Into the Water(20)
By the time he got back to the house it was mid morning, the sun high in the sky. Patrick spotted the tabby, the stray that Helen had been feeding, moving lazily across the courtyard, heading for the rosemary bush in the bed outside the kitchen window. Patrick noticed that its back was bowed slightly, its belly swollen. Pregnant. He’d have to do something about that.
THURSDAY, 13 AUGUST
Erin
MY SHITTY NEIGHBOURS in my shitty short-let flat in Newcastle were having the mother of all arguments at four o’clock this morning, so I decided to get up and go for a run. I was all dressed and ready and then I thought, why run here when I could run there? So I drove to Beckford, parked outside the church and headed off up the river path.
It was hard going, at first. Once you pass the pool you’ve got to get up that hill and then back down the slope on the other side, but after that the terrain becomes much flatter and it’s a dream run. Cool before the summer sun hits, quiet, picturesque and cyclist-free, a far cry from my London run along Regent’s Canal, dodging bikes and tourists all the way.
A few miles up the river, the valley widens out, the green hillside opposite, speckled with sheep, rolling gently away. I ran along flat, pebbled ground, barren save for patches of coarse grass and the ubiquitous gorse. I ran hard, head down, until a mile or so further up I reached a little cottage set back slightly from the river’s edge, backed by a stand of birch trees.
I slowed to a jog to catch my breath, making my way towards the building to look around. It was a lonely place, seemingly unoccupied but not abandoned. There were curtains, partly drawn, and the windows were clean. I peered inside to see a tiny living room, furnished with two green armchairs and a little table between them. I tried the door but it was locked, so I sat down on the front step in the shade and took a swig from my bottle of water. Stretching my legs out in front of me, flexing my ankles, I waited for my breathing and my heart rate to slow. On the base of the door frame I noticed someone had scratched a message – Mad Annie was here – with a little skull drawn alongside it.
There were crows arguing in the trees behind me, but apart from that and the occasional bleating of sheep, the valley was quiet, and perfectly unspoiled. I think of myself as a city girl through and through, but this place – weird as it is – gets under your skin.
DI Townsend called the briefing just after nine. There weren’t many of us there – a couple of uniforms who’d been helping out with house-to-house, the youngish detective constable, Callie, Hairy the science guy and me. Townsend had been in with the coroner for the post-mortem – he gave us the low-down, most of which was to be expected. Nel died due to injuries sustained in the fall. There was no water in her lungs – she didn’t drown, it was already over by the time she hit the water. She had no injuries that could not be explained by the fall – no scratches or bruises which seemed out of place or which might suggest that someone else had been involved. She also had a fair amount of alcohol in her blood – three or four glasses’ worth.
Callie gave us the low-down on the house-to-house – not that there was much to tell. We know that Nel was at the pub briefly on the Sunday evening, and that she left around seven. We know that she was at the Mill House until at least ten thirty, which was when Lena went to bed. No one reported seeing her after that. No one has reported seeing her in any altercations recently either, although it is widely agreed that she wasn’t much liked. The locals didn’t like her attitude, the sense of entitlement of an outsider coming to their town and purporting to tell their story. Where exactly did she get off?
Hairy has been going through Nel’s email account – she’d set up an account dedicated to her project and invited people to send in their stories. Mostly, she’d just received abuse. ‘Though I wouldn’t say it’s much worse than a lot of women get on the internet in the normal course of things,’ he said, giving me an apologetic shrug, as though he was responsible for every idiot misogynist in cyberspace. ‘We’ll follow up, of course, but …’
The rest of Hairy’s testimony was actually pretty interesting. It demonstrated that Jules Abbott was a liar, for starters: Nel’s phone was still AWOL, but her phone records showed that although she didn’t use her mobile much, she had made eleven calls to her sister’s phone over the past three months. Most of the calls lasted less than a minute, sometimes two or three; none of them was particularly long, but they weren’t hang-ups either.
He’d managed to establish the time of death, too. The camera down on the rocks – the one that wasn’t damaged – had picked something up. Nothing graphic, nothing telling, just a sudden blur of movement in the darkness, followed by a spray of water. Two thirty-one a.m., the camera told us, was the moment Nel went in.
But he saved the best for last. ‘We got a print off the case of the other camera, the damaged one,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t match anyone on file, but we could ask the locals to start coming in, to rule themselves out?’
Townsend nodded slowly.
‘I know that camera was vandalized before,’ Hairy continued with a shrug, ‘so it won’t necessarily give us anything conclusive, but …’
‘Even so. Let’s see what we find. I’ll leave that with you,’ Townsend said, looking at me. ‘I’ll have a word with Julia Abbott about those phone calls.’ He got to his feet, folding his arms across his chest, his chin down. ‘You should all be aware,’ he said, his voice low, apologetic almost, ‘I’ve had Division on the phone just this morning.’ He sighed deeply, and the rest of us exchanged glances. We knew what was coming. ‘Given the results of the PM and the lack of any physical evidence of any sort of altercation up on that cliff, we are under pressure not to waste resources’ – he put little air quotes around the words – ‘on a suicide or accidental death. So. I know there is still work to be done, but we need to work quickly and efficiently. We aren’t going to be given a great deal of time on this.’