The Start of Everything (24 page)

“I’ll take a shower,” I offered, vacating the linens.

Under the hot water, I considered my options. I couldn’t cope with Katja anymore. She’d lied to me about Stephen. She must have felt humiliated when she showed up to see him and he asked where I was.
Good
, I thought.
Fuck Katja
.

Mrs. Holst had said I could leave. Maybe Stephen could give me a lift. Pip’s family lives in Peterborough.

Nostalgia for uni knocked me hard: my room, the courtyards, King’s Parade, Pip and her crowd. She used to annoy the shit out of me. I can’t even remember why. She was never anything but enthusiastic.
Well, maybe
that’s
why.…
I smiled. She always had her work done. She always had her hair done. I’d been jealous. I was as bad as Katja.

A rap on the door. “Soap?” Stephen offered. He’d unpacked his body wash for me. I said thanks, and he handed it past the shower curtain. “I have to visit London in a few months,” he said. “That’s not so far from Cambridge.…”

I flinched. How did he even know? Did everyone know that I’m a “Cambridge girl”?

Then I remembered my sweatshirt. Mum had been so proud. She’d bought us all Corpus sweatshirts. I bet she and Shep took them on their trip, for cold shipboard evenings, and bragged about me. I’d worn it because I was cold, but accidentally I’d been flashing the college crest everywhere.

“We don’t really need to do that,” I said. I didn’t want to explain why I wouldn’t be there, at least not the rest of this year.

“You’re right, of course. Sorry,” he said. “I’ll be in the laundry room.”

He was nice. Maybe explaining wouldn’t be so bad.
His publisher will have some address, or his website will have something
, I thought.
Maybe, once I’ve made some decisions and figured things out, I’ll write to him
.

There were towels on the rack, but he would have washed and hung them this morning for his uncle. I made wet little footprints into the bedroom.

The duvet made a heap on the bare mattress. Stephen’s clothes were gone, presumably on him or in the wash with the sheets. My clothes, which I’d tossed to the floor, were on the bed, with the red sweater he’d intended to loan me. I used my T-shirt to dry off.

While I rubbed it on my legs, I heard a worrying moan. “Stephen?” I said. But it wasn’t coming from the direction of the rest of the flat.

It came again:
Uuhn
. And again:
Uh, uh, uuuh …
from the wall.

Oh, shit
. If I could hear them, they’d heard us. I didn’t usually dirty-talk. I didn’t usually make a man beg. I guess they’d liked the show. I covered my laugh with my hand. I didn’t want them to realise I was hearing them.

He got growlier as the rhythm sped up, and louder.

Mr. Bennet!
I thought.
Who knew you had it in you like that?

Then I remembered: The rest of the Bennets were in London; Mr. Bennet was home alone. And with the Finley kids at Grandma’s, Katja had nothing to do.

I thought she’d been joking, just posturing. A married man, maybe … but Dru and Max’s dad? These were people we knew. Max was sick. Dru was lonely. How could she do that? And in their
home
?

Maybe, like me, she’d got a little competitive, and a little spiteful, if she figured out I was in Stephen’s flat. Where else would I be, if I wasn’t in with her? It was pouring outside. Mr. Finley’s car blocked the drive. She knew the Holsts were sick of me. I had to be somewhere.

The grunting got faster. She made noise, too, a continuous keening that wobbled every time he pushed it in. It went on like that. I got into my clothes. The last big groan sounded like all N’s and G’s with an exclamation mark at the end:
Nnnnnnnnnngggg!
Quiet; then he said something I couldn’t understand; then a door shut.

I put the sweater on last, Stephen’s red sweater. My Corpus sweatshirt was still damp. I left it on the chair to dry. Stephen would be back shortly. I’d ask him about a lift then.

I opened the door to the front hall. The outside door just clicked shut, and through the mullioned window I saw Mr. Bennet head out into the rain. He rubbed his face with his hands.
At least he knows he’s guilty
, I thought.

I walked around the stairs to the Bennets’ door. She was still in there. Every cruel compliment she’d ever thrown me, every time she’d shoved her responsibilities off on me, every chance she took to make herself the A to my B, coalesced into a hot anger.

I knocked by hitting the door with my fist.

CHAPTER 21

MORRIS KEENE

W
e’re near the tail of the fens’ annual swell, and January would have been at the head. So the water levels would have looked much as they do now.

The area where the body had been found, and the flooded areas along the road where it might have gone in, had both been searched and given nothing. The water was wide, and there were too many ditches and conduits feeding it. But now, with Deeping House as a starting point, and the waters receding to January’s levels, perhaps the source of the body dump could be narrowed down.

The B1040 is still closed. I park at the defunct Dog in a Doublet pub and walk down the road until it slips under the risen river. This is the road Marcus Finley drove to pick up his children from his in-laws’. This is the road Ian Bennet drove to dump the Christmas tree at the recycling centre. This is a road back to Cambridge. To have got where it ended up, the body likely went in somewhere along here. Divers had searched. Nothing additional had been found.

I stare out over the water. Chloe prefers action. But we’ve split up; she’s visiting the au pair agency that booked both Katja and Grace. I can think as long as I like.

Where are Grace’s things?
They had to have been got rid of. They could have gone in with the body, and floated or decomposed differently. But if her shared room had been occupied at the time of the murder, they may have been gathered after.

There are side roads between here and Deeping House, leading to ditches that, at higher water, would connect with the river and flood-plains. They all seem too wide-open, though. Next to a farmhouse, or commuter road. Then I start coming across tracks, running along more wet ditches, more secluded ones. I follow two, noting their locations for possible future forensic search. They’re long; it will be a slog. Halfway along the second one, something catches my eye. It turns out to be a crushed beer can reflecting sunlight off its facets. And a toothbrush next to it.

Maybe someone dumped their rubbish here.

There, a ChapStick. And a plastic hairbrush. This is a very specific kind of rubbish, and, looking at the brush, not actually rubbish at all.

I think about the body, how it had sunk at first, and then filled with the various gases of decomposition and rose with the spring heat. I wonder what else might happen underwater. I wonder what might happen to a suitcase or duffel bag, weighted with personal objects. Maybe it took this long for a fastener to deteriorate, or for a creature to gnaw a hole through, freeing floatable objects. There, bobbing on the surface: a clear plastic bottle. Not a drink. Maybe shampoo.

I crack a thin branch off a tree. It’s not long enough.

I roll up my trousers, choose ruining my shoes over maybe cutting my feet, and step in up to my knees. I sweep the bottle to me with the branch’s twig fingers.

It’s a nearly empty bottle of cheap purple shampoo. Someone had written, in permanent marker, two small letters on the side, like one might write if sharing a bathroom, in the help flat at Deeping House, or in a college residence. “G.R.” Grace Rhys.

I wade out, pulling the bottle behind me with the stick. I don’t want to touch it without gloves. I bump it up the bank onto the grass verge. I need to call for a forensics team.

The phone resists at first, rubbing up against my keys also nestled in there. So I grip hard and jerk it out. It pops out from between my fingers and makes an arc towards the water. I reach with my other hand to catch it, my right hand. But, without me being able to close my fingers round it, it bounces, making a second, greater arc.

It sails. It plops. It sinks.

I take off my coat, to keep it dry, along with my suit jacket. I step in, pushing down hard to avoid slipping on the slime underfoot. I can’t use a stick for this; I’ll have to get right to the centre where it fell. I force myself to breathe slowly, making a whistling sound exhaling between my compressed lips. I hesitate.

Turns out the water in which Grace Rhys’s belongings bobbed isn’t more than three feet deep. I get wet up to mid-thigh, then up to my left shoulder bending to retrieve a hard little object I’ve stepped on. It’s not my phone. It’s a watch face without a band; probably that was leather. It’s tangled with a thin gold necklace and a single earring shaped like a crescent moon.

The watch has an engraving on its back: a year, a city, school initials, and a surname: Hart-Fraser.

Hart-Fraser?
That’s George, from Corpus. I swirl my feet farther around the bottom until I kick into my phone. I pluck it up and wade out, dropping down on the grass. I squeeze out my trousers and wrap my coat over my shoulders. I wipe my mobile and shake it and press its dead buttons, over and over and over, my teeth clacking together from cold.

Back at Deeping House, I use Rory Casey’s landline while he plugs an electric fire in next to me to dry me off. I need to call a forensics team to the site, which I’d marked by tying my scarf to a branch. I have the shampoo bottle with the initials, the necklace and earring, the hairbrush, and the engraved watch with me; I didn’t dare leave them.

But I don’t know the number. I don’t know even Chloe’s number. Why would I? They’re in my phone, my now-dead phone. I shiver.
Wait
—Chloe had handed her business cards out to witnesses like they were little prizes. Mr. Casey has one. I phone the number.

“Detective Inspector Chloe Frohmann,” she answers. I realise that with me calling from this phone, of course she doesn’t know who I am.

“Chloe, it’s me. I’m—”

“Keene?” Her voice transitions from clipped and formal to exasperated. “What are you doing? Where’s your phone?”

“I’ve got something.”

“Bad timing, Keene. I’m in the thick of it. Just tell me.”

She gets angry when I don’t phone with new developments right away, but she doesn’t want to be interrupted? I could do without the parental inflection. “I found Grace’s belongings. They were dumped in a wet ditch. Can you call forensics for me?”

“I’ll call CSI,” she says, correcting me. “Where’s your phone? Where are you?”

No need to answer that tone of voice. “I think George Hart-Fraser is the man we’re looking for. His watch is tangled up with her things. It could have fallen off him while he hauled the body about or packed up her belongings. Maybe she called him when she wanted to leave, and he picked her up at the road.” I hadn’t thought it through yet, but it sounded good as it came out of me. When was the heat going to reach the inside of my body? The bone chill shivered inside me even as the heat from the electric fire grazed the hairs on my leg.

“Keene, what’s going on?”

“I went in the water. I’m cold. But it was worth it. Don’t fuss; I’ve got a heater blasting me now. Thirty-five centimetre, dark brown hairs. Sound familiar?”

It takes her a moment. “The hammer?”

Yes! The hammer and bloody shirt from Trumpington Road. The hairs wrapped round its claw seem consistent with the hairs from Grace’s hairbrush, at least in my eyeballing of them.

Chloe gets it.

“George’s address should have bit me harder,” I say. It’s close to where the hammer and shirt had been found—too close. Chloe admits she’s in Cambridge. I ask her to feel him out about the watch, just the watch, because she’s near. And to call forensics for me, to meet me at Deeping House.

“Keene, what happened to your phone?”

I’m really cold. Just shivers at first, but with my voice added it sounds like laughing. “I dropped it. Going after the watch.” It was almost as true as stumbling on the watch after I dropped my phone.