Kelly slammed the front door, threw her coat over the banister, and sat heavily on the couch. She stared at the Christmas tree. It was a symbol of pure joy and celebration, but in Jenna Fraser’s house, it would forever become the hallmark of despair. An overwhelming sensation of defeat assaulted her, and she wiped away tears. Jenna had been sixteen years old. It wasn’t often that Kelly Porter faced the awful realisation that nothing more could be done; she was used to seeing a case through to the end, whether it be a triumph or a disaster. The result of this enquiry was neither, and she felt simply flat. Deflated, dejected, and despondent.
People committed suicide all the time; it wasn’t a crime, but Kelly wanted this to be a crime. A sixteen-year-old with so much to look forward to driven to despair and madness was quite incomprehensible. Kelly needed the final jigsaw puzzle piece to slot in to finish the composition. She demanded a cause, a perpetrator, a guilty party; anything to take away the damning conclusion that a child could be driven to this. She was desperate to understand, in a way she couldn’t remember for a very long time. If only they’d been able to find out who’d sold Jenna the drugs, they might get a conviction. She’d even looked into indirect murder of a minor with oblique intent, but their inquiries led to one conclusion alone: Jenna had thrown herself off the cliff. In fact, she’d run off it.
Acceptance was the last thing Kelly thought she’d signed up for. Policing often required a strong stomach and time spent in the company of scum, but submission wasn’t in the job description: at no point had anyone asked her if she was willing to approach death as a docile, passive spectator. She’d never sat in an interview and agreed to surrender, or shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘Ah, well.’
But that was how she felt now.
A search of Jenna’s bedroom had yielded various empty packets containing traces of the drug that had altered her mind to the state where jumping off a cliff edge wouldn’t have seemed so bad. But that wasn’t all; they’d also found Adderall, a stimulant popular among students, and in large enough quantities to conclude that the girl was a regular user. In a shoebox they’d discovered spoons, sterile syringes – presumably stolen – and elastic straps. The puzzle pieces that Kelly so desperately wanted to find were the wrong ones. Nothing about the girl’s original profile had prepared them for the final conclusions.
Jenna’s bank account had been emptied of prize money, her school performance had dwindled to virtually remedial, her remedial training had dropped off and her behaviour had become erratic: all signs of a drug-addled brain. The girl had so much to live for, but she had nothing to keep her alive. Her developing addiction had fried her future and ended up with her impaled on a tree. Kelly wanted to kick something. What had started out as the hunt for a bewildering cause of a tragic suicide had become a predictable demise. It made her sick to her stomach. There was no call for a lengthy investigation.
The case was closed; the true cause of the girl’s obliteration was kept out of the press, at the behest of her parents, who didn’t want the shame to stain their daughter’s memory, but gossip fluttered around the Lakes with impunity.
Kelly got up and went to the kitchen. Johnny had left her a note: he’d gone off for a training run, but she should call him if she wanted. If she wanted. It didn’t matter what she wanted. She wanted Jenna Fraser to still be alive, so she could talk to her and explain that no matter what it was she no longer cared about, it was worth fighting for. But she’d spoken to drug addicts before, hundreds of them, and each time she was left in no doubt that a drug-altered mind was a mere shell. She had to let it go.
She opened the fridge and took out a beer. She opened it and took it outside onto the wooden terrace overlooking the river, grabbing a blanket on her way. The night was cold and the weather forecasters said they should expect a white Christmas. She curled up on a lounger, wrapping herself in the blanket. The water was still and the sky was clear, enabling her to gaze at a canopy of bright stars.
Johnny knew the guy who’d found Jenna. Kurt Fletcher was an experienced fell runner and he’d seen some injuries in his time; in fact, at Johnny’s suggestion, he was applying to join the mountain rescue. Kelly had visited the crime scene herself, and she’d studied the photographs for hours. She’d thought hard about who else in her team should see them. Kate Umshaw had three daughters around the same age as Jenna. She remembered a senior officer saying once that the police were just people, and it was true. Jenna Fraser’s body was something that no one should ever have to witness. But at the same time, it was their job.
In London, Kelly had seen gunshot wounds, knife wounds, beheadings and beatings. It was the fact that she was being told that Jenna had done this to herself that she couldn’t stomach. Her deep respect for Ted as a professional fought with her visceral need to seek justice. Ruling a suicide and leaving the family to throw away unopened Christmas presents wasn’t justice; it was criminal. The problem was that suicide wasn’t a crime. The Murder Investigation Manual, used by every detective in the country, said that all death was to be treated as criminal until proven otherwise. But she’d looked at it from every angle, and still couldn’t get away from the fact that Jenna’s death was self-inflicted. She knew that she’d behaved like a child towards Ted, and she also knew that they would have to have a grown-up conversation sometime soon.
She was aware of the front door opening, and craned her neck to beyond the living room, knowing it would be Johnny and smiling in relief. If anyone could understand, it was him. It wasn’t only the fact that during his time in the army he had witnessed the mangling of human bodies, whether it be from execution or war; it was more that he knew what she was thinking. It was the pessimism that accompanied a waste of life that he understood.
He came out to the terrace and kissed her.
‘Case closed today,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry.’ He sat down. He looked tired and dirty.
‘Where d’you go?’
‘Just up Fairfield.’
‘Just up Fairfield’ was actually a vertical scramble of almost nine hundred feet. Johnny had his sights on the Lakeland 100, a hundred-mile race through the fells beginning at Ullswater that took even elite runners over twenty-four hours to complete. Ninety per cent of entrants dropped out at the halfway point, gaining Lakeland 50 status instead. Kelly thought him crazy, but she knew he’d do it. She looked at his muddy legs.
‘You follow the beck?’ she asked.
He nodded. He moved over to her lounger and placed his hand on her hip.
‘I need a shower,’ he said.
They’d stopped inviting one another over to stay the night. Instead, they’d fallen into a rough pattern of seeing where the day ended up. They led similar lives, in that their rhythms were irregular, a mixture of intensity and complete quiet, and of course Johnny now had Josie to think of. Neither could have existed in jobs that brought a nine-to-five tempo to their days. Each understood the other’s absence and equally appreciated the time they had together between the chaos. As a result, they’d yet to book a proper holiday, preferring instead to hike together and come home to a fire and a bottle of red, or in summer to find a hidden pool or tarn and eat a picnic.
‘I’ve got soup and cheese in the fridge,’ Kelly said.
‘Perfect, I won’t be long.’
She could have told him what Ted had said; it would be normal for her to go into the details of his findings. Sharing her cases with Johnny had become part of unwinding at the end of a long week. Likewise, he shared his experiences of the fells with her; the ways in which people got themselves lost or harmed on the mountainside without preparation or supplies. He knew that she’d talk to him about Jenna when she was ready. She’d already told him that the girl was considered a classic suicide profile. In other words, her mental state had been proven to be such that she’d provided her own motive. In any death, the detective looked for weapons, wounds and whys. Jenna Fraser ticked all the boxes. That was why Kelly had to let it go. Her weapon was forest and crag. Her wounds were consistent with running and jumping. And her why was crippling lack of self-esteem, compounded by learning difficulties and a lack of mental health intervention, along with isolation that had started at the age of eleven.
The girl was bullied for her success.
When Kelly had suggested that she’d been chased off the cliff by a pursuer, Ted had reminded her that she’d had time to remove her bag of medals and place it by a rock, intact. And she’d got high. The symbols of her extraordinary success in life had been left intentionally as the only thing to accompany her to her death. Kelly couldn’t begin to understand the mind behind an obsessive suicide, and that was just what it was: it was carried out with such vigour that it was as if Jenna had been going for another gold.
It was true that where there was a death, there was always blame, but in this case, the perpetrator was already dead.