12

Drury hasn’t said a word since he emerged from the chief constable’s office. With his bloodless fists clenched and a manic gleam in his eyes, he strides towards the lift, slapping his palm against the button, trying to bruise the wall.

His arguments are stilling ringing in my ears. Delivered at decibels, they had opened doors along the corridor and raised eyebrows. He demanded a bigger task force. More detectives. Greater resources. What he didn’t want was a “bloody shrink” spouting cliches and telling him the bleeding obvious.

Charlie pretended not to listen. Turning up her iPod, she swung her legs beneath her chair and hummed to herself. Now we’re half-running down the corridor, trying to catch up to Drury who is holding open the lift doors like he’s Moses parting the Red Sea.

The police car drops us at the hotel where I rebook a room. Charlie has fallen silent, picking at a hangnail, a performance of compressed sullenness. I try to kiss her cheek. She turns her face away.

“I won’t be long.”

“What about London?”

“Maybe tomorrow.”

“I can go by myself.”

“Your mother wouldn’t like that.”

Drury is waiting downstairs, the engine running.

The lift doors slide closed. I stare at my reflection in the polished steel wondering how I finished up back here-involved in another investigation. Whatever skill I have, whatever ability to understand human behavior and motives, it has turned into a curse.

People teem with their own information. It leaks from their pores, spouts from their mouths, reveals itself in every mannerism, tic and twitch. Whether they are shy, materialistic, body conscious, vain, fluent in cliche, brimming with aphorisms and tabloid axioms, they reveal themselves in thousands of different ways.

And almost unconsciously I pick up these signals, reading their body language and registering the cues. I used to want to know why things happened. Why would a couple murder young women and bury them in their basement? Why does a teenage boy spray a schoolyard with bullets? Why would a schoolgirl give birth to a baby in a toilet block and dump the newborn in a rubbish bin? Not anymore. I don’t want to be able to see inside people’s heads. It’s like knowing too much. It’s like living too long or witnessing too many events; experiencing things to the point of fatigue.

People are complicated, cruel, brave, damaged and prone to outrageous acts of brutality and kindness. I know the causes. I know the effects. I have been there and back again and bought the souvenirs. It’s not that I don’t care anymore. I’ve done my bit. Someone else should shoulder the burden.

DS Casey opens the rear door for me. Drury is riding up front. We’re not going to the police station. Instead, we drive to Abingdon, the tires crunching on gritted tarmac and splashing through puddles of slush. Few cars. Fewer people.

Twenty minutes pass. We pull up outside a red brick and tile bungalow with pebble dash on the facade. Drury stares through the windscreen and finally speaks.

“Someone removed her clitoral hood and clitoris. That’s a religious thing, right? Some Muslim communities do it to young girls. Sew them up…”

“It wasn’t religious.”

“What sort of sick-”

“It was punishment. Payback.”

“Someone hated this girl?”

“Or what she represented.”

“She was eighteen-what did she represent?”

“Women, youthfulness, beauty, sex…”

“It’s a sex crime?”

“Yes.”

He blows air from his cheeks and shakes his head.

“I’m not happy about this, Professor, but I don’t have a choice. Next time you have a theory or uncover something-you tell me first, understand?”

“Yes.”

“I want a full psychological profile. I want to know where Natasha has been and why she came back. Did she run away or was she abducted? Where was she held? Why was she mutilated?”

“I’m a psychologist, not a psychic.”

“And you’re not a detective-remember that.”

The DCI steps out of the car and signals me to follow. He rings the doorbell. We wait. I can hear a TV playing. Footsteps. The door opens. A young man blinks at us. There are tattoos on his forearms and neck. He’s wearing a T-shirt that says, POKER — YOU KNOW SHE LIKES IT, and he’s holding something out of sight, behind the edge of the door.

Drury flashes his badge. “Hello, Hayden, is your mother home?”

“She’s getting ready for work.”

“This won’t take long.”

For a moment they stare at each other before Hayden turns his head and yells up the stairs.

“Mum. Coppers.”

A loud noise, something dropped. An exclamation. Then a tentative answer: “Won’t be a minute.”

Hayden slips whatever he’s holding into the waistband of his jeans and covers it with his T-shirt. A burst of canned laughter escapes from a TV. He opens the door, inviting us in.

A skinny white girl is sitting on the sofa looking drugged in the watery half-light. She’s sitting in an armchair, smoking, her arm bent and her head tilted sideways to let the smoke escape from her lips. Hayden’s girlfriend. She looks about twenty-seven but could be seventeen.

Hayden tells her to go home. She blows a fringe from her eyes and ignores him.

“I said piss off!”

This time she grabs her coat and sneers at him, slamming the door on her way out.

Hayden takes her seat in the armchair and picks up a TV magazine, turning the pages, not reading.

The sitting room is cluttered and claustrophobic, smelling of old shoes and cigarettes. There are Christmas cards on the mantelpiece next to a sad-looking Christmas tree. Fake green branches are draped in strips of tinsel and weighed down by cheap ornaments. The crowning angel is too heavy, bending the uppermost branch like a catapult.

Quiet footsteps on the stairs signal Alice McBain’s arrival. She’s wearing dark trousers, a green-hemmed blouse and a cardigan. A nametag with a supermarket logo is pinned to the pocket. Late-forties, maybe younger, she’s a small woman with short straight hair and the slightly dazed, disbelieving air of a refugee or some other figure beaten down by life without ever comprehending why.

“We’re here to talk about Natasha,” Drury says.

Alice raises a hand to her mouth. Uncertainty shimmers in her eyes; not fear or hope, but something that swings wildly between the two extremes. Missing children create a silence around themselves, a vacuum that is filled with every shade of hope and despair.

Drury has taken a seat opposite Alice, their knees almost touching. She tries to speak, but can’t summon a sound. This is the moment when all that sadness and dreadful wondering come to a climax.

“Late last night I received a phone call from the senior pathologist at the mortuary at John Radcliffe Hospital. Dental records have confirmed that the body recovered from Radley Lakes four days ago was your daughter.”

Mrs. McBain looks at him and then at me. “But on the radio they said it was a woman.”

“It was definitely Natasha. I am very sorry for your loss.”

Alice shakes her head. Her eyes show no emotion, no focus. She understands the news, but doesn’t feel it yet.

“Natasha is dead, Mum,” says Hayden.

There is a groan deep in her chest. She puts one fist and then a second over her mouth, pressing them to her lips. She looks at me, wanting confirmation, fearing everything beyond this moment.

Almost as quickly her grief seems to evaporate. She drops her hands and places them in her lap. She’s not angry with Drury. She’s not hurling insults or making accusations or laying blame. Humble and undemanding, she lowers her gaze to the faded carpet.

“Was she raped?” Hayden asks.

“I can’t discuss the nature of her injuries,” says Drury.

“It’s been three years-where has she been?”

“We don’t know.”

Drury turns to Alice.

“I have to ask you some questions. I know it’s difficult. Had you heard anything from Natasha?”

She shakes her head.

“No phone calls? Letters? Emails?”

“No.”

“Did anyone ever call and hang up?”

“No.”

“I need to talk to your husband, Mrs. McBain.”

“He’s not my husband anymore.”

“I still need to talk to him.”

Hayden interrupts. “I’ll give you his address.”

Alice sniffles and twists the sleeve of her cardigan. “How did my baby die?”

“She drowned in a lake. She was caught out in the blizzard.”

“What was she doing out there?”

“We think she may have been trying to get home. Radley Lakes aren’t far from the farmhouse.”

A faint vibration comes off Alice, as though something is spinning inside her at a terrible soundless speed.

“She was coming home?”

“That’s just one theory.” Drury acknowledges me and goes back to Alice. “Did Natasha know a man called Augie Shaw?”

Hayden stiffens. “Is that the bastard who took her?”

“Please just answer the question.”

Hayden gets to his feet, pulling forward and back like a dog jerking against a leash.

“What did he do to her?”

“I know you’re angry, son. That’s understandable in the circumstances, but you have to leave this to us.”

Hayden isn’t listening. “I saw him on the news. He killed them people in our old house. Did he take our Tash? What did he do to her?”

Drury looks at Alice, hoping she might intervene, but she seems to be wrestling with the news, fighting her emotions.

The DCI tries again. “Did Natasha know William and Patricia Heyman?”

Alice shakes her head.

“What about their daughter, Flora?”

“I don’t know.”

Hayden picks up a cushion from the floor and holds it against his chest as he paces. Alice stares at the muted TV as though lip-reading.

She whispers. “You read those stories, don’t you, of people who never give up hope. Who never stop believing that their children are coming home…” She takes a deep breath. “I stopped believing. I gave up on Tash. I should have had more faith.”

“There’s nothing you could have done,” says Drury.

“Do you know how often I just sat holding the phone, willing it to ring? I did it for weeks, months, nearly a year. Until I finally convinced myself that she was dead. I stopped praying. I stopped thinking she was alive. In the darkest part of the darkest night, I abandoned my little girl… and all the time she was alive. She was trying to get home.”

A sob breaks inside her chest. “I want to see her.”

“I don’t think that’s-”

“I want to see my Natasha.”

“You have to understand-she’s been away a long time-she doesn’t look like she once did.”

“I don’t care. She’s my daughter.”

Drury glances at me, wanting me to dissuade Alice, but I’ve seen grief in many forms and this mother knows her mind. It’s not that Alice doesn’t believe Drury or that she’s clinging to some irrational hope that Tash might still be alive. She wants to say sorry. She wants to say goodbye.

The DCI relents. “In the meantime, I’m going to assign a family liaison officer. She’ll keep you informed of developments. For the time being we won’t be releasing any information to the media. We’d prefer, for the sake of the investigation, that nobody knows it was Natasha in the lake. We have to re-interview witnesses and check alibis. I’m sure you understand.”

“For how long?” Hayden asks, treating it like an imposition.

Drury stands to leave. “Just a few days.”

“Before we go,” I interrupt. “I have a few questions for Mrs. McBain.”

Alice blinks at me, as though taken by surprise.

“I wanted to ask you about Natasha.”

“What about her?”

“What was she like? I’ve seen the photographs and read the statements but I want to hear it from you… in your own words.”

Hayden looks at me incredulously. “What difference does it make now? She’s dead!”

Ignoring him, I focus on Alice. “I’m a psychologist. I’m trying to understand what happened. By knowing more about Natasha, I can learn things about the man who took her.”

“You think she’s to blame for this?”

“No.”

Hayden wants to protest but Alice touches his forearm with her fingertips. He swallows his anger, chewing on the inside of his cheek. Meanwhile, Alice begins talking softly, describing Natasha. Instead of physical details, she mentions moments, relationships, loves. Natasha had a dog. She got him as a puppy on her twelfth birthday, a Jack Russell. She called him Basher. They used to go everywhere together.

“Tash even smuggled him to school one day.” Alice smiles. “She could be a terror, but she was a good student, our Tash. Clever. Easily bored. They said she was expelled, but the school would have taken her back. Mrs. Jacobson told me so.”

“How did she get on with her father?”

“They had their moments.”

“Moments?”

Alice falters. “You try to set boundaries, you know. Kids try to cross them. Tash wanted to grow up too quick. Couldn’t wait for anything.”

“Did she have boyfriends?”

“She was popular.”

“Did she ever take drugs?”

Her eyes narrow and Hayden answers for her.

“What the fuck does that matter? You can’t come in here and say shit like that. She’s dead! What sort of moron-”

“Mind your language,” says Alice. “There’s no need for swearing. The man is just trying to do his job.”

Hayden falls silent. Seething.

A car pulls up outside the house. I can hear the doof doof bass beat from its sound system, cranked up and shaking the air. Moments later the doorbell rings. There are male voices. Laughter. The letterbox flap opens.

“Hey, Hayden, we know you’re in there.”

“Not now, I’m busy.”

“This is business.”

Hayden almost trips over the coffee table trying to reach the door. Cursing, he tells them to leave; mentions the police; more expletives.

Alice stands slowly and looks at Drury. “I have to go to work now,” she says, almost moving from memory.

She extends her hand. “I want to thank you. A lot of people made promises to us when my Tash went missing. Not many of those promises were kept. I want to thank you for bringing her home.”

In the entrance hall, Drury pulls on his overcoat and stumbles slightly, bracing himself against the wall. His eyes are shining. Tilting his head back, he stares at the ceiling.

“That woman just thanked me for finding her daughter dead.”

“I know.”

“I hate this job.”

As we leave the house, the car is still parked outside, a Vauxhall Cavalier, music blaring, tinted windows at half-mast. Two white youths are leaning on the open doors, hands deep in their pockets, hoodies like cowls.

Drury wanders across the muddy grass. He knows their names. They laugh too loudly at nothing at all, grinning at each other. The balance of power is evident. The big one is in his mid-twenties, older by five years, with a shaved head. His mate is skinny with fairer skin and a nervous twitch that sends his eyes sideways as though he’s constantly looking for reassurance.

Drury returns and slips behind the wheel.

“Who are they?” I ask.

“The local wildlife,” he says. “The tall one is Toby Kroger. He’s a big man on the Blackbird Leys estate, a drug dealer and a pimp. We picked him up two years ago for living off immoral earnings, but the two girls he put on the game refused to give evidence against him.

“The skinny one is Craig Gould. He’s a musician with more talent than he deserves. Plays the saxophone. We arrested him a year ago with a vial of Rohypnol in his pocket. He likes his girlfriends to be comatose.”

Drury starts the engine and puts the car into gear. “I could arrest guys like that every day of the week, but it wouldn’t make any difference. They’re floaters.”

“Floaters?”

“Turds that don’t flush.”

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