Good Girl, Bad Girl(9)

I feel embarrassed by her nakedness. I want to pull up her jeans and tug down her sweater and say how sorry I am that we’re meeting like this. I want to apologize that people are taking photographs and scraping beneath her fingernails and swabbing her orifices. I’m sorry that she can’t tell me who did this to her or point him out from a lineup or scrawl his name on a piece of paper.

I crouch and notice the leaves and grass clinging to her hair. There are scratches on her hands and forearms, and bruising to her right eye, and a bump on her forehead. She’s wearing a single earring—a delicate silver stud that catches the light. Where is the other one? Was it lost in a struggle, or taken as a souvenir?

A ghost-like figure steps into the tent. Clad from head to toe in shapeless hooded coveralls, Robert Ness is barely recognizable, but he makes the tent feel smaller because of his bulk.

The senior Home Office pathologist, sometimes called Nessie, is in his late forties with skin so dark it makes the whites of his eyes seem brighter. He’s wearing rimless glasses that momentarily catch the light when he tilts his head.

“Do you two know each other?” asks Lenny.

We nod but don’t shake hands.

“Let’s make this quick,” says Ness. “I don’t want to leave her out here.”

“When did she die?” asks Lenny.

“Early hours. It was cold last night, which lowered her body temperature and kept the insects away.”

“Cause of death?”

“Unclear. She suffered a blow to the back of her head that didn’t fracture her skull but might have rendered her unconscious. I’ll know more after the post mortem.”

“Was she sexually assaulted?” I ask.

“There are traces of semen in her hair.”

A bubble of air gets trapped in my throat.

The pathologist drops to his haunches, pointing to Jodie’s boots. “They’re full of water and I found pondweed in her hair. Fairham Brook is beyond those trees.” He indicates the bruising on her forehead. “That’s an impact injury, likely caused by a fall.”

“What about the scratches on her arms and face?” I ask.

“From branches and brambles.”

She tried to run.

Lenny turns away and summons DS Edgar. “I want police divers here at first light. We’re looking for her mobile phone and a polka-dot-print tote bag.”

Leaving the SOCO tent, I keep to the duckboards until I reach the perimeter of the crime scene. A carpet of papery leaves squelches beneath my boots, hiding roots that bump up from the ground ready to catch my ankles. In daylight the clearing would be visible from the footpath or the top of the embankment. At night it disappears and becomes darker than the meadow because overhanging branches block out the ambient light.

Lenny has joined me. We scramble up the embankment using the trees as handholds.

“Where does the footpath lead?” I ask.

“Once it crosses the footbridge it hits a T junction. To the right is Farnborough Road. Turn left and it crosses the tram lines and eventually reaches Forsyth Academy, Jodie’s school. Her family lives beyond, in Clifton. This would have been a shortcut home.”

“From where?”

“Her cousin’s house. Tasmin Whitaker lives five minutes from here.”

Ness calls out. “You done?”

“For now,” answers Lenny.

Below us, a group of forensic technicians have lifted Jodie’s body onto a white plastic sheet that is folded over her and sealed. A second layer of plastic is zipped up, cocooning her in a bag with handles that is carried by four men to a waiting ambulance.

Lenny watches in silence, her dark hair boxed on her neck.

“The tabloids will have wet dreams over this one,” she mutters. “A pretty churchgoing schoolgirl; a champion figure skater.”

“Figure skater?”

“British Junior Champion. The Times profiled her during the summer. They called her the golden girl of British skating.”

Crossing the footbridge, we follow the asphalt path to the community center. Most of the locals have gone home, escaping the cold, but TV crews and reporters have taken their places. Cameras are shouldered. Spotlights blaze.

“Is it Jodie?” someone yells.

“How did she die?”

“Was she raped?”

“Any suspects?”

The questions seem brutal in the circumstances, but Lenny keeps her head down, hands in her pockets.

We pause at the police car. “What do you need?” she asks.

“Can I talk to her family?”

“They haven’t been formally notified.”

“I think they know.”





5




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CYRUS




* * *



The semidetached house has a single bay window on the lower floor and a small square of soggy front garden surrounded on three sides by a heavily pruned knee-high hedge. Two vehicles are parked nose to tail in the driveway—one a black cab and the other a new-model Lexus with a darker-than-legal tint on the front windows.

A police constable is waiting outside, stamping her feet against the cold. Lenny presses a doorbell. Dougal Sheehan answers and looks past us, as though hoping we might have brought his daughter home.