‘Chapel of Rest’ didn’t seem an appropriate name for the pathetically small room with a dais at one end and some plastic-backed chairs at the other. The pale walls might once have been beige, or perhaps butter, but could now be mistaken for bare plaster. Without a wall-mount or a single pane of coloured glass in the window the overall effect was soul-crushing dullness. It reminded Valentine of an old British Rail waiting room: a place with a purely utilitarian purpose. Surely the deceased deserved better, but then they weren’t the main consideration here. The room was designed to cause no offence to the living, because of course, causing offence is the greatest crime we are capable of.
‘Could they have done a worse job on this place?’ said Valentine.
‘It’s a bit grim. But then, a glitter-ball would only look out of place,’ said McCormack. She caught Valentine’s hard stare and retreated. ‘Sorry, I’m lowering the tone.’
‘Makes a change from me, I suppose.’ He crossed his legs and pinched the crease in his trousers. ‘What kind of contact have you had with the parents so far?’
‘I spoke to them yesterday. Alex McGarvie’s due in an hour or so, and Caroline Simpson should be here by now.’
‘How was she?’
‘Honest appraisal? She was broken.’
‘She’ll be a lot worse when she hears about the post-mortem.’
McCormack lowered her head, her face darkening. ‘God, how do we break something like that?’
‘Gently, Sylvia.’
‘I can’t imagine how it must feel to lose a child, but to be told you had a grandchild-to-be you didn’t know about and . . .’ She halted and turned to the window. ‘I shouldn’t let the job get to me like this.’
‘No, you shouldn’t.’
McCormack took her gaze from the window and focused on the DCI again. ‘How do you do that? I mean, how do you shut out the personal stuff that affects you so much.’
Valentine waited for the right words to form in his mind and after a few seconds realised they weren’t coming. The perfect response wasn’t coming because it wasn’t there, not in him anyway. ‘There was a DS I worked under years ago, a good copper but not one of those rank chasers. He told me that the best you can do is let the job wash over you, never let your outside become your inside.’
‘Wise words.’
‘Really? You think so? I tried to do that but found it only made me put off the introspection, to pile it up into one great heap that left you with a mountain of hurt to deal with in the end.’
‘Oh, right . . .’
‘I suppose the only advice I can give you, Sylvia, is that you learn to cope.’ He paused, gathering his thoughts. ‘I don’t know how, or why. We’re resilient creatures, with enough exposure to the job and with a long enough pass-age of time, we learn to cope. I’m not saying we cease to be shocked or even appalled, but the impact lessens. The initial damage can only be done once, we heal, and the scar tissue is much stronger than the original wound ever was.’
‘I don’t want to be one of those cops that keeps their feelings behind a wall,’ Sylvia said, meeting his gaze. ‘I don’t want to become desensitised.’
‘Those cops were born that way; they always had walls around them. There’s millimetres between some cops and criminals on the same spectrum.’
‘You mean like the difference between a genius and a lunatic?’
‘Exactly, there’s only a cigarette paper between them.’
The chapel attendants entered the room, rolling a trolley from the morgue. They raised the trolley level with the dais before delicately lifting the victim’s corpse onto the platform. Valentine had asked for the body to be taken to the chapel for the purposes of formal identification, but after last night’s visitation he already knew he had found Abbie McGarvie.
It was all just another procedure, a legal requirement. He was sure the girl’s mother could do without the rigmarole, but the investigation could not.
As the DCI waited with DI McCormack, watching the chapel attendants adjust the over-bright lighting, he became aware of a mood change in the room. He got to his feet and turned to face the door, where he met Caroline Simpson’s gaze.
The woman was clutching a blue paisley scarf, twisting it between her fingers. There was a faraway glare in her eyes, like the look of a woman who had already received enough shocks in her life. She stood still, unmoving except for the fidgeting of her fingers around the scarf, and then she made her way towards the detective.
Caroline’s instinct was to offer a hand to shake but her nerves betrayed her and she snatched her hand away to her mouth instead. She seemed perched on the edge of tears.
‘Mrs Simpson, I’m Inspector Valentine and this is DI McCormack.’
‘It’s Miss . . .’ She sucked in her lips and quickly released them again. ‘I’m not married any more.’
‘I’m sorry, Miss Simpson,’ said Valentine. ‘Can I offer you a seat?’
‘No. I’m fine. Thank you.’ Her gaze had settled on the other end of the room, beyond the plastic-backed chairs, where the morgue attendants had laid out the corpse, beneath a blue-green covering. ‘Is that her?’
Valentine motioned to the dais. ‘I believe you spoke to DI McCormack on the telephone. Our information is very limited at the moment, but we found a girl who matched the description of your daughter. We’ve no means of definitively identifying her, which is why we called you here.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘It was a road traffic accident.’
She glanced at the detective and started to walk towards the dais. When she reached the other end of the room she touched the cloth covering the corpse and hurriedly withdrew her hand. ‘Did she suffer?’
‘It was instantaneous.’ He saw no reason to burden her right away with the details of the sexual assault. ‘She wouldn’t have suffered at all.’
Miss Simpson fiddled in her pockets and, with trembling hands, removed a small white handkerchief. She dabbed at the edges of her eyes as she moved around the prone figure in front of her. Her eyes, though glazed with tears, seemed still and peaceful now, scanning the length of the figure. Occasionally, she bit into her lower lip as if the act was helping her to compose herself, but her overall appearance was of a woman ready to crack open and reveal the misery inside.
‘I think I’d like to see her now.’
Valentine moved to the head of the dais and nodded to the chapel assistant standing nearby. He stepped forward and gently peeled back the blue-green covering to reveal the pale features of the dead girl. Her face seemed to have darkened a little, perhaps caused by the lowered lighting, and shadows sat in the hollows of her cheeks and beneath the eyes.
Caroline Simpson stared for only a few seconds before she turned her face away and screwed up her eyes. Her tightened eyelids weren’t enough to hold back the tears. She nodded briskly. ‘It’s Abbie.’
DI McCormack placed an arm around Caroline’s shoulders and led her towards the nearest seat. As they went, the chapel assistants took their cue to return Abbie McGarvie’s body to the trolley and start to leave the small room.
‘I’m sorry I had to put you through that, Miss Simpson,’ said Valentine.
‘She told me, you know, that she’d die like that. She said they’d kill her in the end because she wasn’t like the other girls.’
‘Other girls?’
‘There were dozens, she told me that. I told the police before, after I’d told the social services, though fat lot of bloody good it did me. No one looked out for my daughter. None of them. And that judge, the one that took her away from me . . . Oh, God, they still have Tyler. Is my son okay?’
DI McCormack was still comforting Caroline, rubbing her hands with her own. ‘Tyler’s fine, I’m sure. There’s been a weekly social services visit since Abbie went missing.’
‘Those idiots! Do you know what I call social services now? I call them the SS. They’re as bad as all the rest. They turfed out the only one who ever helped me. Jean Clark believed me and they sacked her.’
Valentine stored away the social worker’s name – it wasn’t one he had seen in Davis’s file. ‘Why did they sack her?’
‘Jean was the first and last one to believe me. Oh, I think your Davis fella might have been coming round, but he’s such a hard man to read, I can never tell. It’s not like you people would ever let on, anyway. But Jean knew what they were doing to Abbie; she believed her. It was all so horrific, and nobody else wanted to believe it was true. They just wanted to brush it under the carpet and then when the school got dragged in and some of the prominent names involved started to come out, they just put all their wagons in a circle. It was as if everyone with any power to stop it, to save Abbie, were sworn to do the exact opposite. Poor Jean didn’t stand a chance against them, so what chance did Abbie ever have?’ Caroline withdrew her hands from McCormack’s grasp and pressed her face into her palms. Her shoulders shook as she sobbed before the officers.
Valentine exchanged looks with McCormack and made to leave, but as he got up, the doors to the chapel of rest opened and a stooped, gaunt man in a navy raincoat stepped in. The man’s hair, thinning, was plastered to his crown by the recent downpour and made his head appear like nothing more than a skin-covered skull. It took Valentine a moment or two to realise it was Alex McGarvie standing before him. The DCI turned back to the others to gauge their reaction, which as he expected, wasn’t good.
‘You bastard!’ Caroline stood up and pointed at Alex. ‘You did this, you killed your own daughter!’
DI McCormack tried to hold back Caroline, as she clawed the air to get at her ex-husband. She continued firing accusations and insults as Valentine guided Alex back out the door.
In the corridor the DCI was challenged. ‘Wait a minute, if that’s my daughter in there, I’ve every right to see her.’
‘Of course, but if you’d mind waiting until we’ve cleared the way,’ said Valentine, wondering why the father seemed less interested in the fate of his child than projecting his wounded pride.
‘I’m the parent with custody,’ said Alex, jerking his arm away from Valentine’s grasp. ‘Why is my ex-wife in there?’
‘Mr McGarvie, you’re both parents.’
‘I have legal rights.’
‘Sir, if you don’t mind, please.’ The DCI directed Alex into the vacant waiting room, but he objected, instead turning around and heading down the corridor towards the doors. ‘I will need to talk to you, Mr McGarvie.’
He spun around. ‘What?’
‘If now’s not a good time, would you like to come in to the station when it’s convenient for you?’
‘On what charge?’
‘There’s no charges, sir. I’m conducting an investigation, it’s a matter of procedure.’
‘Like calling my ex-wife, I suppose.’ He stomped back down the corridor and barged through the exit to the car park, leaving the heavy doors swinging noisily on their hinges.
The DCI’s thoughts pooled as he wondered what he had just observed and what he was dealing with. He had a dead girl, who had been twelve weeks pregnant, and a mother and father in all-out war.
Outside, Valentine jogged back to the car, dodging the puddles and potholes, only to realise that he didn’t have the key to McCormack’s vehicle. He tried the handle but it was indeed locked; he was cursing himself and his stupidity when the rain started to fall again.
For a moment, as he stood looking back to the morgue, over the roof of the car, his vision started to blur, pushing the building out of focus. When his eyes cleared and he could see plainly again, he spotted a young girl standing in front of the closed doors of the morgue. She was watching him. Where had she come from? He hadn’t passed anyone in the corridor, and there was nobody stupid enough to stand out in the rain, except for him.
Valentine stared at the girl for a few seconds more and noticed that, despite the heavy rain, she appeared to be completely dry. Her hair wasn’t even damp, whereas his was sticking to his head. When she spoke, he tried to make out the words but couldn’t – he could only follow the movement of her lips.
As the girl raised her arms to him he realised at once who he was staring at. There was an instantaneous connection between them that he had never felt before, and he heard her voice whispering to him, just like she had when he saw her in the mirror.
‘Help the girls, please. There’s no one else. Please, help them.’
As quickly as the voice came it disappeared. The doors of the mortuary swung open and DI McCormack came running towards the DCI. ‘Sorry, boss,’ she said, pointing the key at the car, ‘you’re soaking wet, look at you.’
McCormack got in and dropped her bag on the back seat. As she started the engine she opened the passenger’s window and called out to Valentine. ‘Boss, the door’s open now.’
The DCI clambered in and acknowledged McCormack. ‘Sorry, I was miles away.’
‘It’s bucketing rain!’
‘Sorry.’
McCormack switched off the engine and pivoted in her seat to face Valentine. ‘Is everything okay?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Boss?’ She tilted her head. ‘You’re acting very strange.’
‘Strange, am I?’ He turned to face her.
‘Oh, I get it. We’ve had a moment.’ She started the car again. The wipers screeched on the windscreen as the car pulled out. ‘Good job I called Hugh Crosbie earlier. I hope 8 p.m. tomorrow night sounds okay for getting to the bottom of this once and for all.’