Murder Takes the High Road(75)

Even when they began making phone calls to Donald’s friends, they weren’t really expecting bad news. Even responsible kids forgot to phone home once in a while.

By the next morning though, fear had set in and they had gone to the police. The fear had been focused on traffic accidents, that kind of thing. No one expected the worst.

And, in fact, it was three days later before the worst was discovered.

Initially, there had been some idea of accidental death. Maybe Donald had slipped in the stream, knocked himself out on a rock, and drowned.

But once the pathologists got involved, it was clear the kid had been hit from behind. Further, the body appeared to have been dragged some little distance and placed in the stream. He had died by drowning,

During the first round of questioning, Donald’s girlfriend and all his friends denied knowing he had gone to the woods—let alone why. The ever-popular theory of murder by passing tramp was floated, but eventually discarded.

During the second round of questioning, Donald’s friends had still denied knowing any reason for his going into the woods, but an obvious reason for a teenage boy to be in the woods would surely be a teenage girl. Or to get high. Or another teenage boy. But in Donald’s case, best guess was a girl.

Donald’s girlfriend had been questioned but she had insisted she had not been with him.

The investigation had moved on, but by virtue of there being no other suspects or motives (he had not been robbed or otherwise assaulted), eventually attention had returned to the girl.

Under questioning, Claire broke down and admitted she had killed him, although there was no clear motive then or really ever.

I made a few notes. Most of the book focused on the trial of Claire Sims and legal ramifications. Kresley’s parents had been enraged that Claire had not been sentenced to life in prison. They would probably have gone for the death penalty had it still been an option. But they were no longer living and there was no mention of any siblings, so there went an obvious angle. Not that extended family can’t be moved to vengeance, but that’s more for LA street gangs and Scottish clans. The Kresleys were nice middleclass English folk.

I moved on to A Walk in the Woods. It was very much the same account, but offered more photos. It was depressing and poignant to see how very young Kresley had been—and equally depressing and poignant to see how young Vanessa had been.

By then I had been reading for a couple of hours and the lack of sleep from the night before was catching up to me. I yawned over the pages of photos, distracted by how much Elizabeth Ogilvie resembled Mrs. Kresley.

Next up was There Grows an Oak. Essentially the same account, though approached more lyrically and tragically, and with a lot more photos. The photo where Mrs. Kresley resembled Elizabeth Ogilvie was not included, but in scanning the pictures of Donald and his classmates, I came across a photo captioned Kresley’s girlfriend Evie Waters.

I frowned, trying to make sense of it. Evie Waters was a thin, sharp-faced girl with black hair. She was not Claire Sims. She was not Vanessa Rayburn. She could never be mistaken for Vanessa in any incarnation.

Who the hell was Evie Waters?

I grabbed Murder in Sussex and reread the passages I’d just been over. I skimmed A Walk in the Woods.

I realized that I had taken it for granted that when these writers referred to Kresley’s girlfriend, they meant Claire. I saw now my mistake—and their mistake too because they had used the term “girlfriend” interchangeably for Claire and Evie.

A new player in the drama opened up a whole new avenue of possibility.

I reached for the books I was least familiar with: Suspicious Circumstances and The Good Girl.

Davidson, the author of Suspicious Circumstances, was as confused by the two-girlfriends angle as I had been, and had missed it entirely. What he did have was a rare family photo of the Kresleys.

I stared at it, feeling my scalp prickle. The rain made shushing sounds against the window.

There had been a sibling. A younger sister by the name of Daya.





Chapter Twenty-Four

It was a jolt.

I stared at the photo and it was honestly impossible to tell. She had been one of those pale, skinny anonymous-looking English girls that provide the “also pictured” in hundreds of photos in British biographies and accounts of settling the Empire.

But she was the right age—ten years younger than Donald, which would put her in her late fifties—and the name “Daya” could not be a coincidence. It was not a common name. Too, there was her odd behavior. Her antagonistic attitude toward Vanessa’s work, accepting and then abruptly backing out of the murder game—even her comments that first night at dinner.

The table behind us had been discussing Vanessa’s DBE and someone had said, “I think maybe she was awarded the DBE before the news of her real identity came out.”

And Daya had answered, “No, that’s not correct. I remember the fuss when it was announced. People picketed.”

“That was such a long time ago. Almost thirty years.”

“It doesn’t seem so very long ago to me.”

“Oh, my God,” I muttered. I rose and took a couple of turns around the table. I ran my hands through my hair.

Daya and Roddy were the only two English nationals on the bus. How the hell had we not suspected them?

Correction. No way was Roddy part of any murder plot. That defied belief.