Running Girl (5 page)

He frowned. He'd remembered enough. More than enough.

He looked at the waste ground, the pond, the ruined farm. There was no one else around now except for a constable down by the water staring at his boots. Picking his way through weeds and garbage, Garvie went across to the farm. He'd never been here before, didn't even know its name until he found a rusted sign lying in the grass:
FOUR WINDS FARM
. A farm no more. He stepped through the broken wall into the courtyard and looked around, fixing everything in his memory: the old mattresses piled up in the porch, the smashed windows, the elder bushes rising in spikes out of the half-collapsed roof. In the courtyard the concrete was blackened here and there where people had lit fires, and under a corrugated shelter at the side was a burned-out car, skeletal and orange with rust.

A lost place. A place for lost people.

What had Chloe told him that morning in the café, about Pike Pond?

‘It spooks me. I don't go up there late. Not even in the afternoon if it's getting a bit shadowy.'

At 6.45 on an April evening there might have been daylight still, but Chloe would never have chosen to run to Pike Pond. Not at that time. Not willingly.

He frowned again.

So what was she doing here?

Finally it was time for him to leave. The sun set, blood-orange red leaking along the horizon towards the car plant. Sitting on his bike at the edge of the field of rapeseed, Garvie looked back one last time, watching the shadows gather rapidly over it all. It was a bad place to die. Chloe had been right: it was spooky. The woods were nightmare-gloomy, the farm was a corpse and Pike Pond was cold and black, like a pool in a fairy story going all the way down to hell.

The last thing he saw before turning to cycle home was the silhouetted shape of the constable standing by his squad car parked on the farm track, still staring at his boots.

NEXT MORNING CHLOE
Dow was everywhere, as if she'd been absorbed into the very fabric of the city. She was on the news ticker running round the side of Tropp Tower, on the giant electronic billboard in Market Square, on newspaper hoardings and television and computer screens throughout the city. In both public and private media one image dominated all others: the snapshot (given to Singh by the Dows on Friday night) of a crazily good-looking Chloe in matching running vest and shorts innocently squinting through sunlight at the camera. Dubbed ‘Beauty' in the tabloid press (victim, inevitably, of ‘the Beast'), she was discussed in a thousand conversations across the city, in council chambers and cafés, law courts and laundrettes, offices and rooms, not least in the shops and streets of Five Mile, crowded suddenly with huge numbers of police and journalists, all obsessively focused on the same thing.

In death, beautiful Chloe Dow was as famous as she had dreamed of being when alive.

The City Squad issued statements several times an hour. They were aghast, like everyone else. But they were confident of bringing the perpetrator to justice. The chief constable, a narrow-faced, dead-eyed man with cropped hair, was confident. The city mayor was confident. Detective Inspector Raminder Singh, newly announced as the leader of the investigation and appearing on screen in a freshly laundered turban, was confident. The police had expertise, method. They were rigorous, careful, painstaking, dedicated, energetic. They would get their man. This was their promise to the people of the city.

Garvie Smith, on the other hand, had no method. He was no expert in any conventional sense of the word. Not even his mother –
especially
not his mother – would claim he was painstaking or energetic. He made no promises. But at eight o'clock on Tuesday evening, in a house not four miles from the City Squad headquarters, he was pestering his uncle for information.

He was at Uncle Len's to babysit his three-year-old cousin, Bojo, while his mother went out with her brother and Aunt Maxie. First they were all having a drink. And he was pestering.

‘Garvie!' his mother said for the third time. ‘Will you leave it alone? All that's confidential.'

‘So?'

Though he didn't often exert himself, when he did he went at things his own way, with a looseness, a lazy swing, a laid-back persistence that was appealing to his friends if not to his mother.

‘Sorry, Uncle Len. She didn't mean to interrupt you. You were just telling us about the autopsy.'

Aunt Maxie laughed.

His mother frowned. ‘I don't know what's got into him. He'd be better off devoting his famous mental ability to his maths revision. Which I hope he's remembered to bring with him. After a certain incident at Old Ditch Road playground, he's grounded till further notice.'

Garvie Smith gave her a look, serious for a second, then turned back to his uncle and grinned one of his grins. His uncle sighed. He knew what his sister was going through with her son, but he was a tolerant man and he'd always liked his nephew. Garvie had the cheeky attitude and looks that uncles find hard to resist. There was that grin for a start. That black hair and those blue eyes – extremely attractive also (so his uncle had heard) to the girls of the neighbourhood. In fact, there was something generally pleasant about Garvie Smith, famous slacker of the Marsh Academy; his uncle could see that, even if his mother couldn't. It was just a shame he was so bone idle.

His uncle sighed again. ‘I know everyone's talking about it. I've seen the coverage. That poor girl's picture's everywhere. But your mother's right. It's confidential. Anyway, I couldn't give you anything even if I wanted to. This isn't TV, Garvie. We haven't had a chance to do the work yet.'

‘You've done the autopsy. You told us.'

‘Preliminary autopsy. As for the rest, it's still in the lab. Will be for several days yet.'

‘There,' his mother said. ‘You have your answer.'

‘OK, then. Just quickly remind us what the preliminary autopsy covers.'

‘Garvie!'

He caught the tone of her voice and at last fell silent. For half an hour no more was said about the matter. But when Uncle Len went into the kitchen to get some more drinks he found Garvie at his shoulder, grinning that grin of his.

‘Oh no, Garvie.'

‘Cause, mechanism and manner of death. That's what the preliminary autopsy covers, right?'

Despite himself, Len Johnson smiled. ‘Your memory's still functioning. But seriously – you're not going to get anything else out of me. Get down that bottle of ginger ale. Since you're here you can make your mother a drink.'

Garvie slowly mixed apricot fizz in a jug. As he mixed he began to talk to himself, quietly at first.

‘Cause of death? Must be strangulation. The guy on the radio said she'd been strangled.'

His uncle ignored him.

Garvie took a glass out of a cupboard, apparently still deep in thought, murmuring to himself, ‘
Mechanism
of death?' He hesitated. ‘Suffocation? Doesn't sound quite right. Stifling? No. Choking? Course not. There must be some other word.'

‘Asphyxia's the correct term for—' Uncle Len bit his lip. ‘That's it, Garvie. You're not getting anything else out of me.'

Garvie grinned. ‘No need. Manner of death's easy. Homicide, right? Unless she strangled herself.'

His uncle sighed. ‘Seriously, Garvie, I literally can't give you any more information. I know you're curious. And I'm assuming it's because you knew the girl.'

He peered at Garvie. ‘In fact, didn't you used to go out with her?'

Garvie made his face blank.

‘I remember her. Nice girl.'

Garvie's blank face stayed blank.

Uncle Len changed the subject. ‘Anyway, Garvie, apart from the fact that I have actually taken a professional oath, I simply don't have the information to give you.'

‘You've examined the body, haven't you?'

‘Very briefly. I've made no report yet. I'm awaiting the results of the tests.'

‘There must be photographs.'

‘Not for you to see. Anyway, they're still being worked on. Not a single photograph of Chloe Dow has been released to the police.'

‘But you can—'

‘I can't!' Len Johnson finally raised his voice. ‘Stop it now, Garvie! I'm telling you, I don't have anything definite. We're still guessing. Listen to me. This is the truth. The only concrete information we've sent through, apart from the brief diagnosis you've already worked out, is the preliminary description of what she was wearing. And like the rest of the population you already know that from the news, and it's very boring. She was out running and she was wearing her running kit. That's it. That's all. No juicy details, no gory descriptions. Now take that drink to your mother – and think of something else to talk about for twenty minutes before we head off.'

Garvie didn't move. He stood there scrutinizing his uncle in silence.

‘What is it now, Garvie?'

‘How old are you, Uncle Len?'

Taken by surprise, his uncle hesitated.

Garvie said, ‘That inspector, that Singh guy, he thought you were coming up to retirement.'

Uncle Len made a small puffy noise of indignation.

‘I told him you're a lot younger than you look.'

‘I'm not sure that's much of a compliment.'

‘It wasn't meant to be a compliment.'

‘No, well. I'll be fifty in August. Born in Barbados, as you know. On Grand Kadooment Day, if you know what that is.'

‘I can find out,' Garvie said, and went with the drinks into the living room, leaving his uncle, who was preparing to explain all about Grand Kadooment Day, standing bewildered in the kitchen.

After they had gone Garvie Smith sat alone in his uncle's front room, thinking. He thought about complex numbers. They were interesting, the way they didn't add up. Like a very noticeable girl going missing without anyone noticing. Like her body turning up in a place at a time when she would never have willingly gone there. He thought too about the dead body itself: a simple nought, a brute fact, a thing on an autopsy gurney. Perhaps even that wasn't as simple as it sounded.

Time passed slowly in Uncle Len's house now that Garvie was on his own. He ate all the snacks that Aunt Maxie had left for him, and settled Bojo when he woke up, and watched the usual crap on TV. He even thought about getting out his maths revision until he realized he had forgotten to bring it. But he couldn't stop thinking about Chloe Dow's dead body, about autopsy reports and confidential preliminary reports. Photographs. He was pretty sure Uncle Len hadn't been telling him the truth. After all, he had examined the body. Photographs had definitely been taken. Information existed, even if it wasn't officially ‘available'.

At ten o'clock the television news came on, and inevitably the main story, much extended, was the Dow investigation. Garvie watched an awkward interview with Detective Inspector Singh, who appealed again for witnesses to come forward, and footage of Mr and Mrs Dow disappearing through a media scrum into the police station. There was an emotional interview with Chloe's ‘best friend', Jessica Walker – a slim, dark-haired girl whose pretty face was blurred with leaky mascara – sobbing her way through the questions, repeating over and over that Chloe was the best, the kindest, the most beautiful friend she could have had, and blurting out at the end that she would love her for ever. Garvie snorted; he knew what sort of friend Jessica had been. More interesting to him were the factual reports. The murder was being treated as a sex attack. The cause and mechanism of death were announced as strangulation and asphyxia, the estimated time of death between 4 and 9 on the Friday evening, but more probably between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. Prolonged immersion in the water made it difficult to be more exact, a spokesman said, a fact which might have been deliberately exploited by the murderer. Chloe's body, fully dressed, had been weighed down by an iron bar, though the source of the bar remained unknown. Her mobile phone, found submerged in the pond near her body, was being examined; inevitably data on it had been destroyed.

The now-familiar photograph of Chloe appeared several times during the programme, as if to corroborate not only her beauty, which was plain to see, but her kindness, her popularity and her heartbreaking girlish charm. Every time it appeared Garvie flinched a little. He knew the photograph. He remembered taking it.

He shut off his memory. When the news ended he turned off the television too and lay on the sofa in silence, staring up at the ceiling. He was not the worst boy in the world. But he couldn't stop thinking about those autopsy reports, photographs, Chloe's body on a slab. After five minutes he got up off the sofa and made his way upstairs.

UNCLE LEN'S STUDY
was a small room created out of a partitioned spare bedroom, next to the room where Bojo slept. Garvie opened the door and peered in. In the shadows he could see a desk with a computer on it under the window, a grey filing cabinet and several shelves filled with medical and legal books. Flipping on the light, he slipped inside and shut the door behind him.

There was a smell in the room. It was his uncle's smell: peppermints and liquorice.

He started with the easy things. The filing cabinet was a disappointment: everything in it looked old, and the headings on the file dividers –
Committee Meeting Minutes, Budget Reports, Annual Reviews
– suggested general business rather than specific cases. He turned to the desk drawers. Two were empty, the third filled with back issues of an old magazine called
Calypso Magic!
That left only the computer.

He turned it on, and for a moment sat staring at the password field. Then he went into the bottom drawer of the desk again and got out one of his uncle's old magazines and browsed through it until he found what he was looking for: a piece on Grand Kadooment Day, the calypso carnival celebrating the end of the traditional sugar crop in Barbados. Every year – he read – the carnival took place on the first Monday in August. In the year the magazine was published – 2007 – the date had been the 6th. What Garvie wanted to know was: what had it been in 1962?