The Reckoning (34 page)

‘Oh, it’s you.’ She peered up at Rob. ‘What did you say your name was again?’

‘DC Rob Langton.’ He put his card on the table along with Godley’s. ‘Superintendent Godley sends his regards. He’ll be coming to see you tomorrow himself. He didn’t want to bother you today.’

‘That’s nice of him.’ I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or not. She gave a sniff, then blew her nose on a tissue the housekeeper supplied. ‘So what happens now?’

‘We’re reinvestigating the case from the start.’ The side of my face felt hot where Marla Redmond was burning holes in it by glaring at me. ‘In the light of what’s happened, we need to review the evidence that’s been collected so far by DCI Redmond’s team. It changes our perspective on the case.’

‘So it’s not that they did a crap job.’

‘Certainly not.’
Probably not
.

‘What do you want from me?’ She sounded listless, as if she had no energy left. I wondered how much of the brittle drawl had been put on for Goldsworthy’s benefit.

‘Now? Nothing. Except your permission to have a look at Cheyenne’s bedroom.’

‘Whatever you want.’ She took another sip from her mug and pulled a face. ‘This is disgusting.’

‘Keep drinking it,’ Small ordered. ‘It’ll do you good.’

‘I know I’m being weird. I just don’t seem to be able to take it in. It doesn’t seem real. I keep expecting her to walk through that door.’

‘Shock,’ Rob said. ‘It’ll take a while.’

‘Why did this have to happen?’ She started to cry again, rubbing at her eyes with the balled-up tissue. ‘I just don’t understand why this had to happen.’

‘I’ll show you Cheyenne’s room.’ The housekeeper stood up. ‘I want to do something to help.’

The other two looked as if they wished they had thought of that as a way of getting out of the room. The sound of Gayle’s sobs was disturbing, especially when there was so little you could offer as comfort. I felt I had to say something.

‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Skinner. I wish we had been able to find her for you.’

‘I know you do. But you didn’t.’

‘No. We didn’t. Is there anyone we can call for you? Someone you’d like to stay with you?’

‘Lydia’s here.’ She sniffed. ‘I’m used to being on my own. Even Cheyenne was never around. I never knew where she was, to be honest with you, and there’s no need to look at me like that. I’m not proud of it, but I didn’t want to fence her in. My parents were hell on me and it made me a rebel. I got married when I was eighteen, just to get away from them. Eighteen. I didn’t have a clue.’

I was quietly patting myself on the back for having guessed correctly. She looked younger than thirty-two without her sunglasses, though she had the unnaturally smooth skin of the high-maintenance Botox addict, like her husband.

‘You mustn’t blame yourself, Mrs Skinner,’ Rob murmured.

‘Who else is there?’ Her eyes welled up again.

‘The person who took her,’ I suggested.
Or possibly your husband for getting her involved in his dirty world
.

‘You will find him, won’t you?’

‘It’s a promise.’ Now that the urgency had passed, the entire might of the Metropolitan Police was at our disposal. I hoped she hadn’t noticed the irony.

The housekeeper was waiting by the door and we followed her out, into the hall and up the spiralling oak staircase. Cream carpet stretched as far as the eye could see.

‘I bet this is fun to keep clean,’ Rob said.

‘Not my problem. The cleaner comes twice a week. I do everything else – cooking, ironing, looking after Cheyenne. And Gayle, if it comes to that.’ She threw open a door. ‘This is Cheyenne’s room.’

It was more of a suite. A little hallway led into a sitting room with a computer desk and television, a big sofa and two beanbag chairs. It was a typical teenage girl’s room in that there were random posters on the walls for bands I’d never heard of, and pictures of young and pretty actors, borderline androgynous with their long eyelashes and pouting lips, safe and unthreatening. I looked for a couple of minutes at the collage of pictures she had framed: her friends posing, wearing bizarre outfits at fancy-dress parties, leaping off a diving board into a sparkling blue pool. In the background and not quite in focus, a man in a polo shirt and shorts looked on. I thought I recognised John Skinner, which made sense. The same two girls appeared with Cheyenne again and again.

‘Who are these two?’

Lydia came into the room far enough to see where I was pointing. ‘Cheyenne’s best friends. That’s Katie Harper and that’s Lily Flynn.’

Katie was the dark-haired one, Lily, the wistful blonde. Katie had a brace on her teeth in most of the pictures, a mouth full of metal that didn’t stop her from smiling broadly. They were both shorter and thinner than Cheyenne and I lingered over the photo that showed the three of them together, Cheyenne in the middle with her arms tight around the other girls’ necks, pushing them down. She looked over-excited, her face pink, her eyes wild.

Cheyenne had collected little bits and pieces of rubbish – scraps of paper, stickers, a chocolate wrapper – and pinned them to her noticeboard. A collection of concert-ticket stubs and wristbands hung down the right-hand side; she had been to Glastonbury the previous year, and Latitude. Aged thirteen. I wondered if her mother had gone with her, or if she’d been unaccompanied there too.

The room was immaculate otherwise. Pale pink cushions stood on point along the sofa, and a big fluffy rug the same colour was draped over the back. Gauzy curtains hung at the window and around the archway that led to her bedroom.

‘Did she keep it like this?’

‘Not her. She was a messy madam.’ Lydia was standing in the hallway, hanging back. I could understand her not wanting to enter the room, and I could understand that she wanted to keep an eye on us. I caught sight of myself in the mirror with Rob behind me looking very tall and out of place, his suit extra-dark as if it was drawing the light into it, my face severe and hard. We looked sinister, appropriately enough. We had come with the news of Cheyenne’s death, and if she had lived, we wouldn’t have been there.

‘Was her computer here?’ I pointed at the desk.

‘She had a laptop. A white one. Your lot took it away.’

Which meant we would be receiving it sometime later that day, along with the other evidence the other team had managed to collect.

‘Bedroom through here?’

‘And bathroom. And wardrobe.’

I understood why she’d mentioned the wardrobe when I saw it. It occupied a space about the same size as my own bedroom, with floor-to-ceiling shelves and hanging rails that were loaded with clothes. I checked a few labels.

‘High-street stuff.’

‘She didn’t have expensive tastes, for all that Gayle would give her anything. She liked to shop with her friends and they shop at Topshop or Jane Norman or Oasis.’

I was rattling through the racks. ‘Size twelve. Size ten. What was she?’

The housekeeper rolled her eyes. ‘Whatever she could fit into. She wore things tight. Spilling out of them, she was. Refused to try on a fourteen, which is what she was. I bought her underwear but I had to cut out the labels before she saw the size.’

‘Do you know what she was wearing at the club? It would help us to be able to describe her to the other people who were there.’

‘No.’ Lydia scanned the rail. ‘Something new, probably. I don’t see that anything’s missing. Apart from her jacket. It was dark-green, a blazer sort of thing. Wool.’

‘Did you find any labels or receipts in her bin?’

‘No.’ She didn’t sound certain, and I waited. ‘There was something by her bed. A Topshop tag. I don’t know what it was.’

‘Did you keep it? Throw it away?’

She frowned. ‘I think I threw it away.’

Dead end. ‘Okay.’ A kilt and blazer swung from hangers at the end of the wardrobe. ‘School uniform?’

‘Yes. I washed it. For when she came back.’

The kilt was about twice as long as any of the other skirts. ‘Quite a contrast from her usual style.’

‘Oh, she hated it, but she looked lovely in it. Just lovely. Much nicer than in any of this tat.’ She glared at the rest of the clothes, disapproval all over her face.

Somewhat inevitably Cheyenne had slept in a four-poster bed, the canopy draped in gauzy hangings that matched the curtains. Soft toys filled the window seat and a pink elephant sat on the pillow, legs splayed, a melancholy look in its black button eyes. Row upon row of bottles of nail varnish, perfume, hair products and make-up of all kinds filled the top of the dressing table, jostling framed pictures of her parents out of sight behind the mirror. Rob nudged open a drawer to reveal a few inhalers rattling around inside it. He picked one up and checked the canister.

‘Ventolin. She was asthmatic?’

‘Not badly. She used to get wheezy when she was stressed or after she did exercise. I couldn’t get her to take her inhaler with her when she went out but I put one in her schoolbag every day, just in case.’

The drawer next to it contained a curling iron, straighteners and a hair-dryer, all neatly put away with their cords wound around them.

‘She always left them plugged in.’ Lydia went to stand beside him, looking down into the drawer. ‘I used to come up and check before I drove her to school. The number of times she’d left the straighteners on. Look.’

She lifted the cloth that covered the table to show me a series of brown scorch marks on the painted surface.

‘You looked after her,’ Rob said.

She snorted. ‘I stopped her from burning the house down.’

‘That too.’

‘I did my best.’ She looked away, and her voice was muffled when she spoke again. ‘Didn’t always approve of her mother’s ideas, but what could I do? She needed discipline but Gayle didn’t know how to do that. She only knew how to love her. That was what she never had herself, you see. It was the other way round. Lots of rules and no love.’

‘You seem to know her very well.’ I had moved around so I could see her face.

‘I’ve worked for her since Cheyenne was six months old. They’re my family.’ She straightened a brush and comb, her fingers lingering on them for a second longer than was necessary. ‘I’ll stay as long as she needs me.’

‘How do you think Gayle will manage?’

‘She doesn’t know what’s hit her at the moment, what with John being arrested.’ She shook her head. ‘God knows. I think she’ll fall apart. She loved her, like I said. Wanted to be her friend. That was the problem.’

‘Speaking of friends, do you have contact details for Katie and Lily?’

‘Have you got a pen?’

Rob produced one and I had my notebook to hand. She wrote their mobile numbers down from memory, along with addresses for both of them.

‘They both live over towards Hatfield. I used to pick her up from their houses all the time. She couldn’t wait to be able to drive so she could come and go as she liked. Always wanted to be independent, you see.’ She gave a long, quivering sigh. ‘You just think to yourself, what could I have done different? What could I have said to her that would have stopped her from going to meet a stranger? Why didn’t she have more sense?’

They were unanswerable questions. I looked around at the room, seeing a girl caught between childhood and the grownup world that she longed to join. She had only seen the promise of freedom, not the dangers that went with it. Useless to tell the housekeeper that she had done her best, that there was no point in regretting things unsaid. She knew as well as I did that it was all too late.

I bullied DCI Redmond and DS Small into driving me over to Hatfield so I could meet the friends, accompanied by their mothers. To give them their due, they didn’t complain much, even though it took them out of their way. It would be a couple of hours until the girls were home from school and I settled down in a café to wait, alone. Rob, looking unaccountably embarrassed, had made his apologies and returned to London with the other two officers. He had somewhere else to be, he had said. Which was fine, of course. I read through another witless magazine without taking in a word of it and drank three cups of tea, and just as I was about to leave I remembered: it was Friday. Of course Rob had somewhere to be. He had a hot date.

I tackled Katie Harper first. In person, she was blossoming from the braces-wearing giggler of the photographs to a self-possessed young lady with a winner of a smile. She was wearing a lot of smudgy eye make-up but with jeans and a hoodie so it didn’t look as if she was trying too hard to be grown-up, unlike her best friend.

There wasn’t much sign of the smile once I broke the news that Cheyenne’s body had been found. I explained that because it was a new investigation I needed to ask the same questions all over again and Katie nodded, fully prepared to cooperate, but there was little she could add to what I knew already. Cheyenne had told her about Kyle and how she’d been contacted by him through Facebook.

‘Aren’t you supposed to be over sixteen to have a Facebook account?’ her mother asked.

‘Thirteen, actually. But Cheyenne changed her birth date to pretend she was nineteen. They don’t check up.’ Katie’s mother was not looking impressed, and her daughter rushed on. ‘It was just Cheyenne. She said people would think she was a baby if she used her real age.’

‘What people? People who didn’t know her?’ I asked.

She nodded. ‘She used to chat to people all over the world. She got a guy in Australia to help with a geography project once.’

‘So this wasn’t the first time she’d met someone over the Internet.’

‘It was the first time she went to meet them in person. But no, she had loads of friends online.’ Katie turned to her mother. ‘You don’t have to worry. I would never do something like that. I just use it for keeping in touch with people. You’ve got to be on there or you miss out. You know I don’t have any friends on the Internet I don’t know in real life.’

‘That was the rule,’ Mrs Harper explained.

‘Very sensible.’ I didn’t say that a similar rule would have saved Cheyenne, but I can’t have been the only one who thought it.

‘Why did he get in touch with her?’

Katie shrugged. ‘He saw her pictures, I think. Liked the look of her. She kept her profile open so anyone could see it. She liked the attention.’