The Silence (Dc Goodhew 4) (8 page)

‘No, I meant how could she be in there?’

Her cheeks reddened but, apart from that, any other sign of warmth disappeared and her face became expressionless. ‘Please rejoin your friends.’

Someone rapped hard on the front door just then and Gully waved me back towards the main room as she turned to answer it. I didn’t budge; in fact, I had no plans to move and realized I was gripping the doorframe so hard that my fingers ached.

She put her eye to the spyhole, then pulled away in an instant, reaching for the catch. I was only seeing the back of her head, but I could tell she was both surprised and relieved.

However, by the time they were face to face, she just sounded irritated. ‘Why are you here?’

He spoke quietly but I was close enough to hear his reply. ‘I was talking with Norris when you called in.’ The man who had entered the house looked about Gully’s age, a little older maybe. Short hair, cleanshaven, casual clothes. Reminded me of a medical student or a bartender. Okay, that’s a bit diverse; the point is, he didn’t remind me of a policeman or any kind of detective. He neither shook my hand nor told me I should do anything that might include releasing my hold on the doorframe. He introduced himself as DC Gary Goodhew, then turned back to Gully.

‘That wasn’t an answer,’ she insisted.

‘You requested assistance with the lock?’ he replied.

‘Yes, but I didn’t expect you.’ She released a ponderous sigh. ‘Whatever . . . let’s get on with it. What do you know so far?’

‘Shanie Faulkner’s gone missing and the quicker we get access to her room the better.’

‘But we can’t just force the door without damaging the lock. And if you break in through the window you’ll add glass, external debris and God knows what to the scene. We can’t risk disrupting forensics.’

He glanced back at me and I retreated into the doorway by a few inches but I could still hear them whispering.

‘Sue, stop stating the bloody obvious and just slow down. Look, this lock is really old – and it wasn’t designed for a bank vault.’ A pause, then, ‘Do you know what this thing is?’

‘No.’

‘Watch.’ He must have meant ‘watch’ as in observe, not as in Rolex, because a moment later I heard a metal-on-metal shuffling followed by the unmistakable sound of the lock bolt sliding aside.

I glanced behind me into the main room and found that everyone else seemed to be staring over at me. I must have looked like someone who’d been posted there as a makeshift door guard.

‘What’s going on?’ Jamie mouthed.

I shrugged and Phil looked like he was about to stand up. I shook my head quickly and raised my finger in the ‘wait’ gesture.

‘Who came to the door?’ Oslo asked before I’d had a chance to turn away.

‘Another policeman.’

Then Meg: ‘What’s he doing now?’

Something told me that it would be unwise to make any comment that might bring them all spilling out into the hallway.

‘Hang on,’ I whispered.

As I stepped out from the lounge doorway, everything hit me at once: Shanie’s open door, the artificial light from Goodhew’s phone, bouncing off the bedroom walls, the way Gully moved towards me – and the smell.

Most of all, the smell.

Gully grabbed me and turned me round in a single manoeuvre. She was only an inch taller than me but I felt weightless, as though she’d lifted me right off the floor and just handed me over to Jamie.

Jamie dragged me to a chair in the kitchen area. ‘Sit down.’

I knew her routine by now. I’d be given tea and wisdom. I’d be asked if I was feeling okay, and treated as if I’d suddenly developed a disorder making me liable to sudden disintegration.

I just did as I was told, while all around me hell was unleashed. Jamie was trying hard not to cry, while Oslo started talking about natural processes and how long she’d obviously been dead already. Phil remained silent; so did Matt. And Meg sobbed loudly, as if she really had been Shanie’s bestest bezzie, or however she might have described it.

The police presence swelled like increments in the Fibonacci series. First Gully, then Goodhew, then two more uniforms . . . and a few minutes after that, another three, including the boss. He was older than the rest, thin in a steel-rod kind of way. He introduced himself as Detective Inspector Marks, and I got the impression that he thought that would put me at ease, but by then, I was unable to know how I felt.

After that there were others, too, but all we were thinking about by then was how soon we could get on with whatever was going to come next.

PC Gully stayed in the room with us, fielding questions. ‘We will need a statement from each of you,’ she repeated.

‘Separately or together?’ Meg asked.

‘Separately.’

‘Can I have someone with me, though?’

‘Yes, but as I just explained, it can’t be Phil.’

‘So we’re suspects, then?’

‘Significant witnesses.’

‘No, we’re suspects. If you thought we were innocent, you wouldn’t now be trying to stop us talking to each other, would you?’

‘We need to have statements that are made independently.’

‘So Phil speaks to you first, then sits in along with me and he doesn’t speak at all, what’s wrong with that?’

‘We may need to revisit the various statements.’

‘So now we can’t talk to each other at all?’ Meg’s mood was fast escalating towards a full-blown screaming match, but the only thing missing was an adversary. Gully remained resolutely patient, and none of us tried asking Meg to calm down; because we knew better. Without warning, Meg changed tack. ‘So how did she do it?’

‘Meg, I’m sure you realize why I can’t comment on—’

‘Was she hanging, or what?’

‘Meg, please lower your voice.’

‘Has she been dead since Friday?’

One look at Gully’s face would have told Meg that she stood no chance of an answer, so she turned to me. I was still sitting on the same chair, but with my knees raised to my chest and my arms clutched round them.

‘Libby, what did you see?’ Meg shouted suddenly.

I pressed my forehead flat against my knees and stared at the fabric encasing my thighs. I pictured a mouse, and I pretended that it had been the cause of it all. A dead grey mouse, with its form and features fading. A mouse left with more dignity than that glimpse of Shanie I had caught reflected in her bedroom mirror.

Both Matt and Libby were picked up from Parkside by Matt’s sister Charlotte, and the contact address now given for both also belonged to Charlotte. Brimley Close was a cul-de-sac of post-war semi-detached homes, once carbon copy three-bedroom, two-reception houses, but now embellished with a variety of extensions and improvements. Number 14 looked tidy but tired, maintained but not polished; everything about it said ‘domestic’ and Goodhew wasn’t surprised to learn that it was the house inhabited by the Stone family throughout Matt and Charlotte’s childhood.

Charlotte was about five foot four; she was dressed in battered jeans and a pink scoop-necked top. Her hair was light brown and blessed with exactly the kind of curls that straight-haired people spent a fortune trying to replicate, and which she had probably spent hours trying to tame.

She shook his hand, then led him along the short hallway and into the lounge. The room was dominated by an oversized flat-screen television and a chunky three-piece suite. The TV was new enough for the instruction manual to still be in use, as it lay on top of several issues of the free weekly paper and a pile of letters resting on their empty envelopes. By comparison, the sofa and armchairs seemed twenty years out of date. They had been uniformly upholstered in a leaf-patterned chenille, using a colour palette that might have been entitled
shades of goat and cow.
When Goodhew first sat down, and each time he moved, a fresh plume of dust took to the air.

‘Are your parents home?’

‘There’s only Dad now. He’s at work.’

‘And where is that?’

‘He works for a landscape gardener, so they’ll be employed somewhere local. I’d rather wait until he gets home.’

‘No one’s told him yet?’

‘No, not yet,’ Charlotte replied. ‘I wanted to get Matt and Libby settled in first.’

‘Libby’s staying here?’

Charlotte jerked her head in the direction of the front window and the cul-de-sac beyond. ‘Libby’s parents live at number 57, but she doesn’t want to go home.’

Her eyes flickered as she seemed to read his expression – accurately as it turned out. ‘Matt and Libby aren’t in a relationship, if that’s what you’re thinking. They have separate issues to deal with, and both decided they’d take the opportunity to try living away from home.’

‘What kind of issues?’

‘Personal. Ask them if you like, but I just didn’t want you misconstruing anything from the outset.’

It was then that Goodhew decided that he would speak to Libby first.

Libby Brett reminded Goodhew of one of the characters in the game
Who Is It?
, with features that were neat and symmetrical. Her hair was cut into a jaw-length bob.

Does your character have blue eyes?

Yes.

Fair hair?

Yes.

Dangly earrings?

Yes.

Then it must be Libby!

Her full name was Elizabeth Dinah Brett and she’d be eighteen on her next birthday, though she could have passed for about fourteen if she’d wanted to. The earrings were little silver flowers, and were the only frivolous things about her appearance. She wore a blue cotton shirt that made her look as though she’d just removed her school tie.

The note about her said she was studying accountancy ‘A’ level along with English, business studies and critical thinking. Her expression gave away very little so perhaps that was one of the entry requirements for identifying the future tax advisors amongst them.

‘She killed herself, didn’t she?’ Libby said.

‘It’s too early to say.’

She gave a little snort, half disgust, half disrespect. ‘I thought you’d have made up your mind by now.’

‘No, it’s the pathologist who—’

‘Not
you
the individual, I mean
you
the police.’

‘What makes you think we decide on the outcome before we have the facts?’

Her expression closed a little more. ‘I never said that.’

He changed direction. ‘Do you think Shanie was depressed? Had something upset her?’

‘If I had to guess, I’d say that Shanie spent her whole school life as the nerdy kid in class. Probably wishing she got looks instead of brains.’

Goodhew realized then that he had only seen one low-res photo of Shanie and apart from that, only had the time spent with the body to go on. As far as attractiveness went, neither had given him much of a clue.

‘A kid like that often ends up feeling embarrassed about their academic ability – like a tall person who stoops over time. And that’s why I don’t think she did it.’

‘Did what?’

Libby’s eyebrows gave a little twitch, a hint that she thought he was missing the obvious. ‘That’s why,’ she explained patiently, ‘I don’t think she killed herself.’

Goodhew ran back over her previous sentences. He’d obviously missed the point somewhere. ‘You’ll have to explain.’

‘Okay.’ Libby didn’t actually seem at all put out by his slowness to grasp her theory. ‘If you’ve spent your whole childhood feeling like a misfit, don’t you, kind of, get used to that being the norm?’

Goodhew shrugged. ‘I’m not sure about that.’

‘If you woke up one day and suddenly everyone treated you like a different person to the one you’d been all your life, that would seem odd, wouldn’t it?’

‘Of course.’

‘Shanie was used to being the geeky, studious one. She wouldn’t have been surprised that we found her a pain in the backside at times, but we also made the effort to include her, and at the same time she is here doing a course that recognizes her ability. So this was probably the best time she’d ever had as a student. Now do you understand?’

Goodhew nodded, but he didn’t agree. If only the steps to suicide were so clearly signposted before the event. In his experience the trigger usually came from problems that weren’t so obvious to everyone else.

‘And how was your relationship with her?’

Libby bit her top lip while she considered the question. ‘The first couple of days she was here I couldn’t stand being in the same room. She asked daft questions about everything, from posting a letter to catching a bus. D’you know how some people get you helping them with simple things and before you know it you’re indispensible? My instincts told me not to let her latch on. Maybe I was wrong, but she didn’t seem quite on the same planet as the rest of us. She always dressed like a “before” on a makeover show, her hair needed trimming and she didn’t bother with make-up when it would have done her a favour.’ Libby threw up her hands. ‘I’m being honest and I sound like a bitch. But it didn’t take me long to realize that she didn’t pay attention to those things like other people, because they weren’t important to her. Whenever she stopped hiding behind her high IQ she could be pretty sweet.’

‘You liked her then?’

‘She grew on me enough that I would have felt something when she left. Left properly, I mean.’

Goodhew dropped that line of thought abruptly. Instead, he looked down at his notepad until he was certain that the silence between them was beginning to seem uncomfortably long. Then with equal abruptness, he asked his next question. ‘How would you describe yourself?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Sum yourself up in two or three words.’

She looked confused.

‘For example, would you describe yourself as honest?’

‘I think so.’

‘Tell me about your trip to London.’

She shook her head. ‘This is crap.’

She was right, but Goodhew’s aim was to give things a little shake just to see what, if anything, fell out. Hard facts and straight answers were just a bonus. ‘So you were in your room all the time, but you pretended to be out?’

‘That’s right. I didn’t want to be disturbed.’

‘Fair enough, but lying about a visit to London seems extreme.’