The Last Winter of Dani Lancing: A Novel (16 page)

“I’ll arrange it.”

She photographs each page methodically and quickly with the little spy camera, but does not read anything, barely glances at the content. Not until she has finished and stowed away the camera does she begin to read the file.

Patty shakes those memories away; she needs to concentrate on Tom now, not twenty years ago.

“What forensic testing … of what evidence, Tom? I saw the files back then and there were no DNA samples taken.” She tries to
remember the exact wording. She’s sure it said: “Samples collected for storage: none.”

“I haven’t seen the original report. Perhaps they weren’t classified as samples because by the standards of twenty years ago they weren’t.” Tom tries to make it sound like he isn’t guessing.

“But today? Today these tests …”

“Minute traces can be tested today whereas twenty years ago you needed so much more. And samples can be taken from so many more surfaces and materials.”

“And does the file have—”

“Patty, I don’t know. Maybe, but …”

He feels out of control. Normally he wouldn’t give the family any technical detail, just be calm and reassuring without getting anyone’s hopes up. But this is Patty.

Tom continues. “They sent me a scan of the log sheet—it’s a one-page summary on the front of the file. It says there were fluid samples taken and clothing samples retained.”

Patty feels tears break through the levee and begin to run down her cheeks. She thought she’d cried every tear her body was capable of years ago; she’d become desiccated through so much sobbing, but they still come. Tom stands and moves forward slowly, like a trainer with a wild animal. He puts his arms around her shoulders, and … Flashback to twenty years ago and he is breaking the news to her and she begins to scream and scream, he holds her tight. The same woman twenty years later … He can feel a fury build in his own chest but he holds it down.

Later, when he is alone, he will scream Dani’s name until his lungs feel like they will burst. Then he will cry for her and her mother. He will cry for them all. Now, he and his love’s mother are wrapped together before the last sob wracks Patty and she pulls
herself away from him. She gets up and goes in search of some tissues. All she can find is a roll of toilet paper.

“Patty, you have to know that the chances are slim. Really slim that anything is even usable, let alone could provide evidence.”

“But possible?”

He should say “no.” He can see her hopes rise. He should say “no” to save her more torment, but he can’t. “Yes, it’s possible.”

Possible. The word seems to burrow into her, letting the fog out. Her heaviness falls away, like one of Salome’s veils dropping to the floor revealing the shape of something indistinct, a tease, but something is there. Patty feels alert, for the first time in years.

“Do you have any idea about the timescale? When will Dani’s murder be reviewed?”

Tom hesitates. “Forty-eight months,” he tells her, deeply embarrassed. “Probably about forty-eight months. I’m very, very sorry.”

“Oh, Tom” is all she can say.

They sit together for a while longer, though there is not much more to be said. Tom gives her a web address and tells her that a letter will arrive soon restating pretty much what he has just told her.

“Jim will be informed too,” Tom tells her.

“I can tell him,” Patty offers.

“Or I can.”

“It would be better if I told him.”

“Fine.” Tom nods.

In her heart, Patty knows she won’t tell him and thinks it better if he doesn’t know. Not for a while at least. Finally Tom moves to leave and Patty shows him to the door.

“Oh. Wait,” and she runs off.

Tom stands at the door awkwardly as time ticks by. She is gone for at least five minutes, before she finally returns.

“There is this. I thought you might … I don’t know why I have it. I have almost nothing else but …” She hands him a small metal cup on a fake marble plinth. On the front is a gold-colored plaque that reads:

14 J
UNE
1982

800
M
C
HAMPION

D
ANIELLE
L
ANCING

He smiles as he runs his finger along the rim of the trophy. He remembers the day as if it were yesterday, not almost thirty years ago. She broke the school record that day, and that night was the first he talked to her, talked to her properly, just the two of them.

“Tom. Isn’t there something you can do to bump her up the list? Surely there must be.”

He looks at her as the memories crash around him. Patty was good. She had ambushed him at his most vulnerable.

“There is nothing I can do,” he manages in a small voice.

“That can’t be tr—”

“Cold cases are looked at by another unit. I can’t ask for preferential treatment, and they wouldn’t give it. Besides, I think the chance any review will uncover something is so small. Really, Patty, I don’t want you to have false hope.”

He holds out his hand to her, but she pulls away. He can see her harden before his very eyes. He hears it in her voice too. The ice queen.

“Don’t worry about me,” she tells him and opens the door. “Bye, Tom.”

“Patty.”

He walks away from the house. Darkness has fallen while he was inside and the night air is chill. He hopes he made the right decision, to see her himself rather than have a junior FLO deliver the news. He doesn’t know what four years of waiting will mean to her. He remembers all too vividly those first few months, that first year or two. She was like a hunting dog, pulling apart everything. He didn’t know how Jim could stand it back then, watching the obsession grind her down and waste her away. He desperately hopes this will not rekindle that madness. There is no chance that the samples will provide the evidence to find the killer—this isn’t TV. There is never going to be an answer to who killed Dani.

Patty watches him walk down the road, away from the house. As he retreats, she feels the tremor begin. She rides the crest, surfing the crashing wave out … out … out … It takes a long time for her to come back to her body. She has found over the years that the tremors are like ripples made by a stone thrown into a lake. A small splash and there’s just a gentle undulation that carries you outward until calm returns. A big stone and it’s a roller coaster. And this? Well, this was no small stone, this was Atlantis, sliding under the churning ocean creating waves that could last for all time.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

The dead leaves crunch underfoot as Patty runs. She knows it’s some kind of addiction—she craves the endorphins her body ekes out like some crack-dealing Scrooge. She runs every day, has done for the last six or seven years. Sometimes only a few miles but often fifteen or more. Always alone. It depends on how much thinking she has to do, or how desperate she feels. On desperate days she runs the furthest and fastest.

It’s cold. Autumn is really biting, but the sky is clear and there’s some watery sun that shines through the brown papyrus of the leaves. She can see her breath.

Still less than a day since Tom’s visit. It feels like she’s been struck by lightning. “She’s alive, she’s alive!” She imagines some mad scientist howls at the moon in glee that Patty Lancing is reanimated.

“When did I die?” she asks herself.

“When you gave up hope,” he echoes through her head.

“Oh, are you back in my head, Jim?”

“I never left, just waited for you.”

Patty speeds up, trying to outpace the truth. Because, of course, she had given up. She had looked under every rock, tried to dig out every secret surrounding her daughter’s death, but there was nothing. She hit brick wall after brick wall as if someone were blocking her at every stage. But she still went around the maze time and time
again. Month after month and then year after year. And then—she can’t pinpoint the time or the place, but she started to slow down. Then she fell to her knees and crawled and finally she lay down and died. That was probably when she started to run. Her body still worked, but inside there was nobody home. When was the last time she shed a tear, the last time before yesterday? Years. Years and years. Silent and cold, dead but running. Until now. Bolt from the blue and … her case will be reviewed. Something to live for. But four years? She runs faster.

Her lungs burn, and finally force her to stop. She has lost all sense of time; it’s dark and she has no idea where she is. The temperature’s dropped, suddenly it’s freezing. She looks up to the moon and to the side sees the Pole Star. She could wish on it. The thought makes her smile.

“Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight. I wish I may, I wish I might …”

But what does she wish for? She closes her eyes and a face she had almost forgotten fills her mind.

Friday, October 8, 2010

The
bizness 4 U
building had been launched, with great fanfare, by a government minister five years before—all slick and shiny. Two hundred subsidized luxury offices to boost London’s entrepreneurial spirit. Today, half are empty, the other half full of massage therapists, women baking organic flapjacks and media start-ups. Patty arrives on level four and peers out from the lift. It looks exactly the same as levels two and three, both of which she has walked around for the last twenty minutes. The carpet is luxuriant, but hideously turquoise. Large plants in pots have been placed every ten feet, real plants, but the lack of light has caused them to brown at the edges and curl like old toast. At least half of the lightbulbs are blown and a large pink penis has been drawn in the lift. This is the last floor she will look at, she decides, and heads out. Nothing, nothing, nothing … But then the final door reads
MARCUS KEYSON INVESTIGATIONS
. She feels a little sick.

She has spent the last four days, since Tom’s visit, in the British Library reading the
Journal of Forensic Science
. She realizes now just what an explosion there’s been in criminal investigations in the last four or five years. The uses of DNA matching and profiling have boomed over this time and she had sleepwalked through it. For four days she has read voraciously, yet after all that, she has no greater insight into Dani’s case. She does not know if her killer can
be found. What she does know, however, is that she needs to find out what samples the police gathered in 1989. Then she can discover what can be done with that evidence and see where it might lead.