The Family Remains(35)

Philip shrugs, as if it’s the first time he’s ever given a moment’s thought to his sister’s boyfriend.

‘You never thought that maybe …?’

‘What? That he had something to do with Birdie’s disappearance? Well, yes, of course. Of course we all thought that. But when the police couldn’t find him either it just seemed more likely that they’d either absconded together or died together. And Justin was a softie. A lapdog. He wasn’t a killer. I mean, at least that was my impression.’

‘What did Justin do? As a job, I mean?’

‘He was a … well, he claimed to be a musician. A percussionist. He played the tambourine in Birdie’s band. Clearly that’s not exactly a career as such. I assume he had other skills. He was a bit of a hippy. Scruffy. Outdoorsy. A bit flaky.’

‘So, Birdie and your mother had an argument. Birdie left. And do you know where she was living at this point?’

‘In London. That’s all we knew. With Justin. And a cat.’

‘She had a cat?’ I make a note in my notebook.

‘Yes. I seem to recall she got the cat without checking with her landlord. He was going to kick them out and so they were house-hunting.’

‘And you don’t know where she ended up?’

Philip sighs. ‘She had a plan, she said. She knew someone with a big house who might be able to put them up for a short while.’

I feel a muscle in my cheek twitch. ‘A big house?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t happen to know where this big house was?’

‘No. Sorry. All she said was that she had made a new friend who lived in a huge house and the friend had offered them a room as a temporary measure.’

‘And what year was this?’

‘The same year she and my mother stopped talking, when I was fourteen. So it would have been 1988; the year she and her band were at their most famous.’

‘And the band, they split up in 1990?’

‘Yes. Around about then.’

I sigh and stretch my shoulders apart slightly. ‘So, the skeleton that our forensics team have assembled, it is roughly twenty-five years old. Which puts us at about 1995 on the timeline. And your other sister, Jenny, passed away in—?’

‘Nineteen ninety-six.’

I change position in my chair to relieve the ache in my back. ‘So. Philip. We found fibres attached to these bones. Shreds of a label from a bath towel. A very expensive brand. Which makes me think, if she wasn’t wealthy enough herself to afford a two-hundred-pound bath towel, that she must have been with someone who was. It makes me wonder about this big house and the new friend. Is there nothing else you can recall about this arrangement?’

‘No. None of us can remember anything about it. We were all asked about it at the time of the original investigation. But nobody knew any more than that. We don’t even know if she and Justin ever actually took up the friend’s offer of a room.’ He shrugs, then he looks up at me, very suddenly, and I see that his eyes are wet with tears. ‘How did she die? My sister? It is my sister, isn’t it?’

I stare at Philip and nod. ‘We believe it is. Yes.’

I feel appalled with myself for allowing my need to find out why she died to distract me from my responsibility to break this news to her brother. I clear my throat and sit a little straighter.

‘There appears to have been a blow to the head,’ I say. ‘She then appears to have been left to decompose inside a cocoon made of fabric and towels, outdoors. The bones were taken out of the towels and transferred into a black bag, which was tied in a knot and dropped, we assume, into the Thames, at some point in the past few months to a year.’

‘You mean, the murderer came back for her?’

‘Yes, it looks that way.’

Philip’s head drops. When he raises it again, there are tears on his cheeks.

‘Why would someone want to kill her?’

‘It might have been an accident.’

Philip shakes his head. ‘No. It doesn’t sound like it, does it? Leaving her in a shroud. Then coming back for her twenty-five years later. Disposing of her. It doesn’t sound like an accident.’

‘No,’ I agree. ‘No. It doesn’t.’

I watch realisation dawn across his face.

‘Someone killed my sister,’ he says. ‘And they’re still out there. To this very day.’

‘Yes. I’m afraid it would appear that way.’

Philip looks at me. His eyes are wide. ‘You are going to find out who did it, aren’t you? You are going to catch them? And make them pay?’

I want to say yes, but I cannot, for I know that there is only so far a case like this can stretch, that the passage of time obfuscates and complicates, that history swallows evidence in its wake. But I know that I will do my very best and that my very best is all I have to give and so I say, ‘Philip, I give you my word, I will do everything I can.’





31




April 2017


‘Baby. You look tired. Have you been getting enough sleep?’

Rachel looked up at her father from her desk where she was tapping numbers into her accounting software. Her father appeared to her through a haze of bleary eyes, bleary thoughts, a darkly shifted perception of the world.