Post Mortem (6 page)

The cold water had seeped into Lizzie's running shoes. The tide had come in without her noticing its advance. There was a strong smell of brine and seaweed. The wind was bitter and the chill of the sea had penetrated into her bones. Her hands were frozen. She looked away from the water towards the seafront. Lights were on in the windows, and car headlights fanned across the beach. She imagined the town's cafés, its B&Bs crammed with bored asylum-seekers staring out of dirty windows at the dark ocean.

She took her phone out of her jacket and held it in her palm. It was a temptation. She wasn't exactly sure how phones were used to trace people – that was CID stuff, not the province of uniform. Could the police locate her, she wondered, just because the phone was switched on, or did she need to make a call? And how precise would any such location be? Would it illuminate her on some electronic map, a pinprick of light here on this lonely beach? She knew it couldn't possibly be like in the movies, where the cops turned up within minutes of a mobile phone being switched on anywhere in the world. She could only guess at the reality of trying to get local police to respond quickly to a phone trace in St Leonards.

The phone lay cold and dark in her hand. She longed to switch it on. It was as though its lit screen would offer her some primal warmth, some link to others. The retained voicemails, the texts, even the lists of contacts would place her somewhere in a world that had a matrix of connections. Standing here by the sea, she imagined herself slipping off the map, like Voyager travelling out into deep, deep space.

18 APRIL

11

C
ollins turned the car into the concrete descent to the underground car park of Victoria House, swiping her warrant card at the gate and entering her PIN. The building was separate from the other police buildings, tucked away, anonymous. It was not a port of call for the public, not an address for anyone really except the people who worked there. She couldn't think of anyone, not one single interest group, who liked the cops who investigated cops.

Her alarm had gone off at 6 a.m. Outside her window it had still been dark and it had been desperately hard to be prodded from sleep by the alarm's insistent beeping. She had grabbed a short, hot shower. When she got out, the milk for her coffee had boiled over the stovetop. There were some advantages to living alone: she had made an ineffective stab at wiping it up and then given up. On the way in she had picked up what had turned out to be probably the most expensive coffee and muffin in the Western world – she'd stopped on a red route and been photographed by a mobile CCTV car.

A strong smell of buttered toast greeted her as she made her way down the corridor to her office. The door was propped open with a spoon in the hinge. The window to the office was open too, and Steve was standing on the low roof smoking. A crow hopped around warily within about a foot of him. More than a year ago Collins had named the bird Sid and begun to tame it – or perhaps, she acknowledged, it was the bird who had tamed her. Steve sometimes threw things at
it: the roof was littered with fag packets and old biros, all of which had once been missiles. At other times she had seen him toss the bird the crust of a sandwich. He seemed to treat Sid like a low-level informant, despising and befriending him in equal measure.

Collins threw her car keys on the desk and the crow came hopping towards the window, its head on one side. She shouted over to Steve.

‘My spoon in the door, is it?'

‘No comment.'

‘What time did you get home?'

‘Not too bad. About midnight. I've been in for an hour. I've bashed out a briefing document on where we are with Ms Griffiths.'

‘Thanks. Have I got time for a cigarette before I go up?'

‘Sorry. He's already been down asking where you are. We'll mainline some decent coffee and fags when you get back. You look knackered.'

Collins smiled. ‘Thanks for that. Tell it like it is, Steve, that's always the best policy. I'll be taking you up on the coffee and fags provided I'm not a hospital admission once he's finished with me.'

Baillie had moved into an expansive office on the sixth floor. His suit jacket was on a wooden hanger on a coat stand. He wore a beautifully pressed white shirt with an off-white and navy striped silk tie. He also wore, Collins noticed, very good brogues.

The DCI had only recently taken up post but the office, with its grand view of the Thames, already bore his imprint. Waiting while he read Steve's briefing document, Collins glanced at the shelf behind his desk, where a framed photograph of a small blond boy, aged about eight, had been given pride of place. The boy looked at the viewer with a solemn expression and held, in small, tense hands, a very big fish. We are normal people, the photograph seemed to
announce: we share your concerns. How could we be anything other than normal, for
here is my son with a big fish
. On the desk itself was a button with the instruction to press in case of panic. DCI Baillie, Collins already suspected, was not the type to panic: the button must be intended for others.

Baillie put the briefing document down and looked up. ‘So, Sarah, no phone use, no financial, no vehicle.'

‘That's right, sir. She withdrew three hundred pounds from a cashpoint on Kilsby High Street at 19:32 hours. Nothing since.'

‘What about the phone?'

‘We've done urgent checks. Nothing. It must be switched off. She may even have got rid of it.'

‘She's on a contract?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘What about family? Friends?'

‘Mum hasn't heard from her. We haven't had time to develop her lifestyle yet. We're working on it.'

‘And she left her car behind?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘You've started checking the CCTV?'

‘Jez is down there with Alice. They only opened at eight.'

‘OK. So she's not using her vehicle or her phone. She's not with any family that we know of.' He paused and looked at Collins. ‘That's correct?'

‘Afraid so, yes, sir.'

Baillie went and stood by his window, gazing out towards the Thames. Collins could see, beyond him, the opaque grey river, sinuous and cold.

‘Sir, I wondered about publicity . . . Perhaps we should release that Lizzie is missing. She's a pretty girl, fairly recognizable.'

She waited while Baillie studied the river. Finally he spoke. ‘No, I don't think so. Not yet, anyway. We don't know enough.'

‘OK, sir.'

Baillie turned and considered Collins with interest, the ghost of a smile at the corner of his lips. ‘You happy with that?'

‘Of course, sir.'

He smiled. ‘You don't
look
happy.'

‘OK, well. Look, I take full responsibility for—'

‘But that's not the issue, Sarah. We've moved on from that.'

‘Thank you, sir.'

There was a silence. Baillie waited for Collins to continue. She spoke carefully.

‘It's just that I don't know what's going on with Lizzie or how much time we have. I wouldn't want her coming to harm or to lose any evidence. And I'd rather not wait until she makes a mistake, because she's a cop and we might be waiting a while for that. She probably knows quite a lot about disappearing.'

‘Sarah, Sarah, Sarah, hang on, hang on a minute. We don't need Lizzie Griffiths to
make a mistake
. We are better than that. We are going to deploy our resources and we are going to find her. I have a lot of confidence in you. You won't be coming to me in a couple of days and saying that she is still missing.'

‘Well thank you for your confidence, sir.'

He smiled again, but there was, nevertheless, something undeniably irritated in his eyes. ‘You've got Farah Mehenni's postmortem this morning?'

‘Yes, sir. In fact I'm sorry, Steve and I need to head over there now.'

‘You'd better go. When you get back, I want an update on how you're getting on with locating Lizzie.'

12

L
izzie shifted in the narrow single bed and drew her cold feet into the warmth of her body. Troubled by sudden remembrances, she had slept fitfully. All night she had recoiled from the bed's freezing edges as she struggled to fit beneath the too-small blanket. Street light had filtered purple through the curtains, and she could sense the imprint of others who had slept on the mattress before her. She had woken with a claustrophobic sensation: one day her own heart would stop beating; the blood would no longer move.

She swung her legs out of the bed and her bare feet recoiled from the sticky carpet. The water in the bathroom emitted from the plastic shower head in an irritating squirt that alternated between scalding and freezing. The smell of the drain was ineffectively masked by disinfectant.

Shivering, she put on clean pants and a fresh T-shirt.

The dining room was empty of other guests. Individual boxes of Rice Krispies and Alpen were lined up on the shiny paper tablecloth like cardboard soldiers on forlorn sentry duty. A glass bowl held segments of limp grapefruit in yellow fluid. A female teenager with spotty skin and chipped nail polish approached and asked if she would like a fried breakfast or porridge.

Lizzie declined both and asked for fresh coffee. ‘Hot, please,' she emphasized. ‘And strong.'

Home. Most people would go home
.

The girl put a cafetière on the table in front of her and smiled. ‘I made it as strong as I could.'

Lizzie could not look at her straight: she brought to mind her first sight of Farah, the figure in a dark hallway. She looked down. ‘Yes, thanks, thanks for that. Thanks a lot.'

Through the smeary window she registered blindly the traffic queuing along the coast road.

Number 7 Kenley Villas; the house next to Carrie Stewart's. Hadley had insisted they park the police car round the corner, but Lizzie couldn't see the point. They were both in uniform, after all, and so the Mehennis would know they were police. They would either open the door or they wouldn't.

She had knelt down and opened the letter box. She could still feel, as she had felt it then, the stone of the doorstep against her bony knees – hard and cold through her uniform trousers. Through the narrow and awkward aperture she could see the darkened empty hallway. Hadley, standing beside her, put a hand on her shoulder and pulled her back a little.

‘Never heard of the dog that didn't bark?'

She stood up and brushed down her knees. They exchanged glances. Lizzie imagined a bloody big dog banging its head against the door and giggled at the thought and at Hadley's wilful misappropriation of the Sherlock Holmes quote. Hadley feigned ignorance with a suppressed smile.

‘Well?' he said. ‘What?'

Lizzie pulled a straight face and knocked again. ‘Police. Anyone home?'

The door opened a crack. Dark beady eyes, as alert as a mouse, peered at them. Lizzie craned round the half-closed door to see.
The woman must have been about sixty years old. She had thin dark lips and olive skin. She wore a green cable cardigan and a pink and green patterned headscarf. Hadley stepped round Lizzie, pushing her gently aside. He put his shoe, a large black Doc Marten, on the threshold.

‘Your son in?' he said. ‘Younes?'

The woman shook her head and started speaking a language Lizzie did not know but recognized as Arabic or one of its brother languages.

‘May we come in?'

‘Yes, yes,' the woman replied, but it was not clear that she had understood the question.

Hadley stepped swiftly sideways into the hallway. He was so large that the woman was virtually pressed against the wall by his bulk. Lizzie followed him into the dark, narrow corridor. Hadley had already pushed open the door on the side of the hall. He disappeared into the room, leaving her with the woman. She was small and wiry, wearing a dark skirt and pink slippers. She kept speaking, moving her hand in a patting motion as if smoothing something down. It was a reassuring movement that suggested she was used to trying to appease. Appease whom? Men? White people? Police officers?

Younes Mehenni's mother was bewildered but also strangely tenacious. Lizzie followed her as she turned and walked down the hallway into the kitchen. The woman was still talking but was also now dialling a number into her phone. Lizzie was uneasy. She looked around her. The house had a strangeness about it – it was the same basic layout as Carrie Stewart's, which was only next door, and yet Lizzie's sense of it was so different. This woman, it seemed, lived only on the surface of the place and had in no way penetrated its core. It was mutual: the house had had no effect on her either. She seemed to move around these rooms, transposed as if by green screen from her North African city.

The kitchen, like the hall, was dark. There was the smell of foreign food. Although there was washing on the floor and dirty plates on the side, the room did not feel truly inhabited. It felt as though the family could leave in a matter of minutes and never again be found. The floor was cheap linoleum, an orange flowery pattern left over from the sixties. The work surfaces were Formica, edged with pine panelling. Someone else's optimism, lingering long after its authors had disappeared. There were no pictures on the walls, no books, no clues as to the inner life of the place.

Mrs Mehenni passed Lizzie the phone.

‘Yes, who are you?' The voice was female, heavily accented, and angry.

‘I'm a police officer.'

‘I
know
that. What's your name?'

‘PC Griffiths.'

‘And your number?'

‘611DW.'

‘I've made a note of that, PC Griffiths. Now tell me what are you doing there.'

‘Who are you?'

‘You are in my mother's house. I want you to leave.'

‘Your mother is Mrs Mehenni?'

Silence.

‘We need to speak to your brother, Younes.'