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‘We’re gardeners,’ I said. ‘Here to price up a job.’
Jo tugged Martin’s notebook out of her bag. ‘OK.’
I wasn’t sure that anyone would fall for it because the gardens were immaculate. The hedges ruler straight, the soil finely tilled, the roses all neatly budding. We made our way down a small path, around the building to the front – the side of the flats that overlooked the park – Jo reading from Martin’s notes. ‘Middle of the garden, by the statue.’
‘The statue?’
‘Apparently.’
‘Of?’
‘There.’ We rounded the corner and sure enough there was a statue in the middle of the front gardens. A statue of a woman, naked and kneeling, holding what looked like a large pitcher, water flowing from it into the well next to her.
Jo read from Martin’s notes. ‘Vic. discovered by statue, right wrist attached to statue’s right arm. Cable tie. Black.’
‘Weirder and weirder.’
Jo paused from reading. She dropped her bag on the floor and looped a full circle around the stone woman, the gravel crunching under her feet as she walked. When she’d done the full three hundred and sixty degrees she turned to me. ‘She’s like the suffragettes, chaining themselves to railings. Solidarity?’
‘Who is she?’ I peered up close at the statue woman’s face, freckled with lichen, her hair tied in a topknot, the ponytail swirling around her moss-green neck. ‘Aquarius?’
‘Don’t know.’ Jo crouched to the ground and pulled the camera out of her bag. ‘Knew this baby would come in handy.’
‘Martin’s right,’ I said. ‘There’s something wrong here.’ I couldn’t put into words why, but every part of my body refused to accept the narrative we’d been given. I glanced around the garden. It was completely cut off from the park by an eight-foot hedge, anyone in the park wouldn’t be able to see into the gardens. There were three benches arranged at the east, west and south ends and bird feeders swung from a metal pole. The beds were planted with the kind of shrubs that don’t take much looking after. Jo snapped pictures of the statue as I tried to put my sense of unease into words. ‘You’d be scared someone would see you for one thing.’
Not someone from the park, but someone from the flats. I glanced up at the many windows of the numerous flats that overlooked us. The windows got bigger the higher up the building you went – so that on the top floor they were floor to ceiling. Huge windows. I counted the number of floors and did a rough estimate. At least sixty of them.
‘Would have been dark,’ said Jo. She put the camera on the stone at the base of the statue and picked up the notebook again. ‘Vic. discovered by newspaper boy: 6.50 a.m.’
‘Time of death?’
Jo flicked through the pages. ‘Pathologist reckoned she’d been dead between three and four hours.’
‘Let’s give her a name. I don’t like calling her Vic.’
‘Vicky?’
Despite myself, I half-smiled. That’s what I love about Jo. Even in the hard times, the darkest of dark times, she can make me smile. ‘Why would the newspaper boy be round here? The entrance to the flats is at the rear.’
‘No, there’s another one there, look. Some residents must use that one.’
‘We need a plan of the flats. I’ll put Aunt Edie on it.’
I kept looking up at the windows, hit by the enormity of the task ahead. There must be at least thirty flats in the building, thirty owners to track down – possibly more because some of the flats would have been sold in the seven years since our woman’s body had been discovered. Some of them were probably sublet. The theme tune to Mission Impossible started up in my mind. I tried to get a more precise count of the number of windows, and that was when I first noticed her.
On the third or fourth floor, the face of a woman, an older woman, pressed against the glass, the palm of her hand also raised and touching the window. When she saw me spot her, she pulled back, so quick I wasn’t sure whether I’d imagined her. Just a dark space where she once stood and perhaps the smudge of her fingerprints, although I was far too far away to see for sure. ‘This place gives me the creeps,’ I said to Jo.
‘Nutter. This is the pinnacle of human achievement. You live here, you’ve made it. Bet these cost a bomb,’ she said.
‘Someone’s watching us,’ I said, scanning the building again. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled and I felt the shudder run all the way to my toes.
Jo lifted the camera and rapid-snapped photos of the building. Nothing moved but I couldn’t shake the feeling. I stepped away from Jo and tried to imagine the scene. A naked woman, cable-tied to the statue. I sat on the ground next to the statue, held my wrist against hers.
Jo returned the camera to the bag. ‘There’s something missing. Something we’re not seeing.’
‘Besides her clothes?’
‘Yeah, besides her clothes. Although, actually they were there; Martin said they were neatly folded, next to her body.’
I shook my head. ‘Who’d get naked to commit suicide?’
‘I know right.’
‘So what’s missing?’
Jo flicked through Martin’s notebook. ‘We’ve got a list of her possessions. Brown ankle boots, scuffed. Denim-effect dress, belt, bra, red knickers. Train ticket dated 28th of August – the day before her body was found. Stamped.’
‘Didn’t Martin mention a necklace?’
‘Yes. She was wearing that. The only thing she was wearing.’
‘Go on.’
‘The train ticket was found in bushes near the body.’ We both glanced around at the perfectly manicured shrubs. ‘So where was her purse?’
‘Good point. Maybe she didn’t have one?’
‘And the other thing – what did she carry the strychnine in? Had to be some kind of container.’
‘Is it a powder or a liquid?’
‘Her bag’s what’s missing,’ said Jo, bending to scribble something in the notebook. ‘It’s obvious. Every woman has a handbag.’
I pulled a face at that. I’ve never owned a handbag in my life.
Jo straightened up. ‘Women that wear dresses have handbags. Dresses don’t have pockets.’
I thought about this. ‘She’d have needed money for the train fare.’
‘She would have had a handbag,’ said Jo, again. ‘’S’obvious. Can’t believe we didn’t think of it sooner.’
‘Maybe there was one and Martin’s not noted it.’ I glanced at Martin’s pristine notebook and knew I was clutching at straws.
‘We need to speak to the police – the person in charge of the original investigation,’ said Jo. ‘DI Roberts, according to the notes here.’
‘Wasn’t that the one that Martin said he wasn’t sure about?’
‘And what about the necklace? What kind of necklace was it? It’s got to be important if she kept it on.’
‘Wonder what they do with it? The evidence? Do they store it all somewhere?’
‘It’s an unsolved case,’ said Jo. ‘They can’t throw everything away. There must be a warehouse somewhere with Vicky’s possessions in it.’ Jo’s eyes lit up at the thought.
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘We’re going to need to speak to the police.’ My heart sank at the thought. Neither Jo nor I are keen on involving the police in the business, even though we know it’s going to be unavoidable at times. We’ve both grown up seeing them as the enemy – due to a couple of student demonstrations where they’ve seemed more concerned with social control than upholding the freedoms of the general public.
Jo sat on the bench by the bird feeders and wrote something in Martin’s notebook. I took a walk around the small enclosed garden before taking a seat next to her and lighting a cigarette. ‘Why here?’ I said. ‘She caught a train from Nottingham. Why come all this way to die? Martin’s right, it’s like she was trying to draw attention to something, but what? The flats? Someone who lived in one of the flats?’
‘Possible.’
‘The statue?’
‘The park?’
‘If it was the park, you’d think she’d have killed herself in the park.’
‘What about the Park Killer?’ I said. I’d been unable to get him out of my thoughts since we arrived.
‘He’d been dead five years before Vicky got the train here.’
‘Maybe she wanted someone to find her,’ I said, looking up again at all the windows in front of us. ‘I mean, before she died. Maybe it was a cry for help.’
‘Aspirin is crying for help,’ said Jo. ‘She’s hard-core. She didn’t want to be found, not alive at any rate.’
‘How did she know the statue was there?’
‘Maybe she didn’t. Maybe the idea only struck her when she got here.’
‘What about the cable tie? She had to have brought that with her. Is there anything on that in the notes?’
Jo flicked through the pages of the notebook. ‘No. Only that they’re standard issue, available in every DIY shop in the country. Black plastic.’
‘She chose this spot. It’s so, so,’ – I struggled to find the right word – ‘premeditated. There’s no reason to ever come here unless you were coming here.’ What little road there was stopped at the flats, the rest was trees and parkland. ‘And naked. Why would you strip to commit suicide?’
‘It was August,’ said Jo, as if that made any sense at all.
I shook my head. ‘It’s another statement. Naked and tied.’
‘The statue’s naked.’
‘Why go to all this trouble to make such a statement but then not leave a note?’ I kicked at the grass. ‘It’s like she wanted to make a statement, but it’s one no one can understand.’
‘Maybe the message wasn’t aimed at us. Maybe it was aimed at someone else.’
I thought about this for a moment.
‘Maybe it wasn’t suicide,’ said Jo.
That was the thought that had been playing in my head since the moment I’d seen the statue. Maybe she’d been forced to ingest the strychnine. Maybe she’d been tied to the statue once she was already dead. ‘We need to know more,’ I said. ‘More about her, more about her background. Jesus. How are we going to do that if the police didn’t even manage it at the time?’
Jo slung her backpack over her shoulders and linked arms with me. ‘Martin doesn’t think the police were trying very hard.’
‘Well, we’re going to try harder. Much fucking harder,’ I said.
Jo grinned at me and I noticed she’d got lipstick on her teeth. ‘Right.’
‘First things first. We need to know who she was. Martin’s right. Somewhere she’s missing. We need to find out who’s missing her.’
Chapter Seven (#ulink_1032f67b-4fe8-5006-ad11-f96507197d3e)
When we got back to the office, I rang directory enquiries and got the number for the missing persons’ helpline. I rang them straight away and gave them the few details we had for Vicky Doe: white, female, previously given birth, aged between twenty-two and twenty-five when she died seven years ago; possibly from either Leeds or Nottingham. Not much to go on really.
‘I’ll check our database,’ the woman on the phone said.
‘The police probably checked at the time,’ I said.
‘You never know. We get new reports all the time – sometimes for people who’ve been missing for years.’
‘Why would someone not report them missing at the time?’
‘Sometimes it takes a while for people to realize their loved ones are actually missing, not just out of touch.’ She checked herself. ‘But you shouldn’t get your hopes up too high. Hundreds of women go missing and are never reported.’
It makes you think, doesn’t it? Hundreds of women go missing and no one ever reports their disappearance? I glanced across at Jo and she raised her eyebrows as if to say I told you so. And of course she had. I’m not naive, I know there’s a lot goes on in this world that most people would rather not know about, but it takes a lot to have no one care – to have no one in your life that cares enough to report you as missing? These women were ghosts, drifting in and out of people’s lives, not having made enough of an impact to even be sought.
The woman on the phone said she’d get someone to call me back, but warned it might take a few hours.
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ said Aunt Edie, as she dropped an envelope into the out tray.
‘We need you to get us a plan of the flats. Either from the management company, or the fire service or something,’ I said to Aunt Edie.
‘Don’t forget – we’ve got to be at Old Bar at two o’clock,’ Jo reminded me. ‘Are we going to walk?’
I glanced at the clock. It was just past one.
‘It’d be great if Matt just turns up,’ said Jo. ‘Easiest case ever.’
‘Mmm. Although Nikki’s still got the job of breaking the news to her parents.’
‘Poor mite,’ said Edie, coming back from the kitchen. ‘She rang this morning to see if there was any news. I told her she’d have to be patient.’
‘We can call in and see Tuff while we’re there – he works in the bookshop just opposite the uni. Jan seemed to think he knew something but wasn’t telling. And he needs to report the damage to Matt’s car.’
The click of the kettle sounded and Aunt Edie made to get up, but I beat her to it.
‘My turn.’
I picked up Aunt Edie’s mug.
‘Tenner still says he’s with a woman somewhere,’ said Jo.
