Into the Water

Hairy shrugged again. “Might show her going in, but it won’t tell us what happened up here.”

• • •

MORE THAN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS had passed since then, and we seemed no closer to finding out what really had happened up there. Nel Abbott’s phone hadn’t shown up, which was odd, although perhaps not quite odd enough. If she’d jumped, there was a chance she might have disposed of it first. If she’d fallen, it might still be in the water somewhere; it might have sunk down into the mud or been washed away. If she was pushed, of course, whoever pushed her might have taken it off her first, but given the lack of any sign of a struggle up on the cliff, it didn’t seem likely that someone had wrested it away from her.

I got lost on the way back from taking Jules (NOT Julia, apparently) to do the ID at the hospital. I dropped her back at the Mill House and thought I was heading back towards the station when I found that I wasn’t: after I crossed the bridge I’d somehow swung round and found myself back at the river again. Like I said, whichever way you turn. In any case, I had my phone out, trying to figure out where I was supposed to be going, when I spotted a group of girls walking over the bridge. Lena, a head taller than the others, broke away from them.

I abandoned the car and went after her. There was something I wanted to ask her, something her aunt had mentioned, but before I could reach her she’d started arguing with someone—a woman, perhaps in her forties. I saw Lena grab her arm, the woman pulling away and raising her hands to her face, as though afraid of being struck. Then they separated abruptly, Lena going left and the woman straight on up the hill. I followed Lena. She refused to tell me what it was all about. She insisted there was nothing wrong, that it hadn’t been an argument at all, that it was none of my business anyway. A bravado performance, but her face was streaked with tears. I offered to see her home, but she told me to fuck off.

So I did. I drove back to the station and gave Townsend the lowdown on Jules Abbott’s formal identification of the body.

In keeping with the general theme, the ID was weird. “She didn’t cry,” I told the boss, and he made a kind of dipping motion with his head as though to say, Well, that’s normal. “It wasn’t normal,” I insisted. “This wasn’t normal shock. It was really odd.”

He shifted in his seat. He was sitting behind a desk in a tiny office at the back of the station, and he seemed altogether too big for the room, as though if he stood up he might hit his head on the ceiling. “Odd how?”

“It’s hard to explain, but she seemed to be talking without making any sound. And I don’t mean that kind of noiseless sobbing either. It was strange. Her lips were moving as though she was saying something . . . and not just saying something, but talking to someone. Having a conversation.”

“But you couldn’t actually hear anything?”

“Nothing.”

He glanced at the laptop screen in front of him and then back at me. “And that was it? Did she say anything to you? Anything else, anything useful?”

“She asked about a bracelet. Apparently Nel had a bracelet that belonged to their mother, which she wore all the time. Or at least she wore it all the time when Jules last saw Nel, which was years ago.”

Townsend nodded, scratching at his wrist.

“There’s no sign of one in her belongings, I checked. She was wearing a ring—no other jewellery.”

He fell silent for so long that I thought maybe the conversation was over. I was just about to leave the room when suddenly he said, “You should ask Lena about that.”

“I was planning to,” I told him, “only she wasn’t all that interested in talking to me.” I filled him in on the encounter at the bridge.

“This woman,” he said. “Describe her.”

So I did: early forties, slightly on the heavy side, dark hair, wearing a long red cardigan despite the heat.

Townsend studied me for a long time.

“Doesn’t ring any bells, then?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” he said, looking at me as though I was a particularly simple child. “It’s Louise Whittaker.”

“And she is?”

He frowned. “Have you not seen any background on this?”

“I haven’t, actually,” I said. I felt like pointing out that filling me in on any relevant background might be considered to be his job, since he was the local.

He sighed and began tapping at the keys of his computer. “You should be up to speed with all this. You should have been given the files.” He smacked a particularly vicious return, as though he was banging keys on a typewriter rather than an expensive-looking iBook. “And you should also read through Nel Abbott’s manuscript.” He looked up at me and frowned. “The project she was working on? It was going to be a sort of coffee-table book, I think. Pictures and stories about Beckford.”

“A local history?”

He exhaled sharply. “Of sorts. Nel Abbott’s interpretation of events. Of selected events. Her . . . spin on things. As I mentioned, not something that many of the locals were keen on. We have copies, in any case, of what she’d written so far. One of the DCs will get you one. Ask Callie Buchan—you’ll find her out front. The point is that one of the cases she wrote about was that of Katie Whittaker, who took her own life in June. Katie was a close friend of Lena Abbott’s, and Louise, her mother, was once friendly with Nel. They fell out, apparently over the focus of Nel’s work, and then when Katie died—”

“Louise blamed her,” I said. “She holds her responsible.”

He nodded. “Yes, she does.”