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Anna’s father has made us cups of tea and dug out some Shortie biscuits that it took him more than a few minutes to find a plate for. Stood in the kitchen, he’d stared at the cabinets on the wall with a kind of muted agitation that suggested he no longer recognised them – what they’d become, or how they even got there in the first place. When I told him not to go to so much trouble, the tea was more than enough, that’s when he’d looked my way with the same irritation hardening his features. But a second or two later, it came to him, and he reached for the cabinet closest to his right shoulder to take down a plate.
Now we sit in the lounge, me on the sofa, Toby Johnson in the armchair beside me, the tea and biscuits on their tray set down on the coffee table. Across the room from us, perched on the end of the second armchair, sits Anna’s mother. Like Toby, what crosses her face is difficult to read. One moment she’s strangely still, vacant, the next teary. She’s a frightened bird, caught at the edge of a main road during rush hour, who’s forgotten what its wings are for.
Mary Johnson looks nothing like her daughter. Her neat, trimmed hair is a deep red – rich enough to add some vibrancy to her well-defined cheekbones on any other day perhaps, but its unnaturalness makes it difficult to pinpoint any resemblance to her eldest offspring. Toby is the dark-haired contributor, though his eyes are dark too, not blue like Anna’s. He does all the talking. Mary hardly speaks at all, she only sobs quietly now and then where she sits with her elbows propped on her thighs, leaning forward as if relaxing were still not an option. Not yet. Maybe never again.
It’s warm in the room. The central heating’s on. I feel it in the sweat that’s dampened the armpits of my shirt when I reach for the tea, and in the air that blocks my nose with the dust burning off radiators not been used in a while. Now and then, a trickle of water passes through the pipes. There are no other sounds in the house. No washing machine, or tumble dryer, or creaking of the floorboards overhead. No other visitors either, nor signs of Anna’s sister or the woman who opened the door to me earlier.
When I first got here, they thought it was to give them the outcome of the investigation, but when I explained I was the officer with Anna that night, Toby couldn’t welcome me into the house quick enough. Mary had looked more reluctant. But then it’s late afternoon and they’ve had a long day.
Toby tells me they were a good few hours at the funeral arrangers. He says the questions were harder than he expected, and a part of him was ready to agree to anything just to have it done, while another was telling him these would be the most crucial choices he’d ever be asked to make, and he was being asked to make them at a time when just picking what clothes to put on in the morning was almost too exhausting to bear.
His eyes water. Proud man that I can see he is, I look away.
Anna is all over the place. School photos, family portraits. On the walls, on the mantelpiece, and beside the lit candles on a low cabinet to Mary’s right.
‘She wasn’t alone, Mrs Johnson,’ I say, and she peers over at me without turning her head. It’s like she’s afraid to look at me, afraid of what I might tell her. ‘Your daughter never felt alone, I can assure you of that.’
Mary brings the tissue to her eyes. Toby rests his chin on his chest and nods. A pair so equally united and utterly separate in their grief. I’ve seen it time and again. Not all marriages survive it. How can they, when the very thing meant to complete your partnership is gone?
‘She wasn’t in any pain,’ I add.
Her tearing cry, long and brutal. Fingernails digging into the back of my hand, leaving a mark I didn’t notice until much later.
‘She was in shock. She couldn’t feel anything.’
Toby brings his head up and thanks me. He looks like there’s more to add, but he can’t speak it, and I’m glad. That’s not what I came for.
‘Did she say anything?’ a thin voice asks from the other end of the room. The tissue Mary clutches between her fingers is crumpled and torn, bits of it break loose, fluttering to the floor, some of it clinging to her wool skirt.
‘We spoke about lots of things.’ Delete messages. They can’t... I can’t... ‘She told me about her studies. And about her sister. About the veterinary practice.’
Mary splutters a brief laugh, surprising herself as much as any of us. She covers it by saying, ‘She loved her animals.’
‘She did,’ Toby confirms. ‘She absolutely did. Drove us up the bloody wall with them round the place. Dogs, cats, hamsters, rabbit. Then there was the horse once. Remember that, love? She wanted us to buy that filly?’
Mary nods but her gaze goes back to the tissue she tears in her hands. Wishing she’d bought the horse, perhaps. Thinking that might have made the difference.
‘We had to put our foot down over that, didn’t we, Mary, love? It’s the expense more than anything, you know?’ Toby tips his head at the closed patio doors behind him. ‘Chester’s not been right at all. That’s her cat. He’s only been as far as the garden, won’t stick his paw above the fence. I think he’s waiting for her.’
Mary stifles a sob and reaches for a fresh tissue from the box at her side. Toby’s lip quivers beneath his moustache and he brushes his hand over it.
On the wall above the fireplace, Anna sits behind her sister. Both are in dark green school uniforms and looking back at us with the most congenial of smiles. Sienna’s is close-lipped and bashful, Anna’s is broad and natural and shows her teeth. Her eyes are as pale as they were the other night, except in the photo they’re calm, and brightened by the clarity of youth. Everything ahead of her.
‘Sienna’s first year, Anna’s last.’
I look to Toby when he speaks, and realise I’ve been smiling at the photo.
‘The only time they were in the school together. Seven years between them. That was taken last year, before she went off to college.’
‘She seemed like an intelligent girl, Mr Johnson.’
‘Yes. Oh yes, always the bright spark in her class. No idea where she got it from. Not us, love, was it?’ He glances at his wife and softly smirks. ‘Actually, it’ll be from her mother, of course. She’s the school teacher. I’m just the paper shifter.’
‘What is it you do?’ I ask.
‘Civil servant. Answering phones, sending papers from one side of the office to the other, making sure everyone’s doing the job they’re supposed to.’
‘A noble profession,’ I say, and mean it. Personal experience has taught me our Force would be worthless without the staff in the office, the ones rarely seen behind the computers and the telephone lines. They’re our backbone. We couldn’t do the job without them.
‘Pays the mortgage,’ Toby concludes, and I smile in response.
We drink our tea quietly, only the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece a reminder that life outside these four walls goes on. It’s 3.40pm and Ange and Dan will be home soon.
‘Would you mind me asking when the funeral is, Mr Johnson?’ I ask, returning the empty cup to the table.
Toby lowers his own and rests it on his polyester trousers. The shirt he wears, buttoned to below the dip of his throat, looks like new, the collar crisp, telling me that despite what he said earlier about the little tasks, he nevertheless felt it appropriate to dress up to make the funeral arrangements for his daughter; make a good impression.
‘We didn’t want it too soon, you know. Still getting our heads round it.’ His free hand flutters over his forehead, knowing already perhaps that getting his head round it will never happen. ‘But at the same time...’
He looks to his wife, but gets no help from there.
‘So it’s next Thursday. Three o’clock is the earliest we could get.’
‘I’d like to attend, if that’s okay with you.’
Toby’s eyebrows lift. ‘Of course. That would be very good of you. St Catherine’s Church for the service. Then onto the crematorium. Food at the rugby club afterwards. All welcome.’
I smile, thinking only the service will be appropriate. It doesn’t hurt to show that the Force cares, that each fatality is another loss to our community we register as more than just a statistic.
I excuse myself and ask if they’d mind if I use the bathroom before I go, then follow Toby’s directions to the top of the stairs and the room at the far end of the hall. It’s a sizeable bathroom, all white tiles and quaint seaside memorabilia, and as I wash my hands at the sink, I picture Anna there brushing her long black hair in the mirror. I stare into my own eyes and for a second imagine she looks back, from somewhere there beyond the glass, her smile the same as on the photo downstairs, light eyes brightening the muddled brown-green of my own.
The floorboards are silent as I return down the hallway, doors on either side of it. I have no intention of stopping, but the last door on my right is ajar an inch or two, and through it I see a pale pink and grey striped duvet cover and a picture of something on the wall. I take a step back and realise it’s a poster of a glossy black stallion.
My fingers press at the door so it eases open. The room is large and tidy, the double bed made, and with red feathered cushions arranged neatly against the pillows. There are no other posters other than the horse – the rest of the walls are bare but painted a soft pink to match the duvet. A long dressing table sits beneath the window, on top of which are neat rows of bottles and creams and makeup, and around its mirror those strings of lights that everyone seems to like these days. These ones are stars. Beneath them, tucked into the mirror’s frame, are a series of passport photo snapshots. I tread over the grey carpet and peer at the pictures of Anna and a group of friends posing for the camera, at one point five of them all squeezed into the booth together. Three girls, two boys. I try to pick out which one of the two might be Brad, but somehow I don’t think either is.
I step back out, and am pulling the door to almost closed, when a quiet voice behind me says, ‘That’s Anna’s.’
I turn to see Anna’s sister leaning against the door jamb of a room on the other side of the landing. Her hair is held back by an Alice band, her face pale, as her sister’s was that night.
‘You must be Sienna,’ I say.
She knots her arms across her t-shirt.
‘Anna told me about you,’ I add, wondering what I’ll say next; whether I’ll lie and say something cliched like, ‘She thought a lot of you,’ or, ‘She said you were the best sister anyone could have,’ and if she’d believe me if I did.
But I don’t have to wonder for long. Sienna Johnson disappears back inside her room, slamming the door hard enough that the vibration rattles under my feet and up into my calves.
*
That night I can’t sleep. My body’s still trying to catch up with what shift pattern I’m keeping these days. But when some time after three in the morning I manage to drop off, I dream about Anna. Or at least it’s her to begin with.
In the dream, we’re in the ambulance alone. No Charlotte, no second paramedic, just me and Anna. She’s afraid and she wants me to do something. I can’t see her legs all that clearly, but I can see the blood. It pours from the stretcher in sheets, the same way it would in a horror film, or in a cartoon when someone forgets they left the bath running. Except this is neither of those things. Where Anna’s blood hits the floor, it pools around my boots in a circle that draws ever closer, ensnaring me and splashing up to stain my trousers. I can smell it. Though not the rustic metal scent of fresh blood, but the cloying, rancid stench of meat on the turn, as if she’s already dead.
Anna’s fingers get hold of my utility vest and yank at me, her eyes hard and cold, a vicious fury seething inside her. I see it in her face, but more than that, I feel it inside me. It lodges there in my very centre, except I don’t know what to do to help her, not really. My first aid training will only take me so far.
I rip off my vest, twist it up and try to make a tourniquet out of it around one of her legs, but there’s too much blood and I’m fumbling. My fingers slide over her thigh, my hands tremble against her cool skin. Then the rear doors of the ambulance are flying open.
Toby stands there. He’s furious. As furious as his daughter, his eyes black with rage. I look at the stretcher, except it’s no longer Anna lying there but Sienna, and she’s crying. The blood has gone – there is no blood, only tears, and I’m standing over her with her dress up over her knees and my hands still trying to tie my screwed up vest around her thigh.
Toby comes at me, pushing me against the back of the ambulance. My mind shouts that what he sees is not what he thinks, but none of it makes it out of my mouth. I see his fist as he raises it. But right before it hits, my eyes are wide open and I’m sat up in bed, my heart punching through my chest.
