by Alice Castle
Meanwhile, Mum was away again. It had been a boooring week. She’d been stuck at home with the au-frigging-pair, her kid brother, and a dad who worked such long hours at the hospital that sometimes she almost didn’t recognise him when they coincided at the breakfast table. Just because he was some big-shot surgeon. Well, he might be saving all those mangled people, sewing on legs or whatever – and she felt for his patients, she really did – but poor little Matthew would have loved a game of football in the garden. She didn’t care any more, she was used to it. And anyway, she was too busy now to worry about her parents and all the mistakes they were making. She had to keep her public happy.
Suddenly her blank, pale face lit up, her mouth flicking up at the corners in that characteristic way that had launched ten thousand posts. She’d just had a brainwave. If she’d got that many likes for just a straight shot in the dress, how about if she pulled the straps down, accidentally on purpose, and leant forward – with her special smile, too, of course. That would really get them going.
***
‘Oh my God, she’s alive. Call an ambulance!’ Beth shouted, dashing forward and kneeling at the girl’s side. There was silence behind her. Beth turned round, where the gallery assistant was still standing, stock still, knuckles in her mouth. ‘Ring the police!’ she yelled again, then turned back to the girl.
Beth grabbed her hand, knew she should be feeling for a pulse, but the cool skin defeated her and she couldn’t remember which bits of the wrist to press. She gave up and shook the girl gently instead. Maybe she’d just wake up, say it was all a joke? To her horror, the slight form slithered all of a piece from side to side on its marble slab, and she stopped. The last thing she wanted was to knock the poor girl off her plinth and do more damage. She leaned over her, touching her face, which was still faintly warm, thank goodness.
‘Can you hear me?’ Beth said urgently. ‘Are you ok? Can you wake up?’ At the same time, she was fishing in her bag for her phone, which as ever was hiding under a heap of jumbled junk and hoping for a quiet life. With one hand, she chucked the contents of the bag out onto the floor and picked out the phone, prodding the three 9s with shaking fingers. The other hand she kept around the girl’s face, patting her cheeks, feeling her forehead – though that was ridiculous. Was she thinking she might have a slight fever, like Ben with an ear infection? Was she going to dose her up with Calpol and send her on her way?
Beth turned, exasperated, to bark at the gallery assistant. ‘Is there anybody else here? Anyone who can help?’ Beth was just being treated to a trembling shrug when her call connected. ‘Which service? Um, ambulance? Please, as quickly as you can. Yes, it’s Wyatt’s Picture Gallery, Wyatt’s Road, Dulwich, you know, the first proper picture gallery in the UK…’ She was rambling, and she mentally slapped herself round the chops. There was no way the emergency operator needed a history lesson.
‘Look, there’s a girl here, she’s unconscious, I can’t get her to come round… I don’t know what it is… yes, she could have taken something, I have no idea what… how old is she? Um, well, I’d guess she’s in her teens… do we want the police? Um, well, yes… though, hang on, no, I’ll ring the police myself. If you could send an ambulance as quickly as possible… I don’t like the way she won’t come round. Something’s wrong.’
Replaying the conversation in her head later, Beth thought how ridiculous she had sounded. Of course, something was wrong. You didn’t just happen across moribund teenagers every day of the week, especially in a place like Dulwich. And the way the body – no, the girl, she was alive – had been posed? That was just plain weird. Someone had a sick sense of humour. Or a degree in art history. Maybe both.
The idea of explaining all this to the police made Beth’s heart sink. She needed someone who knew the place a bit, who could understand that there was more to this than just some stupid teenage game that had gone wrong. Before she knew it, Beth was scrolling back in her call history with an unsteady hand, until she found the number she was looking for. She pressed dial.
The phone rang out, and a deep voice clicked on. Beth started to speak, then realised it was just an answering machine. Should she leave a message, or just ring 999 again? She was pondering it when she realised she was pretty sure the girl’s skin was feeling cooler. They had to keep her warm. It might be sunny in Dulwich, but it was cold as the grave in here. Beth whipped off her cardigan and draped it round the girl. ‘Do you have any blankets? Anything to keep her warm?’ she asked the assistant. ‘Did you bring a jacket in this morning? Anything at all?’
The girl’s cluelessness was beginning to exasperate Beth. ‘Ok then, go to the gift shop, get any scarves, tea towels, there must be loads left over from the Vanessa Bell exhibition, whatever you can find. And a cushion, if there is one.’
Beth was almost sorry she’d sent the girl off, listening to her slightly flat feet slapping across the parquet flooring as she ran the length of the gallery to the gift shop. Alone in the niche, with the scarcely-breathing girl lying so still, Beth realised what an enormously successful bit of mortuary design she was kneeling in. The cold marble beneath the girl must be leaching all the warmth from her body, while the sepulchral stillness of her three long-dead companions seemed to beckon her to join them.
Well, not on my watch, thought Beth. She clasped the cold, splayed fingers in her own warm ones, and chafed them as best she could, breathing on them to try and chase away the deadly chill. She kept up a constant stream of babbling chat, though she was useless at small talk at the best of times, and this was hardly that. Should she be trying to walk up and down with the girl, as you sometimes saw in hospital dramas? She wasn’t sure she should attempt it. For a start, the girl might have broken bones – and Beth wasn’t sure if she could support her, anyway. Though the girl was thin to the point of emaciation, Beth could see she was tall – certainly taller than her.
While she was lying so still, Beth had a perfect chance to have a good look at her. She was beautiful, and much younger than Beth had first thought; little more than a child. Her skin was translucent, the Anglo Saxon, skimmed milk type, dead white with a blue tinge, veins traced over her eyelids and at her temples, the colouring Beth associated with naturally blonde or sandy hair. The eyelashes, extravagantly fanned out on the girl’s cheeks, as Ben’s had been as a sleeping baby, had been inexpertly encrusted with thick mascara, while the eyeliner edging the lids was smeared. When she woke up, she’d have panda eyes. When? If.
The girl screamed youth, dressed up to ape something more sophisticated, in her party dress. Beth could see that the delicate straps of the dress were silk, as was the lining which was, eerily, the same ice-blue as Mrs Moody’s extravagant frock. The girl’s chest was barely moving now. It was heartbreakingly sad, to see her lying here. Beth felt the desperation of sheer panic. She was going to die. What should she do?
The phone broke into her worries. Automatically, she clamped it to her ear. ‘Hello?’
Immediately, a deep voice filled her ear. ‘Harry York here.’ Her immediate feeling was one of relief. At last, here was someone who could help her, take a bit of this burden off her shoulders. The gallery assistant was worse than useless, and there seemed – incredibly – to be not another soul in the place. Weren’t there supposed to be curators, guards; a boss, even? It seemed a bit bizarre that she and a work experience girl should still have the run of the place. And, apart from anything else, she had to get in to work sometime today.
‘Inspector York, thank God it’s you.’
There was silence for a beat. She could forgive DI York of the Metropolitan Police for being surprised to hear from her. When they had last met, a few months ago, there had been, well, a heated exchange. From Beth’s point of view, Harry York had been much too willing to accept that some mysteries could never be solved. As she had been one of the prime suspects in a bloody murder, she hadn’t been nearly as sanguine as he about the case languishing on the Met’s books, and had nearly got herself ki
lled while trying to wrap things up neatly and clear her name. York had given her what he described as a firm talking-to – and what she remembered as a massive, shouty dressing-down.
But this was no time to worry about social gaffes, and the wisdom of revisiting painful scenes. Beth needed someone useful at her side and, annoying and insufferable though he certainly was, she’d never had cause to doubt York’s essential good qualities. He might be too much of a pragmatist, in her view, but he was the best police officer she knew. Ok, the only police officer she really knew. But, after the last investigation, he was wise in the ways of Dulwich, and that counted for a lot.
‘Beth, er, Miss Haldane. Your voice sounds odd. What’s going on there? How can I help?’
‘I’ve found a body…’
Immediately, York groaned.
‘But listen, it’s not like that! This time, she’s alive. Well, at the moment,’ said Beth, her gaze going again to the girl lying on the slab. She was very, very pale. And still as death.
‘Right. I’m on my way.’
***
Harry York had a polystyrene cup containing alleged coffee in each hand as he strode down the corridor of the police station in Camberwell. He had to hand it to Beth, she managed to stumble across some top crime scenes. This one, complete with a teenager in clubbing gear draped over a coffin, was spectacular by any account.
The girl had been shipped off to the A & E at King’s College Hospital, with the paramedics shaking their heads gravely even before they tried to drive her two miles across London. This journey made squeezing a camel through the eye of a needle seem a doddle, as they contended with crazed Uber drivers; kamikaze Deliveroo cyclists; joggers darting across the road whenever the mood took them, as though their quest for fitness raised them above the mere highway code; not to mention the lumbering red buses; and, of course, a whole bunch of mothers crashing around in Chelsea tractors they could hardly control.
It hadn’t been much easier getting Beth and the dippy intern over to the police station. First, they’d had to winkle the rest of the gallery staff out of a hush-hush meeting in the new wing of the place, then Beth had had to square her absence with the school, then they’d had to drive to Camberwell. It had all been a lot easier when Dulwich Hospital had its own casualty department and there’d been a police station in Lordship Lane. The cuts. York was beginning to feel like his own stepfather, who sat in a chair all day complaining about the world. But really. This case was going to be hell to deal with, without the victim perishing as a result of the government’s austerity programme.
***
York pushed open the door of the interview room with his foot, and deposited the two cups on the table. Beth, who’d been sitting nervously in the featureless room, with its institutional yellow-painted walls and unlovely lino floor, was just glad there wasn’t a two-way mirror anywhere. She knew from hopeless addiction to cop shows that if there was, a team would be sitting in an adjoining room dissecting her every move, discussing whether her fidgeting made her guilty, or just desperate for the loo… but she wasn’t a suspect. She wasn’t even ‘helping the police with their enquiries’, or whatever the euphemism was. She had just stumbled into something. Again.
She smiled her thanks for the coffee, saw the contents of the cup and sniffed a little suspiciously. She took a sip and smiled again, bravely this time. York pushed his own cup away.
‘So. Here we are again.’ York fixed Beth with a cross blue stare, and she felt obscurely guilty. Then she thought better of it – it really wasn’t her fault that she’d run across the girl today. And, in a way, thank God she had. The longer the child had been left there – and chilling wasn’t the right word, but it had popped into her head and wouldn’t go away – chilling in the mausoleum, the worse her chances would have been. At least Beth had raised the alarm and got her off for some treatment.
She sat up a little straighter and decisively flicked her fringe out of the way. It swung back as inexorably as a fire door, but Beth had made her point. She wasn’t going to apologise, again, for being in the wrong place. Maybe she’d actually been in the right place this time.
‘We’ve got your fingerprints on file from last time. Just run me through your reasons for being in the gallery?’
Beth thought for a moment. She was already feeling defensive, thinking she should come up with valid reasons for being in the place… but stuff that. She had as much right as anyone with a Friends’ pass to pop by.
‘Well, mostly, my only reason for being there is that I love the Picture Gallery,’ said Beth, shrugging. ‘Simple as that, really. I’d gone to pick up some stuff from the Village before work, but it was such a lovely day… I found myself walking to the Gallery gardens, then I thought I’d just take a quick peek while the place was really quiet… there was no-one there at all, apart from the girl on the desk. Tricia Stroud, I think she said her name was…’
York grimaced slightly. Of course, Beth thought. He’d just come from trying to make some sense of Tricia’s scrambled account of events.
‘I was just going to look in on a few friends and then get on with the day…’ Beth went on.
‘Sorry, friends? I thought you said there was no-one there?’ York broke in.
She blushed. ‘Oh. Well, some of the pictures. I’ve been visiting them since I was a little girl. I think of some of them as… friends. Sorry, that sounds so lame. Well, you get called a Friend of the Gallery, and that kind of makes you friends with the pictures…’ she tailed off.
York turned a smile into a cough. Beth could just imagine how twee he thought she was being, and so completely Dulwich, too. While she might consider herself one of the saner residents of the borough, she did have the time, during the working day, to commune with artworks when she felt like it.
‘I bet you wish you had that sort of job,’ she smiled ruefully.
He met her eye and laughed. ‘More free time would definitely be good. But art galleries? To be honest, probably not. They remind me of school trips – or visits with my boring aunt that were supposed to be ‘improving’, but only helped my daydreaming. I can’t image wanting to see a picture.’
‘They lift my spirits,’ said Beth, simply.
‘Not this time,’ said York with some irony.
‘Well, it wasn’t the pictures’ fault,’ said Beth protectively. ‘It’s whoever played that evil joke.’
‘A joke? Is that what you think it was?’
‘Well, maybe. It’s just that she was arranged… artistically, for want of a better word. Her hands were posed. The way she was lying. The place she’d been put.’
‘You don’t think she just lay down there herself?’
‘I can’t think how she would get in. You’d know all that better than me, how easy it is to get into the gallery, whether she was on camera and so on. But she was so still, so out of it… when I saw her anyway. I don’t think she can have walked far, can she? Her feet were bare.’
York sat back in his chair, ignoring its creaks. It seemed to be one of those ancient plastic seats that protested too much – they might sound as though they were falling apart but they had years of loud, uncomfortable service in them yet to come.
‘How did she get in there, that’s the question? And what on earth was she doing last night?’ York mused.
‘Isn’t there another question we should be asking?’ said Beth.
‘What’s that?’ York said.
‘Well, isn’t it obvious?’ Beth said. ‘Who is she?’
‘You didn’t recognise her?’
‘No, not at all. I was with her for a while before the ambulance crew came, and I’m sure I’ve never seen her before. Such a beautiful girl, though… I hope she’ll be ok?’
York ignored the note of enquiry. ‘You don’t recognise her at all?’
‘No, should I?’ asked Beth. ‘It looks like she’d been to a party… there must be some parents out there going nuts that she’s not home. Has anyone reported her missing?’
York gave her an old-fashioned look. As usual, he seemed to have no intention of sharing any knowledge with Beth. Useful though she may turn out to be in this investigation, she could see that she wouldn’t be allowed to forget for one instant that her role was to provide him with nuggets of information. Not the other way around.
‘Do you know much about the party scene here? For teenagers?’ York asked her.
Beth shrugged again. ‘Well, Ben’s only little still, and I’m much too old. So, no, not really. I mean, I know that parties go on… some of the mums with older children talk about them. But thank goodness, I don’t have to worry about that stuff yet.’
‘That stuff? What’s ‘that stuff’?’ said York, leaning forward a little, to a symphony of protest from his chair.
‘Well, I suppose, underage drinking. Being out late. Even drugs…’
‘Is there much of a drug scene in Dulwich?’ said York, incredulous. Despite herself, Beth felt a little stung. While no-one wanted junkies lolling outside Romeo Jones, the Village’s chichi café-cum-deli, that wasn’t to say that Dulwich was such an unsophisticated backwater that they couldn’t get drugs if they wanted them.
‘I wouldn’t say the place is awash, but if you think about it, we are in London. It’s only a few minutes into the centre on the train, then there’s plenty of drugs if you know where to find them. And alcohol, well, that’s even easier to get.’
‘Is it easy? That girl definitely looked under-age to me.’
‘She did look young, didn’t she? But if you think about it, these kids have money. They have parents who almost certainly drink the odd glass of wine, at least, so they can pinch booze from home. And I’m sure they can buy it. We always used to when I was that age.’
