Roxanne, p.7
Roxanne, page 7
Waters half-turned away and took in the scene in front of the parked car. The little river shone like polished pewter in the April sunshine as it made a bend around the clearing in the trees. The water flowed steadily from right to left, and when he looked down into it, there were long tresses of brilliant green weed waving in the current. The bottom was gravel or sand, light golden patches of it in the sunlight, and there was a little beach of the same material. It was easy to picture children paddling here on a hot day, and then he noticed the wooden picnic table, the sort that’s made as a single piece with the benches either side. ‘The family like to use it,’, that’s what the keeper had told Terek, and that’s why the keeper had stopped here. If that was the only reason, and this had happened a month or two ago, the girl might have remained undiscovered for longer – this is a secluded and secret place. And that, he thought, begs a question. How did Roxanne Prescott find it? We’re almost a mile from the main road, along a single-carriageway track in the middle of a private estate…
Detective Inspector Terek was watching him now. As Waters refocused on the present moment, Terek said, ‘I see nothing yet to indicate this is one for the squad,’ as if Waters himself wasn’t a member of the said unit – ‘the squad’ had become shorthand for Freeman’s group of detectives. Waters shrugged, suggesting he didn’t want to argue the point, but then said, ‘We need to know the cause of death, sir. I agree there’s nothing obvious. It might be a suicide.’
Terek moved to rear of the Mini, and said as he peered at the hatchback handle, ‘I pointed out to DCI Freeman, of course, that she might have been left here by another party.’
Waters nodded. The sense of resentment that some felt when an elite squad was put in place at Central hadn’t entirely disappeared. More than anyone else, Waters knew, Simon Terek had taken it personally. ‘But I doubt it,’ the detective inspector continued, ‘I think she found somewhere out of the way and took some sort of overdose.’
Waters returned to the front of the car so he could look in through the windscreen. Shading his eyes with a hand, he leaned in without touching the bonnet. He could see her face more clearly from this angle. Her left cheek lay against the dark grey, faux leather seat cover, and her skin had the inevitable pallor of death. Obviously. But not so obvious until one looked this closely was the fact that all her face was the same, it was all so pale, even where it rested against the seat. If she had died here, died in that position, there should have been pooling of the blood after the heart stopped beating. For the first six or so hours after death, the blood, still fluid and warm, settles into the lowest parts of the body. Waters looked at her right hand, hanging a little below the level of her face, and found no darkening there either, not even in the fingertips. He was no pathologist, and it was hardly conclusive – but it was a little odd if she had indeed died in the front seat of this car.
Terek said, ‘Right. I think we’ve seen enough.’
Waters moved back to the driver’s side and crouched down. The tyres were in good order and clean – they didn’t look as if the owner often drove them anywhere but on tarmac. They were all standing on the short turf of the clearing, but not so short that it might have been mown, and some of the grass had recovered from being driven over. In fact, most of it had. It was difficult to make out the tyre tracks when looking back towards the larger clearing. He saw Freeman there, in conversation with a new arrival, a tall man he did not recognise. Remember the shovel that had been used to kill Mark Randall? How it had mysteriously reappeared and been found days after the event? Smith had examined its position and concluded immediately that it had been put there too recently to have been found in the search conducted by uniformed officers, and what gave this away was how the vegetation had not grown up around it or discoloured beneath it. Here, looking at this wheel, Waters concluded the opposite; the car had been parked here for a couple of days at least. Working back, that would make it Monday, maybe the Sunday.
Terek was waiting for him now, and making it obvious. As soon as Waters straightened up, the detective inspector set off back towards the clearing, using the same route they had used to reach the car, and Waters followed.
When they reached Freeman, the man was still with her, and she introduced him as the landowner, Mr Walmsley. He shook hands firmly with Terek and Waters, and said, ‘Jonathan Walmsley. What an awful business. Do you have any idea what happened?’
It was easy enough to answer that with something non-committal. Walmsley looked past them back towards the car, squinting a little as if short-sighted, and said, ‘It’s a Mini, isn’t it?’
Freeman said that it was, nothing more. The man shook his head again and said, ‘A blue Mini. I’ll ask around the staff, see if anyone noticed it. I’m afraid we get all sorts on the estate, some of them up to no good. We keep track of who comes and goes, as far as possible.’
Freeman said, ‘Thank you, Mr Walmsley. That’s something we would have asked you to do. It would be helpful.’
‘And it’s a young woman?’
All three detectives remained silent, and Walmsley went on, ‘That’s what Roy said when he left the message earlier on. Roy, our keeper. He said he’d found a young woman in a car, and he was sure she was dead.’
Freeman said, ‘Yes, sir. There is the body of a young woman in the vehicle.’
Walmsley looked at each of them in turn, as he said, ‘You live somewhere all your life. You think you’ve seen everything, and then something like this… Out of the blue. Never in a million years. Look, Chief Inspector, I’ll get out of your way. Thank you for explaining everything that’s about to happen. You have my personal number. If there’s anything, anything at all I can do, call me straight away.’
Walmsley left them, and made his way around the clearing without being reminded. When he reached the other side, they saw him chat briefly with Sergeant Holt and the constable, a man at ease with people because he had been born with authority and never had to work to acquire it. Waters allowed himself a couple more assumptions – public school and county society. He remembered passing the ‘No Public Right of Way’ signs as soon as he’d left the Lakenham road, which meant ‘the estate’ Walmsley had referred to must be vast, and Walmsley had mentioned ‘the staff’. Even today, running a large estate must require a number of people, and if you can afford to pay a man to look after your pheasants, you are wealthy indeed.
Not for the first time, Detective Chief Inspector Cara Freeman seemed to have been close to reading his mind. She looked at Waters and said, ‘He showed an appropriate amount of interest.’
He acknowledged that, and she continued, ‘We’ll have a list of the people who work here, though. Routine. Just to be on the safe side.’
Waters said, with a nod in the direction of the vehicle, ‘Because of the location,’ and Freeman said, ‘Yes.’
Working closely with others often means we acquire an unspoken understanding, but in the case of the murder squad, another factor was in play. They had been chosen, hand-picked by Freeman because their thinking complemented her own in some way. Some of those who had not been chosen were inclined to feel excluded when they saw this in action. Terek said then, ‘Ma’am? I’m sure what Mr Walmsley said was right. They must have plenty of trespassers, people coming and going all the time if the roads are ungated.’
Freeman said, ‘I’m sure they do. But twenty-two-year-old girls, on their own? Not so many of those, I’d say.’
The Range Rover backed into a space between two oak trees, turned and drove away. Serena made a note of that, and then she was waving an arm again. Seconds later, a silver BMW saloon appeared and took its place. A well-rounded, middle-aged woman got out, and when they saw the bag, they realised this was the GP, here to certify a death. Serena approached her and the two women were in conversation as the crime scene manager recorded the next step in the proceedings.
Freeman said, ‘One of you needs to take the doctor to the car and then report back to Serena. There’s no sense in more people going down there than necessary. Right. Thoughts?’
Her gaze settled on DI Terek.
‘Ma’am. There are no signs of violence on the body and no signs of a struggle in the car. My impression is that this is an overdose. Impossible to say yet whether it was an intentional one, but suicide is a strong possibility, in view of the location.’
And then both senior officers were looking at Waters, though, surely, for very different reasons. To say what he wanted to say would not be the easy choice. He could say it later and privately to Freeman, but wouldn’t she then rightly think to herself, why did you lack the nerve to say that straight away? Sooner or later, son, we must stand up and be counted – if you’re asking my opinion, it’s always the sooner the better.
He said, ‘I don’t disagree with any of that, ma’am. But I’m not certain the girl died in the car. We saw no evidence of substances. There’s nothing to suggest she was an habitual user. Not that I can see.’
There was a look of surprise on the detective inspector’s face, but he hadn’t asked, hadn’t invited any sort of discussion when they were both looking at the scene.
Freeman said, ‘Go on.’
He spoke first about the apparent absence of bodily fluids. Dying is a messy business most of the time but the inside of the vehicle was clean and tidy. He looked at Terek because the DI himself had used the word and might think Waters was being ironic. Then Waters mentioned the apparent absence of blood-pooling, and it was plain that Freeman found this interesting.
She said to Terek, ‘That’s potentially significant, isn’t it?’, giving him no place to hide, but all he managed in return was, ‘Possibly, ma’am.’ Then he pointedly refused to look in Waters’ direction.
‘And thoughts on how long she’s been there, in that case?’
When it was apparent Terek would say nothing further, Waters said, ‘A day or two at least. That’s little more than a hunch, ma’am, but the grass this side of the tyres seems to have recovered from being driven over. There might be some entomological evidence. Both front windows are open but I saw no sign of flies. It’s a late spring, though. So people are saying…’
Freeman pulled a girlish face and said, ‘I hope you’re right. I don’t like it when they get into all that eggs and maggots stuff… OK, it’s decision time.’
Waters began counting silently – one thousand seconds, two thousand seconds… The GP was being escorted around by Serena. The white clouds overhead moved on a little, and the clearing was lit by brighter sunshine. A solitary yellow butterfly appeared from nowhere and danced into the light. Six thousand seconds…
Freeman said, ‘There are elements of doubt. The full scenes-of-crime goes ahead – car, tyre tracks, the works. Let’s aim to get the poor girl out of here and into the mortuary by tonight. Locate the next-of-kin and get her identified there as soon as possible. I’ll get Tom to look at Robinson’s list and see if we can bump this to the top. And we’re going to need to interview the two girls who reported her missing – we have to know more about when she was last seen alive.’
The GP had arrived and Serena introduced her. Freeman said to Waters, ‘Would you take Doctor Griffiths down to the car?’ This was a routine job but the glance she gave him was one he already recognised. It meant, see what else you can find out – some of these docs can be useful. And it means you get a second look before the SOCO pulls it apart.
Chapter Eight
At fourteen minutes to four o’clock in the afternoon, Freeman left the Lake Central station, accompanied by Detective Sergeant Denise Sterling. Neither knew Kings Lake well but John Murray had shown them where to go on the interactive map, and then there had been a moment of silent commiseration from all the detectives who were staying behind – the ones who were not about to break the worst of all possible news to unsuspecting parents.
Freeman knew that some senior detectives in this situation would phone ahead but she couldn’t see the point. If a bomb is about to explode in your life, does it help to be warned twenty minutes in advance? Doesn’t it, if such a thing is possible, make it worse?
Driving around and looking for the place was unthinkable, and so she entered the address into her satnav as a precaution, a backup. Always have a backup. Always have your excuses ready, too, but if Harry Alexander ever said she should have sent another officer to do this to preserve her own distance from any subsequent inquiry, she would disagree and say so aloud. It’s the worst thing anyone can be asked to do. How does one choose which member of the team should go in your place? The one who might be least damaged? How does one calculate such a thing?
The likelihood that these parents would become significant in an evidence chain was miniscule, too, and should that happen, she would step away. But people need to meet the person running an investigation into the death of a loved one; at least once they should meet them face to face, look them in the eye and see that it matters.
Should she have also brought Priti, her newly-appointed scribe? Yes, in theory, on every case. But this isn’t a case yet, is it? So why was she, as head of the murder squad, the person to break the news to relatives? Because it might be a case, and because she had considered the alternatives, which were DI Simon Terek or someone from uniform. For different reasons, she had concluded both were unacceptable.
By the time she had clicked the seatbelt into place, Freeman had gone over all this again. Going to see the parents of Roxanne Prescott herself was absolutely justified and absolutely justifiable. Obviously, the rest of it she had no need to rehearse because it would never need to be said. She wanted to see where the girl whose body was at that moment being carefully removed from the little blue Mini had come from – the more one can see of an individual’s trajectory through life, the better. Sometimes you can see so much of it, the point at which it ends comes as no surprise at all.
When she focused the satnav with a finger and thumb, the destination was already blinking on the screen. Not far at all, then. Freeman glanced at her companion and said, ‘Sorry, Denise. I suppose I should have asked. You’ve done this before?’
Sterling said, ‘Yes, ma’am. In my early uniform days, I did a year in traffic. I’ve done it too many times.’
There they sit by the side of the road, we say, in their nice, souped-up motors, ready to pull us over for speeding or forgetting to renew the insurance. But it’s the traffic police officers themselves who knock on your door at one o’clock in the morning, who ask you to confirm your name before they tell you.
Freeman said, ‘Once is too many.’
She looked at Sterling again but saw no sign that the detective sergeant was having a problem with this. There was something old-school about her though she wasn’t yet forty, and she habitually wore a skirt and a jacket to work. She was squarely built, the blonde hair always pulled back into a pony-tail, and Freeman had little doubt that DS Sterling was as tough as she looked when the need arose.
‘I asked you,’ Freeman went on, ‘because you have children. I don’t know if that makes it worse for you, but I thought it might help when we’re speaking to Roxanne’s mother. Hearing myself say that, it sounds ridiculous now.’
Sterling’s eyes, Freeman noticed, never left the street as they began to make their way through the town, and they were never still. She looked at the traffic moving around them and at the people on the pavements. Sometimes an individual would catch her attention, and her gaze would rest on them for a little longer, before switching back to wide view, seeking the next thing or person of interest.
Sterling said, ‘I’m all right with it, ma’am. You don’t join a murder squad and expect not to meet some grieving people.’
And that was the end of that conversation. In the eight months since she had formed the squad, Freeman had made a point of working with all of them individually in some way, but this was the first time she had been out alone in the field with Denise. It was clear she didn’t lower her guard as readily as Serena, for example. Interestingly, those two, Denise and Serena, had had their moments early on – there had been something of a clash of personalities, which Freeman and Greene had allowed to run its course under close observation. As far as the DCI knew, the two of them could now work together amicably enough but the reason they had exchanged words wasn’t difficult to guess; there were too many similarities for them not to get on each other’s nerves at times. Like sisters, she thought, as she dropped a gear and went quickly past a bus. An oncoming taxi had to slow, and beeped the horn several times. Sterling probably got his number.
It was an ordinary-looking house, but they almost always are. Nothing has distinguished it before this moment but from tomorrow the neighbours will always look at it differently. A semi-detached ex-council house in an anonymous road of more or less identical semi-detached ex-council houses. There was a black Passat estate parked in the short drive someone had added as an improvement; when these houses were built, most of the people who first lived in them couldn’t afford a car. But it looked a tidy, cared-for sort of place, a decent family home just a minute or two away from calamity.
Denise Sterling said, ‘Do you think they’ve been trying to ring her, ma’am? Will they know the moment they open the door? Sometimes they do.’
