After You Die (22 page)

‘He hasn’t had them for three days.’

Rachel shook his shoulders and he stared through her. Seeing the door, knowing he should make a run for it, now, while she was squatting down off balance.

‘His pills are in the glovebox of my car.’ Rachel took a set of keys from her pocket. ‘Could you fetch them, please? He should have one as soon as possible.’

His nan hurried out of the front door and the gap was there but too small and Rachel seemed to know what he was thinking because she stood up, blocking his path until the door slammed shut.

‘What did you do to Dawn Prentice?’

His eyes snapped back onto her. ‘Nothing.’

‘The police think you killed her.’

He was going to be sick.

No. Don’t. Hold it down.

‘I don’t care if you killed her, Nathan.’

Nathan closed his eyes.

‘Look at me.’

Opened them.

‘You know what the police can be like. If they think you murdered Dawn and they can’t find anyone else, that’s it. You’ll be thrown in a young offenders’ institution just like your brother was. And we know how that turned out.’

His breakfast came up in a hot rush and she stepped back sharply. He retched and spat and cried but she didn’t stop talking.

‘You are going to do exactly what I tell you from now on. Right?’

He nodded, spit trailing down his chin, throat burning.

‘Good. Then we both know where we stand.’

Ferreira drove down the rutted, sun-baked track towards Nene House, trailing a cloud of dust that swirled around her car, feeling every bump rattle up through the steering wheel, the sound of barking dogs audible above the music as she drew closer.

Warren’s Range Rover was parked in front of the house but it was the only vehicle there and she was glad Sally wouldn’t be around to police their conversation.

She walked down the side of the house, past a recycling box full of wine bottles and a washing line hung with wet laundry. The dogs started barking furiously, whining and yelping, catching a new scent on the air. She caught one herself, marijuana and tobacco, and she followed it to a small paved area hidden behind an old outhouse where Warren was sitting staring across what passed for their garden, a few tangled shrubs dotted around the edge of a lawn which needed mowing, running down to a ranch fence that divided their land from a grass field beyond and after that the river.

His feet were on an upturned milk crate dragged from a pile of others just like it stacked against the crumbling red-brick wall, and he barely stirred as she pulled out a heavy cast-iron chair to sit down on opposite him at the table. He was even more gaunt than when she had seen him two days before at the hospital, greyer looking and smaller and somehow desiccated.

‘Is there any news?’ he asked, dragging his attention away from the play of the wind across the lawn.

‘We’re making progress.’

‘That’s a no, then.’

‘It takes time, Warren. I’m sorry I don’t have anything to give you just yet.’

He cleared his throat. ‘When can we have Holly’s body back?’

‘Soon, I think.’

He didn’t ask about Dawn’s and she wondered if that was significant, decided it probably wasn’t. They’d separated, why would he expect to be responsible for her burial? Zigic was still trying to get in touch with her parents, retired to Cyprus and facing the worst kind of homecoming now.

‘Where’s Sally?’ Ferreira asked.

‘Shopping.’ He took a long draw on his joint. ‘At least that’s where she said she was going.’

‘You don’t believe her?’

‘I’m not easy to be around right now.’ He said it as if it was a direct quote. ‘I suppose you can’t blame her for wanting to get away for a few hours. Holly wasn’t her child, what does she care?’

‘I’m sure she cares,’ Ferreira said.

‘That’s because you don’t know her.’ Contempt flared around his nostrils. ‘Sally thinks it was a “mercy”. Like she went peacefully in her sleep.’

Ferreira said nothing.

‘She didn’t, did she?’ he asked. ‘She can’t have, not being left alone like that for days.’

‘It was a stroke. A pretty massive one, the pathologist said, so Holly would have died quickly, relatively painlessly.’

‘And what about before the pretty massive stroke?’

Ferreira looked away from him, knowing how Sally must have felt, why she needed to get away from his boiling fury for a few hours. He needed more green in that joint, or better-quality stuff, if he was maintaining this level of anger on it.

‘Well?’

‘I need to talk to you about Holly’s blog,’ she said.

‘You haven’t answered my question.’

She reminded herself what he was going through. That grief affected people in lots of different ways and that she should be patient with him. Understanding. Indulgent even, because he had lost his only child and that bought you a lot of grace.

But she didn’t like his attitude. She’d always believed that extreme situations like this brought out people’s true characters and if this was his …

‘Come on,’ he snapped. ‘What do you think her death was like? The long, drawn-out bit before she had a stroke?’

‘I imagine it was terrifying,’ Ferreira said. ‘I imagine she felt scared and powerless and she couldn’t work out why nobody came to help her for days on end.’

He nodded. ‘Because I should have gone to see her, shouldn’t I?’

‘Only you know the answer to that question, Warren.’

‘I should.’ His face crumpled but there were no tears, just the dry reflexes that came when a person was all cried out. ‘I should have known something was wrong. You hear people say it when their child dies, they all say the same thing – “I could feel it. I knew.” – and I thought that’s what happened. But they’re liars. You don’t feel anything. They die and you feel nothing.’

Warren reached for his lighter and tried to get a flame out of it, until, on the sixth or seventh attempt, he shook it and swore and threw it into the long grass.

Ferreira took her own from her pocket and held it steady while he relit the stub of his joint. Up close she could see just how strong he’d made it, hardly any black visible through the thin paper. He inhaled deeply and slumped in the uncomfortable chair, elbow on the table, head in hand.

‘What’s this about then?’ Warren asked. ‘Holly’s blog?’

‘You didn’t follow it?’

‘Not really. I knew she had one. We didn’t talk as often as I would have liked. What with the divorce and all of that mess.’

Suddenly Ferreira wished they were having this conversation on record. She thought of his quick temper and that ferocious attack, the grabbed knife.

Sally would cover for him. She was punching well above her weight looks-wise and his guilt would tie him to her for ever. Of course she wouldn’t call the police if he came home covered in blood.

Her gaze drifted across the garden, to a stainless-steel incinerator where he might have burnt his clothes and the gentle slope leading down to the river where he might have thrown the knife.

‘Holly’s death doesn’t rule anyone out’, Zigic had said. The nurse was supposed to come the next morning and Warren would have known that.

‘I didn’t kill Dawn,’ he said, as if he’d heard her thoughts. ‘We were bickering over money, that’s all, nothing serious.’

‘Bickering over money motivates the vast majority of crime in the world.’

‘Only when people care about it and I don’t. Christ, I don’t have any to care about. If I did I’d have given her it long ago.’

He started to make another joint and Ferreira took her own tobacco out, got hers rolled and semi-smoked while he was still breaking up a nugget of dark, noxious-smelling skunk into the paper. His fingertips were stained with it, nails rimmed an oily green.

‘Why does her blog matter anyway?’

‘Along with all the support, Holly was receiving a heavy dose of abusive feedback. Anonymous comments, insults, threats.’

His fingers froze. ‘What kind of threats?’

‘Every kind,’ Ferreira said. ‘I think at least one of the people targeting her’s local.’

He reached for her lighter and lit up. ‘In the village, you mean?’

‘Quite possibly. We’re working on tracking down IP addresses, that kind of thing, but most online abusers manage to hide where they are with proxy servers.’ Ethan had explained it all, didn’t hold out much hope of giving her a target. ‘The abuse looks personal, though, so what I wanted to ask you was whether Holly had any enemies before her accident?’

‘She was fourteen,’ he said incredulously.

Sixteen, Ferreira thought. Sixteen when she died but to him she would always be the fourteen-year-old he waved off on her rock-climbing weekend.

‘Kids can be vicious, Warren. And Holly doesn’t seem to have stayed in touch with any of her old school friends. She hadn’t used her Facebook page since the day of the accident – her friends kept trying to contact her for a while but she never answered any of their messages.’

He watched a tattered white butterfly come to land on the tabletop.

‘I assumed she was still in touch with them.’

‘No. And that can offend people.’

‘Her friends were nice girls.’

‘What about the girls she wasn’t friends with?’ Ferreira asked. ‘Is there anyone you can think of who might want to upset her?’

He took a hit, held the smoke down in his lungs for a long time before he reluctantly exhaled. ‘I was working a lot back then. You have to when it’s your own business. I didn’t take much of an interest in Holly’s school life.’

‘But you two went out running together?’

‘She never mentioned having problems. She would have if there was something troubling her.’ He followed the butterfly with his eyes as it took off, fluttering over to a large shrub with acid-yellow flowers beginning to droop. ‘Holly was popular and she was sensible, girls like that don’t get in fights.’

‘Did she have a boyfriend?’

‘No.’ He tried to scowl at her but couldn’t seem to focus properly, hunched over the table, neck loose, all awkward angles. ‘What’s it got to do with anything now? Dawn’s the person who was murdered. Holly was just … unlucky enough to be there.’

‘It matters because whoever did it left Holly to die when it would have been the easiest thing in the world to make an anonymous nine-nine-nine call and save her. Whoever killed Dawn didn’t care what happened to Holly.’

He winced.

‘Won’t it be someone she was talking to online? They’re all freaks,’ he spat.

‘It’s a possibility. People form very intense friendships. And enmities. She was spending most of her waking hours online. It was her whole life.’

Another wince as he read an accusation into her words.

‘Did Holly ever talk to you about why she quit physio?’ His head bobbed but he didn’t answer. ‘And school? Why did she stop caring, Warren?’

‘Do you think we were happy about that? Do you think we wanted her to give up? Holly knew her own mind. She was a strong girl. Stronger than either of us.’ He took a long pull on his joint. ‘You’ve got to respect your child as an individual, they’re not little mini-mes you shape with your own prejudices and beliefs. Holly knew her mind. Dawn wanted to dictate to her, right, she thought she knew what was best for all of us, all of the time. She was a control freak. She got it from her dad. Bastard. It wasn’t her fault, not really, she was raised bad. She didn’t know how to let Holly be.’

‘You two argued about it,’ Ferreira said, trying to get him to look at her. ‘Holly’s right-to-die campaigning?’

He was staring past her, across her left shoulder, lips parted.

‘Holly wanted to die, didn’t she?’

‘She had no future,’ he said, the words running together. ‘Dawn wouldn’t accept it.’

‘But you did? You agreed with her?’

Warren blinked, one eye moving slightly slower than the other.

‘Is that what you and Dawn were arguing over?’

No answer. No denial.

‘Is that why Dawn wouldn’t let you see Holly?’

She waited, seeing how he swayed slightly where he sat, free hand hanging limp over the back of the chair, thumb brushing circles across his fingertips as if there was something intriguingly textured on his skin.

He was past the point of talking to, she realised.

She thanked him for his time and walked away feeling as if she’d wasted hours, caught up in the time-bending quality of his self-medicated grief.

As she turned the corner around the house she spotted a T-shirt lying on the ground under the washing line, went to pick it up without thinking, meaning to throw it back over the line just to get it out of the dirt, but as she held it between her hands she saw the decal on the front, a symbol she recognised but wasn’t sure where from.

She pegged it out on the line, stretching it taut, and snapped a photograph of it with her phone. Seeing it like that, captured on the screen, she remembered – last night, fatigued and propping herself up with rum-spiked coffee as she sat in bed with her laptop on her knees, going through Holly’s Twitter feed, looking for patterns in the chaotic hate.

The dating sites Dawn used came through within an hour. Zigic had impressed upon them the benefit of cooperation and the potential harm a negative statement to the press could cause their PR department. Appealing to their public spirit might have yielded a result as quickly but somehow he doubted it.

Dawn had found her lovers through two of the bigger sites and with that came mandatory credit-card registration, which meant real names, mobile numbers and addresses too, cutting out days of work for the team. Handily they also had the men’s profile pictures. Everything in neat bundles waiting to be tapped.

But for that they needed resources.

‘How many we looking at?’ Riggott asked, sitting in Zigic’s chair, commanding from it the way he always did when he came up to Hate Crimes.

‘Thirty-nine men.’

‘I was expecting more the way you were going on about her.’

‘These are only from the last twelve months.’

‘You get it once a week, I reckon. Why shouldn’t she?’ Riggott gave him a goatish look. ‘Any of these studs got a record of disability-related harassment?’