Angela Clarke - Watch Me

Burgone’s face was pained. Chips rested a hand on his shoulder. ‘Why don’t you get some air, lad? Keep you clear headed, hey?’ More than colleagues who’d worked together for a number of years, they were friends. This hurt Chips as much as it did the DCI. Nasreen turned her attention to the paperwork on her desk to give them privacy, not looking up as Burgone left the room, but feeling his every anguished step. It was just gone 10.30 a.m. Lottie had been taken against her will. They had twenty-three hours to find her: the clock was ticking.

Opening the file, Nasreen sharply inhaled: there was Chloe Strofton. If there had been any doubt she was the younger sister of Nasreen’s old school friend, it was gone now. The smiling selfie, taken in happier times, showed that pretty Chloe had the same blue eyes and pinched chin of her older sibling. But instead of the curly, mousey hair that Gemma had, Chloe’s was long and wavy, streaked with blonde highlights. Now would be the time to mention she knew the family – or used to know the family. Nasreen should say she recognised the girl from the photo. Keeping quiet about a personal connection to a case was a bad idea. What would her colleagues think if they knew she’d bullied a young girl till she’d tried to kill herself? They questioned and arrested teens regularly enough that her young age wouldn’t matter. They’d see her as a bully. She’d be lumped in with the likes of Morris. Nasty, tainted. She could imagine Chips’s revulsion. If he didn’t use the personal connection to the case to get her removed, Saunders would use her past, her failings, to get rid of her. He would drum her out of the team. And Burgone, the thought of him knowing what she’d done … Her skin prickled with the shame of it. It didn’t matter what she’d done since, or who she’d become: that one stupid, cruel mistake had tainted her. If she told them she knew the Stroftons, she’d be off the case. But if she kept quiet, she could find out who did this to their daughter. This was her chance to make it better.

Sleeping with Burgone had been an error of judgement. She’d let her own desires get in the way of the job and look what had happened. Burgone had acted rashly too. They were both to blame, but she couldn’t help feel it was she who’d jeopardised their careers. That she was responsible for threatening the Gremlin taskforce. What had happened with Gemma had taught her she couldn’t let her own selfish needs override another’s. This was her chance to atone for those mistakes. Nasreen looked at Burgone’s empty chair, his dark cashmere overcoat hanging lopsided from the back. More than anything she wanted to help him.

Chloe Strofton’s last forty-eight hours had been unremarkable. She’d spent the day at Romeland High School, after which she’d told her parents she was staying at her friend Melisha’s house. Instead she disappeared. She was picked up on CCTV boarding a bus from near her school in St Albans to Hatfield, getting off at the Galleria shopping centre just after half past four. A camera then picked her up once more inside the shopping centre. She wasn’t seen again until her body was found in Wildhill Wood, a number of miles away, at 8.30 p.m. the next day, following an anonymous tip-off from a male caller. The Snapchat of her suicide note had been sent at 8 p.m. the previous night. Did the wood hold personal significance to Chloe? Why had the caller not left his details? People used wooded areas for all kinds of insalubrious pursuits: drug taking, underage drinking, illicit rendezvous. She made a note to call the officer at Hertfordshire Constabulary who’d worked on the case, and ask his opinion.

Photos from the scene showed Chloe Strofton’s small body on the forest floor, curled into child’s pose. Her arms and face were a dark purple from hypostasis – where blood had pooled post mortem. Her veins made a blue marbling pattern in her skin: petechiae within hypostasis . Nasreen had seen bodies like this before: a drugs overdose. The pathologist had noted that the girl’s body showed no indicators of previous drug use. Chloe Matilda Strofton was fifteen years old, 5'4", and weighed 105 lbs. At her time of death the following substances had been found in her blood stream:

Morphine (free) of 370 ng/ml

6-monoacetylmorphine of 16 ng/ml

Codeine (free) of 15 ng/ml

Alprazolam of 34 ng/ml

Amphetamine of 22 ng/ml

Next to the body, along with her school bag, were a blue plastic wrap and a 1cc syringe. No spoon, no cotton wool, lighter or any of the other drug paraphernalia you might expect to find from cooked heroin. Chloe had prepared the syringe elsewhere. Or someone had prepared it for her. Over-the-counter drugs, or even prescription drugs, and alcohol, were easier to source. As were razor blades and the materials you could use to hang yourself with. Chloe hadn’t copied her older sister’s failed attempt.

The investigating team hadn’t requested to look at Chloe’s computer; Nasreen would have liked to know what her search history was. How had a fifteen-year-old girl from a middle-class area, with no known history of criminal activity or drug use, ended up forty-five minutes from where she lived, dead from a heroin overdose?

Nasreen had worked on the case of a twenty-three-year-old mother who’d overdosed and suffered pulmonary congestion like Chloe. She’d asked the pathologist at the time if it would have been quick – the woman’s toddler had been in the flat and she didn’t like to think of him seeing his mother in agony. The pathologist confirmed that in cases of pulmonary congestion, the victim would quickly enter a comatose state, dying relatively soon after from lack of oxygen. Chloe’s death would have been fast and painless. That was something. She didn’t like to think of the girl on her own in the woods, frightened, in pain, with no one to help. Perhaps the bright Chloe, predicted As and A*s in her GCSEs, had researched her options and chose this as an easy death? Chloe would never sit those exams now, never turn sixteen, never go on to have a job, or a family of her own. A life over, all too soon.

The rap of Saunders’s pen on his desk raised her and Chips’s attention. The DI pointed at the phone cradled between his shoulder and his ear, and mouthed, ‘Cell site hit.’ A signal from the phone had been picked up! Nasreen couldn’t suppress the flutter in her stomach: this could be good news.

DI Saunders was nodding, writing down what he was being told. ‘Okay. Yup. We’ll let the SOCOs and the tech lads see if they can find anything on it. Anything at all. Keep me updated.’

That didn’t sound so promising.

Saunders turned to face them. ‘The phone was ditched, not far from the spot where the hoodie was found. A young lad found it on the way to school, pocketed it, and apparently turned it on during his first break.’

Compromised DNA.

Chips threw his hands up in front of him. ‘Where were the parents? Did they not notice their kiddie picking up a bleeding phone?’

‘Apparently his eleven-year-old brother walks him in,’ Saunders shrugged. ‘Latchkey kids, I guess. What you gonna do?’

If only someone else had spotted it first – though most people would instinctively pick the phone up, regardless of whether they planned to turn it in or keep it. The boy had inadvertently disturbed the scene, delayed them finding the phone, and more than likely compromised any forensic traces on the device. And the discovery possibly had bleaker implications. ‘Are we sure it was ditched, rather than dropped during the struggle?’ Nasreen asked.

‘The kid says it was switched off when he found it. And it was further down the road. He thinks.’