Running Girl (30 page)

Finally he reached the end of Eastwick Road and parked across the entrance to the flats.

‘I'm sure you understand all this,' he said, in what he hoped was a quieter, friendlier tone. ‘Think of your mother, if nobody else.'

After he turned off the engine they sat there together in silence for a few moments. It was twenty to one; Five Mile lay sleeping around them.

At last Garvie stirred, as if coming out of a trance, and looked at Singh for the first time since leaving the woods.

‘So Naylor, Johnson, whatever his name was. He was a sex offender?'

Singh looked at him curiously. There were times when the boy seemed oddly dim. ‘Yes. I told you.'

‘On the Sex Offender Register?'

Singh frowned as he nodded. ‘As I just told you.'

‘Then,' Garvie said sadly, ‘he's almost certainly not your killer.'

And without saying anything else he let himself out of the car and went through the gate to Eastwick Gardens, where his mother sat waiting for him.

THEY SAT FACING
each other under bright lights across the kitchen table.

‘Talk,' she said, and sat staring at him, oddly.

She was wearing her old blue flannel dressing gown and broken-soled slippers, and her strange expression made her face look out of place, as if it wasn't really her own.

‘Talk to me,' she said. ‘While you still can.'

‘I thought you were at work,' he said uneasily. ‘I didn't think you'd worry.'

‘I came back between shifts and found your note. While I was here the inspector called. I knew then there was trouble. I been here ever since, waiting.'

He was too tired to be charming and his mother's odd expression was too disturbing, so he said as humbly as he could that he'd got into trouble again, with the police.

‘What trouble now?'

He noticed that his mother's voice was strange too – so strange he almost decided to tell her the truth. But not quite. Truth was a slippery sort of thing. Besides, he didn't know if he could trust himself to speak or even think about Naylor just yet.

‘Same as before,' he said cautiously.

‘Meaning?'

‘Got caught with a bottle in the Old Ditch Road playground.'

He was expecting her to lay into him, to deliver a few home truths in her usual high-volume, maximum-impact style. But she said nothing, just stared at him in her new strange way.

‘Smoking the magic puff too?' she said at last.

‘No, Mum.'

‘No?'

‘I've finished with all that.'

‘Finished with it, have you?'

He nodded.

After a moment she reached into her dressing-gown pocket and took out a small plastic bag and placed it on the table between them.

It was a ten-spot from Alex.

‘Found it in your room,' his mother said.

He didn't say anything to that.

‘But you tell me you didn't have any with you tonight in the Old Ditch Road playground?'

‘I didn't. I swear.'

‘Don't worry, I know you didn't. Because you weren't in the Old Ditch Road playground, were you?'

Garvie sat silent.

‘I know where you've been,' she said. ‘And I know what you've been doing.'

He saw her lip tremble and her eyes well up, and with a sense of horror he realized what her strangeness was. She wasn't going to lay into him. She couldn't. All her loudness and certainty had gone, and with them her authority, and he realized immediately that this was far worse.

He started to get up, but she shook her head and began to speak in that strange voice, quieter and harsher at the same time.

‘You see it now, eh? What it means, to be a mother. Means sitting here at midnight wondering where you are. Means asking what's happened to you. Means telling myself that whatever trouble you get yourself into it's my fault. My fault you're out all night, my fault you're smoking that puff and running with those thieves and dealers, my fault you're wasting all the talents you were born with. Mine, Garvie, not yours. I can lose you, but you can never lose yourself. You understand me?'

Tears ran down her face. Her cheeks puckered and glistened.

‘I'll tell you what else it means. It means knowing what Mrs Dow is thinking now. That nutty woman you like to laugh at. Knowing what she's thinking at night when she can't get to sleep no matter how many pills she takes. Her daughter's dead, but she's alive to tell herself every night of the rest of her life that she's lost her, and it was her own fault and nobody else's.'

Her chin was wet, her nose was running.

‘And you now. Playing your games like it was a bit of fun, like it was a puzzle you can drop in the bin when you've solved it. Like it ...'

She said no more.

She sat with her hand across her mouth as she wept. Cheeks wet, eyes swollen, weeping angrily without noise, almost unrecognizable, almost a stranger, as if his mother were disappearing in front of his eyes.

He got to his feet so fast he knocked over the chair, but she put up a hand to stop him hugging her and, glaring at him wetly, rose from the table and went away, still weeping, across the living-room floor into her room and shut the door behind her, leaving him standing alone at the kitchen table.

She'd always said that one day he would go too far. But he'd never known what that really meant. He did now. He didn't have to be a genius to know that his bad day had just got much worse.

AS THE DAWN
came up murky green in Cornwallis Way, Detective Inspector Singh sat alone at his desk with the list of the meetings at the Centre for Public Service Partnerships in front of him. His tunic was dirty and torn, his turban soaked, his drawn face grey. But his posture was still upright, still unbending. He had never hidden things from himself. Without excuse or qualification he recognized that this was, by far, the worst day of his short, almost certainly doomed, career.

In his mind he went through recent events. He thought about the mistakes he had made. He thought, with a feeling of fury, about Garvie Smith, remembering the way the boy had turned to him in the car just a few hours earlier to tell him that Naylor was not the murderer of Chloe Dow. He remembered how he felt. Exasperated. Furious, even. Afterwards he'd driven back to Naylor's hut as planned, to meet the pathologist, determined not to think any more about what Garvie had said. But despite himself he began to be doubtful, and the longer he worked at the hut in the dripping woods with the forensics team, the longer they failed to find the phone that Naylor must have used when he called Chloe, the more his doubts nagged at him. He kept going over the evidence in his mind. It was strongly against Naylor. The groundsman was a man of violent tendencies exacerbated by his addiction to cocaine. He'd raped before. He'd been obsessed with Chloe, stealing her things, photographing her, stalking her at school, spying on her at home, pursuing her as far as Pike Pond, where he'd even been seen the Friday afternoon of her murder. He'd lied about his alibi, which had turned out to be bogus. It was beyond all reasonable doubt: in the old clichéd terms, he had the means, the motive and the opportunity.

And yet (damn that boy) Singh's doubts nagged and would not stop. It wasn't until he was driving home at four o'clock in the morning that he finally realized what Smith must have meant, and at once turned his car round and drove at speed to Cornwallis Way, where he surprised the night staff by striding past them without a word, then running up the stairs and across the empty open-plan area into his office, and pulling open the filing cabinet drawers to hunt for the list of the meetings at the Centre for Public Service Partnerships.

Then he sat at his desk staring at it while the murky green dawn came up. Staring at one entry in particular:

17.30–20.30: Group Therapy (SOTP)

It was so obvious he'd forgotten it. Naylor had been enrolled on the compulsory SOTP programme. Every Friday he attended the weekly group sessions.
Every
Friday, taking into account his travel time, he was occupied from five o'clock till nine o'clock – exactly the window of the time of Chloe's death. It was his alibi for the thirteenth. He'd lied to them about it not because he was guilty of Chloe's murder but to hide the fact that he was a sex offender.

A call to the night staff at Probation Services duly confirmed it: Paul Johnson had been at the Centre on the evening of Chloe's murder.

So Singh sat alone in his office, his morning prayers completely forgotten, watching the dawn come up.

He was still sitting there, haggard and filthy, when colleagues who had heard the news came into his office to congratulate him on the closure of the case. In their faces he saw how he must look, with his wet turban and bloodshot eyes, and he saw their puzzlement when they failed to get a response from him other than a disgusted stare. Occasionally he heard them whispering questions to his PA outside. Some time later he heard Dowell and Collier at the water cooler outside his office addressing a group of younger officers about the investigation, Dowell saying, ‘It took longer than it should have but we got there in the end.'

Then all conversations died away, and he looked up to see the chief constable come into his office and carefully close the door behind him. They looked at each other. There was no trace of congratulation on the chief's gaunt face as he told Singh that he was relieved the Dow case was finally closed.

Singh couldn't wait any longer, and, rising to his feet, said, ‘We got the wrong man.'

The chief looked at him with the same dead expression. His eyes seemed lidless.

‘He was her stalker,' Singh said, ‘but not her killer.'

Still the chief said nothing. His eyes were locked on Singh's. Singh began to explain about Johnson's SOTP programme, but his voice failed and there was silence in his office.

‘To think,' the chief said slowly, ‘that I promoted you.'

He left the thought hanging in the air for a moment, standing silently watching Singh as if he expected the man to shrivel, implode and turn to dust. In fact, that was what Singh felt was happening to him.

‘To think,' the chief said again, quietly, ‘of the mistakes. Of the blunders. Of the stupidities.'

Singh was unable to speak. No speaking on his part was required, however.

‘To think of the suicide of an innocent man,' the chief went on. He rested his cold eyes on Singh. ‘Of the wrongful arrest of Alex Robinson. Of the hours and hours, stupidly, moronically, spent looking for a non-existent Porsche.'

Even when he was quiet it seemed to Singh that the chief's face continued to glow slightly, alien and phosphorescent, with the force of his contempt.

‘There's a press conference in twenty minutes,' he added, and at that moment the phone rang.

Singh stood looking at it stupidly.

‘Answer it,' the chief said.

Singh picked up the phone, and heard Shan's voice say, ‘I know it's meant to be all over, but something's come up. Can you come in?'

Singh glanced at the chief. ‘I'm busy,' he said to Shan.

‘It's something I don't understand. Something that doesn't fit. You better come and see it.'

Despite himself, Singh felt a little jolt of curiosity. ‘What is it?'

‘Footage from CCTV at Bootham Street. Near Market Square.'

Singh didn't reply but slowly replaced the receiver, frowning. For the first time that morning he felt something other than despair. Despite everything, he felt the wild, improbable sense of a last chance.

‘At the press conference—' the chief constable began again, but Singh took a breath and said, ‘Please. Wait a moment. There's something you have to see.'

The chief stared at him. Singh managed to hold his gaze.

‘
Wait
a moment? What
is
this?' the chief said in a whisper.

Singh took a breath. ‘A non-existent black Porsche, I think.'

The angle of the CCTV camera was all wrong and the footage muddy-coloured and granular, but the picture was clear enough to show the distinctive contour of Bootham Street with its church and bank, the early evening traffic heavy in both directions, and blurry, speeded-up lines of people knotting and unknotting as they made their way along the pavement to the bars and clubs in Market Square.

After a moment Shan slowed the tape and pointed to the figure of a dark-haired woman wearing a dark dress and pale jacket waiting by the kerb.

‘Chloe Dow,' he said. ‘The reason we didn't spot her sooner is we were looking at Market Square. She was just south, in Bootham Street. I'm sure it's her, though. See the clothes and the hair. And the way she's looking out for someone. Now watch.'

He speeded up the tape again, and they saw a low-slung car with the familiar Porsche profile approach from the Market Square end of the street, turn out of the jerky flow of traffic and pull up alongside the kerb. It was black. The passenger door was pushed open from inside, Chloe stepped down off the pavement and got in, and the car at once edged back into the traffic and flowed away in the direction of the ring road.

‘It's not possible to work out the registration at this distance,' Shan said. ‘But there's analysis to be done on the car. And the driver. Probably a man. Could be a woman. No one else in the car, so far as we can tell.'

The chief constable shifted his gaze from the screen to Singh and raised one eyebrow.

Singh took a breath. ‘Chloe Dow was scared. She was being harassed by her ex-boyfriend. She was being stalked by Naylor. But the person who really scared her is in that car. That Thursday night she got dressed up and went out with him and something happened.'

There was a silence while the chief contemplated this.

‘What?' he said at last.

‘I don't know.'

Another silence.