It was quiet in the car. Sam Knowles felt he could hardly start a conversation with Lizzie about the weather, but he thought he’d have a go. ‘It’s going to be a nice summer if it stays like this.’
Lizzie ignored him.
‘Are you going anywhere on holiday in the summer?’ Still nothing. He turned pink. She was torturing him. It was bad enough that he fancied her, but if she didn’t even admit to his existence, then what chance had he got?
She negotiated the roundabout and signalled left, stopping at the pedestrian crossing. ‘What?’ She saw his discomfort. ‘Sorry, Sam, I was miles away. I just can’t get my head around Jamie May being involved in Carly’s murder. How much would I love to be able to find something out? You know, to really help with the investigation.’ She paused. ‘What were you saying?’
‘No, nothing. Just making conversation.’
‘Right.’
They drove another mile in silence until Lizzie relented. ‘So, have you searched a house before?’
Sam smiled in relief, a reprieve. ‘Yep, on several occasions, actually.’
‘Good. Tell me what to do, ‘cos this is my first.’
They took a moment to walk the street before coming back to the battered front door. The May household was a terrace in the middle of a typical long row of houses in Heavitree, one of the older parts of town. It had a small patch of grass at the front, and a long back garden leading out to an alleyway that met up with a road at one end and the cemetery at the other.
‘I wonder if Jamie was trying to get home when I intercepted him at the cemetery yesterday? It’s just down the road.’
‘It’s likely. He must have been devastated.’
Sam eyed the front garden, turned into a muddy drive for the aged maroon Fiesta parked at an angle in front of the door. He rang the doorbell.
‘I still feel a little strange being out of uniform,’ Lizzie laughed, finding a place for the car keys in her bag. ‘I don’t expect people to take any notice of me now I’m in plain clothes.’
Sam smiled. ‘Oh, I don’t think you’re going to have any problem at all, Wonderwoman.’ He slipped neatly to the left to avoid her elbow.
‘Oh,’ Sandra May said as she opened the door. ‘I thought it would be the older policeman I met yesterday.’
Sam replied, ‘No, just us underlings, Mrs May, to do the house visits. Hope that’s alright?’
He didn’t wait for an answer as they followed her into the living room. Sam was surprised at how empty it was. There were no pictures on the walls, no ornaments, no soft cushions, nothing that would turn this room into a home.
‘What a lovely tidy room,’ said Sam, deciding that in this case, banality was exactly what was required.
‘I don’t like stuff everywhere.’ She looked at the floor when she spoke to them. ‘It’s hard enough having to work forty hours a week and bring up a boy on my own without having to spend all my free time cleaning and polishing. It’s got what we need.
‘So what do you want to see? I need to get back to the police station for Jamie.’
‘We would like to see his room please, Mrs May, and anywhere else he’s likely to leave his stuff.’
She sniffed. ‘Right, you’d better come upstairs. But we weren’t expecting visitors, so you’ll have to take us as we are.’ She led them up a narrow staircase, the wall burnished to a dull yellow sheen from the brushing past of countless hands. ‘I know it needs decorating, but everything costs money, doesn’t it?’
She stood back in the cramped space at the top of the stairs and let them go through into Jamie’s room.
‘Thanks, Mrs May,’ said Sam, ‘we can manage from here.’ She sniffed again and made her way downstairs.
To Sam, the contrast between Jamie’s room and the rest of the house was more marked than it would have been in a typical home. Jamie had been through the upstairs of the house in a hurry, there were clothes on the floor, open jars of hair gel and canisters of deodorant and aftershave on top of the chest of drawers. The walls were covered in posters for heavy metal and death metal bands, and there were CDs and even vinyl records on every surface. ‘This is more like it,’ he muttered to Lizzie as they stood inside the door.
‘Shouldn’t take too long,’ he added. ‘It’s not a big room. You start on the left and I’ll start on his laptop, so we won’t get in each other’s way.’
‘Sam, what are we looking for?’
‘I don’t know, but we will when we find it. Put everything back where you get it from.’ She put her tongue out at him.
The search was as methodical and thorough as they could make it without taking everything out of the room. Once Sam found Jamie’s laptop, it took him three minutes to work out that Jamie’s password was ‘Napalm Death’. After several further fruitless minutes searching folders and browsing history, Sam shook his head, ‘Nothing. You’d think there’d be something here that would help us.’
‘I know we’re missing something,’ Lizzie said. She gingerly checked the boy’s underwear drawer, the place where most teenagers would store personal stuff. She found tobacco, bits of cardboard he used for filters for his roll-ups, and an unopened packet of condoms. ‘We asked Sandra May not to touch anything. So, what is it we’re not seeing?’
There were hand-written song lyrics, and a demo CD, and at one point Sam played a couple of Jamie’s songs off his computer, which weren’t bad. It was a poignant moment to hear the strong voice of Carly Braithwaite belting out vocals as if she was just in the next room.
‘She could really sing, couldn’t she?’ said Sam, pausing in his perusal of the CD rack.
Lizzie slapped his arm and let out a little squeal.
‘Got it! There’s no guitar in the house, is there? I wonder if the guitar I saw at Westlake’s house was Jamie’s? I wonder if that’s where he was heading when I arrested him yesterday? I thought he was coming home, but Westlake only lives a mile or so away. I knew we’d missed something.’
‘What does it mean, though?’ asked Sam.
‘Don’t be a numpty. If the guitar was in the house, then Jamie had to have been there with it, at the party. It’s corroborating evidence, isn’t it?’
Sam nodded at her. He didn’t want to destroy her excitement too early on, but Jamie had already admitted to being at the party. Still, she was making deductions, and that was good.
The sound of the music brought Mrs May unexpectedly up from the kitchen with tea and biscuits, which they drank and ate standing in the small room. Sam could see that Sandra May wasn’t a cold woman, just one who had been worn down, and who was worried sick about her son.
‘Mrs May, where are the clothes Jamie was wearing on Saturday night?’ Lizzie asked, eyes bright. Sam stared at her. What was she getting at?
The woman looked confused. ‘He was wearing black jeans, like he always does, a white tee shirt and his grey hoodie.’ She thought for a moment. ‘I think he must have come home when I was at work yesterday and got changed, though, because he was wearing his hoodie again when I saw him last night at the police station.’
‘So what does he usually do with his dirty clothes? I can’t see any here in his room, which is weird if my brothers’ habits are anything to go by.’
Mrs May led them out to the small bathroom across the landing. There, on the top of a laundry basket under a stripy towel was a grey hoodie, some dirty jeans, a white tee shirt, socks and underwear.
‘Was this what he wore to go to the party on Saturday night?’
Sandra May nodded, ‘I think so. Course he came back late on Sunday night, and never came back on Monday night at all. That’s when I reported him missing, so that’s probably what he was wearing all weekend.’
Lizzie lifted the trousers off the pile and tried the pockets, then she tried the deeper pockets of the hoodie. There, squashed deep down in the right hand pocket, was a black ballet pump.