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‘It’s only half a day. Leon, the colleague, says he spoke to him yesterday and he was really agitated about having lost his job.’
‘Half a day? Give the bloke a chance, Christ! They never heard of a bender?’
‘I think that’s supposed to read, excessive period of alcohol consumption.’
Mae gave her a look. ‘And anyway, I don’t know a Matthew Corsham. Am I supposed to?’
‘Not him. The girlfriend.’
Mae returned his eyes to the document. And his heart skidded to a stop. Eleanor Power.
Kit leaned against the doorframe. ‘Rings a bell, right?’
It wasn’t a question, and they both knew it. He gave her a quick glance. ‘You like your homework, then?’
He read the whole thing en route to his desk, walking on autopilot. Not taking his eyes from it until he was in his chair, screen on. A dull wince, the kind that sits there for years until it’s so familiar it almost goes unnoticed, tightened in his chest.
Yeah. It rang a bell.
Mae pulled the keyboard over, put the name through the PNC. Fourteen Eleanor Powers in the country, three in London.
Could it really be her?
‘I’ve run her already,’ Kit told him, reminding him of her presence behind his chair. ‘No records on her, DWP, electoral roll, nothing. Hasn’t had contact with a GP in five years.’
It figured. Five years meant 2006. The year everything fell apart. Eleanor, Ellie, who had seen Jodie Arden getting into a car the night she went missing. Ellie Power, whose mother held her hand and finished her sentences for her when she was too upset to speak. Who was consumed with the irrational belief that her friend’s disappearance – her death, Ellie believed – was her fault. To the extent that, one afternoon, after the session of questioning that would end up being replayed and dissected in the tribunals that lost DS Heath his job and nearly destroyed Mae’s career, she decided that her imagined guilt was unbearable. She followed that conviction through with such brutal decisiveness that Mae was unable to hold it together at work the next day, or the day after that. He’d never gone back, not to his old job, not to any of the spots they’d offered him in Traffic or Custody. Not to anything in the Brighton and Hove district. Not to anything on the Sussex force at all.
But there was one other tiny detail. One minor footnote that he hadn’t come across before or since and would happily never come across again, not least because it was this that discredited her in the eyes of the CPS and collapsed the entire case against Cox: Ellie Power suffered from Dissociative Identity Disorder. He felt the fine hairs on his arms lift as he recalled the specifics of it. How according to her own testimony, sometimes she did and said things, went places that she couldn’t remember. Stopped being Ellie Power at all and became – someone else.
Siggy. The name sounded like a whisper in his head, crept like insects on his skin.
He rubbed his palm over the stubble on his scalp and willed his heart to decelerate.
Kit, oblivious, reached over for the mouse and clicked through the pages. ‘Coincidence she turned up here, on your patch. Nothing on her since your missing prostitute, and now—’
‘Jodie Arden was a fucking child.’
She lowered eyes. ‘Sir.’
Mae sighed. He leaned forward, started lifting the various notes and notices pinned to the blue hessian-fronted panel at the back of his desk. Under several sheets of stuff he’d been meaning to read, there was a photo. He pulled the rusting pin out.
Kit leaned close. ‘Is that her?’
It was a head-and-shoulders of a dark-blonde girl in a dress that fastened at the neck: Jodie Arden at her cousin’s Bat Mitzvah. It was the shot they’d used in the police press packs, but the media had rejected it in favour of a racier snapshot taken by a friend on a night out, that showed her in an altogether different light. The papers had treated her like an adult, which meant printing whatever they wanted. She’d missed the social media explosion by a hair’s breadth, but the hacks had got hold of everything, nonetheless. Including the drinking, including the drug use. And including the fact that she had been sleeping with a much older man, a psychotherapist by the name of Charles Cox, who just so happened to be treating her best friend Ellie. Worse still, Cox also just so happened to be dating Jodie’s own mum. It was this man who owned the car Ellie Power saw Jodie climbing into before she disappeared off the face of the planet. Her disappearance had been news for all of two days, after which another girl in another part of the country had gone missing. A nicer girl, Aryan and clean, a girl who’d volunteered in Uganda and had a place at Cambridge and played the oboe or whatever. With no new information, Jodie Arden had just become another statistic, one among thousands of almost-adult runaways who slipped through the cracks.
‘She was a week off eighteen when she disappeared,’ he said, carefully. ‘I don’t know what you were like, but I sure as hell wouldn’t fancy being judged for life at that age.’
Kit put her hands up. She ventured a tentative laugh. ‘You always this heavy first thing on a Monday?’
‘You just wait till end of the week,’ he said, replacing the photo. ‘I’m an unstoppable gag machine by Thursday lunch.’
‘Right. Well, apologies.’ She gathered up the paper she’d delivered, giving him a sideways look that he couldn’t interpret. ‘Just saw the name and thought you’d be interested. Given your involvement.’
‘Ancient history, to be honest.’ He stood up and straightened his shirt. ‘Come on.’
‘So we are looking at it?’
‘You’re the trainee, so I’m training you. Got to start somewhere.’ Good thing about rank was how you didn’t have to explain yourself to anyone under you. He swept his jacket off the back of his chair and felt in his drawer for a tie, then remembered something. ‘You got a change of clothes?’
Kit frowned, shook her head. ‘Not apart from my gym stuff. Why?’
‘Best ditch the uniform. There’s a plain-clothes store down by the armoury, you can get the key from the guy in Evidence. Find something there, OK? Meet me in reception in five.’ He flipped the collar of his shirt up and gestured an after you.
8. (#ulink_77c71461-6b7c-5800-873c-67068e78a588)
Ellie (#ulink_77c71461-6b7c-5800-873c-67068e78a588)
I stood back from the door, head on the side, to admire the result. Cosmetically at least, my doorframe was OK now. Between the tub of wood putty and a few scraps of sandpaper I’d found, I’d rebuilt the splintered section back up and shaped it to match the contour of the rest. There had been an inch of gloss paint left in the tin from last time it had needed repairing, and I’d done a fair job. I was proud of it. Mum would be pleased.
I felt my shoulders drop as I thought how Matt would be proud, too. I’d managed to convince him I was pretty handy with repairs the first time I’d gone to his narrowboat. It was about a month after I’d first got talking to him at the hospital while I waited for Mum to finish her shift. For weeks, we’d accidentally-on-purpose bumped into each other before he properly asked me out. Our first real date was on a Saturday afternoon: a lazy lunch at a riverside pub. Matt invited me back to see the boat afterwards but had forgotten that he’d been halfway through laying new floorboards until we went inside.
‘Oh god, state of the place,’ he said, shoving the mess of cushions on the built-in sofa up to one end to clear a space for me. ‘Sorry, not a great start.’ He started lugging the new boards across from where they were propped by the log burner, roughly laying them into place to give us something to stand on.
I sat where I was shown, but raised an eyebrow, flirty from the wine. ‘Start to what, exactly?’
He glanced up, embarrassed, ‘I meant, I—’
Nudging him with a toe, I put him out of his misery. ‘Kidding.’ And he laughed, and it felt good. Then, seized with the urge to show off, I got to my feet, rolled up my sleeves, and picked up a hammer from a pile of tools in the corner.
‘Let’s do it, then,’ I said, indicating the boards. ‘I’ll help you get this floor down.’
He bit the corner off a wry smile. ‘You don’t strike me as the woodworking type.’
‘Stronger than I look.’
‘Oh yeah?’ He grinned, ran his eyes over me. I let him do it, my hands on hips, weighing the hammer in my hands. After that, it was a matter of pride to prove it.
The memory of it split like a burning frame of celluloid the moment I heard the front door. I glanced at the time: Mum wasn’t due back for another half hour.
She burst into my bedroom. ‘Has he rung?’
‘No. I’d have told you—’
‘OK. All right,’ she said, slumping slightly.
‘What’s happened? How come you’re early?’
‘I swapped cleaning sectors with Angie so I could leave early,’ she said, then she told me how she’d gone to the photographic lab where Matt worked, to see if Matt had been there. ‘There were two blokes talking outside his office, one of them said Matt’s name, so I hung around. He said he’d been to find Matt, hadn’t got anywhere, so he’d called the police.’
It was probably Leon, I thought, the friend who’d called me before. ‘But the police weren’t actually there.’
‘No, but—’ she made a gesture with her hands, flustered. ‘Look – I just – are we still OK here? I mean, you’ve been careful, even with Matt, right? They’re not going to find the address?’
I tried to hold her eye, but I couldn’t.
She gaped. ‘Oh no, Ellie. What did you do?’
‘I’d been meaning to tell you,’ I said weakly. ‘It was when we were applying for the volunteering.’
‘You gave them our address?’
‘No, he did it. He didn’t know not to. I could hardly tell him not to, could I? How would I explain it?’
‘Well, fuck!’ She threw her free hand up. ‘Great! Wonderful, good work!’
I wanted to say sorry, but she hated me apologizing.
‘I said this would happen. I said, the first time you brought him round. It was too big a risk. Didn’t I say?’ She went into her bedroom and started to rush about, pulling off her tabard and stuffing it into the washing basket. Then as if remembering, she went out to the kitchen and returned with the bag containing the wet clothes from that morning.
As calmly as I could, I said, ‘Mum. Tell me what’s going on.’
‘Nothing! I just want to be prepared.’ She roughly pulled a shirt on and went to the dressing table, plonked herself down and pulled out her make-up. ‘They’re going to come here, aren’t they? The police. And they’re going to ask questions.’
‘So we answer them.’
‘Yeah?’ She spun round, a blob of foundation balancing on fingertip halfway to her face. ‘With what?’
‘How about the truth?’
‘We don’t know what happened! We’ve got no fucking idea what the truth is, have we?’
I bit into my cheek until I tasted blood. I wasn’t going to cry.
Mum applied the make-up, sighed and got up. She went to the bed and patted the place beside her.
I sat, and she put an arm around my shoulders. ‘Come on then.’ She squeezed. ‘They’re going to come, so let’s think what we’re saying. Where had you been, last night?’
‘The pub, but—’
‘Which pub?’
‘Mum, why are we even—?’
‘Which one?’
‘The Windmill. He had an IPA; I had a lemonade.’
‘And people saw you.’
‘Yes. No. Not people we knew.’
‘You weren’t arguing?’
‘No! Why would we be?’
She sighed heavily and went back to the mirror, flipped open a compact. ‘They’re going to ask you this, Ellie. You need to get this right. If they get a whiff that you might be hiding something, we’ve got trouble. They’re already going to have linked you to … what happened before. You do understand that, right?’
‘I’m not hiding anything!’
She raised her eyebrows, then moved her gaze pointedly to my neck. Gave a loose, open-handed gesture to my shoulder, my hip. Siggy shuddered in the aches, as if she was part of them, like they were hers.
Quietly, I said, ‘I’ll just tell them what happened.’
‘About the bruises?’ she said, incredulous.
‘He might be somewhere right now needing help, Mum!’
‘You can’t talk to them. Not yet. Not until we know what’s happened.’
‘But that’s what they do! That’s what the police do, they find out what happened!’
She said nothing to that, but the rise of her eyebrows said, not always. I looked away. If there was one thing I did not want to be talking about right now, it was Jodie Arden.
My eyes lighted on the bag of wet clothes from the morning. ‘What are you going to do with that?’ I asked, nodding to it.
She peered into the mirror. ‘I am going,’ she said, lifting her lashes now with the mascara wand, ‘to incinerate it.’
I waited for her to face me, to grin. But she wasn’t joking.
‘What did you find, Mum? This morning?’
An infinitesimal pause. ‘Ellie—’
And then, from outside, we heard a woman’s voice. ‘This one. Over here.’
We both stood up, fast. She had turned towards the sound but swung back to face me, hands on my shoulders, pulling me into a hug.
‘Listen to me,’ she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. ‘Let me talk to them. We can make sure they look for Matt properly, and maybe it’ll all be fine. But it wasn’t before, with Jodie, was it? And if something has happened to him, and if you – Siggy – had anything to do with it, we need to control this as best we can.’
Three knocks at the door.
‘You are a good person, Ellie. We are good people. We’ve done our bloody best. I will not allow that bitch to ruin your life, or mine.’ She brought her mouth right against my ear, and in a vicious whisper she said, ‘Do you hear me? Siggy? You’re not having her. You’re not going to take my daughter.’
From the other end of the corridor I could hear a second voice, a man, calling through the front door.
My mother touched my face. ‘Not. A. Sound.’ And then she left the room, closing the door softly behind her.
9. (#ulink_ff0f5615-6040-5edc-8018-83e1d51a5d0c)
