They reconvene mid-morning at Kentish Town station. Sue Trainer, Jimmy Omotayo, Rose, Adam and members of the forensic team that will conduct the search at Wyndham Terrace. This includes the pathologist, a woman called Saoirse Benjamin, who Rose has heard of but never met before.
Scarlett had been hard at work already back at UCIT. This morning she’s managed to track down the birth certificate and last known school records of one Vincent Tully, from Totnes, Devon. The secondary school he’d attended had been no help, even though it was still a working school. But she’d managed to find out where the largest intake of children had come from and then contacted that primary school. It was now a café called The Old Schoolroom but the owner had helpfully kept a bunch of historical photographs she’d found on the premises because she ‘couldn’t bear to throw all those little faces away’.
And so now, one of those little faces – that of a murdered boy – looks out from the image on the whiteboard.
Vincent is around ten here, in 1967, much younger than in Rowan’s picture. He has dark wavy hair and pale, deep-set eyes that look rather mischievous. The side of his mouth is hitched as though he were about to say something to the round-faced child next to him, whose head is very slightly turned towards him. The patina of age from the blown-up black-and-white photo adds a certain distance, but all the same, Rose can’t stop looking into those eyes.
Hello, Vincent.
‘Thanks for coming, everyone,’ says DS Trainer then, her voice sombre. ‘Scarlett over at UCIT has done some sterling work for us in finding details including a picture of the child whose remains we expect to find at 42 Wyndham Terrace this morning. The Fuller family are vacating the property and it seems there has been a delay in them finding somewhere suitable, but I’m told they’ll be gone by the time we’re ready to head over there.’ She pauses and looks at the picture, her expression grave.
‘I said “child”,’ she continues, ‘although we don’t tend to think of fifteen-year-olds like Vincent Tully in quite that way, as the parent of a daughter that age myself, let’s not forget that he was not an adult. He was very young when the woman in the cell along the corridor killed him, albeit in an act that wasn’t premeditated, but was nonetheless disproportionate as an act of self-defence. Celeste Allingham, her deceased brother Hugo and Rowan Tully, Vincent’s mother, then proceeded to hide what had happened, rather than giving him the dignity of a proper funeral and taking themselves off to the authorities to face the consequences.’
Everyone stares at the picture. The room is pin-drop silent for a few moments.
Rose feels a thickening in her throat. Despite all the damage and pain that has been caused in the years since that murder, she can’t help thinking about the unfairness of it all. Who would want that angry teenage version of themselves to be trapped forever, unable to develop but unable to rest either? She certainly wouldn’t have wanted that period of her life to have been preserved.
Vincent would have been a man in his early sixties now and no one can say what kind of person he would have turned into. Maybe not a nice one. But he never got the chance to find out and instead, simply became the worst essence of that angry boy.
‘Now,’ continues Trainer, ‘I’m aware that there have been a lot of strange goings-on in that property, including a multiple murder in 2006. It’s not for me to say whether or not there is a connection with what happened there in 1972.’ Her gaze flicks to Rose and Adam, but not in a dismissive way, it feels to Rose. It simply doesn’t need to be said right now. The here and now of Vincent’s death is the issue, not what came after. ‘But I think we can safely say that if we find what we expect to find in that bedroom, something very tragic and wrong will finally be brought out into the light where it belongs.’ Another pause.
‘Let’s go, everyone.’
Rose gathers her things and prepares to go to 42 Wyndham Terrace for the last time.