dry. Or perhaps it was simply that the world didn’t help anyone by being beautiful.

  And then feeling returned to her, but it wasn’t any kind of soothing balm. It was the heavy weight of responsibility she felt toward Angeline, who so badly needed looking after. It was in Angeline’s nature to seek to destroy herself, and Zoe was the only one who could really step in.

  She pulled her phone out and breathed out a long sigh.

  There was music in the background when the call went through. Then Angeline’s voice saying her name, stringing out the second syllable so that it sounded like a celebration.

  “I’m so sorry I missed your call,” Zoe sai
d, wanting to explain but unable to. “Are you out somewhere? Do you need help?”

  “Why didn’t you…come?” Angeline asked.

  There was a squeeze of familiar guilt, and then Zoe felt a strange longing for Angeline to be the one looking after her. For Angeline to cuddle her while she cried her heart out over Aidan.

  “I’m coming now,” she said as lightly as possible. “Tell me where you are, sweetheart. I can come and see if you’re all right.”

  “I’m not telling you where I am,” Angeline sang down the phone at her. And then she was suddenly crying instead, telling Zoe that she was all alone and frightened.

  It took Zoe fifteen minutes to get her to admit that she was in a dockside wine bar called the Zoo, because she’d been kicked out of the lunch place she’d gone to.

  “What lunch place?” Zoe asked.

  “I was supposed to be…to be having lunch with a guy…but he stood me up.”

  Zoe felt doubtful. Who would Angeline have been meeting? Some guy off Tinder? During the day? It seemed a lot more likely that she’d gone somewhere alone, hoping to latch onto someone who might buy her a few drinks.

  Zoe called a cab. Angeline was clearly far gone, and if Zoe messed around with trains and her bike, there was every chance that her friend would end up in trouble. She’d just have to walk to Southampton Station in the morning to pick up her bike.

  The cabdriver wasn’t quite sure where the Zoo was, but they found it in the end. Or at least a board advertising it. It seemed to be accessible only on foot.

  “Will you wait?” Zoe asked, handing him a tenner. “I just need to grab my friend and take her home.”

  “I’m not sure I should be waiting here,” the driver said doubtfully. And then, “I guess I can do a circuit if I have to move.”

  “Thank you,” Zoe said with a warm smile. “I’ll be as quick as I can. Keep the meter running.”