فصل 34

34

ERIN

The boy—Josh—was standing outside the house when we arrived, like a little soldier on guard, pale and watchful. He greeted the DI politely, looking more suspiciously at me. He was holding a Swiss Army knife in his hands, his fingers working nervously around the blade as he opened and closed it.

“Is your mum in, Josh?” Sean asked him, and he nodded.

“Why do you want to talk to us again?” he asked, his voice rising with a sharp squeak. He cleared his throat.

“We just need to check a couple of things,” Sean said. “It’s nothing to worry about.”

“She was in bed,” Josh announced, his eyes flicking from Sean’s face to mine. “That night. Mum was asleep. We were all asleep.”

“What night?” I asked. “What night was that, Josh?”

He blushed and looked down at his hands and fiddled with his knife. A little boy who hadn’t learned yet how to lie.

His mother opened the door behind him. She looked from me to Sean and sighed, rubbing her fingers over her brows. Her face was the colour of weak tea, and when she turned to talk to her son I noticed that her back was hunched, like an old woman. She beckoned him to her, speaking quietly.

“But what if they want to talk to me, too?” I heard him asking.

She placed her hands firmly on his shoulders. “They won’t, darling,” she said. “Off you go.”

Josh closed his knife and slipped it into his jeans pocket, his eyes on mine as he did. I smiled and he turned away, walking quickly down the path, glancing back just once as his mother was pulling the door closed behind us.

I followed Louise and Sean into a big, bright living room leading out into one of those boxy modern conservatories that seem to make the house bleed seamlessly into the garden. Outside, I could see a wooden hutch on the lawn and bantams, pretty black-and-white and golden hens, scratching around for food. Louise indicated for us to sit on the sofa. She lowered herself into the armchair opposite, slowly and carefully, like someone recovering from an injury, afraid of inflicting more damage.

“So,” she said, raising her chin slightly as she looked at Sean. “What have you got to tell me?”

He explained that the new blood tests gave the same results as the original ones: there were no traces of drugs in Katie’s system.

Louise listened, shaking her head in clear disbelief. “But you don’t know, do you, how long that sort of drug stays in the system? Or how long it takes for the effects to manifest or to wear off? You can’t dismiss this, Sean—”

“We’re dismissing nothing, Louise,” he said evenly. “All I’m telling you is what we have found.”

“Surely . . . well, surely supplying illegal drugs to someone—to a child—is an offence, in any case? I know . . .” She grazed her teeth over her lower lip. “I know it’s too late to punish her, but it should be made known, don’t you think? What she did?”

Sean said nothing. I cleared my throat and Louise glared at me as I began to speak.

“From what we’ve discovered, Mrs. Whittaker, regarding the timing of the purchase of the pills, Nel could not have purchased them. Although her credit card was used, it—”

“What are you suggesting?” Her voice rose angrily. “Now you’re saying Katie stole her credit card?”

“No, no,” I said. “We’re not saying anything of the sort . . .”

Her face changed as realization dawned on her. “Lena,” she said, leaning back in her chair, her mouth fixed in grim resignation. “Lena did it.”

We didn’t know that for sure either, Sean explained, though we would certainly be questioning her about it. In fact, she was due to visit the station that afternoon. He asked Louise whether she’d found anything else of concern amongst Katie’s possessions. Louise dismissed the question bluntly. “This is it,” she said, leaning forward. “Can’t you see that? You combine the pills and this place and the fact that Katie spent so much time round at the Abbotts’, surrounded by all those pictures and those stories, and . . .” She tailed off. Even she didn’t seem entirely convinced by the story she was telling. Because even if she was right, and even if those pills had made her daughter depressed, none of it changed the fact that she hadn’t noticed.

I didn’t say that, of course, because what I had to ask was difficult enough. Louise was hauling herself to her feet, assuming our meeting to be over, expecting us to leave, and I had to stop her.

“There’s something else we need to ask you about,” I said.

“Yes?” She remained standing, her arms crossed over her chest.

“We wondered if you would be prepared to let us take your fingerprints.”

She interrupted before I could explain. “What for? Why?”

Sean shifted uneasily in his chair. “Louise, we have a matching print from the pill bottle you gave me and from one of Nel Abbott’s cameras, and we need to establish why. That’s all.”

Louise sat back down. “Well, they’re probably Nel’s,” she said. “Wouldn’t you imagine?”

“They’re not Nel’s,” I replied. “We’ve checked. They’re not your daughter’s either.”

She flinched at that. “Of course they’re not Katie’s. What would Katie be doing with the camera?” She pursed her lips, raising her hand to the chain around her neck, running the little blue bird back and forth. She sighed heavily. “Well, they’re mine, of course,” she said. “They’re mine.”

It happened three days after her daughter died, she told us. “I went to Nel Abbott’s house. I was . . . well, I doubt you can imagine the state I was in, but you can try. I beat on her front door, but she wouldn’t come out. I wouldn’t give up, I just stayed there, pounding on the door and calling out for her, and eventually,” she said, sweeping a strand of hair from her face, “Lena opened the door. She was crying, sobbing, practically hysterical. It was quite a scene.” She tried and failed to smile. “I said some things to her—cruel things, I suppose, in retrospect, but . . .”

“What sort of things?” I asked.

“I . . . I don’t really remember the details.” Her composure was starting to slip, her breath shortening, her hands gripping the sides of her armchair, the effort turning the olive skin over her knuckles to yellow. “Nel must have heard me. She came outside and told me to leave them alone. She said . . .”—Louise gave a yelping laugh—“she said that she was sorry for my loss. She was sorry for my loss, but it had nothing to do with her, nothing to do with her daughter. Lena was on the ground, I remember that, she was making a noise like . . . like an animal. A wounded animal.” She paused to catch her breath before continuing. “We argued, Nel and I. It was rather violent.” She half smiled at Sean. “You’re surprised? You’ve not heard this before? I thought Nel would have told you about it—or Lena, at least. Yes, I . . . well, I didn’t hit her, but I lunged at her, and she held me off. I demanded to see the footage from her camera. I wanted . . . I didn’t want to see it, but I wanted more than anything for her not to have . . . I couldn’t bear . . .”

Louise broke down.

Watching someone in the throes of raw grief is a terrible thing; the act of watching feels violent, intrusive, a violation. Yet we do it, we have to do it, all the time; you just have to learn to cope with it whatever way you can. Sean coped by bowing his head and remaining very still. I coped with distraction: I watched the chickens scratching around on the lawn outside the window. I looked at the bookshelves, my eyes passing over worthy contemporary novels and military history books; I took in the framed pictures above the fireplace. The wedding photo and the family shot and the photograph of a baby. Just one, a little boy in blue. Where was Katie’s picture? I tried to imagine what it would feel like to take the framed picture of your child down from its place of pride and put it in a drawer. When I looked over at Sean, I saw that his head was no longer bent; he was glowering at me. I realized that there was a tapping sound in the room and that it was coming from me, the sound of my pen knocking against my notepad. I wasn’t doing it deliberately. I was shaking all over.

After what seemed like a very long time, Louise spoke again. “I couldn’t bear for Nel to be the last one to see my child. She told me there was no footage, that the camera wasn’t working, that even if it had been, it was up on the cliff, so it wouldn’t have . . . wouldn’t have captured her.” She heaved a huge sigh, a shudder working itself through her entire body, from her shoulders to her knees. “I didn’t believe her. I couldn’t risk it. What if there was something on camera and she used it? What if she showed my girl to the world, alone and frightened and . . .” She stopped and took a deep breath. “I told her . . . Lena must have told you all this? I told her that I wouldn’t rest until I saw her pay for what she’d done. Then I left. I went to the cliff and tried to open the camera to get the SD card out of it, but I couldn’t. I tried to break it free from its mount, I ripped my fingernail out doing so.” She held up her left hand—the nail of her forefinger was stunted and buckled. “I kicked it a few times, I smashed at it with a stone. Then I went home.”