Ann Cleeves - Hidden Depths

She reached the house and let herself in. She hadn’t slept well and felt restless, edgy. The walk hadn’t helped. If Samuel were asked to choose between me and Peter, she thought, Peter would always come first. That was why he didn’t tell me about Lily, why he didn’t warn me.

She made herself coffee and stood by the kitchen door to drink it. There was still blue-and-white tape across the cottage door, and while she was standing there a car appeared in the drive. It was one of the crime scene investigators from the previous day. He waved at her, before climbing into his paper suit and walking across the meadow.

In the cool of the house she phoned Samuel. It was quarter past eight and she thought he might be still at home. He lived only ten minutes from the library. Before dialling she didn’t have any idea what she was going to say to him. When the answerphone clicked in, she was quite relieved. She thought she might have made a fool of herself by demanding an explanation. Didn’t it occur to you that I deserved to know my husband was having sex with a girl younger than our daughters? But he could have retaliated. You were having sex with your husband’s best friend. Besides, she’d never made any demands on Samuel. It was the basis of their relationship. She replaced the receiver without speaking.

On impulse she decided to go into Morpeth for the day. She wanted people around her, the feel of fabric between her fingers as she looked for something new to wear, coffee, a good lunch with a glass of wine. She didn’t even bother to change or put on fresh make-up, just picked up her car keys and her bag and almost ran out of the house. As she locked the door behind her she heard the ring of the phone inside. She paused for a moment but she didn’t go back in. She might call into the library to see Samuel later, but she needed time to plan what she was going to say to him.

Vera had left a family liaison officer with Julie, with instructions that she should be taken away from the house – to a friend’s, to her parents’ home, anywhere as long as it wasn’t in the village where soon a team would be doing a fingertip search of the length of the footpath leading from the allotments to the main road. Now Vera was back in the station. She’d called the team together, her three closest staff, shouted them into her office from her open door. Charlie was still on the phone to the officer who was coordinating the Seaton house-to-house enquiries. Joe Ashworth had just arrived from the high school, serious, rather flustered. She realized he was thinking of his own daughter. When Katie was fourteen, would he have the courage to let her get into school, into town, on her own?

‘Laura definitely didn’t get on the bus,’ he said. ‘The other kids didn’t make anything of it. They thought she just hadn’t been able to face school after what had happened to Luke.’ He paused. ‘I had the impression she didn’t really have many close friends. They were shocked that she was missing, excited even. But none of them seemed terribly upset. The teachers told me she kept herself apart from the other kids. One of them said she was a bit aloof.’

Of course she was aloof, Vera thought. Since she was young she’d had to put up with people teasing her about Luke. And for a moment Vera wondered if it was all much simpler than they’d been making it. Perhaps Laura had killed her brother. Revenge because he’d not saved Tom Sharp when he fell in the Tyne. Because he was always the centre of attention and he’d made her life a misery without even trying. And now she’d run away. Perhaps Lily’s death was nothing but a horrible coincidence. Then she told herself that was ridiculous. The idea that there was no link between the two deaths was preposterous. And still at the back of her mind was the thought of the one obvious suspect.

Holly came in with a tray of coffee: four mugs of black liquid, a pile of plastic pots of milk on a chipped saucer. It was the first time ever Vera had seen her make drinks without being bullied into it.

Charlie finished the phone call and joined them. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Not yet. Some of the residents of the street are still out at work. I’ve told the team on the ground to get their phone numbers, call them at wherever they’re working to see if they saw Laura this morning.’

In any other circumstances Vera would have been pleased that they were pulling their fingers out, working together, showing a bit of nous.

‘I got the coroner’s report on Parr’s wife’s death,’ he went on. ‘It was definitely suicide. She slit her wrists. The paper’s on your desk.’

She nodded her thanks.

‘This puts the focus back on the Armstrong family,’ she said. ‘Perhaps all the business with Peter Calvert was a distraction. Perhaps Lily Marsh was never an intended victim at all. She saw something, got in the way. Are we any closer to knowing what she was doing the night Luke Armstrong was killed?’

‘The girls she shared the flat with were out that night. A trip to London to the ballet. Very classy. They stayed with friends in Richmond. They can’t tell if Lily was there Wednesday night or not.’ Holly had become an expert on Lily’s flatmates.

‘What would Lily Marsh have been doing in Seaton? An ex-pit village on the coast. I mean, it’s just not her sort of place, those clothes she wore. She’d have stuck out like a sore thumb. Nobody saw her. I did the house-to-house myself Charlie had worked that patch as a PC and still had friends who were community police officers. ‘There have been no strangers around at all.’

They sat, each of them trying to imagine Lily in her silk and her beads in the street where the kids played skipping games and the mothers sat on the steps watching them. All of them failing.

‘Where do you think Laura’s body is?’ Charlie asked. The question they’d all had at the backs of their minds, none of them wanting to speak it.

‘We don’t know yet that the girl is dead.’ Vera didn’t shout, she kept her voice calm and reasonable. It wasn’t the time for being showy. But she meant it. Or maybe she just wanted it to be true. For Julie and for herself. She wasn’t used to failing and another death, the death of someone young, who’d never had the chance yet to be happy, would be the worst sort of failure.

‘He didn’t keep the other victims alive,’ Joe said. ‘Not that we can tell. Certainly not the boy.’

‘This might be different.’ Vera knew it was irrational, the idea she’d formed walking along the footpath with Julie, that the killer was enjoying himself, the game, the spectacle. That he might want to prolong the pleasure by keeping his victim alive.

Charlie knew better than to argue. ‘If there is a body, where will it be?’

‘In water,’ Holly said.

‘So where should we look? Every house in Tyne and Wear has a bath.’

‘No,’ Vera said. ‘He won’t use a bath again. Laura’s a striking young woman. Not beautiful like Lily, but big eyes, cheekbones you’d die for.’ She caught her breath at the phrase but nobody else seemed to notice and she continued, ‘She looks odd, exotic. He’ll want to turn her into a picture. It’ll be somewhere dramatic.’

‘Then he must be holding her,’ Joe said. ‘Either alive or dead. He won’t risk posing the body in broad daylight. Not again. He got away with it with Lily, but he’d never try it a second time.’

‘Did we ever hear back from Northumbria Water?’ Vera demanded. ‘Weren’t they supposed to have blokes working at the outfall by the lighthouse the afternoon Lily was killed? Has anyone spoken to them?’

‘That outfall hasn’t been used for five years,’ Joe said. ‘Some European directive on sewage and clean beaches. The guy I spoke to reckoned a team must have just parked up there to have a break.’