Good Girls Don't Die (3 page)

It was Roxanne who suggested they meet at the Blue Bar. The imposing exterior showed that the premises had once belonged to some venerable Victorian institution, a bank or corn exchange, but the revamped interior, with big wooden ceiling fans and giant potted palms, had been designed to resemble either a New Orleans jazz club or the lobby of a Thirties colonial hotel. Grace, standing in the doorway scanning for the friend she hadn’t seen in several years, couldn’t help thinking of Polly Sinclair who, six days ago, had sat over there by the window with a group of fellow language students. A few of them had been drinking shots and become quite rowdy; now, at seven o’clock, it was too early for a big crowd of serious drinkers, and Grace easily spotted Roxanne Carson seated at the bar. She called out to her friend, and Roxanne slid down from the tall bentwood chair and held out her arms. ‘Grace Fisher! It is so good to see you again!’

‘And you! Been far too long.’

‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns …’

They laughed and hugged, then levered themselves up onto the bar stools. ‘So how long has it been?’ asked Roxanne. ‘Not that it matters, you look just the same! Hair a bit shorter, but slim as ever, damn you!’

‘You look good, too.’

Grace knew that, trim and tall, with straight brown hair, regular features and grey eyes, she’d never be the one to draw attention from anyone glancing in their direction. Roxanne, on the other hand, was petite and curvy, with a mane of dark curls that she said came from her Sicilian grandmother. At uni she’d never had any trouble attracting either friends or lovers, yet on Grace’s first evening in the hall of residence she’d heard Roxanne sobbing through the wall of the neighbouring room. She’d made her get up and take the bus with her into Brighton, where they’d sat on the beach, eating fish and chips and throwing stones at the reflection of the harvest moon in the water. Although never best friends, after that they’d remained close enough to stay in touch for a year or two after graduation.

A barman, good-looking in white shirt and narrow black tie, came up and greeted Roxanne by name; if he recognised Grace as one of the detectives who’d come to speak to his manager two days before, he gave no sign. ‘It’s two for the price of one on shorts before eight o’clock,’ he said. ‘Special midweek promotion, just for the ladies.’

‘We’re fine with the house red, thanks,’ replied Roxanne with a flirtatious smile. She turned to Grace. ‘OK with you?’

‘Sure.’

‘So, the last I heard, you’d got married,’ she said.

‘Yes, and now I’m waiting for my divorce!’ Grace achieved the light-hearted tone she aimed for whenever the subject arose.

‘Quick work,’ observed Roxanne. ‘What happened?’

‘Oh, the usual. Bad idea to live with a man you work with, I guess.’ Two glasses of wine were placed in front of them, and she raised hers in a toast. ‘Cheers!’

‘So what happened?’ repeated Roxanne with a mischievous grin. ‘You’re not getting off the hook that easily.’

‘Oh, we didn’t agree on stuff at work. Trev was happy to remain a constable, but I reckon he never forgave me for being fast-tracked.’

‘That’s a bit lame.’

‘Well, he was in the police national cycling team, and that was always his main priority.’ Grace knew it sounded like an excuse but, even though she could see that Roxanne was waiting to hear more, she took a swig of wine and looked away around the bar.

‘How long were you married?’ asked Roxanne.

‘Two years,’ she answered curtly. ‘So what about you? How long have you been in Colchester?’

‘I’ve been at the
Mercury
four years. Too long! I’m desperate to move on, but all the nationals are downsizing, buying stuff in and putting even their regular journalists on shifts. Too much is online these days.’ She reached across to touch Grace’s arm. ‘Didn’t mean to pry. Sorry. Sounds like it still hurts?’

‘It’s OK. It got complicated. I’ll tell you another time.’

‘Oh, here.’ Roxanne dug in her battered trophy handbag
and drew out a folded newspaper. ‘I brought you a copy. We ran my interview with Polly Sinclair’s parents today.’

Grace heard the pride in her friend’s voice and responded with appropriate enthusiasm. ‘Great, thanks. I’ve only seen the office copy.’

‘I love having my name in print that big,’ Roxanne said with shameless delight. Grace grinned, then cleared aside their glasses so she could spread the newspaper out on the bar.

A photograph of a smiling Polly – blue-eyed with blonde curls, sweetly plump – took up nearly a third of the tabloid’s front page.
Student missing for four days
: the headline was in large, bold type. In a box at the side was a smaller image of Phil and Beverley Sinclair – the decent, apologetic couple who now haunted the police station – with the heading
Desperate parents appeal for help
. Phil, a burly man in a short-sleeved white shirt, had his hand over his wife’s clenched knuckles. Beverley must once have shared her daughter’s fair-haired prettiness, but it was clear that the lines running across her brow and down beside her mouth would now deepen into permanence. Grace had only met them briefly, a sharp reminder that, while their journey to Essex heralded an agony of uncertainty and dread, she could think herself lucky enough to have arrived just as a potentially intriguing case kicked off.

Roxanne caught her eye and gave an awkward laugh. ‘We’re ghouls, aren’t we? Feasting off misery and misfortune. Or I am, anyway. At least you’re
doing
something.’

‘Not true,’ Grace said. ‘Your article’s already had a good
response. A lot more people who were in here last Friday night and remembered seeing her have been in touch. Gives us a far better timeline.’

‘Good,’ said Roxanne. ‘So what’s the theory?’

Grace saw the glitter of a reporter’s eye, and her own heart sank. ‘You know I can’t discuss it. You have to go through Hilary Burnett, or I’m in big trouble.’

‘Like Hilary knows what’s really going on!’

Grace shrugged helplessly.

‘I had a call from the crime reporter on the
Daily Courier
just before I came out,’ said Roxanne. ‘If this turns into a decent story, it could be my chance to get a foot in the door in London, so if there’s any way you think you can help –’

‘I can’t. I’d love to, but I really can’t. And you realise that if it does turn into a major inquiry, then I may not be allowed to speak to you at all.’

‘Yeah, I guessed as much,’ Roxanne acknowledged with a sigh. ‘Still, maybe Hilary will make sure the local paper gets the edge. I know she’s really hot on networking, helping women give the old-boy clubs a run for their money.’

‘Yes,’ Grace agreed, glad that Roxanne wasn’t going to push too hard. ‘It’s thanks to her that I landed up here. She used to work in corporate PR with my stepmum.’

‘So you’re alongside Lance Cooper?’ Roxanne asked with a sly grin.

‘I am.’

‘Hot, isn’t he?’

Grace laughed and held up her hands. ‘I am not even going to go there!’

‘I forgot, love and work don’t mix.’

‘No.’

‘Shame! But you must’ve found out whether he’s spoken for?’

‘I only got here on Monday!’

‘Huh, call yourself a detective! Will you find out and let me know?’ Roxanne finished her drink and signalled to the bartender. ‘Shall we get a bottle this time?’ she asked.

‘Yeah, why not?’ Grace had been afraid Roxanne would hold the necessity for professional discretion against her, but her friend seemed to understand that it wasn’t personal. She began to relax, and heard a Black-Eyed Peas track start to play. Recognising the music of their years at uni together, she felt whisked back to a time when she’d still been carefree and confident that life would go her way.

‘It really is good to see you again,’ Roxanne voiced Grace’s own thoughts with unexpected sincerity. ‘The local reporter may know everyone in town, but I haven’t actually made many friends here. So if you’d like to meet up and do stuff, whatever, just give me a shout.’

‘I will! I was rather dreading the weekends myself, not knowing a soul.’

‘Good. Look, shall we grab a table and get something to eat? The tapas here isn’t too bad.’

‘Great.’

The Blue Bar was beginning to fill up, raising the noise level to a din. Grace and Roxanne were older than most of the crowd. Even the barman, Grace recalled from his statement, was a student doing part-time work. As they moved
to a table, she looked again around the high-ceilinged chamber; on the night she disappeared, Polly, bare-legged, had worn a short pale blue dress, blue high-heeled shoes and a small green bag with an across-the-body strap. The last signal transmitted by her mobile had been close by at about one o’clock in the morning. Then the phone, like Polly herself, had simply vanished. There had been no sightings, her parents had her passport, and she’d not used bank, credit or travel cards, nor accessed any of her digital networks.

From everything they now knew about her, it seemed unlikely that she’d chosen to cut herself off from friends and family. Even when she’d gone to Australia and Thailand on her gap year, and had gone hiking, ridden elephants and got a tattoo, she’d kept in constant touch and complained if her mum failed to send regular news bulletins from home, asking specially for photos of the family dog, a golden retriever. Now that she had been missing for nearly five days, the chances that Polly would be found safe and well were diminishing rapidly.

Was whoever was responsible for her fate here tonight, Grace asked herself. Was the perpetrator – if there was one – amongst these loud, red-faced, excited young men? They were little more than teenagers. Would one of them be capable of abduction, rape or perhaps even murder? Was one of them some kind of obsessive stalker who had Polly locked away somewhere? But if so, where?

The day before, she and Lance had gone to take a look at Pawel Zawodny’s yard, pretending it was a casual
courtesy to call on him, not to waste his time, and found it kept in good order on a busy industrial park with security monitored by CCTV. If he’d taken Polly by force, he’d hardly imprison her there.

They’d also checked into Matt Beeston’s background: second son of two barristers, he’d gone to a private north London day school, had no criminal record, and the university had no record of any complaint against him.

Unlucky Polly; a split-second’s misjudgement and she may have put herself in the power of someone out to do her harm. Grace felt her adrenaline pump at the memory of being out on the beat as an inexperienced constable, of the demand for constant vigilance, the endless monitoring of one’s environment, the need to assert and maintain control. Fail to notice a tiny mood shift, or trust the wrong person at the wrong time, and it could all go catastrophically wrong. Was that what had happened to Polly?

Grace shook herself. Wrong to identify with the victim: that way you missed things, jumped to inaccurate conclusions. Wrong to think about the past: she was here to move on. She picked up the menu and turned back to Roxanne, willing herself to recapture that earlier lovely moment when she’d remembered being naive, wide-eyed and careless.

The air was still warm when they finally left the bar. They made for the High Street as Roxanne phoned for a taxi. People from other clubs and bars had spilled out onto the noisy streets, making the most of the balmy June night, and there was much drunken laughter and banter outside
a popular kebab shop. One girl, misguidedly attempting a somersault on a bike rail, slipped and lay giggling on the ground while her girlfriends shouted their glee and tried to haul her up. A group of buff young men – Grace had the impression they might be paratroopers from the local barracks – gathered round, all clutching beer cans and cheering and jeering in equal measure. Fired up by the attention, the girl tried to repeat her clumsy performance with equally dismal results. When Grace had shadowed uniformed beat officers as part of her graduate-entry training, she had accompanied her share of revellers to A & E after they’d got into brawls, fallen over or vomited themselves into unconsciousness. It was both distasteful and a shocking waste of police time. Her colleagues – many of them legendary boozers themselves – were probably right to despise members of the great British public who couldn’t hold their drink. Yet Grace had remained aware of how vulnerable inebriated youngsters of both sexes could be to robbery, violence or sexual aggression.

Roxanne must have seen the serious expression on her face, for she gave her a playful push, nearly overbalancing herself in the process. Laughing, Roxanne grabbed on to her friend in just the same way that Grace had watched Polly’s grainy avatar cling on to her mates to keep herself upright.

‘Polly was as caned as we are now when she disappeared,’ she told Roxanne. ‘It’s on the CCTV footage.’

‘What d’you think has happened to her?’

Grace shrugged, aware of the shadowy doorways and
silent alleyways around them. ‘No idea. But look at us – she’d have been pretty easy prey for someone who was sober and determined, wouldn’t she?’

The cab Roxanne had ordered drew up, and as they identified themselves and clambered in, Grace looked back at all the young women innocently enjoying a boisterous summer night in this old market town, and wished them well.

She lay awkwardly on top of the jagged debris that covered the half-cleared site where a Sixties office block in the centre of Colchester had been torn down. The body had been arranged with feet apart, legs straight and covered demurely by the smoothed-down, patterned skirt. The arms rested to the sides, and the head was pillowed on some red fabric that looked, from where Grace stood, like a neatly folded item of clothing. Trying to peer past the crime scene investigators, who were carefully laying plastic stepping boards over the rubble, Grace saw but did not immediately account for the dead woman’s short dark hair, startling herself with the realisation that this was not Polly Sinclair.

Despite the surrounding activity, and the undeniable thrill of privileged access to the epicentre of this event, Grace’s brain was sluggish this early in the morning. It had been such fun to gossip all night with Roxanne, but now she was regretting the amount she’d had to drink and her short, fitful sleep. She tried some deep breathing to boost her oxygen level.

‘Not seen a corpse before?’ Lance’s quiet enquiry was sympathetic, but Grace, caught off-guard, replied more snappily than she intended.

‘Of course I have. I’m fine.’

Lance stepped back, and Grace saw his face go blank.

‘Do we know who she is?’ she asked, trying to retrieve his goodwill.

‘Not yet. The super’s talking to Wendy now. The crime scene manager,’ explained Lance, nodding in the direction of the forensic van where Keith Stalgood stood engrossed in serious discussion with a woman about Grace’s age. With her shapely figure and white-blonde hair, Wendy looked like she’d be more at home on a country and western stage than amid the gruesome buzz of a crime scene.

Distracted by the purr of a powerful engine, Lance turned to watch a gold Porsche Panamera slide in behind the forensic van. He smiled. ‘Good, here’s Samit. Now we can get started.’

‘Samit?’

‘The pathologist, Dr Tripathi.’

The driver’s door opened and a middle-aged man got out. He wore chinos and a check shirt, and had a pleasant, unassuming face with watchful eyes behind rimless glasses. Seeing them stare in his direction, he nodded politely, then went over to greet Keith.

‘Nice car,’ Grace observed.

‘Last case we were on, he had an E-type Jag.’

Grace was relieved to see the friendliness had returned to Lance’s eyes. The CSIs finished laying the walkway and,
after instruction from Wendy, disappeared into the van. They soon returned with the kit for a portable tent, which they expertly slotted together to hide the body from prying eyes and protect it from contamination.

‘Don’t know if we’ll get to suit up nor not,’ said Lance glumly. ‘Keith won’t want any more of this rubble dislodged than necessary.’

‘Sure. Do you reckon this is linked to –?’

‘Don’t say it!’ Lance cut her off. ‘Because if our guy has gone and left us a second victim, then this is one serious “oh shit” moment.’

She nodded, understanding perfectly what he meant: they hadn’t a single lead on Polly’s disappearance, and here another woman was dead.

Looking around, Grace realised that the street on which Samit’s Porsche and the forensic van were parked led up towards the Blue Bar. Over the past couple of days every nearby alleyway, garden, yard and unoccupied or neglected building had been searched for any clue to Polly’s fate, but nothing had been found. Now this.

Keith beckoned them over, and they went eagerly. Wendy and Samit had already ducked under the inner cordon of tape and were pulling pristine forensic suits up over their clothes.

‘I want you as exhibits officers,’ Keith informed them brusquely.

Grace and Lance grinned at each other and dived for the forensic van. Moments later they joined the others inside the tent. In the filtered light, with only their eyes visible,
their white-suited figures seemed unearthly. Samit concluded his initial description of the young woman; while he concentrated on posture, body weight and identifying marks, Grace saw a slim young woman with expensively cut short dark hair and good-quality clothes. Last night’s eye make-up now appeared clown-like against the dead pallor of her face.

Squatting down, Dr Tripathi began the process of taking surface swabs and tapings, each of which he handed to them to be bagged and marked. ‘I’m now going to lift the skirt,’ he informed Keith, who gave a nod of agreement. Delicately, he folded the patterned skirt back up to the dead woman’s waist. ‘Well,’ he exclaimed softly. ‘That’s a new one even on me.’

Grace looked over his shoulder: the victim had no underwear, and a clear glass bottle glistened between her pale thighs. Grace instinctively turned away, but then made herself drag her eyes back, to look with her mind, not her emotions. The neck of the bottle had been neatly inserted in the dead woman’s vagina.

Samit continued his narrative. ‘There is a bottle between the subject’s upper thighs that appears to be intact and contains a clear liquid.’

Grace could see that the bottle had been aligned so the label faced neatly upwards. The gaudy design of red and silver illustrated the name, Fire’n’Ice, and some of the letters had been written backwards in an attempt to suggest Cyrillic script. She glanced at Lance, who mouthed ‘vodka’ at her.

Samit stood up to make room for the photographer and turned to Keith. ‘What’s your strategy?’

‘I’d like to remove the bottle now so we can get started on any fingerprints or DNA it might provide,’ Keith told him.

Samit nodded. ‘Be better to remove the clothes in the mortuary, too, rather than on this rough ground.’ He crouched back down, examining the position of the bottle more closely. ‘I’m unable to see any blood or obvious wounds around the vagina. There are no visible marks to suggest a violent struggle, nor that she was dragged here.’

‘There’s no clear route in or out,’ said Wendy. ‘There’s no way of knowing whether this is the murder scene or whether she was dumped here.’

‘Nor how many people might have been involved,’ added Keith.

Grace stared out at the jagged, uneven surface of broken bricks, tiles, glass, concrete and rubbish, heard in the near distance the build-up of morning rush-hour traffic, thought of the young woman she’d seen last night, attempting her drunken somersaults. She’d witnessed how easy it would have been to lead such a lamb to slaughter.

‘Sooner we get a starter for ten, the better,’ said Keith.

Taking out a torch, Samit shone it into the eyes of the corpse, raising his chin to focus through the bottom of his varifocals. ‘Possible petechial haemorrhage suggests strangulation. Though it’s anyone’s guess what we’ll find beneath her.’ He straightened up. ‘She could have a bloody great knife stuck in her back for all I know,’ he commented drolly.

As Samit stepped back, Grace was able to look straight down into the dead woman’s face. Her features were rounded, soft, childlike, jarring against the dark hair of her brutally exposed genitals. Grace could see now that the red garment placed carefully under her head was a folded-up woman’s jacket. Beneath her right ear something bulged under the fabric. Grace pointed to it. ‘That looks like a pocketbook.’

Keith nodded approvingly. ‘Might give us an ID. As soon as you’re ready, Samit, I think we should move her.’

‘Right. Then I can do the PM immediately,’ said Samit.

‘Good.’ Keith turned to face them as best he could in the confined space of the tent. ‘The bottle goes to forensics, but what you’ve all seen here stays under wraps until I say otherwise, understand? Not a word of this leaks out to the media. No one outside the investigation is to know anything about it. No one. Right?’

‘Right, boss.’

He waved Lance and Grace out of the tent, and they made their way to the edge of the inner cordon, where a CSI came to take their evidence bags from them.

‘This place is a going to be total nightmare,’ grumbled the CSI, surveying the rubble. ‘God knows how much material we’re going to have to take and preserve.’

Grace and Lance stared at one another as they snapped off their disposable gloves and peeled the protective covers from their shoes. Despite the shock of what they had seen, the excitement of being handed a secret to keep had turned the investigation into an adventure.

As Grace hopped about on one foot, pulling off her suit, she noticed Roxanne watching from the far side of the road. The reporter beckoned urgently, in defiance of the uniformed officers tasked with encouraging the few pedestrians out so early in the morning not to rubberneck. Handing her suit to the waiting CSI, Grace walked reluctantly as far as the blue-and-white tape where, certain it was not a good idea to be seen speaking to a journalist, she remained safely inside the cordon where the uniformed officers could hear every word.

‘Hey, Roxanne.’

‘Is it Polly?’ Roxanne’s eyes shone, her pen already poised over her open notebook ready to take down a quote.

‘You have to go through Hilary.’

‘Oh, come on! The whole national media pack’s going to be here by lunchtime. Give me a head start, at least!’

Grace shook her head. ‘Ask Hilary.’ She turned away and, aware of Roxanne’s hungry eyes boring into her back, walked the few yards back to where Lance waited. He looked at her with raised eyebrows. ‘Did she know you were going to be here?’ he asked.

‘No!’

Over his shoulder she saw Keith, exiting the tent with Samit, notice Roxanne and then direct a sharp, questioning look at her.

‘Shit!’

‘Come on,’ said Lance. ‘Work to do.’

Grace saw that he was rescuing her, and was relieved to let him shield her from their boss’s displeasure.
Suddenly she was desperate to know just how much Keith had been told about why she’d really left Kent. She’d given the breakdown of her marriage as the reason for quitting her job, and very much doubted that Colin, her old DCI, would have had the balls to deviate from that version of events in his reference. Grace imagined that her stepmother had probably told her old friend Hilary most of what she knew, which thankfully wasn’t everything, and Hilary had asked no direct questions. But news travelled fast: had Hilary gossiped with anyone here about the obvious gaps in Grace’s story? Grace hadn’t picked up any signals that she had, and now told herself firmly there was no point speculating on what Lance and the others did or didn’t know. Best just to keep her head down and get on with the job.

Once they had finished signing over the evidence bags, they began the short walk back to the police station, weaving their way through quiet, narrow lanes where the shops were only just opening for the day. Although they did not immediately speak, Grace could sense Lance’s bubbling excitement.

‘Do you think the bottle was an afterthought,’ he said eventually. ‘A last-minute impulse? Or was it the whole point of the exercise?’

‘It must have been arranged like that postmortem. Which means he didn’t use it as a weapon.’

‘If I’m allowed to reference the FBI’ – he shot her a teasing look – ‘there’s a difference between “staging” and “posing”.’

Grace nodded encouragingly. She was already familiar with the distinction but, pleased that they were evidently on good terms, didn’t want to steal his thunder.

‘Posing is what he likes to do for himself, his signature,’ he explained. ‘Staging is for our benefit, a message.’

‘So which is this?’ she prompted him.

‘I reckon she’s been staged.’ Lance checked over his shoulder to make sure they were not overheard; Grace was thankful that there was no sign of Roxanne trailing them. ‘Laid out all neat and tidy to taunt us because we haven’t found Polly yet.’

‘And the bottle?’

‘Has to be a sick joke, surely? No one in their right mind would –’ He shook his head in disbelief.

‘Who says he
is
in his right mind?’

‘True. But there was no other obvious violence; it wasn’t a sadistic attack.’

Grace considered the grammar of the crime scene. Her immediate reaction had been that the almost gentle pose and delicately inserted bottle contained an eloquence she couldn’t yet decipher. ‘Her head was cushioned. He made her comfortable before he left her.’

Lance shook his head stubbornly. ‘It’s a message for us. Some game he’s playing.’

‘He’s trying to communicate something,’ agreed Grace. ‘But I don’t think it’s a game.’ She wanted to say that the message, whatever it was, had seemed to her to be
sincere
, but now clearly wasn’t the time to change Lance’s mind about what they’d seen. Besides, she was more interested
in hearing his thoughts than in putting forward her own. She could bide her time.

‘Maybe he’s pissed off because we
haven’t
found Polly,’ he said, ‘and this is his way of letting us know.’

‘That there’ll be a price to pay if we don’t play his game, you mean?’

‘Yeah. It’ll all be about him keeping control, won’t it?’

‘If you’re right,’ she said, ‘then you’re saying this poor girl’s death is supposed to steer us to something we’ve missed.’

‘Exactly!’

‘So what is it?’ she asked. ‘
Why
haven’t we found Polly? Where is she? What point are we missing?’