Good Girl, Bad Girl(96)

“You’re sick.”

“Did you lose your erection when you tried to penetrate her? Maybe you wanted to humiliate her.”

Farley’s fist rattles on the side of the bed where he’s been handcuffed to the frame.

“I know you put branches on her body, but it’s not as though you covered your tracks. You left footprints at the scene. You tied your dog to a nearby tree. You bragged to a schoolgirl that the police had found Jodie. You couldn’t have made it any more obvious if you’d hung a sign around your neck saying, ‘Arrest me.’?”

“I’m not dumb.”

“Prove it to me.”

Farley goes quiet. I let the silence build until it fills every corner of the room. It leaks into his ears and his chest and his bladder and his bowels and every dark place in his mind. Very few people are comfortable with silence. It’s one thing to be on a plane or in a train carriage or in a waiting room and to ignore those around you, but not when you know someone is expecting you to answer.

“How?” he mutters.

“Tell me what happened—the whole story. I’m not the police. There are no cameras or recorders, no notebook, no witnesses. I’m not a priest. I can’t take your confession. I don’t care if you’re guilty. I don’t care if you feel guilty. I only want the truth.”

Farley turns to face the window and I wonder if he’s chosen to stonewall me.

“I didn’t chicken out,” he whispers.

“What were you doing on the footpath?”

“When I can’t sleep, I walk my dog.”

“Why did you choose that path?”

“It’s close to home.”

“There are nearer parks.”

Farley raises his shoulders. Drops them. It might be a shrug. It might be resignation.

“I got a dog yesterday,” I say. “A Labrador called Poppy. She’s not really mine. She belongs to a friend of mine who’s staying with me, but we’re going to take turns to walk her. I do the night walks, because I don’t like my friend going out alone.”

Farley is listening.

“Our nearest park gets locked up at dusk, so last night I took Poppy around the block a few times. It’s a different world at that hour. You think the roads would be deserted, but all sorts of people are out walking their dogs. Some stop and chat, talking about the weather or the stars. Last night, I was two streets from home when I looked up and saw a woman getting ready for bed. She’d left her curtains open.”

“Was she naked?” asks Farley, facing me again, more animated now.

“She was wearing a dressing gown and drying her hair.”

“How much could you see?”

“She was studying herself in the mirror, turning her face left and right, as though she was searching for something she’d lost.”

“What?”

“Youth.”

Farley doesn’t understand.

“I felt sorry for her. She looked lonely. I wondered if that’s why she left the curtains open—to be noticed.”

“Lots of them do,” he says.

“Really?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Is that why you go walking at night?”

He goes quiet.

“Is that what you were doing on the night you saw Jodie—looking in windows?”

Again nothing.

“Did you see Jodie on the footpath?”

“No.”

“Where was she?”

“In the water.”

“You first saw her in the water?”

“I heard her.”

“What did you hear?”

He looks at me plaintively. “Splashing.”

I make him go over it again, describing how he left home with his dog and went along certain roads where he’d been lucky in the past. At some point, he decided to take Silverdale Walk, past the school and across the tramlines. As he approached the footbridge he heard someone cry out and then a splash.

“I thought it was an animal, you know.”

“What did you do?”

“When I got to the footbridge, I peered over the side. That’s when I saw her.”

“Jodie?”

He nods. “I didn’t know it was her. I thought somebody had dumped some trash into the pond. I went to check it out—in case it was something valuable, you know—but I saw her moving. She was crawling through the reeds.”

He swivels his head slowly, eyes wide, wanting me to believe him. I can smell the sweat rising from his body and the faint hint of urine.

“Then what?”

“I scrambled down the bank. I thought she might need some help. She was coughing. Wet. Cold. I wanted to keep her warm. I offered her my jacket.”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing.”

He lifts his eyes, blinking miserably, unable to make his mouth form the words.

“She ran away. You chased her.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt her. I wanted to make her warm.”

“But you didn’t. You tied your dog to a tree. You undressed her. You were going to rape her.”

His head rocks from side to side.

“You tried to have sex with a dead or dying girl.”