When he wakes up, it’s already early evening. Downstairs, there’s a sound coming from the front room. For a moment, he thinks it’s that dreadful Arjun as he’s Jackie’s only visitor, but that can’t be right. Arjun was there this morning. He’s not due again until tomorrow. He realizes the voices are coming from one of the televisions. Two of the screens are tuned to Morte Sands, all but empty at this time of day, but the third is tuned to the news.
‘Why are you watching that rubbish?’
Jackie practically leaps out of her recliner.
‘Oh. They’re doing a reconstruction of that terrible attack on that girl. Didn’t you attend that one?’
‘You don’t want to watch that nonsense. You’ll only scare yourself.’
He goes to take the remote out of her hand.
‘The mother’s doing a special appeal.’
Her mother? He switches his attention to the screen. ‘. . . Still no concrete leads three days after it happened…’ a lady with an immaculate blonde bob solemnly informs him.
‘Maybe I’ll watch a little longer. Just to keep you company.’
‘That would be nice. Thank you.’
Lowering himself onto the flowery sofa, he knocks Laurel and Hardy to the floor.
‘. . . We have in the studio, DI Holt who is leading the investigation, and Ally Dymond who is Megan’s mum.’
The camera pans out. He catches his breath. It’s Danielle, but it isn’t. It’s not just her hair and eyes, it’s her air. She thinks she’s better than everyone else. Just like Danielle.
‘. . . But first we have a reconstruction of the events leading up to the attack…’
The film sequence begins to roll. They’ve found a good lookalike for her daughter. He’ll give them that. Tall, red hair, it’s hard to believe that mother and daughter are related. The lookalike goes into a newsagent and buys a chocolate bar. Yes, he remembers her chocolatey breath.
‘I’ve been in that newsagent. Not for a while, but it makes you think, doesn’t it?’ Jackie tells the television.
The stand-in walks with purpose along the trail. That’s all wrong. She was much more of a dawdler, reading her phone the whole time. Silly him, they won’t know that, of course, will they?
Then a voice tells viewers to cast their minds back to the day of the attack. It had been a warm, but wet Tuesday. Wimbledon was on the television and that evening someone scooped £157 million on the EuroMillions.
‘Lucky beggar,’ mutters Jackie, popping a Haribo Gold Bear into her mouth.
The girl stands in the middle of the trail while the voiceover explains the route she took and how police believe she had arranged to meet someone there, but who? They even do that thing where the camera looks like someone is spying on her from a distance, but it’s in the wrong place. He was at least another ten metres further along.
Then it ends. But they haven’t shown her sitting on the bench. There’s no mention of a man on a bike, either. Why not? Then he realizes why not. The police have nothing. They’re so incompetent they’ve even missed the false trail he laid – the weapon with her blood on it and Benson’s fingerprints – what more could they ask for? Peter has been pestering women for years, surely his prints are on file.
The lady with the blonde bob is talking again.
‘DI Holt, this was a very brutal attack on a young girl. Local residents are frightened it may happen again. How close are you to finding the person that did this?’
The camera is on wide-angle, but he’s not interested in the detective next to her and fixes on the CSI, but she may as well not be there for all the use she is. She’s just staring down at her hands as if none of it is anything to do with her. You wouldn’t know it was her child that had been attacked.
‘Well, Suzy, I’d like to assure local residents that this is a very rare crime for this area and there’s no reason to suspect it will happen again. Having said that, I can also assure you we’re doing everything we can to apprehend Megan’s attacker. We’re working on a few theories which I can’t talk about at the moment. That’s why we’ve done the reconstruction. We have lots of information, but we need more. We need people to think about what they were doing that day. Were you in the area? Did you see Megan? Did you see anyone else in that area at that time? It was just after lunch, and it was drizzling quite hard, but there would have been people about.’
Still she keeps her head bowed. She’s a waste of everybody’s time. She just wants to be on TV, probably wants everyone to feel sorry for her.
‘And you think someone close to Megan’s attacker might suspect something. They might even be protecting them,’ says the presenter.
‘Poor love,’ says Jackie, dropping another Haribo into her mouth.
‘Yes, we think someone – a friend, a family member – must suspect something. He would have had blood on his clothing when he got home.’
A reaction. Barely perceptible, but he sees it. She tenses at the mention of blood, her jaw clenches. He smiles. She’s trying to hold it all in.
‘Please, an innocent girl was viciously attacked that day. We’re appealing to anyone who may know something, have seen something, no matter how small, to contact us.’
‘Thank you, DI Holt. Ally, would you like to say a few words? Perhaps you could tell us what kind of a girl Megan is? We understand she is still critical. How are you coping?’
He leans towards the television, ignoring a teddy in a soldier’s uniform that tumbles off the sofa. She’ll have to look up at the camera now. The presenter is addressing her directly. It’ll be rude not to.
But she doesn’t move. The presenter tries again.
‘Ally, I know how hard this must be for you, but is there anything you’d like to say?’
What’s she playing at? Even the detective looks embarrassed. The camera lingers on her and just as he’s sure it’s going to cut away, she looks up and there it is, right there, in her eyes. He knows that look; it’s a look of defeat welded to acceptance of one’s fate. He sits back and lets her expression flow over him, as soothing as if he’d just injected himself with morphine.
‘Megan is kind, loyal, funny, beautiful, infuriating – a normal teenager,’ she says.
Not bad, but it has a rehearsed feel to it and is a little rushed. She needs to speak more slowly, with more emotion. Tears would be good. Even if she doesn’t mean them. ‘And she is very loved.’
Lies. The only person she loves is herself. She couldn’t care less about her daughter, leaving her alone all the time. He wants to shout at the screen, ‘TwilightSparkle hates you. She told me. She told me how you left her alone for hours on end, how you never had any time for her because you were always at work.’
‘Poor lady. She’s broken-hearted,’ says Jackie.
‘Yes, poor lady.’
The camera pans out. The detective throws a look at her and then the presenter as if to say, that’s all you’re going to get, but the newsreader ignores him.
‘Take your time, Ally. Is there anything else you’d like to say to people watching this?’
The tips of her fingers dance around each other on her lap. The camera homes in on her once again, but it’s obvious she isn’t going to say any more.
He’s been duped into watching a laughably inaccurate reconstruction and an emotionally stunted and media-obsessed mother. He stands up to leave, but then stops and lowers himself back down onto the sofa.
Something’s changed. Her fingers are still. Slowly, deliberately, almost robotically, she raises her head. Her eyes. Her eyes are unblinking, defiant, no pain, no sorrow; her pupils are black with fury and she’s staring right at him. Everything around him blurs.
‘I know you’re out there.’ Good grief, she’s talking directly to him. A heat rises from his neck to his face. ‘But you will be caught—’ She says this with absolute certainty, like it’s inevitable.
She pauses a while, searching for the right words. No, he’s wrong, she’s already selected those. She’s making sure she has his attention. The bitch has it all planned. She knows he’s watching.
The camera closes in on her face, just as she expects it to. She stares down the lens at him. Now, it’s just the two of them. Jackie has gone. The studio has gone. No one else exists. Her eyes anchor his.
‘Because I’m coming for you.’
* * *
Penny is by Megan’s bedside when I return from the TV studio. She immediately gets up and offers me her seat. I take it along with Megan’s hand.
‘How is she?’
‘Good. I don’t think she’s moved again, but it’s so difficult to tell.’
‘She will.’ I kiss Megan’s forehead. ‘Well done, love. Keep doing what you’re doing.’
Penny sits in the armchair in the corner of the room.
‘I watched the appeal on TV.’ I nod. There’s an unfamiliar terseness in her voice. ‘So, what was all that “I’m coming for you” stuff at the end?’
‘Honestly, I don’t know.’ That’s the truth. I hadn’t gone to the studio planning to do anything other than describe Megan, make her real to the viewers and convey my anguish in a way that would spur them to pause their lives and reach deep into their memories. But as I watched the reconstruction and I listened to Holt, it was obvious to me that the police have little to go on, and I became convinced Megan’s attacker was watching and would know that too. I couldn’t bear the thought of him sitting on a sofa wearing the smuggest of smiles thinking he’d won. ‘But Holt was furious with me. As soon as the cameras stopped rolling, he had a right go at me.’ I couldn’t blame him. Heartbreak gets results. Confrontation doesn’t. ‘He told me I’d jeopardized the investigation and if Megan’s attacker was watching I might even have turned myself into a target which they could do without, seeing as they’re already guarding Megan.’
‘Maybe he’s got a point.’
Her response takes me by surprise, so much so I think I’ve misheard.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, they’ve got enough on their plate without having to watch out for you too. Why don’t you just let them get on with it?’
It irks me that Penny is siding with Holt. It’s not as if the police did her any favours over her ex, Ian.
‘Well, I would if—’
‘If what?’ she snaps.
I sense there’s something else going on here that I’m not up to speed with, but I’ve no idea what.
‘I don’t think the investigation is going very well.’ There, I’ve said it. It’s not in the league of major cock-ups, but something isn’t chiming. I wait for Penny’s reaction to my revelation. There isn’t one. It’s like she hasn’t heard me or hasn’t understood the significance of what I’m saying so I fill her in. ‘They haven’t found Megan’s phone. There’s nothing on her laptop. They’ve no idea why she was there in the first place. Nobody seems to have seen anything. They don’t have anyone in the frame. It’s slipping away from them.’
‘I thought the weapon had a fingerprint on it,’ she offers, half-heartedly.
‘It does, but—’
‘But what?’ There it is again, a shortness that wants to head off the conversation, but why? She must want to know who did this as much as me. I plough on.
‘Something doesn’t sit right. First rule of crime – get rid of the weapon. Second rule – wear gloves. This guy failed on both counts but managed not to leave a single shred of any other evidence at the scene.’
‘Perhaps he panicked. Anything could have made him drop it.’
‘Maybe. But I can’t help thinking they’ve missed something.’
Penny is staring at me oddly.
‘Leave it alone, Ally. Let them do their jobs.’
‘Even if they’re not doing them properly.’
‘Even that,’ she sighs. ‘Megan needs you here, not swanning around the countryside playing Sherlock Holmes.’
Why is she saying this? This isn’t like her. And I don’t swan anywhere.
‘It happens to be my job and there’s nothing wrong with taking an interest in the investigation. This guy needs to be caught, Penny.’
‘And that’s exactly what the police will do and they don’t need any help from you.’
‘That’s the point. They do need help.’
Penny shakes her head.
‘I get it. You’re a CSI, you want to do your bit to catch this guy.’ She pauses. ‘But you’re a mother too. Maybe you need to remember that.’