Nine

It was nearly two o’clock by the time that Detective Chief Inspector Wilde saw the girl from the car again.

They had kept her in a cell, where, the duty sergeant had told him, she had eaten the lunch that they had given her. ‘Cleaned the plate,’ the sergeant had said, with a sardonic smile. ‘Obviously racked with trauma.’

The girl was put in an interview room, one of the better ones, with two high windows that let in the sunlight. As he came in the door, she looked up at him, and he was struck again with her calm. He held out his hand; she took it. Her grip was light, but not featherweight. There was a little pressure in the fingers. The touch was warm and dry.

He sat down opposite her.

‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.

She held his gaze. He saw that her eyes were brown. Her hair looked smooth, as if she had been brushing it—although, as far as he knew, there had been nothing in the car that belonged to her. Perhaps one of the WPCs had given her a comb. She was really quite pretty: smooth-skinned, wide-shouldered, a full mouth. A round, wholesome-seeming girl. She looked like a Thomas Hardy milkmaid: Tess, whose skin would have smelled of milk. Even the dress she wore was a milkmaid dress, blue cotton with little cream flowers all over it. A tight bodice and a full skirt. Laura Ashley, he thought.

‘I don’t know what to call you,’ he continued. ‘I’m not very good at guessing.’

Her eyes were ranging over his clothes and hands. She looked as if she were cataloguing what he was wearing, remembering it.

‘My daughter’s called Alice,’ he said. ‘She tells me that there’s no one else in the country called Alice. She thinks I ought to be reported to someone, for cruelty, choosing a name like that. But I thought it would suit her. Her mother liked it, too.’ He grinned. ‘But what she really wants is to be called Frankie. After a girl in her class. Francesca.’

The girl gave a little smile.

‘Irritating, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘You give your child a nice name and all they want is to use something else. A name’s a kind of sign, I suppose. A kind of category. Terrible to get that wrong.’ He leaned forward, smiling. ‘So I don’t want to call you Edith if it’s Elizabeth, do I?’

She said nothing. ‘You look like an Elizabeth,’ he said. ‘Or Anne. Or Judith. Nice names. Names for girls.’ He paused. ‘Like Alice.’

She shifted a little in her seat, dropping her gaze into her lap.

‘Mum and Dad,’ he said. ‘Brothers and sisters? What would they call you?’

The bait was not taken. Yet he thought he saw something, some slight, passing, momentary change at the mention of her parents.

‘What day is it?’ he said. ‘Tuesday. What about that? Miss Tuesday. Makes you sound like a calendar.’

There was no response.

Wilde glanced at the WPC standing by the door. She widened her eyes by way of exasperation.

He changed his tack. ‘How old are you?’ he asked.

Nothing.

‘Eighteen, nineteen?’

Nothing.

‘Was Alisha Graham your friend?’

Nothing.

‘This is an awful thing to be involved in,’ he commented, still keeping his voice low. ‘A dead person. Perhaps someone you didn’t even know. Any kind of death is a shock. Sometimes, so much of a shock that we don’t want to think about it. Sometimes even a road accident we might pass … it strikes you, makes your blood run cold. Much worse if you’re actually involved.’

Now, the girl showed all the signs of her attention wandering. She was looking around at the floor, moving some microscopic piece of dust with the tip of her shoe.

‘Tell me about Alisha Graham,’ he said.

Blankness. He leaned forward and tapped the table lightly with his knuckles, wondering if the doctor could have been wrong, and she did have a hearing problem. If that were so, the movement of his hand ought to have made her look up. But she only glanced very briefly at his hand, then looked away, back to the floor.

He thought back to the contents of Alisha Graham’s car. They had been laid out, bagged.

There had been a single holdall, brand new. Still with the price ticket inside. A bright blue and green holdall. He had stood for some time staring at it, thinking that it was not the kind of thing you might expect a seventy-year-old woman to be carrying. Yet it was full of her possessions. A picture frame with a photograph of another elderly woman who bore her a slight resemblance. Her sister, he guessed. Two paperback books. A notepad and pen. A wallet containing forty pounds, stamps, change, a scrap of material, a card place name from a conference or a meeting. A pair of tights, underwear. A sweater, a skirt. Thick and unforgiving material in the clothes, even the underwear. Support tights still in their packet. A Lycra girdle, the same, in a chainstore packet. Two pairs of walking socks … but no shoes.

He had wondered for some minutes what was odd about it, besides the shoes. Besides the price tickets, the unworn clothes. Then he had realized that the unticketed, old clothes were unwashed. They were badly creased, and smelled stale. Two sets of clothes. New, still carefully kept in their wrapping, as if taken from a drawer. And used. Crumpled. Taken from a pile of laundry. Or the floor.

He had opened the notebook and the books.

The notebook was well-thumbed, thick, a spiral-bound pad of five hundred pages. He had flicked briefly through it, seeing sheet after sheet of notes and sketches, and a dozen different location headings. Then, halfway through, he came to a page marked The Aubrete Estate.

On the top of the page was Matthew Aubrete’s name and number.

Underneath it, the Manor’s postal address.

Then, something he failed to understand at all.

A vein of arborescent marcasites at nine hundred feet …

He had flipped the page, turned it on its edge. There was a drawing of four sets of parallel lines. The same handwriting had made notes around the edges of the drawing.

The horse walked the pulley.

The head lay on Poor Heart Hill.

The blue vein was interlaid with Bath pavers.

Wilde had turned the page round and round.

What was she, an industrial historian? That’s what Aubrete had said. A kind of chemist. A vein of arborescent marcasites …

Where was Poor Heart Hill?

He considered the girl now, the neat parting on the top of her head, the hair combed flat on either side, drawn back to the plait at the nape of her neck. She didn’t look like girls of eighteen looked these days, he thought. She had no makeup, no jewellery. Some of the girls at Alice’s school, not much older than Alice, wore all kinds of rubbish: nose studs, belly rings, ankle chains. Alice was always telling him that he was not much of an authority on anything, least of all women, and yet he knew enough to realize that very few girls of eighteen still wore plaits. The shy ones, perhaps. The over-protected ones. The innocent ones, of which, God knew, there were precious few left.

He wondered if the girl in front of him were innocent.

‘What is an arborescent marcasite?’ he said.

She looked up. Seemed surprised.

‘Do you know what it is?’ he asked.

No reply. She lifted one hand, and scratched her neck.

As she did so, he noticed the marks that the doctor had remarked upon.

On both forearms were several straight lines. Not deep. Not scratches, but grazes about an inch wide. They were not inflamed, and they had formed a slight scar, which had led the doctor to believe that they were perhaps a week old.

‘What are they?’ Wilde had asked him.

‘Defence marks,’ the doctor said.

And the man had raised both arms across his own face, fists turned inwards and elbows pointed forwards as the hands were brought up towards the face.

‘The outside of the forearm takes the blow from an attacker,’ he explained.

‘And she’s got these marks?’

‘Yes.’

‘What caused them? A knife?’

‘No,’ the doctor replied. ‘Nothing as sharp as that. It’s as if she’s been hit with something blunt and abrasive. Glancing blows. A piece of wood, perhaps, a roughened edge.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Probably not by anyone trying to really harm her. More like a flurry. In a temper.’

‘They couldn’t have been caused by falling?’

‘Not really. If she had fallen on anything gritty or coarse, like concrete, she would have similar marks on the heels of her hands or her elbows or knees, or all three. No … this is as if she pulled her arms up and put her hands by her ears. Perhaps she was even trying to put her hands over her ears.’

‘And someone hit her in that posture.’

‘Exactly.’

Now, as the girl dropped her hand, he held out his own.

‘May I?’ he said.

She froze, her hand mid-air, not extending her fingers to his. He got up from his chair and walked around the side of the table. He sat on the edge of the desk, not too close to her, and held out his hand again, palm uppermost. Very slowly, she lowered her hand to his.

He turned the palm over, and looked at her wrist. Just as the doctor had said, there were no signs of abuse: no marks on the wrists themselves, either of having been tied, or of her having tried to cut the flesh. There were no track marks for needles inside the elbows. This, he thought to himself, was not a disturbed girl. Not in any immediately recognizable way, at least.

He gently turned the arm and looked at the marks.

‘Did someone hit you?’ he asked.

She looked, too.

‘This looks as if someone hit you,’ he said. ‘Did you have an argument with someone?’

She gave a little tug, to be released from his hold. He held on to her, running a finger down the arm and back to the hand. He held it quietly between both of his.

‘Now, if I were a fortune-teller, I might be able to know a bit more about you,’ he observed. ‘And that wouldn’t be difficult, would it? To find out more than you’re telling us.’

He looked at her hand closely, as if he really could tell her life from the lines there. The skin was smooth and soft. No sign of any manual work. The nails were manicured, though without varnish. Most of them were flecked with white.

‘You know, when I was a little boy,’ he said, ‘my mum used to tell me that white bits on the nails were because I didn’t get enough calcium. But there’s another theory now.’ He looked into her face, tried once again to read its impervious expression. ‘They say it’s because of pressure on the nail bed.’

She looked at her hand in his.

He turned her hand over, and it was then that he saw the flattened tips to the first three fingers. He stopped, raised the fingers closer. Turned them over, and looked at them from the other side. They were definitely rounder and flatter than the other hand. Just for a second, he thought of the grid in Alisha Graham’s notebook. Then, a distant bell rang far back in his mind. He knew that he had seen such fingertips before; reddened tips to the first three digits of one hand. But he couldn’t think where.

The girl abruptly withdrew her hand. She wiped it, with methodical care, on the fabric of her dress.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

She closed her eyes.

‘Why did you go to Anna Miles’ house?’ he said. ‘Alisha Graham was due at the Manor. You were only two miles from the Aubrete estate. From the right house. Why didn’t you go there? Why did you drive down to Anna Miles?’

She might have been carved from stone. For the first time, Robert Wilde felt his temper rising.

‘What is Anna Miles to do with you?’ he demanded. ‘What are you to do with Alisha Graham? Why were you in that car?’

Staring at her face, he saw her squeeze her eyes tighter shut.

And then, more eloquent than any words, a tear formed on her eyelashes, and ran slowly down her face.