He had been apologized to half a dozen times in the space of two minutes. Other cultures would have been ashamed of an insufficient display of grief; here in quiet Finchley, they were ashamed to have him witness it.
“Nobody knows what to say,” Hazel whispered, pressing away her tears as she gestured him to the sofa. “It’s not like she was hit by a car, or was ill. They don’t know what you say when someone’s been—” She hesitated, but balked at the word and her sentence ended in a gargantuan sniff.
“I’m sorry,” said Strike, taking his turn. “I know this is a terrible time for you.”
The sitting room was immaculate and somehow unwelcoming, perhaps because of its chilly color scheme. A three-piece suite covered in striped silvery-gray cloth, white wallpaper with a thin gray stripe, cushions angled on their points, ornaments on the mantelpiece perfectly symmetrical. The dust-free television screen gleamed with reflected light from the window.
Sheryl’s misty form trotted past on the other side of the net curtains, wiping her eyes. Ray shuffled past the sitting-room door on his bare feet, dabbing under his glasses with the end of his toweling-robe belt, his shoulders stooped. As though she had read Strike’s mind, Hazel explained:
“Ray broke his back trying to get a family out of a boarding house that caught fire. Wall gave way and his ladder fell. Three stories.”
“Christ,” said Strike.
Hazel’s lips and hands were trembling. Strike remembered what Wardle had said: that the police had mishandled Hazel. Suspicion or rough questioning of her Ray would have seemed unforgivable cruelty to her in this state of shock, an inexcusable exacerbation of their appalling ordeal. Strike knew a lot about the brutal intrusion of officialdom into private devastation. He had been on both sides of the fence.
“Anyone want a brew?” Ray called huskily from what Strike assumed was the kitchen.
“Go to bed!” Hazel called back, clutching a sodden ball of tissues. “I can make ’em! Go to bed!”
“You sure?”
“Get to bed, I’ll wake you at three!”
Hazel wiped her whole face with a fresh tissue, as though it were a face cloth.
“He’s not one for disability pay and all that, but nobody wants to give him a proper job,” she told Strike quietly as Ray shuffled, sniffing, back past the door. “Not with his back and his age and his lungs not being the best. Cash in hand… shift work…”
Her voice trailed away, her mouth trembled, and for the first time she looked Strike directly in the eye.
“I don’t really know why I asked you to come,” she confessed. “It’s all confused in my head. They said she wrote to you but you never wrote back and then you got sent her—her—”
“It must have been an appalling shock to you,” said Strike, fully aware that anything he could say would understate the case.
“It’s been—” she said feverishly “—terrible. Terrible. We didn’t know anything, anything at all. We thought she was on a college placement. When the police came to the door—she said she was going away with college and I believed her, some residential placement at a school. It sounded right—I never thought—but she was such a liar. She lied all the time. Three years she’s been living with me and I still haven’t—I mean, I couldn’t get her to stop.”
“What did she tell lies about?” asked Strike.
“Anything,” said Hazel, with a slightly wild gesture. “If it was Tuesday she’d say it was Wednesday. Sometimes there was no point to it at all. I don’t know why. I don’t know.”
“Why was she living with you?” Strike asked.
“She’s my—she was my half-sister. Same mum. We lost Dad when I was twenty. Mum married a guy from work and had Kelsey. There were twenty-four years between us—I’d left home—I was more like an auntie to her than a sister. Then Mum and Malcolm had a car crash out in Spain three years ago. Drunk driver. Malcolm died outright, Mum was in a coma for four days and then she passed, too. There isn’t any other family, so I took Kelsey in.”
The extreme tidiness of their surroundings, the cushions on their points, surfaces clear and highly polished, made Strike wonder how a teenager had fitted in here.
“Me and Kelsey didn’t get on,” said Hazel, again seeming to read Strike’s thoughts. Tears flowed once more as she pointed upstairs, where Ray had gone to bed. “He was much more patient with all her moodiness and her sulks. He’s got a grown-up son who’s working abroad. He’s better with kids than me. Then the police come jack-booting in here,” she said on a sudden rush of fury, “and tell us she’s been—they start questioning Ray like he’d—like he’d ever, in a million years—I said to him, it’s like a nightmare. You see people on the news, don’t you, appealing for kids to come home—people put on trial for things they never did—you never think… you never think… but we never even knew she was missing. We’d have looked. We never knew. The police asking Ray questions—where he was and I don’t know what—”
“They’ve told me he didn’t have anything to do with it,” Strike said.
“Yeah, they believe that now,” said Hazel through angry tears, “after three men told them he was with them every minute of the stag weekend and showed them the bloody photos to prove it…”
She would never think it reasonable that the man who had been living with Kelsey should be questioned about her death. Strike, who had heard the testimony of Brittany Brockbank and Rhona Laing and many others like them, knew that most women’s rapists and killers were not strangers in masks who reached out of the dark space under the stairs. They were the father, the husband, the mother’s or the sister’s boyfriend…
Hazel wiped the tears away as fast as they fell onto her round cheeks, then suddenly asked:
“What did you do with her silly letter anyway?”
“My assistant put it in the drawer where we keep unusual correspondence,” said Strike.
“The police said you never wrote back to her. They say they was forged, the letters they found.”
“That’s right,” said Strike.
“So whoever done it must’ve known she was interested in you.”
“Yes,” said Strike.
Hazel blew her nose vigorously, then asked:
“D’you want a cuppa, then?”
He accepted only because he thought she wanted a chance to pull herself together. Once she had left the room he looked around openly. The only photograph stood on a small nest of tables in the corner beside him. It showed a beaming woman in her sixties wearing a straw hat. This, he assumed, was Hazel and Kelsey’s mother. A slightly darker stripe on the surface of the table beside the picture suggested that another had stood beside it, preventing the sun bleaching that small strip on the cheap wood. Strike guessed that this had been the school photograph of Kelsey, the picture that all the papers had printed.
Hazel returned carrying a tray bearing mugs of tea and a plate of biscuits. After she had carefully positioned his tea on a coaster beside her mother’s photograph, Strike said:
“I hear Kelsey had a boyfriend.”
“Rubbish,” retorted Hazel, dropping back into her armchair. “More porkies.”
“What makes you—?”
“She said his name was Niall. Niall. Honestly.”
Her eyes leaked more tears. Strike was at a loss to understand why Kelsey’s boyfriend might not have been called Niall and his incomprehension showed.
“One Direction,” she said over the top of her tissue.
“Sorry,” said Strike, completely at sea. “I don’t—”
“The band. They’re a band that came third on The X Factor. She’s obsessed—she was obsessed—and Niall was her favorite. So when she says she’s met a boy called Niall and he’s eighteen and he’s got a motorbike, I mean, what were we supposed to think?”
“Ah. I see.”
“She said she met him at the counselor’s. She’s been seeing a counselor, see. Claimed she met Niall in the waiting room, that he was there because his mum a
nd dad died, like hers. We never saw hide nor hair of him. I said to Ray, ‘She’s at it again, she’s fibbing,’ and Ray said to me, ‘Let it go, it keeps her happy,’ but I didn’t like her lying,” said Hazel with a fanatic glare. “She lied all the time, came home with a plaster on her wrist, said it was a cut and it turned out to be a One Direction tattoo. Look at her saying she was going away on a college placement, look at that… she kept lying and lying and look where it got her!”
With an enormous, visible effort she controlled a fresh eruption of tears, holding her trembling lips together and pressing the tissues hard across her eyes. Taking a deep breath, she said:
“Ray’s got a theory. He wanted to tell the police, but they didn’t care, they were more interested in where he’d been when she was—but Ray’s got a friend called Ritchie who puts a bit of gardening his way, see, and Kelsey met Ritchie—”
The theory was rolled out with a huge amount of extraneous detail and repetition. Strike, who was well used to the rambling style of unpracticed witnesses, listened attentively and politely.
A photograph was produced out of a dresser drawer, which did double duty in proving to Strike that Ray had been with three friends on a stag weekend in Shoreham-by-Sea when Kelsey was killed, and also revealed young Ritchie’s injuries. Ritchie and Ray sat on the shingle beside a patch of sea holly, grinning, holding beers and squinting in the sunlight. Sweat glistened on Ray’s bald pate and illuminated young Ritchie’s swollen face, his stitches and bruising. His leg was in a surgical boot.
“—and, see, Ritchie came round here right after he’d had his smash and Ray thinks it put the idea in her head. He thinks she was planning to do something to her leg and then pretend she’d had a traffic accident.”
“Ritchie couldn’t be the boyfriend, could he?” asked Strike.
“Ritchie! He’s a bit simple. He’d have told us. Anyway, she barely knew him. It was all a fantasy. I think Ray’s right. She was planning to do something to her leg again and pretend she’d come off some boy’s bike.”
It would have been an excellent theory, thought Strike, if Kelsey had been lying in hospital, pretending to have suffered a motorbike accident and refusing to give more details under the pretense of protecting a fictitious boyfriend. He did Ray the credit of agreeing that this was exactly the kind of plan a sixteen-year-old might have come up with, mingling grandiosity and short-sightedness in dangerous measure. However, the point was moot. Whether or not Kelsey had once planned a fake motorbike crash, the evidence showed that she had abandoned the plan in preference for asking Strike for instructions on leg removal.
On the other hand, this was the first time that anyone had drawn any connection between Kelsey and a motorcyclist, and Strike was interested in Hazel’s absolute conviction that any boyfriend must be fictional.
“Well, there was hardly any boys on her childcare course,” said Hazel, “and where else was she going to meet him? Niall. She’d never had a boyfriend at school or anything. She went to the counselor and sometimes she went to the church up the road, they’ve a youth group, but there’s no Niall-with-a-motorbike there,” said Hazel. “The police checked, asked her friends if they knew anything. Darrell who runs the group, he was that upset. Ray saw him this morning on his way home. Says Darrell burst into tears when he saw him from across the road.”
Strike wanted to take notes, but knew it would change the atmosphere of confidence he was trying to nurture.
“Who’s Darrell?”
“He didn’t have anything to do with it. Youth worker at the church. He’s from Bradford,” said Hazel obscurely, “and Ray’s sure he’s gay.”
“Did she talk about her—” Strike hesitated, unsure what to call it. “Her problem with her leg at home?”
“Not to me,” said Hazel flatly. “I wouldn’t have it, I didn’t want to hear it, I hated it. She told me when she was fourteen and I told her exactly what I thought. Attention-seeking, that’s all it was.”
“There was old scarring on her leg. How did that—?”
“She did it right after Mum died. Like I didn’t have enough to worry about. She tied wire round it, tried to cut off the circulation.”
Her expression revealed a mixture, it seemed to Strike, of revulsion and anger.
“She was in the car when Mum and Malcolm died, in the back. I had to get a counselor and all that for her. He thought it was a cry for help or something, what she did to her leg. Grief. Survivors’ guilt, I can’t remember. She said not, though, said she’d wanted the leg gone for a while… I don’t know,” said Hazel, shaking her head vigorously.
“Did she talk to anyone else about it? Ray?”
“A bit, yeah. I mean, he knew what she was like. When we first got together, when he moved in, she told him some real whoppers—her dad being a spy, that was one of them, and that was why their car had crashed, and I don’t know what else. So he knew what she was like, but he didn’t get angry with her. He just used to change the subject, chat to her about school and that…”
She had turned an unattractive dark red.
“I’ll tell you what she wanted,” she burst out. “To be in a wheelchair—pushed around like a baby and to be pampered and the center of attention. That’s what it was all about. I found a diary, must have been a year or so ago. The things she’d written, what she liked to imagine, what she fantasized about. Ridiculous!”
“Such as?” asked Strike.
“Such as having her leg cut off and being in a wheelchair and being pushed to the edge of the stage and watching One Direction and having them come and make a big fuss of her afterwards because she was disabled,” said Hazel on a single breath. “Imagine that. It’s disgusting. There are people who are really disabled and they never wanted it. I’m a nurse. I know. I see them. Well,” she said, with a glance at Strike’s lower legs, “you don’t need telling.
“You didn’t, did you?” she asked suddenly, point blank. “You didn’t—you didn’t cut—do it—yourself?”
Was that why she had wanted to see him, Strike wondered. In some confused, subconscious manner, trying to find her moorings in the sea on which she was suddenly adrift, had she wanted to prove a point—even though her sister was gone and beyond understanding—that people didn’t do that, not in the real world where cushions stood neatly on points and disability came only by mischance, through crumbling walls or roadside explosives?
“No,” he said. “I was blown up.”
“There you are, you see!” she said, tears erupting again, savagely triumphant. “I could have told her that—I could have told her if she’d only… if she’d asked me… but what she claimed,” said Hazel, gulping, “was that her leg felt like it shouldn’t be there. Like it was wrong to have it and it needed to come off—like a tumor or something. I wouldn’t listen. It was all nonsense. Ray says he tried to talk sense into her. He told her she didn’t know what she was asking for, that she wouldn’t want to be in hospital like he was after he broke his back, laid up for months in plaster, skin sores and infections and all the rest of it. He didn’t get angry with her, though. He’d say to her, come and help me in the garden or something, distract her.
“The police told us she was talking to people online who were like her. We had no idea. I mean, she was sixteen, you can’t go looking on their laptops, can you? Not that I’d know what to look for.”
“Did she ever mention me to you?” Strike asked.
“The police asked that. No. I can’t remember her ever talking about you and nor can Ray. I mean, no offense, but—I remember the Lula Landry trial, but I wouldn’t have remembered your name from that, or recognized you. If she’d brought you up I’d remember. It’s a funny name—no offense.”
“What about friends? Did she go out much?”
“She hardly had any friends. She wasn’t the popular sort. She lied to all the kids at school too, and nobody likes that, do they? They bullied her for it. Thought she was strange. She hardly ever went out. When she was meeting t
his supposed Niall, I don’t know.”
Her anger did not surprise Strike. Kelsey had been an unplanned addition to her spotless household. Now, for the rest of her life, Hazel would carry guilt and grief, horror and regret, not least that her sister’s life had been ended before she could grow out of the peculiarities that had helped estrange them.
“Would it be all right if I used your bathroom?” Strike asked.
Dabbing her eyes, she nodded.
“Straight ahead, top of the stairs.”
Strike emptied his bladder while reading a framed citation for “brave and meritorious conduct,” awarded to firefighter Ray Williams, which was hanging over the cistern. He strongly suspected that Hazel had hung that there, not Ray. Otherwise the bathroom displayed little of interest. The same meticulous attention to cleanliness and neatness displayed in the sitting room extended all the way to the inside of the medicine cabinet, where Strike learned that Hazel was still menstruating, that they bulk-bought toothpaste and that one or both of the couple had hemorrhoids.
He left the bathroom as quietly as he could. Faintly, from behind a closed door, came a soft rumbling indicating that Ray was asleep. Strike took two decisive steps to the right and found himself in Kelsey’s box room.
Everything matched, covered in the same shade of lilac: walls, duvet, lampshade and curtains. Strike thought he might have guessed that order had been forcibly imposed on chaos in here, even had he not seen the rest of the house.
A large cork noticeboard ensured that there would be no unsightly pin marks on the walls. Kelsey had plastered the cork with pictures of five pretty young boys whom Strike assumed were One Direction. Their heads and legs protruded outside the frame of the board. There was a particular recurrence of a blond boy. Other than the pictures of One Direction, she had cut out puppies, mostly shih-tzus, random words and acronyms: OCCUPY, FOMO and AMAZEBALLS, and many recurrences of the name NIALL, often stuck onto hearts. The slapdash, random collage told of an attitude completely at odds with the precision with which the duvet had been laid on the bed and the exactly square position of the lilac rug.