The Boy in the River (21 page)

I turned away from the view, went back into the flat and slid the door closed behind me. I poured a couple of drinks. I could feel Faith’s eyes on me as I did so.

At least I’d been able to do something, I told myself fiercely. Soon, I hoped, there would be more arrests, extraditions, convictions. Adam would get justice and I would have played some part in getting it for him.

‘Are you all right?’Faith asked.

I looked at her. Was I all right? Well, yes. Yes, perhaps I was all right. Because if Adam could be laid to rest, then so could my own ghosts. Couldn’t they?

31

London and Dalkeith, July–September 2003

For a while it seemed that they could. Faith and I were married that summer.

After the ceremony we spent two blissful weeks in Europe, travelling to Perugia, Florence, Venice and Verona. In contrast to the time I had spent in the murky netherworld of the Adam case, the days now seemed full of sunshine and hope. On our return to Britain we sealed our good fortune by buying our first proper home, a flat with a view over the Thames near Putney Bridge.

I felt I had reinvented myself and turned my back on a grim past. For her part, Faith had finished the research for her Masters, and it seemed a good moment to cement the idea that we could work together in a formal capacity as a husband and wife team. Our skills seemed complementary, and Faith had overcome her earlier reservations. The work we’d done on the Adam case was becoming well-known in police circles. Just married, and full of confidence that we could make anything work if we tackled it together, we decided to give it a try.

I was unpacking, still very much in holiday mood, wearing shorts and a luridly coloured shirt. People had not yet discovered I was back in London and right now the only thing on my mind was finding my favourite CDs in the pile of boxes that blocked the hallway.

And then the phone rang.

The caller spoke with a Scottish accent, quiet and formal. He almost made me feel inappropriately dressed. The Scottish National Crime Faculty wanted to know if I would be willing to help on a high-profile case involving the murder of a child, which possibly had a religious aspect. If so, I would receive a call shortly from the senior investigating officer.

Detective Superintendent Craig Dobbie came on the line soon after. He wanted to talk about the brutal murder of a schoolgirl called Jodi Jones. It had taken place while we were away on honeymoon, and I had missed the headlines. Within a few days Faith and I were taking the Flying Scotsman to Edinburgh. It was glorious weather, holiday weather. We spent some of the time re-reading the case notes that Superintendent Dobbie had faxed us, which outlined the events with harsh brevity.

Jodi, a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, had been murdered at around 5 p.m. On 30 June – just a couple of weeks earlier. Her body was found off a well-used woodland path known as Roan’s Dyke, outside the Lowland Scottish town of Dalkeith. She had been mutilated. Some seventy cuts and slashes had been inflicted on her body. Murders involving frenzied attacks were not unknown to the police, but according to the forensic officer some of the cuts to Jodi’s body had been made, with apparent precision, after she had died. Rumours of the extreme brutality of the crime had leaked to the press, but no precise details had been released.

I closed the file, sat back in my seat and tried to concentrate on the sunlit countryside slipping past the window.

We stayed at the Balmoral, a rather grand old hotel in the centre of Edinburgh, and that evening we dined in the hotel’s dark, old-fashioned restaurant. We were to see the police at Dalkeith the next day. I wasn’t sure what that meeting would bring, but we were both calm and resolute. We were going to play our part.

When the cab arrived the next morning we were ushered out by a uniformed doorman as if we were A-list celebrities rather than on our way to a murder inquiry.

‘Have a good day, sir, madam,’ the commissionaire smiled.

I felt a frisson of discomfort. Everything about us – our clothes, our Italian tan, and even our attitude, seemed out of kilter with reality. We drove out of the city and into the wooded countryside to the southeast. Faith hadn’t spoken since we had got into the car and I felt sure she was having the same doubts as I was.

Dalkeith proved to be an unlovely town built of grey stone. The police station was a squat modern block set back from the main road. The sergeant at the desk was a hard-faced man in his forties who told us gruffly to wait and made us a truly vile cup of coffee. He kept looking from me to Faith. She was wearing a red jacket and bright red lipstick and seemed to set the room on fire.

I heard footsteps on the stairs and a moment later we were shaking hands with Detective Superintendent Craig Dobbie.

He was just as I had pictured him: capable, quiet, softly spoken and as solid as granite. One of the most senior police officers in Scotland, he had been assigned to the West Lothian force to take on the highest profile murder investigation in the country.

He sat us down at a large table in the incident room. A drowsy bluebottle buzzed against a window that looked out on lowland fields and farms. Rather to my surprise, Superintendent Dobbie suddenly stood up, asking if we would excuse him for a few minutes.

I glanced around at the walls – maps and charts, large arrows and photographs, and several whiteboards with names and numbers written on them in coloured felt-tip – as he conferred with a group of officers in the corridor. The knot of men kept looking over in our direction, while Dobbie spoke earnestly to them. I had the distinct impression he was trying to reassure them about the bearded academic and his attractive young wife.

Superintendent Dobbie returned to the table with several of his colleagues in tow. Within minutes the room was a hive of activity. Faith and I had taken seats at opposite ends of the table, and watched a large pile of material appear between us. Nearly everything was in clear plastic bags, and I glimpsed clothing, books and one or two items that looked stained, perhaps bloody.

Finally, Craig Dobbie set a large folder down in front of me and told us that he was going to leave us alone for a while. He delegated a Detective Sergeant Campbell to help if we needed anything, and pointed out a small collection of books and papers, which weren’t sealed in evidence bags.

‘They’re Jodi’s diaries and some personal papers. I’d like you to look at them as well. If you want to examine any of the items in the bags, Sergeant Campbell will call me over and we’ll go through things for you.’

The photographs were extremely detailed large-format prints; shots of the area around Dalkeith, aerial views of the housing estate where Jodi had lived, and of Roan’s Dyke, the footpath where she’d been found, and some neighbouring estates at the other end of the path. As I turned the pages we returned to ground level and moved down the track.

The body was sickeningly mutilated. Picture after picture showed wounds across the girl’s face, her neck and breasts, her stomach, even her eyes. The case notes had not prepared me for the gross nature of the injuries and the depravity of the killer. I didn’t trust myself to catch Faith’s eye.

Superintendent Dobbie returned and placed his large, strong hands together on the table. ‘Do you have children, Dr Hoskins?’

I told him I had a son and a daughter just a bit younger than Jodi had been.

‘Then I’m afraid you’ll find the diaries as distressing as the photographs.’

He explained that the prime suspect was Luke Mitchell, Jodi’s boyfriend. He was fifteen years old. Forensic evidence linked him to the crime scene, but Luke had claimed to have found Jodi’s body. He was not under arrest. The police didn’t have sufficient evidence. But Luke did have some unusual interests.

For one thing, he had an obsession with Marilyn Manson, the American singer. Superintendent Dobbie felt this might be significant. An alert pathologist had noticed that Jodi’s wounds were mainly inflicted post-mortem, in a pattern resembling the ritualized injuries inflicted on the victim of the Black Dahlia murder in 1940s Los Angeles and which Faith immediately recognized. She had come across the case during her psychology studies. Elizabeth Short, a Hollywood B-movie actress, had been found dead, her body mutilated. The killer was never found. Marilyn Manson was apparently fascinated by it.

I made a few meaningless notes and tried to clear my head. I knew Superintendent Dobbie was observing me. He could see how affected I was, and he probably thought I was thinking of my children. That was true, in a way. If Abigail had lived, she would have been within a few months of Jodi’s age. I felt confused and inadequate. I couldn’t see why this quiet Scottish policeman needed me: he appeared to have already made the obvious connections. He soon supplied the answer.

‘I don’t just want to solve this crime, Dr Hoskins,’ he said. ‘I want to know what gets inside the minds of people and makes them do this. I want to know what tips them over the edge. I’d like you to help me understand that. Because if we don’t understand it, I don’t see how we can ever work to prevent it.’

Later that day we visited Roan’s Dyke. There was little now under the birch trees to mark the atrocity that had been perpetrated here – striped police tape, some trampled undergrowth, coloured marker pegs stuck in the leaf mould.

Faith and I returned to our hotel in silence. I lugged my briefcase across the lobby, laden with photos, notes and reports, some of them copies, others originals that I had to guard with my life.

I dumped the bag on the bed and slumped into an armchair. Faith sat opposite me. I flicked on the television. Sky news was on and the screen filled with the face of Luke Mitchell.

Faith and I were transfixed. The boy was cool, articulate, intelligent. He accused the police of harassment and calmly protested his innocence to the interviewer over and over again. He insisted he knew nothing about Jodi’s murder. He spoke with what sounded like complete candour, directly into the camera. He was fair-haired, good-looking, clear-eyed. He looked like an angel.

Faith got up abruptly, walked into the bathroom and shut the door. After a moment I heard the shower. I looked at the closed door for a second then turned of the television. I opened my case, removed several of the photos from the folder and laid them out on the bed.

I stared at them for some time, totally absorbed and utterly repelled. At length I became aware of Faith standing beside me.

‘What were we thinking of?’ she said. ‘That we could build a glittering career together based on obscenities like this?’

‘I’m sorry.’ I shuffled the photographs together and locked them in my case. ‘This was all a mistake.’

‘Did you see the way those policemen looked at me? You could hear them asking, What’s
she
doing here, that wee blonde girl with her shiny lipstick? What could
she
know about all this? And they were right. This is way out of my league, out of any league I want to be in. How could anyone stand it, dealing with this kind of material, day after day? How could anybody mix in this world and not be contaminated by it? Do you think you can?’

We didn’t talk much more after that. We checked out, took a cab to the station and got on the first train back to London. The train was packed. The trip back was a nightmare. The weather had held and it somehow made it worse to see the fields and hills slipping brightly past. We couldn’t look at one another. We seemed unable even to offer each other comfort.

It didn’t take long to confirm the Black Dahlia hypothesis. The cuts to Jodi’s body, especially the ones made post-mortem, echoed those inflicted on Elizabeth Short sixty years ago. And there was also a clear link with cult singer Marilyn Manson, who, as Dobbie had pointed out, was fascinated by the Elizabeth Short killing. The promotional video for his song ‘moBSCENE’ featured dancers dressed in 1940s gear with their faces made up so that they appeared to have wounds similar to Elizabeth Short’s. In the summer of 2003, the time of Jodie’s death, the song was in the charts. It was hard to avoid the notion that Jodi’s killer had been influenced by it.

But even if Mitchell was obsessed by the Black Dahlia, there were no indications that this was a religious crime. I had hoped there would be: it might have helped explain Jodi Jones’s dreadful death and the equally dreadful things that had happened to her afterwards. As it was, I was left wondering what Superintendent Dobbie expected from me.

But then, sitting in my study one dull afternoon, thinking bleakly over the case for the hundredth time, I remembered his words to me as we sat around that table in Dalkeith police station. He didn’t just want to solve this crime: he wanted to understand it.

He was not alone. How could anyone in our society do such things? What had happened to Adam had been horrible enough, but at least we could tell ourselves it was performed by people of an alien culture and beliefs, people who were profoundly
not like us
. Jodi Jones and Luke Mitchell, though, were disturbingly like the kids next door. They were rebellious and confused, perhaps, but no more than many other adolescents struggling to come to terms with a bewildering world and their own sexuality.

I realized that this admirable Scottish policeman, who must have seen most of life’s horrors in his time, had been deeply shocked by this case. Superintendent Dobbie gave me the impression of a man fighting a doomed rearguard action against a new and incoherent world that threatened to engulf him and all he stood for.

I talked to him on the phone several times over the next few days and weeks. I was painfully aware that I wasn’t giving him the answers he sought, but he was too courteous to say so, and instead he listened to all my observations with calm dignity.

Not long afterwards, Luke Mitchell was arrested and once again questioned by the police. New searches revealed that the boy’s alibi was false. His mother had lied for him. Neighbours reported that he had been seen burning various items in his backyard early on the evening of the killing. One by one, doors were slamming on Luke.