I think about Evie Cormac. More of the details have come back to me. She was discovered behind a false wall at the back of a walk-in wardrobe in an upstairs bedroom. The house, in north London, had been rented by a low-level crim called Terry Boland. It was his body police had found in the same bedroom six weeks earlier. He was strapped to a chair with belts around his neck and forehead. The killer or killers had used an eyedropper to put acid into Boland’s ears, slowly burning through his eardrums, destroying his cochlea and auditory nerves. Once he was deaf, they heated a metal poker with a blowtorch and used it to burn through his eyelids and his corneas, until his pupils boiled in their sockets. I remember this because the tabloids seemed to revel in every prurient detail.
The murder was still under investigation when Angel Face emerged from her hiding place. Nurses cleaned off the muck and washed her hair, discovering a pale, pixie-faced thing with freckles and dirty-brown eyes, a child too small to hold her own history.
In the days that followed, she dominated the news cycle. The entire nation seemed to adopt her, discussing her fate over dinner tables, in hotel bars, across backyard fences and in supermarket queues. There were public appeals, newspaper rewards and offers to adopt her.
I know what it’s like to be at the centre of a media storm. I was once the survivor – the lost little boy, whose parents and sisters were murdered. I have been there, done that, seen the movie, and stayed for the closing credits. Is that another reason Guthrie turned to me?
Speeding up over the last mile, I check my watch as I reach the front gate, holding my wrist steady because I’m breathing so hard. I’m forty seconds outside my best time. I’m happy with that.
Lifting the latch on the gate, I walk up the front path to a tall narrow house. My ancestral home. It once belonged to my grandparents who retired some years ago to the south coast, preferring a modest bungalow in Weymouth to a six-bedroom, Grade II listed house that looks like it should be haunted, or at least have a mad woman in the attic. It was crumbling then, it’s falling down now – a masterpiece of urban decay.
The ground floor has two large bay windows and a handsome carved doorway with fluted half columns and leadlight glass panels that throw red and green patterns onto the hallway rug when the sun is angled in the right direction. To one side, a garage is almost completely overwhelmed by ivy; and to the rear, beyond a stone wall, an uncut meadow, guarded by ancient trees, makes up a quiet corner of Wollaton Park.
As a child I knew every cubbyhole, nook and odd corner of this house. I explored them with my brother and sisters. We played hide-and-seek or other games that involved make-believe guns, or swords, or dungeons, or dragons. We practised jumping from one piece of furniture to the next, never touching the ground, which was molten lava, or covered in spiders. Now the house is mine. My inheritance. My folly. My last link to the past.
Periodically property developers or estate agents knock on the door or push their business cards through the mail-flap, trying to convince me to sell. I once made the mistake of letting one inside. He began talking about morning rooms and secondary kitchens and conservatories, offering quotes and discounted terms.
‘You’re sitting on a goldmine,’ he said. ‘But we have to act quickly, while the market is hot.’
‘Before this place falls down,’ he should have said.
I reach under a pot for the spare key. As I straighten, I notice an unmarked police car is parked opposite the house. I know it’s a police car because two-way radio antennas are sticking from the roof and a square-headed figure is behind the wheel.
Unlocking the door, I walk to the kitchen, a big, high-ceilinged room with a scrubbed wooden table and mismatched wooden chairs. I get a glass of water from a spitting tap.
The doorbell rings. Water spills down my chin. I want to ignore both things, but that’s not going to happen.
The shadow behind the stained glass is a detective in a misshapen suit, or maybe it’s his body. Medium height, with short arms and spiked hair.
‘I’m sorry to bother you. I tried to call ahead, but nobody had your phone number.’
‘I don’t have one.’
‘What sort of person doesn’t have a phone?’
‘One with a pager.’
He sneaks a glance at me as though I’m mentally challenged.
I turn and walk down the hallway. He follows, introducing himself.
‘I’m Detective Sergeant Alan Edgar. Lenny sent me to collect you.’
‘You call her Lenny?’
He looks at me sheepishly. ‘Chief Inspector Parvel.’
I drink another glass of water. The silence plays on his nerves.
‘We’ve found the body of a teenage girl who went missing last night.’
‘Where?’
‘In Clifton . . . beside a footpath.’
I rinse the glass and put it in the drainer.
‘I need a shower.’
‘I’ll be in the car,’ he says, glancing at the ceiling, as though the house might collapse at any moment.
In the upstairs bathroom, I strip down and turn on the tap. The pipes clank and shudder as I wait for the water to arrive, spitting and hawking from the showerhead. Some days it remains cold as though testing me, or scalding hot as though punishing me, but whenever I call a plumber he recommends ripping out the entire heating system and installing a new one, something I can’t afford.
Hot water arrives. I’m clean for another day.
Dressed in old jeans, a flannelette shirt and an olive-green army coat, I fill the pockets with a chapstick, keys, chewing gum and my money-clip. I have no pets to worry about, no plants to water, no other appointments to keep.
DS Edgar opens the car door for me. I wonder if his mates call him ‘Poe’. There are worse nicknames. I’ve had some of them. At school I was called ‘Virus’ because of the rhyme.
‘You’re a psychologist,’ Edgar says. Not a question. ‘You treated a mate of mine in the SWAT team. You said he had PTSD and recommended he be medically retired. Pissed him right off.’
‘I can’t talk about my clinical cases.’
‘Right. Sure. You were probably right.’
‘Probably’ means he thinks I got it wrong.
I often get this reaction from police officers when they discover the work I do. I’m the specialist they see after they’ve been attacked, or shot at, or have discharged a firearm, or witnessed a tragedy. I judge their mental state. I look for signs of trauma. I prevent suicides. The thin blue line can be a mentally fragile one.
Edgar has grown uncomfortable with the silence.
‘How do you know the guv?’ he asks.
‘We go way back.’
‘Did you meet her on the job?’
‘When I was a child.’
He doesn’t react, but I recognise what he’s doing. He’s digging for details. He knows what happened to my family. I’m the boy who came home from football practice and found my father dead in the sitting room and my mother on the kitchen floor and my twin sisters hacked to death in the bedroom they shared upstairs. Did I really discover my older brother sitting on the sofa, watching TV, resting his feet on my father’s body?
I don’t give him the opportunity. ‘What do you know about the victim?’
‘Jodie Sheehan. Aged fifteen. She was last seen at a fireworks display at the Clifton Playing Fields. Her parents reported her missing this morning. Her body was found just after midday in a wooded area next to Silverdale Walk.’