The Girl Before

“I’ll get myself one. It’s good of you to meet me.”

“Oh, it’s no bother. I come into town anyway on a Wednesday, for the market.”

I get myself a ginger ale and go back to join him. I’m amazed by how easy it is to track people down these days. A phone call to Scotland Yard had established that Detective Inspector Clarke had retired, which felt like a setback, but simply typing “How do I find a retired police officer?” into a search engine—not Housekeeper, of course—had thrown up an organization called NARPO, the National Association of Retired Police Officers. There was a contact form, so I sent them my request. A reply came back the same day. They couldn’t give out members’ details, but they’d forward my question on.

The man sitting opposite me doesn’t look old enough to be retired. He must guess what I’m thinking because he says, “I was twenty-five years in the police game. Long enough to take my pension, but I haven’t stopped work completely. Me and another ex-detective have a little business installing security alarms. Nothing too pressured, but it’s tidy money. You want to talk about Emma Matthews, I understand?”

I nod. “Please.”

“Are you a relative?”

He’s clearly noted the resemblance. “Not exactly. I’m the current tenant at One Folgate Street.”

“Hmm.” At first glance James Clarke seems like a solid, ordinary bloke, the kind of workingman-made-comfortable who might own a small villa in Portugal beside a golf course. But now I see that his eyes are shrewd and confident. “What exactly do you want to know?”

“I know Emma made some sort of allegation against her former boyfriend, Simon. Not long afterward, she was dead. I’ve heard conflicting explanations as to who or what killed her—depression, Simon, even the man she went on to have a relationship with.” I deliberately don’t mention Edward’s name, in case Clarke picks up on my interest in him. “I’m just trying to shed some light on what happened. Living there, it’s hard not to be curious.”

“Emma Matthews pulled the wool over my eyes,” DI Clarke says flatly. “That didn’t happen to me often as a detective. Almost never, in fact. But there I was, faced with this plausible young woman who said she’d been too scared to report a really unpleasant sexual attack, because the attacker had filmed it on her phone and threatened to send it to all her contacts. I wanted to do something for her. Plus we were under pressure at the time to get rape convictions up. I thought with the evidence we had, for once I’d actually be able to please my bosses, get justice for a victim, and put a nasty piece of trash called Deon Nelson away for a long time into the bargain. Triple whammy. Turned out I was wrong on all three counts. She’d told us a pack of lies from the start.”

“She was a good liar, then?”

“Or I was a middle-aged fool.” He shrugs ruefully. “My Sue had passed away the year before. And this girl, who could have been my daughter…Perhaps I was too trusting. That’s certainly how our internal investigation saw it afterward. Officer coming up to retirement, pretty young woman, his judgment goes haywire. And there was some truth in that. Enough to make me take the retirement a bit early when they suggested it, anyway.”

He takes a long mouthful of his beer. I sip my ginger ale. To me the soft drink screams I’m pregnant, but if he’s noticed, DI Clarke doesn’t mention it. “Looking back, there were things I should have spotted. She ID’d Nelson far too confidently on VIPER, given she said he’d been wearing a balaclava during the assault. As for the accusation against the ex-boyfriend…” He shrugs.

“You don’t believe that either, in hindsight?”

“We didn’t even believe it at the time. It was just her lawyer’s way of getting her off. ‘I felt scared, I can’t be held responsible for what I said.’ It worked, too. Plus the Crown Prosecution Service was none too keen to tell the world in open court what a fool she’d made of us. She had to accept a formal caution for wasting, but it was a slap on the wrist, nothing more.”

“But you still arrested Simon Wakefield after she died.”

“Yes. Well, that was more arse-covering, really. Suddenly there was a possibility we might have been looking at this all wrong. Young woman alleges rape, then admits lying but claims her boyfriend’s a Jekyll and Hyde character who’s violent toward her. Soon after, she’s found dead. If it turns out he did kill her, we’re stuffed. Even if it turns out to be suicide, it doesn’t look like the police treated her very well, does it? Either way, it’s better to be seen to have arrested someone.”