The Girl Before(59)

“Or I was a middle-aged fool.” He shrugs ruefully. “My Sue had passed away the year before. And this girl, who could have been my daughter…Perhaps I was too trusting. That’s certainly how our internal investigation saw it afterward. Officer coming up to retirement, pretty young woman, his judgment goes haywire. And there was some truth in that. Enough to make me take the retirement a bit early when they suggested it, anyway.”



He takes a long mouthful of his beer. I sip my ginger ale. To me the soft drink screams I’m pregnant, but if he’s noticed, DI Clarke doesn’t mention it. “Looking back, there were things I should have spotted. She ID’d Nelson far too confidently on VIPER, given she said he’d been wearing a balaclava during the assault. As for the accusation against the ex-boyfriend…” He shrugs.

“You don’t believe that either, in hindsight?”

“We didn’t even believe it at the time. It was just her lawyer’s way of getting her off. ‘I felt scared, I can’t be held responsible for what I said.’ It worked, too. Plus the Crown Prosecution Service was none too keen to tell the world in open court what a fool she’d made of us. She had to accept a formal caution for wasting, but it was a slap on the wrist, nothing more.”

“But you still arrested Simon Wakefield after she died.”

“Yes. Well, that was more arse-covering, really. Suddenly there was a possibility we might have been looking at this all wrong. Young woman alleges rape, then admits lying but claims her boyfriend’s a Jekyll and Hyde character who’s violent toward her. Soon after, she’s found dead. If it turns out he did kill her, we’re stuffed. Even if it turns out to be suicide, it doesn’t look like the police treated her very well, does it? Either way, it’s better to be seen to have arrested someone.”

“So you were just going through the motions?”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong. That might have been why the high-ups wanted the arrest, but my team did a proper job when we interviewed him. There was no evidence whatsoever to suggest Simon Wakefield had anything to do with Emma’s death. His only mistake was getting involved with her in the first place. And I can hardly blame him for that. Like I said, older and wiser men than him had fallen for her charms.” He frowns. “I’ll tell you something that was unusual, though. When most people are caught lying to the police, they cave in pretty quickly. Emma’s response was to tell another lie. It might have been planted in her head by her brief, but even so that’s not a common reaction.”

“How do you think she died?”

“Two possibilities. One, she killed herself. Out of depression?” He shakes his head. “I don’t think so. More likely her lies had caught up with her somehow.”

“And the second?”

“The most obvious one.”



I frown. “What’s that?”

“You don’t seem to have considered the possibility that it was Deon Nelson who killed her.”

It’s true—I’ve been so focused on Edward and Simon, the possibility of it being someone else altogether has hardly crossed my mind.

“Nelson was—probably still is, for all I know—a vicious piece of work,” he continues. “He’s got convictions for violence dating back to when he was twelve. When Emma nearly got him convicted with a made-up story, he’d have wanted revenge.” He’s silent for a moment. “Emma said as much, actually. She told us Nelson was making threats against her.”

“Did you investigate them?”

“We logged them.”

“Is that the same thing?”

“She’d been arrested for wasting police time. You think checking out every allegation she made after that was a top priority? It already looked as if we’d been far too quick to charge Nelson with rape in the first place. What with his lawyer alleging racial harassment, there was no way we were going after him again without firm evidence.”

I think. “Tell me about this video, the one on Emma’s phone. How come you mistook it for rape when it was nothing of the sort?”

“Because it was brutal,” he says flatly. “Maybe I’m old-fashioned. I just can’t see how people can enjoy that kind of thing. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in twenty-five years’ policing, it’s that you can never understand other people’s sex lives. Young people now, they see this nasty, aggressive porn on the Internet, they think it might be fun to make a video like that on their own phone. Men treating women as objects, women going along with it. Why? It baffles me, it really does. But in Emma’s case, that’s what happened. And with her boyfriend’s best friend, too.”

“Who was that?”

“A man called Saul Aksoy, who worked for the same company Emma did. Nelson’s lawyer got a private investigator to track him down and persuaded him to make a statement. Of course, Aksoy hadn’t broken any laws, but still. What a mess.”

“But if it was Deon Nelson who killed her,” I say, my mind still running on Clarke’s theory, “how did he get into the house?”

“That I don’t know.” Clarke puts down his empty glass. “My bus is in ten minutes. I should go.”



“One Folgate Street has a state-of-the-art security system. That was one of the things Emma liked about it.”