Saturday 9th December 2023
Chrissy
Chrissy scoops up the empty sweet wrappers that litter her sofa cushions – flustered, fumbling – and motions for the detectives to sit down. She’s no longer comforting herself by bingeing on crisps, but sucking hard-boiled sweets is the only thing that keeps her anxious nausea at bay.
She glances from one detective to the other: the dark-haired, clean-shaven DC Colella and the woman – DC Wright – with a sharp silver bob and pencilled-on brows. She’s shaken from her encounter with Georgie, her own outburst at the church. Let them have good news for me. Please, please, please.
‘Is it Leo?’ she blurts. ‘Is there something?’
‘We’re the detectives who’ve been assigned to his case,’ says DC Colella. ‘We haven’t tracked him down yet, but we have some things we’d like to talk through with you. We’re all very anxious to resolve this.’
Chrissy tugs at a tangle in her hair. Resolve this. Not make sure he’s okay. There’s a difference that seems bigger and harsher the longer she dwells on it.
‘Leo’s phone and bank card have not been used since his release,’ he tells her.
‘Is that …?’ She chokes on her own question: is that good or bad?
She knows it’s bad.
‘But we have some CCTV footage,’ Wright says briskly, and Chrissy jolts in her seat.
How do they know about the camera in her hedge? It’s been hidden there for less than twelve hours and she’s told nobody about it.
‘It shows Leo leaving the prison at 8.30 a.m. on the day of his release,’ Detective Wright says.
Of course. Not her CCTV. Chrissy shakes herself, refocusing on what they’re telling her. Leo left over an hour before she arrived to collect him. She should’ve got there at dawn, camped out all night. Her guilt starts spiralling, but she hauls herself back.
Detective Colella is opening a laptop on the coffee table. ‘Can we show you the footage, Ms Dean?’
Chrissy clenches her stomach. She wants to ask what she’s about to see but her mouth has frozen and the laptop has been swivelled towards her, footage starting to play. The familiar prison gates, the grim-looking building behind them, the white sky and low grey clouds.
Then, Leo. Her heart soars at the sight of him. He’s stepping out tentatively, walking into the world as if he doesn’t quite believe nobody will stop him. Chrissy aches as she watches him clutching his few belongings in a clear plastic bag, like a schoolkid on exam day. How she wishes she could climb into the computer, wrap him up tightly in her arms.
She sees him pause. Something has caught his attention off to the right – or someone, perhaps, exasperatingly out of shot. Chrissy shifts the laptop as if it will make the camera pan around. Leo is absolutely still, looking that way, his face unreadable in the grainy image. He snaps his gaze back and continues walking, glancing warily – almost furtively – around him. Then he stops again. Turns back to the right. He pulls up his hood and starts moving in that direction, half-jogging, disappearing out of shot.
Chrissy lets out a cry of protest, turning to the detectives. ‘Is there another camera? Another angle? Can we see where he’s gone?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ Detective Colella says. ‘He isn’t picked up on camera again. But …’ He takes the laptop back and moves his finger on the mousepad, clicking several times. ‘We are interested in this.’
He turns it back to face Chrissy. She is still recovering from seeing Leo, breathing choppily, wanting him back. Now she’s looking at an image of a quiet, unremarkable street.
‘This is just around the corner from the prison,’ Wright says. ‘Twenty minutes before Leo was released.’
Chrissy sits forward, hardly daring to blink. A battered white car pulls up and idles for a moment. The driver is indistinct, but appears to be a man wearing a dark baseball cap and a scarf. One of the detectives leans over Chrissy and zooms in. The image granulates even further, but the driver is clearly on the phone, one large, gloved hand gesticulating in the air. After he hangs up, he half-opens the door of the car, then pauses, his gaze seeming to snag on the camera. For a second he stares directly at it. Still his face is fuzzy, his eyes the only focal point between his hat and scarf. He slams the door and the car roars off.
Chrissy sits back. ‘What … what has that got to do with Leo?’
‘Maybe nothing,’ Wright says. ‘But we ran the reg through our systems – we’ve been checking vehicles captured by CCTV in the area around that time – and discovered that it’s a stolen car.’
‘Is there anything to indicate Leo might’ve gone off in it?’
‘Not as yet. It was caught on a speed camera an hour later, heading north. But since then, nothing. We’ll be alerted anytime its reg triggers a camera. It could be a false lead, but …’
‘You don’t recognise the car, do you?’ Detective Wright jumps in.
Chrissy frowns, shaking her head. ‘Where was it stolen from?’
‘A residential address in Derby, two weeks ago. Has Leo ever been involved in vehicle theft, to your knowledge?’
‘No!’ Chrissy straightens up. ‘Of course not!’
She can’t process it all, can’t fit it in with anything else she thinks she knows. Detective Wright is standing up now, Colella closing the laptop, zipping it back into its shiny leather case. They’re leaving and she is floundering, playing catch-up. As they make for the door, she shakes herself alert.
‘His visitation records,’ she blurts. ‘Did you get those from the prison?’
Colella pauses with one foot out of the living room. ‘We’ve requested them. We’ll contact you as soon as we know anything further.’
‘While we’re here,’ Wright says, ‘do you have anything that might have Leo’s DNA on?’
‘What?’
‘A hairbrush, toothbrush? It’s … procedure. Just in case …’ Wright clears her throat. ‘We may need to identify …’
Chrissy’s lungs shrink in her chest. This can’t be happening. None of it. And she doesn’t have anything to offer them, because Leo has never lived here, has been using prison toothbrushes and combs, leaving his DNA all over a cell instead of his spotless, untouched bedroom.
‘No, no, I don’t …’ It is this, on top of everything else, that chokes her up completely. Not even a single strand of Leo’s hair in her home.
The detectives exchange an inscrutable glance and then leave her be, promising to get back in touch. Chrissy watches them go, left with more questions than answers. Was someone other than her waiting for Leo near the prison that day?
She closes her eyes as it all rushes over her. White cars and red marker pen and the grey sky behind the grey prison gates. After a few moments she walks to the window, letting in a blast of fresh, cold air. Her gaze falls on the frosty hedge in front of her cottage and she thinks of the camera hiding inside. She ordered it yesterday, after realising the police weren’t entirely in her corner, that she might have to take matters into her own hands. And after you made the decision not to show them all of the notes, she reminds herself with a twist of guilt. Express delivery, and the camera had arrived late last night, in a conspicuously large box for such a small thing. Maybe she should’ve done it a year ago. Swallowed her fear and pride and found out who hated her enough to hand-deliver threats to her house.
She grabs her phone, opening the associated app. She didn’t hear anything overnight, but the compulsion to check is irresistible.
She scrolls through an hour or so of dark nothing, just the icy moonlit lane and the occasional bird or bat flitting across the lens. It makes her think of the wildlife camera Ethan bought her for her birthday one year. He’d said it was to capture birds and foxes in the garden of the pub, said little Leo would love it, too. But she wonders, now, whether he wanted to keep tabs on her comings and goings, and a shiver drops down her spine.
Then her breath catches and she is back in the present. There is someone on the screen: 12.23 a.m. and there’s a figure advancing up the lane. Head down, hood up, ends of a scarf flapping in the wind. Not wearing the same clothes as the person the detectives showed her, but with the same sense of being bundled up, frustratingly unrecognisable.
There is something familiar about them, though, as they get closer. Their walk, their stature. They stop right in front of her house, staring up at it. Just like in the prison CCTV, the eyes are the only distinct part of their face.
But this time, she recognises them. She looked into them less than an hour ago.
Georgie.
What the hell is she doing outside Chrissy’s cottage after midnight?
Georgie stands there as the clock in the bottom corner shows the passing of one minute, two minutes, almost three. Then she turns and walks back the way she came, her hood blown back to reveal her long dark hair.
Chrissy puts down the phone, her heart racing. Was she right, then? About the ring? It was just a thin gold ring, but there was a delicate leaf pattern etched into the metal, only noticeable if you really stared. A coincidence, she’d thought earlier, even though she couldn’t stop staring. But Georgie had acted so strangely. And she’d been outside her house in the early hours of this morning.
Could it really be the same ring Chrissy had seen, once, on Ethan’s computer screen? The night he’d called her a nosy, suspicious bitch for asking, as mildly as she could, who he was shopping for?
She closes her eyes, picturing the ring, remembering that evening. And all the times he would disappear overnight, never explaining, but furious if she wasn’t at home waiting for him when he returned. She suspected there were other women, of course. But she knew better than to ask, trained herself to stop caring.
If Georgie was one of them, what is she doing in Cromley, nearly four years after his death?
Her thoughts propel her into the kitchen, to the drawer where the note she held back from the police still lurks inside. She studies the handwriting – black pen, this one, not red – and the wording, the message: so much more pointed, personal, than all the others. So much more knowing.
Next to it is a small velvet pouch, covered in dust. She opens its tightly knotted drawstring, unfurls the locket on its silver chain. Flipping the heart open, she kisses Leo’s pudgy, perfect face, then she brings the note and the locket over to the table and studies them side by side. A threat and a promise. From the same person? About the same binding, inescapable thing? Or does somebody else have a window into her past? Somebody she wouldn’t have given a second thought to, until today?
A bang sends the question flying out of her head. She jumps up in shock and feels a gust of cold wind and then there is someone here, someone in her house, advancing towards her with a balaclava over their face and something raised in their hand. Chrissy freezes. Scissors. It’s a pair of scissors. She sees the glint of the metal, the black fingers of a glove, and a scream dies in her throat as the sharp point of the blades rushes towards her.