Good Girls Don't Die (28 page)

In pride of place on the tiled mantelpiece that surrounded a flame-effect electric fire was a framed 6x4” colour print of the photograph Ivo had shown Grace earlier this morning of Marie Tooley with her son. Danny placed an old-fashioned wooden tray down on the smoked-glass coffee table, then sat beside her on the couch. He wore the same kind of grey trousers and white shirt that he wore to work. He poured tea from a brown pot covered with a knitted tea cosy made to look like a country cottage, with flowers round the door and a red chimney as a bobble on top; the milk jug had roses on it, and he apologised for having no sugar. As Grace accepted a cup and saucer, she wondered where his good manners had come from, if perhaps there had once been grandparents on the scene.

She leaned back against the lumpy cushions of the dark-brown needlecord couch. ‘So is this where you sat with Polly?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he answered warily.

‘What did you talk about?’

‘Not much. Books. It was late and she was tired.’

‘So had you arranged to meet that Friday evening or did you just bump into her in town? Or, given how upset she’d been, when she came into the bookshop to apologise to you that afternoon, maybe you were keeping an eye on her? Making sure she was safe?’

‘She knew I’d always look out for her.’

‘And you gave her a lift home?’

‘Yes.’

‘That was kind. But you brought her here rather than back to her place?’

‘I’ve told all this to the other policemen.’

‘I know, Danny, and I’m really grateful to you for going over it again.’ Grace sipped her tea, looking around the threadbare lounge. ‘Tell me, did Polly ever invite you to her house? It can’t be far from here.’

‘No, it’s not.’

‘So did you ever go there?’

‘I liked it when she came here.’

‘So when did she tell you that she wanted to disappear for a while?’

‘She’d seen Dr Beeston again in the bar that night, and that upset her.’

‘So did she first mention it in the car, or when you were sitting here with her?’

‘It must’ve been in the car. She didn’t want to go back to her house.’

‘She’d been drinking quite heavily, hadn’t she? You didn’t
think maybe this plan to disappear was just the booze talking?’

Danny put his cup and saucer neatly back on the tea tray. ‘I made her some tea, told her we could talk about it all calmly in the morning, but her mind was made up.’

‘Where did she sleep?’

‘Upstairs. Your tea’s going cold.’ He stood up, fidgety and nervous. ‘Shall I get you some hot water?’

‘No, I’m fine, thanks.’ Grace sat quite still, waiting to see how Danny would deal with his agitation.

‘I don’t use the front bedroom, so I gave her my bed. I can show you, if you like.’

‘OK, thanks.’

‘I slept down here on the couch.’

Grace smiled. ‘Like a proper gentleman.’ She got to her feet, pushing herself up awkwardly from the saggy foam cushions.

She followed him up the narrow staircase and into the little back bedroom. It was furnished as if for a child, with a single bed and matching single white melamine wardrobe and chest of drawers. There were more books and a couple of framed black-and-white photos on the walls that she recognised from Ikea; one of Audrey Hepburn in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
and the other of Brooklyn Bridge. The sheets and duvet cover, too, though faded from frequent laundering, were cheerful Scandinavian patterns: she wondered if someone had taken Danny shopping or whether these were the spoils of a solitary trip in his brother’s illicitly borrowed car. But any sense of pity she had for him was swiftly overlaid
by the acute awareness that Polly may have died here. Grace simply couldn’t imagine the young woman electing to sleep here, given that her own bed in Station Road was barely five minutes’ walk away. Unless she’d not been sober enough to get there. Or dead. The thought made the hairs on the back of Grace’s neck stand up.

‘So did you, like, lend her a toothbrush and stuff?’ she asked as cheerfully as she could, and watched Danny struggle to maintain the rosy fiction he’d offered Ivo of how he’d lent Polly some of his clothes and made sure she had everything she needed for her desperate adventure. The more questions Grace asked, the more she felt as if she were taunting him with his own lies; she could see that here in the reality of these rooms it became harder and harder for Danny to believe in the fairy-tale he’d spun himself of how he’d rescued his damsel in distress. Somehow, late that night, his fantasy had come to an abrupt end, and now he couldn’t bear to admit to himself what he’d done to the girl he loved.

He was reluctant to let her look in the front bedroom, but she insisted politely until he had to open the door. She didn’t go in: if this house
was
a crime scene, then the less she contaminated it the better. Even if there were no bloodstains, nor even the signs of a struggle because Polly had been strangled or smothered, there might still be other evidence here that would enable them to interrogate whatever account Danny gave of Polly’s presence.

The bedroom had been completely stripped, right back to the floorboards; only the pale, sprigged wallpaper
remained, with unfaded shadows where furniture or pictures had once been, along with old spattered stains that had been inadequately wiped off. Grace wondered with distaste if they were the ghostly marks of Marie Tooley’s vomit.

‘Was this your mother’s room?’ she asked.

‘It’s where she died,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry. You said she was ill and you took care of her. What was wrong with her?’

His reply was reluctant. ‘She had problems. She was depressed.’

Danny immediately turned away and went downstairs. Grace took a last look around and then followed him back down to the dingy front room. Through the window, keeping to the public highway at the end of the driveway, she could see the little knot of photographers who’d been there when she arrived. They’d snapped her, just in case, but hadn’t been unduly interested. She sat down again on the uncomfortable couch.

‘Danny, we have CCTV images of Polly in Colchester on the night you brought her back here. She was so drunk that she could hardly stand up.’

‘It was the night air. It went to her head.’

‘What do you think about young women who get as drunk as that, like Polly was that night?’

‘They can’t help it.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘It’s not their fault. It’s not what they’re really like. Polly just needed someone to take care of her.’

‘Just as well you were there for her, then. Tell me, do you drink?’

‘No, never.’

Grace pointed to the photograph on the mantelpiece. ‘Is that your mum?’

Although Danny nodded and smiled, Grace saw his body tense up.

‘Before she got ill,’ he said.

‘How old are you there? Six, seven?’

‘Yes. She was a good mother. She loved me.’

‘I’m sure she did. What were you doing? Looks like you were having a picnic or something.’

‘She liked picnics. When she was well, we used to do all sorts of nice things together.’

Danny put his hands around his knees and hugged them to him. As he began to reminisce, Grace could see that he had all but forgotten she was there. The longer he talked about cherished treats and remembered outings, the more she thought about the catalogue of neglect, chaos and degradation that must have been Danny’s actual childhood.

As he showed her out twenty minutes later, standing back in the shadow of the door so the photographers couldn’t catch a decent shot of him, she thanked him for the tea and was rewarded with his familiar sweet smile.

She could easily have walked down to the quay, but decided to move her car so she wouldn’t have to face the cameras again when she returned for it. The car park wasn’t too crowded on a Monday, and she made her way down to the water and sat on a bench looking out across the jingling
masts of the boats to the mudflats on the far side of the river. What she’d learned was hardly going to satisfy Lance: it wasn’t evidence. Yet she was more certain than ever, from Danny’s body language, his evasions, his hopeless loyalty to his mother, that he had murdered Polly Sinclair.

Whether or not Polly had been too out of it to know where he was taking her or what she was agreeing to, his princess had assented to come home with him. Had he believed this was the start of the love affair he’d dreamed about? If so, then if Polly had probably been sober enough to reject him: for Danny, the shame of her rejection must have been unbearable.

What was it that Ivo Sweatman had said to her?
You’d be amazed how many times you have to let someone down before you finally convince them you’re not worth it
. But did it work like that? What about the person whose faith and hope is endlessly thrown back in their face? How worthless do their efforts feel? How angry does that make them?

Grace was more convinced than ever that she couldn’t follow Lance’s well-meant advice to watch her back: Danny was too damaged, too vulnerable, too lethal. She couldn’t just pipe down and let it go. But Colin and the review team were in charge now, and they were all gung-ho about charging Matt Beeston and possibly Pawel Zawodny, too; they weren’t about to listen to her. Besides, she already knew exactly what her old DCI would say: Clear the ground beneath your feet. Go for the obvious before the fantastic. Bring me evidence, not mumbo-jumbo. She might hate Colin Pitman’s guts but sometimes he was right.

There was only one way to prove this to herself. Grace had noticed a payphone near the entrance to the car park and made straight for it. Ivo Sweatman picked up after a couple of rings.

Ivo couldn’t even remember the last time he’d been up and dressed at this ungodly hour, let alone out of doors. And come to think of it, whenever the last time had been, he was more likely making his unsteady way home rather than standing around in the morning chill at the edge of a playing field, listening to the birds chirruping away like they were tuning up for school orchestra practice. He felt like Little Lord Fauntleroy or Fotherington-Thomas or some other childish sap who could actually tell the difference between one little brown bird and another. Fair enough, the Ice Maiden had asked him if he’d mind looking a fool if she turned out to be wrong, but when he’d told her he’d be honoured, he hadn’t reckoned on a bloody nature ramble at first light on a Tuesday morning.

She’d told him to take another look at the photograph of Danny-boy’s mother, and then to start in Wivenhoe Woods, especially any really overgrown areas close to the little car park at the end of Rosemead Avenue. He hadn’t parked there for fear, at this unseemly hour, of attracting
unwanted attention, which was the same reason he’d said he’d meet the dog-handler here on the playing field that bordered the woods. There was a middle-aged guy heading across the grass towards him now with a black-and-white dog on a lead, a kind of spaniel, Ivo guessed, though it looked too soft and playful to be capable of the kind of serious work he wanted done. And for which the Young Ferret had obligingly organised a handsome payment upfront.

Ivo hoped for her sake that the Ice Maiden wasn’t clutching at straws. Danny-boy could have dumped Polly’s body absolutely anywhere around here – in the creek, a gravel pit, beside a railway line where no one ever went – and he’d warned her that Whatshername from Sky News had already had her bonkathon ex-SAS tracker out here and found nothing. But the Ice Maiden hadn’t cared.
She’ll be somewhere safe, somewhere special, her head on something soft. That’s how she’ll be found.
That’s what she’d said, and so here he was, prepared on her say-so alone to give it his best, even if that did mean risking every single brownie point he’d chalked up with his editor this past week.

He was wrong for starters about the soft-looking dog, for the guy came right up to him and greeted him by name, introducing himself as Martin and the spaniel as Lucy. Although Martin had explained it all to him on the phone, Ivo still couldn’t for the life of him see how the cadaver dog wasn’t going to get totally confused by all the different whiffs and odours that even Ivo’s jaded nose could pick up as they drew closer to the trees, and Lucy herself seemed
to be in such an ecstasy of busy excitement that Ivo figured it would take her all day to make her way through just the first few yards of vegetation.

Ivo showed Martin the photo on his phone: the background behind the amateurish wooden structure was out of focus, just fuzzy green outdoors, of no help at all. ‘We’re looking for something like an old den, that kind of thing,’ he said. ‘It’ll be at least fifteen years old now, so there may only be a few bits of wood left, if there’s anything at all. And it’s likely to be well off any of the regular paths.’

‘If there’s something here, we’ll find it,’ Martin said calmly, and set off along the nearest track holding the eager Lucy on a short leash, leaving Ivo to resign himself to a long, footsore morning chasing around in ever-decreasing circles.

‘And if you find anything, for God’s sake don’t touch it,’ Ivo remembered to call after him.
Ring Keith, call 999, anything, but don’t go near it
were the Ice Maiden’s orders, not that he needed them: after Roxanne, the last thing on earth he wanted was the image of another dead girl in his head.

‘I have done this before,’ Martin called back over his shoulder, unperturbed.

And whatever you do, don’t call me. You have to keep me right out of it
. He’d heed that instruction, too, but found he couldn’t summon up much relish for grabbing any glory that lay in finding the rotting corpse of ‘Our Polly’. He’d gathered that DS Fisher was way out on the edge of a cliff here, backing her hunch about Danny-boy. He was convinced she was right, but feared that that poisonous little fart of
a boss of hers, Colin Pitman, would probably be more keen right now on getting rid of her than convicting the right suspect. Ivo felt a stab of guilt that his headlines had helped to undermine Keith Stalgood’s position, but hey, all’s fair in love and war.

Lucy pulled her handler unhesitatingly along paths that all led in the same direction, and the dog was now clearly determined to continue in a straight line into less frequented undergrowth. Ivo and Martin had to fight their way through vicious brambles and thick, spiky bushes. By the time they came across a broken-down ladder which, though well hidden, was, as Martin pointed out, lying on top of this year’s new growth, even Ivo could smell it. Fuck, it was horrible! But, peer as he might through the dense tangle that surrounded them, he couldn’t see anything that resembled a den or a kids’ stockade. Lucy sat back on her haunches facing the spreading base of a rugged oak tree, her nose pointing up at the trunk. As Ivo watched the dog sit there, so still, yet taut with quivering anticipation, his brain clicked into gear: a ladder! He looked up, and there above him, maybe fifteen or twenty feet up and laid across two thick branches, was the platform of what must once have been a fairly substantial tree house. Between the rotting planks Ivo could make out a bundled shape tightly wrapped in black plastic.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said, blundering back the way they’d come, praying that he wouldn’t throw up. Martin followed, making a big fuss of his dog, rewarding her for a job well done.

‘Two weeks ago, you say she went missing?’ he asked Ivo.

Ivo nodded, not trusting himself to open his mouth.

‘Whoever left it there must’ve trussed it up tight or you wouldn’t have needed the dog to find her. Not in this weather. Mind you, it’s been protected from the worst of the rats and the carrion birds.’

Ivo wasn’t listening. He was trying to keep his hand steady enough to find the right number on his phone. It was only when he heard Keith’s sleepy voice that he realised he’d woken him up, that it was still only half-past five in the morning.