Good Girls Don't Die (29 page)

Grace had been woken at two by the Skype ringtone on her laptop, which she’d left on the floor by her bed. The connection to southern Afghanistan had been patchy, but, as the sun was rising in Helmand, and before the 40-degree temperatures kicked in, she’d been able to have an illuminating conversation with Michael Tooley, a matter-of-fact professional soldier in khaki singlet and shorts sitting in what looked like a swelteringly hot metal shipping container. She felt like she’d only just fallen asleep again when her mobile rang sometime after six. It was Keith, calling from Wivenhoe Woods where he was waiting to meet the forensic pathologist and the crime scene manager. The second he’d heard that Ivo Sweatman, aided and abetted by a trained cadaver dog, had discovered what, according to the dog-handler, could only be human remains in the collapsing remnants of a kids’ tree house, he’d driven there with blues and twos all the way from Upminster. Grace did her best to sound astonished.

By the time she was climbing the stairs to the MIT office
shortly before seven, all hell had broken loose. She met Hilary coming down. ‘I’ve just been told a third suspect has been arrested,’ she said, ‘and there’s not a single officer available for the morning press conference. What on earth am I supposed to tell the media this time!’

Hilary clattered off and Grace went into the office. Lance materialised at her side as if he’d been waiting for her. ‘You have anything to do with this?’ he asked with a sly grin, his eyes shining with excitement.

‘Me? No!’

‘Yeah, right. But don’t worry, my lips are sealed. They’re bringing Danny in now.’

‘Good.’

‘I told the superheroes it has to be you who leads the interview, that you’re the only one who’s had a real handle on this right from the start.’

Grace was surprised, and touched. ‘Thank you.’

‘Come on! It’s your collar, regardless of whatever funny handshakes you’ve been having with Ivo Sweatman.’

Confirming Lance’s words, Superintendent Millington immediately called Grace into her office, and she, Grace, Lance and Duncan spent the next hour planning the interview strategy. Before they were finished, Keith called from the mortuary to report that Dr Tripathi had now cut through enough of the tightly bound layers of black refuse sacks and gaffer tape to confirm that they contained human remains. It would take some time to fully uncover the body, which had been wrapped with great care in a clean bed-sheet and then swaddled with an eiderdown, but the pale
blue dress the corpse was wearing would appear to confirm unofficially that they had found Polly Sinclair. Formal identification and preliminary post-mortem results would follow later in the day, and they’d keep the interview team updated.

When Grace and Duncan entered the interview room an hour later, Danny was already sitting at the table beside one of the duty solicitors, who nodded familiarly to Duncan. Danny picked nervously at the loose cuffs of his plain white work shirt and listened numbly as Duncan went through the formal preliminaries. The dark hairs showing on Danny’s arms above his bony wrists looked as if they had sprouted there overnight, making his pale skin seem naked and exposed, that of a child in an adult body.

It had been agreed, after some discussion, that Grace would begin by showing Danny the print-out of the photograph that he had framed on his mantelpiece. ‘You know what this is, don’t you, Danny?’ she asked, identifying it for the tape as a numbered exhibit.

‘How did you get that?’

‘You let the journalist from the
Courier
take a photo of it. And we talked about it yesterday, didn’t we?

‘Yes.’

‘Where was it taken, do you remember?’

‘I was only little.’

‘Was it in Wivenhoe Woods?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Think hard, Danny. When’s the last time you visited this place?’

‘Not for years. I don’t know where it is.’

‘So it would surprise you, then, if we told you that we’re pretty certain we’ve found it?’

Danny stared at her in obvious panic. Grace had tried earlier to explain to Lena Millington that Danny was immature, naive, a fantasist, but also ruthless, cunning and manipulative, not in pursuit of power over other people but in defence of his own self-delusions. He was panicking now from fear not that he’d been caught but that his precious house of cards would come tumbling down and leave him facing nothing but emotional and psychological ruin.

‘I spoke to your brother, Michael, earlier this morning.’

‘You can’t have done! He’s in Helmand.’

‘He is, yes. But we had a video call. He told me about your mother’s illness.’

‘She was depressed. He never understood depression.’

‘Your mother may have been depressed, but she was also an alcoholic, Danny.’

Danny smoothed his fingers over the photograph of Marie Tooley. ‘This is my mother. Look at her. She’s fine. She’s lovely.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Grace. ‘On a good day. A rare good day, from what Michael told me.’

‘She was a lovely mother.’

‘But there were also months at a time when she failed to get out of bed, soiled herself, vomited and refused to clean it up. And rewarded your devoted care with vile abuse.’

‘She was ill. I looked after her.’

‘You did, Danny. I know. Michael could never understand why you stayed. Why you didn’t get out like he did. I spoke to the social workers who also tried to help you. They said you missed so much school on her account that it was a miracle you got any education at all.’

‘She couldn’t help it. She tried. When she was well, she promised it wouldn’t happen again. She never meant to be like that. She was ill. It’s not who she really was.’

‘Like Polly?’

Danny’s head shot up and he stared at her, his mouth hanging open in shock.

‘Polly was really rude to you that night in Colchester when she asked for a lift. Even Dr Beeston was surprised that she had such a mouth on her.’

‘She didn’t mean it! She came specially to apologise the next day!’

‘And when she got drunk again the next night, and was staggering around alone in the centre of Colchester at one in the morning, what did you think?’

‘I took care of her.’

‘But then she turned out to be just as ungrateful as your mother, didn’t she, Danny? Polly didn’t love you any more than your mother did.’

Danny placed both hands on the table, shoved his chair back and got to his feet. For a moment Grace thought he was going to attack her, and she tried hard to remain impassive, glad of Duncan beside her. But Danny turned to his solicitor. ‘She can’t do this. She can’t talk like this. Make her stop.’

The solicitor soothed him and got him to sit down again, explaining that, though he was free not to answer, the police could ask him anything they liked.

‘What did your mother like to drink?’ said Grace. ‘Did she like vodka?’

‘Tea. She liked to drink tea.’

‘Not according to your brother, Michael. If she got to choose, then she liked vodka, but most of the time she’d take whatever was cheap, whatever was on special offer. She made Michael give you an ID card so you could pretend to be eighteen and go out to buy her booze for her. You always had to buy whatever was on special offer, or she’d yell and curse at you when you got back.’

Danny folded his arms, sitting straight in his chair, chin down, legs pressed together, not looking at anyone.

‘But it was the booze that stopped her loving you, wasn’t it, Danny? Stopped her being the lovely mother who took you on picnics and ate crisps with you in a tree house in the woods.’

Danny went on pretending not to hear.

‘Fire’n’Ice was on special offer the week that Rachel Moston was killed.’ Grace tried to keep the excitement out of her voice. She still had some lingering doubt about whether Danny was really capable of luring a confident young woman like Rachel onto a demolition site in the middle of the night. She was desperate to get to the truth, to know finally what had happened that summer night when all the students were out celebrating the end of their exams.

She opened a folder she had placed earlier on the table.
‘You’d have recognised Rachel from the bookshop, is that right?’

Danny nodded imperceptibly.

‘For the tape, please.’

‘Yes.’

‘But she was never nice to you like Polly.’

‘She had no idea who I was.’

‘So it was OK to be angry with her. You were upset and distressed about what happened that night when, as you told us, you had given Polly a lift home. Unbearably distressed, perhaps. Rachel was strangled five days after Polly went missing. Whoever did that left a very definite message in the way he posed her body.’ Grace dealt out three crime scene photos. ‘What do you think this meant?’ she asked. She placed her fingertip on the paper, pressing down firmly on the glistening bottle of Fire ‘n’ Ice between the pale thighs.

After a single glance, the solicitor looked away, his face contracting in disgust. Grace watched Danny carefully. Whatever he felt, it was not surprise: he knew exactly what to expect.

‘I think whoever did this wanted to explain something, to explain his feelings,’ said Grace. ‘Rachel had been out celebrating. She’d completed her degree and would be leaving uni for a good job. She’d been out with her friends and had drunk one too many on a warm, balmy night. That’s when you saw her leaving the Blue Bar, right?’

Danny stared at Grace, his mouth set with a belligerence she’d never seen in him before.

‘So, what? You offered her a lift? Told her you also lived in Wivenhoe and that your car was parked nearby? Is that how you got her to walk with you?’

‘She’d been sick,’ he said abruptly. ‘The cabs refused to take her in case she threw up again.’

‘So you were looking after her?’

‘I said I’d get her home.’

‘But you didn’t.’

He shook his head.

‘For the tape.’

‘No.’

‘Where did the vodka bottle come from?’

‘It was on a wall. Someone had left it there. She said it was a shame to let it go to waste and started drinking from it. She’d just been sick! It was disgusting.’

‘So she deserved this?’ Grace pointed to the crime scene images. ‘She ought to be ashamed for being so drunk. For not being nice to you when you were trying to look after her. For not being Polly.’

‘I’d never hurt Polly like that!’

‘No. Not like this. You wrapped her up in an eiderdown. Put a frilly pillowcase under her head. Its pair was retrieved from your airing cupboard an hour ago.’

Danny stared at her as if she was speaking a foreign language.

‘But afterwards, after you’d done this to her, you took Rachel’s red jacket and folded it up, didn’t you?’

This time Danny nodded. ‘The bricks were filthy, sharp. The dirt was getting in her hair. I didn’t know what else to do.’
He raised his head with a look of pride. ‘I’m good at looking after people.’

Now Grace was coming to the part that was hardest for her. She swallowed back the grief and squared her shoulders. ‘And Roxanne Carson?’ she asked, hoping her voice wouldn’t tremble. ‘You didn’t take such good care of her.’

‘She was going to write stuff about Polly.’

‘And about you.’

‘I didn’t care about that. But she was going to put things in the paper that weren’t true. All she wanted to talk about was Polly being drunk and having sex with Dr Beeston. She wouldn’t stop asking questions.’

‘And you wanted to stop her from printing that kind of stuff?’

‘She didn’t understand!’ cried Danny. ‘None of that stuff was Polly’s fault. I loved her!’

‘But Polly’s dead, Danny. How did that happen, if you loved her?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I think that you hoped Polly would love you back. Especially after she came to the shop to apologise to you. That proved she liked you.’

Danny nodded.

‘Maybe you even imagined that meeting up with her in Colchester, taking her home, was like a date. That maybe she felt the same way you did.’

He stared at her with anxious, poignant hope, as if somehow the past could be rewritten.

‘But once she’d had a drink, she changed,’ said Grace. ‘She didn’t like you so much after all.’

‘No, we’re friends.’

‘It’s the hope that’s so cruel, isn’t it? When you hope for something, hope for love, and it doesn’t happen, you feel let down, stupid, ashamed, like it’s your fault for wanting it.’ Deep in her mind Grace heard the click of a kettle switching off: she knew in her very bones the shame of that moment when you realise that you are not loved as you stupidly believed yourself to be. That moment of shame could change a person forever. ‘Polly turned you down, didn’t she?’ she asked. ‘Destroyed your hope.’ Grace had spent only one night alone in a budget hotel bed that never got warm. Danny’s childhood had been unimaginably worse and gone on for far longer than that. ‘Made you feel like you weren’t worth bothering with.’

‘She wasn’t like that!’

‘That must have been unbearable.’

‘No. It didn’t happen.’

‘Which is why you wanted to show that you were looking after her, to leave her pure and safe in your special place, the place where you enjoyed lovely picnics with your mum.’

Danny stared at her.

‘We’ll be able to match the perforations of the bin bags you wrapped her up in to the remainder of the roll under your sink. We’ll be able to work out exactly what happened that night. Danny?’

‘What?’

‘Have I understood? For the tape, please.’

But Danny smiled and shook his head, and then stretched out a finger and gently stroked the image of his smiling mother. ‘Polly went away,’ he said, still smiling. ‘She wanted to go somewhere safe, where bad things wouldn’t happen, and I helped her.’

As Grace turned into Alma Street, she could see Pawel Zawodny already waiting outside the house. He smiled as she drew near, his coat collar pulled up against the early autumn chill from the river.

‘Thanks for coming yourself to meet me,’ she said.

‘My pleasure. I think I owe you something for my being free to come here and not in a cell.’

‘Hardly!’

He had the key ready in his hand. ‘You want to see inside?’

‘Please.’

He opened the front door. The single downstairs space seemed much bigger now that it was unfurnished, with only the built-in shelves and slatted blinds remaining from when Caitlin and Amber had lived here with Rachel Moston. The wood-effect floor and all the surfaces were spotless, and the low September sunlight streamed in through the glass of the conservatory extension. She was happy that it was all so different to the Edwardian terrace she had shared with Trev. Her old home in Maidstone was now sold, her
divorce would soon be final and she could at last abandon her featureless rented flat. This house would be a new beginning.

‘It’s just as lovely as I remember,’ she told him.

‘You don’t feel it’s unlucky? Or haunted?’

‘No. Do you?’

Pawel pulled a face. ‘Unlucky for me, maybe. But not so much as for those poor girls.’

‘But you’re still selling up?’

He nodded. ‘Two are already sold.’

‘But you know that I spoke to the university accommodation people,’ she told him. ‘They said they’d reinstate your houses on their lists.’

He shrugged. ‘Yes, they told me. And thank you. But there will always be doubt about me here. Maybe only behind my back, but it will follow me around. Better I go home, make my mother happy.’

Although he smiled, his eyes – the same blue as the bare walls, she noticed – had a hurt, guarded look.

‘So you’ll accept my offer?’ she asked.

He held out his hand and she took it, liking his dry, warm grasp. They shook on the deal, and then he followed her upstairs.

‘If you want me to do any work before you move in, just let me know. I charge you a fair rate.’

‘Thank you, yes, I may want some extra shelves and things.’

‘He’s in prison, the man you caught?’ he asked abruptly.

‘Danny Tooley. Yes. Awaiting trial. He’s pleading guilty
to two of the murders, but he still won’t actually admit to killing Polly Sinclair. We have clear-cut evidence, and he doesn’t even really deny it, but I don’t think he can bear to bring himself to say it aloud, not even to himself. Not yet, anyway. And maybe he never will.’

‘But he wasn’t the one in bed with Polly that morning?’

Grace could hear a strain of anxiety in Pawel’s voice. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That wasn’t the man who killed her.’

‘I can’t forgive myself. I should have made sure she was all right.’

‘If she was hurt that morning, then Matt Beeston is responsible, not you.’

He didn’t look convinced. ‘How are their families?’

‘Not great. Maybe once the trial’s over, it’ll be a tiny bit easier and they’ll find some kind of peace. I doubt it, though. I don’t think the families ever truly recover.’

He nodded sympathetically, then moved to stand by the bedroom window, making out that he was checking the catch on the casement. ‘I was very angry with you for a long time,’ he said without turning around.

‘I can imagine.’ She didn’t know what else to say. It didn’t feel right to apologise, however unfair the consequences that had followed on from his arrest. The fall-out and detritus of a violent crime – like the occasional tattered yellow ribbon that still fluttered from trees or lamp posts around the campus – was perhaps never entirely effaced.

‘You had to say those things to me,’ he said, turning to face her. ‘It was your job, but you didn’t really believe any of it, did you?’

Grace thought of all the people – including Colin Pitman – who had congratulated her once Danny had been charged with all three murders, who had insisted they’d always trusted her judgement; Keith had been the only one she’d believed, and Lance the only one who truly meant it when he’d grinned and said he didn’t mind admitting that he’d been wrong but that he didn’t intend to make a habit of it. He’d also been the first to buy her a drink after she’d been made back up to DI. After everything she’d been through in Kent, the vindication had felt absolutely wonderful.

‘Not for a moment,’ she told Pawel with a smile. It was a good lie, a decent and respectful one, and as she uttered it, she realised that, deep down, despite his masculine pride and arrogance, she probably never really had thought of him as other than he was – a kind, honest, old-fashioned and hard-working guy.

He took a deep breath and exhaled joyously, most of the tension vanishing instantly from his face. Seeing the effect of her words, Grace smiled and held out her hand. Pawel ignored it. Instead he placed both hands lightly on her shoulders and kissed her formally on both cheeks.

At the front door, Grace turned back to look around once more at the light, open space that Pawel had created and that would soon be her new home. She would be happy here, she promised herself.