Running Girl (10 page)

‘Jess?' he said, more softly.

‘What?'

‘When did you last see Chloe?'

Something went across Jessica's face, a little flurry of emotion, and she began to chew the inside of her cheek.

‘Can't remember, actually.'

‘But she was your friend. Your best friend. You saw her all the time, didn't you?'

‘Yeah, well. Course.' She folded her arms. ‘Must have been at school that day. Friday. Friday morning. At school.'

‘Right.'

While she glowered, Garvie sat quietly smoking, until at last she glanced at him and managed to smile again, and when she finally spoke, it was in her usual sexy wheedle.

‘Garv? Why do we have to talk about other people all the time, Garv?'

‘You want to talk about something else?'

She nodded and he sat back.

‘All right.' For a moment he continued to smoke thoughtfully, then he said, ‘How about complex numbers?'

She looked at him doubtfully. ‘Can't we just talk about me?'

Snuffing out his cigarette, he took a scrap of paper and a pencil out of his jacket pocket. ‘A complex number, Jess, is made up of a real number and a number in an imaginary dimension. Call it
z
. There's a formula, right:
z
=
a
+
bi.
.
i
means
b
's in an imaginary dimension. Right?' He drew quickly.

Jessica squinted at it. ‘Looks like maths,' she said with distaste.

‘
i
²
is always −1. You'd think that was impossible, right?'

‘I would, yeah. Like, totally.'

‘Well, it isn't. In an imaginary dimension the impossible's possible. See? That's where
i
is, up there, and −
i
, down there. On an
imaginary
axis. Now, you don't compute
i
numbers, you rotate them, by ninety degrees, into that imaginary dimension. 1 ×
i
moves you up there, where
i
is. Times
i
by itself to get its square, and you rotate another ninety degrees, and end up there, at −1. Same thing for −
i
, by a different route. Elementary. Yeah?'

‘Yeah, yeah, course.' Jessica attempted a smile and produced a slight twitch. ‘But what's that got to do with me?'

Garvie looked at her thoughtfully. ‘I don't know yet.'

He drew another diagram.

‘Here's a complex number:
z
=
a
+
bi.
See? That point there. Point of a triangle. A cinch to work out. Let's say
a
= 4 and
b
= 6.
.
z
= 7.211.'

She scowled.

‘All right. Here's another complex number. Call it “What Jess did”.'

‘Why?'

‘ 'Cause Jess is complex.
a
= something real, something solid – I don't know, let's say ... “Chloe's running shoes”.'

Scowling, Jessica turned away and began flicking ash all over her skirt.

‘
bi
is trickier,' he said. Pausing, he looked at her. ‘Hmm. I'm going to call it “Bad feeling”.'

‘What d'you mean, “Bad feeling”?'

‘Bad feeling between Jess and Chloe. And all we have to do now is work out the result.'

There was a silence. After a moment he said quietly, ‘See what I'm getting at?'

Jessica finished her cigarette in one long furious drag and obliterated the butt on the bench arm-rest. ‘There are times, Garvie Smith, when I'm not so keen on you.'

He nodded sympathetically and patted her knee, and she said in a soft wail, ‘Garv, I don't get it. Why do you have to keep bringing other people and strange numbers and stuff into it? Can't we just talk about
me
?'

She slid round on the bench and curled up her legs and put her feet in his lap and wriggled her toes.

He sighed. ‘All right.'

There was a long silence.

‘Well, go on, then,' she said.

‘What nice big feet you've got, Jess.'

For a moment she looked at him, horrified, her eyes big with shock. Then she recovered herself and was properly cross. Kicking her legs free, she jumped off the bench and stood facing him, little fists clenched.

‘Temper,' Garvie said mildly.

She said, ‘You know what's wrong with you, Garvie Smith? You just don't care about anybody but yourself!'

In a fury, she turned from him and wiggled away as fast as she could round the corner of Jamal's.

Garvie sat there a moment longer, thinking. He thought about Chloe's feminine room and the horrible sunset up at Pike Pond and Jessica's feet. Jessica's feet, particularly. But most of all he thought about the way she'd looked at him, not in anger, but in horrified surprise.

With a sigh he got up and walked back into the street. There was a news hoarding outside Jamal's which said
NO CLUES YET IN
‘
BEAUTY
'
MURDER
, and he glanced at it without expression and headed for home.

‘You really don't care about anyone but yourself, do you?' his mother said from the doorway, where she had materialized with her usual sudden solidity.

Interrupted in his thoughts, Garvie kept his eyes on the ceiling and sighed very gently through his nose.

‘Two hours ago he phoned,' she said, ‘to ask where you were.'

‘Who did?'

‘Mr Trindle.'

‘Who's he?'

‘Your geography teacher.'

‘Really?'

His mother glared at him. ‘So what's the answer?'

‘Answer to what?'

‘Where were you? Obviously not in your geography lesson.'

For a moment he considered telling her he'd taken flowers round to Mrs Dow's, but before he could open his mouth his mother said, ‘This isn't anything to do with the investigation about Chloe, is it? You're not getting mixed up in that, are you?'

He registered the dangerous note in her voice. ‘Course not,' he said.

‘Well, then?'

‘I didn't go anywhere. I was just told Trundle had cancelled his lesson.'

‘Trindle.'

‘Whoever.'

His mother began to do the breathing thing, and, lying there, he braced himself for the usual argument, the storm of outrage at the untidiness of his room, the verbal assault on his unauthorized absences from school, the outcry against his general lack of effort. He sensed it coming. But it did not come. Cautiously, he glanced at her. Although her face was the familiar bunched mask of disapproval, she was holding something unfamiliar in her hand. A letter. A letter in an official-looking, somehow foreign envelope. While he was still considering this, she suddenly sat down heavily on the end of his bed and he blinked in surprise.

‘What're you doing?'

‘You better listen to me for once,' she said. ‘I've something to tell you.'

‘Can't it wait?' He paused. ‘I was trying to revise.'

Without warning she told him anyway, and he sat up and stared at her.

‘What?'

She told him again. The director of human resources at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Bridgetown, Barbados, had written to her inviting her to apply for the position of Senior Nurse, Surgery. ‘But it's in Barbados.'

‘It is.'

‘And you've got a job here,' he said. ‘Why would you want to go there?'

She told him. Money was tight here. The flat was expensive here. In Barbados the living was a lot cheaper and, as it happened, the house in Bridgetown where her elderly mother used to live was still standing empty, just waiting for someone to move in. There was family there too – Garvie's other uncles and aunts, and more cousins than she could remember.

She hesitated. ‘And I think you'd be happier in Barbados,' she said.

‘No,' Garvie said.

‘All right,' she said. ‘I think it would be good for you living in Barbados.'

‘No,' he said again.

‘It's not for you to say yes or no. It's my decision.'

‘I won't go.'

‘What will you do?'

‘I'll doss with friends.'

His mother sighed. ‘I'm serious, Garvie. I'm done watching you do nothing. I'm not going to stay here and watch you get into trouble.'

‘I'm not getting into trouble.'

‘I want you to stop before it gets serious.'

‘I told you, I'm not getting into trouble.'

There was silence while he suppressed a memory of what Inspector Singh had just said to him.

She got to her feet. ‘I have another week or so before I give them an answer.' With a slow, fierce eye she looked around the room. ‘If you want me to turn the job down you better start showing me why living here is so much better for you. You've got exams next month.'

After she'd gone, Garvie sat alone, looking around – as she had done – at the hideous mess of dirty laundry and rubbish. Somewhere in all that was his school bag. Perhaps.

He got up wearily, but in the kitchen his mother put on the radio and he stopped to listen. A voice came to him, flat and crackly but still recognizable: Detective Inspector Singh making a statement.

There had been a new development, he was saying. The police had shifted their focus to the Market Square precinct in the centre of the city. He appealed to anyone who thought they might have seen Chloe there between the hours of six and midnight on Thursday to come forward to assist them. But he would not give a reason for this shift in focus, nor would he answer questions about CCTV pictures of the area or explain what Chloe might have been doing.

‘Is there anyone specifically helping you with your enquiries?'

‘The investigation is making progress,' he said shortly. ‘I have no further statement to make.'

‘Are there any suspects at all, in fact?' the reporter asked.

But Singh declined to comment.

Garvie lay down quietly on his bed again, and stared at the ceiling. Market Square: a small crooked block of cobbled streets long since redundant as an artisan centre, revived now as a picturesque collection of cafés, bars, restaurants and high-end clubs, all discreet awnings, clever floor-lights and menus in French, and strikingly more in period now than it had been a few hundred years earlier. The natural habitat of the old and rich.

Garvie gazed impassively at the ceiling.

Chloe had liked to talk about Market Square as if she knew it intimately. But her personal inclination was for the bigger, more popular venues in The Wicker – the natural habitat of the young and famous. She wouldn't have shied away from Market Square, but it wouldn't have been her choice.

Garvie's eyes narrowed slightly.

It would have been someone else's choice.

AS THE DAYS
passed there was no subsiding of media interest in the ‘Beauty and the Beast' murder, rather the reverse, and on the day of Chloe's funeral it boiled up to a new intensity. The news channels were jammed with Chloe: her youth, her charm, her dreams, her hopes, her mystery, her murder and, like a piercing memory never to be forgotten, her picture: that snapshot, that face of heart-breaking innocence and beauty. At the Marsh Academy the camera-toting press besieged the gates in ranks of eight and nine, kept at bay only by the diminutive Miss Perkins, in whom they recognized, uncomfortably, a determination more extreme than their own.